Elfhome

“I can live with that. Tommy Chang called and asked if we were racing this weekend and if you’d be lead, and I told him yes. I’d really rather not have Tommy pissed at me.”

“I should have my shit together by the weekend.”

Roach worked the hydraulic controls on the truck and dropped the big steel container within a foot of the wall. “You sure you want two more?”

“Yeah, out front so I can build chutes down from the second and third story.” The kids could work at cleaning out one room to sleep in if things turned sour fast with his condo association. The stuff in the classrooms seemed fairly harmless compared to the trash in the backyard.

“Okay.” Roach said and whistled to his dog. “Andy’s bringing the second one. I’ll tell him to drop it in front.”

#

There were ten tengu in the kitchen. Not a feather was showing, but they were unmistakable from the lean muscle builds, beak-like noses, and the flutter of nervousness that went through them as Oilcan walked back into the kitchen. The center island been cleared of clutter and they were gathered around it like flocking crows.

“Where are the kids?” Oilcan asked.

“Upstairs.” Riki pointed above his head. “I told Blue Sky to have them pick out rooms on the third floor and write their names on the chalkboard and make out wish lists.”

It was fairly down Oilcan’s to-do list, but the tengu weren’t on his plan at all.

“And the indi?” Oilcan asked.

“My little cousins have them across the street,” Riki said. “Indi are kind of stupid — they’ll eat plastic and other stuff that will make them sick. I figured it would be better to keep them out of the building until it’s cleaned.”

“Why are you doing this?” Oilcan growled.

“Because you need help.”

“Maybe I don’t want your help.” There was no “maybe” about it, but the logical part of him, the part most like his mother and so different from his father’s unreasonable passion, knew that Riki was right. He needed a lot of help to clean out the building and make it livable. He just didn’t want to acknowledge that Riki was right.

“I didn’t think you would want my help,” Riki said.

A reasonable person would stay far away knowing that they weren’t wanted, but then, Oilcan wouldn’t use words like “reasonable” to describe Riki. “Is this some kind of plan to make me grateful enough to forgive you?”

“No.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

Riki stood silently for a few minutes and then said, “Did you know there were oni children at the whelping pits yesterday?”

Oilcan recoiled as he realized that the elves wouldn’t have let a single oni live; the oni children wouldn’t have been spared. “What does that have to do with you screwing us over?”

“Tinker went into that warren to save your kids. She didn’t go there to kill the oni children. She didn’t want that. She hated that.”

“Leave Tinker out of this!” Oilcan shouted. “That’s — that’s totally different. You wormed your way into our lives. You lied to us. You made us trust you. I told you things that I have never told anyone in my life — not even Tinker. And the whole time you were standing there, going ‘I watched my mother die too,’ you were planning on killing Tinker.”

Riki flinched as if Oilcan had struck him, but didn’t deny it. He hunched his shoulders and continued, “Tinker went into the warren because that’s what had to be done to rescue those kids.”

“That doesn’t make what you did right!”

Riki nodded. “What I did was wrong but I had to do it. The worse of it is: if you ask me what I do differently, the honest answer is ‘nothing.’ I wouldn’t dare. I got my baby cousin back safely. I got my uncle out of orbit and on the right planet. I got my whole frigging race protected. I wouldn’t change anything but it still doesn’t make it right.”

Oilcan hands clenched into fists against his will. He looked away from Riki and forced his hands to relax. “So this is some insane plan: to make it all right in your head, you’re going to force me to take your help?”

“This is trying to do the right thing so I can live with what I had to do.”

#

Apparently doing the right thing involved a small army of tengu. Oilcan saw not a feather or heard no rustle of wings; they simply appeared with ninja stealth. By the time Roach’s younger brother, Andy showed up with the second dumpster, there were tengu in every room and the dumpster in the back alley was full.

“Already?” Andy said when Oilcan told him. The boy glanced at the big steel container he was about to drop under the largest second story window. “You still want this one in the front, or should I take it around back?”

With the tengu “helping,” the dumpsters were going to be filled as fast as Roach and Andy could rotate them. At several hundred dollars a load, hauling away the trash was going to run Oilcan a lot of money and he still didn’t know if Windwolf would allow him to move into the building. It was tempting just to stop all work and wait for permission. Yet, if Windwolf said yes, then the work had to be done and everything was in motion already and running smoothly.