Wood Sprites

“Unless it’s important — like the mansion is on fire.” Louise earned an annoyed look from her twin. She was more worried, though, about the future than the past. The damage was already done. She couldn’t figure out how the babies even got Tesla out of the bed without them noticing. They always slept with the bed in the raised position.

“We didn’t actually leave,” Nikola said.

His sisters nodded. “We didn’t.”

“You said you left,” Jillian growled.

“We did, but we didn’t,” they cried.

“Oh, that’s perfectly clear,” Jillian grumbled.

“Tesla didn’t leave the room, but we did.” Nikola attempted to clarify. “We just didn’t have any bodies.”

“Huh?” Jillian looked utterly confused.

“Oh.” Louise realized what Nikola meant. It was like when she dreamed of the babies. They existed somehow separate of Tesla as well as integrated with him. If they could enter her dreams, then moving through the house like ghosts wasn’t completely impossible, just very weird. “I understand.”

“You do?” Jillian cried. “I don’t.”

“The babies dream-walked,” Louise said.

Nikola nodded vigorously and then pointed toward Louise’s feet. “Joy showed us how.”

Joy was pulling the clean underwear from Louise’s backpack and tossing them over her shoulder. She had cans of freeze-dried blueberry cheesecake stacked beside her. She looked up, wide-eyed with surprise at being the center of attention.

“Joy!” Louise cried. Their underwear was scattered all across the bedroom floor.

“Must take yummies!” Joy shoved the cans into the emptied bag. “Not stupid panties.”

“No, junk food is the one thing we can get easily!” Louise gathered up the underwear.

“Wait!” Jillian shouted. “Dream-walked? What the hell does that mean?”

“Shhh!” Louise bent down, trying to unload enough of the cans to fit the clothes back into the bag. “The secret elves might hear.”

“What does it mean?” Jillian whispered fiercely.

“They astral-projected. That’s how the babies are talking to us through Tesla. It’s their spirits. Their souls.” Louise sighed at the disbelieving look Jillian was giving her. “They’re sitting on top of a magic generator. And they’re elves. Maybe all elves can dream-walk.”

Joy made a raspberry and jerked the can out of Louise’s hand. “Not elf. Dragon, silly!”

“What?” both twins cried.

“Joy says that we’re related to two dragons: Brilliance and Clarity. That’s why we can dream-walk.”

Surely that couldn’t be right. Still, Dufae’s Elvish name had been Unbounded Brilliance. There were certainly lots of myths about dragons having children that were very humanlike. Louise struggled not to get distracted by the possibility. “So there are caves under the mansion?”

Nikola nodded. “Caves, but we didn’t notice any bats.”

Jillian disappeared back into the secret room, mumbling about billionaires with secret identities and their propensity for secret lairs. She returned with a fat roll of papers nearly four feet long, and unrolled to be nearly four feet wide. Esme had provided them — somehow — with a copy of the blueprints of the mansion. Judging by the frayed edges marked on the copies as jagged lines, they were scans of the original as-built prints. “Ming has to know the caves are there. I’m sure he picked this place because of the magic.” Jillian flipped through the pages until she hit the last one that showed an entire warren of rough-shaped rooms under the mansion. According to the title block, the cave systems had been labeled as sub-basement. “Holy bat caves!”

“No bats!” the babies all squeaked.

Louise studied the maze. It seemed too easy to be true. Surely they couldn’t just slip through the mansion’s cellars and come out on Elfhome. The magic, though, was coming from somewhere. Dufae had written about leakage from his world to Earth. If there were a pathway, surely Ming would claim it for himself and keep it well hidden from the eyes of mankind.

As she studied the blueprint, though, nothing seemed to suggest that there was a pathway to another world. “There’s no way to get a car or even a horse down into the caves easily.” She pointed out what seemed to be the only staircase into the area through the mansion’s large walk-in pantry. “According to this, the mansion was built in 1890. It was another twenty years before Windwolf came to the Westernlands, and he might have settled anywhere on the East Coast, or even gone to — whatever they call South America. Ming wouldn’t have had to hide moving people and supplies to Elfhome from Earth, because there weren’t any elves to see.”

Jillian pouted and reached for her ball and glove. “But if we could get to Elfhome here in Hudson Valley, we would be at Aum Renau.”

“Windwolf probably picked this area for the same reason Ming chose it. First thing Dufae did was find places on Earth opposite massive pools of magic so he could cast spells with what leaked across. On Elfhome, right here, there’s probably the strongest source of magic on the continent.”