FREE STORIES 2012(86)

She hurried through the crowd of elf warriors, trying to reach his side. But he'd entered the enclave and the door firmly locked.

#

Her place had been too silent in the mornings. It reminded her too much of when she was being shunned. She'd splurged on an old digital clock radio within a week of arriving in Pittsburgh. After two days of failing to talk with Forest Moss, she woke to the news that Ginger Wine's been attacked during the night. Dozens of elves had been killed in the attack; their names, however, weren't being given out. With heart looping through her chest like it was on a rollercoaster, she took a bus out to Oakland.

Ginger Wine's was smoking rubble. Oni bodies were stacked on the street like cord wood. There was no sign of the dead elves. In the summer heat, the slaughterhouse stench was nearly unbearable.

A work crew from the EIA were loading the oni onto trucks.

"Do you know which elves were killed?" Olivia asked one of the men. "What happened with their dead?"

The man pointed toward the Fairgrounds where black smoke was billowing up. "Elves cremate their dead; say it frees the souls to pass on. Ginger Wine only lost two of her people. The rest are all Stone Clan." He obviously thought she was friends with the Wind Clan elves that ran Ginger Wine's establishment.

"Was Forest Moss killed?"

"The domana? No. He wasn't here. He had been out with Windwolf. He totally lost it, though, when they got back. He wondered off screaming." The man gave a vague wave toward downtown. "Completely out of his head."

#

Forest Moss was on the top floor of Kaufmann's. She'd found him only because the concentration of Pittsburgh Police, EIA and Wind Clan elves gathered around the department store. Olivia apparently missed Tinker domi by minutes. In her wake, the elves and humans were trying to come to an agreement about what should be done with Forest Moss. None of them were happy about the elf lord occupying Kaufmann's but no one wanted to risk trying to get him to leave.

She cautiously worked her way through the store, dodging the Wyverns who were searching the aisles. Judging by their speed, they were using it as an excuse to keep a distance between them and their charge.

Forest Moss was in the back corner of the children's department. He'd collected all the mannequins around a child's tea table with a toy china tea set. The dolls gathered around him, smiling brightly, holding out stiff white hands to welcome him. Somehow Forest Moss had reduced a half dozen various mannequins to plaster dust. It hazed the air and covered everything with fine white powder.

Why was he here of all places? Why was he destroying the dolls even as he treated them to tea? There was so much she didn't know about him, not even his age. From the photos she'd seen of him, she knew that his hair was always pure white, even without the fine dust. It poured down over his shoulders and was gathered in a loose ponytail just above his hips. She couldn't tell his age from his profile; it was so marred by the scars encircling his empty eye socket. His eyelid had been sewn shut, the scars vivid white as his hair against his dusky skin.

"Its all your fault." Forest Moss wailed as he clutched an eight-year old girl mannequin to him. "You were supposed to protect them. They whispered little lies to you and you believed them all. Our beautiful lovelies, all dead, because you failed them."

She took a deep breath as she felt a wave of sympathy toward him. She still felt responsible for Tyler's death even though she had been helpless to prevent it. She'd been overruled at every turn. His "real mother" let him play with the rough older boys. As "men" the teenagers didn't need to listen to her arguments that Tyler was too young to play in the hayloft. She couldn't talk her husband and sister-wives into taking him to the hospital after he'd fallen. In everyone's eyes, she was old enough to fuck, but too much a child to make any demands on how her "children" be raised.

How much more guilt was Forest Moss feeling because he hadn't been helpless?

Maybe Forest Moss needed her as much as she needed him. Certainly she would have given anything for someone to reassure her that she had done everything she could to save Tyler and that his blood was on other people's hands.

Taking another deep breath to steel herself, she closed the distance between her and the tea table.

He whipped about to see her, hand pressed to his mouth, fingers cocked oddly. He paused, his brow knitting together. Unlike his hair, his eyebrow and eyelashes were dark brown. Judging by what was left of his face, at one time, he'd been very handsome. And he seemed much younger than she expected. If he were human, she would have guessed him to be in his late twenties.

She'd spent days trying to arrange for this conversation but she hadn't considered exactly what she would say. At least, not in Low Elvish. When she ran through this moment in her head, everything was in English with a lot of slang and curse words thrown in. "I heard that you – You – You want a someone to be your domi? A human domi. I'm-- I'm--" Willing sounded too much like a marriage vow. "I want – I need you."