She had to stay focused on what was important: protecting Joy and the babies.
She’d been sure Jillian would have a plan; asking would only start them barreling toward breaking her vow. Now she was afraid that Jillian didn’t have a plan.
They had to do something. Joy had plowed through the food that Louise had stolen from the kitchen and it was nearly gone. Every time that Louise had tried to bring food back from breakfast or lunch, Anna caught her. Sooner or later, hunger would drive Joy out into the open.
Humans might believe that Joy was some kind of exotic lizard. Even if humans understood what Joy truly was, they probably wouldn’t able to hurt the baby dragon. At least, not while she had access to magic. But Edmond was an elf. He might be the very person that had trapped Joy in the nactka. Of all the treasures found on Earth, the only one that Yves truly wanted was the box with the eleven other baby dragons. What had the secret elves planned to do with them?
And what would Edmond do to Nikola? Louise was fairly sure her parents wouldn’t have believed that Nikola was a magical merger between the babies and the nanny robot. They would have insisted that they dispose of the embryos as a biohazard in one of their maddening “we know what’s best because we’re adults” moves. It was the main reason that the twins had kept him secret. Edmond would probably believe, but then what? Would he care? Would he see the embryos as biological waste or worse, something to use to his advantage? He’d done something to Anna six unborn daughters, Louise was sure of that, although she couldn’t prove it.
And what had happened to their older sister?
Had April’s cousin warned Alexander before the secret elves figured out that she used the name Tinker? Had the NSA secretly escorted her out of Pittsburgh during the last Shutdown? Was Alexander already enrolled in some kind of witness protection program here on Earth? Or had the secret elves captured her and given her to “that idiot cat” which had killed the other scientists?
Louise shuddered at the thought. The next Shutdown was in two days. If they left in a few hours, they could get to Monroeville in time to sneak across the border while Pittsburgh was on Earth. Somehow. They could find Alexander or hide with Orville. Maybe. But if Alexander had been kidnapped and brought to Earth, the twins would be the only ones who had any hope of finding and saving her.
The only positive note in their life was that their video had blocked the UN vote long enough to render it moot. The world was holding its breath, waiting to find out if Windwolf survived the attack, instead of blindly accepting that he’d been killed. If the Viceroy had been killed, how could they hope to stop Ming again with a video?
There was no one the twins could turn to without endangering the person. They were all alone in this Fortress of Evil. The babies. Alexander. Windwolf. Elfhome. The sheer magnitude of responsibilities overwhelmed Louise.
“Jilly, what do we do?”
“I don’t know.” Jillian seemed too small, too young to be her twin. Somehow during the last few days, she’d become so much less than her real self. “Do you think they had anything to do with Mom and Dad’s accident?”
“I don’t think so,” Louise said with more confidence than she felt. The accident had been splashed across all the newsfeeds; a dozen people had been killed when a tractor-trailer truck had plowed through downtown traffic. The driver had been drunk and asleep in the back of the cab when the auto-drive failed. The truck had plowed through a crowded crosswalk before striking her parents’ car on the driver’s side, pushing it into the path of an oncoming bus. “If Anna killed someone, it would be neat and clean, like laser surgery. She wouldn’t be that messy.” She shuddered, thinking of the one victim that had been wedged up under the truck’s undercarriage and only discovered hours later. “Edmond might go for wholesale slaughter, but he sent his own son away so Anna wouldn’t be distracted.”
Despite all that, she had a small niggle of doubt. Jillian, though, wasn’t strong enough to hear anything else. Not now.
Louise wondered if they were a big enough distraction if Edmond would send them away too. A shiver went down her spine. No, that had “would not end well” written all over it. On the heels of the fear came a wash of anger. She was braver than this, wasn’t she? Yet the idea of having to do another pantry raid terrified her. She hated the fact that now that she knew what evil the house held, she didn’t want to leave their room by herself.
She felt safe in the bedroom. Esme had planned for them to search out April. She’d guessed that they would be entangled with Edmond and Anna. Louise was sure that Esme had known that they’d end up in her room. Surely she’d left them something; breadcrumbs to follow while lost in this dark place.