“Depends on who you ask,” Taggart said. “Ask me, no. I’m never doing that again. I’ve had enough of the stench of blood. I wouldn’t put it past Network though; certainly they suddenly green-lighted our show after months of having us on hold.”
“Wait. What?” Jane had missed something important.
“Taggart is an award-winning war correspondent,” Nigel said because Taggart apparently was modest and Hal was falling into a stupor. “Network probably okayed our show because it created a win-win for them. If there’s a war, they have one of the best men trapped inside. If there isn’t, they get what promises to be a hit show.”
It suddenly made sense why Network hadn’t warned Dmitri last Shutdown about the men’s arrival and yet had given them a freshly painted truck. The decision had been made to send them after they’d processed WQED’s last news dump, and then it was too late to send an e-mail to Pittsburgh.
Jane swore. “Bastards.”
Nigel spread his hands slightly in a “what are you going to do” motion. “It gets us what we wanted, so we can’t really complain.”
“We’ve been trying to get onto Elfhome to film documentaries for years.” Taggart scrubbed at his face. “The UN has a chokehold on information coming out of Pittsburgh. Most people wouldn’t notice it. We notice because there’s a huge black hole where things like wildlife documentaries should be. Jane Goodall’s work produced sixty years of film. Jacques-Yves Cousteau alone had thousands of hours of documentaries. Oxford Scientific Films did four seasons on meerkats. What do we have from Elfhome in nearly thirty years? A whole new world with fascinating people, plants and animals? Zip.”
“Maybe the networks don’t think they’ll sell.”
Taggart snorted. “Documentaries are funded differently. Production companies like ours often fold their profit back into the next film, along with money from private investors, government grant money and philanthropists who have a special interest in the source material. Normally we make a film and then market off the rights to networks. It gives us creative control over what we do.”
Nigel nodded along with Taggart’s explanation. “We’ve had the money for the last three years, but our visa applications kept getting turned down. We just didn’t have the clout to force them through. So we decided to see if a major network would have better luck—and they did.”
“But you’re stuck filming crap now.” Hal snorted. “Chased by Monsters? Better be damn good at running.”
“And exactly how do you get hurt filming a landscaping show?” Taggart retorted.
“If it can’t kill us, we don’t film it,” Jane said, to stop the fighting before it could start. “There’s a lot of dangerous flora and fauna in Pittsburgh and it doesn’t stay beyond the Rim. It comes into people’s backyards and sets up shop. We teach our viewers how to deal with it, but it means we have to actually get close enough to get hurt.”
“Deal with, as in kill?” Nigel seemed flabbergasted.
“This isn’t Earth. These aren’t endangered species. This morning we were dealing with a very large strangle vine in a neighborhood with lots of children. There’s no way to move it to someplace where it isn’t a danger, especially while it’s actively trying to kill anything that stumbles into its path. Pets. Children. Automated lawnmowers.”
“That one is always amusing to watch but it always ends badly for the lawnmower,” Hal said.
“Well, yes, the idea behind ‘chased’ is that we aren’t hunting the creatures,” Nigel said.
She remembered that they’d mentioned a list when they first met Chesty. “Which creatures?”
They had a list that made Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden’s fare look tame. She stared at it in horror. Half the animals were mythical—possibly—and certainly never seen near Pittsburgh. Did they have the pull to get them all the way to the Easternlands to find out? Humans were discouraged from leaving Pittsburgh city limits, with the exception of the train crews, who actually got to travel to the East Coast. The elves normally forbade humans from traveling to the other continents. Fame, however, opened many doors.
“What, exactly, did the network set up for you in terms of visas?” she said.
“Why?” Taggart asked.
“Many of these animals aren’t native to the Westernlands.” She scrolled down and a laugh of disbelief or perhaps fear slipped out. “Basilisk? Bigfoot?”
“We thought we should list all legendary animals,” Nigel said, explaining—apparently without realizing it—why they had visa problems. “Can’t hurt to ask. Dragons are real, right?”
“Elves say they are.” Jane desperately wanted a Scotch, but if she had one, Hal couldn’t resist having one, and she didn’t want go back down that road. “This list is suicidal if you’re not willing to defend yourself. This isn’t Earth, where you can sit in your Jeep and take pictures of lions, or go sit in the middle of a bunch of apes. Most of these things will peel open a SUV like it’s a can of sardines and make a snack of everything inside.”
“It would be amusing to watch but it would end badly for you,” Hal murmured. It was hard to tell if he was making a play on his previous statement or if he didn’t realize he was repeating himself.
“The list is a starting point.” Nigel leaned forward, face lighting up with inner fire. “To get us in the door. What we want is all of Elfhome. To revel in all that it has to offer. The virgin ironwood forest. The beautiful immortal elves. The strange and magical beasts. And the humans that live peacefully side by side with all this.”
Jane shook her head, trying to resist the power of a TV host beaming at her one-on-one. “Don’t snow-job me.”
“I’ve seen this kind of shit before,” Taggart said with quiet intensity. “When a country goes dark, its means someone has something it’s trying to hide. And often what they’re hiding is horrible war crimes like mass graves and attempted genocide. Someone is keeping the media out of Pittsburgh.”
The knowledge that there were people sharing her house, people whose safety she was responsible for, weighed heavily on her. It sank her into the murky waters of old nightmares, where well-founded grief blurred into something strange and nearly unrecognizable.
She bolted awake with Chesty nosing her face.
“I’m fine!” She pushed him away and sat up. Her alarm clock read six in the morning with the sky just lightening with dawn. Hal’s soft snores invaded the normal quiet of her house. “I’ll be even better when I get rid of all these men.”
She stomped across the hall and pounded on Hal’s door and got an “I’m up!” yelped in reply. She stalked down the hallway, shouting, “Daylight is wasting, ladies! Time to get up!”
She wasn’t prepared to find Taggart already in the kitchen. Judging by the smell, he had made coffee and toast. He wore low-slung pajama bottoms and had been standing in front of the bank of televisions she’d set up so she could watch all three Pittsburgh channels at once.
He had dark curls on his chest that matched his long black mane, which only served to underscore her first impression of “wild man.” Judging by his muscled abdomen, he visited a gym often in New York. She could also tell in a glance that she was very much into dark-haired wild men.
She opened her mouth to tell him to get dressed and nothing coherent came out.
He gazed at her with open worry. “Are you okay?”
“Just…just…” Needed to remember that she was extremely pissed at him for invading her life. “I had a nightmare.”
He quirked an eyebrow.
“Lawn gnomes had taken Hal. I couldn’t find him.”
“Ah, so you don’t really hate him?”
She was caught off guard by the question. “No! Why would you say that?”