“We need lots of seating.” Oilcan pointed at the largest piece on the floor, a huge U-shaped leather sectional. They didn’t have a family-only communal space at the enclave yet. If he could get Jewel Tear moved to the second floor, though, they could use her current room. The American ideal of family was one who gathered in a living room on a couch. The twins might find comfort in that familiar arrangement.
Baby Duck eyed the sectional doubtfully. “It’s too black.”
Again? It took Oilcan a moment to realize that she meant Stone Clan Black. The kids had spent their whole life identifying themselves with the color — only to have their clan betray them. Baby Duck was wearing a man’s chambray work shirt in Wind Clan Blue as a dress with rainbow leggings. Under a very thin veneer of “I’m fine,” the kids were still traumatized.
Blue Sky and Spot closed ranks with Baby Duck to lend their support. The three were the youngest and had become fast friends over the last week.
“Too smelly,” Spot whispered in English. It was the first time Oilcan had ever heard Spot talk; he’d been wondering if the half-oni wasn’t able to speak. The boy looked as if his father had been a Labrador retriever instead of an oni. Spot had big amber eyes, long floppy ears, dark fur, and a wedge-shaped black nose. According to Tommy Chang, the boy had spent his entire life hidden away because of his appearance. It might have made him too shy to talk, or maybe he didn’t follow Elvish, since the other half-oni kids seemed to know only English, Chinese, and Oni.
Spot wrinkled his black nose and whispered, “Cat peed on it.”
Oilcan smelled nothing but a lavender-based cleaning product that the store apparently used by the gallon. “Are you sure?”
Spot cringed back behind Blue Sky, nodding.
“You don’t want an ugly, black, peed-on couch.” Blue Sky championed both Baby Duck and Spot.
“This one is big!” Baby Duck dashed over to a long white couch that looked like stitched-together clouds. She flopped down and the massive puffy pillows swallowed her. “Quiee! Too soft! Too soft!”
Spot and Blue Sky rescued her from the couch.
“What about this one?” Oilcan moved to a half-moon sectional behind the first row of couches. It wasn’t his style. The tufted cushions and curved sections seemed too pretentiousness to him, but it was a misty blue color in a soft micro-suede fabric.
“Oh, that one is just right!” Baby Duck cried. She and Spot tumbled onto the couch to test it out.
Blue Sky went into alert mode as the other sekasha drifted closer. Oilcan recognized the hard look on the boy’s face; they were seconds away from Blue Sky launching himself at the interloper.
“We’re getting this couch!” Oilcan announced, catching Blue by the shoulder. He turned the boy around and pushed him toward the distant service counter. “You three go find an employee. I want to start the process of getting this stuff loaded.”
Blue resisted enough for Oilcan to know that he wasn’t going willingly. “He’s looking at Spot weird. No one invited him. He just added himself. He doesn’t have any right to be here. He’s not one of us.”
Not one of us?
Oilcan had been aware that they’d picked up a second armed guard just as everyone piled out of the vehicles outside of the store. Oilcan had assumed it was one of Forge’s people; they’d provided backup to Thorne on previous shopping trips. Who exactly had they picked up? Oilcan glanced at the male sekasha drifting toward them.
“Shit,” Oilcan breathed in English. The sekasha was a complete stranger. “I’ll deal with it.” Oilcan gave Blue Sky another nudge. “Trust me.”
Blue Sky was a good kid. He’d spent most his life trusting Oilcan and Tinker. He gave Oilcan an unhappy look but he obeyed. The boy caught Baby Duck and Spot by the hand and dragged them off.
It was hard to tell with elves, but the sekasha seemed “teenage” young. The male was shorter than the warriors in Tinker’s Hand, but so were all of Forge’s. His armor and tattoos were Stone Clan Black but the ribbon in his braid was an emerald green. He was watching the children, just as Blue Sky claimed. He had his face set in the emotionally neutral “warrior’s mask” that the sekasha had perfected; there was no way to tell what the male was thinking.
Whatever his interest in the kids was, it was derailed by a La-Z-Boy recliner with its footrest raised. The warrior squatted to closely eye the mechanical pieces of the chair.
“Who is that?” Oilcan whispered to Thorne Scratch, pointing discretely at the sekasha.
He didn’t understand any of the words that she used as a reply. He really wasn’t as fluent in Elvish as he thought.
“I don’t know what those words mean,” he whispered.
“I’ll try to break his name down to more common words,” Thorne said, then paused to think it through. “On certain nights, when the moon is bright, there appears to be two smaller lights that bracket it. It’s been determined that they’re reflections of the moonlight off of thin wispy clouds. I’m not sure if you can see them in Pittsburgh; the conditions must be right for them to appear. I have yet to see them here in the Westernlands.”
“Paraselene.” Oilcan gave the scientific name, which meant “beside the moon.” The elves had determined the true nature of the optical illusion, although he wasn’t sure how. It was a very specific refraction of moonlight through ice crystals found in cirrus clouds that were shaped like hexagonal plates.
Thorne Scratch gave an uncertain nod, probably because she didn’t know Latin. “His full name means ‘the ghost white gleams to either side of a full moon when it is nearest to Elfhome in its elliptic orbit, and thus its brightest, in the middle of winter over foreign mountains.’”
Her original phrase had been much shorter. Oilcan didn’t know the Elvish for “supermoon” or “paraselene” or whatever “foreign mountains” denoted. They needed an idiom that they both easily understood.
“We sometimes call the illusion ‘moon dog’ instead of paraselene,” Oilcan said.
Thorne looked slightly surprised. “We use that phrase too. In old legends, the moon dog was thought to be the greyhound of Huunou. It is believed that it was rare to catch sight of the dog in the sky because Huunou often gifts it to those who have his favor.”
Oilcan had heard of Huunou’s greyhound. The dog was a weirdly seasonal mythological creature, like Santa’s reindeer, if his reindeer tortured anyone who didn’t put out cookies. The elves made a big production of “feeding sky’s greyhound” around Winter Solstice by putting out brightly decorated suet, much to the delight of the local bird population.
Moon Dog’s name, however, really didn’t explain who he was, and more specifically, what he was doing with Oilcan’s little group of shoppers. Thorne Scratch sounded like she knew the young male, but he hadn’t been part of Earth Son’s or Jewel Tear’s households. “Where did he come from?”
Thorne shook her head to indicate that she didn’t know. “He was not on the list that Little Horse gave to me, yet the last time I saw him was at Cold Mountain Temple. It is possible that he is not here officially, much the way he was not at Cold Mountain Temple formally. Most of his life has been shaped by his dangerously odd name. Perhaps, once again, he’s let it take him on a wild hunt.”
Huunou was the god of a weird collection of things, starting with everything in the sky and working down to laundry. The moon was often referred to his palace where he slept and the sun was his blazing red horse. He was the “Santa” of the winter solstice celebration. The weeklong festival was like Christmas for the elves, but with little weird hints of Halloween thrown in. It made for a bright, joyous, but a little creepy celebration. All the elves he knew looked forward to it. None of what Oilcan knew would indicate “dangerously odd.”