“Boo!”
“Jane!” Boo skittered away from her outstretched hand, ducking through the shelving under the counter. “Go away!”
“Boo, I’m here to take you home!”
“They’ll kill you if they find you here!”
“Who?” Because now that Jane found her baby sister, she wanted to know whom she was going to kill.
“Lord Tomtom’s warriors.”
“Who?”
“You have to go!”
“Carla Marie Kryskill, come here now!”
“Jane!” It was the little girl whine she remembered so well. “I can’t leave Joey! He’s my responsibility.”
“Fine, we’ll take Joey too.” Who the hell is Joey? Jane couldn’t remember ever hearing of a missing “Joey.” Maybe it wasn’t another kid.
“They have him in a spell so he can’t be found and he’s chained.”
“We’ll get him out. Where is he?”
Boo stared at her for a long moment as if staring into her soul. After eight years, did Boo still have the ability to trust anyone?
“I promise,” Jane whispered. “We will not leave without the both of you. Okay? Semper Fi. Leave no man behind.”
Boo’s eyes filled with tears and she gave a tiny nod.
“Take me to Joey.”
Originally built as a row of isolated shotgun-style buildings, Boo’s captors had cut doors between the restaurants and built up walls until the structures were one big maze. In a dim back room, they found a little black-haired boy, chained by one foot, inside a gleaming hologram-like spell. Jane stared at shimmering lines of power that wove from the floor to a matching design in the ceiling, creating a cage out of nothing.
She knew nothing about spells except they were much like lamps—they needed a power supply and a continuous loop to function correctly. In theory, breaking the circuit turned off the spell. She tapped the bar quickly. It felt as cold and hard as steel but it looked no more solid than light beamed through smoke.
“What’s going on?” The little boy sounded very American. He looked like a kindergartener. “Who are you?”
“This is Jane.” Boo reached through the bars to lace fingers with him. “She came! She’s here to save us. Both of us.”
Jane dug frantically through her backpack. “Taggart, I found them. I’m going to kick the beehive to get them free. Get ready to move fast.”
“Okay.” Taggart answered steadily.
She took out the bolt cutter and laid it aside where she could find it quickly. Once she started, they’d probably only have minutes to get to safety. She found the foam package of whack-a-moles. They’d developed the little explosives to force vespers out of their holes so they could be filmed. They worked on the same principle as a nail gun, driving a spike straight down into hard packed ground. She’d never tried them on concrete; hopefully they wouldn’t explode like a pipe bomb instead.
“Here.” She passed the light reflector into the cage. “Hold this up like a shield. Boo, get behind that counter.”
She used clay to create a seal between the explosives’ barrel and the concrete over the spell etchings.
“Fire in the hole!” The explosion was deafening in the small room. Thankfully, though, the bars of the cage vanished.
“Jane! Incoming!” Taggart shouted. The grate rattled up back at the café’s entrance. There was the loud whistle of the monster call. As the grate clattered down and gunfire broke out, there was a distant roar of the river monster.
Swearing, Jane snatched up the bolt cutter and scrambled quickly to Joey. The chain was stupidly short, only a few inches between a loop on the floor and the shackle around his ankle. The metal cuff had chafed him raw and bleeding. She’d thought that there was something horribly wrong with his foot until she realized that it wasn’t deformed. He had a bird’s foot. Instead of a human foot with five little toes, he had a bird’s with four scale-covered talons. Three long talons faced forward. A shortened fourth splayed out in place of a heel. Not as long as a true crow’s foot, but long enough to allow him to grip a branch solidly with his foot.
Jane gasped as the image of Tinker’s kidnapping played out in her mind’s eye. The boy was a tengu. Boo had been taken by oni? The oni had been in Pittsburgh all these years? How many of the missing children—thought dead of jumpfish and strangle vines just like Boo—had the oni taken?
“Jane! They’re coming!” Boo tugged at her arm. “Just go away. They won’t hurt us; they need us alive. They want the call for the tengu flock! They need the blood of the Chosen to take control of the flock.”
Jane’s breath caught in her chest as she saw for the first time Boo’s feet. The ghost-white scales of her talons that matched her pale hair. Jane looked up into Boo’s face. Her baby sister’s face. Her baby sister’s blue eyes.
“What did they do to you?” Jane cried.
Hurt filled Boo’s face. “Just go away!”
“We’re all going, now shut up.” Jane cut through the chain.
“Jane?” Hal shouted over whistle blast and gunfire.
“Over here!” Jane started to unload her backpack of weapons.
A minute later, Taggart found them. “That door won’t hold for long. Do you have any weapons?”
Jane laughed, checking the magazine and handing him a pistol. “Two of my grandfathers were Marines. The third was a moonshiner. The other was a part of the local mafia. Do the math.”
“You’ve got guns. Lots of guns.”
“My family all but bleeds bullets.” Jane took out two more pistols. She held the little twenty-two out to Boo. “You remember how to use these?”
“Don’t point it at anyone you don’t want to kill.” Boo took the gun. “Which is a lot of people right now. Aim down the barrel, hold your breath, squeeze.”
“Good girl.”
There was a roar, this time sounding far too close, and the whole building shook as if hit by a freight train.
“Where’s the back door?” When Boo only stared at her in horror, Jane groaned. “Please tell me there’s back door.”
Boo shook her head. “They’re nailed shut. That’s the only door in.”
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Jane scanned the room. What should they do? She realized that there were too few of them. “Where’s Hal?”
There was a sudden explosion from the hallway beyond the cage room.
“I’ve made us a door!” Hal called.
“Hal! Damn it, how many times have I told you to warn people before you blow things up?”
They went out the hole that Hal had blown through the back wall. A back service alley ran the length of the boardwalk, lined with boarded-up loading docks. Electricity was crawling over the building like a lightning storm had been anchored to the storefront. They ran toward the truck that seemed a million miles away.
Jane realized that the whistling was growing quieter. She nearly stumbled as she looked over her shoulder and realized that Taggart was running in the opposite direction, still blowing the whistle and leading the river monster away. A muffled roar came from inside the building and screams of something that could have been human.
“Idiot!” The park was a maze of deep waterways to anyone who didn’t know the area. Once he was beyond the corner of the building, he’d be out of sight. Nor was there any guarantee that there weren’t oni coming around the other way to cut them off.
“Hal, get Chesty and the kids to the truck.”
“What?”
“Truck! Go!” Jane shouted and pointed. “Chesty, follow!”
She headed for the stairs that one time led to the top of the Dragon’s Den ride. “Taggart, you idiot, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Giving you a chance to get to the truck and into it without a horde of monsters on top of you. Five people and one large dog and only three doors.”