“As promised, Lemon-Lime met me in private and warned me that I was in grave danger.” Nigel continued his story. “They had picked up on the fact that the oni were blocking access to Elfhome. They were worried that the oni might try to keep me from reporting on what I found.”
“The dragon!” Yumiko growled.
Nigel refused to be sped up. “They had given me the monster call and explained how it worked. I thought it would be harmless to give it a test blow, so I did. That’s when the dragon appeared.”
“What did it look like?” Yumiko said. “What color was it?”
“I couldn’t tell what color it was as it was covered in white frosting,” Nigel said. “It offered me some cake that it was holding in its hand.”
“What?” Yumiko cried.
“I told you that the cake figured prominently in the tale,” Nigel said calmly. “I found out later that it had burrowed its way into the heart of the cake unseen…”
“What? A dragon?” Yumiko threw out her hands to measure something huge.
“Oh, no, it was just a wee thing.” Nigel held out his hands to measure out something the size of a squirrel. “It appeared on my shoulder out of nowhere, covered in frosting, with cake clenched in one claw.”
They stared at him and the image he’d painted.
“Cake?” Yumiko said finally.
Nigel mimed cutting slices of cake. “I found out later that when they cut open the cake, the entire heart had been hollowed out. The serving staff never saw the dragon. They assumed rats had gotten to the cake and whisked it back to the hotel’s kitchen.”
Nigel had broken Yumiko. The female tengu sputtered, hands approximating the size of the described dragon.
“The dragon asked me if I wanted cake and said that it was yummy,” Nigel continued as if unaware that he just hurt Yumiko’s brain. “Lemon-Lime was quite upset at her. I got the impression that they had given her a large dinner before leaving home. They pulled her from my shoulder, scolded her firmly, and — and hid her away.”
“No. No. You must be mistaken. Dragons are not that small. They don’t — don’t— don’t — you don’t scold them. They’re like gods.”
“She looked very much like what Joey drew.” Nigel pointed to the picture. “She had a mane, and small five fingered clawed hands, with these proportions to leg to body to head. Lemon-Lime warned me that the oni might have more of these darling little things held prisoner. They did not know, though, what the oni planned to do with them. I fear the worse having seen the namazu. Since we humans don’t know anything about dragons, I can’t even guess what the oni could make from their DNA.”
Yumiko laughed bitterly. “You’ve met creatures made from dragons. The sekasha are all that remains of Honor. She was shattered down and combined with elf DNA to create the holy warriors. Pure Radiance is the granddaughter of Clarity. The Chosen are descendants of what was left of Providence’s daughter, Nirvana. You have no idea what the greater bloods can do with bioengineering. There is no limit to the perversity that they can create. The war between the oni and elves started when a Stone Clan trading party found an overlooked passage between Onihida and Earth. Without their connection to the Spell Stones, the domana could not protect their people. There had been twenty to thirty sekasha among the party. The oni used the warriors in an attempt to reverse the process and create a true dragon. What they created were evil mockeries. They had a fraction of their ancestor’s intelligence and none of the sekasha’s nobility. They did have great cunning and many of the dragon magical abilities. The oni call them dragons, but we tengu refuse to give them that name. They lack a true soul and are purely beast in nature. All but one was killed at the start of the war. Malice is all that remains.”
Jane waited for her to add in the recent discovery but Yumiko did not mention it. The tengu’s trust did not extend to the men. “If they did get hold of a real dragon?”
“They would make more monsters.” Guy guessed as Yumiko considered what she should admit.
“It is not that simple,” Yumiko finally broke her silence. “One of the things that the oni discovered with their experiments was that they could create transformation spells fueled by the body of a dragon and aimed by their souls. They had limited success with the creatures they had cobbled together with the sekasha DNA. The elves will tell you that their holy ones breed true — that no matter how diluted the blood stock becomes, the divinity of the warriors is dominant. It is the nature of the dragons, part of their ability to phase through walls and walk between worlds. There is a magical bond between their bodies and souls, a cohesion that cannot be broken. The oni have discovered how to twist this and create a spell that affects all creatures of a selected profile. When they captured Providence, it was with the intention of testing the full potential of the spell. Providence begged us to kill him so that wouldn’t happen. As punishment for our obedience to our guardian, the oni used us as test subjects. With his dead body, they transformed our entire tribe from human to tengu in a single spell. What can the oni do with a true dragon? The answer is beyond your worst nightmares.”
“Jesus,” Jane whispered.
“Pray,” Yumiko said. “And hope your god can protect you better than ours could. You said you saw this ‘dragon’ in New York City? Tell me where exactly. I’ll have yamabushi go and search for this creature.”
“It was at the NBC gala. I believe that Lemon-Lime crashed the party. They had hacked the hotel security to unlock the door of the room we met in. They wore masks throughout the meeting. They didn’t give me their proper names or any direct way to contact them. They are very careful with their identities; millions of their fans have been trying to determine who they are for several years.”
“Wait, Lemon-Lime Jello?” Yumiko connected dots and recognized the name at last. “You mean those cartoons?”
Joey threw his hands up in the air and twiddled his fingers. “Blast it all!”
“Yes!” Nigel said. “Indeed! Aren’t they simply brilliant?”
Yumiko looked like Nigel had broken her again.
Nigel had carefully not mentioned that they were twin little girls. He obviously didn’t trust the tengu with the girls’ lives. Jane wasn’t sure if she did either. The woman was willing to kill to keep Joey and his cousins safe from the oni. What if she decided that the twins were a liability? Yumiko controlled operatives that could easily travel to Earth and Onihida. She could send someone to New York to kidnap or kill the little girls without Jane ever knowing.
Jane distracted the conversation the future episodes of Monsters in Our Midst. “What else do the oni have hidden around the city? Do they have Malice here? Can we safely discuss the tengu?”
“No.” Yumiko said. “Nothing on the tengu.
“If we could get the Pittsburghers to understand that the tengu…”
Yumiko stood up, fists clenched. “There is so much that the oni do not know about the tengu. We have spent hundreds of years keeping them ignorant of our strengths and weaknesses. We cannot allow them to know anything of us!”
“A tengu kidnapped Tinker.” Alton earned a dark look from Yumiko. He held up his hands. “Hear me out. What do all the humans in Pittsburgh know about the current events? That some kind of animal killed the Viceroy’s sekasha Hawk Scream, possibly a pack of wargs. That the oni were behind the gunfight on the Veterans Bridge. That a shitload of monsters were downtown trying to eat Bowman. And that a tengu kidnapped Tinker.” Alton had been ticking the events off on his fingers. He held out the four fingers. “Four logical stories for Hal to cover. If he doesn’t cover them, people are going to wonder why.”