Between Shifts (The City Between Book 2)

by W. R. Gingell

  I tried to snarl let me go! but all that came out was an actual snarl. Detective Tuatu went white, and his arms tightened around me.

  “Just a moment, please,” said Athelas’ voice, though I couldn’t see him now. “There’s really no need to be so overwrought; in just a moment—yes, there he goes.”

  Daniel collapsed by the door, a matted mess of blood and fur, and shrank again until he was a human, now white and bloody in patches.

  “JinYeong?” asked Zero.

  “Coming; the last I saw, he was dealing with the couple of loiterers outside who wanted to ensure their pack leader’s privacy. Should I take blood from the male or the female?”

  “Both, if JinYeong doesn’t arrive soon,” Zero said.

  I wriggled furiously to get free, but although the detective panted with effort, he didn’t let me go.

  “Yogiya, yogiya,” said a familiar voice.

  “At last!” said Athelas.

  “Ah!” said JinYeong, his eyes narrowing on Daniel, who lay in a swiftly widening pool of his own blood. “Chajada!”

  “It’s the boy?” Zero said sharply. “It’s his blood?”

  “Ne.”

  Athelas knelt swiftly beside Daniel, and there was a disturbance in the blood pooling around him. Did it lift up or did it dance? I didn’t have the chance to figure that out, because Athelas moved further over, until I couldn’t see anything but Daniel’s closed-eyed face.

  Athelas asked Zero, “Do you want him to live or die? With this kind of blood loss he’ll be dead in minutes.”

  I tried to shout at them that of course we wanted him to live, but all that came out was a snarl, low and wild. Daniel twitched, his head turning blindly toward me.

  “Hold the pet!” Zero snapped. “Pet, do not shift!”

  “I’m trying!” retorted the detective, and that was almost a snarl, too.

  Wildly, I tried again to bite him, scrabbling at the floor with my feet to get to Daniel. Detective Tuatu yelled, and a vice-like hand closed around my neck.

  “Bad pet!” said Zero’s voice, with that commanding tone in it. It cut through some of the compulsion to go to Daniel, and the teeth that had begun to grow longer and rounder thinned out again.

  I choked a bit, and said hoarsely, “Save him!”

  “Take the blood we need,” said Zero. “Make sure there’s enough. Then save him. I’ll take the pet home.”

  JinYeong asked a question, his voice a garbled blur, and Zero answered, “Bring them both. That one will die Behind.”

  “Wait!” said Detective Tuatu, his voice panicked. “You can’t kill her! I didn’t call you in to kill people!”

  “You didn’t call us in,” Zero said. “Our purposes aligned for a brief time and we worked alongside you. You have no jurisdiction here.”

  “But the law—!”

  “I told you when we began,” said Zero, his voice utterly terrifying in its calmness, “that we care nothing for human courts. This shifter is Behindkind and under Behind law she will die for her crimes.”

  Detective Tuatu took two steps forward, putting himself between Zero and Erica. “You can’t kill her!”

  My eyes were clouded, but I saw JinYeong sigh. He was behind the detective before I could blink again, one arm slipping around Tuatu’s throat in a way that could have been affectionate if it hadn’t been for the way it made the detective’s eyes bulge. The other snaked down to seize Tuatu’s right wrist.

  Detective Tuatu fought for air, his mouth opening and closing, and I began to struggle again, forgetting that it was Zero’s implacable hand that held me.

  “Don’t you kill him!” I yelled at JinYeong.

  JinYeong raised one brow at me and forced the detective’s arm back toward himself, wrist upward.

  I screamed at him, or maybe I snarled again, and Zero’s hand tightened around the nape of my neck. Both of JinYeong’s brows went up this time, his eyes bright, and he grinned at me. Then he bit down on the detective’s wrist, a single, brief puncture; and let go.

  Detective Tuatu’s eyes rolled back and he collapsed onto the floor.

  Athelas, who was crouched over Daniel, hiding him from view, said over his shoulder, “The pet is very combative today.”

  There was a warning in his voice. I didn’t know if the warning was for me, or for Zero, but I didn’t care. I made an inarticulate growl and kicked out at Zero again, my eyes fixed on JinYeong.

  “I’ve noticed,” said Zero, holding me further away. “Do not bite me, Pet.”

  JinYeong licked the trace of blood from his lips slowly, mockingly, and asked another question of Zero.

  “Leave him where he is,” Zero told him. “He’ll wake up soon?”

  JinYeong shrugged and spoke again.

  “Can you be finished within the hour?” Zero asked Athelas.

  “I’m nearly finished,” murmured Athelas, without turning his head. “And JinYeong will attend to the old pack leader. You can take the pet home.”

  “Ne,” agreed JinYeong. He gave me one last, exultant smile; and if I was nearly beside myself with rage and the urge to tear myself out of my own skin, I saw what he in his complacency didn’t.

  Erica staggered to her feet behind him and stood on all fours, swaying. She saw me dangling in Zero’s grip, her eyes clouded but vicious, and Zero snapped a warning at JinYeong that was just too late.

  Bloody, rage-filled, and savage, Erica shot past JinYeong, leaping over the detective’s prone body and right for me.

  Maybe she was blinded with rage. Maybe she thought I was the easiest way through, or that Zero would be so occupied with making sure I didn’t bite him that he’d have no time for her.

  Maybe she knew she was going to die anyway, and just wanted to take me with her.

  She leapt, snarling, and I saw teeth. Zero pivoted, wrenching me sideways and thrusting upward with his sword hand at the same time. Shocked and unable to see, I heard the liquid patter of something hit the floor, my legs dangling against Zero’s thigh. A reflection glittered on the freezer doors, broken into a triptych of myself, Zero, and Erica.

  I dangled from Zero’s right hand in one freezer door, my hands clinging so tightly to his wrist that the glove pulled away from the skin, and my teeth too close to that exposed wrist for his safety. Zero, side-on, filled all of the middle freezer door and extended past the frame of it; and in the third was the wolf form of Erica, gutted and impaled on Zero’s sword like some kind of grisly standard, her own teeth just a foot from Zero’s face. There was a spatter of darkness on his face and neck in the reflection.

  “Did she bite you?” I panted, shocked out of my haze—or maybe it was just because Daniel was unconscious. Somehow my teeth and my face were my own again instead of struggling to tear through my skin and turn me wolf. “Did she get you?”

  Zero turned his head, catching my eyes, and said, “Don’t bite me, Pet.”

  “Not gunna,” I said, coughing. “Did she get you?”

  Zero’s other shoulder went down a bit, and something in the reflection in the corner of my eye slid to the floor with a heavy smack, like wet concrete.

  “Don’t bite me, Pet,” Zero said again, but this time it felt like that wasn’t what he was really saying. It was hard to look away from his eyes. “She didn’t touch me.”

  “Okay,” I said, but one of my hands was stretching out to wipe away the blood anyway, just in case there were teeth marks there.

  Zero twitched me away from himself and put me down gently, facing the front of the store, with his hand still around my neck. “I’m taking the pet home,” he said again. “Bring the blood as soon as you can.”

  He pushed me in front of him, and it was no use trying to turn around and see what was happening behind him, because he was too big, and his hand was too strong. He marched me from the store with that hand. I don’t remember doors opening for us, or alarms going off, so I suppose we wandered Between at some stage before we reached the front doors. I was used to it by then,
and I didn’t notice exactly when the freezers faded and we began to walk through an icy maze of smooth, glassy Between walls that eventually brought us back into the house in the bathroom.

  “How many ways can you get Between from this house?” I asked. It was a stupid question; an inconsequential question, but my mouth wanted to talk because if it didn’t, my teeth might start chattering instead. “What if someone wants to come in?”

  “They can’t come in without killing me,” said Zero. “Keep walking.”

  “But I’ve got some stuff in the bathroom,” I protested, pushing back ineffectually at the tidal wave of forward motion that was Zero. I’d been buying stuff like bandages and antiseptic wash while they were gone; figured we’d need them sooner or later. “We’ve got to clear up all that blood and make sure she didn’t get you.”

  “I’m not injured,” Zero said, without acknowledging my futile attempts to stay in the bathroom.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I’m not injured.”

  He lifted me right through the door and across the hall, then down into the living room and dropped me on my side of the lounge.

  “Just…sit there,” he said. “Don’t move. Don’t chew on anything. Don’t shift.”

  “I’m not gunna shift,” I said, moving uncomfortably. There was glass all through my clothes, and even though they were big pieces, I didn’t like them there. Glass, and blood. “Not anymore. It was just that Daniel was—and then JinYeong—anyway, it doesn’t feel like my skin is crawling off anymore.”

  As though I hadn’t spoken, he warned, “Once you shift for the first time, the change is complete; you’ll never be human again.”

  “I said I wouldn’t shift,” I told him, scowling.

  “I said I wasn’t injured,” he countered.

  I shivered a bit. “What?”

  “Never mind. Clean your face.”

  “That’s what I was trying to say in the bathroom,” I muttered. “That’s where the stuff for cleaning is.”

  “Stay,” said Zero warningly, and went back to the bathroom himself. He came back with a small bucket of warm water, two flannels, a towel, and the antiseptic wash. He threw one of the flannels at me, dipped his own in the water first, and said again, “Clean your face.”

  I didn’t realise how much blood there was on my face and hands until the water turned red and the flannel still came away sticky. Zero finished before I did, and that made me wonder how I hadn’t seen the state of my face in the same reflections that had shown me the splatter of blood on his. Maybe it was just because he was so white that it showed up more clearly.

  I went to the mirror to make sure I’d gotten the rest of it, and there was a wound along my chin. The glass door must have cut me after all. I grimaced and dabbed it down with antiseptic wash, which made me grimace a bit more.

  “Use the butterfly strips,” said Zero, without looking up at me. “Your face is still messy.”

  While I had been busy cleaning my face, he was busy setting out something on the coffee table. It wasn’t photos and stuff this time; it was something that looked like it could have been a lab set with a beaker and a tiny vial. Instead of a network of tubing and a Bunsen burner, there was a silver wire with a flat-bottomed pendulum at either end, one each in the beaker and vial, and beneath the beaker was only empty space. I couldn’t see what was holding it up, even when I blinked at it a couple of times, so I looked away again and stuck butterfly strips across the cut on my jawline.

  It didn’t help with the pain, but it did make my face look a bit better. I sat down on the lounge again and leaned forward to point at the glass beakers.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t touch.”

  “Yeah, but what is it?”

  “Something for making the antivirus,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Athelas, slipping from Between at the same time as his voice, “I see you’re ready to go. Very good.”

  “Did you get enough?” asked Zero, his eyes running over the red-filled bottle that Athelas was holding with a professional sort of assessment.

  “Where’s Daniel?” I demanded, at the same time.

  Athelas, ignoring me, answered Zero. “I believe so. Are you ready for it?”

  “You can begin. Try not to disturb the pendulum. It’s a delicate balance in this house.”

  Athelas poured blood into the beaker carefully, and it looked like so much that I couldn’t understand how Daniel was still alive.

  “Where is he?” I asked Athelas, suspiciously.

  “Somewhere safe,” he said easily, holding the bottle over the beaker to allow every last drop to drain.

  I scowled at him. “Yeah, that’s what people say when they’ve killed someone.”

  Much amused, Athelas asked, “How shall I convince you, then, Pet? When I left him they said I’d gotten him to them just in time; any more blood loss would have been fatal.”

  “Who is they?”

  “Daniel is somewhere Behind,” Zero interrupted. He set something bubbling and coiling below the suspended beaker of blood; something that was invisible but somehow still seemed to make movement in the air. “Somewhere like a hospital with some of the pack members. He’ll survive.”

  “All right.” If Zero said it, I would believe it. I sat back on the lounge, wrapping my arms around my legs, and watched them over the torn, bloody knees of my jeans. “What are you doing with the blood?”

  “Extracting what I need from it,” Zero said. “Be quiet, Pet.”

  Zero was worse than Athelas when it came to answering questions without really answering them, I thought glumly. To add to the fun of the evening, I smelled the stench of vampire as something tickled the edges of Between, and JinYeong strolled into the room, his clothes and face as clean as if he’d checked himself in at the dry cleaners.

  I opened my mouth to remark on his general lack of personhood, but Zero said again, “Be quiet, Pet.”

  JinYeong grinned at me and said a brief something to Zero.

  “The detective is at home and sleeping off the small amount of vampire saliva he was injected with,” Zero said.

  “Injected? He was flamin’ well bi—”

  “Be quiet, Pet.”

  I glared at JinYeong over my knees as well, and he made a mocking air-kiss at me. That was even more annoying, and I felt my skin begin to do the same, itching, crawling thing it had done before. I looked away from him and caught Athelas’ eyes; saw the amused comprehension in them.

  “Shall I make you coffee, Pet?” he asked.

  “Can’t afford it,” I said. “Oi. What’s that?”

  From the beaker of blood, a single drop rose along the silver wire, travelling slowly, and grew smaller as it followed that wire. It sank into the pendulum in the smaller beaker like the first three or four drops had done, and I saw a small, velvety drop burgeon at the bottom of the pendulum.

  “Antivirus,” said Athelas.

  “It looks like blood,” I muttered.

  “The appearance is similar,” Athelas allowed. “However, the composition of it is entirely dissimilar. When it comes to rest in the vial through a combination of magic and alchemy, it is something else entirely.”

  Unconvinced, I watched the passage of blood drops across the silver wire until there was almost half a vial of dark red stuff that wasn’t blood but looked exactly like the blood from which it had been taken. It looked so much like it, in fact, that I glanced back at the larger beaker to compare the colour, and was surprised to see it empty.

  “Oi! Where’d it go?”

  Athelas, smiling faintly, didn’t answer.

  Zero said shortly, “Athelas told you.” He lifted the pendulum in the vial by the wire until it was clear of the glass, then took it swiftly away and let it drop into the original beaker with a soggy sort of clink.

  The vial, he picked up and stoppered with a glassy top, then shook.

  I giggled, which made them all look at me, and said, “Shake before use
works for everything, I s’pose!”

  Zero looked at me in silence for a moment or two, then leaned across to give me the vial. “Drink it,” he said.

  “It still looks like blood,” I said doubtfully, pinching the glass stopper out.

  JinYeong hissed a disparaging laugh, but Athelas only smiled.

  “Oh well, here we go,” I said, and upended the vial in my mouth.

  It was bitter. Bitter and salty and tarry. I swallowed, shuddering, and complained, “How come I have to swallow it, anyway? Why can’t you inject it? Won’t it work slower this way?”

  “I don’t know how to administer an injection,” said Zero. He leaned forward and pinched my chin carefully between two fingers, avoiding my cut, and twitched it one way and then another. “And Behindkind don’t usually use them.”

  “The goblins do,” I muttered.

  Zero tilted my head back to peer at my eyes and didn’t answer. He was frowning.

  “Behindkind have a swifter method of delivery,” Athelas explained. “If the antivirus was merely chemical, administered to your bloodstream, it would be quicker to give you an injection.”

  “Yeah, bet you know how to give injections, too,” I mumbled to myself.

  Athelas’ eyes crinkled slightly at the edges. “Since, Pet, the antivirus is both chemically and magically derived, it is quicker to administer orally, where the magic can sink in more quickly.”

  “How quickly?” I asked him, going cross-eyed in my attempts to see him. “When’s it gunna work?”

  “It should already be working,” said Zero.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Yeah, but is it working?”

  But I could tell from Athelas’ faint frown and Zero’s utter stillness that it wasn’t working—and worse, that they had no idea why not.

  JinYeong, muttering to himself, plucked the antivirus vial from my fingers and sniffed at it. He offered it to Zero, who tapped one finger to the lip of the bottle.

  The residue collected and melded together into a single, small drop, lifting until it floated right out of the bottle and hovered in the air in front of Zero.

  I hugged my knees to my chest and watched the drop slowly revolve in the beam of Zero’s icy blue eyes. JinYeong watched it, too, though that was probably because he was getting hungry again and it looked a lot like blood. In his eyes I saw reflected the moment Zero sent a spark of what must have been magic through it.