Jane shook her head. “It would take us fifteen minutes to drop down to 51, swing across the West End Bridge, come back across the Fort Duquesne and get into Point Park. Another three or four minutes to walk through the park and set up.”
“We could U-turn—there’s room enough and—” Hal started.
“Hal, last time I listened to you, I nearly lost my license. No!”
“If they go up the Allegheny, we’ll miss them,” Hal said.
Nigel suddenly blew a loud piercing tri-toned whistle.
It made Jane jump and swear. “What the hell?”
“Am I supposed to hear it?” Hal asked. “I thought it was ultrasonic.”
“It has four tones. Only one is…” Nigel started to explain.
The last of his explanation was lost under a deafening roar, seemingly in answer to his whistle. It was stunningly loud. The deep rumbling noise echoed off Mount Washington, making it impossible to pinpoint the exact origin.
Chesty leaned out the window of the truck and growled.
“What the hell is that?” Taggart asked.
“I don’t know.” Jane peered into the dark. The glittering school of water fairies darted suddenly to the left and flowed up the Allegheny River. There was another roar and it seemed closer. Louder.
“You think it might be the Nessie?” Nigel asked.
“What the hell is the Loch Ness?” Jane said.
“The most popular theory is that it’s a plesiosauria, about the size of a sperm whale.”
“Shit!” Jane cried. The last thing Pittsburgh needed was a huge river monster.
Nigel blew his whistle again. The answering roar from the dark waters sent shivers down Jane’s back.
“Nigel!” She snatched the whistle from Nigel’s hand. “What the hell are you thinking?”
“That we get a picture of whatever it is.” Nigel’s tone indicated that he had no clue why she was angry.
“Is that it?” Hal was leaning far out over the railing to point at something arrowing through the river, coming at them at alarming rate. It seemed comfortingly small—barely a dozen feet in length—until Jane realized that she was just seeing the creature’s head. There was another wedge behind it, easily adding thirty feet to the creature. Suddenly the forty-some feet that the bridge deck was from the river’s surface didn’t seem far enough.
Chesty had gone full-throttle warning snarl.
“In the truck.” Jane reached out and jerked Hal back. A second later, electricity flared in the water like a Tesla coil discharging, outlining a massive crocodilelike body. The monster was nearly fifty feet long from nose to tip of tail. “Truck! Truck!”
“How wonderful!” Nigel cried. “Shouldn’t we be filming this?”
“Too dark.” Taggart shoved him into the backseat, earning Jane’s love. “We’ll film it tomorrow!”
They cautiously looked for the river monster the entire next day, careful not to stray too close to the water’s edge, with Chesty on watch. Jane kept hold of the whistle and refused to let them use it.
“We could call Nessie to us,” Nigel pointed out many times.
“No!” Jane kept shouting back.
Taggart finally broke the pattern. “Can you at least explain why?”
Jane growled. God, she hated being outnumbered. This was like riding herd on her little brothers, only worse because “I’ll beat you if you do” wasn’t an acceptable answer. “First rule of shooting a show on Elfhome.” She grabbed Hal and made him face each of the two newbies so there was no way they could miss the mask of dark purple bruises across Hal’s face. “Avoid getting ‘The Face’ damaged. Viewers don’t like raccoon boys. Hal is out of production until the bruising can be covered with makeup. We’ve got fifty days and a grocery list of face-chewing monsters to film. We have to think about damage control.
“Second rule!” She let Hal go and held up two fingers. “Get as much footage as possible of the monster before you kill it. People don’t like looking at dead monsters if you don’t give them lots of time seeing it alive. Right now we have got something dark moving at night in water. No one has ever seen this before, so we can’t use stock footage to pad. We blow the whistle and it will come out of the water and try to rip your face off—violating rule one—and then we’ll have to kill it and thus break rule two.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Taggart said.
“Would we really have to kill it?” Nigel’s tone suggested he equated it to torturing kittens.
“If it’s trying its damnedest to eat you? Yes!” Jane cried. “And if we just lure it out of the river right now, without some way to keep that from happening, we will have no other option. Until we know which of the three rivers this thing is in now, even setting up a safe perch to film from is going to be a waste of time. We don’t have time for this. I can get people to keep an eye out for it and call us if it shows up.”
She had Hal too well trained to argue with her. Nigel looked to Taggart instead of her.
“I think Jane’s right,” Taggart said. “Our end goal is to get enough great footage that we can get an open pass to Elfhome. We haven’t shot anything but water today.”
Nigel nodded reluctantly. “Okay, let’s do the saurus tomorrow.”
It came as no surprise that her nightmares had gotten worse. Between Tinker’s kidnapping, the lack of any progress at finding her, and quiet sounds of someone else in her house, she had no hope. At three a.m., she slipped out of her room and padded down to the kitchen to find something to drown them out.
There was light on in the kitchen. It was in an odd place. She paused to feel Chesty standing beside her, not growling, before swinging the door the rest of the way open.
Taggart was holding her refrigerator’s door open, studying its contents, wearing only his low pajama pants.
“Do you not have shirts to sleep in?”
“Actually, no.” He eyed her milk as if there was something strange about it.
“It’s fresh.”
“I’ve never seen milk in a glass bottle before.”
“I get it from a dairy down the road. It’s easier for them to recycle glass bottles than plastic.”
“It’s like I’ve gone back in time.” He poured the milk into her smallest saucepot. “Do you have any sugar and cocoa I can put into this?” As she handed him her sugar bowl, he explained his lack of shirts. “Network wanted us in L.A. first before coming to Pittsburgh to do pre-production work. Design the logo, hire on the people that will be doing the graphics for titles and end credits. Mostly what we spent the month on, though, was having it drummed into us that we were going to film monsters. The bigger and more fantastic, the better. Then we flew to New York to drive to Pittsburgh—and half my luggage didn’t make it.”
“Ouch.”
“Luckily it was just my backup boots, some extra pairs of jeans, and,” he motioned to his bare chest, “the shirt I sleep in.”
“We do have clothing stores.” Jane put the cocoa on the counter beside the saucepot. “We can get you something tomorrow evening after filming.”
“Thanks. Sorry about waking you up.” Then reluctantly he added, “I have bad dreams. If I go back to sleep, it’s like I just hit pause when I woke up.”
“Been there, doing that. You didn’t wake me. I’ve got my own little demons.”
He did his eyebrow quirk, which was stunningly sexy since he had the most striking eyes she’d ever seen.
She found him a teaspoon to keep from blushing. She grew up with a small testosterone-driven army, but never had to deal with man alone in her kitchen, half-naked, in the middle of the night. At least, not one that wasn’t related to her.