Wen Spencer - Wolf Who Rules

"I like knowing where I stand."

"Yeah, nice when you can get it." The oni kept walking. "These are the old steam tunnels that used to heat all of Oakland."

"Who are you?"

"My name is my own to have." The oni said.

"That makes it awkward to thank you."

The oni paused to look at him. Finally, he said, "You can call me Tommy."

"Tommy," Wolf bowed. "Thank you."

Tommy grunted as if surprised.

"You are Lord Tomtom's son?" Wolf asked.

Tommy started down the tunnel without seeing if Wolf followed. "His bastard. Don't think that you did a disfavor to me by killing him. Quite the opposite. I would have killed him myself if I thought I could have gotten away with it."

"I see."

"No you don't. You have no idea. He raped my mother just to see if he could get a human pregnant. It took him months to get her knocked up, and kept her tied to the bedpost the entire time. Even after I was born, he'd come to our place and beat the snot out of both of us and rape her again, just because he could."

"Is that why you helped me?"

Tommy glanced at Wolf, ears laid back. At the next intersection, he paused to ask quietly, "What am I?"

"You? You're an oni."

"The fuck I am. I'm a human."

"Your father-"

"Was a sadist pig." Tommy stalked off. "So my good, kind, beat-to-death mother doesn't count, even though she contributed half my genes, gave birth to me, and raised me to be a man? A human man. I'm not one of them. Not that that means shit to you elves."

Wolf had never considered that the half-oni would think of themselves as human. How could he refute the difference that mindset made in a person? Making Tinker an elf had not changed her basically human outlook. If the half-oni had the capacity of human compassion, then it had to be logical that they could be revolted by the oni's lack of it.

"It means something to me," Wolf told Tommy.

Tommy stared at him again, as if trying to see into the inner workings of his mind. Perhaps he could. "We know that the plan is to kill all of us mixed blood alongside of the oni, but we're more willing to gamble on you elves being humane than the oni."

How ironic, that both sides were looking for humanity in the other.

"We don't want to be their slaves," Tommy continued. "We've had thirty years of that shit."

"Then why didn't you leave? There's a full planet for you 'humans' to go to."

Tommy made a sound of disgust. "It's all so black and white to you elves? I don't get how you can live so long and not realize the world is full of gray. We didn't leave because we couldn't."

"Why couldn't you?"

"You can't just walk out at Shutdown. The U.N. has fences and guards and you have to have the right papers or they throw you in prison. And even if you get past the guards, you need a birth certificate and social security numbers and high school diplomas to live in United States. And you need money, or you're out on the street and starving."

"And you don't have these things?"

"The oni are masters of keeping power to themselves. They've got all the paperwork. They try to keep us from learning how to speak and read English. They know how much money we're making, and they'll beat we us half to death if they even suspect we're trying to keep a little on the side. We don't know how many oni there are in Pittsburgh - who is a disguised oni and who isn't - so we can't even turn to the humans for help. The oni spy on us as much as they spy on you."

Wolf wasn't sure if Tommy was telling him the truth, but certainly it would explain how the oni kept control of the half-breeds. He could see ways around the oni enslavement - until then he remembered that all the half-oni would have been born and raised in the oni control. A child could be kept ignorant, molded into believing it was helpless.

Tommy stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. The half-oni's ears twitched. Wolf caught an echo of harsh voices. He would have to accept it as real.

"There are oni ahead of us," Tommy whispered. "We can't go this way. I can only cloud their sight and they have noses like dogs."

Wolf nodded, and followed Tommy back to a tunnel they'd passed before. They went through a maze of turns and up a flight of stairs to go through another grate into a basement stacked high with cardboard boxes. The labels indicated that the boxes once held cans of food. Just as Wolf wondered if they still contained their original contents, Tommy opened a door and the smell of cooking food flooded over them.

Beyond the door was a large kitchen filled with Asians. A low right-angled counter divided the kitchen off from the restaurant's dining room. The long leg into the dining room was a bakery display case filled with buns and breads.

"What are you doing here, Tommy?" One of the cooks, an old man, asked in Mandarin as he took a tray of buns from the oven. "Bringing him here?"

"The oni are in the steam tunnels," Tommy answered in the same tongue.

"Ugh!" the old man grunted. "You get us all killed."

Wolf looked at the crowded kitchen. "These are all mixed bloods?"

"No." Tommy wove through the cooks. "These are all humans. That was my great-uncle."

A herd of children galloped into the kitchen from a back room. Some could pass as human - might even be fully human - but mixed in were children with horns and tails. With cries of dismay, in ones and twos, the adults yanked the children out of Wolf's path, leaving only one child standing alone.

The little female looked up at him fearlessly and he knew her. Zi.

"Hi." She cocked her head, puzzled by his presence. She had a cookie in either hand. She held one up to him. "Do you want a cookie?" And when he hesitated, she added. "I didn't drop it or anything."

"Thank you." Wolf took the cookie with his left hand and bowed slightly to her. "That is very nice of you."

"Come on." Tommy caught him by the left wrist, and said in rough low Elvish. "If oni find you here-they kill everyone."

"What is she doing here?" Wolf resisted being moved. He had demanded that the little female be kept away from people that would poison her against elves.

"No one else would take her. The humans are afraid of the oni and the oni don't give a shit. Look at me, I'm Lord Tomtom's son, and even I don't get a disguise to protect me."

Wolf scanned the kitchen, seeing this time that the children were in the arms of only small-framed, battered women. There were only two males, men made fragile by time. They used Mandarin in their fearful cries, and it was Chinese written on the signs posted around the room. The skin clan used this kind of slavery - transporting women out of their homelands to places they couldn't speak the language and then tied them down with children.

He understood now Tommy's hate. It was the same hate that fueled the genocide of the Skin Clan.

Tommy suddenly pushed him back against the wall. "Stay still! I don't have my father's talent - I can't mask a moving object from multiple watchers. They will kill everyone if they find you here!" He glanced to his uncle. "Mask the scent!"

The uncle opened the fridge, took out a container and flung the contents on the grill. An eye-watering reek filled the air. "Onions! Pepper!"

While some of the women quickly herded the children upstairs, others took out knives and attacked onions and bright red peppers. Tommy's focus was on the door. Moments later, it opened, and oni warriors crowded into the restaurant. There were a dozen large, red haired, horned males. They had war paint on their faces and carried machine guns and swords. They snarled in Oni, wrinkling up their noses against the assault of smell.

The leader was the tallest among them. He set four of the warriors to watch the street and barked orders to the others. Three warriors raided the bakery counter. The rest moved into the kitchen and back rooms. The leader picked out a female, shoved her face down onto one of the tables, tore away her skirt, and forced himself into her with brutal casualness. The woman pressed knuckles into her mouth, stifling whimpers. No one else appeared even to notice, but Tommy locked down hard on Wolf's good arm.