Wood Sprites (15 page)

May first was Alexander’s birthday. She turned eighteen, a full and legal adult. Louise and Jillian celebrated alongside her and yet a universe apart, with cupcakes they bought on the way home. They risked a birthday candle because their mother was working late, stuck at work because her company needed to counterbalance growing protests with more security measures at upcoming events. The lone candle, though, reminded Louise that their baby siblings might never see a single birthday, and it made her cry.

“Make a wish, then blow it out,” Jillian choked out.

Louise wiped away tears, thinking how stupid “wishing” magic sounded. She didn’t even know what it was she needed to wish. For more time? For everyone to forget that they were supposed to be doing a play at school or that Jillian and she were shouldering a monster-load of the work? That they could find a
nactka
that had been lost for hundreds of years tucked away in their parents’ basement?

Somehow they needed to save their sisters and brother.

She blew out the candle, and they ate their cupcakes while searching the world for Dufae’s lost box.

* * *

“Jillian! Louise!” Zahara had bounced up beside Louise at the twins’ locker. Since Jillian had cut her hair Peter Pan-short, their classmates couldn’t tell them apart from behind. Jillian had already been sucked away to deal with some play-related emergency. It left Louise feeling horribly aware that she rarely dealt with the world without Jillian beside her. It nearly felt like she had lost her right hand. “Did you see the
Today Show
this morning?”

Louise gasped as she realized that it was the day that Nigel was going to be a guest. She’d forgotten in the search for the
nactka
. “No!”

“Nigel Reid did a shout-out to Lemon-Lime.”

“He did?” Louise cried, at once crushed that she’d missed seeing him, and yet excited at the idea that the real Nigel Reid had mentioned her and Jillian.

“He said he was a big fan. And he had Wembley with him.”

“What?” Wembley was one of their running jokes in
The Queen’s Parting Gift
. The Court had told the humans that the queen was giving them a “wembley” as a gift and meant at first a beautiful songbird. After the bird dies, they come up with a series of increasingly uglier animals to offer up as a wembley, that all meet bizarre deaths, until they get to a woolly-mammothlike
kuesi
, which are so ugly that they’ve crossed the line to cute.

“Well, the two
kuesi
at the Bronx Zoo had a baby, and they’ve named it Wembley.”

“They did?” It had been the gift of the two
kuesi
that the twins were making fun of. It nearly seemed like a joke that of all the possible animals that the elves could give the humans, they had chosen two
kuesi
. The reason, though, was because most Elfhome animals required magic to function normally. Apparently the
kuesi
had been bred to be indifferent to the levels of magic around it.

“He’s so cute!” Zahara cried and pulled up a video clip on her tablet.

The video started with Nigel already onstage with Wembley. The baby
kuesi
looked vaguely like a very hairy elephant with nubs of tusks. Its trunk was in hyperactive overdrive and developed a fixation on exploring up and under the host’s dress. The first time the woman squealed and jumped. She spent much of the video circling Nigel with the trunk in chase while the man explained about how the
kuesi
had been used to build the first railroad on Elfhome. Nigel seemed torn between amusement and confusion to what could possibly be attracting the animal so strongly.

“Do you have some peanuts hidden down there?” Nigel asked.

The host glared at him for a moment, which unfortunately distracted her long enough for the trunk to find its target again. The video clip ended with the host squealing a second time.

“That’s the shout-out?” Louise managed to say after she stopped laughing.

“No, wait, it comes before. Let me see if I can find it.” Zahara went to a website that was labeled Lemon-Lime Love. “Ugh. No. No.” She changed sites to one called Jello Shots.

Louise’s stomach flipped weirdly at the site names. “Oh, tell me that those aren’t what I think they are.”

“Fan sites dedicated to your videos? Okay, I won’t tell you then. Here.”

The clip was labeled “Nigel Reid is a Jello Shot!”

The clips started with Nigel leading the baby
kuesi
out onto the stage. Despite being only a few months old, it was already as tall as the Scotsman. Its long hair was silky and unruly, making it look like a shambling mound of hair with a trunk.

“Thank you for having me. This little fellow is a six-month-old Elfhome
kuesi . . .”

“Kuesi?
I thought he was a wembley.” The host double-checked her teleprompter. “I thought . . . it looks like a wembley.”

Nigel laughed. “Yes, everyone thinks so because of the video
The Queen’s Parting Gift
. The people at the zoo have gotten so tired of having people insist that the sign is wrong that they’ve named this little guy Wembley. But he really is a
kuesi
, which is a cousin to Earth’s woolly mammoth.”

“Oh, he’s so cute,” the host said and then went wide-eyed as the beast beelined over to her and loomed above her. “And big!”

“I asked the Bronx Zoo to borrow him because I hope to be working with Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo in the near future.”

“Wow!” For a moment the host was more interested in the news than the animal standing beside her. “I love Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”

“Yes, they’re a wonderfully creative and knowledgeable production company.” Nigel dodged around gender, age, and number of people involved, probably because he didn’t know any of it.

“How in the world did you make contact with—” Whatever she was going to ask was cut short by the
kuesi
fondling her under her dress. She jumped, squeaking loudly, and the clip ended.

The comments under it exploded with speculations on what work he’d be doing with Lemon-Lime. The thread quickly grew ugly as the Jello Shot fans decided that Nigel was merely trying to capitalize on Lemon-Lime’s fame and that he was lying about the entire thing.

“Holy shit,” Louise whispered as she realized that despite being posted just an hour before, there were twenty pages of comments already.

“What are you doing with Nigel?” Zahara asked.

Louise stared at her, full of horror. It had never occurred to her that anyone who knew the truth about them would connect them up to Nigel. “You can’t tell anyone about this! We’d get into so much trouble if our parents knew!”

“They don’t know?”

“No! They think the Internet is full of pedophiles, and we’re not allowed on any adult site until we’re at least fourteen.”

“Wow. That’s like really fossil-age thinking.”

“My mom knew
one
person that got into trouble like that, so she’s super protective. If they found out that we’ve posted our videos online and are commenting on filmmaking sites and set up the YourStore—”

Louise stopped being able to talk, because she was completely breathless at the idea of how much trouble they’d be in. They’d be grounded for months without Internet, and they might never get their video equipment back.

“I won’t tell,” Zahara promised. “And I’ll tell everyone else not to say anything. But this was on television. Does anyone else know that you’re Lemon-Lime?”

Their Aunt Kitty had helped them pick the name, but she didn’t know about their videos. Also she didn’t watch morning shows. She wasn’t a morning person. Any time they did see her in the mornings, it was usually because she’d been up all night and hadn’t gone to bed yet. It was part of the reason she often babysat in emergencies.

“So what are you doing with Nigel Reid—that your parents know nothing about?”

It sounded horrible when Zahara said it that way.

“He wants to ask us questions about the gossamer call.”

Zahara’s eyes went wide. “But didn’t you just make that up as a joke?”

“Yes. I mean, no. We know there is a whistle for the gossamers, but we haven’t found any references to what it looks like or how it works.” Louise pulled at her hair at the sudden realization that they didn’t have anything concrete to tell Nigel. Her research had been detoured by everything else.

“So what are you going to do?”

Louise stared at Zahara as her mind raced. Was it possible that the codex had some information on it? Once they had a magic generator, they could experiment with any spells that the elves might have embedded into a whistle, but they didn’t have any gossamers to test them on. They could build a virtual simulator of a gossamer if they could find anything about their physiology. So far they hadn’t found any studies on the massive living airships. The fact that the creatures were translucent made all pictures of them blurry and difficult to figure out where the flying jellyfishlike animal ended and the sky began.

“Louise?”

“Um . . .”

“You should at least thank him for the shout-out,” Zahara said.

“You think so?”

The bell rang for homeroom. There was a sudden and massive movement of bodies as everyone in the hall headed to their classroom.

“My mom always thanks anyone that says something nice about her to the media.”

Louise nearly protested that they weren’t on the same level as Zahara’s fashion-model mother, but then remembered the
Today Show
host’s reaction to the name Lemon-Lime. They might have been unaware of it, but apparently they were famous. “Okay, I’ll thank him.”

* * *

There were hundreds of messages under Nigel’s original post. The first was “Seriously? Nigel Reid? THE Lemon-Lime? I don’t know which one to disbelieve the most.” The second stated, “Dude, Lemon-Lime talks to no one. They’re like ghosts!” A random reply on the next page showed that the comments turned ugly as fans decided that the shout-out was just a way to steal Lemon-Lime’s fame.

Louise winced. Poor Nigel. Zahara was right; for all the grief he was getting, he deserved a thank-you. She opened up a private message and gave it a subject line of “Thank you for the great shout-out.” After that, she didn’t know what to say.

Famous people are all just normal people at their core, Zahara had said. It was certainly true for her and Jillian. Well, they were normal if one ignored them being elves, conceived after their male genetic donor was dead, and smarter than just about everyone else. . . .

She stared at the blank screen for a while as the cursor blinked. They had nothing to give Nigel right now. All they had was a handful of observations that anyone could make. They should be sure before they told him anything, and that would take time. Meanwhile the poor man was going to get dragged through dirt. In public.

If they released a Lemon-Lime video acknowledging Nigel, then they could clear his name. They had planned on doing filler anyhow.

* * *

“Oh, great idea!” Jillian reacted to the news with wide-eyed amazement. “A video reply will confirm we’re really Lemon-Lime. We could crank a filler out in a few hours.”

By the end of homeroom, they had a short storyboard laid out. Normally, they did stop-motion with Barbie dolls on green screen; it gave their work a distinctive style. Unfortunately, they’d blown up their entire cast. Louise always thought they should acknowledge the accident by having Queen Soulful Ember blast the royal court to cinders. The addition of Nigel to the mix gave them the idea of changing who got vaporized. In the new video, the queen lets loose a series of blasts, aiming at one precious treasure after another. Her court barely manages to deflect her spells’ damage onto what seems to be unoccupied space. After the court leaves the area, however, ninja scientists rain out of their smoldering hiding spaces.

The second act was solely a shot of the Cathedral of Learning to symbolize the University of Pittsburgh. Jillian was writing the dialogue for the first section, but Louise had an inspiration for the middle section. She typed dialogue that would later need to be read in. The first male would say, “Good God, not again. And those were the last of the anthologists, archeologists, biologists, and botanists. What’s next on the list? Ah, entomologist. Yes, we do need to learn more Elvish. This dictionary we have sucks.”

“I do not think that word means what you think it means,” some unseen male says with a slight Spanish accent.

“Get me entomologists!”

The third act was a shot of a crude box trap baited with ants. Nigel Reid and his cameraman stumble into the trap and ninjas hammer it shut and cover it with mailing stickers, addressing it to Elfhome. They could use sound bites from Nigel’s documentary on fire ants—painfully short to stay within fair use limits—specifically the discussion on the queen, since applying the factoids to Soulful Ember would be funny. Once Nigel was trapped inside the box with the ants, she could use a slightly muffled version of the section where he was cheerfully describing the pain of being stung. Repeatedly.

Louise pulled old backgrounds from their home computer to build the needed sets. Giggling, Jillian told her between first and second period that the “precious treasures” would be various plot McGuffins from earlier videos. They could get around not showing the queen and her court and use only dialogue to progress the story. They spent the break between second and third period recording the lines in the girls’ restroom.