Between Shifts (The City Between Book 2)

by W. R. Gingell

  The stock boy was one of those tall, good-looking blokes that knows he’s good-looking. You know: ruffled brown hair and an almost lantern chin, hazel eyes and a bit of a crooked grin. Well, I was only guessing about the last bit; he definitely didn’t grin at me. He didn’t really try to teach me how to do anything, either, but all he was doing was putting stuff on the shelves and it didn’t look too hard. He didn’t try to talk to me.

  I said, “Hi,” anyway.

  He sort of grunted, which was rude, but I was still pretty mellow so I just craned to see his name badge and said, “Name’s Pet.”

  “Daniel,” he said.

  “Your name badge says Scott,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I forgot my badge so they gave me this one.”

  “Nice of ’em.”

  “Yeah. They usually give us the one that says Barbara.”

  “Who’s Barbara?”

  He looked at me sideways. “No one knows. It’s one of the old badges; she probably hasn’t been here for twenty years.”

  I straightened the cans I’d put on the shelf and looked around for somewhere to put the plastic they’d been wrapped in. Daniel nodded briefly at the shopping trolley that was hiding behind the cage of stock we were working on and I grinned my thanks at him.

  At least I knew he was capable of being useful if he wanted to be.

  “There were police outside,” I said, going back for another carton. “When I came in, I mean.”

  There had been, too; though it was anyone’s guess whether they’d been collecting evidence or contaminating it, if I was to believe Detective Tuatu.

  “There are always police around here,” Daniel said shortly. “We get shoplifters galore.”

  “Don’t think they were here for a shoplifter,” I said. “They were messing with the bins outside.”

  “Then it’s probably another body,” he said.

  I stared at him a bit. “You get a lot of bodies?”

  “We’ve had a couple,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about it. They’ll pack up and go away soon.”

  “What, they don’t question you at all?”

  He shrugged. “What’s there to ask questions about? It’s got nothing to do with the store.”

  “Dunno,” I said doubtfully. “If there were two bodies outside my house, I’d wonder a bit.”

  “We can’t help what people throw in the rubbish bins,” said Daniel. “Those are the wrong ones.”

  “What?”

  “Those are the wrong cans. You’ve put salt reduced where the normal one goes.”

  “Oh.” I looked at the cans, and then at the ones on the shelf. “There’s already salt reduced ones up here.”

  “We can’t help what nightfill does, either,” he said. “Just take the wrong ones out and put ’em in the cage with the other overstocks.”

  “Right,” I nodded. He was pretty casual about dead bodies, for someone around my age.

  I mean, I was a bit more casual about them these days, but I’d seen a lot of bodies lately. Actually, I’d seen a lot of bodies over my lifetime, and nothing would ever be as bad as the first two I saw. Seeing your parents’ dead bodies will do that to you.

  What was his excuse?

  If I’d been working harder through the day, I probably would have been sore and tired by lunch time. Lucky for me, I was working with Daniel all day. He moved at the physical equivalent of a drawl, and even if he wasn’t talkative at least he didn’t care when I went for my breaks, so long as I didn’t mention the couple extra minutes he took on his own breaks. Hopefully I’d be working with him most days; it’d be a nice, easy way to go poking around the store without anyone noticing I wasn’t where I was meant to be.

  I went and looked for JinYeong when lunch came around, dodging the couple of giggling cash office girls who were asking the other women in the staff room if they’d seen the new assistant manager. Since there were sighs of appreciation and a general expressive exchanging of looks, I guessed he must be pretty good looking.

  He must be, if the cash office girls were talking about him instead of their new cash office assistant.

  I grinned. It would be fun to tell JinYeong that the cash office girls were more interested in the new assistant manager than they were in him.

  Unfortunately for my plans, JinYeong wasn’t in the cash office when I peered through the glass stripes of the two-way glass to look for him. He wasn’t in the little tea-making area, either, though that didn’t really surprise me; he wouldn’t have made his own coffee when he could find someone to do it for him.

  I found him in the manager’s office, smirking.

  Flamin’ typical. How had he managed to come into the store to be a cash office assistant, and end up as the assistant manager? I should’ve known.

  “What the heck?” I complained. “You’ve been sitting up here all day playing manager while I’ve been down there working like a slave?”

  JinYeong’s smirk got a couple degrees more annoying. He opened his mouth to say something—and what’s the bet it would have been “Coppi, Petteu!”—but one of the cash office ladies knocked coyly on the open office door just in time.

  “I’m going out to the shop for coffee,” she said brightly. It was the woman from this morning; the one who’d taken him upstairs with her. “We always shout you your first coffee in the cash office, even if it was a mistake about you being there.”

  “Ah!” said JinYeong in satisfaction, and gave vent to a flow of words that the cash office lady nodded at every so often, like she was a waitress taking his order. I suppose it was close enough.

  It was funny, though; I saw the slight blankness in her eyes that meant JinYeong was using his vampiric powers of persuasion, and I wondered why. She would have done whatever he asked, anyway, and as far as I could tell, he was only asking for coffee. Fancy coffee, yeah; but just coffee.

  I said to her by way of a joke, “Me too. I’ll have what he’s having,” and she gave me a confused, sideways look. I don’t know if it was because JinYeong was still messing with her mind, or if it was because she wanted me to know exactly how insignificant I was, but either way, I just grinned back at her. I could make my own coffee.

  I didn’t occur to me until she turned pertly and left with a spring in her step, that she’d taken JinYeong’s orders in Korean, without a blink. Did she understand Korean, or…?

  “Waaaait a minute!” I said accusingly.

  “Petteu!” JinYeong snapped. “Kugol hajima!”

  “Stop what? You gotta use your mojo, don’t you? Because they can’t understand you if you don’t use your little manipulation thing!”

  “Ah, dabdabhae,” muttered JinYeong. He got up from the desk and stalked around it, backing me into the corner of the office.

  That was annoying, but all he did was talk menacingly at me in Korean for a few minutes, and it was really satisfying to wait until he finished before I said, very slowly and clearly, “I don’t. Speak. Korean. I have. No idea. What you just. Said.”

  JinYeong showed me his teeth, then stalked back around the desk to sit down on his chair. He pointed at the chair opposite and said, “Anja.”

  I gave him a look. “I’m a pet, not a dog. I don’t sit on command.” I jumped myself up on his desk and added in a helpful sort of way, “Think of me as a cat. I might do what you tell me to do, or I might not.”

  JinYeong’s brow went up. Questioningly now, he said, “Chero?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do what Zero tells me to do.”

  “Jjincha dabdabhae!” said JinYeong, in exasperation. He said something else, where I heard Zero’s name again, and something I was pretty sure was dog. It was either dog or swearing, anyway.

  “What about it?” I demanded. “I said I wasn’t your dog. I can be Zero’s dog if I want. Anyway, I still wanna know how come you’ve been sitting up here doing nothing while I’ve been working myself to the bone downstairs.”

  JinYeong raised a brow again and point
ed at the computer screen. There were about twenty camera feeds up there in split screen; one of them showed the last aisle Daniel and I were working in. The others we’d worked were all up there, too.

  “Okay,” I said. “So maybe we weren’t killing ourselves. Anything interesting on the cameras?”

  He shrugged and tapped the screen where one of the squares was labelled alleyway. It was the only black square on the screen.

  “Well, I s’pose we know for sure it was someone here,” I said. “Or that someone here helped whoever it was. So what else have you been doing?”

  He gave me a look.

  “What, nothing? You’ve just been watching the cameras all day?”

  “Ani,” said JinYeong, and now he pursed his lips in a distinctly satisfied smile.

  “Oh, right; you’ve been flirting with all the female staff members,” I remarked. “I’m sure that’ll be useful.”

  JinYeong lifted one shoulder carelessly and let it drop. As he did, the cash office lady came back again with three coffees in a cardboard holder and an extra sheen of lip gloss glittering on her lips.

  Hang on. She really got me a coffee, too?

  I looked over in surprise at JinYeong, who glowered at me. So that’s what he’d been telling me to stop!

  The cash office lady gave him his coffee, smiling, and took her own. Then she pushed the cardboard tray at me without quite looking at me, coffee and all.

  I took it, chucking the cardboard tray on JinYeong’s desk, and that made her jump. She turned and gave me a surprised, disdainful look that asked, without actually asking, why I was still here, breathing the same air as her and JinYeong. I was pretty sure she didn’t even remember giving me the coffee.

  I couldn’t help grinning again. This was interesting. So if I asked someone to do something while they were under JinYeong’s influence, they’d do that, too?

  “Petteu,” growled JinYeong. “Naga.”

  “All right, all right, keep your knickers on,” I said, still grinning. “Gotta go have some lunch, anyway.”

  Daniel looked a bit more bright and perky after lunch, though I didn’t notice it made him any quicker at his work. It did make him look around a lot, though, so I wasn’t surprised when a uniformed lady came down our aisle with a handful of tickets to put up on the shelves.

  She was at least ten years older than me and Daniel, but that didn’t stop his eyes lighting up, or the slight flush of red in his cheeks. I nearly grinned, but he probably would’ve glared at me and I wasn’t in the business of making enemies at the moment.

  She was a nervous lady, I thought. Pretty, but not beautiful; in her thirties, with a round chin and real gold curls like Goldilocks should have had. Her name badge said Erica, and I got the feeling that she wasn’t comfortable. I’m not sure exactly why. She didn’t smile at Daniel until she was nearly level with him, but when she did it was a real smile, like they were good friends but maybe she was trying to keep a bit of distance between them.

  I could understand that. He was obviously fascinated with her, and at her age she ought to be able to tell. I mean, if it was obvious to me, it must have been blindingly obvious to her. She still did all the usual hello things, though, and she smiled at me as well to make sure she wasn’t just singling him out.

  So why did I feel like she wasn’t quite comfortable?

  It wasn’t pertinent to the body outside, but I’m nosy and I like to know what’s happening around me, so I was a bit peeved when a customer pulled me away to get them some nappies that weren’t on the shelf. By rights, Daniel should have got them—he was the one who was trained and knew where stuff was. But of course Daniel was too busy pretending not to look at Erica and then watching her when she wasn’t looking at him, and he completely ignored the customer.

  I dunno, maybe he did it on purpose—maybe it was part of his repertoire as a stock boy.

  Begrudgingly, I trotted out into the storeroom to look for the box of nappies, and felt the faint but certain stirrings of excitement around the edges of the world that meant something Behindkind was happening.

  I froze, the concrete floor beneath me swirling with shadows that weren’t normal shadows from the sun through the roller door. What was that? Who was playing with Between? Was something coming through?

  I threw a quick look around the storeroom, but there was no one else around. I could see the nappies I needed on one of the pallets of stock that were closest to the roller door, stuck behind all the others and with no way through but to climb over. The tantalising feeling of Between opening and closing was somewhere in the middle of the stack of pallets, too; if I was to climb over the top, I could take care of both problems at once.

  Another glance around at the empty storeroom, and I scrambled on top of the pallets, my hands flat against the plastic wrap around them so it didn’t squeak and give me away. Lucky for me, whatever was tickling Between was also making a bit of noise itself—scratches and clacking, like a really big spider or maybe just something with a small hammer digging for it in the pallets. Up there, I could see it, too; the softening of edges that turned boxes of stock into steps climbing high up into the roof and made the emergency fire door look like a big sign with foreign writing on it instead.

  And maybe it was just the lycanthropy starting to kick in, but I could have sworn I could smell a difference, too; a clear, metallic sort of smell that wasn’t the cold mustiness of the concrete in the storeroom.

  I was halfway across the top of the pallets, moving slowly, when I saw a white head and broad shoulders in between pallets where they couldn’t possibly have fit. It was definitely not a human thing to do—not unless that human had been murdered by being crushed between pallets.

  And I mean, if he had been murdered, he wouldn’t be moving, would he?

  What was Zero doing here?

  I watched him reach up and through a pallet as if it wasn’t there, feeling carefully for something that looked like it was wriggling away from him.

  “Oi,” I said. “You can’t do that.”

  Zero’s shoulders stiffened, and he turned around. “You shouldn’t be crawling around on top of the load,” was all he said.

  “I know. Health and safety. But a customer wants a box of nappies and I can’t reach ’em so—”

  The box of nappies rocked from side to side, then got up and scuttled across the top of the load toward me.

  “Yikes!” I said, and fell on my backside, squashing a box of packaged noodles. I gingerly picked up the box when it got to me, and there was a little spider thing beneath it, all metal legs and bolt-encrusted body. “Thanks,” I said to it, and patted it carefully where there were no bolts, just in case those were the Between equivalent of eyes.

  “Go back out,” Zero said. “I’ve got this area covered.”

  “Didn’t think you were coming in with us,” I told him, scrambling back off the pallets of stock. “Though it was just me and JinYeong since it’s his fault.”

  Zero emerged from between the pallets without disturbing them by so much as a millimetre. “I wasn’t.”

  “Got bored, did you? You weren’t here this morning.”

  “The storeman was taken suddenly…ill.”

  “Bet he was,” I said. “He wasn’t ill in a way that Detective Tuatu’s gunna worry about, was he?”

  Zero looked at me for a long, expressionless moment. I couldn’t figure out if he was thinking about how to answer, or what to answer, but he said at last, “No.”

  “All right,” I said, nodding, and took the box of nappies out to the customer.

  Erica was gone from the aisle by the time I got back, and Daniel was back to his laconic, inattentive self. That was okay; I didn’t think there was too much more I could get out of him that was useful, anyway, and I was curious about why Zero had so suddenly appeared. I was sure he hadn’t planned on coming in with JinYeong and me—actually, I’d got the idea he was planning something else with Athelas.

  What made him change his
mind?

  I still hadn’t come to a reasonable conclusion by the time my shift ended. Daniel finished at the same time, but he had to stop and explain why we didn’t get our last cage finished before he went home.

  Lucky me, I could go straight away.

  I nipped off to the locker room while Daniel was still explaining to Rhonda why two people hadn’t been able to finish their final cage of the day. I plunged straight into a fog of perfume as soon as I opened the door of the ladies’ locker room, and someone’s voice behind a line of lockers said, “No, he’ll be waiting for me if I go out now!”

  I wasn’t trying to be quiet or anything, but by now it was habit. I slowed down and pricked up my ears.

  That’s just a manner of speaking. Despite the lycanthropy, I wasn’t feeling that wolfish yet.

  I put the sleeve of my shirt over my nose to protect against the fog, but it didn’t do much to protect my nostrils from burning with every breath in. I would have complained, but I would have had to take away my hand from my nose, and there was no way I was gunna do that.

  Someone was still spraying it, too; I heard the shhhhh noise behind the sound of a woman’s voice. The voice stopped for a moment, and there was the chirpy sound of someone replying by phone.

  “I can’t!” she said, her voice hushed. “Please! Just meet me outside in half an hour!”

  There was another chirpy moment while the other person spoke, then she said, “All right. An hour. Please come!”

  Now I was really curious. I had to go around the lockers she was behind, anyway; my locker was on that wall. So I kept going, not taking too much care to keep quiet. Despite that, when I came around the corner, Erica and her golden curls jumped just as violently as if I’d snuck up on her.

  “Sorry!” I said brightly, as she gasped and put one hand to her chest. “Just gotta get me lunch bag.”

  I took it out of the locker and waggled it at her, and sauntered away again. I was pretty sure that normal human interactions meant ignoring the kind of thing I’d just overheard, and I didn’t want to be too weird on my first day. Not much good being undercover if everyone thought I was a weirdo.