“Your what?” Hal asked.
“Gossamer call.” Nigel got a shy, embarrassed grin. “We’ve spent the three years of waiting for visas on researching everything known on Elfhome. The oddest thing was that the most comprehensive videos on Elfhome are a series of animated shorts by a strangely secretive production company known as Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”
“Actually their name is the only thing anyone knows about them,” Taggart added.
“Animated?” Jane wondered if she had heard them wrong.
The grin got even shyer. “The videos use a fairly crude method, blending modeling and CGI work, but they’re hysterical. Each is about ten minutes of pure farce but the storylines interlock creating a very detailed world. The thing is, if you check their facts, they’re spot on.”
“What you can check,” Taggart said.
Nigel nodded. “Which loops us back to the idea that all information about Elfhome is being strictly limited. One of their videos mentioned a gossamer call and indicated that it was ultrasonic in nature.”
“What exactly is a gossamer call?”
“What they’d discovered was if you analyze video tapes of the gossamers arriving and leaving Pittsburgh, you can isolate the ultrasonic commands that the elves use to control the living airships. They’ve also pieced together information that any creature bioengineered with magic—such as wargs—have similar ‘call commands’ embedded at an instinctual level.”
A month ago, Jane wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but then the undeniable evidence had surfaced that the elves could manipulate DNA at fantastic levels via magic. “They had enough information to build one of these calls?”
Nigel’s grin went from shy to incandescent. “I can’t wait to try it out.”
Jane made a note to herself to steal Nigel’s gossamer call before they toured the viceroy’s airship.
“Oh! Oh!” Hal cried. “A saurus!”
Secretly she was hoping that they wouldn’t get any tips on saurus sightings. With Hal, the filming was fairly simple: find it; kill it. They would pad the footage with how to tell if a saurus was in the area, the type of guns needed to successfully drop the big lizard, the dangers of bringing too small of a gun to the fight, the merits of such tactics as shooting from second story windows or tree stands and any other bullshit they could think of.
Nigel and Taggart, though, probably wanted to do something stupid like film the saurus without trying to kill it first. Things could get messy fast.
“Where was the saurus spotted?” Jane hoped the location was near the Rim where the T-Rex’s Elfhome cousin might wander back off radar.
“Dormont,” Hal said.
“Dormont?” Jane said. “That’s nearly downtown!”
“It says Dormont,” Hal read. “Sleepy Hollow Road. Where old Mount Lebanon golf course used to be.”
Jane took his tablet to read it. The tip had been sent by “Beef4U.” The name sounded slightly pornographic and juvenile. Was it a joke? “That’s Castle Shannon.”
“Another castle?” Taggart asked.
“It’s a town,” Jane said.
“Was a town,” Hal muttered.
She pulled up a map to double check her memory. “Yes, for some reason the early settlers in this area all wanted castles. Castle Shannon was a farm that grew into a town.”
“Pittsburgh never lets go of the past,” Hal continued to mutter. “You get directions by what used to be there. Castle Shannon is mostly empty row houses.”
Nigel sprang to his feet. “We go now?”
“No!” Jane cried. “It’s already dark.”
“It would be very atmospheric,” Nigel started for the door.
“Sit!” Jane barked and pointed at the chair he just vacated.
He wavered and glanced to Taggart.
“You’re hurt. I’m drunk.” Either Taggart was a lightweight or exaggerating, as he was only on his third beer. Jane always kept count of other people’s drink so she knew when to shut them off. She had thought Taggart would be good for at least four beers before hitting “drunk.” “Hal is on pain killers. It’s dark out. And there’s a fucking war brewing. Jane is right. We finish setting up a shooting schedule, get another good night’s sleep and start out at dawn.”
They transferred everything she thought might be useful from PB&G’s production truck to the CBM truck. It would be a week until Hal’s face healed enough that they could film, so they could focus first on the network show. They hadn’t resolved the housing issue except to verify that no one in the offices was actually handling those duties. She really didn’t have any choice but to take the men home again.
It was ten o’clock when they left the offices, a full fifteen hours since they left her house, but it still felt like she was slacking. Part of her soul wanted to be out looking for lost little girls. Even if Tinker were found, though, her soul wouldn’t be satisfied. She would need her Boo back for her to be at peace and the nightmares to end.
As she pulled out of the parking lot, she turned on the radio and tuned to KDKA. Her cousin Sean was doing the news before leading into his show on local fusion music. Their video clip of the tengu was still the headline story. Pittsburgh Police had set up a tip line for anyone who might have spotted a black winged man flying over the city. Director Maynard of the EIA reported that he had requested additional troops during Shutdown. As Dmitri pointed out, the United Nations would have to approve the request, influenced most strongly by the United States. Sean repeated the news that Windwolf sent for royal troops. Once again, everyone in Pittsburgh was reporting in except the oni.
Sean transitioned to commercial with “You’re listening to Sean Roach on KDKA.”
Taggart chuckled quietly. “He’s using the name Roach? Seriously?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Roach,” Jane growled.
“They’re cousins,” Hal sang from the backseat.
“Your cousin’s name is Roach?” Taggart said.
“Yes, my Uncle Bill Roach is a very successful businessman. All his kids are business savvy.”
“And they stayed here in Pittsburgh?” Taggart asked.
“New York is not the center of the universe,” Jane said.
“I didn’t say it was. In fact I don’t really like New York.” He stared out the window at the forest to the north of the city as they drove down Bigelow Boulevard. The streetlights went up to the Rim and stopped abruptly. Beyond it elf shines drifted over the dark canopy, a million earthbound stars. “I like quiet and solitude.”
“Mine,” Hal grumbled quietly in the backseat.
“What is that?” Nigel leaned forward to point through the windshield.
She glanced to see where he was pointing. They were crossing the Fort Pitt Bridge. Downriver was a glimmer of lights moving in the dark water below.
“Water fairies,” Hal said. “Lots of them. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
It was probably the most dangerous section of road in Pittsburgh. Five lanes of traffic fed onto the bridge from three directions and had approximately five hundred feet of road-planning insanity to merge to two lanes into the tunnel or take the off-ramp to the river-hugging Route 51.
During the day, Jane wouldn’t have thought about stopping, but traffic trickled to a halt at night. She checked her rearview mirror. There wasn’t any other traffic following them. She put on her flashers and stopped at the center of the bridge.
“Stay off the road,” she warned.
A large truck rumbled across the inbound deck overhead.
They scrambled over the jersey wall to the sidewalk and set up tripods for the night shooting. The mass of water fairies flowed inexplicably closer, coming upriver.
“We could go to the Point,” Hal murmured in the darkness beside her. He pointed across the water at the fountain set in the wedge of concrete that marked where the Mon and Allegheny River flowed together to create the Ohio River.