He had a point.
The river monster came crashing out of the building into the back service alley. It looked like a weird cross between a catfish and a crocodile. Its mouth was a snout filled with teeth with long whiskers on either side. It had four stubby legs and a long whiptail. Electricity snarled and leaped from it to every nearby object.
Taggart whistled and the thing turned and crawled at stunning speed after him.
“Don’t go left at the end of the buildings, Taggart. Swing right!” Jane ran up the steps keeping track of both Hal and Taggart as they both ran in opposite directions. “And stop blowing that stupid whistle. It turned already. Let it go chomp on someone else!”
Taggart’s laugh came across the channel.
When Jane reached the second floor deck, she saw that a big male was running to block off Hal. She lined him up and only thought about how they’d taken her sister. Twisted her sister’s body against her will until she wasn’t even human anymore. She killed him like she’d kill any other monster trying to stop Hal.
She turned and picked off a male coming out of the building, carrying a rifle. A third that she hadn’t seen took a shot at her from the boardwalk’s roof. The bullet whined past her. She didn’t miss with her return fire.
“Jane, we’re at the truck,” Hal reported.
“Get out to the street and head toward the mall to pick us up. And be careful, Nessie might be out there with us.”
One of the oni, however, cooperated nicely in drawing the monster’s attention. She scrambled over the wall to the city street to join up with Taggart just as Nigel drove up.
“That was stupid,” she said as she scrambled into the backseat with Chesty, Boo and Joey.
“Yeah, a little.” Taggart squeezed into the back from the other side. “I spent three years as a war correspondent. My nightmares are all about sitting and watching people die and doing nothing. I don’t think I could stay sane if I’d stood and watched you die.”
“Mine,” Hal muttered darkly.
Whatever she might have said was cut short as Boo snatched up Helga from the dashboard.
“Look, Joey!” Boo cried. “I told you someone would find Sergeant Helga Teufel Hunden and Jane would come for us.”
“Why didn’t you just go home with Grandma Gertie?” Jane asked.
“I told you!” Boo pulled the little boy into her lap. “Joey’s my responsibility. I couldn’t leave him. Big sisters take care of their little brothers.”
Jane recognized her father’s ghost even though he had been dead before Boo could talk. She’d imprinted him into her little sister without meaning to, but this was all kinds of wrong. “Boo, he’s not your little brother.” The boy wasn’t even human.
“Yes, he is!” Boo tightened her arms around Joey and glared at her with cold hard eyes. Her father’s eyes. “You always said that you can’t pick your family but still had to do right by them. The oni made us brother and sister. I’m Joey’s big sister and I won’t let anything bad happen to him.”
From within Boo’s protective hold, Joey blinked up at Jane. He looked only five or six but he’d been chained and caged like an animal. The only real difference that she could see between him and any of her brothers at his age was that like Nigel, he’d been born with odd feet. This might be all kinds of wrong, but it wasn’t this little boy’s fault. She nodded. “Okay. If he’s your little brother, then he’s mine too.”
A quiver of Boo’s bottom lip was all the warning Jane got before she had her arms full of bawling little girl with poor Joey squashed between them like a teddy bear. Boo cried as if she’d had her heart torn out.
“Hey, hey, big girls don’t cry,” Jane said, because any moment she was going to lose it. If she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and she knew from experience that her tears would burn like liquid fire. “It’s okay. You’re safe!”
“I was so afraid!” Boo wailed. “I prayed and prayed that you’d come for me, but I thought—I thought when you saw what they did—I thought—you’d say that we weren’t s-s-s-sisters anymore!” She had been so scared that she could barely even say it.
“You are my baby sister.” Jane held her tight. “Nothing anyone could do to you, no magic, nothing, could change that. You will always be my baby sister.”
Once Jane got Boo and their new little brother safe, she was going to war. Not with her rifle, although she dearly wanted to, but with her camera. The oni obviously were gearing up for guerrilla warfare because they couldn’t stand against the joint forces of humans and elves. The news blackout was their doing; keeping the two allies from uniting. She wasn’t going to stand back and let them get away with it. She wasn’t going to let them turn her city into a war zone. She was going to find out their every secret and broadcast it across two worlds. They were about to learn the meaning of “no better friend, no worse enemy.”