Between Floors (The City Between Book 3)

by W. R. Gingell

  “I don’t have time to tend to your nightmares tonight,” he said. “It would have made you sleep soundly.”

  “Nobody has to tend to my nightmares,” I muttered. “I can look after ’em myself.”

  “Do as you please,” said Zero, and vanished into his study.

  If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I’d hurt his feelings. If it was JinYeong, I would have been sure—JinYeong tended to sulk. Even now, he was watching me with his mouth pursed.

  I threw a cushion at him. “You mickey-finned me,” I told him. “You’re no better.”

  JinYeong folded his arms and muttered a stream of sulky Korean into the other side of the room. I ignored it and went to the kitchen to get some paper towel to clean up the coffee spill. Lucky the carpet was dark; it wouldn’t stain, at least.

  “A piece of advice, Pet,” said Athelas, when I got back. I expected to see his face all quiet and amused like it usually is when he talks to me, but when I looked up from my coffee stain, he was quite serious.

  “What?”

  “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “The only feeding that’s going on around here is me feeding you lot,” I pointed out.

  “A fair point,” said Athelas, and now he was smiling faintly again. “However, do you think you could refrain from offending my lord?”

  “Don’t speak for me,” said Zero’s voice. “If there’s a need for me to speak, I’ll do it myself.”

  His voice was harsh, so I was surprised to see that Athelas’ smile had grown. “My mistake,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Zero.

  “Hotsori,” muttered JinYeong, and stalked away upstairs as if he were done with the nonsense.

  Athelas gazed after him, and the amusement in his eyes grew. “Life becomes more and more interesting every day,” he said.

  “Yeah? Don’t suppose you’re gunna tell me why?”

  “I think not.”

  I looked around me at a room that wasn’t as darkly uncomfortable as it had been when I first woke, and at an Athelas who was no longer dripping in blood and horror.

  “Oh well,” I said. “Looks like we’re back to normal again, anyway. Whatever that is.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I didn’t mean to fall asleep again—I meant to stay awake, with one eye on Athelas, for as long as it took him to drop off to sleep. I must have fallen asleep at some stage, though, because I woke up from a refreshingly dreamless sleep, still on the couch, while the clock told me it was ten in the morning.

  Flaming heck. I’d really slept in today.

  I could feel the movement of Zero upstairs; along with it a flicker of JinYeong’s presence, but Athelas was opposite me on the other couch, his eyes closed.

  “Ha,” I said, with slightly satisfied crankiness. “So much for super fae healing.”

  “My healing is coming along quite nicely, thank you Pet,” said Athelas, without opening his eyes. “And for your information, healing veins and muscles takes significantly more time than healing outer wounds.”

  “’Zat mean you were running around the place bleeding on the inside yesterday?”

  Athelas opened one eye. “Perhaps you would be good enough to make tea, Pet?”

  “You were!” I said in astonishment. “You were running around slaughtering Behindkind and making trouble while you were bleeding internally! Why didn’t you let Zero deal with it?”

  Athelas opened the other eye and turned his head to gaze at me. “Are you planning on mounting a strike to protest your treatment?”

  “All right, all right,” I grumbled. “I’m flamin’ going!”

  “Some things,” said Athelas as I headed for the kitchen, and his voice was meditative and soft, “are personal. Those things should be handled personally.”

  “Revenge, you mean,” I muttered to myself as I tapped the button to boil the jug. I mean, fair enough. They had suspended him on strands of moonlight and tortured him for a bit over a week. I’d be pretty cranky at that, too.

  Hang on. I was the one who’d died six times. I was already flamin’ cranky. It didn’t help that it was humans who were responsible for that—it was the sort of thing I was used to from Behindkind, and I didn’t like the feeling that humans had been capable of something just as horrible as Behindkind, given the right tools.

  I didn’t like the fact that there was a group out there like Upper Management, giving them the tools to do it.

  I thought Athelas had gone back to sleep when I came in with the tea, but he opened his eyes as soon as I put the tray on the coffee table. Maybe he smelled the biscuits. I dunno. I helped him to sit up, and maybe he found that suspicious, because the look he gave me when I passed him his tea as well was nearly worried.

  “Pet,” he said. “Have you put something in my tea?”

  “What?”

  “I hesitate to think it of you—”

  “Yeah? Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Well, if the truth must out, I did wonder if your forgiveness included pranks directed at myself instead of JinYeong. I had the distinct impression that Zero gave you some bad ideas last night.”

  “Heck no,” I said. “It’s too much fun messing with Blood-Breath. Told you I forgive you.”

  “Indeed,” said Athelas, and sipped his tea. “Then perhaps you could pass the biscuits.”

  “They’re not your favourites,” I warned him. “And before you think that’s a subtle bit of payback, you can blame the vampire for it. He found where I was hiding them and ate them. I don’t think he even likes them; he just ate them because they’re yours and because I hid them.”

  Athelas smiled into his tea. “Certainly. What else would you expect of him?”

  “Nothing good, anyway. How long are you gunna be lying around the living room?”

  “A few more days, I expect. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said, to give him something to think about. Not revenge. But Athelas is always thinking about stuff, and when he’s not guessing what I’m up to outright, he’s getting too flamin’ close. I wanted to give him something to think about. Not that I was gunna be up to anything. Not around the downstairs living room, anyway. I was going to be doing all my getting up to things outside the house.

  Keeping tabs on Daniel from Morgana’s window, for instance. Probably training with Zero again, now that Athelas was back home and Tuatu hadn’t been arrested. Figuring out how to help Tuatu when he didn’t want help and Zero didn’t want me to help.

  Athelas settled a lingering look on me, and said at last, “I don’t believe you.”

  It surprised a laugh out of me. I filled his teacup again and said, “Okay. Think what you want.”

  “Ah, where’s the enjoyment in that? I expected hot repudiations.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Are you? Again, I take leave to doubt it.”

  I dissolved into ridiculous giggles. “Maybe that’s my revenge! Driving you mad with tiny doubts.”

  “If so, your revenge has well and truly been completed,” he said, and put down his teacup. There was a distant look to his eyes that I didn’t like. “In the moonlight I had a thousand tiny doubts that never made up enough to allow me to be sure one way or the other.”

  “Yeah, and that’s weird, too,” I said, without thinking about it.

  He smiled, waking from that glazed look. “Indeed? And what seems strange to you, Pet?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just…I didn’t think you could make mistakes.”

  I hadn’t exactly thought he was infallible. It was more that I’d thought he couldn’t be wrong. Dying six times had proved that wasn’t true. Athelas, just like any human, could be so blinded by what he thought he knew, that he couldn’t see the truth even when it was right in front of him.

  And if Athelas could be wrong about that, there was a slight chance he was wrong about other things—even fae things.

  “I’ve made many mistakes in my time, Pet,” Athelas sai
d, smiling faintly. “Some of them I rue more than others—some of them are more dangerous than the others. Some of them are perhaps not the mistakes I thought them to be.”

  “Got no idea what you’re talking about, now.”

  “I’m happy to hear it.”

  “Typical,” I said gloomily.

  JinYeong, padding downstairs at the sound of hot drinks and biscuits, shot me a malicious look. I ignored it, and him. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him, and this morning it was hard to feel the same level of antipathy toward him that I was used to feeling. Maybe I could think of a prank or two to pull, make things feel more like normal again. Apart from the guerrilla kiss, he’d been pretty nice last night. More than that, I’d seen the way the golden fae treated him, and now that I knew how he’d been turned, it seemed like a tenuous connection between our respective human and once human states had been formed.

  I didn’t much care for that.

  And speaking of connections, there was something I’d been wanting to ask Athelas for a little while now. Maybe I could ask it suddenly enough that he wouldn’t be ready for it. With that aim in mind, I said abruptly, “Zero says there’s a connection between us.”

  There wasn’t even a flicker of reaction from him. He said smoothly, “Does he? Why so?”

  “Because of the dreams,” I said. “He said we had to be connected in some way for that to be possible.”

  “How interesting,” he said. “No doubt my lord will have further words with me, in that case.”

  There was silence for a moment, before I asked what I’d really wanted to ask. “Is there a connection between us?”

  “Certainly. You’re my pet; I’m your owner.”

  “Yeah, but that’s true with Zero and JinYeong, too. I don’t go dreaming about them.”

  “Perhaps they have not been in as significant an amount of peril.”

  “Isn’t it weird that I’m dreaming at all?”

  “Unusual, certainly,” said Athelas. “But not unprecedented. You’ve lived for most of your life in a house teetering perilously on the edge of this world and the one Behind. Certain things—certain abilities—leach more than others.”

  “I’ve been contaminated by Between?”

  “As non-felicitous a way of putting it as I could imagine,” he sighed. “But effectively, yes. I will discuss the matter with Zero.”

  “Oi!” I said indignantly. “I want to discuss the matter now! And I want to know why Upper Management were asking about me!”

  “Pet, must you yell?” Athelas sighed.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, remembering in time that he was still injured. “You want more tea?”

  “I would like to point out that not all problems can be solved by tea,” said Athelas. “And yet, at the risk of undermining that, yes, I would.”

  Lucky I asked; when I got to the kitchen to make another pot of tea, there was one last packet of Athelas’ special shortbreads hidden beneath the box. I grinned my satisfaction at the teapot and took them with me when I trotted back out with a teacup and three cups of coffee.

  JinYeong, nosey thing that he was, looked bright as soon as he sniffed the biscuits.

  “Found you some more shortbreads,” I told Athelas, setting the tray down. “Don’t let JinYeong have ’em; he’s had blood and snacks and he’s still moping.”

  JinYeong said an offended, “Mwoh? Petteu, wae irae?”

  Zero, coming down the stairs in time to hear, said, “I see the Pet is awake,” and went on to the bookcase to pick out a book.

  I trotted off to the kitchen while JinYeong protested from the living room about his lack of shortbreads. He was still going when I got back with Athelas’ teapot, so I told him, “I got them for Athelas, not for you,” and gave him a cup of coffee instead.

  “Ah, wae?” pouted JinYeong.

  “’Cos you weren’t tortured for a week and a half. Also, you’re mean to me.”

  JinYeong’s mouth dropped open. “Ya, Petteu! Nan moggolae!”

  He made a dart for the plate of biscuits, but I snatched them away and ducked behind Zero. “Well, you can’t eat ’em! Zero, the vampire is trying to eat Athelas’ biscuits!”

  There was a snarl from JinYeong that sounded like Don’t call me the vampire! as he dodged around Zero and after me, but I leaped the couch without even thinking about it, and stuck my tongue out at him from behind Athelas’ couch.

  “Yeah, you forgot I’ve still got vampire spit, too, didn’t you? Told you you’re getting old!”

  “Don’t taunt the vampire,” said Zero, looking up from his book-choosing.

  “The house is so lively these days,” sighed Athelas. “Pet, do you suppose I could have one of those biscuits at some stage? Since you got them for me, after all.”

  “Coming,” I said. I feinted right, but JinYeong wasn’t having any of it. He leapt the couch in a moment, fingers snatching where I’d just been. My feet flickered over the coffee table and I landed softly on the carpet, rolling through the gap between Athelas’ usual chair and Zero’s spot. Not one of the biscuits dropped, and I laughed in glee.

  Across the room, I felt rather than saw Zero’s put-upon sigh: he sat down on the couch JinYeong and I regularly and warily shared without trying to go to his normal seat, and opened his book. JinYeong cleared that seat in a second, and I nipped around Athelas again while he was diving for my ankles. There was a chance; I took it. I dived for Zero and safety, ducking under his arm and into his leather jacket, tucking in my feet just as JinYeong snatched at them.

  Legs, safe. Biscuits, safe. Good thing that Zero was so flaming big, or I would never have been able to get away with it.

  Zero put down his book. “Pet—”

  “Sanctuary!” I panted. “Sanctuary!”

  Athelas’ soft laugh danced across the coffee table toward us. “Well done, Pet!” he said. “But what now?”

  “Nawa, Petteu!” said JinYeong, prowling back and forth in front of the couch. There was a glitter to his eyes that wasn’t the dark, dangerous one I was used to.

  “Nope,” I said, peering at him from my leathery hiding place. If I didn’t trust the dark glitter because I knew what it meant, I didn’t trust the one I didn’t know the meaning to. “I’m not coming out while you’re standing there.”

  “Pet,” began Zero again, but he must have run out of words, because nothing else came out. Or maybe it was just that I’d knocked over his coffee while I was leaping over furniture. At length, he simply sighed and went back to his book, his arm stuck out awkwardly where I had taken shelter.

  I stuck my tongue out at JinYeong.

  “And yet I still await my promised biscuits,” said Athelas. There were crinkles at the corner of his eyes. “Pet,” he said. “Come.”

  JinYeong made the smallest bite of satisfaction at me, the edges of his teeth showing.

  “No fair!” I protested. “Behindkind all ganging up on the pet!”

  “Pet, Pet!” sang JinYeong, and he must have meant me to understand, because the meaning came through perfectly. “Come here and don’t leave me waiting!”

  “Bite me and I’ll bite you back!” I warned him.

  In a voice that was very close to a purr, he said, “Hae bwa.”

  “You’re flamin’ weird! Zero, make him go away!”

  “JinYeong—”

  “Hyeong,” said JinYeong, still in that soft, purring voice, “Hajimasaeyo.”

  “Stop chasing the pet around the living room.”

  JinYeong looked at Zero, then at me. Very deliberately, he bared his fangs at Zero and said, “Shileo.”

  Now there was a dark, dangerous look to his eyes, and I didn’t know if it was aimed at Zero or me. Whichever way, I didn’t like it.

  “Is he allowed to say don’t wanna at you?” I demanded, looking up at Zero. “If I’m not allowed to say don’t wanna to you, the vampire shouldn’t be able to!”

  “Don’t bait the vampire,” said Zero, and stood up.

  “Oi
!” I protested, but Zero only touched me briefly on the head in passing with a zap of static electricity and walked away into the kitchen.

  JinYeong was on me in a second. I squeaked and tried to dive away, but something pushed me sideways and sent JinYeong flying across the room. He collided with the opposite wall, shocked and dishevelled, and rolled back onto the floor in a tumble of slender limbs.

  I expected him to get up straight away, but he didn’t; there was a glassy look to his eyes where his head rested on the carpet, his hair tumbling across his forehead, and a small gasp trembled on his lips.

  Uncertainly, I stood up. “JinYeong?”

  “No doubt he’ll pick himself up,” said Athelas amusedly. “Unlike my poor biscuits, which are incapable of picking themselves up.”

  JinYeong rolled onto his back with difficulty, his right hand dropping to the carpet, and drew in a rattling breath. His eyes, dark and bloody, glared up at Zero as Zero came back out of the kitchen with another mug of coffee and went toward the staircase.

  “Zero,” I said, but he didn’t stop, leaving my uncertain, “Zero—JinYeong is—” hanging in the air behind him as he climbed the stairs.

  JinYeong muttered something wet and angry, and coughed a bit of blood onto his chest.

  I don’t think I actually meant to walk over there, but that’s what happened. JinYeong’s glassy eyes roamed my face, and I saw a smile come and go on his bloody lips.

  I slipped my hand into his inner suit pocket, prompting a rasping, surprised, “Wae?” from him, and pinched his handkerchief. Trust him to have the exact same type of handkerchief in the exact same pocket I’d seen him put the other one in.

  “You’re all mucky,” I said to him, patting away the blood on his lips and then at the bit that had splattered on his suit. “Better get that off so I can wash it straight away, or it’ll stain.”

  “Appaseo; mothae,” said JinYeong, pouting.

  That was a good sign. If he was well enough to pout, he must be recovering.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said, and grabbed one of the fallen biscuits. I shoved it in his mouth. “Here, have a biscuit.”