“I was here first!” Joe shouted.
“Oh, the snake?” Nigel lifted the lid on the bucket and held it out to Joe.
“No!” Jane shouted.
Joe smacked the bucket away from him with a scream. The bucket and snake parted company in midair, the snake landing on the table in front of Taggart.
“Taggart, move!” Jane caught the bucket as it came sailing past her. Taggart sprang back from the table, abandoning his laptop after slapping the screen down. “Calm down, Joe!”
Hal leaned back against the kitchen counter, obviously having learned from the last time not to get close to Joe. “Really? Can you not grow a pair? It’s not going to hurt you. Look how small it is! It’s like an earthworm — an earthworm on steroids — with deadly poison. Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
Joe had snatched up the chair that Taggart had been sitting on.
“Joe!” Jane didn’t really want to punch the man who filled out their paychecks. “Put down the chair, Joe!”
With a roar, Joe smashed the tabletop with the chair. It missed the snake but hit Taggart’s laptop.
Jane swore and leapt forward to save the laptop from further damage.
“We were in the break room, not Accounting,” Hal explained patiently to Dmitri as to why the head of Accounting was being taken out on an ambulance gurney. “It’s practically on the opposite side of the building! We needed a plastic bin to put the snake in. We didn’t know that someone had brought in fresh donuts and Joe was there, binge-eating them. You know how he just stands there and grazes when he’s stressed out.”
Jane was letting Hal talk because it was Hal’s magical power to charm people in and out of things. Also she had missed how it started and they hadn’t had time for her to verify the important details, like why Joe had been in the kitchen. She would have gone with Nigel, since there was a certain “familiarity breeds contempt” vibe that diminished Hal’s ability on Dmitri, but Nigel was part of the reason they needed an ambulance. Who would have thought that quiet, gentle Nigel could be so fierce when it came to protecting small animals?
Said snake was unharmed, recaptured, and currently back in the Disney cookie bucket.
Taggart was back at the table, checking the damage to his laptop, looking all kinds of concerned.
Dmitri turned to Jane. “Did you have to hit him with a chair?”
“I’m afraid that was me,” Nigel said. “It was Joe’s weapon of choice. Duel of honor and all.”
“What?” Dmitri sounded as confused as Jane felt.
“I was honor bound to protect the wee thing. I brought it into this building; I had to care for it until I released it into the wild. Mr. McGreevy chose to wield a chair; I simply returned his volley.”
“Right,” Dmitri said after a long, calculating stare. He turned his attention to Taggart frowning at his laptop. “Is it broken? We still need the video for next week’s show.”
Taggart looked to Nigel and did an odd side glance to Dmitri. Taggart was horrible at lying. He also knew the limits of his ability.
“Unfortunately”—Nigel picked up whatever silent message that Taggart was trying to beam to him, — “prior to the blackout, Taggart had his laptop plugged in and there was a power surge that seems to have corrupted some of our data.”
Jane remembered that Taggart had needed to talk to her privately. He must have found something in the video.
“Surely you have a backup,” Dmitri said.
“The Chased by Monsters equipment isn’t fully compatible with the ancient stuff in the PB&G truck.” Jane kept to the truth. The gear that Nigel and Taggart brought with them from Earth far outstripped anything on Elfhome. “We’re really having to juggle. We can upload video from PB&G’s equipment to CBM, but not vice versa. The software won’t run on the old operating system. We port everything through CBM because it gives us more control over the video editing.”
Her team was nodding along with her statements. She wished they would stop as that would probably tip off Dmitri the moment she needed to start lying.
“We have such a limited memory capacity on the PB&G equipment that we normally scrub the cards after we upload the video.” Again, true. Head nods all around. She and Hal had been using the oldest cameras that WQED owned because Hal routinely broke everything. Since Dmitri was focused on her, Jane couldn’t frown at her team. “We’ve been shooting with both cameras and then consolidating the footage on Taggart’s laptop.” They also had backups but she didn’t want to discuss whether Taggart wanted the footage “lost” for some reason. “He has a state-of-the-art machine that handles the editing easily. Even the machines here at the office struggle with the new editing software.”
Still true.
She paused, hating the need to lie to Dmitri. The man had trusted her since the day they first met. He’d given her everything: a career that she loved, responsibilities beyond what her education would normally obtain, a legal shield when Hal had gotten out of her control, the man of her dreams, and even her little sister’s safe return. The man was responsible for the safety of the entire station, though, not just her team. Because he wouldn’t be able to lie to the elves, she had to keep the truth from him to keep him safe.
Dmitri stopped her with a look. “So you’re saying that you need to film more footage?”
Jane breathed out with relief that Dmitri had skipped ahead, probably guessing that he wasn’t going to get the full truth if he pushed. She glanced to Taggart, who nodded. “Yes.”
Dmitri pointed at Nigel. “Don’t bring any more creatures into this station.”
“Yes, sir.” Nigel said.
“There was a reflection that I hadn’t noticed.” Taggart pointed to the screen of his laptop.
They had centered next week’s show on the growing menace of wargs. They had been camped out at the top of the South Hills fire tower at edge of the Rim. Because of the remote location, Boo had been with them. Boo had helped out by holding the light reflector as they filmed. Her little sister had just gotten the magical tattoo that gave her the massive tengu wings. Unlike the other tengu, Boo’s wings were angelic white. Occasionally she lost control of them as she was still learning the complex muscle memory for flight.
Somehow they hadn’t noticed that every time Boo opened her wings, there was a perfect reflection of them in the fire tower’s windows.
“If they were black like the other tengu, I would say just run with it. The tengu are trusted allies now, no one would be surprised that we had at least one helping out on the hunt. But they’re white.” Taggart didn’t finish the statement.
“Can’t you edit them out?” Hal said. “Industrial Light and Magic it?”
Taggart shook his head. “It would take me days to erase her out of every frame. If she hadn’t been opening and closing them, it wouldn’t have been as difficult. There’s other factors that make it tricky — but it boils down to time. I can grind it out for the following week but not this week.”
“But this means we need to film and edit an entire show in less than twenty-four hours,” Hal said. “We don’t have a script. We don’t have a monster. We have nothing.”
“We have a city at war and a secret militia,” Jane whispered. “I’m sure we can come up with something.”
7: WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT
“Up you go!”
Wolf Who Rules Wind hadn’t hit his grown spurt yet, so it was simple for his eldest brother, Whiskey Smoked With Peat Fire, to hoist him out of bed and toss him up into the air.
“Whiskey!” Wolf cried in surprise.