“Jane’s right.” Geoffrey and Alton both said.
Alton continued, “The other elves don’t like her but she’s Windwolf’s Voice. Slandering her would be like attacking him. They’ll defend her because she’s one of them and we’re not.”
“With something like this, we would need solid proof of her guilt,” Geoffrey said.
“Even with the sekasha?” Guy asked. “They have the right to kill anyone with or without proof.”
Geoffrey and Alton glanced at each other.
Alton shrugged. “Elves and I discuss dead animals. You have a broader range than me, Geoff.”
“It would be Russian roulette,” Geoffrey said. “Someone would die. The question would be if it was me or Sparrow. I don’t want to play that game.”
“I know!” Hal cried. “We could put up a big sign in the middle of the night opposite of the enclaves saying ‘Sparrow is a traitor!’ Do we know the Elvish word for traitor?”
“No, I don’t,” Geoffrey said. “And we couldn’t get it up without being caught. The laedin have increased their patrols around enclaves.”
“We’re not tipping our hand,” Jane said. “Sparrow doesn’t know that we know. It’s our one advantage.”
“Jane is right.” Her mother backed her. “You’re not to tell anyone.”
“Sparrow might suspect we know,” Taggart said. “She’s tripping over us every time she turns around.”
“We could make it that she trips over a lot of different people every time she turns around,” Guy said.
“What?” Jane said.
“Other people live in this city,” Guy said. “If they knew what was going on, they’d want to defend it. They have a right to defend it.”
“No,” Jane said. “We’re not going to get a shitload of people involved. We trust them. They trust other people who trust other people until someone trusts the wrong person.”
“We can’t fight an entire army by ourselves,” Boo whispered. “That’s what the oni have. An army.”
Jane’s family had to stop being right all the time.
Alton did his oldest male thing. “The EIA and the police have their hands tied in this. If we don’t do something, then if this goes south fast, no one is going to be ready.”
“Ready?” Jane shouted. She had to get this back under control. “The last thing we need is a bunch of people with a bone to pick with the elves and who have no military training an excuse to get trigger happy. We need to have them focused on the oni and that’s what we’re doing with Monsters in Our Midst.”
“Let’s militarize our viewers.” Hal said. “Hal’s Army! Roger’s Rangers! Hal’s Heroes!”
“Hal!” Jane caught herself before backhanding him. This wasn’t something she could stop simply by hitting him. There was also the fact she needed to tell him about the wedding. A highly active fan group might stabilize him after she yanked the ground out from under him. “Fine. Hal’s Heroes.”
“Yes!” Hal shouted. Then he realized that she had caved too easily. “What’s the catch?”
“You need to be very careful with what you say. Written scripts. No improvisation. No information without showing a source other than the tengu or Boo or Lemon-Lime. We need military precision, not a circus.”
“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Taggart said.
“It’s a great idea!” Hal started to bounce in place. “We could set up a uniform like red berets and spy cells. I could be Adam Selene. Lemon-Lime would be Simon Jester.”
“Who?” Jane asked. “What?”
“Oh, Jane, you really should read more,” Hal said.
She was changing her mind about smacking Hal.
“Ow!” Hal cringed back from her. “It’s from a book!”
“We need to find the box,” Nigel said. “I thought the issue was that whoever had it was smuggling possibly sentient reptile eggs. I didn’t realize that Lemon-Lime understood the dangers so fully.”
“We need to find the namazu eggs,” Marc said firmly.
“Yeah, the namazu nearly killed Bowman and they almost took out us,” Geoffrey said.
“How are we even going to find the box?” Guy asked. “I mean — it disappeared over a month ago.”
“It could have ended up at the Carnegie,” Hal said. “We’ll never know until we ask. You all know how traffic gets at Shutdown. Between the traffic and the rivers and the bridges being out and the GPS maps all being wrong, it would have been easy for them to get lost for an entire day. You know it happens.”
“I didn’t call the Carnegie,” Nigel admitted. “Since it had been over a month, the issue didn’t seem to be pressing as what we found ourselves caught up in.”
They’d been busy saving Boo, Yumiko, killing man-eating monsters, and planning a wedding. (Although she wasn’t sure if Taggart had told Nigel yet that he was best man; it had been a hectic twenty-four hours since she proposed.)
Nigel explained more why he hadn’t called the Carnegie Museum after arriving in Pittsburgh. “The wildlife of Elfhome is still fairly unknown because most species can’t exist without magic. Living specimens of plants are shipped to Earth but they die shortly after arriving. Even insects and bacteria fail to thrive — it’s the main reason why we don’t need to worry about invasive species during Shutdown. This lack of things to study pre-production made it simple for me to show up at the American Museum of Natural History saying that I wanted to research all things related to Elfhome. Here in Pittsburgh, though, I’m surrounded by native wildlife. The title of my show is ‘Chased by Monsters.’ What possible reason would I — a naturalist — have for researching a necklace, a bracelet, and a mysterious hunk of wood?”
“Who needs an excuse?” Hal said. “You point a camera at most people and they become blathering idiots.”
“Not always,” Jane warned. They used the tactic to their advantage in the past. The fire marshal, Brian Scroggins, was one of the people they could manipulate by putting a camera on him. Brandy was not. It was almost guaranteed that if they tried to involve her, they’d end up with a ticket and possibly jail time.
“They have that huge wyvern on display,” Hal said. “We say we want to film it as an example of bioengineering that the elves have done in the past.”
“Are wyverns bioengineered?” Nigel asked.
“Who knows? Who cares?” Hal said. “We can ask the elves later and not use it if they say no. In the meantime, we get in. Poke around. Ask a few questions. The oni probably have someone planted at the Carnegie.”
Jane stood up to signal the end of the discussion. “Okay, tomorrow morning back on the river. Once we find both nests, we’ll hit the museum.”
“Don’t hit it too hard,” her mother said. “The Carnegie is a treasure that we can pass on to our children.”
Jane thought finding Boo would have ended her nightmares. The fear that the oni would come thundering down on their heads, though, had fueled new dreams. At three in the morning, she tiptoed down to her kitchen.
Taggart was already there making hot cocoa. “Bad dreams?”
“Yeah.”
He held out his hands to her. “Me too.”
It felt good to lean against his bare chest. It felt better to kiss him. After a few minutes, she decided she wanted a locked door between them and anyone else who might be roaming about the house in the middle of the night. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him toward the stairs.
“Wait.” He reached out to switch off the boiling milk. “Okay.”
Upstairs. Door locked.
Chesty rose from her bedroom floor with a low warning growl.