Between Decisions: The City Between: Book Eight

by Gingell, W. R.

  The first thing I saw when I got upstairs was the open window. It was only open a crack—just the amount I used to leave it open so that I could wriggle my fingers beneath the sash and lift it to climb in. Still, it wasn’t usually open these days.

  “Who left you open?” I muttered, crossing to close it. As I did, I caught sight of a shiver of movement along the fence at the side—on the neighbour’s side, I was pretty sure. I’d just missed seeing whatever it was that had made the movement; a moment too slow at looking down. I frowned, and JinYeong exhaled a small aish of sound by my ear, startling me by his sudden proximity.

  He said, “That crazy halabeoji is out there again.”

  “I know,” I said, my eyes flicking across the house next door.

  “How do you know? You can’t smell him.”

  “I can see him,” I said, tipping my chin just slightly toward the lower windows of the house opposite. Reflected in one window was a scruffy figure that crouched below the level of the fence, creeping stealthily toward the front of the house and, presumably, freedom via the front yard.

  JinYeong’s brown eyes grew thoughtful. “Who taught you to do that?”

  “Dad,” I said. “And before you say it’s strange, I know.”

  He grinned, then asked unexpectedly, “How long have you known it is strange?”

  I stopped and stared at him. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

  “I am charming,” he said, with certainty.

  I almost expected him to do what he’d done more than once before: lean forward and encroach on my space, warm and worrisome.

  Instead, he leaned back into the window frame, still gazing down at me through his lashes.

  “Stop looking at me,” I complained, looking away and back out the window. “You reckon he was up here? The window was open.”

  “Hyeong would not allow that,” JinYeong said.

  I stared out the window again, hoping to avoid his eyes, and caught sight of something even more interesting than the old mad bloke creeping around in next door’s yard.

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, staring in disbelief at the moving truck. “Got a new neighbour! That isn’t supposed to happen, is it?”

  There hadn’t been a steady neighbour here for a good while; that’s the way it turns out when you live in a street where weird stuff happens and there’s a double homicide to crown it all.

  JinYeong’s expression grew curious. “I wonder if Hyeong knows?” he said softly. “This should not happen. I wonder…”

  “You wonder what?”

  “I shall not tell you,” he said, lifting his nose. “You don’t tell me anything.”

  That surprised a laugh out of me, but I said, “You reckon Zero’s dad has found us, don’t you? It could be a spy moving in.”

  “Perhaps,” he said darkly. “We will tell Hyeong and the old man.”

  “Good idea,” I said in relief, starting back across the room. That would give me an excuse to get out of the distracting and disturbing solo presence of JinYeong, and at the same time an excuse to make sure that Zero and Athelas weren’t fighting. I hadn’t heard the sounds of death, but neither Athelas nor Zero tended to make a lot of noise when they were at their most deadly.

  JinYeong caught at my sleeve and tugged me to a stop. “It is too early.”

  “What do you mean, too early?” I asked him, hunching my shoulders. “You saw how he was looking at Athelas, and I haven’t heard a peep out of either of them.”

  “Hyeong will be very quiet and very threatening,” he said, releasing me. “The old man is not like me; Hyeong cares for him in a different way. It would be rude to…ventilate him like Hyeong did to me.”

  “You’re pretty blasé about that for someone who nearly died,” I remarked, but I sat down on the closest armchair to stop myself from going back down the stairs.

  He shrugged and threw himself into an armchair at right angles with mine, curling up with his arms folded on the fat arm of the chair and his eyes resting on me.

  He looked soft and defenceless: hair freshly washed and down in a heavy fringe across his forehead instead of swept away, high and sophisticated; wearing a soft jumper and the most elegant pair of trakkie daks I’d ever seen. But JinYeong looking soft and defenceless was the most dangerous JinYeong, in my experience, so I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “What?” I demanded. Athelas’ safety aside, this was exactly the reason I hadn’t wanted to leave the safety of the other two. The room felt far too warm and closed-in with JinYeong’s eyes on me. “What do you want now?”

  “I wish to know something,” he said. “I wish to have a name for you.”

  “Yeah, but do you have to keep staring at me?” I complained.

  JinYeong only rested his chin on his folded arms and continued to observe me, catlike. “I cannot keep calling you friend,” he said.

  “Rude.”

  He lifted his chin from his arms and narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t throw wrong meanings at me.”

  “You learn flamin’ quick,” I said. I meant to glare at him again, but there was a laugh burring in the back of my throat, and it was hard not to give into it. I didn’t quite give way, but I didn’t glare, either. “I’m not giving you my name just yet.”

  “Very well,” he said, but he didn’t look as though he was disappointed. “Then I want something else.”

  I must have looked pretty suspicious of him, because he grinned, sharp and mischievous. “Not that,” he said, on what was almost a purr of laughter. “I wish to look at those papers again; I had a thought.”

  “Yeah? All right, but you’d better not go showing them to Zero or Athelas.” I still felt a bit warm in the face, but at least it was something reasonably harmless he wanted. For just a fraction of a second, I’d actually thought he would tell me he wanted a kiss.

  JinYeong made a small, dismissive sound. “There are no secrets from Hyeong. He knows everything.”

  That was surprisingly touching, and more than a little bit naïve. “Maybe from your perspective,” I told him. “From mine, he’s not as all-knowing as that. Athelas is the one I’m more worried about.”

  A small frown twitched into place between his brows. “Why do you worry about the old man?”

  “Because he made Tuatu get all that stuff,” I said. “The papers you saw last time, I mean. And I can’t figure out why. I don’t know what he was looking for—don’t even know if he found it—but I’d rather he didn’t know I have it all now.”

  “Mmm,” said JinYeong. “Then nothing makes sense.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, and started for my room.

  “I already told you,” he said, following me.

  “Nope,” I said, when he tried to follow right into my room. I grabbed him by the arms and physically turned him around, then pushed him back into the living room. He didn’t try to resist, but he looked so ridiculously pleased with himself that it made me want to kick him.

  “I will wait,” he said instead, and padded back over to the armchair to sit down again.

  I ducked into my room and looked around at the mess in there. You gather a lot of detritus when you live with two fae and a vampire, somewhere between worlds. Stuff like a necklace that used to be a snake—or maybe was just pretending to be a necklace for a while to lull humans into a false sense of security—and a frog that used to be a tie. Stuff that couldn’t be counted on not to be something else at an inopportune time.

  But there was also the detritus I’d gathered that was a bit more…human-related. That kind was even harder to sort out, even if you didn’t have to worry about it turning into something weird and strangling you while you were asleep.

  It was just paperwork, and it shouldn’t have been such a big pain in the neck, but it was. Most of it was stuff that Athelas had had Detective Tuatu searching the internet for, but some of it was information I’d gotten from Abigail and her group of humans. Most of it was gathered in one area, so I picked up an armful and poked t
he rest of the bits and pieces into another pile with my toe and sighed a bit. One of those pieces of paper was missing, too, I was certain. I hadn’t seen it since last week—a photocopy of my great-grandma’s license that I’d originally thought was my mother’s—and worse, unless a certain tie-turned-frog had taken off with it, I didn’t know who had taken it. JinYeong was the only one who came into my room with any regularity—a mistake that was going to be rectified from now on—but if I’d had to pick from one of the three psychos, I would have guessed Athelas. Only he never came into my room, and JinYeong and Zero both had.

  I huffed out a sigh and combined my pile of papers, then went back out to JinYeong.

  “I wish to know,” he said, when I put the heaping pile down on the floor between the chairs, “I wish to know why the old man was so careless.”

  “What do you mean, careless?”

  “So careless that he used the detective to do this.”

  “Tuatu didn’t know not to say stuff like I owe you,” I told him. “Reckon that’s how Athelas got him.”

  JinYeong made a small hum that was hard to decipher as either agreement or disagreement. “I agree. But that is not why; that is how.”

  “Dunno what to tell you,” I said. “Maybe he thought Tuatu was the one who had the best access to what he wanted?”

  “Perhaps,” said JinYeong, but he didn’t sound convinced. He pushed a few bits of paper aside, picked up another, then sorted rapidly through the rest, picking up and discarding at will. “This one, this one, no, ah here it is! This one, no, this one.”

  I stared at him. “What are you looking for?”

  “I am not looking, I have found,” he said, wafting the little sheaf of papers he’d found at me. “It is as I thought.”

  “What did you think?” I took the papers from him mostly to stop him brandishing them in my face, but none of them made a lot of sense in conjunction with each other. “They’re all bills? I can see that; what about it?”

  “These numbers are the same,” he said.

  “What numbers?”

  “What is this? P.O.? The number is the same, but the name is different.”

  I blinked a bit. “Flamin’ heck. They are, too. Five didn’t mention it to me last time I talked to him.”

  “The leprechaun knows about this?” JinYeong looked faintly offended. “Before me? Also, if he did not see this, he is blind. What is P.O.?”

  “Post office box,” I said, amused. “And I didn’t say Five didn’t see it; I said he hadn’t mentioned it to me. He seems to work on collections of data points that make a map instead of picking out this or that. Hang on. If this is a post box number, how come all these bills from different addresses are being sent to the same box? And why are the names all different?”

  “This person does not wish to be known,” said JinYeong, as if it were perfectly natural. “So they give a false name.”

  “Yeah, but why is someone paying bills for several other people?”

  “Bills?”

  “They’re bills,” I said. “You know, electricity and water and stuff?”

  “One is for this house?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and as I looked down at the water bill for my own house, it dawned on me exactly what it was that was important about this bill. It was a bill from two years ago—which meant that someone had been paying for my water, knowing perfectly well that I was here. More slowly, I added, “This is the water bill for this place. The others…well, that’s the power bill for—flaming heck!” I looked up at JinYeong with wide eyes. “This one’s the power bill for Morgana’s place. Want to bet there’s something here for Ralph’s place too?”

  “That sneaky old man,” murmured JinYeong. “What does he want with this information?”

  I wanted to know that, too. I didn’t like the idea of beginning to suspect Athelas again when Zero had given such a good reason for trusting him, but I also didn’t want to be as blind as Athelas regularly accused me of being.

  Still, it wasn’t as though trying to find out who knew about the three of us human Heirlings—and was actively hiding us—was the same as being involved in the murders. Athelas could even be under Zero’s orders by doing so, and they just hadn’t told me—as usual. We already knew that someone like Upper Management was involved in keeping Heirlings hidden from the murderer, and it was likely that whoever had paid for our power and water while hiding the fact that they were doing so, was someone from that group. It made sense for Athelas to be looking for that person.

  I took a photo of the P.O. Box number on a couple of the bills, careful to get the names in the shot. Nemo Keiner. Vivien Nunc. Two would do for now, but when we found the bloke, I was going to ask him exactly what joke he was playing with his names.

  “Might have to go to the post office later,” I said, sliding my phone back into my pocket. “Bring along your mojo and see what we can find out.”

  JinYeong elevated his nose very slightly, looking pleased with himself, but said as if it was a very great consideration, “Perhaps I shall do that.”

  I managed to stop myself from snorting rudely, and asked him, “How’d you see this, anyway?”

  The addresses were all in different places on the bills, and the names were all different: the only common denominator was the box number and the suburb: P.O. Box 681, Hobart, 7050.

  He shrugged. “I like numbers. They are peaceful. I will look at other things now—that one. I want to see what that one is about.”

  “It’s a police report,” I told him, but I passed it anyway. JinYeong might not have much human sense, but it was obvious that he had a useful point of view despite that. “Good luck finding useful numbers on that one. I read it last night: it’s an overall report of crime going up in the area up toward the old brewery from about ten years ago. I reckon that’s probably when Abigail moved into the area.”

  JinYeong gave a small sniff of laughter. “Ah. Then the crime did not grow; it was stopped.”

  “Yeah, but I bet they left a bit of a mess when they were first starting,” I said. “Might need to suggest to them that they move out of that area soon. If someone knows how to find them by picking up police reports…”

  “This is all interesting,” said JinYeong. “The things the old man has gathered—they are things that someone would gather if they wished to keep you close and safe. He is looking for that person?”

  “Yeah,” I said soberly. “That’s the bit that doesn’t make sense to me: who would be looking for us, apart from Zero’s dad or the king? And if they’ve already found out this much about us, why are we all still alive? If it’s Upper Management that’s looking after us, why wouldn’t they have made a move already?”

  JinYeong, his eyes fixed on the page, made a soft sort of mmm sound.

  “And,” I began to add, when there was a snap and tug at the bit of Between that edged the house. “Hang on, reckon someone’s here.”

  There was a dull thud from below, followed by Athelas’ voice, sharp and negative, and a wall-shaking crunch that was ridiculously familiar to me. My head jerked up: someone or something had just gone through one of the downstairs walls.

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said in exasperation. “What now?”

  JinYeong’s eyes met mine: we scrabbled to get all the papers together, then he thrust them into my hands and I dashed off to throw them in my room while he darted downstairs.

  When I got down there, the first thing I saw was JinYeong, hands in pockets and his eyes alight with laughter, observing Zero from just beyond the stairs. Zero—who was currently sprawled on the floor with his head partway through the living room wall and Palomena’s knee on his chest, her knife at his throat.

  “Is that you, Pet?” she asked, without looking away from Zero. He looked a bit dazed, but I didn’t really blame her for not taking the chance: even a dazed Zero is a dangerous Zero.

  “Right here!” I said cheerfully. “I don’t know why you two don’t just go out for coffee or something.”<
br />
  Zero’s eyes focused on me for a moment, then went back to Palomena. “I am drunk,” he said to her, very clearly. “Enjoy the moment: it won’t happen again.”

  “I’m not sure that I would have said it was enjoyable,” said Palomena, withdrawing her knife. She replaced it in its sheath and used that hand to gently massage the wrist of the other hand, which was purple and bruising fast. “Are you usually drunk before noon, by the way?”

  “Why?” Zero asked, curling away from the wall and lurching to his feet. He shook his head, staggered a bit, and seemed to gain his balance again. “Looking for more information for my father?”

  “I report on exactly what I’m asked about,” she said. “Nothing more, and nothing less. For example, after this meeting, I’ll make a report to my commanding officer that details everything I happened to notice about the Pet and her apparently changed position within the house, despite the fact that I previously had no information to suggest there was such a change. I’ll pay especial attention to how that change has affected her interpersonal relationships among the three of you. My commanding officer will then pass that report on to Lord Sero’s father.”

  There was a very long silence while Zero gazed quizzically at her, then at Athelas; and JinYeong, out of sight of the rest of them, dabbed his fingers toward me in a come here gesture. Oh yeah. Zero’s dad thought we were a couple.

  It looked as though JinYeong thought it would be a good idea if he continued to think that, too. I considered him silently for a moment, then stepped away from the staircase and joined him by the entrance to the kitchen. Zero’s dad would definitely want to know what was up if that particular “relationship” had changed.

  “Don’t reckon you’re supposed to tell us what your orders are,” I said, leaning into JinYeong’s inviting side and allowing his arm to circle me naturally.

  “Indeed I’m not,” she said, turning a little toward us. I noticed, not without a bit of amusement, that she didn’t seem to be able to bring herself to put her back to Zero entirely. “I think you’ll agree that I haven’t told you what I was ordered to do, however.”