Hal was being Hal because the schedule board was there, reminding him in the most romantic of ways that Jane wasn’t marrying him. At the moment, Hal was standing on the conference room table, demonstrating his new toy: a bullwhip.
“I had one of these in grad school,” Hal was saying, making it crack loudly. “I went full-on Indiana Jones: bullwhip, safari shirt, brown fedora. UC-Davis took the whip away from me; the students were complaining. I don’t know why. The archeologists shouldn’t be the only ones to get to have fun!” Hal pretended to be addressing an undergraduate student. “Cytosine! Guanine! Adenine! Thymine!” Hal cracked the whip at his imaginary student with each scientific term. “If you want to call yourself a biologist, you need to know the basics!”
Dmitri was holding up a chair like a lion tamer. “Sit!” he commanded. “Sit!”
There was a reason that their production meetings were rare. (Jane was letting Hal keep the bullwhip in favor of the box of dynamite she had confiscated and stashed with her cousin, Roach. Where was Hal getting his endless supply of explosives?) Hal’s chaos, at least, was keeping anyone from noticing that Jane had checked her phone.
Could Jane get up and walk out of the meeting to find some place more private to call Duff? Everyone from station manager down to head of accounting was crowded into the conference room with her but nothing was getting done, not with Hal trying to prove…something…with the bullwhip.
Jane looked at the meeting’s agenda memo. They had already covered all preproduction issues for their next six episodes including budget concerns. All they really needed to do was make delivery of rough-cut video for the upcoming episode and discuss a handful of postproduction details. It shouldn’t be too harmful if Jane slipped away. Hal ignored mundane work issues, using his position of “star” to skip anything that could be boring. Could she trust Taggart and Nigel to cover for her?
Taggart was working on his laptop, ignoring Hal’s insanity. His ability to generate a pocket of calm in the middle of chaos was one of the many things that she loved about him. They were running behind on the rough cut as every frame needed to be checked to make sure they hadn’t included anything that gave away their many secrets. Taggart had a video editor open in one window but in the other he was answering an email. Jane’s mother had discovered Taggart paid more attention to the fine details of their wedding than Jane did. Her mother called it “getting the groom’s input” but mostly it gave her plausible deniability if she forgot to ask Jane about something truly important. Jane hated to dump yet more of her responsibilities onto Taggart but she supposed that was part and parcel of getting married. (Every day she discovered new joys of marriage — the only downside so far was the actual event.)
Nigel was patting his pockets and glancing at the floor in an out-of-character air of alarm.
“What’s wrong?” Jane asked.
“I’ve seemed to have lost my snake.” Nigel looked under the table, making everyone sitting at the table push back from it as an Elfhome-honed defensive mechanism kicked into overdrive.
“Snake?” asked the head of Accounting, Joe McGreevy. He was a big man with a Neanderthal-like response to snakes: grab the nearest item and use it to club any snakelike object to death. The clubbing usually only stopped once both snake and club were reduced to pulp. Everyone in the room edged away from Joe, taking their belongings with them.
“What snake?” Dmitri said in a tone of voice that seemed like he was afraid that he’d heard correctly but was hoping otherwise.
“I found the most beautiful snake out in the car park. I was afraid he’d get run over, so I put him in my pocket. Just a little thing.”
Hal paused, whip cocked. “Banded with red and black and yellow?”
“The very one!” Nigel cried, sounding like a British schoolboy. “Yes, I know it was most likely venomous with those colors, but it was such a wee thing!”
That triggered a sudden exodus from the room with the exception of her team and Dmitri. Taggart didn’t look up from his laptop but changed to sitting cross-legged on the table.
Dmitri put down the chair and stood on it. “This changes nothing. We still need your rough footage for next week’s show so that we can start producing promotional material and music score.” Dmitri worked his way across the room, going from chair seat to chair seat in a version of “the floor is lava.” He paused at the door once he was safely in the hallway. “You are not to leave this room until that snake is found and contained. And keep it away from Accounting.”
Snake wrangling was not one of Jane’s skills. Pittsburgh had a few poisonous snakes, most of them rattlesnakes and their Elfhome cousins. She’d never encountered any brightly colored ones but she wasn’t a naturalist. She joined Taggart on the table while Hal and Nigel looked for the snake. “Is it deadly, Hal?”
“Possibly.” Hal lapsed in to host mode. “There are sixty-five recognized species of coral snake on Earth. Those in North America have the most dangerous venom found on the continent. Their bite contains a powerful neurotoxin that paralyzes the breathing muscles — so they can be deadly. There are also multiple nonpoisonous species that mimic the coral snake’s coloration as protection from predators, such as the red milk snake. Coral snakes are quite reclusive and non-aggressive, so there are very few recorded bites on Earth. It tends to be a warmer clime breed but I’ve been hoping for one to show in Pittsburgh so we could compare the Elfhome species to Earth ones.”
“Whatever.” Jane shook her head. Naturalists! She was glad that she’d left Chesty at the motor pool, guarding her SUV. Her big elfhound would have insisted on joining the hunt. “Find the snake.”
She called Duff. “I’m clear. What’s up?”
“Yumiko tracked Alton down this morning to rake him over the coals: Hal’s name came up in an emergency meeting between Jin Wong and Tinker domi. Yumiko wanted to know about finding a box in pieces after a gunfight at the Carnegie.” Duff raised the pitch of his voice slightly to mimic Yumiko. “Why hadn’t yinz told the tengu about it?”
Jane doubted that Yumiko used the Pittsburgh slang of “yinz” for “you guys,” but the sentiment was probably correct.
Duff dropped his voice back to normal. “Alton called me since he didn’t know. What shoot-out at the museum? Does she mean Nigel’s baby-dragon box? Did you find that?”
Did Jane not tell her family about the shoot-out? It happened a week after July’s shutdown — back when Sparrow was still alive and second-in-command of the elves. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Two little girls — known to Nigel only as Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo — had somehow crashed a ritzy party in New York City to give Nigel a magical whistle. The girls weren’t alone; they had a baby dragon with them. Lemon-Lime told Nigel about a box filled with other baby dragons and then warned him that Sparrow was an oni double agent.
Jane hadn’t wanted to believe the information but Lemon-Lime had made a cartoon of Jane’s fight with a saurus — months before it happened. There was no denying that the whistle worked; Jane’s team used it on the namazu. Somehow these little girls on Earth were magical geniuses who knew the future.
What’s more, Jane had had an odd conversation with Tooloo. The elf talked about playing poker with children. Tooloo’s coded message seemed to be that Nigel and Taggart were “cards” being played by Lemon-Lime in a dangerous game against other people who could “see” the future. To seal the deal, “an anonymous female” called the EIA with wildly specific details of what was about to happen at the museum, and then, from halfway around the world, Queen Soulful Ember had gotten a message to the Wind Clan to intercede on behalf of Jane’s team. While it seemed to indicate that the queen’s oracle, Pure Radiance, and Tooloo were two “poker players” helping Jane’s team, the question became who else was playing? Normally you needed five to seven people to play the game correctly. Did Lemon-Lime count as one player or two? Did the oni have people who could see the future?