Elfhome

It was the male child that the oni had butchered down to eat — a gruesome collection of parts. Laid out like a half-assembled jigsaw puzzle, it was made more horrifying by what was missing.

Esme whimpered and stumbled backwards.

Despite coming to the morgue to find the murdered children, Tinker wasn’t prepared for the sight. She could only stare dazed at the butchered male and remember the smell of roasting meat that hung in the air of the whelping pen’s kitchen.

“Domi,” Pony murmured. “Can we do what is needed and cover it up?”

Tinker blinked up at him, confused for a minute as to why they were there. Oh yes, DNA samples. She fumbled with one of the swabs to unwrap it and then forced herself to rub the clean white tip against the bloody stump of a severed arm.

Only as she closed the cap did she realize Esme was silently weeping.

“Oh, Esme, this isn’t your son.” Tinker said. “This is a male elf child killed by the oni. I was looking for him.”

Esme shook her head. “I dreamed that I’d find him here. I opened the drawer and there he was — newborn like when I left Earth — crying. It’s him.”

Stormsong scoffed. “You’ve flung wide open a door that’s not easy to keep closed in the first place. Your blood tie to domi means that her nuenae can easily overlap yours. The more you interact with her, the more her nuenae will transpose yours.”

Esme wasn’t listening. “He’s here!” She walked halfway down the row of doors and opened another drawer, seemingly at random. “And he’s helpless — and flying monkeys are coming for him.”

“Oh gods, I thought we were done with that shit,” Tinker whimpered. Esme had driven her nearly mad by invading Tinker’s dreams; calling for help through the only line of communication available to the astronauts trapped in space. It had been an insane week full of prophetic nightmares. Again and again, Tinker had found herself facing a twisted echo of something she had dreamed. She so didn’t want to go through that again.

Esme unzipped the body bag to reveal the young elf female.

Tinker groaned at the sight of the child. None of the humans dead had been battered into broken bones held together with torn flesh. Tinker’s hand shook has she swabbed the inside of the female’s mouth, trying to ignore that her jaw been broken so badly that the bones had pierced the skin and half her teeth were missing. Tinker murmured apologies as she plucked a few strands of hair free, just in case.

“What are you doing?” Esme asked.

“I’m trying to figure out why the oni kidnapped these children,” Tinker explained. “Only establishing DNA baselines is the first step of bio-engineering magic — which is highly illegal — even for me.”

“We should hurry,” Pony said. “If someone else is coming.”

“There’s one more.” Tinker told Esme. “A second male. Can you find him too?”

Esme frowned but nodded. She concentrated for a minute before picking a third drawer on the other side of the room.

Taking samples from the second male was even more emotionally wrenching. His face was relatively undamaged and he reminded Tinker of Oilcan. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to be in the room, wearing the gloves and the mask, breathing in the omnipresent reek of rotting flesh. She fled out of the room, blinking back tears, desperately tearing at the gloves with latex-encased fingers.

Pony wordlessly caught her hands with his and pulled free the gloves and then held her until the need to scream and throw things passed.

“They shouldn’t be here.” Tinker growled. The children been innocent and trusting and had forever ahead of them; they shouldn’t be locked in these little boxes, surrounded by death.

“No, they should not. They be should be given up to the sky so their souls can be free of their bodies.”

“What do you mean? How do we give them up to the sky?”

“They should be cremated as soon as possible. To be trapped in a dead body is torment to the soul.”

Tinker remembered then that most elf ghost stories started with someone dying and not being properly cremated. “How — how do I make this happen? Who takes care of these things?”

“Normally their clan.” Pony reluctantly added, “But none of the Stone Clan would know how.”

“Are you sure about that?” Tinker muttered.

“I did not know that you locked your dead into steel drawers.” Pony admitted unhappily. “I would have not known how to find this place, even if I had known that was your custom.”

Tinker wanted to argue that any of the elves could ask Maynard for directions but Pony had a point. The Stone Clan might have assumed that the children’s bodies had been automatically cremated by the humans once they’d been recovered from the whelping pens.

“Someone is coming.” Stormsong moved between Tinker and the door.

“It’s the flying monkeys.” Esme whispered and wisely moved back, giving the sekasha lots of room to move.