Eight hours on the river and there wasn’t a time that she thought it was safe to tell Hal about the wedding. He was being weirdly fragile, which might mean he’d already figured it out. She’d discovered when fighting his drinking problem that he’d ignore uncomfortable truths if not dragged out into the light of the day and chained around his neck.
She’d also learned that she could only force him to acknowledge so many uncomfortable truths without him collapsing under the weight. On Earth he’d lost everything — career, friends, and wife — in a sudden cascade of betrayals. He’d fled the planet rather than face the truth. Would she have liked him better if he hadn’t been so damaged when they met?
To be on the safe side, they left the dynamite with Roach.
While both naturalists chafed at calling it a day, her family had plans to once again eat as a family at Hydehold to celebrate the win against the namazu. It was really a flimsy excuse to be together as a family. They all felt that Boo needed it, especially since the tengu had taken Joey off to live with his cousins. A single meal would not erase six years of horror.
It came as a surprise when the tengu arrived in a car like normal people. It was a green, nondescript, SUV that would draw no attention to itself.
Joey threw open the door the moment the car stopped, half falling out of vehicle. “Jane!”
She crouched down to his level as she realized that he was crying. He flung himself into her arms. He clung to her, gripping her tightly as he buried his face into her shoulder.
She gave Yumiko a hard look as the tengu female stepped out of the car.
Yumiko shrugged. She had changed out of her pizza delivery outfit. She wore a backless black tank top which showed off impressive muscle tone for such a thin woman. “He forgot his Ravenclaw T-shirt and wanted to come back for it. I told him that someone could just pick it up but he said he had to be the one to get the shirt.”
“They won’t know!” Joey wailed. “I have to be sure! I need to see!”
“Marc.” Alton murmured quietly.
Yumiko frowned at Alton. “What about him?”
Jane picked Joey up, marveling anew how little he was. How little he weighed. It was hard to believe all her brothers were once this small. All she could remember from growing up was that they were all about equal-sized. “Boo, didn’t you pick up presents for Joey?”
“Yes, we did!” Boo took the hint. She swooped in to relieve Jane of the little boy. “We got a real drawing pad, the kind that artists use, and colored pencils.”
“Really?” Joey sniffed.
“And we’re making spaghetti for dinner! Do you want to help?”
“Spaghetti? With meatballs?”
“Yup!”
Yumiko looked torn between the fact that Boo was carrying Joey away and the fact that the boy had stopped bawling hysterically.
“When my dad died,” Jane said quietly. “Marc was about that age. He used to get up in the middle of the night and go from bedroom to bedroom, making sure everyone was okay. He needed to know that the people he cared about hadn’t died while he wasn’t watching. Joey’s aunt and uncle might have been dead for months but to him, they just died. He’s dealing with it the best he can. Boo was his only comfort for months and I saved him. I know you mean well but you’ve shattered his world a second time. Yes, he has his cousins, but he’s smart enough to know they’re just children and that he can’t lean too heavily on them. That’s why he ran to me, not Boo.”
“You’re an expert on little kids?”
“I have five little brothers, and a score of younger cousins that I had to ride herd over, on a planet with man-eating plants. When kids are rattled hard enough, there’s nothing a child their own age can do to get them settled down. They want an adult that can put the world right.”
“So he wants the woman with the biggest gun.”
“Kids aren’t creatures of logic. They’re pure emotion. I could pull my little brothers out of trouble, but they’d want mom before they’d stopped being scared. You guarded Riki, right? You went off to college with him and were at the house when it was filled with the other adults. You weren’t the one that fixed all the little disasters of Joey’s life when he was a toddler. You’re big sister but not mom.”
“Getting him out of the cage made you mom.”
“Kids don’t always make sense. You can’t argue with their logic because they don’t use it to see the world the way you might.”
“I guess we’re staying for dinner.”
“I hope you like spaghetti.”
Jane’s mother had made a quick and simple meat sauce over angel hair pasta for the first family dinner. It barely qualified as “spaghetti” in their terms. To do it right, first homemade loaves of bread needed to be made. The stale bread was reduced to crumbs, mixed with ground beef, pork, sautéed onions and garlic, freshly grated Parmigiano, eggs and basil picked fresh out her mother’s window garden. The resulting meatballs were then browned, baked and added to a marinara sauce made with fresh tomatoes that simmered for hours.
When Boo was little, they had it every Sunday. The aroma of the shimmering sauce would fill up the house. It was the smell of home. Jane had not realized how much she missed it until she walked into her kitchen. It wasn’t surprising that Boo said it was her favorite.
Her mother was beaming with joy. She hugged everyone as they came in so that she had an excuse of give Taggart the official “welcome to the family” hug. At dinner, her mother quietly made sure that he got the biggest and best of everything. It made Jane glad that she’d warned him that her mother knew, otherwise he’d probably be caught off guard by the sudden bombardment of affection. Luckily all the other news of the day distracted Hal and her brothers. She let Hal and Geoffrey cover the events so she didn’t have to lie about where the tengu got the spells. Yumiko stayed too focused on her plate; the female was obviously listening closely to see if Jane had betrayed that information. With a nervous glance at Jane, Hal managed to dodge around the discussion of Geoffrey’s sexual orientation while broaching the subject of questioning the elves about the oni.
She took command of the conversation to make sure that he didn’t misstep. “There’s a lot about the oni that we know only because of Boo. We need to figure out other sources of the same information so that we can share it without fear of exposing her. Since they never mentioned the oni up to now, the elves have been holding back…”
“We should corner one,” Hal impatiently jumped forward on her argument. “They can’t lie… Ow!”
Jane had kicked him under the table. She wanted to keep control of the conversation. The damage had been done. Her little brothers took it as permission to talk.
“They can dance around the subject like crazy,” Guy muttered darkly.
“They lie by omission,” Duff said. “Oh by the way, there’s an entire universe we haven’t told you about. We’re at war with them. We stranded them on Earth a few hundred years ago. They might have bred like crazy. There could be thousands.”
“At least they don’t stand there and lie to your face,” Marc said.
Alton snorted. “That’s for sure. There’s some humans that I wouldn’t trust a single word coming out of their mouth.”
“We’ll interview any elf we can corner.” Jane said loudly to gain control.
Her brother ignored her attempt.
“Damn right we’ll corner them!” Guy shouted.
“We should start with major domos at the enclaves,” Alton said.
“What?” Everyone chorused in surprise.
“We’re filming this,” Alton explained his logic. “The major domos are the ones that speak the best English. They’re also all in their quads; they need four digits to express their age. It means they saw the start of the war. A lot of the elves we know as friends, like the ones that live with Moser, are fresh out of doubles. They were born after the war.”