Between Decisions: The City Between: Book Eight

by Gingell, W. R.

  Silence, heavy and complete, remained unbroken until Athelas said, “What do you think to accomplish by this episode, Pet?”

  “Dunno,” I said, pushing my face more firmly into the scratchy, warm brown shoulder of his jacket. I could hear his heart beating, steady and quiet. “Don’t think I was thinking, actually. It was more of an instinct.”

  Athelas seemed to sigh; a faint thing in and out, and the world flickered around us. I hugged him a bit tighter, and this time when he breathed in, I heard his breath shudder, too. I had heard that kind of breath only once before, and that was when my father cried, so I held on a bit tighter and didn’t look.

  Instead, I concentrated on the scratchiness of Athelas’ jacket and, in the very tangible strength of that feeling, drew us both out of my mind and back into the human world. There, I had somehow made it to Athelas’ chair as well, and if I had before laid my head on his shoulder with the visceral instinct that it was the thing to do, now I couldn’t quite raise it again because of how heavy and tired it was.

  I mumbled into his neck.

  “A moment, Pet,” he sighed, and soon I felt his hand, heavy and energising at the same time, on my shoulder.

  I didn’t remember him using his healing talents on me before, though I’d seen him use them on Zero. It didn’t feel anything like what I would have expected it to feel like. It didn’t really feel at all. It was more as though I had eaten after fainting from lack of food, and my energy was finally being allowed to store itself again.

  Before I could gather that energy to get up, I felt a flutter of Between around the front door, and a roar fairly shook the house.

  “Pet! Pet!”

  “Ah heck,” I said, as something big and white snatched me away from the brown scratchiness that was Athelas. “Reckon Zero’s back.”

  Chapter Three

  Blue eyes dazzled me, much like the sunlight at present pouring through the windows.

  Flamin’ heck. It was already morning?

  I said accusingly to those blue eyes, “You interrupted an experiment.”

  Zero’s gaze flickered past me to Athelas, and the coldness I saw in it chilled me right to the bone. He said to Athelas, “If you think I won’t carve out your stomach, you’re very much mistaken.”

  “I’m under no such misapprehension, I believe,” said Athelas.

  His voice sounded light and amused, so why did the words make a sob catch in my throat?

  “What are you doing?” I asked Zero, wriggling against the arms that held me. He’d picked me up as though I was a baby, and even if I didn’t think I could walk right now, that was insulting and unnecessary. “I can stand on my own two feet.”

  “No, you can’t,” he said briefly. “Not for another few moments, I think. Are you all right?”

  “’Course,” I said, and where I hadn’t really been able to feel Athelas using his healing talents on me, I definitely felt Zero pushing magic into me, bright and wild.

  I yawned and pulled my head away from his shoulder where it had drooped again. I suddenly felt as though I could walk again, but it didn’t seem as though Zero was going to put me down any time soon. Since the whole world was too bright to bear at the moment, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe it would also stop him from hurting Athelas; his arms were already in use, after all.

  That thought both cheered me up and left me free to gaze at the room around me. I hadn’t seen it when my head was tucked down on Athelas’ shoulder, but the entire world was awash with particles of light and auras in glittering essence of Between. Even compared with the brightness of morning sunlight, it was dazzling.

  “Heck,” I said, trying to blink away the brilliance of it all. “Reckon I busted an optical nerve or something.”

  “Athelas,” Zero said, his voice sharp with command. “Explain.”

  Ah heck, I thought, chilled from my ears to the pit of my stomach. He wasn’t going to stop, and as soon as he put me down…

  Something hard and uncomfortable pressed against me, forced by the unyielding bulk of Zero’s stomach muscles into the softer flesh of my leg, and I had a crystal-clear recollection of what it must be.

  Flaming heck. I’d actually brought them down to me in the real world as well as my mind. I wriggled a bit more, and with a stifled sigh of exasperation Zero shifted me just far enough to allow me to slip a hand into my pocket and pull out one of the syringes that I’d stolen from a goblin a long time ago.

  I flicked the cover from the needle with the nail of my thumb and manipulated the whole contraption until the plunger was beneath my thumb, narrowly avoiding sticking myself with the needle. I would have stuck it in his neck, but I couldn’t quite reach, and I didn’t dare do it while I couldn’t see where I was putting it.

  Instead, I had to wrap my arm around his neck, pulling myself closer. From there, I could just reach far enough to snatch the needle from one hand to the other, so I did it, breathless with panic because Athelas still hadn’t said a word to exculpate himself, and I was half afraid he was actually trying to antagonise Zero.

  I s’pose it could have seemed like I was scared and looking for comfort, because Zero’s arms tightened straight away.

  “You had better not have hurt her,” his voice said in my ear, fairly radiating fury, “or—”

  Got it! I plunged the needle into the soft bit between shoulder and neck and depressed the plunger as quickly as I could.

  “Pet,” said Zero in shock, swaying slightly. “What did you do?”

  “Mickey-finned you,” I said. “You better put me down before you drop me.”

  He did so, staggering slightly, and tried to focus on me. “Why?”

  “Because you said you were gunna gut Athelas,” I explained, swaying a bit. We were a fine pair, hardly able to stand up to face each other. “And that’s not fair, because I’m the one who made him do it.”

  “I very much doubt,” Zero said, blinking heavily, “that you made Athelas do anything.”

  Yeah, that was fair enough. Still, I’d been the one to ask him to do it, whatever his motives or expectations had been—and he had warned me.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, trying to make my way around the coffee table, which seemed determined to follow me no matter where I went. Zero dropped down onto the couch and put his head in his hands. “I still asked him to do it, and I’m not gunna let you hurt him because of it.”

  “What did you think you were doing?” demanded Zero. He looked as though he was trying to get up but couldn’t quite manage it. His shadow, threaded with light, looked like it was trying to pull away from him.

  “It is not your business, Hyeong,” said JinYeong’s voice. I felt his hand plucking at the back of my collar to stop me falling over, and he steered me around to my side of the couch. This time, the coffee table didn’t follow. “She wishes to get her memories back, and she is not hurt. Just drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk!” I said. “It’s just hard to stand up and stuff is…weird. Where did you pop up from?”

  “You are drunk,” he said. “Sit down.”

  I sat down because I couldn’t do much else by then. I wished the room wasn’t quite so separated into tiny pieces of light.

  My attention caught on an interesting group of light particulates across the coffee table: a buzz of brightness around Zero’s pocket that resolved itself into a form I recognised. Zero had a USB in his pocket. I said to Zero: “You went to the library.”

  JinYeong gave a crow of laughter and dropped down beside me on the couch. After yesterday morning’s performance, I couldn’t tell him to move, and he knew it, the smug little git. He’d just stare at me from across the table, and the room was already dizzying enough as it was.

  “Jal haesseo,” he said to me, his eyes still bright with malicious laughter.

  Zero said rather thickly, “How did you know we went to the library?”

  “I can see the USB in your pocket,” I said. My voice came out a bit gloomy, but that was proba
bly only because I didn’t know why I knew it was the USB. And maybe a bit because I really was something very close to drunk. “The one I exchanged the house for. You never told me what was on it.”

  “No,” said Zero, sinking against the back of the couch, his eyelids dropped low over his eyes. As though he couldn’t quite stop himself from saying it, he added, “I didn’t stop the merman from letting you look at it. You can’t blame me if you walked away before you saw what was on it.”

  JinYeong, his voice amused, said, “Ah, jaemisseo! Hyeong, you are drunk too!”

  “Perhaps you should retire abovestairs for a few hours, my lord,” suggested Athelas.

  “No,” said Zero, his voice obstinate and very slightly slurred. “I want to have a word with you.”

  I snorted a bit and overbalanced against JinYeong, then pushed myself away. “Good luck doing anything but sleeping after that lot.”

  Zero tilted his head to the side and fixed a hazy look on me. His shadow, while technically doing the same, looked a good deal more alert, and that made me giggle. JinYeong gave a sniff of laughter beside me.

  Zero, suspicious and sleepy, said, “How did you see the USB when it’s in my pocket?”

  It wasn’t so much that I could see it as sense it. It seemed as though the room was inside one of Blackpoint’s computers, and all the lines of code that went to make up the room around me were still buzzing with the connection, lighting up all the interesting points around the room in a soft but pervasive kind of purple halo that fit within the sparkling matrix of the rest.

  My three psychos weren’t immune to that effect, either; they weren’t purple, but they were each lit up to a greater or lesser extent. Zero was a steady glow of Between particles, JinYeong another beside me where it was hard to see, and Athelas lit up his side of the room.

  “Dunno,” I said. “Reckon that’s something to do with getting back a few of my memories. I’m seeing the world in a different light.”

  It made me giggle again, and although Athelas shut his eyes briefly, the corners of his mouth turned up in an instinctive smile.

  “Stop dripping on the carpet,” Zero said to JinYeong in irritation. I was pretty sure he was trying to stop himself from smiling, too.

  JinYeong gave another sniff of laughter. “I do not need your concern, Hyeong. I will heal.”

  “You’re dripping on the carpet.”

  “You do not care about the carpet. You are picking a fault.”

  I sputtered a laugh into my sparkly elbow but said to JinYeong, “Don’t drip blood on the carpet; I gotta clean that up afterwards.”

  “I shall shower,” said JinYeong loftily, and disrupted the world around me by removing himself from the couch.

  I tipped over again, straightened myself, and said to Athelas as the buzz that was JinYeong disappeared into the shower, “This is your fault.”

  “Should I apologise, or inform you that you’re welcome?” he enquired.

  “Pft,” I said, and fell asleep for a while.

  Luckily for Athelas, Zero seemed to do the same, because when I woke up again, his eyes were closed and his breathing had deepened. The balance of the couch had been reset, by which I knew JinYeong had returned from his shower, and the world was still bright and formed from particles and lines of light. At least Athelas and Zero weren’t quite so bright anymore.

  “How come everything still looks like we’re in the Matrix?” I asked Athelas, rubbing my eyes. He had been in my mind with me for the memory recovery, so hopefully he’d have a good idea what was going on.

  “It would appear that you’ve always been able to see and manipulate magic—and Between,” said Athelas. “As an Heirling, that is to be expected. From a full human, however, it is less common; but then, a fully human Heirling is…unprecedented. The way you see the world would naturally be different to that of a fae Heirling.”

  “Yeah, yeah, same as usual: I’m not supposed to be able to do this and no one knows exactly why,” I said soothingly. “A bit late saying that now, isn’t it?”

  To my surprise, Zero’s eyes cracked open. With an air of very great concentration, he managed to say, without slurring, “It could be a way of dealing with Between that is peculiar to humans who have so little other behindkind blood that they have no other facet by which to view Behind and Between. The fact that the revenant and the zombie can also do something of the sort with their houses leads me to believe that our conclusion that they’re Heirlings is correct.”

  “Look at me, being right and stuff,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the very bright glow of particles beside me that was JinYeong. I was less tired than before, but it would be nice if things stopped being quite so bright; I might feel a bit less dizzy, then.

  Through the glow, JinYeong grinned at me, and the glow pulsed a little stronger.

  “Good grief!” I said, annoyed anew at him. “I know you think you light up the room, but do you have to be so flamin’ literal about it?”

  A softly glimmering Athelas murmured, “You have such a unique method of communication, Pet.”

  “You telling me not to provoke fights in the lounge room?” I enquired, rubbing at my eyes to try and help dissipate the glow further.

  “I will not fight,” said JinYeong, as I remembered that doing something physical wouldn’t fix something that hadn’t been affected by a physical thing. “I have just showered.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes, reaching out to put a hand on top of the head of hair nearby that wouldn’t stop glittering. I shouldn’t have needed to touch him, but touching Athelas had made the effects of what I’d done so much stronger that it seemed like a reasonable crutch to use.

  JinYeong, sounding significantly more startled than I’d expected, said, “Mwoh hae?”

  “Belt up for a bit,” I said, curling my fingers into his hair so that he couldn’t get away. It was a good thing he had just showered: his hair was soft and faintly wet rather than thick with gel or wax. “I’m turning your wattage down.”

  “Bulkaneunghae,” he said, with conviction. His voice was a bit closer, which was sensible if he didn’t want to lose hair.

  “Garbage,” I told him. “All light bulbs can be turned down. You just need the right mechanism.”

  From across the coffee table, Zero’s voice said coldly, “What are you doing, Pet?”

  “You can have a pat on the head later,” I told him. Neither Zero nor Athelas glowed as brightly as JinYeong; typical, that. Even today, JinYeong was being a headache. “Go back to sleep.”

  “I don’t know why I bother,” muttered Zero. There was an element of hopelessness to his voice, and maybe of wonder, too.

  “Me either,” I said cheerfully, trying to relax the hyped-up part of my brain that was straining to see and understand. I needed to relax, not stop seeing stuff altogether.

  There was a brief silence. Then Zero said, sotto voce, “I’ll expect a pat on the head. I won’t forget.”

  JinYeong huffed a short, derisive breath out at him, but I couldn’t help smiling. The first time Zero had been the recipient of a goblin syringe, he had gotten soft and warm and approachable. It looked like that was a fairly consistent reaction for him. It was nice to know that he wasn’t always an iceberg—or maybe just that on the inside, he never had been.

  I took another moment to relax my mind, breathing in and out deeply. Then I opened my eyes to find a far less brilliant JinYeong gazing at me with a curious expression on his face—a face that was a lot closer than I’d expected it to be. That confused me until I realised that I still had a good handful of his hair and hurriedly let it go. JinYeong straightened, re-establishing the space between us, and turned his face away from me.

  “A pleasant interlude,” said Athelas, his eyes faintly mocking. He was no longer glowing at all; neither was the room around me. There was a moreness to everything that suggested I could open that sight again at will, but for now everything was tucked away in the fashion it should be tucked away.

&n
bsp; Across the table, Zero stirred and seemed to wake again. Still slightly slurring, he said, “Pet, go out with JinYeong. I need to have a discussion with Athelas.”

  “I don’t want to go out with JinYeong,” I argued. “And if you’re going to ventilate Athelas’ stomach again, I’m not going anywhere. I told you: he only did what I asked him to do. And he did it flamin’ well, too—you do want me to get these memories, right? You haven’t been chasing this murderer for so long that your life won’t have purpose without it?”

  “I’ve been chasing the murderer for an insignificant length of time, considering my lifespan,” he said, stubbornly precise with his words despite the obvious difficulty. “I’m hardly likely to suffer from a lack of purpose in my lifetime.”

  “I believe there is rather a surplus of purpose than a lack of one,” Athelas murmured.

  It probably would have been better if he hadn’t said anything; Zero’s eyes flickered back to him and hardened.

  “Out,” he said to me, swaying in his seat. “I won’t tell you again.”

  I threw a look in JinYeong’s direction, and he tipped his head toward the front door, his eyes bright with malicious laughter.

  “Wae? Shilleoh?”

  “Exactly,” I told him. I had absolutely no desire to be walking the streets with JinYeong, who was still full of laughter and sultry looks. To Zero, I said, “And it’s not much good trying to intimidate me when you can’t even stand up straight.”

  There was a huge, gusty sigh from Zero. “Pet—”

  “I’m not gunna leave the house while you’re half-drunk and likely to hurt Athelas,” I told him. “Me and JinYeong’ll go upstairs. That’s enough. If you start trying to kill Athelas down here, I’ll know. Otherwise, we’ll leave you alone.”

  I got up and headed for the stairs before anyone could argue further. JinYeong followed with a spring to his step that suggested he was delighted with the way things had turned out, and that was worrisome. At least I’d be able to leave him in the upper lounge room and ignore him from the comfort of my own room if it got to be too much.