Between Floors (The City Between Book 3)

by W. R. Gingell

  JinYeong sat back with red lips and heavy lids, looking far too satisfied.

  “Oi!” I said resentfully. “Were you drinking my blood?”

  JinYeong gave me a bloody, sharp-edged grin.

  From behind me, Zero said, “The blood would have come out whether or not he drank it. It might as well be used.”

  “It was being used where it was.”

  “Bites on the shoulder hurt more than ones to the neck,” he told me. To JinYeong, he said, “Tend to the detective. I’ll take him home when he’s fallen asleep.”

  “Ye, hyung,” purred JinYeong.

  He was flaming happy. Oversized mosquito.

  I turned around to ask Zero, “Should the detective be going home? Reckon there’s some people out to get him.”

  I had put a dryad at the detective’s house, though. It was a small plant that wasn’t always a plant, and lived to protect—that should mean something, right? He’d be safe.

  “The detective will have to look after himself,” said Zero. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking through his desk. He definitely didn’t want to discuss this with me; but more than that, I got the feeling that he was concerned about something else.

  I couldn’t help saying, “He can’t look after himself if he’s unconscious,” but I didn’t want to push it. I was pretty certain the dryad would be good enough protection for most things, and it was better than nothing.

  It wasn’t like I’d be able to change Zero’s mind, anyway. The only reason he’d helped Detective Tuatu with his previous case was because I’d gotten involved and my three psychos had been responsible for my involvement. Getting me out of trouble had involved getting Detective Tuatu out of trouble, so things had worked out. I didn’t have that kind of leverage this time.

  “When’s Athelas getting home, anyway?” I asked. “He’s at work a lot lately, isn’t he? What’s he trying to find out?”

  “Don’t bother Athelas with questions when he gets home,” Zero warned me, and followed JinYeong back upstairs.

  JinYeong came back down later, but Zero didn’t. I would have wondered what was happening up there, but I felt the slight sideways tug to the fabric of the house as Zero left. He must have been taking Tuatu home.

  I would have complained to the uninterested JinYeong about that, but I didn’t feel as energetic as I would normally have felt about it. I mean, I know I was injured, but it wasn’t like the injuries weren’t being fixed. It was as though my mind still thought I was injured and in pain, leaving me utterly disinclined to do anything but hunch up on the sofa with the vague uneasiness of someone who’s forgotten something important, like turning off the stove.

  Besides, JinYeong was inclined to pace around the living room, and that was off-putting. Why was he so restless?

  Oh yeah. That’s right. I’d booby trapped the house before I left yesterday. They weren’t proper booby traps—they were vampire booby traps. Stuff that obsessive-compulsive, numbers-loving, finicky vampires would be bothered by on a very fundamental level. Stuff like a single curtain ring missing from a set, the pictures around the house being a few millimetres higher on one side than the other—maybe a very tiny drop of someone else’s perfume in a certain irritating vampire’s wardrobe.

  I grinned. JinYeong looked at me suspiciously and went away again with an annoyed “Aish!” but he came back as soon as he heard the jug boiling for coffee.

  Athelas hadn’t come home by dinner time, and neither had Zero, which was rude. JinYeong came back downstairs to pace, and that was annoying enough to make me pull out my phone and try to call Athelas. I didn’t want to be eating dinner with only the vampire for company.

  Enough was enough.

  JinYeong paused from his pacing long enough to look quizzically at me as I put the phone to my ear. I stuck my tongue out at him to tell him to mind his own business, and he flicked his eyes toward the ceiling and went on with his pacing.

  The phone rang for far too long, but just as I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to get any answer, there was a slight beep, and I heard someone pick up the line.

  “Athelas?”

  Nothing, just a murmur in the background.

  I said again, “Athelas? You coming home for tea?”

  “Ah!” sighed a voice that definitely wasn’t Athelas’. “Very good!”

  “Oh, heck no!” I said, and hung up. I threw my phone on the coffee table and complained to JinYeong, “Think my phone’s still hacked after Between. Some weirdo was just whispering in my ear. Flaming creepy!”

  One of JinYeong’s brows went up. He picked up my phone from the coffee table and looked it over, but he mustn’t have been able to see anything wrong with it, because he threw it back down on the coffee table a few moments later.

  “Pab hae,” he said to me.

  “Whatever,” I muttered, but I got up to make us something to eat, anyway. I was hungry, too, or I might have pretended not to understand.

  I went back to the couch after dinner, lying down to take up all the space so that JinYeong couldn’t sit down as well, and somehow or other I fell asleep while I was waiting for Zero and Athelas to get home.

  I fell into a confused dream of voices asking my name and prodding at me, that devolved further until I was back with the muddy little tackers poking at me again, and woke up just as confused, to see Zero stepping down into the living room.

  He stopped when he saw me, and asked, “Why are you sleeping here?”

  “Just happened,” I mumbled. I felt weird.

  Actually, I felt great. Why was that? I was pretty sure I’d been nearly half killed yesterday.

  That’s right. Vampire spit.

  I looked down at the hand that had had the broken finger, and it was straight and unbroken. It wasn’t even a little bit bruised anymore; nothing like the mess it had been yesterday. I wriggled it cautiously and it bent without a pang, so I used it to poke myself in the ribs.

  Nothing there, either.

  I felt for my collarbone, and while I was doing that, I asked Zero sleepily, “Where were you?”

  “Taking a walk,” Zero said briefly.

  That woke me up a bit more. “Yeah, but where were you walking to?”

  I mean, he wasn’t gunna tell me, but I wanted him to know that I knew he wasn’t telling me stuff. I wanted to make him not tell me, instead of talking past me.

  “Go back to sleep, Pet.”

  “Can’t,” I said. “My owner just came home at—hang on, what is it? Three in the morning? Yeah, my owner just came home at three in the morning. We pets can’t ever get back to sleep after that. We’re too excited.”

  I looked him up and down, searching for a certain tell that was, contradictorily, both bright and shadowy, and saw it there on his forehead.

  “You’ve been getting all lordly Between, haven’t you?” I demanded. That was the bright shadow of a crown that banded across his forehead. I’d seen it once or twice before.

  “Pet—”

  “And where’s Athelas? Did he not come home again? He’s working a bit hard, isn’t he?”

  “I wasn’t being lordly Between,” said Zero, after a pause. “I was accessing my birthright.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous for you?” I asked. If he was going to distract me from inconvenient questions about Athelas—and I would have to come back to that question later, too—by answering other questions that were a bit less inconvenient, I was gunna take full advantage. “Accessing your birthright when you’re Between? Got the impression you were trying to avoid some people.”

  Zero looked at me for a very long time before he said, “Only if I’m too slow.”

  “You were cleaning up the detective’s blood, weren’t you?” I said accusingly.

  “If you’re not going to sleep, get me coffee.”

  “All right,” I said, and got up. “But you were Between, cleaning up blood, weren’t you?”

  “It’s just as well I did,” Zero said. “Why didn’t you tell me
you’d left blood there yourself?”

  “Me? But—oh!” I said guiltily. “Forgot about the thorns.”

  “I already took care of that when I came to get you,” said Zero.

  “Yeah? What blood, then?”

  The scent of JinYeong’s cologne wafted into the room a moment or two before he did. “Ko,” he said. “Coppi isseo?”

  “Just about to make it. What do you mean, nose?” I felt my nose carefully, and there was a crustiness there that flaked away in rusty brown bits that might once have been red. “Oi! When did my nose start bleeding?”

  He answered me with something I was pretty sure was When you broke it.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I don’t remember that breaking.”

  Zero said, very coldly, “You didn’t clean up the pet after you healed it?”

  JinYeong shrugged and said something about an order.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “He says you didn’t tell him to clean me up, just to heal me.”

  JinYeong grinned.

  “I’ve scrubbed the blood from Between, at any rate,” said Zero. “Is the pet still affected?”

  “Ne.”

  “Affected by what? Oh, vampire spit? Yeah, that’s still going on. It came in pretty handy, actually.”

  There was a slight snort from JinYeong, and a short, dismissive sentence.

  “What?” I demanded. “We did all right! You try fighting a rock troll!”

  JinYeong said a couple more sentences in Korean that I was pretty sure claimed he had, in fact, fought rock trolls; three of them at once.

  It was my turn to snort. I did it much more loudly than he had, scattering more bits of flaky red, and scoffed, “’Course you did!”

  “Ibwa, Petteu!”

  Look here, Pet.

  “Can’t,” I said smugly, skipping away into the kitchen. “Gotta make coffee. Boss says.”

  He followed me into the kitchen anyway, and sat elegantly on the other side of the kitchen island as I boiled the jug and got out the coffee beans, resting his chin on the palm of his hand.

  “What?” I demanded. “It’s no good glaring at me.”

  “Isseo, matchi?” he said, eyes narrow. There’s something, isn’t there?

  Heck yeah, there was. He had to have noticed some of the things I’d done around the place, even if he didn’t know he’d noticed ’em. If I’d done a good enough job, it would have been grating at him for the last couple of days.

  “Dunno what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Ittda,” muttered JinYeong, this time to himself. “Hwakshilhae.”

  I turned around to put the coffee beans in the grinder and grinned at the cracked tile above the sink. I wondered which thing it was that was bothering him. Probably the curtains; they were the most obvious.

  While the coffee was grinding, I washed my face in the sink. When the water ran clear instead of rusty brown, I wiped my face on the inside of my shirt and called out to Zero, “How’s the detective?”

  “Sleeping,” came Zero’s voice. “He’ll be recovered when he wakes up.”

  “Any cops around his place?” I turned around with the ground beans, still wiping at my face with one hunched shoulder, and found JinYeong watching me with narrow eyes. I mouthed what? at him and kept going with the coffee.

  “One or two,” Zero said, stepping up into the kitchen. “They didn’t see me arrive. Come here, Pet.”

  I threw him a wary look but did as I was told. First he looked at my nose, then my formerly broken finger; then he got me to do a few reaches and stretches—probably checking on the ribs and stuff.

  “Good as new!” I told him happily.

  JinYeong looked smug at that, annoying little mosquito. He said something at the ceiling in a soft, satisfied sort of a way, and that was annoying, too; but since he’d actually fixed me, I didn’t like to be too grumpy about it.

  “Don’t go to see the detective for a while,” Zero said to me, and sat down beside JinYeong.

  “Why?” I argued. “He’s injured—”

  “He’ll be healed by the time he wakes up.”

  “—and there’s someone out there trying to frame him.”

  “Exactly,” said Zero, as someone knocked at the door.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You are not,” said Zero, his voice much colder, “to go and see the detective until I tell you otherwise.”

  Again, someone knocked at the door.

  “Anyone bothered about that?” I asked.

  “Ignore it,” Zero said. “Humans don’t answer the door at this time of day. They usually don’t knock on other people’s doors, either.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I reckon we should answer this time.”

  Zero leaned his forearms on the kitchen island. “Why?”

  “’Cos I reckon the knocking is coming from the linen closet.”

  Chapter Three

  JinYeong’s head came up swiftly. “Hyeong, eotteokaeyo?”

  “I don’t know,” Zero said slowly. “Whoever it is might have—never mind. There’s no use worrying about that right now. They can’t get in unless I let them in.”

  “You gunna let ’em in?”

  It took him a moment to answer, and that worried me. I didn’t often see Zero hesitate.

  “Yes,” he said. “But not just yet. They may not know exactly where we are.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, but there was hesitation in his eyes as well.

  “Yeah, but you’ve got a pretty good idea, don’t you?”

  “While they’re here, try not to notice things,” he said.

  “Things like what?”

  “Between things. You’re just a pet: A very human pet.”

  “Nae kkoya,” said JinYeong, as if he was agreeing.

  “What, I’m supposed to pretend I belong to him?”

  “You do belong to him. You belong to all of us.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Don’t argue with me, Pet,” said Zero, with finality. “Don’t argue with them, either. Don’t talk to them at all if you can help it. JinYeong—”

  “Kurae, kurae, nan halgaeyo.”

  Zero didn’t look convinced that JinYeong either understood, or would behave himself, but he nodded. “Very well. The room may change around you—don’t mind it. Everything will be where you need it to be, it will simply look a little different. The view from the windows might also be different.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. “Are we moving house?”

  “Something like that,” said Zero. “They’ve got a fix on one of the doors from Between, but there’s no need to let them have the human location. We can always get rid of that door later if need be.”

  “That gunna help?”

  “If we do well this morning, perhaps.”

  The knocking came again, this time more loudly, and someone said distantly, “My lord, please allow us in. We’re here officially.”

  The house around us flickered. JinYeong grabbed a wall, but I didn’t realise what was happening in time, and when the house shivered and became more an idea of a house than a solid object, I fell over.

  Zero’s huge hand grabbed me by the collar just as it looked like I was going to sink through the floor, and reefed me back up through the carpet.

  “I told you to not see things when they got here, not before,” he said. “Use your eyes.”

  I looked around, and the house shifted before my eyes. For a moment it was the house I’d lived in for years, then it was another house; much smaller and neater.

  “Don’t do that,” I muttered, and it flickered once more.

  When things stopped moving, it almost looked like my old house around me again, and I wasn’t sinking through the carpet.

  “JinYeong?”

  “Quaenchanayo,” said JinYeong, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Pity I hadn’t thought to do the same. I edged toward the two support beams that were b
ehind the couches, and said, “What, we’re ready? That was quick.”

  Zero said, “Be sure to keep quiet as much as possible, Pet.”

  “Yeah, got it,” I said, and gave him the thumbs up. I felt a bit sick in the stomach, actually. The house moving around us shouldn’t have worried me too much—after the times I’d been Between, it shouldn’t have felt much different—but there was something different about it.

  Maybe that was the difference between magic and Between. I would have to ask Athelas about it when he finally got home. And thinking of Athelas, it was definitely weird that he hadn’t shown up in the last couple of days. Zero didn’t look worried, but Zero didn’t ever really look anything.

  I was so busy thinking about Athelas that I was taken by surprise when Zero opened the linen closet and two gold-armoured fae shouldered their way through the door frame and into the living room.

  One was male, his colouring as golden as his armour, the other female, her hair raven dark and oiled in braids. The male took the lead, very nearly oblivious to the female who strode after him, which made me think she was his lieutenant—if those were the kind of ranks fae held in their forces, anyway.

  These people—were these people part of that group Zero called Enforcers? Was that the ‘gold’ they were always talking about?

  Another thought struck me, and I grimaced. They’d come from Between, right into the house. I’d never seen that happen before. I mean, Zero and the others came straight into the house from Between, but we’d never had visitors that way—not unless you counted the old mad bloke, and he wasn’t Behindkind. He already knew where the house was, anyway, and he was human, so he’d used human ways of sneaking in.

  Oh boy. What’s the bet this was my fault? What’s the bet someone had tracked me and Tuatu through Between? Was that what Zero had been about to say earlier?

  I grimaced and edged just a bit behind one of the support beams. Dead cert. It couldn’t be a coincidence that someone had found the house right after me and Tuatu were wandering around Between by ourselves.

  Hang on, though. How would they know I belonged to Zero?

  Maybe it wasn’t my fault.

  Zero waited until they were in the room properly, and until the golden fae shifted uncomfortably, before he asked, “For what reason have you tracked me down?”