Elfhome

Oilcan steeled himself against the blood and explored deeper into high school. The building was everything he hoped, although hip deep in garbage. How did the oni live here without attracting notice? Were some humans this disgusting that no one noticed what animals the neighbors were? The volume of work needed to make the place livable was daunting. Still the bones were good. The first floor had three huge rooms that been a gym, library, and dinning room, a small warren of offices, two bathrooms and an industrial grade kitchen. The large backyard was already fenced in by a high brick wall, although piled with garbage. The twenty classrooms on the upper floors were large, littered with clothes but had sunshine streaming in through big, dirty windows. While the urine-soaked bathrooms lacked showers, there were enough of them that he could easily turn one into an elfin bathing room. The roof showed no signs of leaking. No one had gutted the cooper pipes. The hot water tanks were sound. The heating system had been upgraded in the last quarter century. The only glass that needed replaced was in the lower, smaller windows — they’d been smashed outward during the fight.

His grandfather always said that you needed a plan for everything from baking a cake to total global domination. He’d drummed project management into both of his grandchildren. Again and again, Tinker had used her training to change the world: from creating hoverbike racing to defeating the entire oni army single-handedly. Oilcan had always kept his projects smaller and more personal. This was going to be the largest project he had every taken on. Still, the key to any project was to break it into small manageable steps.

First things he would need were a chalkboard (this was a school after all,) chalk, and every dumpster he could get his hands onto.

#

The third floor of the school, Oilcan decided, would be the “family” level, while the guest rooms could be on the second. He picked out the room at the head of the stairs for himself. From it, he could keep watch over all the comings and goings. He’d cleared a path to the chalkboard and started sketching out a plan on how to make the kid’s life right.

There was no way he could get the building cleaned all at once, so he needed to prioritize the rooms. He would also have to fix the front door and make sure the back door locked tightly and any other entrances were secure. Utilities were on, but he wasn’t sure if all the light fixtures worked — he should check those before it got dark.

The building was silent except for the scratch of his chalk, so he jumped when someone said directly behind him, “I had no idea that project management was genetic.”

Last time Oilcan had seen Riki Shoji, the tengu was still pretending to be a human physics grad student that lucked into a job at Tinker’s salvage yard. All that remained of the disguise was the tone and cadence of Riki’s voice — a wry sense of humor that scraped along the baritone registry. If it wasn’t for voice, Oilcan won’t have recognized the tengu warrior as Riki. He stood in the door like a dark angel, wingtips brushing the doorframe. From the machine gun on his hip to the steel fighting spurs on his bird-like feet, there was nothing of the witty scholar Oilcan had called friend.

The only other person that ever triggered so many conflicting emotions in Oilcan — most of them negative — was safely dead by Pony’s hand. There was a point, just a few days ago, when Oilcan was sure he would kill Riki given a chance. That was before he found out that the oni had been holding Riki’s six-year-old cousin Joey as hostage.

It was an uncomfortable feeling knowing that Oilcan had the luxury of never having to decide how far he would go to protect Tinker. He never had to kill someone. He never had to betray someone that trusted him. If faced with the same choice, could he have saved Tinker by allowing the oni to torture someone that trusted him? Especially now that he intimately knew the horrors that the oni could inflict? Oilcan couldn’t even imagine choosing either and staying sane.

Rage had been wonderfully simple compared to what Oilcan felt now.

“What are you doing here?” Oilcan growled.

The tengu shifted uneasy. “I heard that you ended up with the kids we rescued yesterday.”

Oilcan took a deep breath and let it out. He knew that the tengu had been instrumental in the rescue but he didn’t know that Riki had been involved. Tinker had told him that as part of the Chosen bloodline, Riki had been considered the leader of the tengu prior to Jin’s return. It was why the oni kidnapped Joey Shoji; it gave them a hold on all the tengu through Riki. It would make sense for Riki to lead an assault instead of Jin. “And?”

“I’ve stayed at your place. It was okay for two, but way too small for six. I figured you needed help moving.” Riki nudged the mounds of trash that threatened to block the door. “Looks like you could use a lot of help.”