Between Shifts

by W. R. Gingell

  I couldn’t help gasping a little bit, because it was so sudden and bright.

  “Perhaps you should consider looking away when Zero employs his magic,” suggested Athelas, as the drop sank back into its vial. “You’ll find yourself a little more sensitive at the moment. Zero, shall I fetch more blood from our young friend?”

  “We can’t take any more,” I said, and there was a feeling of sharp sickness in my stomach. Next time the crawling of my skin began and my teeth tried to force their way out of my mouth, I wouldn’t be able to stop it. There was no time to wait for more—and no way I was going to let them take more right now. “You said he’d die if we did.”

  As if I hadn’t spoken, Athelas enquired again of Zero, “Shall I?”

  “No,” I said.

  To my relief, Zero put the stopper back in the bottle and said, “No.”

  “I see,” nodded Athelas. He was smiling. “All very heartening, but that is our last drop of antivirus. What is missing?”

  Frowning, Zero said, “There’s nothing missing. It’s fresh, it’s activated, and it’s the same strain that infected the pet. It should have worked.”

  I huffed a small sigh. “So I’m gunna die.”

  “Ne,” said JinYeong, more cheerfully than usual.

  “You’re taking an unusually grim view of things, aren’t you, Pet?”

  I glanced over at Athelas and saw the glitter of amusement in his eyes. If there was anything I knew about Athelas, it was that he could be amused at the idea of people dying; but I didn’t think that was why he was amused. I’d seen him like this before.

  When had I seen him like this?

  “Ah!” I said. “Got it!”

  JinYeong made a pft sort of noise and stuffed his hands in his pockets, but Athelas, whose eyes flashed up to meet mine, looked startled.

  I grinned at him, and the startled look faded back into amusement again.

  “What is it, Pet?” asked Zero. He hadn’t reacted; his voice wasn’t particularly interested, either.

  That was all right. Zero never sounded particularly interested in most things, but I’d come to understand that it didn’t stop him noticing them.

  “Reckon Athelas has an idea,” I said.

  I remembered that look—that quiet amusement, with an edge of superiority. Athelas had looked the same way the day JinYeong dragged me out of my hidden room—he’d known I was there all along, and he hadn’t told, just for the sheer fun of knowing what no one else knew.

  “I’m afraid you won’t care for the idea, Pet,” Athelas said now, and this time there was a malicious note to his voice.

  Ah heck. Whatever it was, I was definitely not going to like it.

  Zero’s eyes rested on Athelas. “What do you know?”

  “I suspect.”

  “What do you suspect?”

  “I suspect that if JinYeong were to volunteer his saliva once again, it would make a difference.”

  “Heck no!” I said, trying to scrabble away.

  Zero’s implacable hand at the nape of my neck stopped me.

  “There’s no reason why that should be true,” he said. He didn’t let me go, though; he was thinking about it. “There are no special considerations when a human contracts lycanthropy. Source blood antivirus should kill it.”

  “Then there’s no reason why the antivirus shouldn’t be working,” pointed out Athelas. “All I’m suggesting is that we should consider again—perhaps take into account JinYeong’s saliva.”

  “Wasn’t that what started the virus working again in the first place?” I complained. I still felt pretty aggrieved about that.

  “Indeed,” said Athelas. “It’s very interesting!”

  “Well, I’m not drinking his spit!”

  JinYeong gave a small sniff of laughter and I glared at him, but he only pursed his lips in one of his more smug looks.

  “It can’t hurt to try,” Zero said, thoughtfully; but he surprised me by letting me go. He watched me in an evaluating sort of a way, like he was waiting for me to be reasonable about this.

  Forget being reasonable.

  “I’m not drinking his spit!” I yelled again, dodging away from him and nearly colliding with my lounge in my haste to put the coffee table between us.

  “Would you prefer to die in the throes of lycanthropy?”

  “Yeah!” I said to Athelas. “Yeah. I’m gunna die. That’s okay, but I’m not drinking his spit as well as Wolf Boy’s blood!”

  “I believe I’ve already explained that it is no longer blood,” began Athelas, “but in fact—”

  I saw JinYeong roll his eyes, but somehow I didn’t see him move again until he plucked the vial of antivirus from Zero’s hand, even though he was across the room from Zero.

  “What the—”

  JinYeong was there, in my face. I jerked away, feeling too late the hook of his sharp shoes behind my ankle, and went over backward.

  I’m not proud of it, but I shrieked.

  A mad flapping of arms did me no good; my back hit the couch seat and JinYeong’s hand closed silkily around my neck before I could pick myself up again.

  Leaning over me with one knee perched coolly on the couch seat, he removed the stopper from the vial with his teeth and spat it to the floor, then tipped the single remaining drop of the antivirus onto his tongue.

  “Zero!” I yelled. “Help!”

  Lightning fast, JinYeong touched his finger to his tongue and stuffed that finger in my mouth. I bit down on it, but I could already taste the sharp acidity of the antivirus, and when he wrenched his finger away I didn’t try to spit the antivirus out.

  JinYeong inspected his bitten finger, baring his own teeth, and pushed away from the couch. I don’t know what he said, but he can’t have been feeling more hard-done-by than I was, so I only glared at him and tried to sit up again.

  My arms didn’t want to let me push with them, and there was something weird about my legs as well. Like static on the telly, only warmer.

  “I really wouldn’t bother trying to sit up, Pet,” Athelas said. “You’ll only pass out again in a few moments, so it hardly seems worth the trouble.”

  “Why am I passing out?” I complained, but already my voice sounded as warm and staticky as my arms and legs felt. “I didn’t pass out when…”

  My voice faded away, and maybe someone said, “You didn’t swallow JinYeong’s saliva the first time,” but I wasn’t sure if it was Zero or Athelas, or just my own annoyed inner voice talking to me.

  After that was warmth, and the sound of rushing water—or maybe blood—and I floated away somewhere voices didn’t make sense any longer.

  I suppose the good thing about waking up the day after someone has shoved vampire spit down your throat is that it gives you really good reflexes for a while. I didn’t expect that.

  Didn’t expect to be able to see so much stuff, either. Little stuff I’d never usually see, like the ants crawling on the leaves outside the kitchen window from all the way across the room while sunlight warmed the green to yellow so vibrantly that I could almost smell it. It made the world feel more alive but less touchable, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  And Between was really easy to see. It made patterns around the edges of the living room, as if the house was halfway Between in a way I’d never realised before, and kaleidoscoped around Zero like some kind of psychedelic signpost that he definitely wasn’t just your normal bloke. Athelas was less spectacular; I gazed at him as he sat in his chair opposite me, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he had a bit of a pearly gold glow to him, or that his shadow didn’t quite sit right, he might have looked nearly the same as usual.

  Hang on. The glow and shadow weren’t what made him different today. It was that here, inside, he shouldn’t have had a shadow. Not one quite so dark or silky, that seemed to sink into the very fabric of the house itself.

  “You’re really scary sometimes,” I told him, sitting up.

  Athelas tipped up his head to look
at me and his shadow did the same, just a little too late. I shivered, and he smiled.

  “Well, Pet?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. You want tea?”

  “I think not,” he said. He put a bookmark in his book and set it down on the coffee table. “Try not to bite JinYeong, won’t you?”

  “Why would I bite JinYeong?” I asked blankly, but Athelas only smiled again.

  From his alcove, Zero said, “JinYeong won’t be back until later. I sent him out.”

  Typical. Zero probably just wanted to make sure I couldn’t get JinYeong back for shoving his spit down my throat. He probably thought by the time JinYeong got home, I would have forgotten about it.

  Well, he was gunna be flamin’ surprised, I thought darkly. I had a few ideas, and none of them involved letting smug-faced vampires get away with making me swallow their spit.

  “Sit up, Pet,” said Zero, crossing the room. He crouched by the lounge as I did so, and grabbed me by the ears, sudden and gentle.

  “Oi!” I protested, because even if it was gentle, it was still surprising.

  “Sit still, Pet,” he said, and tilted my head this way and that. I suppose he wanted to see if there was still yellow in my eyes, because it was definitely my eyes he was looking at. When he was satisfied with that, he pushed away the hair from my forehead and tipped my head down to stare at the patch that had been furry yesterday.

  “It’s gone,” I told him, but I didn’t expect him to let go until he was satisfied himself, and he didn’t. “How’s Daniel?”

  “Alive.”

  “Yeah, but is he okay?”

  “He’s alive, for now. If that changes, I’ll tell you.”

  I wasn’t exactly satisfied, but at least I knew he wasn’t dead, and I could check on him later—if I could find him. I sat still and let Zero study my forehead until at last he let me go.

  “Don’t bite JinYeong,” he said.

  “Athelas already said that,” I remarked. “Why would I bite JinYeong?”

  “I should have thought the prospect was more particularly attractive today,” murmured Athelas.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I only bit him yesterday because he shoved his finger in my mouth.”

  “Exactly my point,” agreed Athelas.

  “Enough,” said Zero.

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or Athelas, but I shut up anyway.

  “Don’t let him feed you blood, either,” he added. “There could be more unpleasant side effects than those you had with lycanthropy.”

  “Yuck,” I said. “I had enough blood with the steaks I’ve eaten lately. I’m not gunna drink the stuff.”

  Zero looked me over once again. “You’re not hungry?”

  “Nah. Why? You want some breakfast?”

  “No,” he said, and this time he seemed to be satisfied. “Just an early dinner.”

  I made a face. “All right, but I’m not having steak.”

  I heard a deep rumble that could have been a chuckle, but when my head snapped up to look at Zero, his face was as dispassionate as always.

  “As you please,” he said. “It’s JinYeong’s turn to choose tonight, in any case.”

  “What you want me to do, anyway?” I asked him. “I can make lunch in an hour or two, and we could work on my footwork or—”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But I’ve been—”

  “I don’t have time to train you today,” Zero said. “And I don’t have time for lunch, either.”

  Yeah, he looked real busy; flipping through bits of newspaper and photographs. I sighed, but he ignored that, so I mizzled away into the kitchen to do the dishes someone had made when they did dinner last night and breakfast this morning.

  “Don’t do that,” said Zero’s voice, and Athelas’ gentle laugh floated through from the living room. “It’s too noisy. Find something quiet to do.”

  So I spent the morning profitably instead. And when I say profitably, I mean that I went around the entire house and made every picture on the walls just a little higher on the right. Not much. Not even so much as an obsessive-compulsive human would notice. Maybe a millimetre. If JinYeong was going to shove his spit down my throat and be smug about it, I was going to make a nuisance of myself, too.

  After that, I went quietly around the house and took off one curtain ring from every set of curtains to make a single section sag slightly on each one. That didn’t seem like quite enough, but I didn’t want to risk JinYeong coming home and catching me at it, so the only other thing I did was to pinch Athelas’ cologne and put the tiniest drop of it in the carpet of JinYeong’s wardrobe.

  With any luck, it would drive him crazy, the suspicion of someone else’s scent in his clothes.

  It’s the little things in life, man.

  The day passed slowly, without any lessening of the extra senses or reflexes I’d gained from JinYeong’s saliva. If it wasn’t for the bits of Between I could still see dancing around the house, I might have found it a boring day. I tried to read one of Zero’s books from the bookshelf and he didn’t object when I took it, so I supposed he didn’t mind. I couldn’t understand it anyway, even when I skim-read it without letting myself pay too much attention, and Athelas had left earlier to go somewhere mysterious as usual, so I couldn’t ask him about it. After a little while it ended up face down on my chest while I gazed up at the slowly moving ceiling.

  It wasn’t really moving, of course; but whatever it was Between, or Behind—that version of it was moving. What was it? Water? Sky? I didn’t know, but it was strangely calming to watch it.

  Late afternoon drew on, but neither Athelas nor JinYeong returned home, and at last I turned away from the lazily flowing ceiling to flick my legs up and off the couch.

  “I’m going out!” I called to Zero.

  “For how long?”

  “Dunno. ’Bout an hour or two?”

  “Take your phone.”

  “Gotcha, boss,” I said, and went upstairs to grab my hoodie. The phone was already in the big front pocket, but I slipped it into the pocket of my jeans instead: there was something more important that needed to go in that big front pocket.

  I didn’t tell Zero where I was going, and he didn’t ask. He might have expected me to go to the supermarket to get stuff for dinner, and I was planning on doing that, so it wasn’t that I was being a bad pet.

  I just wanted to do something else first.

  This time I made sure the detective wasn’t hanging around the other side of the house before I sneaked into his yard. There was a light on inside the kitchen, but he shouldn’t be able to see me if I stayed behind the bushes, so I found myself a nice quiet, sheltered part of the garden with a bit of shade and a bit of late sunlight, and started to dig a hole. The dryad seemed to watch me do it, and I found myself slowing down until finally, I stopped.

  “What? What’s the problem?” Its branches shivered slightly, and I asked, “Too cold for you?”

  Another shiver.

  “You’re a plant. How can you be cold?” I looked at it again and sighed. “All right, all right. I’ll take you inside where it’s warm—but he’s gunna look at me like I’m mad, and that’s your fault.”

  As usual, the dryad didn’t reply, but it felt like if it could have spoken, it would have said thank you.

  I wasn’t sure the decrepit-looking doorbell would work, so I knocked on the door, the dryad sitting happily in the palm of my other hand.

  There was a small click from the little view-hole, so I gave it a grin. The door swung open.

  “What do you want?” demanded Detective Tuatu, without opening the door the whole way. “If you try to bite me again—”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “Came to apologise.”

  “Did you.”

  “Yeah. Brought you a house plant.” I held up the dryad, and the roots that had unwound from the rock swayed, then reached for the detective.

  “That’s not a—” he stopped, and bl
inked once or twice. “That’s weird. It didn’t look like a plant before.”

  “Too much stress,” I told him. “You’re seeing things. And if it looks like a tin of cat food sometimes, just remind it that it’s a plant.”

  “If it looks like—”

  “Gunna ask me in?”

  Detective Tuatu looked suspiciously at me.

  “Promise I won’t try to bite you again.”

  He sighed, and opened the door wider, standing aside. I slipped past him gleefully and carried the dryad through the hall.

  “You’ll have to clean the muck off your windows,” I said over my shoulder. “It’ll want more light than that.”

  “Why can’t it go outside?” he demanded. “I don’t want a house plant.”

  “It’s easier to talk to if it’s inside.”

  “I’m not going to talk to a house plant.”

  I shrugged and cleared aside peeling paint and a kitchen scrubber so that the dryad would have the whole windowsill to itself. “Suit yourself. I’m pretty sure it’ll grow faster if you talk to it, though.”

  “It’s going to get bigger? I thought it was a bonsai. Am I supposed to water it?”

  “Didn’t say it’d get bigger,” I told him. “I said it’d grow faster.”

  “I never know if what you say makes sense to you, or if you’re just talking out of your hat.”

  I grinned at him. “It’s a pain in the neck, isn’t it? That’s what those three do to me all the time. I think it’s catching.”

  “Those three,” began Detective Tuatu. “What did they do to me?”

  “Wake up with a headache, did you?”

  “No,” he said. Dark and frustrated, his eyes went rapidly from the dryad to me, then back again. “What did you do with the boy?”

  “He’s fine,” I said, answering the question he hadn’t asked first. “He might turn himself in when he’s recovered a bit. Dunno if you’ll be able to do anything with him, though. Not unless you’ve got a special department in the Police Force that I don’t know about.”

  The detective gave vent to a frustrated laugh. “I could charge him with accessory after the fact, or assault and battery, but I couldn’t prove it. What about her?”