“We’re working on it!” Nikola cried.
“Hooyah!” Chuck Norris cried as the male tumbled to the ground. “Score!”
Three down, Louise thought, how many to go?
Crow Boy suddenly appeared out of the sky, swooping down onto the fallen elves. For a moment, Louise’s heart stopped, thinking he was going to strike them with the machete they’d bought at Home Depot. When he landed, though, he whipped out a handful of the twenty-four-inch zip ties and used them to hogtie the male.
“Pull over by Crow Boy,” Louise instructed. They specified a locking cargo section on the truck so they could hold and transport prisoners if they needed to. If the tengu children weren’t here, they might have to question prisoners at length.
The truck stopped next to the fallen elves. The twins scrambled down out of the cab.
“Nikola, you stay with Tesla; keep him out of danger.” Louise took three of the white mice from her pocket and placed them on the ground. “Girls, you three control the mice, but keep them close. If they get out of range of Tesla, their own AI will take over and we might not get them back.”
Each mouse had a seek-and-neutralize program that would have them taser any humanoid object that wasn’t wearing a “friend” transponder. Their programming also allowed them to be linked into large groups acting as one unit. With the babies herding them, the mice would actually end up in the caverns instead of wandering the neighboring woods, tasering hapless hikers.
“Roger!” Chuck snapped. “Team Mischief, go!”
“Jillian, unload the luggage mules.” Louise pointed Jillian toward the truck that had the rest of their gear. Away from the elves. Away from the violence. Jillian nodded, trying to look anywhere but at the bound males.
Only once Jillian was out of earshot did Louise ask quietly, “Are there any other elves in the area?”
Crow Boy shook his head. “The one outbuilding is an equipment shed and the other is a picnic shelter. There’s no one in either one. If there’s more elves, they’re inside the caverns.”
“Any sign of the nestlings?”
Hurt flashed across his face. He took something out of his pocket and held it out to her. It was a small plushie of a black bird. “This is Lai Yee’s. It was on the ground in the equipment shed, but it could have simply fallen out of a truck.”
It only meant that the little girl had been moved in a vehicle that then came to the caverns. Lai Yee, though, might have been taken out of the truck someplace else.
“We’ll find them.” Louise promised.
While he hogtied and gagged the other fallen elves, Louise sorted through the spells they’d preprinted. They’d made copies of every spell that might be useful, from shields to detection to healing ones like the ones they’d cast on Crow Boy. She found the scry spell and laid it on the warm asphalt of the parking lot. Taking out four magic generators, she connected them to the spell via the power leads. With the increased power input, the scry spell would reach further.
With a word, she activated the spell. With the extra power, a massive dome gleamed to life over the paper. The parking lot flared on the surface, a brilliant dot of confusion as the spell attempted to highlight all the living objects from the ostriches down to the twins. The gift shop was a tangle of metal, rending the building unreadable to the spell. The magic poured down through the caves, though, painting the deep maze hidden under the rolling hills around them. With the parking lot to mark the scale, the sheer size of the cave system was intimidating.
“There they are!” Jillian cried, pointing not at the spell but to a point somewhere to the right.
“What?” Louise couldn’t see anything.
Jillian dashed over to study the spell. “There! See!” She pointed to a bright knot within the largest cavern space. “That’s them.”
“How can you tell?” Louise peered closely at the point. There seemed too many motes of light shifting around to be just the children; if it was the nestlings, then they had several guards.
Jillian gave her a startled look. “They feel like Crow Boy.” She said it as if Louise should understand. “We all felt different when you triggered the spell. The ostriches. Us. Crow Boy. The elves. Even Tesla. What’s down there felt mostly like Crow Boy.”
Louise compared the gleaming three-dimensional maze to the map they’d downloaded from the caverns’ website. The paper-based version of the caves failed to indicate the slope; the deepest point was easily hundreds of feet underground. She estimated that the nestlings were nearly a hundred feet deep. “Mostly?”
Jillian considered the mysterious feeling. Slowly, she shrank inward and whispered, “There’s a bunch of elves with them.”