“I’m not…” Guy caught himself and ended with a low growl of anger.
“You’re not what?”
He glared at Jane until he realized who he was talking to. He glanced away and lowered his voice. “I’m not Boo. Ever since she disappeared, everyone keeps babying me as if I would vanish too. Duff would do something and it’d be ‘idiot’, and I do the same exact thing and it’d be ‘Oh, be careful! You could be hurt! Stop it. Come here. Be a good little boy.’ But no one would ever say what they really meant, which was ‘you’re next.’ I’m not. Never was.”
“They kidnapped the viceroy’s baby brother last night,” Jane snapped. It had to be tearing Windwolf’s heart out. “A sekasha. One of the holy, kick-ass SEALs of elves with magical shield spells tattooed on his arms, trained every day of his freaking life for a hundred years, armed to the teeth including a sword that will cut through just about anything. The oni went into a building filled with elves and took Windwolf’s brother right out of his bed. The oni are dangerous people and we just pushed them hard. They’re going to push back.”
“I’m not scared.”
“I’m not asking you to be scared, I’m asking you to be careful. That means not going out alone. Everyone should pair up as much as possible. And when you do go home, stop a block from the house, make sure you’ve got a bullet in the chamber, safety off, and go in with caution.”
He stopped looking sullen and nodded slowly. “Okay. Assume that the house has been breached.”
“Better safe than sorry.” She tapped the map. “Find me a kill zone.”
She was hoping for at least three e-mails from viewers so they could triangulate the direction the monster headed out of Sandcastle. Thousands of messages scrolled across her screen. She was going to need help to filter through the e-mails. Picking up her tablet, she headed into the garage to enlist the others.
The viewers didn’t just stick to reporting monster sightings. They had questions and they didn’t trust the answers that other sources were giving them. They trusted Hal, so they were turning to Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden for information.
They wanted to know more about the oni and the tengu that kidnapped Tinker. Those that had questions about the river monster wanted to know why Hal was dealing with it instead of the EIA and the police. Displaying a great lack of scientific understanding, several wanted someone (implying Hal, which only boggled Jane more) to contact the hyperphase gate in orbit and have it do a Shutdown so Earth forces could reinforce the EIA.
“Because it’s in another universe,” Jane growled at the tenth such e-mail. “The gate is in orbit around Earth! Different planet, people! How can you live in Pittsburgh and not know the basics? They teach this in grade school!”
“They’re not locals,” Hal said as if he’d been born in Pittsburgh. “They see the moon and it looks the same to them even though it has slightly different craters. The sun comes up and goes down in the same directions, and they lose sight that they’re not in the same universe. To them it’s the same moon, same sun, same stars.”
“The stars are totally different!” Jane cried. She only saw the stars of Earth once or twice a year but she could tell they were in different places. Then again, her father taught her how to find her way home at night, armed only with a knife.
“Most people can’t see the stars on Earth,” Nigel said. “There’s too much light pollution. The children don’t learn the constellations. They can’t tell the difference.”
Reason one thousand why Jane had no interest in moving to Earth. She glanced up to locate Taggart before realizing what she was doing. He stood beside the Hummer, recording her brothers lowering the cannon into place. Unlike Hal, he was as tall as her brothers, but wider in the shoulders, like he’d spent his youth swimming. The memory of him without his shirt flashed through her mind, followed quickly by curiosity of what he looked like without anything on.
Jane looked back down, blushing. Focus, Jane. We’ve got a monster to kill. “Assuming the…the…what are we going to call this river monster?”
“Nessie?” Hal used the name they had stuck on it for lack of another name, before they’d gotten a good look at it.
“Ach, that isnae Nessie.” Nigel’s Scottish had thickened noticeably. He held Alton’s flask; it was filled with her brother’s experiments in making Scotch. It was also proof that Jane was losing control of the situation. If she ever had control.
“Namazu,” Boo and Joey both stated firmly.
“Namazu is a legendary giant catfish, in Japanese myths,” Nigel explained, rolling his r as he lost his BBC accent and the Scottish took over. “Its thrashing is what causes earthquakes. The gods have pinned it under a massive boulder in an attempt to minimize the damage it can cause. The namazu is considered a metamorphic catfish; the accepted image of the creature does not match up to any real species. There are several species of catfish with an electric organ.”
“The monster’s barbels”—Hal put his hands to his mouth and twiddled his fingers—“which is what the whiskers are called, would indicate that the creature might be related to a catfish since there’s only a handful of fish that do have them.”
“Kajo named them namazu,” Boo said firmly. “He made them.”
“Made?” Nigel and Hal asked.
“Them?” Jane and her brothers cried.
“How many did he make?” Jane asked.
Boo shrank back from them. “I don’t know! I only saw him release the last one five years ago. And it wasn’t that big when he did.” She held up her hands and measured out something only about four feet long. “At least, Kajo said it was the last one, so it meant that there were others, right? He said it needed time to grow into something more impressive. Like me. He said that a few years might seem like a long time to me, but in a few decades, I’d start to see the world the way he saw it. That forever was like drifting on an endless sea, everything constantly changing and yet everything stays the same. But after all that, he made me tengu.”
Having admitted that she was no longer human, she curled into a small, sniffing ball.
Duff recovered first. He pulled Boo into his lap. “It’s okay, baby girl, it’s okay. No one is taking you away from us ever again. You’re our baby sister and we love you.”
Over Boo’s head, he gave Jane a look that said: We need to get her help.
Jane had no idea how to get her help and keep her safely hidden at the same time.
“The roe indicates that there’s at least two,” Nigel’s pointed out. “Normally a male catfish is the one that makes the nest and invites the female in. After she lays the eggs, he drives her out and guards the nest himself.”
Nigel took another swig from the flask and started to pass it on to Hal.
Jane intercepted the flask. For this planning stage, she wanted her two experts functional. Hal would not stop at tipsy with Scotch, even if it was stuff as bad as Alton’s homebrew. Beer he could handle, but not the hard liquor.
Luckily, Hal was caught up in the excitement of the upcoming hunt and didn’t notice. “That would explain all the half-eaten oni! The carnage makes more sense with two predators going on a feeding frenzy instead of just one.”
Nigel nodded in agreement. “The great white shark are believed to only need seventy to a hundred pounds of meat every two weeks. All those torn-apart buggers was much more than one beastie could reasonably down in a sitting, even at forty feet long.”