23: IT WAS A GRAVEYARD SMASH
Oilcan could feel the Stone Clan shield that Tinker’s little sisters were holding far to the west of Oakland. He followed the feeling through the forest to almost the shore of the Allegheny River. At the last bit, he veered south, coming back into the city at Butler Street. Something huge and glowing was plowing through a house, setting it on fire.
“A phoenix scorpion!” Thorne Scratch nestled close behind him on his hoverbike. “We will not be able to easily fight it. Your shield will attract it, so we will have to face it.”
Before they reached the scorpion, though, a massive spell arrow killed the monster.
A hovertank came flying out of a side street. It turned and then did an odd hop up as if it was visibly startled at their presence.
“It’s Oilcan!” Nikola’s little boy voice came out of the tank’s speaker.
“Oilcan! Oilcan! Hey, Oilcan!” the three little girl voices joined in.
Dear gods, where did my baby cousins get Tinker’s hovertank when she never found a big enough printer to actually make a final version? Are they actually inside the tank or is this some other kind of dream walking?
Oilcan dismounted from his hoverbike and waved the others to stay back. Thorne Scratch had already met the babies at the ice cream shop, both as mice and a large dog, so she seemed unsurprised by the new twist to their appearance. Nevertheless, she and Moon Dog started to raid the weapons crate for supplies.
The tank glided over to him in a way that would have been intimidating if it wasn’t for the babble of tiny little voices all talking at once.
“We found a back door to Tinker’s computer system…” “We met our grandma elf out on Neville Island…” “Marti says you’re Orphan! Well…she didn’t actually say it to us…” “…we didn’t hack Tinker’s system or anything—someone else did that…” “We’ve joined the Resistance!” “…we hacked Marti’s email looking for information on the Resistance…” “…and we found the plans for this tank!” “…but that is so cool! We listen to your songs all the time!” “…grandma elf said we need to save…” “…Team Mischief reporting for duty! Vive la Résistance!” “…Sir Galahad, the White Goat, and the baby dragons inside the nactka before it’s too late!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Oilcan waved at the tank. “Not all at once! What grandma elf?”
“That doesn’t matter!” A mini Tinker ducked around the tank. Joy sat on her shoulder, eyeing all Oilcan’s rescue and retrieval crew with suspicion. The mini Tinker looked exactly like Tinker had when she was nine, down to the bad haircut. More importantly, she looked just like Tinker did when she was shaken and scared but trying not to let it show.
“At least, right now it doesn’t matter,” she clarified. “One of Esme’s evil half sisters—Danni—is trying to use a nactka to kill all the elves in the Westernlands! We stopped her for now but she might have a backup casting circle.”
One of her half sisters? Did Lain have a horde of evil siblings that she never mentioned? It didn’t really manner who this mystery woman Danni was related to, he couldn’t let her kill all the elves.
A second mini Tinker joined the first. She looked as scared as Twin One but was trying to put on a brave front. It was possible that someone who didn’t know Tinker well would be fooled, but Oilcan saw all the little tells. It went straight to his heart. When Tinker told him about the twins, he hadn’t considered that just looking at them would trigger all the protective feelings he had for his cousin.
“The nactka are in there,” Twin Two said as she pointed toward the Allegheny Cemetery. “With a lot of scary things—besides the graves and dead people and possible ghosts. The oni have some kind of magical spear that can go through our shield.”
“It’s okay, I’m here—” Oilcan stopped as he realized that he couldn’t keep thinking of them as Twin One and Twin Two. “I wasn’t told your names.”
“I’m Louise,” Twin One said.
“I’m Jillian,” Twin Two said.
They weren’t identical twins but close enough that most people would have trouble keeping them straight. Louise looked a little more like Esme while Jillian more resembled their grandfather, Tim Bell.
Gaddy and Team Tinker were staring in amazement at the twins. He hadn’t told them yet who they were going to rescue.
TC shook his head and muttered softly, “Tinker’s really outdone herself this time—she’s cloned herself twice.”
“Is this”—Oilcan motioned to indicate the twins and the tank and Joy riding on Louise’s shoulder—“everyone in your group?”
Louise shook her head. “No. Crow Boy was going to get the nactka while we created a diversion but something went wrong. He’s a tengu who came with us from Earth. Jin told Tinker about Crow Boy. His real name is Haruki Sansei, but I guess Tinker never told you about him.”
“There’s also a human named Law and a female elf named Bare Snow,” Jillian added.
Oilcan didn’t recognize either name. Tinker had told him that the twins had arrived at Haven with a horde of tengu children that they had saved on Earth. If this Crow Boy was among the rescued, then he was also a child.
“Sir Galahad and the White Goat!” the tank said in a chorus of four tiny voices.
Gaddy gave a surprised laugh.
Oilcan looked at her in confusion.
“I went to school with Law,” she explained. “Lawrie Earie Monroe is her full name. Monroe as in Monroeville. Extremely local. Sir Galahad is a good nickname for her; she’s a bit of a white knight. She likes to ride out and save girls in trouble, carrying things made of wood. Baseball bats. Hockey sticks. Big sticks. Rumor is that she’s picked up an elf still in her doubles but no one has actually laid eyes on the female. That might be Bare Snow.”
A fourth child needing to be saved in the middle of this mess.
“Okay, we’ll get the nactka.” Oilcan indicated himself and the sekasha. Tinker wouldn’t abandon her friends, so he would have to assume that the twins wouldn’t leave without Crow Boy no matter what reassures Oilcan gave them.
“Hooyah! We’ll find Crow Boy!” Chuck announced suddenly and the hovertank raced away.
“Can they get hurt?” Oilcan asked the twins.
“Physically, no,” the twins answered together.
“Mentally?” Louise continued. “Maybe. If they remember this at all…afterward…?”
After they were born…
Right.
“I’m sorry,” Louise added.
Oilcan understood. He always felt responsible when Tinker went out of control. He also knew how hard it was as a child to deal with one’s own mess without having the responsibility of taking on another person’s chaos too. “It’s okay, it’s not your fault. We’ll work together to deal with this.”
Louise suddenly hugged him hard like she was worried that a flood would carry her away.
A moment later, Jillian joined her sister and the twins were perilously close to crying.
“It’s going to be okay,” he repeated, patting them on the back, glad that they were miraculously trusting him on sight. He understood better than anyone in either universe what they were going through. Loss of parents. New world. Mind-boggling, out-of-control younger child to take care of while still a grieving child in their own right. He’d been suspicious of his grandfather and Tinker at first but they proved themselves trustworthy quickly. Of course, they weren’t in the middle of a war at the time…
“I’m going to move ahead and protect the sekasha,” Oilcan said.
The twins went stiff, probably bracing for a fight against what he would suggest next. Certainly that was what it meant when Tinker squared her shoulders that way. He needed to give the twins something useful to do.
“If something went wrong with Crow Boy, then chances are good that either he or one of the others are wounded. The three need to be found and gotten to medical help.” He indicated Gaddy and the others. “The rest of these people are Team Tinker, who I have known for years and years. They’re good friends. Keep a shield on them and once you get Crow Boy and the others, pull out and go to Oakland with them.”
The night lit up with another monster-sized spell arrow from the hovertank.
“And see if you can talk your sisters and brother into leaving too,” Oilcan said.
The twins nodded.
There was a brief shuffle to get the twins—and Joy—onto the hoverbikes. He was afraid that they might want to drive because Tinker would. Joy insisted on Hover Hulk because TC kept a stash of homemade cookies in his saddlebags. She started to raid them by phasing the cookies out of the compartment even as the twins got settled into the sidecar.
Oilcan mounted up and they all chased after the hovertank.
The driveway led to an L-shaped courtyard faced with a half dozen garages and warehouse buildings. The broken pavement was littered with dead bodies. Some of them were burnt beyond recognition by the phoenix scorpion. Others were slashed by a blade. A few he couldn’t tell what had killed them.
“We found him!” the hovertank called at the far end of the courtyard.
Oilcan raced forward.
A tengu boy, no more than fourteen years old, leaned against the hovertank, panting. He bled from a dozen wounds on his arms and legs, but none of them seemed serious once you calmly analyzed the streaming blood.
The twins, however, weren’t taking it calmly. “You’re bleeding! You’re hurt! We need to stop your bleeding! We forgot a first aid kit! We could use our shirts!”
“Wait! I have supplies!” Gaddy cried to keep the twins from disrobing. She pulled out gauze and tape and handed them to Louise. “I brought lots.”
“I’m…I’m fine,” the boy panted. “Yes, yes, I’m hurt, but I will not die of these wounds. I had some cover when the puffball went off. The bitch swarmed us with her warriors and took the nactka while we fought for our lives. We only survived because the horror frightened all but the most valiant away. Bare Snow went after Danni. See to Law. I promised Bare Snow that I would keep her safe.”
Law’s wounds were more serious. She had managed to kill some of their attackers before collapsing on the ground.
Gaddy knelt beside Law to treat her wounds. “Ever the white knight.”
“Jump?” Jillian asked her twin.
Louise shook her head. “It would be too hard to keep everyone linked together. We might drop someone.”
Team Tinker had lived through enough mad-scientist experiments to look alarmed.
“The hoverbikes will only take a few minutes,” Abbey said to counter the suggestion.
Tate and Abbey would take the twins. Brandon would take the wounded tengu boy. They bundled Law into Axe Man’s sidecar. Gaddy was the only one who knew the area well, so she would lead them out.
“We need to go!” The babies were upset by the delay due to organizing the rescue. “The bad guys are getting away!”
“No, they aren’t!” Jillian took out a piece of paper with a spell drawn on it. She slapped it onto the wet concrete and spoke the key word. A gleaming dome appeared but she ignored it, instead looking out into the cemetery. “There! Can you feel magic? If you can, you can sense the nactka! They’re there! Moving away from us!”
Oilcan could feel the nactka clustered together behind the lift drive and spell chain of a hoverbike following the tall stone wall alongside the cemetery’s northern boundary. Normally even an unskilled rider would be able to pop a bike up and over a ten-foot barrier but it seemed as if Danni was towing the nactka behind her somehow. The redistribution of weight would mess up the lift drive’s ability to “pop” up. She was speeding along the wall, probably looking for a low spot or the end of the boundary line. If he remembered correctly, it changed to a chain-link fence that stopped abruptly a few blocks east.
Someone with an active spell running was chasing Dani on foot, lagging farther and farther behind the speeding hoverbike. Was that Bare Snow? The spell on her didn’t feel like a shield. He was too inexperienced to tell for sure what type of magic she was using.
“I sense the nactka.” Oilcan climbed onto his hoverbike. Thorne Scratch slipped quickly on behind him. “Gin and Moon Dog follow—”
“Tu-tu-lo!” the tank cried and roared off.
“No!” the twins both shouted but the tank had vanished into the night.
“It’s okay,” Oilcan said so that they wouldn’t feel responsible for whatever chaos the babies were about to create. “Just focus on getting the wounded to Oakland. Law needs treatment quickly.”
The twins nodded solemnly. They had the look Tinker would get that meant she would plow through the heart of a mountain if she had to.
Oilcan took off after the hovertank. He sped up, trying to overtake it. Gin Blossom and TC followed close behind.
The hovertank fired its cannon, lighting up the night. In the moment of brilliance, Oilcan spotted Danni on a hoverbike with a floating box tethered to its back. It wasn’t a spell-locked ironwood box as he expected, but one of the massive plastic ice chests that the foragers like Alton used, big enough to store a human body in. It certainly was big enough for ten nactka.
He could throw all power into the spell chain and catch Danni but it would put himself between her and the cannon. He wasn’t sure if the babies knew not to shoot him by mistake.
The hovertank fired again, lighting up the night. Danni dodged to the right. The much heavier tank didn’t corner as well. Its turret whipped right even as the hovertank struggled to turn. The cannon fired a second time; this time, Danni dodged straight into the path by mistake. The beam clipped her lift drive and the rope tethering the floating ice chest. The drive engine was instantly reduced to a pile of slag and machine parts. The hoverbike dropped like the lead weight that it was.
The ice chest started to drift upward.
“I’ll get the box!” TC called as he surged forward. The Hover Hulk had a bigger engine, which allowed it to pop up to higher elevations.
“Watch out for friendly fire!” Oilcan called warning.
“I’m watching!” TC shouted.
The hovertank continued to fire at Danni, who was scrambling up through a massive oak tree in an attempt to catch the ice chest before it floated away. The woman dodged the brilliance. The dead oak leaves flashed into flame despite the heavy downpour of rain.
TC popped up to catch the dangling end of the tether, trying to pull the ice chest downward to the ground. For a moment he hung there, impossibly static in the night sky. Then the Hover Hulk reached its height limit and started to drift downward. TC struggled to keep hold of the unwieldy floating chest and the oversized hoverbike.
“Stop shooting!” Oilcan shouted again at the hovertank, unable to close on Danni because of the friendly fire.
Oilcan could hear the tiny mice voices arguing even as they shot the cannon again and again, chasing Danni down out of the tree and through the graveyard. The massive beam of light disintegrated everything it hit, vaporizing trees, gravestones, and crypts.
“Lou and Jilly said no! We really should stop!” “That was an innocent stone angel, not her! Don’t fire until you see the whites of her eyes!” “She’s going to go right, left, left, up, down, sword swipe!” “Sword? What sword?”
The mice all screamed as Danni swiped a massive black sword at them.
“That sword!” either Red or Green shouted.
The blade took out a six-inch-thick gravestone of solid granite.
“She has a rune sword,” Thorne Scratch murmured into Oilcan’s ear. “Domana used those during the Rebellion until the wood sprites invented the Spell Stones. Their length gives them a slower attack speed than an ejae but they can cut through almost anything—even sekasha shields.”
The blade was at least six feet long and a foot wide. It seemed to be made of obsidian, polished to a black-mirror finish and etched with runes. The spells shimmered faintly, showing that they were active. Judging by the way that Danni swung the massive blade, one of the spells was some type of antigravity, making it lighter to lift. It seemed that none of the spells cancelled the momentum that the sword’s great mass created. It meant once the blade was in motion, it was difficult to stop. It would be like controlling a wrecking ball with a joystick. A flick of the wrist set it swinging. Stopping it was another matter.
“Watch, watch, watch!” either Red or Green shouted and a moment later the hovertank’s cannon took out a tree dangerously close to Oilcan.
He dodged the falling tree as it thundered to the ground. “Stop shooting!”
There was deep boom and then a crack almost like lightning striking even as one of the Jawbreakers shouted, “Incoming!” In a streak of flame, a rocket came out of the darkness from behind him. It struck the hovertank and exploded. The tank crashed barrel-first into the ground.
“Oh heck!” “What the frigging hell was that?” “Language!” “Take cover, Oilcan! The gunner’s got a machine gun too!”
Oilcan ducked his hoverbike behind a marble crypt for hard cover seconds before tracer bullets sprayed out of the darkness. The loud swarm of white-hot metal chewed at the stone over his head. He ducked down, cursing. He’d lost track of the others. Where were TC, Gin Blossom, and Moon Dog?
Oilcan slid off his hoverbike so he could cast a scry. The spell picked out the lift drives of the missing hoverbikes. They were behind two different mausoleums about three hundred feet west of him. TC was still struggling to control the floating ice chest filled with nactka. With the machine gun focused on Oilcan, the others were safe from the bullets.
The gunner was hundreds of feet to the north, perched on the roof of a building outside the graveyard. He or she had to be using night vision goggles even to see Oilcan in the rain-cloaked night. The person with the active spell—Bare Snow, he assumed—had given up on catching Danni and was closing on the gunner fast.
Danni was using the cover fire, though, to head toward TC.
“She’s heading for TC!” Oilcan shouted in Elvish. He dropped his scry, put up his shield, and took off running toward the mausoleums. Thorne Scratch kept pace with him as bullets rained down on them, pinging off his shield.
The machine gun suddenly went silent. Bare Snow must have reached the gunner.
Moon Dog was closing on TC from the opposite direction.
TC had hold of the large ice chest via its tether. The spell had been set to lift a much heavier weight. The plastic box was trying to float skyward, threatening to take TC with it. The cut tether was too short to attach the chest to anything. Preoccupied, TC didn’t see Danni and Moon Dog racing toward him.
“TC!” Oilcan shouted.
Moon Dog reached TC first, yanking him backward off the Hover Hulk even as Danni swung her massive black sword at him. Missing its mark, the blade cut through the mausoleum’s marble.
“Give that to me!” Danni shouted.
“No way!” TC growled, clinging tight to the chest.
Moon Dog flung TC toward Gin Blossom. TC sailed through the air, yelping in surprise. Gin Blossom caught TC and headed back toward her hoverbike. Moon Dog continued to spin, kicking Danni mid-body, sending her in the opposite direction.
Oilcan shifted round to block Danni from chasing after Gin Blossom even as Thorne Scratch and Moon Dog squared off against the woman, ejae drawn. Rain poured down them, bouncing off the sekasha’s personal shields.
Tinker had said that none of her Hand could land a blow on Chloe, not even Stormsong. Danni, Thorne Scratch, and Moon Dog launched into an elaborate dance with not one swing connecting with the intended target. The two sekasha ducked and dodged, not attempting to parry the massive black sword with their wooden ejae. Despite the cumbersome size of her weapon, Danni was evading all strikes at her.
Oilcan held his shield, protecting TC and Gin Blossom. The sekasha were too close to Danni for Oilcan to hit her with a force strike. But there was another possible target: the boundary wall. If he took it out, Gin could easily flee the rough terrain of the graveyard. On the city streets, Gin could go at top speed away from the fight.
Oilcan aimed a force strike at the boundary wall. He hit it hard, blasting the large fieldstones into pieces. “Gin, if you can, take TC and go.”
“I am trying,” Gin Blossom growled with TC tucked under one arm and digging through her bike’s leather saddlebag with the other hand. “It is like juggling wyvern eggs!”
“Just put me down and get this box out of here!” TC grumbled, still holding onto the floating ice chest.
Oilcan realized that TC was telling Gin to abandon him to protect the elves of the city but Gin was much too loyal to Team Tinker to do that. He would have to help Gin accomplish both before she would flee. Oilcan backed up, keeping his shield up, eyes on the sekasha.
Moon Dog barked something in Elvish that Oilcan didn’t know.
Danni, Thorne Scratch, and Moon Dog suddenly froze in place.
“Damn you,” Danni growled, sword upraised. “What are you up to?”
“You cannot defend against attacks without forethought,” Thorne Scratch said.
Danni laughed. “You can’t attack without thinking.”
“You do not know our ways,” Moon Dog said. “The outcome of this battle was decided the moment you hesitated.”
Oilcan wasn’t sure what was about to happen but it seemed like the tide just turned. He reached Gin Blossom and TC. “I’ll take him. You secure the box.”
Easier said than done, as Gin Blossom was nearly a foot taller than Oilcan. She’d been holding TC like a giant ragdoll. Oilcan struggled to keep the man upright while holding his shield. Gin pulled tie-down straps from her saddlebag.
There was a rumble of a hoverbike and a rider came bouncing across the rooftops of the houses that lined Stanton Street. It hit the building directly opposite the hole that he had blasted and came floating down with a roar of the lift engine at maximum power.
“Oh, you think you can take me?” Danni said. “How about times two?”
One of Esme’s half sisters, the twins said. It meant there was more than one. It explained the insane rooftop stunt with the hoverbike.
The incoming sister had her pale blond hair buzz-cut short and was wearing a camo coveralls. She roared toward the unmoving sword-wielders, obviously intent on breaking the stalemate.
“Adele!” Danni shouted. “Get the box!”
Adele slowed as she glanced toward Oilcan. “I don’t have anything that can deal with a domana shield.”
Danni growled in frustration and swung at Thorne Scratch. Instantly, the sekasha struck. Danni jerked back, barely avoiding the tip of their blades. Thorne’s ejae sliced open Danni’s right cheek, cut off a lock of her long pale hair, and amputated the tip of her right ear. Moon Dog’s blade slashed open her left arm just above her elbow.
The three froze in place again, swords upraised.
The sekasha had no forethoughts about attacking. They merely were waiting with the impossible patience of someone over a hundred years old. Once Danni swung, the size of her sword committed her to a full swing. Moon Dog was right—Danni had lost the fight the moment she paused her attacks.
Danni whimpered, her left arm sagging down as she lost some muscle control. Wounded as she was, she couldn’t wait forever but sekasha could.
“Danni!” Adele dropped her hoverbike to the ground and pulled a machine gun from a saddle holster. It had a belt of ammo feeding out of her backpack.
Oilcan shouted a warning. He couldn’t hit Adele with a force strike as the power of his spell would continue in a straight line and hit the sekasha. Their shields, though, could not take the rapid fire of a machine gun. He couldn’t protect both the sekasha and Team Tinker.
Adele suddenly went tumbling away from her hoverbike. She came up running, still holding the machine gun. “Goddamn elves! We told them that the Death Wind was too dangerous to use!”
“You don’t need to see her to hit her!” Danni shouted.
“That may be true for you!” Adele shouted back and opened fire with the machine gun, spraying the night with brightly burning bullets. They pinged off Oilcan’s shield. She was firing wildly, chewing through her ammo in a mad attempt to hit whatever was attacking her. She wasn’t aiming at the sekasha—but if she continued to spray the area, she was going to hit Thorne Scratch and Moon Dog.
“I got it!” Gin cried, having secured the ice chest to her hoverbike via a tie-down. “Give TC to me!”
Oilcan handed the man to Gin Blossom.
Whoever was chasing Adele—Oilcan couldn’t see who or what she was targeting—herded her around the battlefield. The arc intersected with the hole that Oilcan had blasted through the boundary wall.
“Watch out!” Danni cried as Oilcan did a force strike.
He hit Adele, sending her flying across the narrow road and through the front window of a brick duplex. He slammed a second strike into the house, bringing it down.
“Adele!” Danni cried. She swung at Moon Dog.
Thorne Scratch struck hard and quick. This time Danni didn’t dodge in time. Her head tumbled to the ground and a moment later her body crumpled.
There was a moment of stunned silence and stillness as the battle was suddenly over.
Moon Dog sheathed his ejae and held out his hand to the dark rainy night. “Do not be afraid. We were allies in this fight. Will you not show yourself?”
In all the confusion, Oilcan had nearly forgotten about the last child. “Bare Snow? My people took Law and the children to a safe place. We need to leave. This place is not safe. Can you come with us?”
Thorne Scratch whipped the blood from her blade and cleaned it on Danni’s fallen body. She stood, sheathing her ejae. “Child, you have our word: you will not be harmed. We are leaving. If you do not show yourself, you will be left alone in this place.”
A young female elf suddenly appeared before them. Her black hair was tied up in twin ponytails. She held two daggers that looked like small ejae in her hands. Other than that, she was completely naked. She dropped to her knees and then bowed forward until her forehead nearly touched the ground. “I put myself into your care. Please protect me.”