Wood Sprites

And what would Edmond do to Nikola? Louise was fairly sure her parents wouldn’t have believed that Nikola was a magical merger between the babies and the nanny robot. They would have insisted that they dispose of the embryos as a biohazard in one of their maddening “we know what’s best because we’re adults” moves. It was the main reason that the twins had kept him secret. Edmond would probably believe Nikola existed, but then what? Would he care? Would he see the embryos as biological waste or, worse, something to use to his advantage? He’d done something to Anna’s unborn daughters, Louise was sure of that, although she couldn’t prove it.

And what had happened to their older sister?

Had April’s cousin warned Alexander before the secret elves figured out that she used the name Tinker? Had the NSA secretly escorted her out of Pittsburgh during the last Shutdown? Was Alexander already enrolled in some kind of witness-protection program here on Earth? Or had the secret elves captured her and given her to “that idiot cat” which had killed the other scientists?

Louise shuddered at the thought. The next Shutdown was in two days. If they left in a few hours, they could get to Monroeville in time to sneak across the border while Pittsburgh was on Earth. Somehow. They could find Alexander or hide with Orville. Maybe. But if Alexander had been kidnapped and brought to Earth, the twins would be the only ones who had any hope of finding and saving her.

The only positive note in their life was that their video had influenced enough people that the UN vote was blocked long enough to render it moot. The world was holding its breath, waiting to find out if Windwolf had survived the attack, instead of blindly accepting that he’d been killed. If the viceroy had been killed, how could they hope to stop Ming again with a video?

There was no one the twins could turn to without endangering the person. They were all alone in this Fortress of Evil. The babies. Alexander. Windwolf. Elfhome. The sheer magnitude of responsibilities overwhelmed Louise.

“Jilly, what do we do?”

“I don’t know.” Jillian seemed too small, too young to be her twin. Somehow during the last few days, she’d become so much less than her real self. “Do you think they had anything to do with Mom and Dad’s accident?”

“I don’t think so,” Louise said with more confidence than she felt. The accident had been splashed across all the newsfeeds; a dozen people had been killed when a tractor-trailer truck had plowed through downtown traffic. The driver had been drunk and asleep in the back of the cab when the auto-drive failed. The truck had plowed through a crowded crosswalk before striking her parents’ car on the driver’s side, pushing it into the path of an oncoming bus. “If Anna killed someone, it would be neat and clean, like laser surgery. She wouldn’t be that messy.” She shuddered, thinking of the one victim that had been wedged up under the truck’s undercarriage and only discovered hours later. “Edmond might go for wholesale slaughter, but he sent his own son away so Anna wouldn’t be distracted.”

Despite all that, she had a small niggle of doubt. Jillian, though, wasn’t strong enough to hear anything else. Not now.

Louise wondered if Edmond would send them away, too, if they were a big enough distraction. A shiver went down her spine. No, that had “would not end well” written all over it. On the heels of the fear came a wash of anger. She was braver than this, wasn’t she? Yet the idea of having to do another pantry raid terrified her. She hated the fact that now that she knew what evil the house held, she didn’t want to leave their room by herself.

She felt safe in the bedroom. Esme had planned for them to search out April. She’d guessed that they would be entangled with Edmond and Anna. Louise was sure that Esme had known that they’d end up in her room. Surely she’d left them something; breadcrumbs to follow while lost in this dark place.

The problem was that the room was stuffed to the brim with Esme’s childhood. The bookcases alone spanned thirty feet of the bedroom, floor to twenty-foot-high ceiling. Esme apparently deemed them sacred, as the cherry built-ins were the only furniture in the room that hadn’t been spray-painted black. The ladder connected to a rail via a wheel mechanism that let it glide back and forth the entire length of the bookcase. When the twins first arrived it had been pushed to the far end, and there it had stayed.

Every morning, while they were at breakfast, a team of maids descended on the room to clean. The dust vanished like entropy in reverse. Despite the bric-a-brac, all the lower shelves had been carefully dusted.