Party? Shit, the wedding party! Jane had totally forgotten about the bridesmaids.
Hal’s yelp of pain dragged her attention back. Durrack had him professionally pinned to the ground. The tree had shifted to the house, lured by the vibration of the explosion. Its branches explored the façade, looking for food.
“Watch the tree! Don’t mess up his face, Durrack! We still have close-ups to shoot!” Jane shouted as she waved her team away from the house. If it did catch fire, hopefully the tree would go up with it. “Well? Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Not currently,” Duff said. “You know that most of the people where I work are either related to us or are — you know — pregnant.” He meant the Bunny household members. “There’s one girl — kind of — but we haven’t actually even hung out, let alone dated. I told Mom to call Marc — he’s the person that gets out and about and talks to people. Well — not talk-talk — the Stone being stonelike.”
Marc’s nickname was “Stone” because he rarely spoke. That and because he was built like a stone wall.
Durrack dragged Hal back to Jane. The tree was still exploring the smoking house; maybe it was picking up a panicked squirrel or raccoon trapped inside. Jane waved to Taggart and Nigel and indicated that they all should follow her back to the production truck to get a chicken and more dynamite. (She wasn’t sure why Hal hadn’t used a chicken but it could be because Nigel didn’t like killing things. Unfortunately, most of their summer had involved killing things. Dangerous things.)
The thought reminded her why she called Duff in the first place.
“EIA is here and says there might be more than one tree. Can you confirm?”
“Yes. Bam-Bam called Alton and said that the oni sicced an unknown number of monsters on Oakland. BW have been deployed.”
BW — or black wing — was this week’s code word for tengu. Who was Bam-Bam? It took Jane a moment to remember Bam-Bam was what the kids at school used to call Lawrie Munroe. Law was legendary for saving girls in trouble, usually using baseball bats and random pieces of lumber instead of something sane, like a handgun. It had earned her the nickname based on the old Flintstones cartoon character. Law wasn’t part of their scout network but she could be trusted to pass on accurate information.
Jane glanced toward the distant, oncoming black willow. It hadn’t gotten any closer but she could see a third tree had appeared behind it.
Black willows reproduced via seeds that found root in swampy areas. In marshes, there would be swarms of saplings that fed in packs like piranha, finding safety in numbers. Once the saplings grew as tall as a man, though, they would spread out, seeking less crowded hunting grounds. All the black willows that she and Hal had ever dealt with had been individual trees that had drifted into yards near streams or swampy areas. It was unheard-of for them to march so far from water in one day.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, especially with the blackout in Oakland,” Jane said. “Activate all our scouts to do a full city sweep. Let’s check all the backwaters for a buildup of oni forces. The entire eastern front might be a ghost army to keep the elves tied up while the main attack comes from another direction.”
“Will do,” Duff said. “Anything else?”
“Not now,” Jane said. “I’ll let you know how this goes.”
“Yo!” Briggs called to someone.
Jane realized that Yumiko had joined them. The tengu yamabushi wore skinny jeans and a Team Tinker tank top. Was that how the good guys were telling one another apart from the bad guys now — Team Tinker T-shirts? Yumiko folded her massive black wings, panting slightly from her flight.
Briggs greeted Yumiko with a fist bump.
“My people are spread thin, so I called in the guardians of the Dahe Hao.” Yumiko pointed eastward.
The tall, slender spaceship was five miles away as the crow flew. It was a giant black stroke against the gray overcast sky. The tengu considered it holy since it had delivered their leader, Jin Wong, from space via dragon intervention. Said dragon had covered it with spell runes to keep it from collapsing under its own weight.
“It leaves the Dahe Hao unguarded, but only someone with wings could access the interior.” Yumiko sounded like someone who had made a decision that they hated. “The ship should be fine until I can get backup. It gave me four yamabushi to cover Frick Park.”
“Where’s Alton?” Jane figured from Duff’s various comments that Alton and Yumiko had been together all morning. The entire family had members of the tengu elite keeping an eye on them at all times. By accident or design, Yumiko usually paired up with Alton.
Yumiko gestured toward the south. “He’s in Schenley Park with Xiao Chen, making sure there are no black willows in Panther Hollow.”
Jane didn’t like the idea of Alton out hunting black willows, but as a forager he was well versed in Elfhome’s deadly flora and fauna. Nor was he alone. Xiao Chen was one of the returning tengu astronauts and part of Jin Wong’s most trusted inner circle.
“There are a score of trees moving in our direction,” Yumiko said. “One of our operatives said that a person fitting Kajo’s description used a whistle that started the black willows heading west.”
The name “Kajo” spiked anger and fear through Jane. The oni leader had been the one who kidnapped Boo and kept her alive as his personal plaything. In the end, he’d transformed her into a tengu, changing her down to the DNA level. It would explain why Yumiko and the other yamabushi were handling the search. He was a clever and powerful enemy.
“Jane?” Hal whined. Durrack had him pinned to the side of the production truck. “We really should kill the tree before it gets bored with the house.”
Jane sighed. Hal was right but that would mean letting him play with dynamite again. When PB&G first experimented with killing black willows, they’d determined that Hal was better at throwing than Jane. He’d played lacrosse in college, developing the hand-eye coordination that Jane had never honed. Nigel had demonstrated that he was woefully out of his element. Not that he wasn’t athletic, but cricket “pitching” was more like bowling than baseball, rugby players rarely threw the ball more than a few yards, and Nigel had never played goalie in soccer.
“You have a way of killing trees?” Yumiko asked.
“Dynamite.” Jane glanced at the cage. She had two chickens, giving her the excuse to bring only two sticks of dynamite with them. (She had left the nearly full crate with her cousin, Roach, for safekeeping.) Hal had just used up one.
“I can get more dynamite,” she told Yumiko. “It’s the delivery system that’s a problem. I only have two chickens. I’m not sure where to get more on short notice.”
And she didn’t relish the idea of trying to fling explosive dead chickens at a horde of black willows. There were so many things that could go wrong.
“If you have the dynamite, my people can drop it from above the black willows,” Yumiko said.
It was one of the few times in Jane’s life where the phrase “Praise God” seemed appropriate. The last thing she wanted to do was dodge a swarm of man-eating trees while Hal juggled dynamite.
One of those “only in Pittsburgh” discussions followed as to whether or not they needed to attach chickens to the dynamite being dropped on the mobile trees. (At least, Jane assumed it was a “never on Earth” conversation based by the number of times that Durrack, Briggs, Taggart, or Nigel shook their heads to denote ignorance of the subject.)
Briggs suggested that Yumiko do some test runs. “It’s not like the tree will be shooting at you. As long as you stay out of its reach, you can drop rocks on it until you feel ready for the real thing.”