Elfhome

McDermott had endless forms he wanted signed guaranteeing he’d get paid and not arrested by the EIA. He also insisted she tour a room filled with coffins of oak and steel, making it sound like the law required a coffin for cremation. Considering the elves reaction to the drawers at the morgue — their horror at the idea of “locking the bodies in steel boxes”—the coffins were probably a bad idea. She managed to frighten McDermott into admitting that the coffins were optional and that cardboard boxes were acceptable. She talked him into forgoing even the boxes with assurances that no one would press charges. All the details, though, made her realize how much Lain had quietly taken care of when her grandfather had died.

Start to finish, the cremations would take a good part of the night. Even though McDerrmott’s had four furnaces (a number that slightly boggled her mind,) it would take more than two hours to render the bodies to ash, and then several hours more for the ashes to cool enough to be safely handled. She stayed only long enough to see the bodies safely loaded into the furnaces and talked the Wyverns into standing guard the rest of the night. Tinker wanted to stay in motion so Chloe’s strike forces couldn’t corner her again. She didn’t need witnesses while getting the DNA from the living children — although she wasn’t sure how she was going to do that without rising questions.

Back in the Rolls Royce, Esme proved she had used the time that Tinker had been distracted to piece together the logical end to Tinker’s story. “So you and Windwolf fell in love and he used magic to change you into an elf?”

“That’s the basic gist of it.” Tinker was glad she didn’t have to go into details.

Esme cocked her head. “What I don’t get is why you would be in trouble if you’d been caught at the morgue.”

“Collecting DNA smacks of spell-working.” Tinker quoted Stormsong.

“So, why is it illegal for you do something that simple when Windwolf is going around doing wholesale transformation?”

Tinker sighed. “Technically, it isn’t illegal. The problem is political maneuvering shit. The Stone Clan are being asses.”

Esme nodded as if that made perfect sense.

Proof that Pony had been feeling nervous around the Wyverns, he hadn’t asked where they were going when they left the funeral home. He stopped the car at the end of the McKees Rocks Bridge — a good safe two miles from the Wyverns — to wait for Tinker to chose a direction.

Take the three swabs and Esme to Lain? Track down the other children with Esme still in tow? Surely the less people involved, the better, but the whole deadly trinity of Esme, Lain and Tooloo could derail Tinker when time was against her. Not Lain’s then — and she needed a cover story for tracking down the children and sticking things in their mouths.

“Let’s go to Poppymeadow’s,” Tinker told Pony and he turned the big gray car toward the gleaming city instead of taking the dark twisting roads up to the observatory.

“So you’re an elf with all the bells and whistles?” Esme asked.

Tinker nodded.

“And you wanted this?” Esme said it as if worried that Tinker been transformed against her will, or worse, she had been desperate to be an elf.

Tinker realized her Hand were all listening intently. She had never considered before how they may feel about Windwolf using the nearly forbidden magic to change her. They must have been in full agreement with his decision or they would have stopped him. It was weird knowing that they had gone so against their principles to allow Windwolf to do the spell. They had all been nameless strangers to her then. She couldn’t even remember who had been with Windwolf the night he took her to the hunting lodge and changed her. It was a testament of how much they trusted Windwolf.

It seemed dangerous to admit she didn’t know what Windwolf had planned. It was her stupidity, not his. And yet she couldn’t lie — not to her Hand — they deserved the truth.

“I still don’t have a full grasp on what Windwolf was offering me,” she said cautiously. “It’s too big. I haven’t lived long enough to understand the limits of a human life to really wrap my brain around being an elf. I know, though, I have forever now to be with people I love.” Pony reached out and took her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “Besides, the bells and whistles are pretty cool.”

“Bells and whistles.” Esme stared out the window at the night-shrouded city. The streetlights overhead spilled light across her again and again as they drove through the dark streets. “The spell that Windwolf used — could it make anyone perfect as the sekasha yet able to use the domana spells?”

All the sekasha laughed at the question. “You can not see the world as black and white and in color at the same time.”

“In theory, though, someone could be god-like?” The light slid through the car and left Esme in shadows.