Between Decisions: The City Between: Book Eight

by Gingell, W. R.

  “You’re here already,” she said. “We’ll just have to go to the conservatory. The offices are both occupied at the moment—we’re having a computer upgrade tonight and there are wires and stuff everywhere. Follow me.”

  The conservatory turned out to be a bit in the building where there was no roof. The rainfall and sunlight that had been allowed in through the hole had created a patch of greenery that boasted a few trees and a few small shrubs, and someone had put a couple of chairs underneath one of the trees where you could rest your legs in the sunshine and your upper body in the shade.

  “Heck,” I said, impressed. It looked almost like a bit of Between—if there had been enough of Between itself to it. I saw a flutter of shadow that was probably JinYeong following at a distance in the hallway, and sat down next to Abigail with the comforting sensation that I had backup if I needed it. I didn’t think I would need it—never wanted to need it when it was the humans I was dealing with—but it was nice to know I had it.

  “This is my favourite part of the building,” Abigail said. She seemed pleased by my delight in the space. “Hang on, I’ll get out the book; I’ve put in some bookmarks to make it easier to find the right parts, but I also wrote a few notes down.”

  “I can just take pictures with my phone, can’t I?”

  “You can try,” she said, grinning. “Don’t expect it to work, though: Blackpoint rigged this all for us, and he laid in a lot of security.”

  “Old-fashioned it is, then,” I said, taking the lined page of notes she passed to me.

  “There aren’t too many Annes,” she said, flicking the book out of her phone the way she’d done once before. It solidified in the air and dropped into her lap, and she turned carefully to the first of the bookmarks I could see sticking out of the top. “And I can’t promise you that the mentions we found are your Anne. The records were made before the days they started worrying about who could find their names, so there’s a bit more to go on, but I don’t know how helpful it’s going to be.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in the names thing,” I said.

  “I don’t,” said Abigail. “I’m just mentioning it because of how it affects the searches. The most recent Anne that could still be yours is this one: appeared suddenly in Hobart; they found her along the rivulet in the twenties. No mention of how old she was—just called young woman.”

  I let out a breath. “Not the same one, then. We’re after someone who disappeared later in life—it sounds more like that one escaped from Be—Faery. My great-grandma disappeared in the thirties: left a one-year-old kid behind and just vanished.”

  “Then there are these two. There’s one with a birth record from the turn of the century, so she’d be the right age for having kids in the twenties or thirties at the latest, which seems early. The other one was about fifteen in the thirties, so depending on when your great-grandma started having kids…”

  “Don’t know that,” I said regretfully.

  “I thought you said you came from Queensland,” Abigail said, frowning. “Or is that another part of your memories that you don’t have? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be looking for stuff like this from a group up there?”

  “Nah, the family came from Tasmania originally,” I said. “Mum’s side, anyway. Mum moved back to Queensland with Dad early on when they got married; she always said he came to Tasmania just to find her.”

  We’d ended up in Tassie again pretty quickly, though. Must be something about the place.

  “Maybe he did,” Abigail said dryly. “I mean, your great-grandmother—well, whether or not they’re the same Anne, almost all of the Annes I’ve seen in the records have… impressive histories. Impressive or depressing.”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering the entry I’d seen in Abigail’s book. “Like that one that vanished out of state—the pregnant one.”

  “Exactly. I wrote a note for her, too, but she’s a bit early for your great-grandma, I would have thought: that was in the eighteen somethings.”

  “Yeah,” I said reflectively. “That’s a bit early. Oi, you reckon my dad already knew about all this stuff when he came down here?”

  She shrugged. “You’d know more about that than I do. But you’re pretty well-trained, and I don’t think you can claim it’s all from the big white fae.”

  “Some of it is,” I said. “The fighting part of it—well, it’s from him and Athelas and JinYeong. The other stuff…yeah, my parents taught me a few things.”

  “You’re lucky you had them for long enough to learn stuff from them,” she said, and I heard the note of distant regret in her voice.

  It made me ask, “How did you end up here? I know you said it was City Fae, but what happened to you specifically?”

  “Specifically, my husband and daughter were killed in the crossfire when the fae came after me,” she said, her eyes glassy and hard.

  Heck. That regret wasn’t distant enough for how big it was. I’d had longer to process and accept what had happened, and I was nowhere near healthily recovered.

  “Sorry,” I said, digging the toe of my boot into the mossy floor. I already knew she hated Zero and Athelas, but I hadn’t realised exactly how hard it must be for her to work with them. Heck. What was gunna happen if she ever met Blackpoint and figured out the extent of his betrayal? He hadn’t meant it as a betrayal, but there was no way she wouldn’t see it as one.

  Just the very fact that he was fae and had concealed it from her would be enough.

  “You figure that memory out?” she asked suddenly. “The out of state one?”

  I shivered a bit. “Yeah.”

  “Did it help shake anything else out?”

  “A bit,” I said. “Not enough, though. We’re working on it.”

  “Just make sure they’re not working on you while you’re working on it,” Abigail warned me. “And watch out for your boyfriend, too. He’s a bit friendlier with those two than I thought he was.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. “No need to worry about JinYeong,” I said. “He wears his heart on his sleeve, anyway.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” she said. “But there’s something about him that isn’t normal. You might want to make sure he is what he says he is.”

  “He’s very honest about that, too,” I remarked. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right in the end.”

  I wished I could believe that, because the thought of what was going to happen in the future—near or far—still worried me a lot.

  “Have you thought any more about joining us?” she asked.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

  “Figured you lot wouldn’t want me anymore, actually,” I said, glad to find something I could be completely honest about. “Not after what happened last time.”

  Abigail hesitated, then said, “Let’s just say that I’ve started to appreciate your position a bit more recently. We’d be stupid not to want you, anyway. By and large, I still think that humans should stick with other humans, and I’ve…got a feeling that your big boy would let you go if you asked. Just think about it again, anyway.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, with an unsettling feeling of déjà vu and something else that I couldn’t qualify.

  “Just don’t leave it too long,” she said. “Look, Pet, I don’t want to be rude, but I have to get back to the setup in there: I don’t dare leave it alone for too long in case something happens. I’ve noted down everything that has to do with Annes for you—just make sure you don’t lose the paper. We’ll see you the day after tomorrow when we go after the sirens again.”

  “Day after tomorrow, yeah,” I agreed. Heck, Zero and Athelas must have figured out a way to protect everyone, then—and messaged Abigail. Rude of them not to tell me before I left today, but maybe they would have if I hadn’t just run away with JinYeong.

  I grabbed JinYeong on my way back through the house, and maybe he knew that Abigail had been trying to convince me to join the humans again, becaus
e he seemed a bit preoccupied—or maybe annoyed—when I rejoined him. It wasn’t until we left the house well behind that he broke his silence, and then what he did say surprised me.

  “This—” he gestured widely and vaguely back in the direction of the humans’ headquarters. “This is necessary, why?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “But my great-grandma was part of the stuff that Athelas got the detective to look for, and I reckon it’s important. Wouldn’t you do it if it was JiAh?”

  JinYeong went very still for a moment. “JiAh is…different.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I already know everything, but it helps nothing,” he said. “If I had not known, perhaps it would have been better.”

  “Yeah, but would you have let someone else decide that for you?”

  He sniffed. “Ani.”

  “Exactly. And speaking of things I don’t know, I should probably try to get Athelas to help me with some memories again today.”

  “There are more?” he asked, one brow going up. “You already found some that day. You were not happy.”

  Not happy was a pretty big understatement for the state in which JinYeong had found me.

  I shrugged one shoulder; it wasn’t as if I didn’t already know that—or as if there was anything I could do about it. I said, “Yeah, but there are more—there have to be more. I’ve been making myself forget stuff for years now; I think my parents thought it was the only way to keep me safe, but it’s made everything flamin’ hard recently. I know…well, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure I saw the murderer the night he killed my parents. I just can’t seem to remember more than finding them that night.”

  “You should wait for me,” said JinYeong. “I—when I am upset, I do not want to be touched. I think you need to be hugged when everything is too much. Hyeong is the same, and—”

  “I’m not accepting hugs from you,” I said suspiciously.

  “They are free hugs,” he said coldly. “I will not…expect things.”

  I looked across at him. “Oh. Thanks.”

  “Or,” he said, more persuasively, “you could stop playing games with that twisty old man. Then there will be no need for hugs unless you wish to have them.”

  “Not until I find out what happened to Mum and Dad,” I said. A small memory or two had popped out as I went about my everyday life, lately—perhaps a remnant from the sessions with Athelas and the encounter with Zero’s dad, perhaps just a natural sort of healing after the big blockage had been removed and my mind’s own normal flow had begun again, sweeping away other debris. I didn’t think it would be long before that blockage disappeared entirely, and I wanted to be as ready for it as possible when it happened.

  Maybe that way, I’d be able to mitigate the damage I was almost certain it would cause.

  “Heard we’ll be ready to go after the sirens again the day after tomorrow,” I said to Zero when we got back. JinYeong and I had come back to the house to find Athelas sitting in his chair and flicking through a book that must have been magic-adjacent, judging by how the illustrations didn’t seem to be quite tied to the pages. Zero had been in the kitchen, doing magic at the table on a series of small, plastic items. Some of them had melted into the table, which was going to be a pain to clean up; but most of them seemed to have turned out fine, so when I’d chopped up the beef and added all the spices to my pot, I leaned on the kitchen island, edging around JinYeong to see Zero, and pointed at the mess.

  “I suppose that’s stuff to stop the humans getting tricked into taking out their earplugs,” I said, since he’d only grunted in reply to my first question. “What’s it going to do for the problem with the camera app?”

  “The merman is working on something for us,” Zero said briefly. “Don’t interrupt, Pet; I’ve already ruined too many of these. They have to be ready for the electronics tomorrow.”

  “Got it, sorry,” I said. “JinYeong, shove over, I need this space for tea.”

  I pushed him aside without thinking about it, but instead of allowing himself to be pushed as he always did, JinYeong’s arms moved just a little, then stopped. I was jerked to a surprised stop, far too close to being nose-to-nose with him for comfort. He moved his head back just enough to make a small air-kiss in the direction of my nose, his eyes dark with laughter.

  My eyes flew to Zero, and my heart dropped when I saw that his eyes were on the both of us.

  He said icily, “What do you think you’re doing, JinYeong?”

  I stood up straight at once and said to JinYeong, “Stop doing weird stuff!”

  His eyes danced; he turned to face Zero and shrugged one shoulder. “It is only natural, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, it’s only natural?”

  “Kobaek haesseoyo,” said JinYeong. He sounded pretty cheerful for a bloke who had been very definitely turned down after a declaration of love. Or for one who was on the point of being tossed through a wall—again.

  I would have glared at him, but I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t take it as encouragement.

  There was a moment of silence before Zero spoke. His voice wasn’t a rumble this time: it was a piercing, icy chill. “You did what?”

  “I told her that I loved her,” JinYeong said, his voice crystal clear and resonant with mockery—and maybe a bit of challenge. “I told you I would do so.”

  “I told you that if you tried anything else, I would personally take you apart and—”

  “Don’t take anyone apart in the kitchen!” I told Zero. “I’m making chilli, and if you think I want to try and differentiate between what’s blood and what’s chilli, you’re flamin’ wrong.”

  Zero’s blue eyes turned on me for a brief second before flicking back to JinYeong. He said, “Come outside.”

  “Heck no!” I said firmly. “It’s bad enough having you throwing him through walls: I’m not gunna have you throwing him through the fence, as well.”

  JinYeong turned a more-than-usually-smouldering look toward me, then a provocative one on Zero. “She does not want you to hurt me, Hyeong.”

  “I just don’t want my house wrecked. Pretty sure the new neighbour is already scared of you, too, Zero: for blokes who are meant to be blending in, you’re not doing a real good job of it at the moment.”

  Zero’s eyes flickered across to me. “I told him that he wasn’t to make any overtures toward you, and I told him exactly why.”

  “That was pretty flamin’ rude of you, then,” I said. “If I don’t want him making—good grief, did you say overtures?—toward me, I’ll tell him myself! Actually, I did tell him myself, so you can stop trying to pick a fight.”

  “Nep,” said JinYeong, his nose lifting. “She told me already. We will work it out between ourselves.”

  I turned back to Zero. “Also, are you keeping secrets from me again? Why isn’t he supposed to make overtures?”

  “I can’t—I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not,” said Zero, looking genuinely perplexed. “Don’t you know that—”

  “This is my business, Hyeong,” JinYeong said. “I will listen to you in other things, but—”

  “When?” demanded Zero, as if at the very end of his patience. “I would like to know when, because I don’t remember you doing much listening in the past or the present!”

  “He’s got a point,” I told JinYeong.

  JinYeong pursed his mouth. “I am very good when people ask me nicely. You should try to ask nicely, Hyeong.”

  Zero very carefully put the pieces of plastic that he was trying to enchant back down on the table.

  “JinYeong—” He hesitated, then said exasperatedly, “Just go and check on the officers that the detective has at the waterfront! They’re not allowed to have their phones on them to avoid the danger of beguilement. If you can’t be useful around the house, you might as well be useful elsewhere.”

  “Ye, Hyeong,” said JinYeong primly.

  “And stop saying yes at me!” Zero said grimly. He added, as if unable
to stop himself and annoyed that he couldn’t, “Don’t go too close! Stay on this side of the perimeter they’ve set up. It’s not safe to go further until we’re better armed.”

  It must have amused JinYeong, because I heard the laughter in his voice as he said, “Ye, ye, Hyeong,” and faded away through the wall and into Between.

  “We’ll discuss this later,” Zero said to me; and, sweeping up all the bits of plastic that weren’t melted, he marched away upstairs.

  “I didn’t agree to that!” I yelled after him. Grumpy old fae. He was as bad as Athelas sometimes.

  Since Zero didn’t seem inclined to engage any longer, I left the chilli simmering in the kitchen and went to see if Athelas needed some tea. Perhaps I hoped he might be persuaded to help me look for a few memories, too, but tea always helped to grease the wheels with him.

  “Are you here to enliven my day as well?” asked Athelas, as I approached. “How delightful! I would prefer a cup of tea, however.”

  “You can have tea,” I told him. “No enlivening. The house is flamin’ perky enough without that. I want to do a bit of spelunking.”

  “I see,” he said, closing the book he was reading with one finger as a bookmark. “Then I really do insist upon tea—and you might consider espresso rather than your usual, perhaps.”

  I threw a look at him over my shoulder as I headed for the kitchen. “You want my heart rate up?”

  “I believe it would be useful.”

  “All right,” I called. “But if I can’t sleep, you’re going to be the one I’m annoying.”

  The jug started boiling then, but I was pretty sure he murmured, “A regular day in the life, in fact.”

  He had put away the book he was reading when I got back with the tray of tea and biscuits, which gave him a moment to drink his tea.

  Over the rim, he said, “I trust you’re not cooking anything that can burn, Pet?”

  “Already gave it a bit of a stir,” I said. “I can stir it again later. Some of it might stick to the bottom if I’m gone too long, but it won’t burn. What, you reckon we’ll be gone for a while?”