He pointed wordlessly toward the house.
She nodded.
Without a sound, he ran to find their baby sister.
One down, four more to go.
Jane reluctantly called her younger brothers, saying that she was holding an emergency family meeting. She thought she knew the shape that the evening would take. As they arrived at her house, they all surprised her by their reactions. She never realized that they had been hiding their true selves.
Alton never cried. He’d been stoic through their father’s funeral and the weeks after Boo’s disappearance. Over the years, he’d been increasingly distant, disappearing into the wilderness for days on end. Jane knew he’d be happy to see Boo, but she didn’t expect him to bawl like a baby until Jane took him awkwardly in her arms and comforted him.
Geoffrey always seemed so confident and sure of himself. He’d taught himself furniture-making and started a business specializing in beds and tables made from ironwood. Yet he stood in the dimness of the foyer, smelling of sawdust and bruised green, too shy to approach Boo.
“She won’t know me.” Still Geoffrey couldn’t take his eyes from their baby sister. “I was never home when she was little. I always stayed late at school, working in the wood shop.”
Jane caught him by the wrist and pulled him to Boo’s side. He sank to his knees and whispered, “Do you remember me?”
Boo flung arms around his neck and hugged him tight. “Of course I do. You used to make me toys and leave them on my pillow. Betsy the cow. Billy the goat.”
“I was making you a barn to put them in.” Geoffrey’s voice broke. “I never got to give it to you.”
Jane expected Marc’s reunion to be equally quiet. He was so taciturn and solemn that his nickname in school had been Stone. Much to the family’s dismay, but no one’s real surprise, he’d turned down a football scholarship on Earth to enroll in the police academy. A cop’s “just the facts” façade seemed to suit him well. Marc burst into laughter, though, and couldn’t stop. He swung Boo in circles and tossed her up into the air like she was still six. “Our baby girl! Our Boo!” he kept shouting and whooping.
Duff brought fresh cannolis from the bakery he worked at during summer vacation, which Jane expected. Normally the family clown, instead of laughing and joking loudly like he normally would, he was quiet and gentle. Later, he took Jane aside and insisted that they take Boo to a shrink to a deal with all the trauma of being kidnapped and held prisoner. “We have to make sure we do the right thing by her. We screwed up bad once. We got to get this right. We have to do everything to make sure she can put this behind her and have the life she should have had.”
Sixteen-year-old Guy roared up on his hoverbike. He’d been going through a teenage rebellion phase and had been surly for the last few months. He listened to Jane’s story of rescuing Boo and Joey with quiet concentration. He hugged Boo with the same adult focus, the angry teen temporarily banished.
Her mother arrived and chased them out of the house in order to be alone with her baby. Jane suspected that her mother planned to find out how badly Boo had been abused and if she needed medical treatment. It was a discussion that her older brothers shouldn’t hear and Jane couldn’t bear.
They had retreated to the garage on the pretense of helping Alton skin the elk. Only Duff was actually helping. While the two of them sharpened their knives on whetstones, the rest of them sat watching with beer in hand. Hal, Taggart and Nigel had retreated upstairs for their turn at the bath and to deal with their various war wounds.
“We need to go to Sandcastle!” As the youngest, Guy tended to talk loudest. He was compensating for a lifetime of no one paying attention to what he said. “We need to go now.”
“No.” Jane had been afraid that once her brothers heard the full story they’d want to go take revenge on the oni. She had confessed to shooting Boo’s kidnappers so that they would have no one to attack.
“We need to get rid of the evidence,” Guy continued. “Your fingerprints are on the casings and it would be easy to match the bullets to your rifle if the police do ballistics.”
Marc grunted in agreement.
Jane jerked around to stare at Marc in surprise. “You’re agreeing with him? What kind of cop are you going to be?”
Marc pointed in the general direction of Sandcastle with his beer bottle. “This isn’t Tom, Dick and Harry getting overzealous about defending their marijuana crop. They’re not even slimeball pedophiles that grabbed two kids off the street. This was a heavily armed, well-trained, carefully hidden terrorist encampment. The EIA have linked the oni to that gunfight on Veterans Bridge in June. They carjacked a minivan and the driver is still missing. They threw a VW off the bridge, killing the passenger. And they jigged a load of C-4 to blow in the middle of a traffic jam that they caused. They’ve brought a war to us. Far as I’m concerned, Sandcastle was a combat zone. It’s even more righteous than any of Dad’s kills in Afghanistan, because this is our city.”
Their father had been a sniper for the Marines. He’d taught Jane how to shoot before he’d died. After that, she’d taken his place and taught her brothers.
“That’s right!” Guy shouted. “The elves and the oni are at war. We don’t have to worry about anyone finding out. Right?”
Marc shook his head. “From what I can tell, the mayor is mandating a true neutral stance. Killing an oni—at the moment—is being treated just like killing an elf.”
“What the fuck?” Guy cried. “Why?”
“Because there’s a shitload of Pittsburghers who hate the EIA and the elves, in that order,” Marc said. “They see Pittsburgh as American soil, not United Nations. They hate all the treaty-based laws against immigration and expansion. They want a land rush like what happened with the Louisiana Purchase or the opening of Oregon. Screw the native population. Because Elfhome is a mirror of Earth, we know where to find matching deposits of silver in Nevada, gold in the Yukon and all the oil in Texas. The expansionists are pissed that they’re here on Elfhome and yet still as dirt poor as they were on Earth.”
Guy sputtered with teenage rage. “The mayor is siding with the oni because he’d lose the expansionist vote?”
Marc made a rude noise at the idea. “He’s afraid there’ll be riots in the street just when the elves are already pissed the hell off. It would be one thing if the EIA was at full strength, but they’ve discovered that more than a quarter of their force are actually oni moles. The EIA is so busy housecleaning that it would be just the eighty of us cops dealing with several thousand idiots.”
“The expansionists would really back the oni if push came to shove?” Taggart asked as he walked into the garage. He jerked to a stop, hands up, as six pistols were leveled at him. “Sorry. It’s just me.”
“Make more noise when you walk up.” Jane tucked her pistol back into her kidney holster. “No, they wouldn’t back the oni, but they wouldn’t back the elves either. A lot of people say that the elves are dogs in the manger. They’re not developing the planet’s resources, but they refuse to let humans claim land outside of Pittsburgh city limits.”
“It’s their planet,” Taggart pointed out. “It isn’t right that they lose control of their home world because we can outnumber them.”
“We were born here,” Duff growled. “We have friends with kids. How many generations until it’s ours too? Never?”
“None of that matters,” Alton said. “What matters is keeping Jane and Boo safe.”
“And Joey,” Marc added firmly before Jane could. “We’re not letting anyone screw with a six-year-old boy, regardless of his race or species.”
“And Joey.” Alton and Geoffrey both nodded in agreement.