Wood Sprites - eARC Read online

  “She turns eighteen on May first,” Jillian whispered. “Shutdown is next week and then again on May eighteenth. So if we want to get it to her anywhere close to ‘on time,’ we have to mail it today. Postage to Elfhome is going to take all our savings, so Mom needs to buy the card.”

  Louise went breathless with the idea. They were actually sending their older sister a birthday card. She’d open up the envelope and be so surprised. There was no way she could know about them because their parents had stolen their embryos. Would she be just as excited as they were? Would she want to see them? At eighteen, she would be free to travel back and forth between Elfhome and Earth.

  It was thrilling to think they might actually get to see their sister someday, maybe even someday soon because of the card. Still, Louise couldn’t help feeling as if the birthday card was a terrible idea.

  9: LEMON-LIME FLAVORED FAME

  Iggy was blown away by the video when they showed it to him. “This is awesome. I can’t believe you did this. But that’s Gage. And Mason.” He named their classmates as they appeared. The Lost Boys reached the Jolly Roger and there was a pan-over to show the pirates.

  “Hooo!” Iggy shouted and stabbed the pause icon, stopping the camera on their version of him as Captain Hook. They had taken his suggestion of Captain Jack Sparrow and gone that direction with trinkets braided in among dreadlocks and a five-o’clock shadow shading into a goatee. Instead of the red of Hook’s traditional costume—based on a reference in the book that he fancied himself an officer in the British navy—they went with a tattered black with just hints of gold. He made a dark and exotic pirate captain. “Oh! That’s awesome! That is so awesome! How did you do that? Are your parents like movie people? Did they help you?”

  “Seriously?” Louise thought everyone their age could edit video.

  “Yes!”

  She explained how they had used a rendering application to turn the photographs into skins for CGI models that could then be edited. “The stock running animation is fairly wooden if you spend a lot of frames showing it, so we move the camera angle a lot.” She backed the video up to illustrate how they used just a few frames of the computer-generated movement intermixed with close-ups of the Lost Boys and shots of tropical rain forest that they played with the color spectrum and lighting to make seem moonlit. She let it play through to the sword fight.

  “So cool. But how do you know how to do all this?” Iggy asked as the video ended.

  “We make videos all the time.” She pointed at their production company logo that she had put at the end out of habit.

  “Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?” Iggy cried.

  “It’s a production company name.” Louise showed him how their names made up the word JEl-Lo. “Jillian Eloise and Louise. Lemon-Lime because there’s two of us.

  Iggy stood staring at her with his mouth open for a minute and then he dissolved into laughter. “What I meant was ‘You’re Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?’ My sister has one of your posters above her bed. The ‘blast it all’ one.”

  They had designed character sketches for their series. In their videos, Queen Soulful Ember had a quick temper that led to her blowing up everything that annoyed her. “Blast it all” was her catchphrase and often triggered extreme reactions from her bodyguards and servants as they tried—politely—to keep her from reducing everything to cinders. Queen Soulful Ember’s character sketch for posters and whatnot showed her mostly buried under guards with only her madly twitching fingers visible and the words of her catchphrase flaming overhead.

  The twins planned to use the artwork to make money off their videos. They’d tried to set up a store using an online retailer that would use their uploaded art to create customized items, everything from posters to coffee cups. For a small percentage of the profit, YourStore would handle everything from creating the goods to mailing them out to customers. The twins had gotten all the artwork in place and the prices set. The last step, however, required that they provide bank account information. Their parents wouldn’t let the twins use their account, citing everything from possible identity thief to tax reporting. The same reasons also applied for the twins setting up an account for themselves with an adult co-signer. Their parents didn’t want to be held liable for some financial mess that YourStore might suck them into.

  Since the twins couldn’t collect income, they’d assumed that the store never went live. Had the store been selling their stuff all this time?

  “A Queen Soulful Ember poster?” Louise asked. “A Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo brand from YourStore?”

  “Yes! You’re famous!” Iggy laughed. “Don’t tell me that you don’t socialize online either.”

  “We hang out at Sundance and Vimeo and Vicker.”

  He cocked one eyebrow in puzzlement. “What are those?”

  “Filmmaker sites.” They maintained gender- and age-neutral identities on the sites, posting so that no one would track the messages back to them. It was mostly because their parents were sure that they would be cyberstalked by dirty old men. Louise doubted that anyone would be interested in them, but the secrecy kept their parents from discovering their activities on questionable sites.

  “So you’re totally unaware that there are kids in this school that can quote all of The Queen’s Pantaloons?”

  “All of it?”

  “They totally mess up the timing of the jokes, but yeah.”

  * * *

  The news went through the fifth grade like a virus, visibly moving from kid to kid. The students that had been told they were Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo stared at the twins as if they had suddenly become conjoined. Which would have been totally annoying if it weren’t for the state of their finances.

  After the first bell, Louise logged quickly into their store and checked their account balances.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered.

  Jillian leaned over and frowned at the screen. “What is that?”

  “That’s what YourStore is waiting for us to claim. They’ve been selling our stuff. Lots of our stuff.”

  Jillian slapped a hand over her mouth to smother a squeal.

  “We still have to figure some way to claim it,” Louise said. “We need a bank account.”

  “We’ll get Mom and Dad to set up an bank account for us. With that much money involved, they’d be crazy not to let us claim it!”

  Louise squinted, trying to see the future events unfolding implied by the numbers on the screen. “I don’t think they’ll let us keep it.”

  “Why not?” Jillian cried. “It’s ours! We earned it! It’s not like we can give it back either.”

  “I mean ‘keep it’ as ‘spend it the way we want.’ They’ll want to put it all away for our college fund and things like that. Or at least, get us another playhouse. They’re not going to let us buy an antique piece of computer equipment off some unknown vendor. Remember how they got with that special-effects software we wanted to order?”

  Jillian huffed as she grudgingly acknowledged that their parents would take control of the money. “A new playhouse at least would be cool.”

  “We were saying we need a lot of money to save the babies.”

  “This is not a million dollars. It’s not going to be a million dollars any time soon. Besides, like Mom said, we can’t just pay for the babies to be born. They need a mom and dad and a place to live.”

  Louise considered the possibility of using the money to talk their mom into having the babies. She was always snarling how she hated her boss. But she really did like her job and, knowing their mom, she’d feel as if she should quit working until the babies were in kindergarten. The money at YourStore seemed like a lot of money to them, but it didn’t equal to their mother’s salary for several years.

  “Think April would help set up a bank account?” Jillian asked.

  “No,” Louise said. Their mother’s work had made them aware of salaries and taxes. “If she did, this would look like taxable income for her. She would have to report it and pay taxes on it.”

>   Jillian frowned at the numbers. “I wish Alexander could help us. It must be great to be all grown up and have all this stupid kid stuff over with. I would love for once to be able to stay up as late as we want, to eat pizza every night for a week, and not have to clean our room all the time.”

  Louise nodded. Claiming the money would be no problem for an adult.

  “Oh! Oh!” Jillian cried and started to sort through data on her tablet. “We just need an adult’s social security number. Someone that doesn’t have to worry about added income. Esme is in another solar system. She doesn’t have to worry about filing taxes. We can use her number as the adult on our account.”

  Louise ran the plan over in her mind, looking for dangers. They could set up a joint account, link YourStore to it, and then only use the money online. If they used it carefully, there would be little activity to draw notice to it. It seemed safe enough. “As long as we don’t buy anything big and expensive.”

  “Like a pony?” Jillian said and did a little mime of trying to hide said animal. “What pony? Oh, that pony! It followed us home, can we keep it?”

  Louise laughed out loud.

  “Louise,” Miss Hamilton said, “keep it down.”

  Louise smothered giggles.

  “There,” Jillian announced. “And done.”

  “Jilly!” Louise whispered fiercely. “You didn’t!”

  “I did,” Jillian said without remorse. “And the flash drive adapter ordered with express shipping, no signature required. It will be here tomorrow. All we have to do is beat Mom and Dad home.”

  Louise thought of Tesla sitting in their locker, waiting to escort them home. “And keep Tesla from ratting us out.”

  * * *

  Louise won the flip of the coin. After they got off the train the next afternoon, she ran on ahead while Jillian followed slowly with Tesla. She had felt nearly sick with worry all day and hadn’t slept well the night before. They had done things behind their parents’ back before but never to a point that involved thousands of dollars. Their baby brother and sisters, though, were completely helpless and the deadline for their disposal was just months away. The task of saving them loomed huge and impossible. The money was their only advantage.

  As horrible as hiding the YourStore sales from their parents was, they had to keep the new bank account secret. The delivery of the antique equipment to deal with Esme’s weird mystery was putting everything at risk. If their parents opened the package and started to ask how they had afforded the computer part, not even Jillian could spin a lie believable enough to save them.

  Since Louise couldn’t get to sleep, she had spent the late hours hiding under her blankets and downloading emulators and drivers. In theory, all she needed to do was plug in the flash drive and transfer whatever data it was holding. Once they had a copy of the data, they could hide all the evidence of their crimes.

  Her heart fell when there wasn’t any package on their doorstep. Did their mom come home early? Did someone steal it? Or would it come tomorrow?

  Louise fumbled through unlocking their front door and pushed it open. Lying in the hallway was a bulky envelope that the delivery person had pushed through the mail slot. Its address label read “J. E. Mayer.”

  Relief flooded through her. “Oh, thank god. This better be worth it.”

  Shaking, she ran upstairs. The faster they used the reader and got it hidden away, the less chance they’d get caught. She had it connected before Jillian came in the front door. She could hear her twin thumping around downstairs while she downloaded everything onto her tablet.

  The television went on in the kitchen, blaring out the news, moments before Jillian charged upstairs. She must have parked Tesla somewhere downstairs, as she was alone.

  “Well?”

  “It came. It works. Here.” She flicked files across their home system to Jillian’s tablet. She tucked the flash drive back into the Chinese box. The last step was to hide the reader and the mailer away where their parents wouldn’t find them. “There’s just one large PDF file and lots of jpegs. I think they’re photographs.”

  “More pictures,” Jillian complained as she scrolled down the listing of files. “Etienne Dufae 1843. Roland Dufae 1880. Are those the dates the pictures were taken?” She tapped the thumbnail of the first picture and gasped. “Oh wow!”

  Louise glanced up from stuffing the reader into the back of the camera drawer. Jillian was gazing raptly at a boy who could be their older brother. The photo was in black and white, the clothes were ridiculously old-fashioned, but there was no mistaking the family resemblance. “Well, at least we know who he is.”

  “We do?”

  “Doh, we’re related to him.” Louise considered the mailer. Their parents might see it if she just put it in their trashcan. She folded it neatly so that the mailing label was hidden and tucked it into the bottom of her backpack. Tomorrow she’d throw it out at the train station. “He’s probably our grandfather or something.”

  “It says 1843. More like great-great-grandfather.” Jillian tapped on the next thumbnail. “Etienne had his own store.”

  The boy stood under a storefront sign that read: E. Dufae & Co., Watchmakers and Jewelers.

  “Where do you think that was taken?” Louise said.

  “It’s ‘Cambridge, MA 1843’ so I’m guessing in the Boston area.”

  Leonardo had gone to M.I.T in Cambridge. Orville had been born there and his mother had been killed there. Louise felt like she suddenly had sunk roots deep into distant soil. It was an odd feeling, suddenly being anchored like that, making her aware how adrift they had been beforehand with no family history beyond where their parents had gone to college.

  Jillian suddenly squealed loudly in pure excitement and leapt up to spring around the room, shouting and flailing her tablet.

  “What? What?” Louise started to flick open photographs, trying to find the one that got Jillian excited.

  “We’re elves!” Jillian shoved her tablet out to show Louise.

  The female in the black and white photo could have been Jillian; she looked more her twin than Louise did. Only the female was an elf. With her dark long hair coiled like a crown on her head, there was no mistaking the point of her ears or the almond shape of her eyes. She sat in the high-back chair like a queen on a throne. From the Victrola beside her chair to the newspaper on her lap, everything said “Earth” while she remained wholly elf.

  “That’s—that’s not possible,” Louise stammered.

  “She’s an elf and she looks like me and she’s a Dufae. Josephina Dufae.”

  Louise stared at the picture as her insides went all fluttery with excitement. This couldn’t be real. It had to be like the Danish king comment on the back of Neil Shenske’s photograph. She picked up her own tablet and started to open the other photographs for more proof. It was impossible to tell in the other pictures; the subjects all wore hats. Certainly, though, the earlier Dufaes had that elf look around the eyes.

  One labeled simply “Dufae” proved to be a scanned copy of a handwritten document showing their family tree. The top branches were all in Elvish runes. The name that formed the trunk, merging all the Elvish bloodlines, was Guillaume Ruelle Dufae. Jillian was right in one regard; the Dufaes started out as elves. Somehow, though, they became Frenchmen. Guillaume had married a Bridget Dubois. There was no indication if she was human or elf; no information was given on her except the date of their marriage and her death. She apparently died giving birth to Etienne because his birth date was the same day. For Guillaume’s death, it was given as only September 1792.

  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 pro
of 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.