The taller Kajo led his group toward the Braddock Trail, which led through the heart of Frick Park.
Law didn’t know what Kajo planned but she didn’t want to follow the oni into Frick Park. Black willows hunted via vibration on the ground; they could feel even something as light as a two-pound rabbit at a hundred paces. The oni could find a safe path through the park, but that would leave only unsafe ground for her and Bare Snow. Guns and knives and even machetes were useless against the giant man-eating trees.
Maybe Kajo didn’t know about the black willows.
There was an odd high-pitched whistle.
It sounded again.
Bare Snow hissed and crouched lower.
“What is that?” Law whispered.
“It’s a monster call!” Bare Snow whispered. “They’re directing all monsters to head toward the sun.”
Toward the sun? It was past noon. The sun was in the west. That would lead all monsters in the area toward Oakland. There was a distant loud creak of wood followed by a hollow thud: the unmistakable noise of a black willow stirring to life.
“Oh, shit.” Law pulled out her phone. This officially had become larger than what she and Bare Snow could handle. She’d call Alton, drop it in his lap, and go after Kajo’s gear. Maybe the bombs were with his equipment.
16: BLACK WILLOW STOMP
Jane Kryskill hated black willows. Hated them with a passion. They scared the piss out of her because she couldn’t hurt them with anything short of dynamite. That they scared her made her angry at the world, which meant she was tempted to shoot anything that crossed her path. Thus she nearly killed Corg Durrack — again — when he suddenly appeared beside her.
“Hey, hey, hey! It’s just me!” Corg had taken hard cover just in case she took another shot at him.
“Didn’t you learn not to do that after the last time?” Jane lowered her pistol. They were near the Rim in an abandoned part of Squirrel Hill. She had Chesty locked in the Chased by Monsters production truck to keep him safe; she knew that meant her back was unprotected. The man should know that between the two facts, Jane would be even more prone to shoot first, ask questions later.
“I thought I was being obvious.” Durrack stuck out his hand to show that he was unarmed.
Jane snorted. It was Durrack’s left hand, not his right. Durrack acted like a Boy Scout, but he looked like a muscle-bound superhero and fought like a Navy SEAL. If he had been anyone else, Jane’s first instinct would have been shoot him anyhow. The mere fact that he’d shown up at their remote location was suspicious. Everyone from Maynard to Yumiko to Taggart, though, had vouched for the man. Besides, his partner, Hannah Briggs, was probably hidden somewhere nearby.
Jane wasn’t sure which government branch the two agents originally worked for. Taggart had said that the pair had saved him and some other journalists in Syria shortly before he quit being a war correspondent. Jane had managed to learn that the two had come to Elfhome on loan to the NSA. They’d been ordered to find, protect, and extract the one technical genius who could build a world gate before the oni could kidnap the person. It was an operation that a typical NSA agent wasn’t prepared for. Durrack and Briggs ham-handed the extraction so badly that they’d been arrested by the EIA and nearly executed by the elves. (To be fair, they hadn’t known that they were after a young girl, let alone that Tinker domi was the Viceroy’s new bride. Bad intelligence can kill a good operative.) By the time the agents had gotten out of that mess, they were stranded on Elfhome with the rest of Pittsburgh. This hadn’t stopped Durrack and Briggs from pursuing truth, justice, and the American way. Time and time again they had thrown themselves into the thick of the heaviest fighting to protect Pittsburgh.
Their paths had crisscrossed all summer. Jane’s team would help the pair deal with Elfhome flora and fauna while trading intelligence on the oni. It was a mutually useful friendship.
Durrack shook his outstretched left hand while still hidden behind his hard cover. “Are we good?”
“Yes, we’re good.” Jane tucked away her pistol.
Interacting with Durrack meant she’d taken her eyes off Hal and Nigel. Hal had taken advantage of the distraction to move closer to the black willow. Grinning hugely, Nigel was scurrying to join Hal. It forced Taggart to shift closer too. The men should be safe as long as they kept out of range of its writhing tentacle-like branches.
It wasn’t the first black willow that the Chased by Monsters crew had encountered. For some insane reason, Tinker had had one on ice at Reinhold’s. It had been before the tengu became her Beholden, so they could only guess at her logic, or lack of it. The tree had broken out and gone on a rampage through the North Side. Jane and her crew had arrived seconds ahead of Prince True Flame. It meant that they got no establishing shots, and had lousy framing, bad lighting, and no direct interaction with the tree. They could only stand back and film the prince reducing the monster to a charred stump. It was safe footage: none of their secrets made it to video. It just hadn’t seemed good enough for their show. Jane had dumped what they had to WQED to use on the evening news and moved on.
If they combined it with what they filmed today, however, there might be enough for a full episode. They just needed to be sure to get enough footage without anyone getting hurt. By “anyone” Jane meant Hal. He knew to keep out of range of its branches, but Hal had the self-preservation instincts of a toddler.
“What are you doing here?” Jane asked without taking her eyes off Hal.
“Maynard sent us to check on this area,” Durrack said. “There were reports of multiple black willows moving thru this neighborhood.”
“Multiple?” Jane cursed softly. She had called Duff and had him deploy some of the scouts within the militia to find something Jane could film. He’d gotten back to her at noon, saying Alton had forwarded a report that a black willow had been spotted in Squirrel Hill. (Jane wasn’t sure how Alton got involved. With the additional load of the Harbingers and their households, the enclaves had all the foragers in Pittsburgh scrambling for fish and game. Jane thought that Alton had gone hunting with Boo in tow.) Somewhere along the lines of communication, the fact that there was more than one tree had been lost.
She scanned the neighborhood around her for more black willows. The Rim cut an arcing path through this area. It ran from the Allegheny River in the Northwest to the Monongahela River in the Southeast. To the south was the collection of neighborhoods now known as Oakland, and the downtown triangle. A few blocks west from her current location was the back end of the enclaves. Virgin forest lay just a few blocks north.
In theory, the tree could have come from anywhere beyond the Rim. A walking tree, though, left a wide trail of torn dirt, shattered sidewalk, and downed (and hopefully not live) power lines. As she studied the area, it was clear that the tree had come through the cemetery at Jane’s back. A trail of overturned granite tombstones and statues made it easy to plot the tree’s course. It had smashed its way in a straight line through the graveyard, hit the stone wall at the cemetery edge, and followed the fence out to the street.
In the distance, Jane could see the bobbing foliage of a second black willow. The incoming tree seemed to be on the same course but it either had found something large to eat or had gotten caught up on some obstacle in its path. She had an unknown amount of time before her team would be dealing with two trees at once. Clearly both black willows were from Frick Park. The flesh-eating plants thrived in the marshy ground around Nine Mile Run. Normally black willows avoided the paved city streets and other rocky outcroppings. Why had they left the marsh?