“There’s a pool?”
“Yeah, brand new, never been used, in the basement. Like I said, they were in the middle of renovations when the first Startup hit. The sixth floor is totally gutted down to studs. It looks like it had been office space and they planned on converting back to hotel — ow!”
Tommy had smacked Bingo to shut him up. “You put water in the pool?”
“I didn’t. Some of the teens did it. Filled it up. Got the chemicals into it — bleach — whatever — to make it safe to swim in.”
Tommy growled. He was “head of the half-oni” because he was the oldest and meanest. He liked to think he was the absolute ruler — it was best that the elves thought so too — but he knew that his aunts could dig in their heels and make his life hell. It was going to be hard to lever his family out of this building if his aunts took a liking to it. “Find someplace else. Fast. It should be anyplace but Downtown: there’s too many new elves moving through this area. It should be big enough for all of us but we need to be able to keep it heated through the winter even if the oni take out the electrical grid. Think wood stoves and fireplaces.”
Bingo whimpered his disappointment.
“And do something about the elevators!” Tommy said. “The little ones aren’t going to be able to do twenty floors of stairs and they’ll crash wherever they run out of steam. We’ll be losing kids all over the building.”
“Okay, Tommy.” Bingo detoured off to go check on the elevators.
The stairs had opened to the massive lobby, which had been cave dark the night before. Morning sunlight poured through the tall windows, reflecting on the crystals of the unlit chandeliers. Someone was sitting at a grand piano at the edge of the dust-filled shaft of light, playing a melody that Tommy didn’t recognize. For a minute he thought a stranger had wandered in off the street. Then the musician lifted their head and Tommy saw it was Bingo’s younger brother, Babe.
“Hey.” Babe nodded and went back to playing.
“Hey, Tommy!” Mokoto sprawled on a couch behind Babe.
The two were the brawn and brains of the night crew.
Babe was six-foot-three of pure muscle with a baby face. It surprised Tommy that the big man knew how to play piano, but that was like Babe. Fierce on the outside, sensitive on the inside.
Short and slim, most people needed a second look to be sure that Mokoto was a male. His sultry makeup didn’t help — the smoldering eye shadow and deep red lipstick read as female. He had on a pink midrift shirt and a black miniskirt so low on his hips it was surprising it didn’t fall off. Tommy was never sure if Mokoto consciously posed sexily, or it was some weird uncontrollable habit. The man always managed to look like a female porn star, complete with a “come hither” look.
“Why are you two still up?” Tommy asked.
“We walked the Lee sisters back to their warren,” Mokoto answered for the two of them. “Some of the regulars have stopped showing up. You know how it is; someone disappears and you don’t know if they decided to find someplace safer or something decided that Liberty Avenue is a good hunting ground.”
“Are we missing anyone?” Tommy had been out of touch for days chasing after missing elves and not-yet-elves and elves-that-used-to-be-humans.
“No, none of ours. All the heads and fingers and toes accounted for. It’s all been the Undefended. You know how it is. They always show up in the early spring, like cherry blossoms. Beautiful. Smelling amazing. Oh so delicate. Then the summer winds come and they drift away. One by one.”
Tommy nodded. The Undefended were all off-worlders. Some came to Elfhome on student visas to attend the University of Pittsburgh and then dropped out of school. The rest were illegals, slipping through the cracks that the oni made in the border to get their own people in and out.
The Undefended were easy to spot. They wore fashion trends that wouldn’t hit Pittsburgh for another year or two. They did exotic things with their hair like dye it odd colors or shave their heads into patterns. They carried fancy smartphones that they had a habit of pulling out and staring at as if they were getting messages from God. They talked louder, with odd slang sprinkled into their conversation. Most of them walked faster than a normal Pittsburgher would. And as Mokoto pointed out, they smelled like flowers. It was as if they blasted all trace of humanity off their skin and replaced it with perfume.
While the Undefended ran in small herds, using their numbers as a defense, everyone in Pittsburgh knew that they had no real protection. They were without family and sometimes friends. They couldn’t go to the police because they would be deported. They couldn’t even use their real names: the list of expired visas was a matter of public record. It made them an easy target.
Any whore working Liberty Avenue, though, could be mistaken as Undefended. It sounded like Tommy might have to hurt someone hard.
Tommy didn’t like being a pimp; it made him feel like his father. He made anyone who forced him into the role of protector regret it. “All of them recent?”
Mokoto looked oddly pained by the question. “They disappeared while we were moving the warren.”
Babe stopped playing the piano to join the conversation. “I think the Lee family should move in with us. There’s just the four sisters and the two baby brothers that can’t pass as human.”
Tommy sighed. What was six more people after a hundred? “Let them know I would like them in our warren.” Wherever that ended up being. “We might want to put the night crew on hold until we find out why whores are disappearing.”
“Sure thing,” Babe said.
Motoko glanced at the back of Babe’s head, pouting that his opinion wasn’t consulted. It was a measure of how uneasy he felt that he shrugged in the end and said, “Yeah, sure. It would be safer for the girls.”
“We’ll talk,” Tommy said to soothe Mokoto’s pride. Babe might be the muscle but Mokoto was the scary one of the two.
As Tommy headed toward the door, he realized that Spot was following him.
“I’m not going to Sacred Heart.” Tommy repeated slower and louder. Since Spot rarely talked, he was never sure how much the boy understood.
Spot reached out, took his hand, and looked up at him. His father had been a brute doglike thing. Spot had inherited his father’s looks but Aunt Vera’s sweetness. He stared up at Tommy with sad puppy-dog eyes.
“No,” Tommy said.
Spot considered and then quietly said, “Please.”
Tommy growled softly. Normally he wouldn’t give in to begging but Spot had walked alone into an oni camp for him. He owed the boy. “Fine. I’ll drop you there. Oilcan is not going to be there, so find Baby Duck and stay with her. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
Tommy rode his hoverbike out to Oakland with Spot perched on behind him. The boy was beaming with joy, ears flapping in the wind. Tommy still wasn’t sure, though, that dropping Spot at the enclave by himself was a good idea.
He was less sure when he reached Sacred Heart.
There were dozens of strange elves at the enclave all dressed in Stone Clan black. They were attempting to maneuver a gossamer into place over the three-story brick building. Tengu flitted about on massive black wings, catching mooring ropes that were being dropped from the gondola.
There was a small knot of humans gathered around a Roach Refuse dumpster hauler. Tommy recognized that most of them were part of Team Tinker, so he pulled into their midst. They weren’t “friends” but at least they were known quantity: Tommy had watched most of the team grow up from kids to adult. Tinker invented the hoverbike. Roach invented hoverbike racing. Tommy created a place for the races to be held.
“Tommy,” Roach lifted his hand in greeting. He had his little brother, Andy, and two of his massive elfhounds with him. The man paused, head cocked, as he looked past Tommy at Spot.