To protect Lemon-Lime, Nigel hadn’t told Yumiko about the box, only Jane and her family. He had already done some legwork on tracking the box: the official report on Earth was that the curator accompanying the museum pieces had vanished on Elfhome during the June Shutdown. Jane and her team had gone to the Carnegie just to double-check that the box hadn’t arrived after Startup. What they found was a horde of oni disguised as humans.
Jane thought that her family knew about the shoot-out at the museum. Hal had blown up part of the Hall of Architecture during the fight. It had been on the news — hadn’t it? Actually, now that she thought about, no reporters had shown up at the museum as Maynard had personally debriefed them. Windwolf had done something newsworthy while searching for his bride; all the local reporters had been in the South Hills covering the Viceroy. Maynard might have put a lid on the information because of the queen’s rare and odd intercession.
Jane glanced at Hal; he and Nigel were carefully peering under the credenza across the room. She lowered her voice and explained why the shoot-out slipped her mind. “That was the day that Hal found out about the wedding.”
“Ahhh.” Duff made sounds of understanding the problem. “You got distracted by Hal going ballistic.”
“Yup.” Jane explained to Duff in quiet tones how her team ended up in a fight at the museum. They were rescued from the oni via the arrival of the Elfhome Interdimensional Agency. They were then saved from being arrested for blowing up parts of the museum by a message from Queen Soul Ember. The short note — arriving via one of the holy sekasha warriors — reminded Director Derek Maynard that the treaty had made the museum property of the crown. “The queen gave us free run of the place. We found parts of the box in the woodshop but nothing of the baby dragons or the eggs that they were in. I didn’t consider it as ‘finding’ anything. All we managed to do was verify what we already suspected: Sparrow had gotten the box to her oni masters. We just put more dots on the line. I would have thought that the tengu spy network would have connected those dots before now.”
Duff laughed. “I got the impression that Yumiko knew about the shoot-out but bought whatever official statement you gave the EIA. Something about filming that scary-ass wyvern they got strung up?”
“Something like that.” Jane had lied so much that week that she’d lost track of everything she said. She would have stuck as close to the truth as possible. She probably did blame their presence on the wyvern. Nigel had been struck speechless by it.
“Yumiko let something slip,” Duff said. “Although I don’t think she’s connected all the dots. Lemon-Lime is in town.”
“What?” Jane snapped in surprise.
Duff explained that the emergency meeting with Tinker domi had been focused on the baby dragons inside the missing box. The female yamabushi had let slip that the tengu had learned of the box when some Nestlings and “other children” suddenly arrived from Earth with a tiny dragon named Joy. “Given how Yumiko talked about dragons in the past, the chances of being more than one tiny dragon teamed up with a bunch of kids seems unlikely.”
Tooloo had made it sound like the new player at the dangerous poker game had just arrived.
“Okay,” Jane said slowly. “That doesn’t change much. Yeah, we found the box but it was empty. The egg thingies inside were what was important. The trail went cold at the museum. We searched the whole place, top to bottom.”
“Maybe,” Duff said. Jane could hear him typing on a keyboard. “The Carnegie runs on human tech, not oni magic. I’m going try to get people in to see if there’s any computers still have any stray usable information on them.”
Jane doubted it. They’d gone through the director’s office and the woman — oni — whatever — had been a sticky-note kind of person. There was a rainbow of little squares littering every surface, all with cryptic comments. They’d taken pictures of everything and pored over the notes later. They hadn’t found anything that suggested where the box’s contents had been moved to. “Give it a whirl.”
“Will do,” Duff said.
“Is that it?” Jane prepared to hang up.
“You’re going to want to call Mom,” Duff said. “She’s on the warpath about something. Bye!”
Taggart must have overheard that part as he nodded and murmured, “We lost the band.”
“Oh no! Why?” Jane cried. Carl Moser had been best friends with her younger brother Geoffrey all through elementary and high school. He’d started an elf fusion-rock band with a mix of human and elf artists and set up an enclave-styled commune in the Strip District. Unbeknownst to her mother and other brothers, Geoffrey had been dating the band’s male elf drummer, but that was a whole other kettle of fish. Jane had picked Moser’s band to play at her wedding because she could trust him and his band mates to keep their mouths shut if any of the family’s dangerous secrets — tengu involvement, resistance leadership, rescued baby sister, yadayadayada — slipped out during the wedding. Replacing Moser’s band would be a matter more complicated than just finding a group of people who could play instruments together.
“We locked them in months ago!” Jane cried. “Oh, Moser is dead meat if he pulls out on my mom.”
Taggart shrugged in ignorance or acceptance of Moser’s fate.
Jane growled with frustration. She hated being the center of attention as it usually meant that she had lost control of a life-or-death situation.
If Jane had had her way, she would have married Taggart in July. Pittsburgh kept the Pennsylvanian law that required a three-day waiting period. They could have gone to the Frick Building on Grant Street and gotten married at the weirdly named Orphans’ Court. She and Taggart had to go there to apply for the marriage license anyhow.
But her mother had spent twenty-six years dreaming of a huge blowout wedding for her daughter. Her mother wanted all the bells and whistles. The fancy wedding invitations on linen paper, engraved with charcoal ink, with a square of tissue to protect the type. The calligraphy addresses printed by hand on the outer envelopes. The white dress with the full train (ordered for her mother’s wedding but never used and carefully kept in tissue paper for the day that Jane could wear it.) A full church service. An elaborate reception with tons of flowers and cookies and booze and a live band. Jane hated the whole thing because she would be center stage from the moment she walked down the aisle to the first dance.
She needed to live with her mother, though, so she had compromised on a small wedding held on the last weekend before Taggart’s visa expired. The fact that they had little more than two months to plan the wedding made it seem as if they could skip many of the embarrassing bells and whistles.
Life had other plans.
Things started to go wrong immediately. Another couple had already claimed the Kryskill family’s church for that date. Jane suggested that they just have the ceremony at Hyeholde, seamlessly going from wedding to reception, but her mother insisted on a church. After days of frantic searching, her mother begged her way into a Russian Orthodox church. The onion-domed cathedral sat in an abandoned section of Homestead, ironically not far from Sandcastle Water Park.