Between Floors (The City Between Book 3)

by W. R. Gingell

  JinYeong very slowly leaned closer and made a small, deliberate snap of teeth at me. Of course I stuck my tongue out at him, then hunched my shoulders and turned away. His leg was still in the way, but I could elbow that, too, if I needed to.

  “The problem is solved,” said the human, and his voice shook as they disappeared from my sight.

  “It will be,” said the Sandman. “But there are some tools needed to complete the job.”

  Wait. Was he—were they talking about Athelas?

  I turned my head again, and my eyes met JinYeong’s. He was listening intently; he’d already come to the same conclusion.

  “You’ve already given us so much,” said the human.

  “It is necessary,” the Sandman said, his voice muted by the length of the hallway.

  I leaned forward, trying to hear, and cold fingers closed around my wrist. JinYeong’s teeth were bared when I glanced at him; his leg pressed warningly against me, and I realised that I had leaned too far forward in my attempts to hear. I could again see the Sandman and his human companion, which meant they would be able to see me if they looked around.

  I hunched back under the desk as they approached the end of the hallway, and as the sound of their passage faded, I tried very hard not to wriggle. I felt hemmed in by JinYeong; his leg pressing against me on one side, fingers around my wrist, his eyes and teeth glittering far too close on the other side. Why the heck did he wear so much perfume? All I could smell was JinYeong; around me, in my hair, in my nose.

  I wriggled violently, elbowing JinYeong in the movement, and huffed back against the back of the cubicle to get away from his leg. There was a very small movement of the partition behind me, and JinYeong’s teeth gleamed in a silent snarl.

  “Petteu,” he hissed in my ear. “Choshimhae!”

  “You flamin’ choshimhae!” I whispered. “Why do you stink so much!”

  “Nemsae obseo!”

  “Shh!”

  “Ah!” he muttered beneath this breath, and I grinned.

  There was a final stirring at the end of the hallway—and if I was guessing about it, I would have guessed that it was toward the widdershins side—and the moment it ceased, I started wriggling out from under the desk. There was an annoyed mutter from JinYeong, but I ignored it. He was probably just complaining about someone finding his pong unliveable, anyway.

  When we were out, I saw him briefly waver in a movement toward the widdershins hallway, but he controlled it.

  “Nawa, Petteu,” he said softly.

  “What about him?” I jerked a thumb at the hallway. If the Sandman knew something about Athelas, we should be following him.

  Through his teeth, JinYeong said the same thing he had said before; but this time the meaning hissed into my mind, hot and clear, “Come out, Pet!”

  “No need to yell!” I muttered, but I followed him toward the door. “What about them? The humans?”

  “They’ll wake up soon, comfortably.”

  Well, that was nice, anyway. Safely on the other side of the door, with a conscious look over my shoulder, I said, still quietly, “Reckon he was talking about Athelas?”

  JinYeong shrugged; said, “Could be, could be not,” so that I understood it.

  “If he was, doesn’t that mean Athelas is still there in the building? That’s the hall I dreamed about.”

  “It’s Sandman,” said JinYeong, still understandable, for a wonder. He pinched my collar between his fingers and pulled me down the stairs. “Then of course it’s dreams.”

  “That thing gives people bad dreams as well as having a flamin’ terrifying face?”

  “Mwoh, bisutae,” he agreed.

  “So he could have just given me dreams about that hallway without it meaning anything?”

  “Ani. Imi isseo.”

  To my delight, that was almost understandable. If I was right, JinYeong was saying that there was a meaning, but the meaning wasn’t necessarily that Athelas was stuck in the police station.

  “Why’s he giving me dreams, anyway? I don’t know him; how come he’s shoving nasty dreams in my head?”

  “Nado molla,” JinYeong said. He sounded annoyed, but I didn’t think he was annoyed with me so much as himself, for not being able to understand what was happening.

  Once we got outside, I was going to nick off by myself and have a go at trying to find Daniel, but JinYeong must have been expecting me to do something like that, because when we got out of the station, he grabbed me by the collar again before I could leg it and pulled me through a rippling of heat haze that wasn’t exactly heat haze.

  I grumbled and tried to shake off his hand, but there was no moving those slender fingers. For an annoyingly pretty bloke, JinYeong was even more annoyingly strong. He pulled me right into Between with him, though our shadows didn’t follow us, and we walked between the road and the shadow of the fence on an almost bitumen path that shimmered with something warm and living. A few birds flew away as our bodiless shadows flitted past out in the real world; I heard them distantly, and almost saw them, but there were little fluttering animals on the shadowy, Between version of the wooden fence that stopped me seeing anything except them.

  “What are those?” I asked, brightening straight away. They were clockwork, I was pretty sure; all tiny bolts and bright patches of colour painted on metal plates, with feathers sticking out of weird places that would never let these things fly. “Are they birds?”

  “Manjiji ma, Petteu,” said JinYeong warningly.

  “Wasn’t gunna touch it!” I said, pulling my hand back.

  “Igodo manjiji ma,” he added, pointing at another bright thing that had caught my attention. His finger shifted, pointing without hesitation another three times. “Igo, igo, igodo manjiji ma.”

  “Wasn’t gunna touch any of them,” I muttered. He had pointed at all the interesting things ahead of us: A couple more variations of the metal birds, and what looked like it might have been a small clockwork safe. I pointed at the safe. “All right, what’s that, then?”

  JinYeong murmured something that had the meaning of “It’s none of your concern,” which was rude. I mean, it was true, and anything that looked like a safe, left out in public, was definitely not something I wanted to be messing with, but still.

  “Is that visible in the real world?” I asked him.

  JinYeong sighed and said something I was pretty sure was, “This is the real world.”

  “Well, the human world, then?”

  “Ne.”

  “What are you gunna do about it, then?” I demanded.

  “Amudun obseo,” he said shortly, but as we passed it, he gave it a short, solid kick that set it tumbling backwards and somehow more than backwards. Backwards in Between, maybe—where backwards was actually deeper into Between.

  “So that’s how you do it!” I said in satisfaction, startling JinYeong.

  “Hajima,” he told me.

  “Would I go messing with stuff like that?” I asked him solemnly, but I grinned all the way home.

  I stopped grinning when we got home, though: Zero still wasn’t there.

  “Flaming rude,” I said, and sat down on the couch.

  JinYeong threw a pillow at me and said lazily, “Pab hae,” which meant he wanted to eat.

  I nearly pretended not to understand him, but I was still feeling the urge to cook, so there was no point in cutting off my nose to spite my face. I didn’t want him to feel too comfortable about things, though, so I just looked at him for a bit before asking, “How come I can understand you more these days?”

  He shrugged. “Nan molla.”

  I don’t know.

  “Fibber,” I accused.

  One of JinYeong’s brows went up.

  “It’s the same thing where Zero and Athelas can understand you, isn’t it? ’Cos I’m pretty sure that speaking Korean is something different from that.”

  JinYeong’s lips pursed in dissatisfaction. Oh yeah. I was definitely right.

  �
��Ohhh!” I said slowly. “It’s all about hearing, isn’t it? ’Cos I’m good at hearing stuff I shouldn’t hear.”

  “Ani,” said JinYeong, unconvincingly.

  “It is.”

  “Anin ko.”

  “Pft,” I said, and advised, “You need to work on your poker face.”

  “You,” said JinYeong, very clearly, though he spoke in Korean, “need to—”

  He stopped, and I grinned at him. “Yeah? What do I need to do?”

  “Ah!” snarled JinYeong, and stomped off to his room.

  I’d almost forgotten what I’d done in his room until he swept back in, looking annoyed and uncomfortable. That’s right. There was still a drop of Athelas’ perfume lingering in his room. Didn’t look like he’d figured out what it was, but it was still affecting him. He hadn’t found the other stuff, either. I gave him a sarcastic look as he passed through the living room again, and he was annoyed by that, too; though he couldn’t protest it. The whole house seemed to annoy him at the moment, though I was pretty sure he still didn’t know what was bothering him, let alone what I’d done around the house. But it was getting to him, all right.

  I made stew for dinner. I had all the stuff for it, and if Zero was gunna be coming home late, it was something I could leave in the crockpot to stay warm until he got to it. I’d just put the glass lid back on top of the crockpot after a taste test when something hard and wooden hit me in the head, then dropped onto the kitchen bench with a clatter.

  It was a curtain ring.

  I looked up innocently into JinYeong’s glaring face as he prowled across the kitchen toward me. “What?”

  “Hajima!”

  “If you want me to understand, you’re gunna have to speak English,” I said.

  JinYeong narrowed his eyes at me. “Bad. Petteu!” he said, with great distinctness. “Ilon kol hajima.”

  “Stuff like what? Why are you throwing curtain rings at me?”

  JinYeong, his teeth showing sharp tips through the softness of his lips, leaned very close and said, “Choshimhae, Petteu.”

  “All right, all right, blood breath,” I grumbled. “I’ll put the rings back. Took you long enough.”

  His voice followed me as I went upstairs to get the rest of the curtain rings. “Do itdda, matchi? Matchi!”

  “Heck yeah, there’s more,” I muttered to myself, grinning. “Just you wait.”

  Zero arrived home late. I jerked upright where I’d been trying not to fall asleep on the couch, alerted by the tug of Between, and trotted off to the kitchen to boil the jug and put a bowl of stew on the table before I actually caught sight of him.

  I heard a faint whisper of sound as he stepped up into the kitchen, and looked around. He was there by the island, dishevelled and a bit bloody, and there was a burn across one cheek that had burned off a few of his frosted white eyelashes and half the eyebrow.

  “Heck!” I said, dropping the coffee tin. “What happened to you?”

  “Has Athelas returned?” There was a tightness to his voice that wasn’t annoyance or pain.

  “Nope,” I said. I ducked under the kitchen island for the first aid kit I kept there: Zero healed quicker than I did, but without Athelas, he’d probably still need a bit of patching up.

  He must have been hoping against hope, because he only nodded and sat down, and he didn’t try to push me away when I gave him his coffee and started dabbing at his face with the antiseptic, either.

  Strike a light. He must be concerned about Athelas.

  “Don’t know much about burns,” I said. “Can’t look it up, either; no data left on my phone.”

  “Just clean and cover it,” he said.

  “Haven’t heard from Detective Tuatu since this morning, either,” I told him, touching tiny bits of balm to the burn on his cheek. I was pretty sure I was hurting him, but I didn’t know how to be any gentler, so I just kept going. “Tried to call him half an hour ago.”

  “The detective can look after himself.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Have you considered,” said Zero, closing his eyes briefly, “that the detective simply doesn’t want to speak with you?”

  “Yeah.” I covered the burn and collected all the blue-tinted swabs I’d used to clean it. “But he always answers anyway, even if he doesn’t want to talk.”

  “Don’t attempt to convince me to help the detective,” Zero said, abruptly rising from the stool. He hadn’t touched his dinner, just his coffee, and now he stood with his back to me, looking out into the living room.

  “Not gunna,” I said, packing the first aid kit away. “But it’s a bit funny, isn’t it?”

  Over his shoulder, Zero asked, “What’s funny?”

  “Athelas went back undercover the other morning, just before me and Detective Tuatu found that body. Right before someone framed Tuatu. And Athelas hasn’t been home in three days now.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Something’s happened to him, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t think there was anything that could get Athelas. What are we gunna do?”

  Zero’s shoulders stiffened. “We are not going to do anything. It’s my own affair. I should never have allowed him to remain with me in the first place—I knew the risks. I’ll look for him tonight.”

  “Again.” I would have bet my last buck that he’d been searching for Athelas all day. Somewhere Between or Behind, by the look of him; there was blood on him that wasn’t blue.

  Still, it surprised me when he said, “Again,” in agreement.

  “At the police station?” There was so much I wanted to say—so much I wanted to tell him—but I couldn’t do it without giving away that I’d been there, too. I would have to wait for JinYeong to give his report.

  “No,” Zero said. “JinYeong looked there today—he would already have told me if Athelas was there.”

  Well, if JinYeong didn’t have a phone, they must have some way of talking to each other that I didn’t know about. I decided to winkle that out later, and asked, “Where, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are we gunna do?”

  He still didn’t turn around. I dunno; maybe he really didn’t want me to see his face.

  “Pet—”

  I don’t reckon he knew how defeated he looked with his back to me, shoulders dropped. Just now, he didn’t look like a high and mighty fae who could crush the world of humans with a look. He looked like a human who had lost a friend and didn’t know what to do or where to turn.

  “You didn’t want Athelas here anyway,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s always doing slippery little things around you that you probably wouldn’t approve of.”

  Zero sighed; a huge, emptying sound. “Yes.”

  “Yeah,” I said, more to myself than him. “I thought so.”

  I climbed on the stool he’d vacated and launched myself onto his back, legs dangling. It was a bit further from the floor than I’d realised.

  Zero didn’t even bother to brace himself for my weight, but he looked over his shoulder at me, perplexed. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m hugging you,” I said, with my arms clutched around his neck. “Didn’t your parents ever hug you? Thought one of ’em was human?”

  “Stop it.”

  Sometimes I’m not a very obedient pet. I locked my arms before he could start to unwind them and did the same with my legs around his waist. “Nope,” I said. “You’re getting a hug whether you want it or not. It’s good for the soul.”

  “I’m fae,” Zero said. He sounded perplexed, too. Every now and then he does, when he’s talking to me. Maybe it’s because he’s not used to dealing with humans much. “I don’t have a soul. Pet, let go.”

  “I don’t think that’s right,” I argued, clinging tighter around his neck to leave no cracks where he could work his fingers in to pull my arms apart. It wouldn’t last long—there was no contest in strength
between us when it came to me and Zero—but I was pretty sure that the human side of Zero was still there, and still needed comfort every now and then, even if he wouldn’t admit it. “And I’m not sure Athelas is right about you, either.”

  “Ah mwohya!” complained JinYeong, as he padded into the room. “Petteu, wae irae?”

  “Just cos you’re a dead cold fish doesn’t mean everyone is,” I told him, tucking my head in close to avoid Zero’s tugging fingers.

  JinYeong glared at me. “Throw it out, hyeong,” he said, and he must have meant me to understand it, because I didn’t have any trouble with the meaning. To Zero, he spoke rapidly and incomprehensibly except for the odd word or two I understood. As he did so, Zero sat down almost automatically, forgetting to tug at my arms, and I loosened my grip until I could drop onto the stool beside him instead of hugging his neck. I was pretty sure JinYeong was giving Zero a run-down of how things had gone at the police station today, and I wanted to listen carefully to make sure my name wasn’t mentioned.

  JinYeong saw me paying attention and showed me the tiniest edge of tooth in a smirk. I glared at him around Zero’s shoulder. Little rat. He better not give me away.

  He didn’t, though; or not as far as I could tell. I would have to go shopping for some stuff to make him snacks tomorrow—I’d actually half-thought he’d give me away despite his promise not to. Especially when he found the missing curtain rings. He must really want those blood snacks.

  When they were finished discussing it, JinYeong in incomprehensible Korean, and Zero in scarcely more comprehensible sentence fragments, Zero said to me, “JinYeong tells me a Sandman has been at the station. If you happen to see one again, call me at once. Don’t attempt to talk to it.”

  “No worries,” I said. “Wasn’t gunna try to talk to it.”

  He hesitated, then said reluctantly, “Give me the detective’s number.”

  I couldn’t help the grin that spread on my face. “You’re helping him?”

  “No,” Zero said shortly. “He’ll be helping me. If the two incidents are related, he has information that could help me find who or what is keeping Athelas.”

  “You going out again now?”