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27: FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE WILLIAM PENN HOTEL


“This is Tommy’s enclave?” Jewel Tear asked Tommy as she slid off his hoverbike.

He started to nod and then realized that all the elf enclaves were named after the head of the household. “We humans use family names. It’s the Chang enclave.”

“Chang,” Jewel Tear said. “Does it have a meaning or is it like Tommy?”

“If it has a meaning, my mother never told it to me,” Tommy said as he eyed a pickup parked in front of the William Penn Hotel. It had “local” written all over it, from the “classic” age of the truck to the WESA bumper sticker to the gun rack in the cab. There was a teenaged black girl standing, talking with Quinn. She seemed to be the pickup’s owner—she was holding keys in her hand—only Tommy didn’t recognize her. Between the dance raves and racetrack, he knew most of the local young people.

He motioned to Jewel Tear to stay back, under the awning over the front door, and stalked over to the truck.

“What’s going on?” he asked Quinn.

“Neither one of us knows how to drive,” Quinn said.

“How did it get here then?” Tommy asked.

“Duff Kryskill showed up in it shortly after you left,” Quinn said. “Alita sent him.”

“He told me to move his pickup to someplace…better?” the girl said. “He forgot I don’t know how to drive.”

Tommy glanced at Quinn.

“She’s one of the bunnies,” Quinn murmured. “Widget.”

The bunnies were all illegals. Duff was a regular at the racetrack, hanging out with his cousins on Team Tinker. If they weren’t running from the oni, they were perfectly safe to interact with his family. But if Duff was hiding from the oni—they needed to get the truck out of sight.

“Where’s Alita?” Tommy asked.

Widget looked puzzled. “Who?”

“Short, dark, and scary,” Quinn said, holding up his hand to indicate Alita’s size.

“Oh, she went with the royal marines.” Widget waved in what might have been a random direction or out toward Liberty Avenue.

Since most of his family couldn’t leave the restaurant, most hadn’t learned to drive. If he remembered correctly, Trixie had learned to drive after running away from home to hide from his father’s warriors.

“Get Trixie to move it,” he told Quinn.

He pulled Jewel Tear into the lobby of the hotel.

The huge room with crystal chandeliers and groupings of beautiful seats was filled with little half-oni—some able to pass as human and some who couldn’t—running loose. It was the three- through six-year-olds. They were old enough to walk without fear of them falling face-first but still too young to be without constant supervision.

“Hey! Hey!” He called to get their attention. “What are you doing?”

“Tommy!” the children all shouted and swarmed him.

“What are you doing down here?” he repeated sternly. “Why aren’t you in your rooms?”

“We’re hungry!” “When’s dinner?” “The lights went off and the elevator stopped working, so when the lights came back on, we played with it!” “We want to go swimming too!”

“They are so little,” Jewel Tear whispered in Elvish, looking down at the children clinging to his legs. All of them were under four feet tall, with some as short as three feet. “They are even smaller than Spot.”

“They’re not supposed to be down here,” Tommy growled. They hadn’t been in the hotel long enough to set up routines of how to efficiently get food to the little kids. It didn’t help that not all of them were his aunts’ offspring, so he couldn’t just send them to their mothers.

“Where’s Motoko?” he called out in Chinese.

“He’s putting out fires,” Trixie said while heading toward the front door to move Duff’s pickup.

“Literal fires or just emergencies?” Tommy called after her.

“Emergencies!” Trixie shouted back before disappearing outside.

“Quinn, get the kids back upstairs and then tell the tweens to find something for them to eat,” Tommy ordered.

“Me?” Quinn said in surprise. “I’m supposed to be guarding the front door and holding down the front desk.”

“You said you needed help with the children,” Jewel Tear whispered in Elvish. “Did you mean these children?”

“Yes, but you need to get warmed up and dried off or you’ll get sick,” Tommy said, pulling her toward the elevators. “You can help after that.”

* * *

His room was one temptation after another. The big bed. The hot, steamy shower. The knowledge that she was on the other side of the bathroom door and would probably welcome him showering with her. He focused on going through his clothes to find something for her to wear. He had plenty of black T-shirts. Normally he had at least one pair of panties mixed in with his boxers when they came back from the laundry. His family did not disappoint. He had no idea which cousin was missing her underwear but they looked like they would fit Jewel Tear. He also found her a pair of sweatpants with an elastic waist, clean socks, and a pair of house slippers.

He hesitated when she called out to him but then pushed the bathroom door open. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, a big towel wrapped around her.

“I cut my feet,” she said tearfully.

She had left Sacred Heart in only a housedress. She must have cut her bare feet on broken glass lying in the street. He hadn’t noticed because all the wounded in Oakland masked the scent of blood on her.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I have some medicine.”

The question was where. He dug around in the drawers until he found where his family had put his first aid supplies.

He cleaned her wounds, making sure that there was no glass embedded in them, sprayed the cuts with disinfectant, and put bandages on them.

“As domana, I was taught how to do healing spells but not how to clean and bandage wounds. It is as if such touching other people was beneath me. I always hated being a domana. I was told that I should always be separate from those beneath me. I wonder, though, if all I was taught was wrong. I see how Wolf’s new domi is with their people and how fiercely loyal they are to her. If I had lowered myself…maybe my laedin would have attempted to save me themselves? Or at least stayed in Pittsburgh long enough to see if I would be rescued?”

“That was my father’s way,” Tommy said. “To be separate and above. He saw people as things to be used and abused however he wished. He was more careful with his weapons than he was with any of us.”

She leaned forward to rest her cheek against his head. “I used to hate my parents. I thought they were evil.” She gave a breathless laugh. “I did not know true evil. I am starting to realize that they were simply clueless and lost, as I am now. My grandparents were all rescued out of the Skin Clan nurseries and transformed to domana to fight their creators. They knew nothing of raising children. Neither my parents nor I could learn how to do it except by avoiding their mistakes.”

All that Tommy knew about love came from his mother and aunts. He had always respected their strength to raise their children right despite the horror of their situation. He’d never considered it was because they themselves had benefitted from a loving home.

“I want to learn how to raise children properly,” Jewel Tear whispered.

It was an odd goal but Jewel Tear had suffered so much, perhaps it was one that seemed obtainable after all the defeats.

* * *

Somehow Mokoto and Knickknack had been roped into shifting the children back to their rooms. It was not going well, because while Knickknack was human and fair-skinned, he was tall and male. That was enough in the children’s minds to make him terrifying. The kids were running and screaming up and down the hallway as Knickknack tried to both corral them into their rooms and back away from the situation at the same time.

“Tommy!” Knickknack said, sounding slightly panicked. “I’m sorry! I’m really sorry.”

“What did you do?” Tommy growled.

The boy burned red with embarrassment but plowed on with his apology. “In the last few months—since Mokoto told me that you’re his…you know…p. i. m. p.…I’ve thought and said a lot of nasty things about you. I didn’t know about all this.” He waved at the chaos around him. “But it was stupid of me not to look at the evidence and see that everyone in your family were working together to protect each other. I mean…I was there, night after night, on Liberty Avenue. I could see Mokoto and Babe calling the shots. When to leave. When to stay. Which johns could be trusted and which ones couldn’t. The few times you showed up, none of your family were frightened of you. If I had just opened my eyes, I would have seen that they all acted like you were a white knight riding in to save them but I just ignored that because it didn’t fit into my head canon as to what was going on.”

Tommy wasn’t sure what the boy wanted out of him. To say that it was fine that the boy was a total idiot?

The children saved Tommy having to answer by running to him, crying. “Tommy, save us!” “Tommy! Save us from the oni!” “He’s going to eat us!”

“He is not an oni, he’s just tall.” Tommy knelt, since the little ones were like kittens—they would scramble up the nearest adult when frightened. Some had sharp claws. Two even had cat ears, though not from his father.

They huddled against him, staring at Knickknack.

“If he was an oni,” Tommy said, “then Mokoto would have killed him. Okay? Now, this nice lady is Jewel Tear. She’s an elf, not an oni.”

“Do elves eat people too?”

“No, elves do not eat people,” Tommy said.

“Why do they keep saying that?” Knickknack whispered to Mokoto. “The oni don’t…do they?”

“Some do,” Mokoto whispered back. “The true bloods don’t. They’re not much different from humans or elves. But the lesser bloods…some of them are basically wild animals that walk upright and talk. They eat anything weaker than them.”

Tommy ignored them, focusing on introducing Jewel Tear to the children. “I want you to be nice to her. She needs to learn how to speak English. Can you teach her?’

Luckily the elevator dinged, announcing Kiki with a little cart of food. The ones with cat ears tilted up their heads and sniffed.

“Pork buns and egg drop soup!” they identified the incoming dishes.

“Knickknack, you’re fairly good with Elvish.” Mokoto nudged the boy. “Help Jewel Tear out.”

The boy went wide-eyed with surprise. “Me? Sure! I’ve been dying to talk magic to a domana!”

“What was the fire that you were putting out?” Tommy asked once he and Mokoto were alone in the suddenly quiet hallway.

“When we were working on the backup generator, Knickknack found out that our electricity was patched into a building across the street. Basically, we were stealing power.”

Tommy had been afraid that the power situation was something sketchy like that. The only good thing was that it seemed more likely that the greater bloods had abandoned the building completely if they weren’t paying for the electricity.

“Why is she here?” Mokoto asked, pointing toward the kids’ rooms.

“She needs a room.”

Mokoto gave Tommy a long look that he didn’t recognize. Was that anger or contempt or just worry? Maybe a mix of all three?

“I’ll explain better when there’s time,” Tommy said. “She can’t pay for a room so she’s going to help out with the little ones for now since we’re short adults.”

“She’s going to be a guest?” Mokoto asked slowly.

“Yes,” Tommy said.

“So we’re staying?” Mokoto said.

“Tinker has to pull off a win, Oilcan needs to stay alive, and we have to keep the electricity on—but yes.”

Mokoto hopped up and down with rarely seen happiness. “Yes!”



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