Since Joy had spoken English, he decided that asking questions might be an intelligent thing to do. “Hi, there. What are you doing here? Were you looking for me?”
“Ice cream! Yummy!” Joy said in her baby-girl voice.
“Oilcan! Oilcan!” someone squeaked.
It was the four white mice from his odd waking dream. They sat astride their tiny hoverbikes on top of the ice cream counter. Instead of racing goggles, they wore wide-brim hats like the ones that Roach had tried to get for Team Tinker. Their hats were different colors: pink, red, green, and blue. Based on everyone’s surprised reaction, the squeaking mice were real, not a figment of Oilcan’s imagination.
Realizing that they’d caught his attention, the mice all started to talk at once with excited gesturing.
“We’ve been looking all over the city for you…”
“…we can’t find Alexander anywhere!”
“You’re in danger…”
“…so you need to cast it right away.”
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Oilcan motioned for them to stop talking. “One at a time. I can’t understand you when you all talk at once.”
They paused for a few seconds — and then all started to talk again, only faster and louder. This triggered a sudden fistfight, with three of the four mice flailing at one another while squeaking, “I was talking! Just shut up and let me talk! I’ll do it! Me!”
The fourth — the one that sounded like Christopher Robin — stood to one side, going, “This isn’t helping!”
Oilcan leaned closer to the mice, peering down at them. They weren’t living animals but small, well-articulated robots. What made it difficult to tell which mouse was talking was that their mouths didn’t move and at least two — the red and the green — were using the same computer-generated voice. Oilcan struggled to remember the names that went to the various colors. Nikola Tesla Dufae had been the one that sounded like Christopher Robin and he wore blue, marking him as the only boy. The pink one had a girl’s voice but was named Chuck Norris. Red and Green were the Jawbreakers.
Baby Duck edged closer to the mice. Robotic or not, she was barely controlling her greedy hands from scooping up the new cute little animals. The rest of his kids were attempting to hide behind Thorne, staring with confused fear.
“Westernlands mice can talk?” Merry whispered.
“I’m not sure they’re really mice,” Blue Sky answered her.
Nikola’s mouse suddenly transformed into a very large dog. “We don’t have time for this!”
Everyone shouted with surprise. The three mice blew raspberries at the dog.
“How…how are you doing this?” Oilcan asked. These were his new baby cousins? Oh, Tinker was going to totally freak out.
“We’re dream walking!” Chuck Norris cried. “Joy taught us how!”
“We’re baby dragons!” Green Jawbreaker stated firmly, but then added less surely, “Kind of. Wood sprites. Intanyai seyosa. It’s all kind of the same thing.”
“We can be anything we want while dream walking,” Red said. “We’re just used to being mice, that’s all.”
“It’s a comfortable size,” Nikola said as he turned back into a mouse. “Tesla feels too big to be just one of us.”
“We’re here, but we’re not really here,” Red Jawbreaker said. “We’re like a figment of your imagination but less so.”
Green smacked her sister. “That was a stupid analogy.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Chuck Norris cried. “You’re all in danger! We’re here to warn you and give you top secret information!”
“Yeah! We’re part of the Resistance now!” Red pointed at her wide-brim hat.
“The Resistance?” Oilcan echoed. “What’s that?”
Guy looked a mix of confused and horrified. “We are Pittsburgh?”
“We are Team Tinker!” the mice squeaked.
“Hooyah!” Chuck Norris added in.
“The Flying Monkeys are setting a trap for the domana!” Nikola said. “It’s a spell using one of the nactka that was in the Dufae spell-locked box! They’ve got troops moving into position to attack the moment that the spell is cast. They know where you are right now. They’re coming for you! You need to get to a place where you can cast a shield spell.”
“I’m a domana now,” Oilcan said. “I can just use my hands to cast—”
“It won’t work!” the mice shouted in chorus.
“It needs to be the special spell that Lou and Jilly made up!” Chuck cried.
“They’ve made the luggage mules fight until they found what Dufae was looking for!” Red said.
Green grumbled, “They wouldn’t let us race the mules while they working on them.”
“Joy has the printout of the…” Nikola paused to look around. “Joy, where’s the printout?”
“Quick! We need to find it!” Chuck Norris cried.
The mice started up their hoverbikes to fly around the room. They were fearless, making jumps that put Oilcan’s heart into his throat until he remembered that the mice weren’t really there — that the hoverbikes were some kind of illusion. Chuck Norris jumped past him and he realized the mouse was making the engine noise for the little hoverbike.
“Here it is!” Green called from inside the ice cream counter.
Everyone leaned in close to see that a full-size piece of paper was tucked between the ice cream barrels, covered with the metal ink of a computer-printed spell and some handwritten notes in crayon along the margins. The other mice landed their miniature hoverbikes beside Green.
“The oni are coming! Now!” Nikola said. “The main force is hitting Oakland but there are troops coming from the boat ramp at the dog park.”
“What?” Oilcan said.
This triggered all the mice to talk at the same time.
“You’ve got to run!” the mice cried. “You need to get someplace safe with a casting circle!”
“Bong!” Green had suddenly made an odd chiming noise.
“What was that?” the other mice cried.
Green threw up her hands. “Print job is done!”
“Hooyah!” Chuck Norris cried and vanished. Red and Green blinked out of existence.
“You need to go,” Nikola said. “You need to go now. Run.”
Then he too was gone.
Joy climbed up onto Oilcan’s shoulder. She grabbed the ice cream bucket from his hands and vanished, taking the ice cream with her.
“Holy. Shit.” Andy muttered exactly what Oilcan was feeling.
“We’re leaving,” Oilcan announced. “Everyone to the trucks.”
Oilcan waved toward the door as he took out his phone. He needed to call Tinker and warn her. The mice claimed not to be able to find her. He wasn’t sure where she’d gone; he’d seen the Rolls-Royce leaving Poppymeadows while he was in Oakland. She didn’t answer her phone. Guessing that Tinker might have gone to tell Esme about the twins, he called Lain.
“Hey, kiddo,” Esme answered the phone and started to talk without even asking who was calling and why. Lain and Tinker both did it all the time; until recently he hadn’t questioned it. “She was here but she left a while ago.”
“I need to talk to her,” Oilcan said.
“I think she’s gone dark,” Esme said. “I’m not sure where she’s at.”
“Okay. Thanks.” He hung up. Tinker had gone into hiding again? Why would she do that? Had she realized that the oni were about to attack Oakland? No, if she did, she would be heading back to Poppymeadows. Something else made her run and hide.
His kids were out the door but the two high-school-aged clerks were still behind the counter, looking scared and uncertain. The oni were coming for Oilcan and his kids, but they might grab the girls for the whelping pens.