"God damn it!" He caught her hand and twisted her arm painfully up behind her back. He leaned his weight against her, pinning her to the trunk. "Just hold still!"
Cheek pressed to the rough gray bark, Tinker saw for the first time how far up the tree they stood - the forest floor lay a hundred feet below. Normally she didn't mind heights - only normally she wasn't this high up with an enemy spy. She felt stopped struggling, fear trying to climb up out of her stomach. She swallowed down on it - she had to keep her head.
Riki grabbed her right wrist, and then catching hold of her left, bound both hands behind her with a thin plastic strap. Once she was bound helpless, he turned her around. He wore war paint-streaks of black under his vivid blue eyes and shock of black hair. His shirt was cut on the same loose lines of the muscle shirt he wore often during her captivity by the oni, but of glossy black scale armor. On his feet, with their odd bird-like toes, he wore silver tips that looked razor-sharp.
"What do you want?" She was pleased she didn't sound as scared as she was.
"I'm not going to hurt you."
"Somehow I don't believe you." She wriggled slightly to indicate her tied wrists. It made her teeter alarmingly on the branch, so she carefully scrunched down until she straddled the thick limb. There, perfectly safe. Ha!
Riki watched her with a cocked head. "There's no shame in being afraid of heights. Most people are."
She stared at him with shock. That was exactly what he said in her dream - wasn't it? She glanced downward and felt dйjа vu; they'd been up high in her nightmare.
"What do you want?" she asked. "Are you going to turn me over to the oni again?"
"No. When you killed Lord Tomtom, we Tengu managed to break free of the oni."
"I gave that up. You melted the witch, so I got out of my no-compete contract."
This was seriously weird.
"Riki, who is the wizard of oz?" "Huh?"
"I had a dream and you were in it."
"And you and you and you too," Riki quoted the movie.
"Oh good, at least you know the source. In my dream, I was trying to get to the wizard of Oz."
"Ooookay, and I thought I was deep in left field. Oh this is sad."
"Do have any idea who he might be?"
"The wizard?" Riki pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket, tapped out a cigarette, lit it and took a deep drag. "Hmmm, in the movie the wizard was the traveling performer that Dorothy met when she ran away from home. Chances are then, he's someone you've met but don't recognize now."
Taking another drag, Riki vented the smoke out of his nose in twin columns as he thought. "His nature is changing; some perceive him as great and powerful, others see him as foolish, but he's the only character that fully understood both Kansas and Oz. Most likely, you're looking for someone with great knowledge, but his intelligence is disguised somehow." Riki gazed off into the forest, eyes unfocused, thinking. "Like Dorothy, he's a traveler between worlds, just as lost…"
Riki's eyes snapped back in focus. "Impatience. He's your wizard."
"Who?"
"Impatience. The dragon that you fought at Turtle Creek."
She tried to fit the name of "Impatience" with the countless jagged teeth and massive snaky body.
"See, intelligence disguised." Riki waved his cigarette, reminding her of the astronomer post docs when they went into lecture mode. "Legends say that a dragon has a body and a spirit, and you can encounter the one without the other. Usually in the old stories, the dragons send their spirits out to cross great distances - but while they're doing it, it's a very unwise thing to approach them. The lights are on, but no one's home."
"Running on autopilot?"
"Let's just say that there's more than one story about someone getting their head bitten off while a dragon's spirit is absent."
She remembered with great clarity the sense of intelligence filling the dragon's eyes-its surprise at having a hand clamped into its mouth. "So you're saying the dragon was unconscious at the time he attacked me."
"Probably."
That would certainly explain how she managed to walk away with nothing more than a sore hand. "So where is this dragon now?"
"Even if I knew that, I wouldn't tell you. I want Impatience for the tengu. That's what I was doing at Reinholds. The oni had set a trap for it, using the fountain as a lure."
"The oni?"
"Impatience was one of two dragons the oni had waiting on Onihida for the invasion. The other is Malice, who is much bigger. Somehow Impatience managed to slip the oni's hold on him and escape."
"So, on top of the royal troops and the oni, we have an unaligned dragon running loose in Pittsburgh."
"Well, a party is only fun if you invite lots of interesting people."
She stuck her tongue out at him. "How do you plan to find Impatience?"
"I don't know. You apparently have to follow the yellow brick road."
In her dream, though, the road ended with the tree. This was going to drive her mad. In the silence between them, she heard a slight noise from Riki's hip pocket. He frowned, slipped out a cell phone and answered it with a cautious, "Hello?"
As he listened, his look changed to worry. "You're where? Jesus Christ what are you doing there? Oh fuck. Yes I said that, what do you expect me to say? No-don't - don't…" Riki sighed. "Put your cousin on. No, no, not Joey! Keiko." Riki waited a moment until the phone could be traded off on the other side of the conversation. "Yeah, I'm here. What's going on?"
Riki listened for several minutes, grimacing as if what he heard pained him. "I'll be there in a few minutes. Hang tight." Riki tucked away his phone. "Change of plans."