Jillian gave Peter Pan’s fearless laugh. “We, at least, have clothes on! You’re going to be naked when they’re done with you.”
And he’d need them to dismiss his wings, but when the hospital staff wasn’t paying close attention.
“They will follow,” Crow Boy said. “They are relentless.”
“First they’re going to have to put out the fire and track down the vehicles. We sent all the vehicles away from the mansion…”
“Well…actually…the truck is still there,” Nikola interrupted in Elvish. “It’s quite durable so we’ve been using it as a battering ram. The rest we drove into the river; so it’s going to take them quite a long time to get them back.”
The doctor swung around to stare down at Nikola. “Jesus santisimo! Elfhome dogs can talk?”
The nurse carefully eyed Nikola. “It’s not a real dog. It’s one of those new very realistic nanny robots.”
“Perfect!” the doctor cried. “If it’s from Earth, it probably can translate for us.”
Louise winced. Nikola had never had to lie before. She wasn’t sure he knew how. He shrunk back with a whimper as everyone in the room focused on him.
The doctor crouched down to Nikola’s level. “Hey boy, do you speak English?”
Nikola whimpered again and looked to the twins and then looked at the doctor and then back to the twins.
“Dog, what’s your name?” The doctor said.
“Konnichiwa.” Nikola slowly stumbled over the Japanese, using his deep male samurai voice. “Boku wa Akita da.”
Strictly speaking, he was an Akita.
The doctor sighed and scrubbed his face. “Okay, we need a translator here as soon as possible and a child advocate. The fibula is fractured and this bruise has a tread pattern on it. Someone stomped on his leg to break it. If I remember my history correctly, the treaty forbids children from being removed from Elfhome, so I’m thinking that someone might be slave-trading them.”
He wasn’t that far from wrong.
* * *
Luckily the hospital didn’t have a translation device equipped to handle Elvish. They cycled a dozen human languages past the twins, three of which they were fluent in, but they pretended not to understand. The child advocate arrived and signed release forms so that Crow Boy could be X-ray and MRI scanned. The test results triggered a phone call to the city zoo to summon a vet.
“This is so wild!” The vet murmured as the adults all eyed the test results.
Dr. Harmeling shook his head. “I’m not sure what the girls are—their vitals are fine so we don’t really have a reason to test them—but he’s definitely not human.”
“Yes, I agree,” the vet said. “His anatomy is very birdlike. His bones are hollow and thin-walled but dense. These masses resemble a crop, a gizzard and these look like the air sacs that play an important part in respiration in birds. These bony hooks on the ribs support the anchorage of the muscles that move the wings. He has three toes in front and one in back, not five facing forward. These are claws on his toes, not nails. It’s just mind-blowing.”
“That said,” the vet added, “he’s displaying a lot more understanding of his situation and surrounding than any animal I’ve worked with, and that includes gorillas. I believe he’s equal to human in intelligence. I don’t think he’s an elf, but what do I know about elves?”
“What does anyone know? We’ll just put him down as a black-winged elf.” Dr. Harmeling tapped the MRI of Crow Boy’s leg. “Some bastard deliberately broke this boy’s leg. All these knife cuts on the arm? This is clearly torture.”
“Setting bird bones is similar to a mammal but occasionally it is harder to keep the thinner bones lined up. We’ll have to take x-rays after the cast is on to make sure nothing shifted after we set it.”
“Think we can give him anything for pain? We’ll need to get these leg muscles to relax to line the bones up.”
“There are some things that we use in birds that are also used with humans. What I tend to use with birds is inhalant anesthesia. It’s pretty safe. As you know, it is gotten out of the system by breathing, so you can wake the birds up pretty quickly.”
* * *
A police officer arrived armed with a machine translator. Apparently the New York police department had to deal daily with people speaking one of the nearly seven thousand different languages on Earth. He was unruffled at the prospect of interviewing victims in Elvish.
The wings, though, freaked him.
“He’s definitely half-bird,” Doctor Harmeling stated after he reassured them that the wings were attached via bones and muscles and not just some clever costume. “He’s not from Earth. They seem to be communicating in Elvish. At least, my staff has picked up a handful of words that they recognize from some videos.”