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13: ENTER THE GODDESS OF WAR


Setting an entire section of Oakland on fire did not make Tinker feel any better.

She had the comfort of seeing Oilcan safe and sound. Well…mostly safe. He smelled worse than a roadkill skunk and his eyes were watering.

She smacked him with her right hand since she was maintaining a shield spell with her left. Rain smeared down the invisible dome around them. “I told you to stay at McKees Rocks!”

“I couldn’t run and hide when everyone was in danger,” he said. “And literally everyone we know seems to be out here fighting.”

“Stupid people,” she muttered because there were none of them in sight, helping Oilcan. Not that there was much that they could do against the massive creatures. Despite the stench, she hugged him hard.

He laughed. “You’re going to smell as bad as me if we keep this up.”

“I don’t care,” she said fiercely.

“Oh, you’ll care in an hour or so.”

He was probably right. Her eyes were starting to water.

“This is why ‘deodorize’ was probably invented. Datapad!” She dropped her shield. Cold rain poured down on her. She snapped her fingers to get her datapad carried over to her by one of the tengu that had come with Riki. The male made faces at the smell as she looked up the spell. She could draw it from memory: smashed skunks were a common problem at the salvage yard. She had never memorized the domana finger positions since she hadn’t recognized the notation as something more than random squiggles. The fingering was fairly simple. She handed the tablet back to the male and waved him away so the metal wouldn’t interfere with her spell-casting.

The spell felt like a thousand tiny fingers scrubbing over her skin and through her hair. A little creepy but not painful. She wondered how it worked. Combining electrons? Now was not the time to be distracted.

The stench vanished from everyone and everything in a wide radius around her. She recast her shield, keeping out the rain.

“You were probably too busy to notice,” she said, “but those little twerps just bounced their way from Haven to somewhere near Washington Crossing Bridge.”

Oilcan tilted his head in confusion. “Which little twerps?”

“My little sisters!” Tinker smacked him again. “They’re tapping the Spell Stones and using catapult.”

“They’re coming to Oakland?” Oilcan asked. “Why?”

“Who knows! The mind boggles. The tengu from Haven are like ‘they were playing nicely with the other children when we left.’ Gods knows what insanity they could wreak with a horde of tengu children at their beck and call. You know that I’m at my worst when I have a construction crew!”

“That’s true,” Oilcan said.

She was tempted to smack him again. “The twerps stopped short of Oakland. They might be lost. They’re somewhere behind the oni army.”

Oilcan pointed west toward the burning bridge and the smoking oni dead, raising one eyebrow.

“Yes. Over there,” Tinker said. “I can feel them holding a Stone Clan shield over there—nearly to the river.”

Oilcan looked down as he focused on his new ability to feel magic. He nodded. “Yeah, I can feel it too.”

“I was going to send tengu to scout for them but if the girls have Little Miss Pocket Dragon with them—and a plan—I don’t think the tengu will be able to fetch them.”

“Joy is with the mice,” Oilcan said. “They’re the ones that gave me the spell at the ice cream shop on the South Side. They said something about a print job being done and took off.”

Tinker pressed her palm to her forehead. Unborn babies running about Pittsburgh with a dragon. Nine-year-olds bouncing into the city like giant rubber balls. All up to gods knew what. If it were her, she’d shanghai any adult sent to fetch her. Sending tengu after them might have been throwing manpower into a black hole.

“I’ll go after them,” Oilcan said.

She looked up in surprise.

“If anyone can talk them into an alternate plan, it’s me,” he said. “I have the most experience with this kind of thing.”

She didn’t like the idea but he was completely right. He had always been able to talk her into alternate routes when her original plan was too insanely dangerous.

Even if she gave him a score of tengu, it felt like she was sending him out shorthanded to deal with two of her sisters. He’d be outnumbered even if he never encountered oni.

It was then she noticed that he’d picked up another sekasha: a young male in Stone Clan black who was all wide-eyed and amazed about something. That made her feel a little better. The summer had been one long accidental lesson on how effective just one of the warriors could be.

“Who is this?” she asked in Elvish, unsure of the protocol. There was some weird custom between the domana involving rank but she wasn’t sure that if it applied to another caste. There was so much she didn’t know about elves.

The male warrior sketched a bow and gave an impressively long name made of words that she didn’t know. Her confusion must have shown on her face.

“His name is Moon Dog,” Oilcan added in a mix of Elvish and English. This triggered a quiet explanation from Throne Scratch to Moon Dog that humans liked to give nicknames to everyone, ignoring whatever name a person got cursed with at birth.

Cursed with?

The warriors in her Hand nodded at Thorne’s explanation. Did they all dislike their names as much as she hated “Alexander Graham Bell”? She felt weird for not knowing that they didn’t like their given names. It would explain why they all used nicknames when referring to each other.

“They can do that?” Moon Dog whispered in surprise.

“They do it for almost everyone,” Thorne Scratch murmured.

Waya! I like that,” Moon Dog said. “I am Moon Dawg.”

A thunder of guns to the west reminded Tinker that she didn’t have time to stand and talk.

“Domi,” Riki said quietly. “The militia is holding the bridges at Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard. They’re vastly outnumbered even with us backing them up. They need you.”

Militia? Pittsburgh had a militia? Since when? Why hadn’t anyone told her? Or had they told her and she misunderstood what they were saying? That was how she ended up an elf and married to Windwolf.

“Okay,” she said. “Let them know I’m here.”

“Oh, everyone in Oakland knows you’re here,” Oilcan said.

She considered sticking her tongue out at him but decided that she shouldn’t be immature in front of people she was about to lead into battle. She hugged him instead. “Be careful.”

“I always am,” he said. “It’s how I survived your tween years.”

She let go of Oilcan to smack him again. Lightly.

* * *

The militia had taken the most direct route from South Aiken Bridge to Morewood Avenue. They had run through the parking garage, gone over a six-foot garden wall, across a backyard, and down multiple back alleys. Tinker had a small army with her: the EIA troops, royal marines, a random Hand of Wyverns, and tengu coming out of her ears. Some were on foot but a majority of them were in trucks. The most direct route was out. She headed in the general direction of the Centre Avenue Bridge while giving out orders.

Oilcan had the right of it; almost everyone they knew was in Oakland fighting the oni. She tripped over one person after another. Moser. Snapdragon. Geoffrey. Bo Pederson. Scary Mary. Durrack and Briggs. Babs Bunny. Even Ellen McMicking was there with her tiny house diner, dishing out free food. With every step, Tinker felt like the weight of the city was pressing down on her more and more.

All these lives were dependent on her.

She might be a domana, but she knew only a handful of attack and defense spells. Worse, the oni most likely had another intanyai seyosa like Chloe Polanski directing the attack. Tinker needed to be clever and unexpected.

At least she had a large construction crew to pull from. She grabbed Geoffrey as the person who most understood magic and human technology.

“You remember my pipe experiments?” she asked him as she pointed to the twenty-foot-long, eight-inch-wide PVC pipes strapped to the roof of the EIA cargo truck. The soldiers had ignored all the writing on the outside of the white tubes, so they were haphazardly stacked. Granted, some of it was random graffiti that Team Tinker had scribbled on them years ago. The team had found her initial operating icons too cryptic and had added clarifications to her pictograms. As usual with a group project, it quickly got out of hand. Andy’s name was the most noticeable from where they stood, done in his then ten-year-old’s wobbly print. The “N” was backward, which was typical Andy.

“Oh, geez, that was ages ago!” Geoffrey said. “But yeah, my aunt is still mad about her lilac bush.”

The pipes needed a crew to position them so she had tested them out at the Roach landfill. Mistakes were made—hence the need for clarifications to the operating icons.

“Yeah, well…Captain Josephson!” she called out to the EIA commander. “Assign a five-man work crew to Geoffrey here!”

Josephson looked surprised but nodded, calling out names of men.

“Oh, here.” She found the sketch of the converters that she made on the way out to Oakland. It was as much as she dared with an enemy intanyai seyosa possibly watching her every move and trying to guess what she planned to do next. “There’s a portable generator on the truck. These things convert electric into magic. Set them up beside the pipes before you get started—but use the extension cord to keep them away from the generator!”

“Wait, wait, wait!” Geoffrey cried as Tinker headed toward the battle. “Is there only the pipes?”

“Nah, everything you need should be on the truck! Sawhorses. Mallets. Metronome. Golf balls.” She was glad that she’d stored all the things together so that the EIA troops could just snap them up. “If anything is missing—improvise. I believe in you! Make it work!”

* * *

Somewhere along the way she’d picked up one of Forge’s Hands. It was troubling that they were with her, not Forge. The good news was it was only one of his Hands. The bad news was that it was his First Hand, led by Dark Scythe.

She wanted to ask “Is Forge still alive?” but guilt made the words stick in her throat. She managed to ask, “How is Forge?”

“We have cast a healing spell on him to speed his recovery,” Dark Scythe said. “He should wake soon but we have little hope that he will be able to fight. A genetic scan has shown that the attack damaged his genetic key to the Spell Stones. Jewel Tear is similarly wounded. The others are seeing to her.”

Tinker nodded her understanding while trying not to wince. She’d forgotten about the female elf who had been through hell and back. Tinker was really letting things slip through the cracks. To be fair, there were currently a lot of cracks.

“Does Forge know how to fix this?” She didn’t have time to scour through the original Dufae Codex to see if anything that her grandfather edited out could be helpful.

Dark Scythe growled. What was that supposed to mean?

“No?” she guessed.

“It is a guess,” Dark Scythe said, “but I think he will know a spell that could reverse the damage but its range would not be that of the enemy’s. It is a matter of cohesion. All spells cast by domana uses the caster as the foci. From the caster, none of our spells are effective beyond matimo.”

Matimo was roughly twelve and a half miles. The domana in Pittsburgh weren’t a problem; she could gather them together in one place. The problem was the counter spell wouldn’t reach Windwolf or the East Coast holdings. Windwolf’s brothers and sisters had gathered to his defense over the last few weeks by moving into his scattered “holdings.” (Tinker wasn’t sure what they were beyond Aum Renau and the port of Brotherly Love. She should find out what-all she needed to protect.) The important fact was that all of Windwolf’s responsibilities were within one mei of Pittsburgh. It meant all of her in-laws were probably now helpless. It was a sure bet that the oni planned to attack the East Coast. Maybe once Pittsburgh was subdued; maybe before then.

Dark Scythe continued. “Since the attack knocked Forge and Jewel Tear unconscious, even if Forge can ‘fix’ the others, his spell would render them comatose for a second time. It would be too dangerous to cast in mid-battle. We would need to be sure that Wolf Who Rules’ siblings were in a safe place. Two such spells, back to back, might also be too much for any person to survive.”

She nodded her understand even as she considered all the implications. She couldn’t safely flip Forge and Jewel Tear back with a localized version of the spell. She’d need to wait for the survivors of the forest expedition return or at least find a safe place to hole up. Jin Wong had said that the oni transformed his people using the dead body of Providence. He warned that if oni used one of the egg-shaped magical traps that held baby dragons to cast a spell, the results would be far reaching. It seemed as if she wouldn’t be able to reverse the spell at the same scale without one of the traps.

And she had no idea where the oni had them hidden.

* * *

She was almost to Morewood Avenue when someone called out from the deep shadows, “Tinker! Tinker! I’ve got something important to tell you! Life and death!”

She knew that the voice was familiar but she couldn’t put a name to it. She veered toward the shadows, still maintaining her shield just in case. “What is it?”

A large man stood tucked in an apartment building’s side entrance. Like many of the people she’d seen so far that evening, he wore a black trash bag as rain protection. Unlike everyone else, he’d simply pulled it over his head and torn out eyeholes.

“What the hell?” Tinker said. “Who are you? Take that off.”

“It’s me,” the man started to pull off the bag. “Bingo.”

“Oh! Shit!” Tinker glanced at her Hand. They all had swords in hand. Things weren’t going to get better when the trash bag came all the way off. “It’s okay! He’s one of Oilcan’s Beholden! Stand down.”

Bingo was one of the Chang boys who worked security at the racetrack. All her past interactions with him revolved around drunken race fans, potential stalkers, and attempted thefts from Team Tinker’s storage locker. Tinker had known him too long to think of him as “not human,” but he was one of the half-oni. He was built like a mastiff dog—large and powerful. He had nothing as obvious as Tommy’s cat ears, so he could pass as full human. But once you knew that his father was a lesser blood oni, it was impossible not to see the evidence of the Skin Clan’s genetic tampering. His big square head. His odd puglike nose. His drooping jowls. His oversized ears that had a slight tendency to flop.

Bingo looked brutish but he wasn’t cruel. He could be painfully honest and stupidly blunt but he never said anything unkind unless provoked. He was surprisingly polite for his size and looks. He said “please” and “thank you” as if they had been ground into him by a loving but relentless mother.

“He’s one of Oilcan’s Beholden!” Tinker repeated loudly so that any random trigger-happy elf behind her wouldn’t kill the male.

She was glad that she had because when he pulled off the trash bag, it revealed that he was half-naked and covered in oni warpaint.

“What the hell?” Tinker said. “Why—why—why—?” There were so many questions that she wanted to ask but couldn’t decide where to start. “Why are you painted?”

Bingo was too dumb to cut to the point. “I was looking for a new warren for us. Tommy doesn’t like where we are now—but he’s the only one. Anyhow, I started in the Strip District and got all the way out to the Rim when the area flooded with lesser bloods. I had this big-brain moment: If I disguised myself, I might be able use all the confusion and find out what their battle plan was. So I stripped down, helped myself to some war paint, and blended in. I grew up with them all around us; I knew how to walk the walk.”

“Get to the point, Bingo!” Tinker growled. She didn’t want the militia to be completely overrun before she got to Centre Avenue Bridge.

“The lesser bloods aren’t all stupid. They knew some stuff and were flapping their mouths a lot, partially showing off but mostly bitching. ‘The plan’ up to a little while ago was to have Okami Shiroikage—the Unmaker—in Pittsburgh when the invasion started but something happened to him. The lesser bloods think he got stuck on Earth when you pulled the gate down. It meant, though, that the leaders got scrambled to fill the gap. Kajo was supposed to lead the troops into Oakland because Lord Tomtom kept killing prisoners by mistake. The lesser bloods figure that Kajo didn’t want the battles turn into a bloodbath. They were told over and over again to only kill humans that shoot at them: EIA, cops, and whoever else shows up to help the elves. That’s it. No killing and eating college students and whatnot. Kajo doesn’t want to fight the humans—yet.”

“Bingo!” Tinker shouted. “The point!”

Bingo pulled out a phone and tapped on it until he found a photo. “Mokoto showed me how to take pictures with my phone. This is the greater blood who’s leading the troops in Oakland.”

It was a blurry picture of a person in a scary-looking wooden mask, painted white with red accents. Big red horns on the head. Little red horns on the jowl. Red eyes inset in a black band across the nose.

“So we really don’t know what he looks like?” Tinker said.

“Trust me, he won’t be taking this off as long as he’s surrounded by lesser bloods. Greater bloods aren’t much different from humans—they’re just prettier. Some of the lesser bloods are really dangerous stupid. They’d eat their own littermates if they thought they could get away with it. The greater bloods stay in command because of these scary masks—and the biggest bodyguards that they can trust.”

Bingo obviously thought that the mask was super important. Everything from the look on his doggy face to the way he gave little “take it” pushes with his phone made that clear. If he were a full dog, he’d be wagging his tail. Was it something about the oni that Tinker didn’t understand, or was Bingo just stupid?

“So the commander is wearing this mask…?” Tinker prompted.

Bingo frowned a moment, apparently picking up—finally—her confusion. “There isn’t a subcommander with them. That’s what the lesser bloods were all bitching about. With this last-minute shuffling, they’ve been shortchanged on leaders. Lord Tomtom was supposed to be out in the forest with the domana fodder. Kajo was supposed to be here in Oakland with his little posse of mask-wearing greater bloods—but he took off days ago with all but two of them. Those two got into a big yelling fight just before I showed up and the girl took off.”

“Girl?”

“The ‘greater blood’”—Bingo did air quotes with his fingers—“who took off was a human female. A girl. Well, a woman. She’s not young but not as old as my ma.”

“Wait. What? How do you know?”

Bingo tapped his wide nose. “A mask doesn’t cover up her scent. I didn’t even have to get close; her smell lingered long after she left the area. My nose says that she’s not an oni or elf but a human—one who’s fussy about how she looks under that mask. The thing is, most lesser bloods haven’t been around enough human women to know what it is that they’re smelling. Fancy soap. Expensive perfume. Makeup. Hairspray. Some of her clothes had even been dry-cleaned.”

That would describe Chloe to a T. Was this a sister to Chloe? How many sisters did Chloe have? How many aunts am I going to have to kill?

“Is she still on the other side of the bridge?” Tinker asked uneasily. Chloe had been able to guess all her moves but the last one. Tinker had less time to prepare—she had fewer aces up her sleeve.

Bingo shook his head. “No. Like I said, she took off. The girl seemed sure that taking the enclaves was going to be easy as taking candy from a baby. Mori didn’t think so.”

“Mori?”

“Moriyajuto. All the greater bloods have stupid-long names that sound scary. Mori and the girl were fighting because both of them seemed to think that they were in charge. The girl knew somehow that Oilcan wasn’t going to be caught up in whatever they did to cripple the domana. The girl told Mori that he was to throw the baenae at Oilcan because, as Stone Clan, he would have a hard time killing them before their poison got him. The girl wasn’t sure if you would show up but if you did, Mori was to use horrors that are immune to fire. She seemed sure that they would just roll right over you. She took about half of the lesser bloods and left.”

“Oh joy.” Tinker knew the finger positions for much of the Stone Clan esva, but in the last few weeks, she’d learned that knowing and doing were two different things. Tinker had never done anything that required her to rapidly bend her fingers into exact patterns. Even her typing was hunt and peck. Oilcan had the advantage that he had played guitar for years. She had practiced holding various shields and doing the flame strike but little else.

At least it sounded as if she wasn’t going up against someone who could see the future.

“Domi, it would be useful to circulate the photo,” Stormsong murmured quietly.

Tinker called over her datapad and got Bingo’s phone to transfer the photo on to it. “See that Captain Josephson gets a copy of this.”

The tengu holding her datapad nodded and faded back to make it so.

“Do you know where the woman went with the other half of the lesser bloods?” Tinker asked one last question.

Bingo waved vaguely toward the west. “No, not really. She said she had more important things to see to. The lesser bloods didn’t know where she went but it sounded like she headed off to the big cemetery near the Rim.”

The Allegheny Cemetery? It was dangerously close to where the twins had landed. Where Oilcan was headed.

Tinker had an army in motion: she couldn’t abandon all these people to go running around blind in the dark. Much as she hated the idea, she would have to trust that Oilcan could get the twins to safety without her.



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