5: MURDER HOUSE
“What the hell happened here?” Law Monroe whispered.
It was the fourth warehouse that Law and Bare Snow had been to since they started chasing after the nactka. All four buildings had appeared abandoned on the outside. This one on Thirty-fourth Street at the edge of the Strip District looked like a slaughterhouse.
Law crouched on the loading dock, cautiously peering through the open bay door. The interior was lit only by the last rays of daylight through high narrow windows. The smell of carnage hung thick in the air. A mist of blood coated everything. There were dead bodies littering the floor, still leaking out bodily fluids. She cautiously rolled the nearest body over. It was limp and warm; rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet. The male was one of Kajo’s pack bearers that she’d been following all afternoon. She’d seen him and the others alive just thirty minutes earlier. Now, in this nondescript warehouse at the edge of the Strip District, the pack bearers were all mysteriously dead. There were no bullet shells on the ground, nor the smell of gun smoke in the air. The exit wounds weren’t the ragged holes made by high-powered guns. The holes were perfectly neat circles, like those made by spell arrows, only much too small. The bodies looked like they had been used as pincushions.
“I think someone set off a puffball,” Bare Snow whispered, crouching beside Law to examine the body. “His fingers are starting to go stiff. In this heat, I say that the puffball was triggered minutes after they arrived.”
“A what?” Law collected puffball mushrooms to sell to the enclaves. She’d never heard of a variety that filled people with holes.
“It is an ancient type of magical trap; a sphere made of clay that looks like a puffball mushroom.” Bare Snow pointed to curved shards of red clay scattered across the top of a cardboard box near the door. “It’s filled with small darts etched with a version of the spell-arrow spell. When the puffball is triggered—either by a specific sound or a key word—a concussion spell on its core goes off, spraying the darts into the air to activate. They will pierce almost everything: flesh, leather, wyvern-scale armor, and ironwood. It has been one of the forbidden magics since the end of the Rebellion. They can sit armed and forgotten for centuries before accidently being triggered. The sekasha thought them dishonorable and thus banned them even as the Clan War started. No elf born after the Rebellion would even know how to create one.”
“How do you know about them?”
“My mother thought I should know all the forbidden magic since our enemy were the ones that developed them.”
A forbidden spell? One that normal elves wouldn’t use and humans couldn’t know as no one would teach it to them? Either the Skin Clan just fumbled a trap or something had gone south within the enemy’s ranks. Maybe Kajo had cleansed his ranks again, killing the pack bearers like he had killed the tengu within his camp. Was this the entire contingent of pack bearers that they had been following?
Law did a quick head count and then counted again. The dead seemed to be the entire work party that they had followed all day. Who had driven away their big yellow truck? Did the mystery driver have the nactka now?
* * *
Law and Bare Snow had stumbled across two identical oni warlords that morning. It had been a combination of keen observation of the native wildlife, clever tracking, and pure dumb luck. Two nearly identical warlords, dozens of warriors, and a score of pack bearers had been camping a few miles beyond the Rim. After breaking camp, the war party headed to the edge of Oakland. By that point, it was early afternoon with the sun just starting its slide down to the west. The taller of the two warlords had used a monster call to send black willows toward the back end of the enclaves. In Law’s mind, that probably meant that he was Kajo and the shorter masked oni was the body double, meant to confuse possible assassins—like Bare Snow.
Kajo then split his party into two groups.
He kept his body double, eighty heavily armed warriors, and a score of wargs. Law knew from experience that the magically enhanced wolves had a keen sense of smell. Bare Snow’s invisibility spell didn’t erase her scent. It would be insane to try and kill Kajo. Besides, their target was the egglike nactka.
Kajo took almost nothing else with him in terms of luggage. Twenty brutish red-skinned pack bearers headed off with the small mountain of camping equipment. Tents and bedrolls comprised much of the gear but there were several large mystery duffel bags. Any one of them could hold ostrich eggs of mass destruction. While the pack bearers were all armed with rifles, they didn’t take any of the wargs with them.
It was a complete no-brainer as to which group Law and Bare Snow should follow.
Law had called Alton Kryskill, dumped the whole problem of the incoming black willows into his lap, and then chased after Kajo’s camping gear.
* * *
They had followed the pack bearers on foot for about a mile up Braddock Avenue. As they neared the great wall of trees at the Rim, the oni turned onto Lincoln Highway and stopped at a gas station where a bright yellow box truck waited. The vehicle looked like an old Penske moving van with all the company logos painted out in a dull tan. Such trucks were common in Pittsburgh. Someone must have had gotten a deal on retired equipment and imported them in bulk. They were such a common sight that Law had never considered that they might be all owned by one organization.
By the end of the day, she would lay money on it.
As Law took a head count through her binoculars, the pack bearers stripped away all that was oni. Their leather clothes. Their face paint. And finally, using some kind of written spells, their red skin and brutish bodies. While their ears were not pointed, they had the tall, willowy figures of elves.
“They’re all Skin Clan!” Bare Skin had whispered fiercely.
Law nodded as she committed the newly revealed faces to memory.
The only time she and Bare Snow had encountered the human-looking elves was when they were overseeing complex espionage missions. There had been Skin Clan operatives embedded in the EIA hunting for Windwolf and within the train offices to set up the strike on Station Square but there had been none on the train itself. It meant that the equipment that the pack bearers were loading onto the yellow truck must be important. Kajo would have probably used normal, true blood oni otherwise.
Law had also realized that the pack bearers wouldn’t have bothered to strip off their disguises if they were going to head back into the forest. The group was going to drive into the city. She and Bare Snow weren’t going to be able to keep up with a truck on foot.
Law moved back to make a phone call to Widget Bunny. The girl had a backdoor into the city’s traffic camera system, set up when she had helped Law save Windwolf from an assassination attempt. She might be able to use it to track the pack bearers while Law backtracked for her Dodge.
“Hey-o!” Widget answered.
“Hi, it’s…” Law paused before saying her name as the morning conversation replayed in her mind.
“We don’t know what level of technology that they’re operating at,” Widget had said. “We have to assume that anything we say might be overheard.”
“It’s me,” Law said. “I need a favor. You know that backdoor that we talked about this morning?”
“Back. Door,” Widget murmured, sounding mystified.
A male voice murmured in the background. “The backdoor to…to that special computer system?”
“Ohhhh,” Widget said as understanding dawned.
“Are you with that boy that you have crush on?” Law asked.
“Sh-sh-sh-sh.” Widget made a funny hushing sound in panic. “Yes, I am. He has a problem with some trees—among other things. I think you know which ones I mean, Bam-Bam.”
That had been Law’s nickname in high school, something only locals like the Kryskills would know. Alton must have told Duff about her phone call regarding the incoming black willows.
“Okay,” Law said. “Can you peek through that door that we talked about and see if you can spot a box truck located at the intersection of Braddock Avenue and Lincoln Highway?”
“Lincoln Highway?” Widget echoed in confusion. It wasn’t surprising that Widget didn’t recognize the street names—it was on the opposite end of town from where the Bunnies lived. “Oh! Oh! That door! What was the other street? Braddock?”
“Lincoln runs along the Rim.” Duff sounded a lot like his older brother. The whole family had broadcaster quality voices. “From the Allegheny to the Parkway. Braddock should be right about here.”
“Can you see the box truck?” Law said.
“Maaayyybe. Give me a second.” Widget typed on a keyboard on her end. “And what’s a box truck? Is it a certain type of truck or is it simply a truck carrying boxes? What am I looking for?”
“It’s a big truck with a cab on the front,” Duff said. “It has a separate cargo area in the back that’s square like a box.”
“It’s yellow,” Law added.
“Why didn’t you say that it was yellow first?” Widget said. “Okay, I’m looking at the intersection…and…there’s the yellow truck. It’s under the gas station marquee. Right? Blast it all! Who are all those people? Bad guys?”
“Yes, very bad guys,” Law said. “Can you keep eyes on them?”
Widget snorted. “In that big yellow thing? Easy peasy lemon squeezy. They’re not going to be sneaking around on little backstreets or off-roading in that.”
* * *
While Widget had tracked the yellow truck through the city, Law and Bare Snow had doubled back to where they’d left her Dodge. By the time they had caught back up with the truck, it had driven to an equally abandoned area on the North Side. It had parked on a short, dead-end street with the unlikely name of Riversea Road.
Law tucked the Dodge into a nearby alley called Drovers Way. She and Bare Snow picked their way over to a spot where they could spy on the Skin Clan “movers.” Like a line of ants, the elves were carrying the camping gear into the building and boxes out of it to be loaded onto the truck. Law did another head count to be sure that the numbers hadn’t changed on them.
“What do you think is in those boxes?” Bare Snow whispered as they watched from the shadows.
Law blew out her breath; she didn’t have a clue.
The Riversea Road building had elaborate redbrick architecture that dated it back to the middle eighteen hundreds. There was an ancient electrical grid on the façade, looking like it connected up to old knob-and-tube wiring, which suggested that the warehouse hadn’t been used for almost a hundred years. Nothing about it gave a clue as to what the oni might have stored within the building.
The elves could be loading anything from apples to weapons onto the truck. The boxes were made of corrugated cardboard without any logos or labels—something almost unheard of in Pittsburgh. The city had a monthly flood of containers of all types. None of it was unmarked: it seemed like the people on Earth were obsessed with labels. Pittsburghers reused old cardboard boxes with no regard for their origin. Newcomers often used the sturdiest containers for dressers and pantries. They made bookshelves and tables from the second most common shipping material in the city: the pallets that the boxes were transported in on.
It was weirdly intimidating that the Skin Clan had a warehouse stocked with plain boxes. It spoke of unimaginable connections on Earth, deep pockets, and mind-boggling foresight.
What did Law know for sure? Kajo had camped out last night. His pack bearers had packed up the camping gear and taken it to the truck. If this was a group of humans, Law would assume that they were done sleeping outside.
“Kajo must have ditched his tents because he’s not going to be camping in the woods tonight,” Law said slowly as she felt her way through the logic. “That would mean that he plans to sleep indoors. A house or warehouse or office building—somewhere in the Pittsburgh area. Someplace that can shelter a hundred warriors.”
It still gave Kajo almost two thousand square miles to pick from.
“I don’t blame Kajo,” Bare Snow murmured. “The way the wind is blowing, it’s going to storm big soon.”
Law nodded as she added this to her calculations. The weather report had called for heavy evening thunderstorms. Kajo probably knew this; he had moles in nearly every institution in the city. “If he plans to be at his new camp for more than a day, he would need things like food and bedding.”
It was just a wild guess but it felt right. Kajo had eighty warriors and twenty wargs with him. That was a lot of mouths to feed. Traveling light would make sense if he planned on taking shelter within the city proper. The pack bearers could gather supplies quickly and move to a new location via the moving van. It would allow Kajo to travel unencumbered.
Just because it felt right, didn’t make her guess correct. She didn’t know enough. She really needed to know what was in the warehouse and the unmarked boxes. You could only build a trap for an animal if you knew where it slept and what it liked to eat. What little information that the tengu yamabushi Yumiko had given her about Kajo wasn’t enough to guess where the warlord had stored the nactka.
Law decided that she and Bare Snow would search the building after the elves left. She called Widget to tell her to continue keeping an eye on the yellow truck.
* * *
When Law was a child, she had resisted her grandfather’s lessons on all things electrical and mechanical. She saw the training as his way to use her as slave labor. She was glad now that a lot of it had still sunk in despite her resistance to learning it. It meant that she knew how to get around simple security systems and basic door locks.
“I could just go in through a window,” Bare Snow whispered from somewhere to Law’s right. The female had stripped down and gone invisible in case there were guards inside the building. “There’s a lot of ways in other than this door.”
Law shook her head as she picked the heavy duty Yale mortise lock on the front door. “This building has a security system.” She paused to point out where she’d already attached a heavy-duty magnet to a door sensor. “If we just opened the door without disabling that, it would set off some kind of alarm. That part right there is old and low tech. There might be something more inside—something more sophisticated.”
Law wasn’t sure how Bare Snow’s invisibility spell worked. It seemed to bend light around Bare Snow so that she disappeared from the landscape. Law knew that it didn’t cover the female’s scent. Law wasn’t sure if the spell would work on the motion sensors. Some security systems used infrared energy—body heat—to detect intruders. Would the spell keep Bare Snow invisible at that level? Maybe. Law’s grasp of electromagnetic radiation was weak but she was fairly sure that heat was a form of light. Whether or not Bare Snow’s spell extended into those spectrums was the main factor.
Even if her invisibility magic worked that way, not all sensors were based on infrared. Some systems used ultrasonic sound waves. Bare Snow was not magically silent when she was invisible. She could move very quietly, even through dead leaves. The problem was that most security systems didn’t pick up noise being made by humans. They used ultrasonic sensors that bounced sound to a known object and back. It detected the interruption of the signal by something unknown blocking the reflected wave. Law was fairly sure that such systems could detect Bare Snow even while she was invisible.
“There should be a control panel by the door that will let me override everything,” Law said as she worked her lockpicks through the last tumbler. It clicked loudly as the door unlocked. “Okay, this is it. Kill anything that moves while I disable the security system.”
It was anticlimactic. There were no oni or monsters within the warehouse. The control panel was as old and low tech as the door sensor. There were window sensors that would be triggered by opening them. There seemed to be no motion sensors or anything else on the inside of the building. Law bypassed all the inputs just to be sure.
Once Law was sure that it was safe to move about, they rifled the warehouse. Kajo’s camping gear sat on the shelves nearest to the loading dock. There was no sign of the mystery duffel bags that she thought the nactka might be in. The warehouse held shelves upon shelves of canned goods. Big commercial-sized cans of things like carrots, corn, peaches, pears, and sweet potatoes. Smaller tins of luxury food like smoked mussels, wild mackerel, stuffed calamari, a dozen different types of sardines, gourmet cookies, and fancy chocolates. Law had never seen so much food, not even in the Oakland branch of the Giant Eagle supermarket just after Startup. While the pack bearers had carried out dozens of boxes, the shelves were all still full. The elves had left behind enough to feed an army for months.
Across the aisle from the camping gear were cardboard boxes stacked flat with rolls of packing tape beside them. The pack bearers must have taped up boxes and filled them with cans pulled from the shelves. Judging by how much food they’d taken, Kajo was planning to stay in one spot for a long time.
Law went through the camping gear a second time to be sure that the nactka weren’t among the various tents, folding cots, and sleeping bags.
“Oh! Oh my!” Bare Snow whispered in the next aisle.
Law turned to the corner to find Bare Snow taking big jars of peanut butter off a shelf.
Bare Snow held out the peanut butter to Law. “We should take everything here for the Bunny babies.”
It was a tempting idea. Hazel Bunny had said that they were running low on basic food supplies. The Pittsburgh stores were picked bare of imported groceries. All that was left was what the local farms could produce. Law had promised to keep the Bunnies stocked with fresh meat, but the women had a dozen mouths to feed through the winter.
Law should stay focused on the nactka but she had no solid proof that the magical bombs had been on the yellow truck. The Bunnies had a real need for food and there were several dozen jars of peanut butter. Kajo probably wouldn’t miss a few. “Okay, take three or four but from the back of the shelf.”
Bare Snow nodded and set about moving jars forward to disguise the fact that some were taken.
If they were going to take peanut butter, they should go for broke. Were there any bulk staples that they could easily steal? Hazel had specifically mentioned that the Bunnies were low on flour.
In the back of the warehouse, Law found big metal airtight bins holding fifty-pound bags of flour, sugar, rice, and dried beans. She and Bare Snow shifted one bag of each to the big fishing coolers on the back of her Dodge.
“We’ll come back later for more,” she told Bare Snow.
Looting the food, though, made Law think of Usagi’s offer to join her household. It was so unfair that Bare Snow was being held accountable for a crime committed before she was born. If Law understood the timeline correctly, Bare Snow’s mother had been an adolescent when someone else in the family assassinated Howling. She’d gone into hiding on an island for close to a century before meeting Bare Snow’s father.
Surely any sane person wouldn’t hold an unborn child responsible for the acts of her family who were all long dead.
“What needs to happen to get the death sentence lifted?” Law asked.
“God needs to whisper in Wraith Arrow’s ear,” Bare Snow said.
“Which god?” Law didn’t know much about the religion of the elves except that they had an entire pantheon of gods.
“Whichever one he’s willing to listen to.” Bare Snow clicked her tongue in an elf shrug. “The sekasha are born perfect; Wraith Arrow might not even listen to gods.”
* * *
With Widget guiding Law to the other places where the yellow truck had stopped, it was lather, rinse, and repeat. Law would disarm the security system. She and Bare Snow would slip in and rifle the place. The second stop was a small warehouse on the South Side on Cabot Way. It was another food depot but much smaller with walk-in freezers and refrigerators full of meat, apples, potatoes and onions. By the door was a stack of big YETI Tundra 350 hard-shell ice chests, only available on Elfhome by special order. She would know as she had to order her own big coolers that she used to store fresh fish. These were still in their original cardboard shipping containers. There were empty boxes, Styrofoam end caps, and plastic wrappers that indicated that someone had unboxed four of the ice chests. Beside the remaining chests was an ice machine quietly refilling with ice. Obviously the pack bearers had filled four chests with ice and frozen meat and carried them off.
Law eyed the chests. Could she take one—or two? Oh hell, she was definitely coming back and looting this place down to the studs! The building had an impressive solar array on the roof, which explained why the freezers and refrigerators are all still quietly humming. She didn’t have to worry about the food spoiling before she returned—although she was going to have to find someone with a great deal of freezer space almost immediately.
The third warehouse had been nearby on Wharton Street. It had an odd array of goods from toilet paper to bed linen.
The nactka weren’t in any of the warehouses. If the pack bearers had carried them away for Kajo, they hadn’t offloaded them from the truck yet.
* * *
Law called Widget for an update on the yellow truck after searching the warehouse on Wharton Street. “Where’s our target now?”
“Well…I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” Widget said.
Law’s stomach went queasy as all the possible things that could go wrong flashed through her mind. “What’s the bad news?”
“I lost the truck,” Widget said.
Law locked down on a curse. It wasn’t Widget’s fault; the girl was doing the best that she could. Law should have followed the truck instead of checking out the second and third warehouses. Kajo could go to ground and vanish for weeks with what his people had stocked up on.
Widget expanded on how she lost track of the truck. “Tinker domi’s fight with Malice took out some important infrastructure downtown.” A lot of stuff had been taken out by the dragon and the massive helicopter that Tinker commandeered from the elves. Widget probably meant the traffic cameras. It wasn’t all that surprising that some of the cameras were collateral damage to the fight. “Our target left the South Side via the Birmingham Bridge. I didn’t see where it went when it got to the other side. The stupid bridge weaves over and under the Parkway, the Boulevard of the Allies, and Forbes Avenue. It’s like a cat’s cradle of roads. I couldn’t figure it out the intersections fast enough to track the target. I only know that it didn’t go out toward Oakland, so it either headed into Downtown or went crosstown, toward the North Side.”
“What’s the good news?”
“It-it-it’s a long story but I started out this morning by hacking into a laptop that belonged to the ex-director of the museum,” Widget said. “Ex-director as she’s now dead. That’s why I’m…I’m where I am.”
Widget meant with Duff at the bakery. Law frowned, wondering what the museum had to do with anything. Was the director dead because she had been an oni mole? There had been some kind of excitement at the Carnegie in July, but Law had been busy trying to find the oni camp where Tinker was being held captive. “And?”
“My mom used to do this kind of investigative shit all the time,” Widget said. “She would always say ‘follow the money’ so I dug around until I found this whole section of property taxes and utility bills for buildings that have nothing to do with the museum. All three places that you’ve been to had their taxes and utilities paid by the museum: Riversea Road, Cabot Way, and Wharton Street. I’m trying to get eyes on the other addresses—maybe the truck is at one of them. Hold on.”
Law waited, listening to Widget type and whisper her odd innocent swears like “blast it all!” and “fudge nuggets!”
“Gotcha!” Widget cried with triumphant. “If you were going to hide, you shouldn’t have picked something so big and yellow!”
“Where is it?” Law said.
“It’s in the Strip District!” Widget said. “It’s currently at the intersection of Penn and Butler and Thirty-fourth Street. Gah, Pittsburgh intersections are so wonky.”
Penn and Butler? That would be Doughboy Square with the bronze statue of a World War One infantry soldier.
“I know where that is,” Law said.
“That’s right by Moser’s place,” Duff added in the background.
Widget continued to explain. “Number ten on the museum list is on Thirty-fourth Street. I couldn’t get eyes onto the building, but I spotted the truck coming up Thirty-fourth, so it must have just left there. It’s on Butler now, heading north.”
The truck was going to run out of city fast. Carl Moser could lay claim to an entire block of row houses because of the proximity to the Rim. There were a few blocks of mostly empty houses and the three-hundred-acre sprawl of the Allegheny Cemetery before the city abruptly ended in massive trees.
Law switched to speaker, slotted her phone into its dashboard mount, and headed for the Strip District.
“The truck turned into the Allegheny Cemetery,” Widget reported a few minutes later. “Why the hell would it go there? Are the oni robbing graves? Raising the dead? O. M. G. What if they can make zombies with magic?”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Law said. “What entrance did it use?”
“The one that looks like the front gate of a castle. Normally I’d say it was very cool but right now it’s super creepy. Major horror-movie vibe—complete with flickering lightning. According to the maps, the cemetery is huge—like a square mile in size—just with little weird bits taken out so it’s not really a square. I’ve got eyes on the entrances but the other gates are all chained shut with weeds growing through their bars. If they’re coming out, they’ll probably use the main gate again. The truck is still in there—doing something.”
“I’m going to check the warehouse on Thirty-fourth Street.” Law said. “Call me if the truck moves again.”
* * *
The fourth warehouse had been filled with death and little else. It was the final destination of the pack bearers—in more than one way. The space contained nothing but potential. Subtle modifications had made it into a solid fortress with the river protecting its back. It could easily house eighty warriors and twenty wargs with a separate living space for Kajo.
Someone had killed Kajo’s people and stolen the truck filled with everything needed to live comfortably for days if not weeks. Whoever they were—they were currently at the Allegheny Cemetery.