Boo wasn’t on the first-floor terrace off the living room, nor the second-floor one off the spartan master bedroom. She was up on the roof terrace, under the protection of the lattice roof, her new wings flaring from her back in snow-white perfection. Her spill of curls was just as white, to the point where it was hard to tell where her hair stopped and her feathers started.
Boo had her eyes closed as she folded and extended her wings. While she had resisted the offer of getting her wings immediately after being rescued in July, she had decided to agree in August, when little Joey Shoji got his. The tengu created the spell tattoo with magic, impregnating the skin with ink, in what Boo described as “instant sunburn.” While the spell gave her wings, it didn’t instantly give her the muscle memory or the strength to use them efficiently. The tengu explained that flying was like learning any endurance sport; practice would be what made flight effortless, not magic.
“Fold,” Boo whispered as her wings closed. “Extend.”
In a rustle of white features, her massive wings spread.
She looked like a battered angel, dressed in a backless tank top and cut off shorts, and sporting vivid bruises on her alabaster skin after countless bad landings.
“Hey.” Jane held out one of the bottles. “Do you want a beer?”
“Sure!” Boo cried, opening her eyes.
Jane had just grabbed what was in the refrigerator. She hadn’t really looked at the label until she cracked hers open. It was a Church Brew Works Blue Valentine. It was a stout beer with chocolate and fudge undertones. It was a good beer, but strong. From experience Jane knew that kids rarely liked the more robust beers right out of the gate. But then, maybe the oni had been giving Boo beer to drink since she was little. Boo seemed excited by the prospect of drinking it.
Boo was sniffing her opened beer. “Wow, it smells like some kind of dessert.”
“Beer takes a little time to get used to,” Jane said to warn her.
It was nearly comical to watch Boo soldier through the first few sips. No, the oni hadn’t weaned her on beer.
“I normally have things like hard cider,” Boo said when she realized that Jane was watching her. “Or wine coolers.”
“You don’t have to drink it.”
“I want to,” Boo said. “He liked sweet drinks. Girly drinks. You guys all drink beer.”
“Kajo?” Jane said.
Boo nodded.
Jane took a long chug on her beer to give herself courage to dive into the conversation that she didn’t want to bring up. The one that she’d unconsciously avoided for over a month. “Boo, if we’re going to stop Kajo, we need to know everything about him. What does he look like? Where is his main camp? What you think the oni might be doing? Anything you can give us will help.”
Boo hesitated for a moment before saying, “Kajo’s a little taller than me. Just enough that I need to tilt my head up a little to look him in the eye.”
That made him damn short, as Boo hadn’t shot up like most Kryskills. She was only about five foot two.
“His hair is long and blond,” Boo continued, frowning in concentration. “Not white blond like mine but still very pale. He normally wears it in a ponytail but sometimes he braids it or he wears it in a man-bun. He doesn’t like having his hair so long but he was told to let it grow. His eyes are very green — they almost don’t seem real. You know in movies, when the actors use contacts to make their eyes really vivid? They’re like that. When I was little I used to dream that he had little emeralds instead of real eyes.”
Boo fell silent for a minute. She took another sip of the beer and cringed. “Oh, this tastes like a chocolate tart that’s gone bad.”
“Being a tengu might have changed how things taste to you,” Jane said.
Boo visibly braced herself to take another sip. “Kajo actually looks like a Disney prince. The chin. The cheeks. The nose. He’s beautiful. So beautiful I could never understand why he kept me. He could have anyone.”
Jane finished her beer as she struggled to keep her anger in check. The “beautiful” bastard who “could have anyone” had stolen a first grader who weighed less than fifty pounds. What kind of pervert wanted a girl that young?
“Five and a half feet tall, roughly. Long blond hair. Green eyes.” Jane focused on the important details. The hair could be changed but not the eyes or height. “Looks human?”
Boo nodded. “Yes, he looks like a normal person. He could walk down the street and no one would think, ‘Oh, there’s an oni.’ That’s why he wears the mask. No one would be scared of him otherwise, at least on first meeting him. Once you got to know him, you realized that he could be so ruthless. Sometimes it seemed like he had no heart — but then he would look at me so sad and say he loved me. Sometimes I believed him.”
It wasn’t much but at least it was more than they had before. She wondered if Marc knew a police sketch artist that he could trust.
Jane moved on. They needed to find the two possible Kajos before they could identify the real one. “Do you have any idea why Kajo would be moving around black willows? Did he put the trees in Frick Park so he could use them in some master plan?”
Boo shook her head. “The trees were here before everything. Before the oni reached Pittsburgh. Before Pittsburgh came to Elfhome. The elves surveyed this area extensively and monitored it for decades before the first Startup. Pure Radiance knew that something big was going to show up here. The Viceroy mapped out the ley lines, the springs, and all the wetlands that were infested with black willow. The seeds of the black willow are like those of a dandelion: real fluffy. Based on their DNA and the genetic drift, Kajo thought that some seeds got blown up into the jet stream during the Rebellion and came down somewhere in the Westernlands. He sees them as a mixed blessing. They’ve made moving around the virgin forest more difficult for the oni but they deterred the humans and elves from exploring extensively.”
Jane took out her phone and started to take notes. There was a lot to unpack from the statement, perhaps more than Boo realized. Her baby sister had been on the inside so long that she didn’t know what was common knowledge and what wasn’t.
Nigel and Hal theorized that the monster-call whistle took advantage of instincts encoded into creatures at a genetic level. For it to work, the beast had to have been doctored at some point with magic to reinforce those instincts into a behavior that could be quickly and readily commanded. Nigel and Hal had experimented with the whistle — carefully — to discover that while most wild creatures — songbirds, small mammals like squirrels, and most fish — didn’t respond, bioengineered animals like elfhounds did. (Chesty was not amused by the experiment but he would obey the monster call.)
Sparrow had betrayed her kind by working with the oni. Kajo must have received all his information about the black willows and the local area from her.
“Kajo is taking advantage of the fact that the trees are in the area but they’re not part of his plans,” Jane said to confirm she correctly understood what Boo reported.
“Kajo said that during the Rebellion they found that the black willows were too vulnerable to the Fire Clan and Stone Clan, especially if the two clans joined forces,” Boo said. “Nor are the trees really an urban warfare weapon — they’re slow moving and have trouble navigating around houses.”
Jane had to agree that if she and Hal had been able to deal with lone black willows in the past, then no, the trees weren’t really ideal weapons. Jane frowned at what she had just written. The Stone Clan hadn’t arrived until after Sparrow was dead; the female elf’s intelligence reports must have been extensive.