The door of his bedroom opened.
“Code red!” Chuck Norris cried. “Abort!”
She vanished, along with Crimson Death and Cthulhu. The tiny dragon bounded away, phasing through the wall.
The mouse in blue was the only one that remained. “Please, Oilcan, help them. I don’t want to be the only one with a cool name.”
“What’s your name?” Oilcan asked.
“Nikola Tesla Dufae.” Nikola looked past Oilcan toward the opening door. “Got-to-go-bye!”
“Domou?” Thorne Scratch stalked into the room, ejae drawn and pointed toward the nightstand. “Who are you talking to?”
That was a good question.
“I might have been talking in my sleep,” Oilcan said.
Thorne Scratch looked troubled as she sheathed her ejae. “Most domana do not true dream but most are not wood sprites.”
Tinker had told him about her odd Wizard of Oz dreams fueled by her mother desperately calling for help. What in the world could the mice symbolize? What was the importance of the weird names?
He realized that his nightstand was littered with pieces of cardboard. He picked up a jagged shard of brightly colored paper. It was the remains of the Everlasting Gobstopper box.
His future was going to be very odd if it involved a miniature dragon and talking mice.
“A runner from cousin is at the door.” That explained why Thorne was awake and armed. “Beloved Tinker of the Wind wishes to talk to you immediately. She wants you to bring your copy of the Dufae Codex.”
“The Codex?” Oilcan glanced at his bedside clock to confirm that it was indeed in the middle of the night. Tinker was still recovering from breaking her arm twice. She should be deep asleep, not in mad-scientist mode. “Oh, that can’t be good.”
He was right. Something was obviously very, very wrong. He’d seen Tinker that afternoon. She’d been surprisingly polished and all princess like, complete with an elegant tea with little tarts and finger sandwiches. She’d given him a fistful of cash with the promise of more later, they’d mapped out a plan for the future like old times, and he’d gone home to paint his door Wind Clan Blue.
Someone had rattled her cage after he left. Hard.
Tinker was still in her nightgown but had pulled on steel-toed work boots. She was clumping around Poppymeadows’ dining room as loudly as her hundred pounds allowed. She must have had a bath prior to going to sleep as she had serious bed head that made her look somewhat crazed. Pieces of paper were taped to the walls, and she was weaving colored thread from one point to another.
Her Hand looked slightly frightened.
Thorne Scratch gave Oilcan a questioning glance. She’d never really met the Godzilla of Pittsburgh in full rampage. He motioned to his First to be silent and still; Tinker rarely noticed anything that wasn’t moving when she was in this mode. Thorne wordlessly took up guard one step back and to the left of him.
“How hard is to find a pair of pants, for gods’ sake?” Tinker shouted. “Is this all the lamps we can get? It still looks like a cave in here!”
There were a dozen mismatched lamps scattered about, trying to fight back the dark “intimate dining” ambiance of the restaurant.
“We’re still looking, domi,” a tengu said from the shadows and disappeared without a sound.
“What’s wrong, Tink?” Oilcan asked.
“I just got handed several ticking bombs! I’m trying to defuse them all at the same time.” She held out her hand and twiddled her fingers through a “gimme” motion. “Let me see your Codex.” She flipped through the pages of his digital copy at a furious speed. She would pause occasionally to swear loudly. “Damn! Damn! Damn! Yours is doctored too. Our paranoid grandfather cut us off at the knees by giving us both the same highly edited version of the Dufae Codex. There are pages and pages of stuff he left out on purpose. Look!” She snatched up the original version. She flipped to the last page and read it aloud. “My beloved grandchildren, Leo was killed by his efforts to build a gateway to Elfhome. Dufae’s enemies have been on Earth all this time. It is possible that they already have the contents of Dufae’s lost box. Stay hidden. Trust only each other and no one else. Keep yourself safe. Keep yourself safe!” She shouted the last sentence a second time after reading it aloud. “Why write this and then hide it from us? I wouldn’t have applied to CMU if I had known this! I wouldn’t have trusted Riki when he showed up. There’s so many things I would have done differently this summer if I’d just had the original.”
“You did have the original.” Oilcan felt the need to point out. “He knew we’d find it after he died.”
Tinker gave him a hurt look, like he’d thrust a knife into her. “It was buried in his files with all the other secrets he didn’t want me to know!”
“I’m sorry.” He felt guilty. She was rattled; he should have just sided with her. The truth could have waited until another day. “It was a shitty thing to do but you know how he was. He hid out on that island under a fake name. He’d help anyone but if they got too friendly, he would start hiding from them. It’s what really killed him. He didn’t trust anyone. When he got sick, he wouldn’t go to the hospital. He didn’t even want you to call Lain. If he’d just taken care of himself, he might have lived for a hundred more years. We are — were — part elf.”
She rubbed either sleep or tears out of her eyes. “We’re missing hundreds of pages. Grandpa copied only the stuff focused on certain spells. There’s big sections that seem to be just raw data output of something. I don’t know what. I’m going to have to figure out how to search through the original just for information on the box.”
“What ticking bombs do you need to defuse? Literal bombs or figurative?” With Tinker one could never be sure. It was a good thing to find out quickly. “What can I do to help?”
She glanced about the chaos that she was brewing. Her gaze settled on the pictures connected with the multicolored string. “You were ten when your mother was killed. You know what it’s like to lose your parents, live with people you don’t know, and be dragged to a completely new world to live.”
“Yes,” Oilcan said slowly. They had a long-standing agreement that they’d never talk about his mother’s murder. He didn’t like talking to anyone about it, not even Tinker.
“So imagine me — two of me at the same time — at nine years old,” Tinker continued. “The two mini-mes had a normal childhood on Earth in New York City. Regular house for a family of four — whatever that looks like. School. No monsters. Just like you when you grew up in Boston. These mini-mes had actual parents — like you did — that had been killed in some manner. I don’t think in front of the mini-mes, but it’s possible.”
“Are we talking theoretical nine-year-old girls?” Oilcan asked carefully. “Or are there real children involved?”
“Real live orphans! Try to keep up!”
Oilcan sucked in his breath as the memory of warm blood seeping under bare toes flashed through his mind. Twelve years. One would think he would start to forget. Certainly he had no clear memory of the series of foster parents who followed until his grandfather arrived from another world; he only remembered the sense of being adrift in a sea of strangers. The night his mother died, however, was etched in stone. Along with it, a sense of guilt for not doing something to save his mother.
“Now,” Tinker charged on, seemingly unaware of the emotional storm she’d just triggered in him. “We’re talking mini-me — did I mention there are two? Well, actually, six but four aren’t born yet, so we’ll deal with them later. Two nine-year-old mini-mes. Crazy smart like me; they worked magic while on Earth. God knows what else they’re capable of — including using the Spell Stones. I know that if someone tried to make me live somewhere against my will, there would be hell to pay. Because I’m me, ‘hell to pay’ could be mind-boggling. Two of me — mind-blowing. The choices are: living with Esme, who is their rightful mother.” Tinker pointed at a photo of her mother taped to the wall. Tinker indicated Lain’s picture beside Esme’s. “Lain — although that’s nearly the same since Esme is living with Lain right now. Me — but what do I know about raising kids? You — but you have a house full of kids already. Forge, who promises to be good but I don’t really trust him completely. Gracie, who was married to my father and loved him desperately but I know almost nothing else about her.” Tinker tapped a hand-drawn picture of a tengu woman that stood in for Gracie. “She’s Jin’s cousin, one of the Chosen bloodline, and the flock’s ‘dream crow,’ which means she can see the future. We would be unleashing two of me on a woman who does not know what I’m capable of. I take that back — Gracie might suspect what I’m like since she was in space when I fell off the planet. No. No. I still think she’ll be totally blindsided, but who wouldn’t be — except for maybe Lain because she’s lived through one of me already.”