Wood Sprites(168)

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 foot long, and unrolled to be nearly four foot 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 not a 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 of 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.”

Which reminded Louise that they should take some of their most portable spell casting supplies. It looped her back to the realization that they would have to abandon everything left of their parents.





37: MOUSE CAGE


An hour later, everything came crashing down on them.

There was a knock after someone tried the door and found it locked.

“Hide!” Louise whispered to the babies, waving the mice to take cover. She could feel the danger looming outside the door. They had run out of time. The mice darted under the furniture.

What should I do? A dozen possibilities flashed through Louise’s mind followed by dozens of possible outcomes, some horrifying. She glanced frantically around the room. Between the babies and Joy “helping,” the twins had barely started with packing. Jillian had insisted that they scan the cave maps and the mansion’s blueprints before returning them to the secret room. It meant that everything that Louise didn’t want the elves to see was sitting out, waiting to be packed.

Tesla stood up; the babies had fled out of the mice robots to inhabit him again.

“Sit!” Louise hissed as one possibly became terrifyingly probable. “Do not fight! You promised!”

“Why do we have to listen to you?” Chuck Norris Pink grumbled in Nikola’s Christopher Robin lilt, but this time Louise recognized the true speaker.

“We won’t fight,” Nikola stated and Tesla sat, “because we promised.”

“But we don’t like it,” one or both of the Jawbreakers complained.

The person knocked again. Louder. Impatient.

Joy wasn’t anywhere in sight. Hopefully she was inside Tesla or the secret room. There was no more time left to look for her. Louise snatched up items blindly from the “to pack” pile and started to shove them into her pockets. No, they were going to check her pockets. She pulled up her left pant leg and slid what would fit into her socks. At least their tablets had secure passwords; there was no way to take them with them and keep them hidden. The babies, though, were vulnerable inside of Tesla’s storage compartment.