Elves claimed to be immortal. Windwolf hadn’t visibly aged during the last twenty-eight years. (At least once a year, a reporter would compare his appearance to a teenage pop idol. The twins parodied this by having Prince Yardstick enter American Idol.) According to anthropologists, elves were considered adult only after they were a hundred years old. Etienne was nearly sixty in his photograph but he looked only seventeen. Was it proof he was full-blooded elf or did half-elves age equally slow? The Dufae family tree traced only the male bloodline. Wives were listed only by three dates: birth, marriage, and death. It gave no clue if the females were elves or not except by the fact that they seemed to live average human lifespans.
Etienne would father Roland and Josephina and die within ten years of when the picture was taken. Obviously he hadn’t died of old age. Etienne’s daughter never married and lived to be a hundred and fifty. The family tree stated that Roland died before he was fifty without explaining why. Was it because he inherited a human lifespan when his sister lucked into an elf’s? Or had he been murdered like Leonardo and Ada? Roland left behind a young son, Adrien, who had been Leonardo’s grandfather.
Which made the twins…what? Elves? Half-elf? Quarter? One eighth? How infinitely small did the amount have to be before it didn’t matter?
Jillian had found the family tree too. “The note at the bottom says that Guillaume was beheaded during the French Revolution’s September Massacres. We’re French elves.” Jillian obviously loved the idea. “French noble elves.”
Louise refrained from pointing out that not everyone who was beheaded in the French Revolution was noble, at least not according to Charles Dickinson, but he might not be an accurate reporter on the events. “We’re New Yorkers.”
Louise abandoned the photographs. They only raised more questions. She opened up the PDF file, hoping for answers. The scanned pages of the file were from a book, handwritten in Elvish. Page after page of runes. There wasn’t a single French or English word in sight. The source material had to be a thick bound journal, as there were over a thousand pages. She checked random pages to verify that it was entirely in Elvish. After the first dozen pages, though, the text changed from handwritten notes to elaborate symbols and circles and glyphs. She recognized the format from the only scientific paper they’d ever found on spell-casting.
“This. This,” she whispered, having to force the words out one at a time. “This is a book of spells!”
Jillian squealed with excitement. “Oh! Oh! Lou!” Jillian went speechless as she scrolled through the book, and when she finally could talk again, she sounded like she could barely breathe. “This is so awesome! We can learn magic!”
“There’s no magic on Earth,” Louise pointed out despite the giddy feeling that was racing through her. An entire spell book of Elf magic. This was better than Christmas. It couldn’t be real. She didn’t want to get all excited only to be disappointed.
“Well, the elves were getting to Earth somehow if the Dufae were in…oh! Oh!”
“What?”
“Leonardo was an elf!”
“Barely. And?
“No one knows how the gate works!” Jillian jumped up and started to pace, words tumbling out with her excitement. “That’s the reason Pittsburgh goes back and forth between the two worlds. If someone could come up with another way of doing it, they’d do that instead. All the scientists on Earth have tried, but they can’t figure out what Leonardo did. It’s not based on any science that they understand. Because it’s not science, it’s magic!”
Louise nodded along with the deductions. It made sense but she was missing why Jillian was so excited by this. “So?”
“We can’t figure out how to save our little brother and baby sisters using science—so maybe we can use magic.”
“Magic?”
“We know what science can do. There’s no artificial wombs yet. We’re not going to be able to implant our brother and sisters into—say—a pig.”
“Ewwww! Why would you say that?”
“I’m just thinking outside the box.”
“Too outside!”
“And we’re not going to be able to talk a woman into doing it!” Jillian nearly shouted to override Louise. “Not without lots of money.”
“There’s the money from YourStore.”
“Yeah, with that we could get the babies born, but then what? We need enough money to raise them. We can’t make enough to do both—not legally—in a few months. And if we do it illegally we could get taken away from Mom and Dad.”