Between Decisions: The City Between: Book Eight

by Gingell, W. R.

  Zero, looking more alert by the minute, exchanged a worried look with Athelas—who, to my relief, looked unhurt, if rather tired. “Why is my father so interested in the Pet’s position?” he asked Palomena.

  “That is something I can’t tell you,” she said. “Even if I wasn’t directly forbidden to do so, I don’t know. I’ll make a report on the appearance of changes due to her apparent change in position, and that’s as much as I can do.”

  Did she put emphasis on change in position? I was pretty sure she had.

  “Ostensibly,” Palomena added, “I’m here to see if you need any assistance in dealing with the occurrences that are reported to be happening along the waterfront. I get the impression that my help is supposed to lean more toward covering up the incidents than finding the source of them, but I wasn’t given clear enough directives to be…completely sure of that.”

  Zero’s eyes grew lighter blue, and I’d have sworn they danced a bit. “You’re offering us help.”

  “I believe that’s my job,” she said.

  I poked JinYeong in the ribs, and he bared his teeth at me but glanced toward Zero and then grinned for real, shrugging one shoulder at me. So JinYeong agreed: Zero was amused.

  More importantly, it looked as though Zero was prepared to accept real help from Palomena, and that Palomena without her nearest commanding officer was inclined to help as much as she could.

  “We would appreciate the assistance,” Zero said to Palomena.

  Nothing much changed in her expression, but there was the briefest little upward pull on one corner of her mouth that made me think she was pleasantly surprised. That was fun and rather nice: she’d come prepared to offer help—had even given us information for free—without expecting that it would be accepted in the spirit it had been offered.

  “I’m being very useful to Zero these days,” I said helpfully, smiling brightly at both Zero and Athelas. “Very hard working and supportive and all that sort of thing. Anyone who wants to know how things are going should know how useful I’m making myself.”

  “I’m quite certain my commanding officer will be interested to hear that,” said Palomena, with a very slight glow of amusement to her eyes. “No doubt if it gets…further than him, anyone else hearing it will be glad to know. There seems to be a great deal of interest in whether one human pet is as loyal to her master as everyone would like to think.”

  “Consider it confirmed,” said Zero, the amusement fading from his face completely.

  “Then I’ll be on my way now that I’ve had it confirmed and offered my assistance. When shall I make myself available to you?”

  “Tomorrow, dawn,” Zero said.

  “I look forward to it,” she said. She bowed to us—even to me, which was nice—and headed back toward the linen closet door.

  I don’t know when it started to be normal for people to pop in and out of the linen closet, but even if it hadn’t been exactly normal by now, it still beat Zero’s dad knocking down the front door to get in. So long as the linen closet was the only way his minions had of getting into the house, we were all a lot safer.

  Well, mostly me. I was a lot safer.

  “It seems as though I’ll have to make it clear to my father that you’re not to be touched,” said Zero to me, after the door closed behind Palomena.

  “You believe he wants to hurt the Pet?” Athelas’ voice was light with surprise. “I had thought quite the opposite.”

  “I don’t believe he wants to hurt her, but I think it’s a common side effect of my father’s interest,” Zero said shortly. “I don’t want him interested in her and I don’t want him following her. JinYeong, get your arm away from Pet.”

  “Heck!” I said, startled. I hadn’t realised it was still there, warm behind me and snug against my waist. I was supposed to be making myself very distant from JinYeong—I’d obviously got far too used to him being close.

  JinYeong surprised me by removing his arm without a challenge to Zero, but he did glance down at me with a curious, tentative little smile that was almost terrifying in its honesty.

  “It’s all right, I’m not gunna try to hit you,” I said, looking away. “I knew what you were playing at.”

  “I’d like to know what you were playing at,” said Zero, but he was looking at JinYeong.

  “Your dad thinks we’re a couple,” I said hastily. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the whole explanation, and right now I didn’t trust JinYeong not to come out with it in an excess of either honesty or mischief. “You going to see him right now?”

  “Yes,” he said, after a moment of thought. “I want to know that you’re not going to disappear one day while you’re out on the street.”

  “You just don’t wanna cook your own dinner,” I said, grinning; and when he grinned back reluctantly and put his hand briefly on the top of my head as he passed me for the linen closet door, it didn’t make me instinctively shy away.

  I didn’t know why it had weirded me out so much when it first started happening, apart from Morgana’s insistence that Zero liked me—didn’t know why it suddenly didn’t now—but for now it was just nice not to feel uncomfortable around him again.

  I called after him, “I’ll go get some groceries, then. We’re out of steak and nearly out of onions. Make sure you come home hungry, ’cos we’re having barbeque tonight.”

  Chapter Four

  Zero was supposed to be out seeing his father, so when I nearly collided with that father along Elizabeth Street just before I got to the mall, it was a bit of a shock. Luckily for me, I saw the flower first, growing where it shouldn’t have been growing. It had sprouted up in the pinch between the boards of an A-frame sign, nodding its little head while the very tall, very beautiful fae behind it scanned the footpath opposite.

  I ducked behind the sign before he could look around and see me, staring sickly up at the flower with memories and nightmares stirring at the edges of my thoughts and threatening to come out before I had the chance to ease them out, nice and gentle, to examine each one carefully and emotionlessly before going onto the next.

  I stayed behind the sign for nearly too long, heart pounding; then I whisked myself into the alleyway closest to the sign without looking to see which one it was. That was probably pretty stupid, because more greenery grew around me as I hurried into the bricked, covered alleyway that should have held tables for the charming little restaurant that was usually part of this bit of Hobart. As I scurried through, the hanging lights coiled and moved as though trying to follow me—or maybe just trying to keep an eye on me. The sound from Elizabeth Street muffled and then silenced completely as ferns closed in around me, but I couldn’t turn around and go back. Zero’s dad would be out there, waiting. My only hope was to push on ahead and hope that I would be able to access the other entrance to this alley that in the human world was at right angles with the one I had used.

  There were two problems with that particular hope.

  Firstly, I was no longer in the human world—or even quite sure that I was still Between. There was an awfully solid feeling to the flagstones beneath my feet, and a dreadfully ancient chill to the air that was far too akin to the air of Behind than I really wanted to acknowledge right now.

  Secondly, I was not the only person in this not-quite-Between-and-not-quite-Behind patch of existence. Ahead of me, a man sat at one of the three black tables, reading a library book. He looked up as I approached, one dirty-blond eyebrow lifting very slightly; but I was pretty sure he was surprised, not contemptuous.

  He looked as though he didn’t know he was tall, dressed in soft, comfortable trousers that were a bit too short and a loose cotton shirt with sleeves not quite long enough, his vest unbuttoned and hanging in folds from his shoulders. Square, useful gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, and his shaggy, dirty-blond hair was just slightly too long: the whole of him looked like a wolfhound crossed with a golden retriever who had been turned into a doubtful sort of human.

 
Unlike a wolfhound or a golden retriever, however, this bloke had a book in one hand and an enquiring look on his face.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  I wasn’t supposed to be here, that much was obvious. I also didn’t particularly want to be here, because this was definitely Between-shading-to-Behind, and there was a really good chance that this bloke was fae, deadly, or wanted to kill me. There was also a good chance that he was all three.

  “You didn’t,” he said. “I was about to go upstairs, anyway; I’ve finished my book and need another.”

  I would have told him that I was just passing through and tried to make a break for it down the other side of the alley, but by then I was far enough in to see exactly what lay down the left-hand turn I would have normally made to exit onto Bathurst Street. What I could see now, instead of an open view into the street, was a long, vast lane of greenery that followed the gentle swell of a hill and reached a crest that showed only blue, glassy sky beyond it.

  “Flamin’ heck,” I said slowly.

  “You seem to have closed the doors behind you,” said the fae, drawing my attention back to him.

  I looked at him doubtfully, taking in the stubbly chin perched on his palm and the curious eyes behind those glasses. I couldn’t tell if he was joking, but any fae should know that humans couldn’t do things like that.

  “Don’t reckon I did that,” I said.

  “I don’t think it was me,” he said. He made it sound really polite, like he didn’t want to call me a liar but knew it hadn’t been him so…

  That made me want to laugh, but an inconvenient thought chilled the impulse. Heck, if he hadn’t done it, who had? Had Zero’s dad…?

  Ah heck.

  “Come up and see the books, if you’d like,” the fae offered, pushing away from his table. “The alley will probably open up by itself later, anyway. I’m going to get another book.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me that I shouldn’t be here?” I asked him. I was reasonably sure that he was fae, and he should be pretty well aware that I was human. Still, he didn’t seem to be about to try and kick me out, or to tell me that humans shouldn’t be able to poke their noses into his quiet little courtyard.

  He shrugged and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Who’s to say you’re not supposed to be here? That’s the thing about Behind, isn’t it? The intersection of the worlds: reality meeting up with another reality at odd points and things happening because of those connections. The entirety of the succession rests on that intersection. Perhaps you’re here exactly where you’re meant to be, at exactly the right time.”

  “Right,” I said, blinking a bit. I hadn’t expected him to talk so much—or to say so much, more to the point. He must know I was a human, but he was telling me things humans weren’t supposed to know.

  Was he planning on killing me? He must be.

  Still, I wasn’t dead yet, and there were definitely flowers creeping up around the edges of the alley from which I had entered.

  So when he said, “Come on if you’re coming,” and moved across the courtyard at a long-legged lope that was nearly as hard to keep up with as Zero’s, I jogged after him and followed him all the way up the metalwork stairs there. I didn’t particularly want to go upstairs with a strange behindkind, but I didn’t particularly want to stay down here and see how long it would take Zero’s dad to get in if he hadn’t been the one who closed the place up, either.

  The stairs felt nice and human as we climbed, shaking and echoing the way they would have in the human world, but a layer of moss crept down to meet us, and by the time we were at the corrugated landing, it was soft beneath our feet as well. There was also a lot more greenery in the alley than there had been when we were down there, and I didn’t think that was due to Zero’s dad.

  “Is that the green man?” I asked, tilting my chin at the courtyard below, where waving fronds curled up and along the curving roof of the alley in both directions. It would be nice if it was the green man; I’d feel a lot safer, too.

  “I would like to think so,” said my companion. “But I haven’t seen a leaf or twig of him in many years. Did you come here in search of him?”

  “Nah,” I said, pulling back from the railing at the end of the landing and moving toward the door. There were definitely a few too many flowers for comfort near the entrance of the alley. “Just would’ve said g’day if it was him, that’s all.”

  “Would you? I heard he’s quite picky about who he talks to. You’ll have to introduce me.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re joking,” I said bluntly, following him through the door and into an antechamber that had more stairs. Much to my relief, there was no instant tug of magic or Behind, and the interior, although dark, still felt very human.

  “I wasn’t joking,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve been trying to get an audience with him for a while now. You’d think he was the King Behind with how hard it is to meet him.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I wasn’t trying to meet him; I had something he was interested in. He sorta pulled me in.”

  “Some people would call that a compliment.”

  I didn’t have much to say to that, actually; I was still too ignorant of the world I kept accidently impinging on to know how much of a compliment it was. So I kept quiet, and we climbed the stairs that were still a fusion of metal and moss, echoing and silencing our footsteps in a syncopated kind of rhythm that led us toward a small window straight ahead at the top and an entrance to the left that allowed soft light to fall on the mossy stairs.

  Turning into that open doorway, the fae stepped onto a wood-boarded floor that stretched out in long, peaceful lines, and I came out a little after him, looking around me curiously. There still wasn’t too much of a feel of Behind about the place, and I felt more at home than I had in the courtyard below.

  That is, until I got a bit too close to one of the windows.

  I felt the pull of them trying to interest me, so I was already feeling cautious about wandering over toward the nearest. I went over anyway because I was still able to pull back pretty comfortably from the tug. When I rested my hands on the windowsill, gazing out at the totally unexpected view there, I could see exactly why they had tugged at me.

  This window should have looked out on plain, red-bricked wall. There shouldn’t even have been a window here, considering that this building was supposedly co-joined with the buildings on either side of it. Instead, I saw deep, dark ripples of a blue that was immediately familiar and touched a bittersweet chord of mingled fondness and hurt in me. It could have been a giant pool I was looking into, like the pool that existed in the upper-story apartment of my friend and local merman, Marazul. Was this fae keeping merpeople in his house, or did he have a mer-housemate?

  Then I saw that the light from the next window was decidedly different from this one, and quickly stepped a few paces over to look out that window instead. I saw a garden, bright and green and peaceful, and when I craned my head to gaze along the wall, without quite daring to touch the glass, there was more wall there.

  All right. So it wasn’t a pool actually attached to the house—might not even be a pool. It was a view of somewhere else—whether pool or ocean, I wasn’t sure. I’d seen windows like this before: windows on a house that was so steeped in the malleable influence of Between that you could see out into Behind through the glass. Ralph the revenant’s house, to be precise. Just quietly, Ralph was one of the aforementioned Reasons I Personally Knew for being worried about a house that was a bit too inclined to follow you when you tried to leave.

  Still, despite my unease, the windows were magical—literally as well as figuratively—and it was hard to pull my eyes away from them to see what the fae was up to. He didn’t seem to be too interested in the windows; he passed across the room to the nearest bookcase instead, without even glancing toward the enticing windows, and put his book back. Then he bent his knees a bit and ducked his head to look on
the bookshelf below the one he’d just replaced his book in, as if he was trying to figure out his next read. Maybe he was. I just hadn’t picked fae for being peaceful readers of books.

  Zero reads books, yeah, but he doesn’t do it exactly peacefully. When Zero reads a book, you know he’s trying to find a monster or figure out a spell, or maybe just work out what laws he’s going to be very careful not to break this week.

  I went back to the first window, and was in the process of watching the light from the ripples play across my skin when I heard the fae sit down. I turned my head and saw him at the long table that drew the centre of the room toward itself, sitting on a bar stool with a wide base and a wide back. It looked comfortable and welcoming: if I had time to read and sip coffee in dancing beams of sunlight, this was the sort of place I’d choose to do it.

  “The other windows have better views,” he said, opening his book. “I’m not sure what you’ll see today, but it won’t be a dirty human street, at any rate. Hobart is on the pretty side, but there are views that are nicer than the bare city street.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, backing away and moving across the room to look at the other set of windows. At least this bloke wasn’t starting by running down the human world like Zero and Athelas still too often did. “You own this place?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  That made me smile a bit. Athelas would have said something like You could say that or Well, something like that, Pet, because he understood that even if he had taken over an area in the human world by owning the piece that connected with it either Behind or Between, it didn’t mean he owned the human bit of it. Looked like this fae didn’t have that knowledge.

  “What do you use it for?”

  “Thinking,” he said, then gestured vaguely with his book. “Reading.”

  “Do you need the glasses?”

  He took them off and looked at them as though seeing them for the first time. “I don’t know anymore. Perhaps. They’re comforting when I’m in the human world. Perhaps I’ll need to reconsider that.”