“I swear to be careful.” Tommy linked pinkies.
Mokoto tightened his grip on Tommy’s pinkie after the shake and used it to pull him into the room. “Come, come, come. This is going to take a while.”
“How many kids are missing?” Surely it wouldn’t take long to get a short list. Any more than a dozen and the police would have noticed.
“You know how it is. Some of the off-worlders start with one name and then realize how stupid it sounds, so they change to another. Plus they’ll lie to your face if they think you’re some scary-ass tranny that will go psycho on them or something.”
If Tommy could erase his presence from the mind of someone looking at him, Mokoto’s secret power seemed to be making strangers very aware of how dangerous he could be despite his small size.
Mokoto was in a big two-room suite like Tommy. He’d pulled the curtains shut on all the windows to block out the daylight. In the big dark space, he’d put up strands of white Christmas lights. In a corner of the sitting room, he had a big plastic bottle filled with elf shines that drifted about, gleaming. A candle flickered on one of the nightstands, filling the space with a musk scent. Some piece of small electronics was playing piano music softly but Tommy couldn’t spot it among the clutter. Mokoto’s huggy blanket — the newer one, not the one that been worn to tatters — was on the big bed along with all his cat plushies. His beloved books were scattered everywhere, including the bed.
As Tommy suspected, Mokoto dragged him past the two armchairs to the big bed. Mokoto liked to cuddle as much as possible, hence the huggy blanket and all the stuffed cats. He’d been that way since they were little. Tommy had made the mistake of vaguely promising Mokoto that they’d talk without specifying where and how much. He should have known better.
“If I fall asleep,” Tommy said, “You need to wake me up.”
“Pft.” Mokoto made it clear that he wasn’t promising anything.
When they were very little, their mothers had converted the restaurant’s attic space into a small bedroom with ridiculously low ceilings. Even tiny Aunt Flo needed to stoop. Only later in life had Tommy realized it had been to protect them from the oni, who couldn’t fit through the trapdoor. Tommy and Mokoto and Bingo and Babe shared a futon mattress that had been wedged up through the hole in the floor. They slept together like a litter of puppies until Bingo got stuck in the trapdoor.
By then they were old enough to find separate quarters in the buildings surrounding the restaurant. They’d knocked holes into the walls to create a proper warren. Tommy liked sleeping alone; it released him from the responsibility of being the oldest. Mokoto hated it. He tended to read until he drifted off.
Mokoto grabbed his books off the bed. One was a paperback romance featuring a half-naked man. The other was a hardcover titled Hotel Administration on Hospitality. Between the Christmas lights and the business guide filled with bookmarks, Mokoto was clearly in the “stay at the William Penn Hotel” camp.
Tommy flopped onto the bed, landing on one of Mokoto’s many homemade stuffed cats. It released a cloud of lavender scent that threatened to make Tommy sneeze. He pulled the toy out from under him. Like its many brothers, the stuffed cat was crudely made of scraps of bright colored cloth, decorated with derpy eyes and a crude heart stitched onto its flank.
“Why only cats?” Tommy tossed the cats one by one at the bedside chair. “Why no dogs?”
Bingo’s father had been a lesser blood with a little dog in him. Bingo could pass as a human as long as he had clothes on.
“Cats are braver than dogs.” Mokoto curled up beside him, head on Tommy’s chest. Mokoto liked to listen to his heartbeat.
Tommy was currently twenty-eight to Mokoto’s twenty-seven and Bingo’s twenty-six. When they were little, twenty-four months didn’t seem like much. He knew now there was a world of difference between a four-year-old and a toddler. “Doesn’t seem fair to Bingo.”
“Fear and love are not logical constructs.”
Tommy thought of his stupid, illogical love of Jewel Tear. He couldn’t argue with that. “Tell me about these missing kids.”
“Seven girls, three boys,” Mokoto said. “I know the boys better than the girls, for obvious reasons. They went by the names…” He sighed deeply. His voice cracked a little as he continued. “Bad me. Counting them as dead already. They use the names Knickknack, Toad, and Joyboy.”
Ah, this was true reason they were in bed; Mokoto was hurting over the disappearances. It put the entire family in danger if someone developed feelings for an outsider. They’d all gone through it when they were young and stupid. They’d all had to deal with walking away from someone because it was impossible to keep secrets from them. It made Tommy feel guilty that he’d been sneaking around with Jewel Tear.
“Knickknack?” Tommy guessed which one meant the most to Mokoto. He’d mentioned Knickknack first.
Mokoto nodded. “Knickknack hates his real name. He thinks it’s boring. He went by Knickknack even before he started working Liberty Avenue. He goes to Pitt. He’s going to be a senior this fall. Every other summer, he’s gone home. This time he decided to stay the summer. He’d asked his parents for money to make it through to fall, but they didn’t want him to stay, so they didn’t send him any. He suspects it’s because they think he’ll try to get a job on Elfhome and stay forever. They were against him going off-world to start with.”
This was a lot more detail than Tommy expected. “How long have you known him?”
“Three years,” Mokoto whispered and laughed brokenly. “We met at the library, of all places. He thought I was hot and asked me out for pizza. We ended up fucking in his dorm room. It was great sex. He’s very attentive and likes to cuddle. But afterward, everything he had in his room, all his little tech toys and the places he’d been and the things he’d seen and the stuff he bitched about missing while on Elfhome… We were both there, in his room, but it was like we were in two different universes.”
Tommy understood. It been one thing to have sex with Jewel Tear out in the woods, but then to see her at the enclave, cleaned up and surrounded by other elves, he’d felt to his core how much they lived in different worlds.
“I shouldn’t have seen him again,” Mokoto said. “But I did. It wasn’t just the sex. It was talking about books, and seeing movies that didn’t have guns in them, and cool music.” He waved a hand toward whatever he had softly playing music. “We would have these discussions that seemed so deep and meaningful. It was like I could be someone that wasn’t pulling tricks on Liberty to keep his family alive.”
The pain was knowing that this kid, who meant so much to Mokoto, was probably dead. The other kids might be in hiding, but Knickknack probably wouldn’t have disappeared without getting word to Mokoto. If the oni grabbed all the whores, they would keep only the girls alive. The boys they would have killed and maybe eaten.
“I knew I was being greedy,” Mokoto said. “I should have just cut him off — but I always felt so thin when he wasn’t around. Like I was just a shadow of what I could be. I liked myself more when he was around.”
Mokoto was too tough to cry. Bingo would be bawling his head off at this point.
“I never told Knickknack anything,” Mokoto said. “Not about the family. Not about the restaurant. Not about what I did in the evenings. He figured out that I lived in Oakland from things I let slip, like how I planned to walk home from his dorm room. When he decided to stay the summer, he asked if he could stay with me. He thought it would be romantic. I told him I didn’t have space; my room was too small. That made him want to see where I lived. So I told him that my pimp wouldn’t let me bring home tricks.”