“Hal,” Jane cried, “you’re going to get yourself killed!”
The female caught Hal’s chin with her hand and turned his head this way and that. “You’re the silly grass man.”
“Yes!” Hal cried and then, “No! I’m not silly.”
“Yes, you are,” Jane growled. “Trust me on that. That’s a single frame of a video he took while he was in the hospital.”
“Why didn’t you come forward earlier?” the warrior snapped.
“Because he was drugged, I thought he had only imagined a giant bird. I didn’t hear about Tinker’s disappearance until this morning. Once I realized that she went off the Boulevard right beside the hospital and that Hal had a clear view of that, I checked the footage. When we realized what it showed, we came straight here.”
“We want to see this video.”
Jane had never been this close to Viceroy Windwolf before. All the elves she knew were young looking; immortality made them practically ageless. Surrounded by his hardened warriors, though, Windwolf looked like a lost boy.
He took a deep breath and breathed out, “Oh, thank gods, she didn’t go into the river.”
“It’s a tengu,” Wraith Arrow, head of Windwolf’s bodyguards, said. “An oni spy. Their masters made them from crows; they like to flock together. If there’s one here in Pittsburgh, there’s more. There’s probably several watching us now, laughing at us.”
“He appears to be drugging her.” The blue haired female was the only one of the elves that seemed familiar with the concept of “camera” and had explained it in detail while showing the video. She’d stopped it now on one of the frames and zoomed in on where the tengu held something white against Tinker’s face. “So she would stop struggling and be easier to carry.”
The female advanced a dozen frames and then turned, holding up the camera to align it with the lay of the land. “He took her upriver.”
“He probably was trying to get to the tree line.” The viceroy’s personal assistant, Sparrow, pointed out that the tengu was flying toward the closest edge of the forest without crossing the heavily populated section of Oakland. “Away from witnesses. From there he could have flown along the Rim and crossed back into the city where there’re few humans.”
Windwolf looked to the blue-haired female. “Discord?”
She looked, frustrated, down at the ground. “I don’t know. This.” She waved at the river. “This has always felt like a waste of time but short of racing blindly about, hoping for something to hit me, no. Nothing. Forgiveness.”
“She’s alive,” Windwolf said. “That is what is important. And she is more useful to them alive.”
The looks on older elves’ faces said that death might be more pleasant than being at the mercy of the oni.
“The sooner we find her, the less damage they can wreak on her,” Sparrow said. “We can cover more ground if we split into several search parties.”
Having plowed through all three channels’ news crews, it was no surprise that Dmitri called moments later. Jane winced at her phone’s screen and glanced toward Mark’s cameraman to verify that Dmitri was probably watching her as well.
“Hm?” Jane tried for innocent-sounding.
“What are you doing?” Dmitri asked totally deadpan.
“Omniscient,” Hal sang quietly.
Jane snorted. Nothing supernatural about Dmitri’s ability when half the time they were beaming straight to the studio, just in case Hal managed to blow up the entire neighborhood. She explained about Hal filming Tinker’s kidnapping.
“And you didn’t think to share this with our news crew?”
“Her family had the right to know first,” Jane said.
There was a long pause on the other side. “Jane, I know that you’re going to want to help but you of all people can’t.”
“Why can’t I?” Jane tried to keep her voice neutral but it came out cold and hard.
Dmitri sighed. “To make a long story short, because I said so. Do you really need the long story?”
“Yes.” Her voice had gone colder and harder. Her father’s voice when he was truly angry. Hal was retreating, quickly.
“I’ve tried several times to syndicate Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden. I know that the American audience would love it, but every time I get close to closing a deal, everything suddenly goes south for no reason. Nigel and Taggart told me yesterday about the troubles they’ve had getting visas to come in to film, so I checked with the other stations. They both have run into similar news blackouts. This Chased by Monsters got past whatever gatekeepers are blocking us. We need for it to succeed because so far it’s going to be the only voice Pittsburgh has on Earth if the elves and the oni go to full-out war.”
“You think there’s enough oni here to start a war?”
“If the elves didn’t want news leaking out, they’d be creating roadblocks for us here in Pittsburgh. EIA Director Maynard was handpicked by the viceroy and he’s proved himself loyal. To keep you and Hal off American televisions, they’d simply keep you from filming. Everything we know about the oni suggests that they’re getting to Elfhome via Pittsburgh during Shutdown. If someone is blocking us at network level in New York, it’s the oni, not the elves.”
“You really think the oni care if humans watch Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden?”
“This is about politics, Jane. The number of troops sent to support a peacekeeping effort could be influenced by the fact that thirty percent of all Americans recognize the name Hal Rogers and know the faces of a handful of Pittsburgh homeowners.”
In other words, whatever they could get out, in whatever form, was actually propaganda.
“Tinker is not your baby sister. The elves will look for a thousand years if they have to. I need you to make sure Chased by Monsters is our voice on Earth. Nigel and Taggart only have visas for two months and then they have to take whatever they have and leave. If they don’t have enough footage for an entire season, the whole thing is canned. Do you understand?”
“Fifty-six days, counting today, to do an entire season?”
“You’re the only one that has any hope of doing this because you’re only one with the right experience with the kind of shit Elfhome can throw at a film crew. I need you focused.”
“Fine.” She hung up on him just to salvage some pride. Fifty-six days. They would need to do approximately one episode every three days to meet the network’s minimum. “Taggart, Nigel! Set up! We’re doing a shoot here.”
“Shoot what?” Taggart asked.
“You want to do river sharks and jumpfish. There.” She pointed at the dead fish piled on the shore, the larger fishes cut open so their stomachs could be searched for the missing princess. “That’s the entire ecology of Elfhome rivers.”
“We were hoping for living examples…” Nigel started.
“We will get to those. Right now everything within miles is probably dead or stuffed. This is a once-in-a-lifetime shot. We’ll get this now. Now!” She shouted to get them moving.
“Right.” Nigel clapped his hands and turned to Taggart, who was already filming. “Here we are with an unexpected bounty. In one place, a full selection of all the fish found in the rivers around Pittsburgh. This massive example here is known as a river shark. They are believed to have evolved from an ancestor similar to the fresh water sharks of the species ‘requiem’ on Earth. Like their cousins, these sharks have round eyes and their pectoral fins are completely behind the gill slits, which normally are five in number. While Earth cousins are normally found in warm seas and mouths of rivers, the Elfhome river sharks have slowly worked their way the entire length of the Mississippi and the Ohio, an amazing one thousand, eight hundred and eighty-one miles, to find their way to Pittsburgh.”