“What’s your ceiling height?” Taggart asked while keeping the camera trained on the tree.
“I can keep out of its reach,” Yumiko said. “Getting too high would make targeting harder.”
The black willow had found something small and furry inside the house. It dragged out the squealing animal and dropped it into its maw.
Durrack muttered an impressively inventive string of profanities.
Jane shook her head. They weren’t going to be able to use any of the audio after Durrack’s arrival. At least it was easier to edit out audio than white wings in a reflection. “Let’s give it a try with just the dynamite. If it doesn’t work, I’ll track down more chickens.”
Jane confiscated their lighter from Hal and gave it to Yumiko, along with their remaining stick of dynamite. She moved her team behind the truck so they wouldn’t be in blast range if the stick bounced or got swatted in their direction.
As Yumiko made test drops with small rocks, Jane called her cousin.
“How did it go?” Roach said when he answered his phone.
“Fire in the hole!” Hal yelled as Yumiko dropped the lit stick.
It was a perfect hit. The stick landed inside the tree’s open maw. There was a deep thud, like a big bass drum being hit. With a long splintering crack, the black willow’s trunk split open and gravity took over, tearing the smoking pieces apart.
Jane took a deep breath, feeling like a massive load had been lifted off her. Clearly the tengu could safely deal with the black willows, freeing her team from the task.
“One down,” Jane reported. “I need the rest of the dynamite.”
“The entire crate?” Roach said with clear reservation in his voice.
“There’s a wave of black willows coming toward Oakland. We’re going to need a lot of dynamite to stop them.”
“I’ll be right there.” Roach hung up after getting her location.
Yumiko landed beside Jane.
“Great job,” Briggs said.
Yumiko and Briggs fist bumped.
Jane realized that she had two women she trusted right under her nose. Yes, she had had reservations about them when she first met them, but they had risked their lives to protect her family more than once in the last two months. “Could the two of you be in my wedding? Please?”
“Yes!” Briggs eyes lit up with joy that was quickly hidden away. “Sure. I’m free.”
“Me?” Yumiko said. “I thought the police officer was your maid of honor.”
“We’re making it bigger.” Jane winced as she realized that she should have talked with Taggart but he’d seemed fine with whatever her mother decided. He only wanted to get married. “My brothers are going to be part of the wedding party. I need more women to balance out the numbers.”
“So, Alton and the others?” Yumiko asked. “All cleaned up? In a tux?”
Jane nodded.
“Okay,” Yumiko said. “It might be fun.”
Like a circus, Jane almost said, but she didn’t want to scare off her volunteers.
“The dynamite is on its way.” Jane took out her phone to call her mother with the “good” news. “Until then, I’m going to need your dress sizes.”
The entire summer had been an insane series of deadly events, starting in July when the oni’s secret war had boiled to the surface. Jane had had to constantly juggle information to keep all the little parts of her life from knowing about the whole. WQED had no idea that she and her team had triggered the destruction of the oni encampment at Sandcastle Water Park, days before open warfare had broken out. They didn’t know about Boo being rescued or how she had been transformed into a tengu of the Chosen bloodline. Nor did the station know that Jane’s team had purposely gone to Mercy Hospital to rescue Yumiko, and that setting fire to her EIA guard hadn’t been an accident but a planned distraction. WQED knew that it was her film crew that shot up downtown and blew up parts of the Carnegie Museum. Both gunfights triggered meetings with Dmitri but became “we will not talk about these events” at the station when the EIA hadn’t pressed charges. The station didn’t “know” that Jane’s team was using Monsters in Our Midst to organize a human resistance army — although Dmitri probably suspected.
Likewise, Jane had kept the NSA agents — and with them the EIA — at arm’s length. It was quite possible that they knew nothing about Boo or Sandcastle. She had to assume that they knew about the fight that ended at the stadium and the museum shoot-out, as the EIA had been present during both. If they didn’t know about the Resistance, they weren’t much in terms of intelligence operatives. But up to this moment, she hadn’t taken them into her confidence.
If the oni were on the move, it was time to get everyone on the same page.
“We’re not sure what Kajo is planning.” Yumiko had been bringing the agents up to speed as Jane relayed the dress sizes to her mother. “He always works with layers of deception. Smoke and mirrors. It’s how he has stayed hidden for so many years.”
“You said these Eyes can magically see things.” Durrack twiddled his fingers in front of his eyes as if X-rays were shooting out of his sockets. “Even without them, Kajo has to know the main elven force is closing on his encampments. You would think that he would want to be commanding their withdrawal or ambush or pincer movement — whatever he has planned.”
Yumiko nervously tapped out a cigarette, nodding. “Our operative reports seeing two people matching the description that we gave them of Kajo. It is quite possible neither of them were the real Kajo.”
“How experienced is your operative?” Durrack asked. “Can they tell one oni from another?”
“The less we talk about my operative, the better.” Yumiko twiddled her fingers in front of her face, copying Durrack’s mime. “Kajo’s eyes.”
That explained why Duff had used Law’s nickname on the phone.
With the rumble of a big engine, Roach turned onto the street in one of his big dumpster hauler trucks. He pulled to a stop behind the production truck. He sat a moment, studying Jane and the strangers around her, assessing her body language before getting out.
“Hey,” he called. He locked his truck after getting out. There was an unasked question posed in the tilt of his head.
“This is my cousin.” Jane started introductions for the more dangerous side of the equation. Roach was the smartest and most charismatic person in her entire family. Considering his older brother was a popular deejay for KDKA radio, that was saying a lot. It was unlikely Roach would do anything to get himself shot, but she wanted it clear that no matter what happened, he was off-limits to being hurt. “You can trust him completely.”
For reasons that Jane never understood, her aunt had named her middle son after her husband without sticking a Junior on the backend. She’d made things worse by giving him the middle name of Angus. Roach started out as “Billy.” Around eleven, he tried to use the more adult “Bill,” which resulted in a lot of “Big Bill or Little Bill?” confusion. Sometime in high school, he decided just to only use his last name. It was a testament to his salesmanship that he’d gotten even his brothers to agree to this. “Everyone just calls him Roach. He’s Team Tinker’s business manager and he handles the Hal’s Heroes merchandising.”
Jane let the others introduce themselves because she wasn’t sure how they wanted to be known. They nodded at the name; their lives had interwoven with Tinker enough to recognize someone she trusted implicitly.
Briggs, being secretly shy, let Durrack do most of the talking.
Durrack was built like a pro wrestler but could be surprisingly charming. He claimed to be “working with Maynard” without mentioning EIA or NSA. He handed Roach a business card that gave contact info, including an office whose street address put it in the EIA building downtown.