Between Shifts (The City Between Book 2)

by W. R. Gingell

  Between Shifts

  The City Between: Book Two

  W.R. Gingell

  Contents

  Warning!

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Newsletter Sign Up

  Warning! Within the pages of this book, you will find murders, mayhem, and Australian spelling. My Korean skills are barely so-so, and romanisations may not always be searchable online.

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

  You can get book three, BETWEEN FLOORS, here. Plus, join my mailing list for latest publication news and the occasional freebie!

  The City Between Series

  Between Jobs

  Between Shifts

  Between Floors

  BETWEEN SHIFTS is © 2018 by W.R. Gingell

  Cover by Seedlings Design Studio

  With many thanks to the people at Kalbi in North Hobart,

  who put up with my awkwardness on a weekly basis

  while I take over one of their tables

  and gorge myself on Bibimbap.

  Chapter One

  I woke to the softness of near dark. The bed was warm beneath my body, but my pillow felt cold against my cheek. Beside me, a weight pressed down on the bed.

  Just a bit of weight. Just enough for someone to have their knee on the bed, leaning over me…

  I turned my head slowly, eyes wide and frozen in the darkness, and the thing leaning over me—the massive thing with a real weight and presence to it—tilted its head. Inky black against the softer dark of my bedroom wall, it was broad-shouldered and human shaped.

  When I turned my head, it lunged for my neck.

  I woke with a yell, throwing wild punches; and this time I woke properly. But as I woke, still punching and kicking, I woke to a redux. A huge shadow loomed over me, utterly solid and real, shoulders broad against the lighter room.

  I grabbed something, I don’t know what, and swung wildly, blind and deaf to everything else in my fixation on that huge shadow.

  It darted back instead of disappearing, and I followed, panting and crying all at once. The corner of one bedpost caught me near the hairline, knocking me back, and for a moment I saw a bright burst of light.

  Through the light, a voice said, “Pet. Pet.”

  What?

  “Pet.”

  Zero. It was Zero.

  I put down the thing I was holding with a shaking hand—what was it? A knife? Where the heck had that come from?—and panted rather than said, “Please don’t stand next to me when I’m sleeping.”

  A small glow of light lit Zero’s face; then softly, subtly, the entire room. “Why?”

  “That’s where the nightmare stands,” I said. I sat up again, shivering, and rubbed the bump I could already feel forming on my head. There was a bit of dampness there. “Did I cut you?”

  “No,” he said, but I could see a faint trickle of midnight blue on one of his arms. “Do you always sleep with a knife under your pillow?”

  “No,” I said. Seriously, where the flaming heck had that come from?

  “Do you always wake up swinging?”

  “No,” I said again. This was the first time I remembered waking up fighting. “Usually I wake up screaming.”

  Zero nodded, his eyes hooded and deep with thoughts while shadows flickered across his pale face. What was he thinking about? “Come out,” he said, and vanished from the room.

  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that—the way they can appear and disappear around the house whenever they want.

  After he left, I flopped onto my back in the bed with the sweat cold on my brow but relief coursing through me. They were back. My psychos were finally back. Maybe I could have a night without the Nightmare again, now.

  That’d be nice.

  I puffed a shaky breath of air at the ceiling, and saw a soft glow in my peripheral. It would have made me jump if I didn’t already know what it was. Over on the bookshelf there was a tiny tree that was growing on a tiny rock, its roots wrapped around and around that rock as if it was trying to force nutrients from it.

  A dryad, Athelas calls it.

  Flaming heck. Zero must have seen it.

  That was another thing Athelas had said—don’t let Zero see the dryad if you can help it. Well, Zero must have seen it when he was in here; the thing was glowing like a nightlight.

  The little fella had been glowing like that the last few nights, too. Don’t ask me how a little tree on a rock can glow, because I don’t know. I don’t know how a tin of cat food can be a little tree on a rock, either; but the dryad had definitely started out as a tin of cat food.

  Well, I kinda know.

  There are layers to reality.

  Like trifle, Athelas says, but it’s not exactly like that. There’s the real world—the human world, my three psychos call it, because to them the real world is the one underneath, or Behind, or wherever it is. Then there’s the bit between, like custard but not quite.

  Maybe I should try that again.

  They call it Behind and Between, but that’s not really right, either. They—

  Man, this is hard.

  There are layers to reality. There’s the human world, of course; but if you know how to see it—if you know where to see it—there’s a place called Between that’s like reality plus. Reality plus a bit of fae around the edges. Reality plus an extra edge of danger. Somewhere that an umbrella can be an umbrella or a sword, depending on how you see it. Somewhere that a tin of cat food could be a little rock with a tree on it.

  Somewhere creatures you didn’t know were real outside the pages of a book pass through, stealing away some unwary humans and stabbing the others with knockout needles.

  If you know how to see it, you can go from the human world into Between; and from there to Behind.

  If you’re mad enough.

  I don’t really recommend it.

  But if you’ve ever driven up to the crest of the southern outlet just before you get into Hobart and thought the skyline looked like a castle for just the blink of an eye before it turned back into a normal city skyline, and thought you’d just imagined it—

  You didn’t.

  You just got a sight of Hobart Between.

  Places aren’t what they seem to be, and neither are things when it comes to Between.

  Once you start seeing it, it’s hard to stop. Worse, you start to attract the attention of Behindkind like fae and vampires, so it’s better not to try to start with.

  Unless you’re me. Then you have to keep doing it.

  Because nowadays there are three Behindkind living in my house: two fae and a vampire.

  “Pet,” said a voice with an edge of a growl to it.

  “Heck,” I said, flicking my legs out of bed. It was time to get up.

  My owners were home.

  They were all there when I got downstairs: Zero, fae, white as snow—so white he almost glowed and almost as big as a horse—Athelas, also fae; sitting in his favourite leather chair with one leg crossed over the other, as tranquil and subtly amused as always, and JinYeong, vampire; the creases of his trousers sharper than his vampire teeth, his hands in his pockets and his mouth sulky as usual.

  “Ah, Pet,” said Athelas. He was smiling, but I felt a bit worried about this smile. “I see you’re well. Are you responsible for the cut my lord is sporting?”
>
  My eyes flicked over to Zero. There could have been the faintest gleam of amusement to his eyes, or maybe ruefulness.

  I said, “You lot shouldn’t come into my bedroom without knocking.”

  JinYeong hissed a small laugh and stalked away into the kitchen. Athelas chuckled, and I suddenly felt a lot less worried.

  “Exactly what I told Zero,” he said. “I did not, however, expect him to come out of the encounter with an injury.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I muttered. I still felt bad about that, but it wasn’t as if Zero couldn’t kill me several times over. I’d seen him wandering around Hobart with worse injuries than I’d given him this morning. The knife wound I’d given him was only a scratch.

  I could see it colouring the edges of the tear in his shirt, staining it bright blue at the edges and fainter indigo further in.

  Oh. It was still bleeding pretty well, though.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t sleep with a knife under your pillow,” Zero said.

  “Didn’t mean to,” I said gruffly. I wish I knew how the knife had gotten there. It wasn’t like anyone else could sneak into the house these days. Not without a good amount of magic, anyway. Had I put it there ages ago, before the psychos came here to live, and forgotten about it while they scared the Nightmare away?

  “I’ll teach you how to use one later. Or perhaps a sword.”

  “Okay!” I said, before he could change his mind. He’d said he was going to teach me a couple weeks ago, but they’d been gone since then, and I didn’t want to miss out again. “Later, when?”

  “Soon,” he said. “Coffee.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. I’d almost forgotten part of my function as pet—make the tea and coffee. I’d been practising, too; tea didn’t come naturally to me, so I’d been looking up a few things on the library computer. I’d found a loose-leaf earl grey tea for Athelas, too; he was the only one who drank tea, so I could have just skated by, but he was also the only one who regularly told me stuff, so I liked to keep him happy.

  It was nice to hear the back and forth of Zero and Athelas’ voices as I got out the tea things—it was even nice to hear the murmur of carpet as JinYeong crossed it; the house had been really quiet for the nearly two weeks they’d been gone. I’d just gotten used to having them in the house when they left again to take care of some changelings that had been taking over human lives, and it had seemed like a lot longer than two weeks. I’d gotten used to them very quickly.

  And that reminded me, I thought, as I poured tea and prepared the coffee plunger. I hadn’t seen the crazy old homeless bloke lately, either. He was the only survivor of a nasty murder scene over the road, and the survivor of a bloodbath of fae a bit later, so if anyone had reason to be slightly mad, he did.

  I wouldn’t blame him if he’d disappeared for a few years again—I’d probably do the same thing if I’d survived what he’d survived.

  Actually, now that I came to think of it, I had survived that. I’d survived the murder of my parents and the murder of the guy across the road. I’d survived a few Behindkind attacks, too. But for me, running away had never seemed like an appealing prospect; before, because I desperately wanted to keep my parents’ house; now, because I finally felt as though maybe I was safe for the first time in my life.

  Which meant I was as completely troppo as the old bloke, because living with three otherworldly psychos was definitely not safe.

  “You’re cracked,” I said to the broken tile above the sink, as I dropped the used teaspoons with a clatter.

  “I’m sure you’ve already thought of it,” said Athelas’ voice as I balanced the tea and coffee tray to carry it out, “but I wonder if you’ve found a good source of moving water yet, Zero?”

  “Are you feeling particularly weak?”

  A brief pause. Athelas didn’t sigh, but he might as well have. “Not particularly, but if you’re intent upon keeping us in this hamlet for the next goodness-knows-how-long—”

  “It’s hardly a hamlet.”

  “—then we should consider finding a source to recharge.”

  “You lot got batteries, have you?” I asked, stepping down into the living room with my tray. It wouldn’t surprise me. There was still a lot I didn’t know about the fae—or vampires. Search engines were more helpful about vampires than fae, but they weren’t that useful, either.

  They ignored me.

  JinYeong took his coffee from me with a slight lift of the lip to bare one tooth, but he didn’t have a bloody look in his eyes, so I took it as a good morning more than a watch out or you’re dead kind of thing.

  Zero said, “There’s a flowing body of water roughly forty kilometres away as the crow flies, and a waterfall roughly the same distance away in a different direction.”

  I passed Athelas his tea and made a mental note to figure out what they meant by recharging and water. I mean, water can recharge stuff if it’s hydro-powered, but I didn’t think Zero was hydro-powered. He was too active away from water—though mind you, his body was big enough to hold a pretty big charge if they really did run on water.

  It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.

  Dissatisfied, I sat down beside JinYeong with my own coffee, trying not to wrinkle my nose. Even if I hadn’t known they were home because of Zero fetching me, I would have been able to tell by the smell of JinYeong’s cologne hanging around the living room.

  “Don’t get comfortable, Pet,” warned Athelas.

  “What? Thought you wanted me here? Zero called me down.”

  “We did; but not merely for tea and coffee.”

  “Why have you got a dryad in your bedroom?” Zero asked. “Where did it come from?”

  If I hadn’t been focused on Athelas, I might have jumped. “You mean the little tree on a rock?”

  “It’s a dryad.”

  “Dunno, it’s just sitting there. It always sits there.”

  That was actually true. It had been sitting there ever since I brought it home from the supermarket where I found it; but when I found it, it had been a tin of cat food. And the supermarket hadn’t exactly been the supermarket at that point, either. Remember what I said about layers?

  But it was a lie, too, even if I didn’t actually lie; a lie Athelas had advised me to tell.

  Zero said exactly what I’d hoped he would say, and he didn’t seem surprised when he said it, either. “It was always in the house, I suppose?”

  “Shouldn’t it be here?”

  He said, “Don’t answer questions with questions,” but he didn’t follow up, either, so he must have believed me.

  I felt a bit bad about that, but mostly I felt relieved. I’m a really bad liar, and I was just lucky he hadn’t noticed. That’s one good thing about the fae—they think of all humans as sort of slightly more intelligent pets, and that means they underestimate us a lot. If the stories I’ve researched online are right, they’ve been doing that for thousands of years.

  You think they would have learned by now, but if my three psychos are any indicator they’re just as superior as ever.

  “Zero didn’t call you down so you could sit down and make yourself comfortable with coffee and ask questions,” Athelas said mildly.

  “Fair point. What’s up?”

  Zero said, “First, do something about that dryad by the end of the month.”

  “Yeah,” I said, glumly. Dunno what I was supposed to do about it; it was a little tree on a rock. Was I supposed to plant it in the garden or something?

  “And get some more food in the house. We’ll need a big dinner before we go out.”

  I cupped my hands around my coffee, hunching my shoulders. “You’re going out again already? Didn’t you catch all the changelings?”

  “We caught all the changelings,” Athelas said, smiling faintly. “Never fear, we’ll not be long. However, we’ve got to find a source of moving water nearby. If you’re a good pet, perhaps we’ll take you with us.”

  Zero
opened his mouth, and I thought he was going to object, but he shut it again and ducked away into the alcove beneath my bedroom that he uses as a study and bedroom for the few hours per night that he sleeps.

  Okay, so maybe I was going, too? I craned my neck to see Zero. “You want me to go shopping right now?”

  “Not right now,” Zero said. “There’s some unpacking for you to do.”

  “What unpacking?” I asked. There were only two packs on the floor by the chairs; a black leather satchel type thing I’d seen slung over Zero’s shoulder when he left, and the neat doctor’s bag that Athelas used when he travelled. I pointed at them. “That?”

  “Not mine,” said Athelas. His eyes were gleaming with amusement. “You’ll be busy enough with Zero’s.”

  “Yeah?” I looked doubtfully at the satchel and grabbed the strap.

  “I’ll carry it,” Zero told me, stepping briefly from the alcove again to pluck the satchel away from me.

  It must have been pretty heavy, because I heard the slight grunt he gave as he picked it up, and Zero doesn’t really grunt at much. He put the satchel over by the bookcase between the windows on the far side of the living room, and when he turned his back, I tugged at its handle cautiously to test the weight.

  I nearly fell over. It didn’t even shift. It just sat there, like it thought it was Thor’s hammer or something.

  “What’s in there?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Books,” said Zero, turning back. There was a faint narrowing to his eyes that meant he knew I’d tried to lift the bag and was laughing at me.

  “Yeah? A library full?”

  “Very nearly.”

  “Hang on, what?”