Elfhome

The chest was two feet high, three feet wide, and four feet long. It had no seams or joints. It looked like one solid hunk of ironwood, as if the chest been carved out of a tree trunk. An eight-phoneme spell lock was inscribed in a band, three inches down, marking off the lid. Even standing several feet from the chest, she could feel the active spell hidden within. If the trap was explosive in nature, there was enough oomph to it to level the coach house. Her Hand had a good reason to be unhappy.

“The little dragon said you needed to take possession of it, but he did not say you had to open it.” Pony murmured quietly for only her to hear.

“If I can’t open it safely, I won’t try.” Tinker promised because she knew Pony would be in blast range.

Personally Tinker could understand Jewel Tear wanting Tiger Eye out of danger’s way. Yet Tinker saw the logic of the male staying beside his domi — there could have been any number of other dangers in the tunnel. They were stronger together as a team than apart.

Tinker was clueless, though, as to how to get the chest open safely. She took reference photos and measurements and then retreated across the driveway to the stable’s hayloft. With the loft door open, she could see the chest where it lurked in the garage. Pony settled beside her, still silent, but no longer unhappy.

Magic basically reduced material to possibilities and spells realigned the material to the desired end. Spell-locks used magic to flip the lock material between two states. Generally an “open” state where two halves of the material were separate identities, and “closed” where they merged into one solid object. When Tinker was learning to create spell-locks, she had reduced about several hundred pieces of wood down to instant splinters before she figured out how pre-tune the lock material.

The chest was made of the ironwood. The super dense wood had been bioengineered to have the same structural strength of high quality steel. Normally boards ran an inch and a half thick and required special spells and tools to cut. She assumed that any attempt cut the chest open would most likely trigger the trap. Without knowing what was inside, even if she managed to shutdown the active spell, cutting the chest open might damage the contents.

She could use a magic null spell on the chest. That would wipe out the trap, but it would also render the spell-lock inoperative in the “locked” position, forcing her to cut her way into the chest.

What she needed was a set of picks and something akin to tumblers that she could feel her way through. She needed to experiment.

#

Several exploded pieces of wood later she remembered why she hated spell-locks.

12: Morning After

The fire alarm screamed Oilcan awake. It died moments later; a wooden sword through its heart, but its death only muted the sound slightly as the rest of the fire alarms in the condo were still screaming.

“It’s a fire alarm!” He shouted to forestall the death of his other alarms. “Something is burning!”

Sometime during the night, Thorne had pulled on her underwear and arranged her weapons close at hand. She placed her hand against the door, and finding it cool, triggered her shields, jerked open the door and disappeared down the hall. A moment later, the screams of children joined in that of the fire alarm.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Oilcan grabbed clean boxers, tugged them on, one leg at a time, as he hopped after her.

Smoke was pouring out of his microwave. Thorne looked like she was considering skewering it. The children were ping ponging around the living room like cornered mice.

“Wait! Wait! Wait!” He shouted over the screaming fire alarms and children to stop Thorne. The microwave was counting down from eighty-seven minutes while a bag of popcorn blazed. He grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall, flipped open the microwave door, and blasted foam over the burning bag. “There, it’s out. We’ve just got to clear out the smoke to stop the alarms.” He wove through the children to open the sliding glass door to the balcony. It was mid-morning outside, surprising him how late he’d slept in. “It’s all right! It’s all right! The noise will stop in a little while.”

He went to open his front door and discovered the children had built a barricade in front out of his recliner and one of his end tables. He picked up the end table and carried it back into the living room. The kitchen counter was covered with his pantry goods. All the boxes and bags, from his baking soda to his polenta — were sitting open. Thankfully they hadn’t figured out how to open the cans.

“I’m sorry,” Merry said. “We were hungry. So I thought we could make pop pop pop.”

“It’s called popcorn,” he gave her the English word. He had made her a bag of it the night before and played her High School Musical. “You should have just woken me up.”

Merry’s glance toward Thorne explained why the children had decided to fend for themselves. This was not the morning he should have slept in.