Wood Sprites

Louise stifled a gasp. It was a crushed signal repeater. It meant that she was out of range for Tesla. The others wouldn’t know that Yves was on their side of the collapse, armed and dangerous. The babies would have lost control of all the mice from the gift shop to another hundred feet back in the caves. They’d have to move Tesla closer in order to find out what happened to Louise. The babies had asked what they should do and she had shushed them! She should have made sure they told Crow Boy what was happening!

Would they have sense to move all the mice with Tesla? Would they think to tell Crow Boy before they moved? They were just babies! They wouldn’t know how to fight Yves except by using Tesla’s automated defense programs.

Yves took something from his coat pocket, stepped back, and pressed it to the wall. Brilliance lit the hallway, blinding Louise. “Ah, there you are, annoying little mouse. Sire wanted you two alive.” He pulled his pistol out of its holster. “But you’re not worth the bother of keeping.”

“Warning!” Tesla came running down the hall, barking in his deep Japanese-man voice. “Primary target under attack! Response code one!”

“Nikola!” Louise cried. “You promised!”

The pistol thundered in the narrow space, horrifyingly loud. Yves fired again and again. Tesla staggered and fell.

Louise put her hand to her mouth, bent her fingers, and called the Spell Stones. Instantly she felt a deep vibration in her bones as she plugged into potential. She changed her finger position to a force strike.

Yves shouted in alarm and swung the pistol toward her. She shouted the spell command and pointed at him even as the muzzle flared. The light vanished. The world thundered noise. Something struck Louise and knocked her from her feet.

Yves had shot her! She lay in the sudden silent dark. She could smell the blood. Her left arm hurt like her humerus was broken. She could feel something hot and sticky tricking down her arm, and she was fairly sure it was blood. Her blood.

Think! Think! She might faint from shock and blood loss; everything already felt a little swimmy in her head. She had to get this right. She needed light to stop the bleeding, but if Yves were still conscious, then it would allow him to shoot her again.

“Lou?” Nikola’s voice came out of the darkness, banishing all thought.

“Nikola!” She sat up, and the swimmy feeling got stronger. Yves’ flashlight lay a few feet away, pointing to Tesla’s front paws. One paw raked the air in an endless sideways run.

“Louise?” Nikola called. “Lou!”

Louise managed to stand and stagger to the flashlight and pick it up.

A bullet had caught Tesla in the head, shattering his right eye and clipping off his ear. The fur had been torn away, exposing metal and circuitry.

“Oh, babies!” Louise sobbed as fear tore through her.

“Something is wrong. We don’t feel right. We’re scared.”

“It’s okay. I’m here.” Her hands didn’t want to work right. She fumbled with the flashlight and the catches of Tesla’s storage compartment while blood ran down her fingers.

There was a fine line etched in frost across the surface of the nactka.

“Oh no!” Louise gasped. A bullet had scratched the magical device. The spell holding the embryos in stasis had failed. The frozen nitrogen that they were stored in was leaking out, and once it was gone, they’d die. She had to keep it cold. How could she do that?

She ran the narrow beam of the flashlight through the dusty air. A solid wall of fallen rocks blocked the way back to the gift shop and any possible freezers in that direction. Nor would any standard freezer be cold enough. The embryos needed to stay far below what even a commercial-grade freezer could produce. There was a reason that the clinic kept the material in special tanks.

There had been the one freezing spell in the codex. They’d experimented with it, but it created a big block of immobile ice. When the information on the nactka came to light, they had abandoned the spell.

Louise searched through her pockets. Had she tucked the pen into her pants? Yes. And two sheets of spare paper. And the plastic bag from the hoodies. She drew out the spell, leaving bloody fingerprints on the paper. “I need to take you out of Tesla.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Tesla is too damaged to move,” she lied as the world blurred at the edges. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them that they would die if she couldn’t save them. She didn’t want their last minutes to be in terror of what was about to happen. If she failed, she wanted their deaths to be quick and painless. “Try to go to sleep. When you wake up — When you wake up — you’ll be real. I promise.”

45: Let's Go Fly A Kate