“Heck,” I said, staring at the book. “That’s another one of those things I forgot, I reckon.”
There was a vague fluttering of remembrance that wasn’t so hard to dig out now that I knew how to do it. I allowed it to come out and felt again the dismay I’d felt one day when I was much younger and coming home from the park, when the way home had become suddenly…not the way home. The first thing I had noticed was the way that the road became sticky beneath my shoes and tried to slow me down. I wasn’t too worried at first, because it wasn’t enough of a tug to make me think that it was actively trying to swallow me up while under the conviction that it was actually quicksand. I hadn’t reckoned on the mailboxes starting to come to life, maws snapping and elongated poles stretching to coil toward me.
The nearest one got to me first, green lid snapping against maroon base, with a tongue that looked a lot like a letter, but furrier.
“You’re a mailbox,” I told it sternly. “You can’t eat me.”
I had known about Between then—known enough to remember how to use it, at least. And I had remembered more quickly back then. Despite making myself forget every time, once I was Between, I seemed to be able to remember what things were and how to use the place.
When I was a kid, that was. Turns out that if you do a big enough number on yourself to make yourself forget the death of your parents, you can make yourself forget a heck of a lot of other stuff, too. It made sense of the way I had been able to use Between so instinctively when I first found it again: I’d had the experience and mental mechanisms for it. I’d just been lacking the actual memories to go with it.
And now that I remembered that, I remembered exactly what had happened with this book. It hadn’t dropped into the bathwater, it had dipped into the creek as I forded it to escape the behindkind that chased me home that day. I’d left it out on the patio to dry off, and it had probably never made it back into the house, though I couldn’t be sure when it had vanished from the property entirely.
“Never mind,” I said to JinYeong. “It’s another one of those wriggly memories I had to dig out. We’d better go in and show this to Zero.”
It wasn’t until we got inside again that I saw it: the Heirling Sword, halfway in and halfway out of the umbrella stand, far too sharp and bright to be an umbrella but not blue enough to be a sword.
JinYeong snarled and shut the door with a force that shook the house, setting a great big something sweeping around the whole place from the front gate all the way around to the last fencepost behind.
“Yow!” I said indignantly. “Let me know before you do stuff like that!”
“It was not me,” said JinYeong, his teeth bared and his expression almost feral in its intensity. His eyes were still on the sword, as though he could force understanding from it by the potency of his gaze.
“Who was that bloke?” I demanded. “He said I could call him the Librarian, but you can’t tell me he’s just a librarian. Not when he did that to the sword.”
I saw the raw horror sweep across JinYeong’s face as he came to a conclusion just a bit quicker than I had.
“Hyeong!” he shouted, as pale as I’d ever seen him. He broke free from his trance and started through the hallway with a long, hasty stride. “Hyeong! We are discovered! Hyeong!”
“Flamin’ heck,” I said, left alone in the hall to rock on my heels in shock. “That was the king, right? It was the King Behind.”
Between Decisions: The City Between: Book Eight Page 26
