“Good evening, sirs and madams,” I announced. “Please remain in your seats. Your company is being audited.”
“One whose authority?” demanded the one in front of me. “Stay where you are, everyone. I’ll handle this. Now, I don’t know who you are, but—”
“You’re the boss, are you?”
“I am the head of the board,” said the human, drawing itself up. “Who are you, and what authority do you represent?”
“I’m with the BTA,” I offered.
It smirked at me, which I found annoying. “Then you’d better sit down while I call your boss,” it said. “I think you’ll find your authority doesn’t go for much around here.”
“Then I suppose it’s a good thing I’m not here under the authority of the BTA, isn’t it?” That wiped the smug look from its face momentarily, which pleased me so much that I tapped my peg against the floor twice, smartly.
“But you said—”
“Didn’t say I was here under the authority of the BTA, did I?” I reminded him.
“Then whose authority are you—”
“His,” I said, as the elevator dinged again. I jerked my thumb behind me and cleared the way for Lord Sero, who filled the elevator doorway behind me. The human swallowed and fell back; and as it did so Lord Sero stepped through the door, Athelas and the vampire flanking him. The human kid trotted in behind them, observing the scene with interest.
“Are you the head of the board?” Lord Sero’s voice could have shaken the foundations of the building—or maybe it was just me that felt the trembling right to my bones.
“Yes.” That was a definite tremor in his voice. I had the feeling he knew exactly who and what Lord Sero was. “Why do you want to know?”
“I want to know who you’re working with Behind, who authorised a human mill start up, and who gave you the job of killing our pet.”
“Your—your pet?”
The kid touched one finger to its eyebrow in a salute. “Hi.”
“I’m not authorised to give you that information.”
The vampire JinYeong laughed and said something softly.
“He says,” said the kid, “that it’ll be more fun finding out this way, anyway.”
“Pet,” said Athelas, “Show the head of the board into his office for us.”
The kid shrugged and went and opened the door. The head of the board walked past it, his face almost as white as Lord Sero’s and vanished within. The kid came back to stand next to me and hissed, “Won’t he just call the Behind offices if we leave him alone in there?”
Athelas smiled faintly.
I said in an undertone, “That’s what they’re counting on.”
“Doesn’t make sense to me,” the kid said. “Oi. I think that one’s trying to sneak away.”
That one was wearing a skirt, so I suppose it was female. She looked like she was trying to back away quietly, but when she bumped into JinYeong, who somehow managed to be behind her without a moment’s notice, she sat down again very quickly.
One of the trousered ones in another cubicle asked, “Can we go? You’ve got our boss.”
“You,” said Lord Sero, “will stay. You will all stay.”
“What did we do?” blustered the human. “We’re employees! We’re not responsible for what our company does!”
“Employees?” I laughed. I hadn’t spent the last three weeks going over every inch of Allied Traders for nothing. “You’re board members, every one of you!”
The female tilted her chin. “All right, what if we are? What we’re doing isn’t illegal, and we’re making an unprecedented link between Human and Other kind.”
“You tried to have me killed!” said the kid indignantly. “That’s illegal over here!”
“We’re not a human company,” said the female. “We’re a Behind company and we fall under Behind laws.”
“And it’s not like we’ve done anything but facilitate a thriving industry across borders,” said another of the board members. “There’s nothing you can do to us, legally!”
“Nothing according to human law,” said Lord Sero, with a white, glittering smile that held no humour. “But we don’t run by human law, either.”
“We’ve done nothing against Behind law, either!”
“Between you and the dropbears,” I said to the whites of all those self-righteous, terrified eyes, “I’d pick the dropbears every time. At least they only wanted to eat us; they wouldn’t have tried to tell us to be grateful to help the ecosystem along.”
“There’s the little matter of coerced murder for hire and tampering with Identify Cards,” Athelas said.
“You can’t prove that!” said another of the suited ones.
The vampire laughed again.
“What an odd notion of our job you seem to have,” said Athelas. “We, on the other hand, have a really very good idea of yours.”
“Yeah,” said the kid, scowling. “And we don’t like it.”
“You should go downstairs now, Pet,” Athelas said pleasantly.
“What? They tried to kill me! I don’t want to go!”
“Take her out,” said Lord Sero to me.
Her? It was a she?
“It,” said Athelas, in a reminding sort of way.
The kid said, “Oi!” at him.
“Yes, it!” Lord Sero snapped. “Take it out!”
I took the kid out. It protested the whole way down in the elevator, but since I was pretty sure I knew what was about to happen upstairs, I ignored the protests and dragged it out anyway. I knew that red look in Lord Sero’s eyes; I’d seen it often enough in the war. Those board members, protesting and self-righteous and convinced of their own innocence, were staring death in the face.
The kid stopped complaining once we were downstairs—maybe it had expected to be kicked out at some stage. It boosted itself up on the secretary’s desk and crossed its legs beneath it. “They always kick me out,” it said glumly. “I mean, maybe I didn’t want to be there, but if I’m part of the team I should have some of the responsibility, too.”
“You’re not part of the team,” I said harshly. There was no way this kid should be present for what was going on upstairs. “You’re the pet.”
“I know they’re going to kill the board members,” the kid said, surprising me.
I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised to know that the kid had seen through my harshness, or because it did actually know what was about to happen.
“Zero and them,” it explained. “Athelas explained it to me once; their job is to investigate, judge, and apply the judgement.”
“Doesn’t bother you?”
“Yes,” said the kid. “No. I don’t know. But those board members—they’re like animals. No, they’re much worse than that. They think everyone else is an animal, and that they can do what they like with them. Over this side of Between, there’s no other justice but Zero for humans when it comes to Behindkind problems. Human prisons can’t hold them, and there are too many people Behind who turn a blind eye to that sort of thing to even try cases there. So when they start incorporating that sort of attitude and turning it into a business—”
“If it needs to be stamped out, there needs to be someone to stamp it out.” I was a lot more certain than the kid; Lord Sero’s unit might be irregular, but it was well within Behind laws. I had no problem with the way they were fixing the problem. “They’re beasts, too; but they’re beasts of another kind.”
The kid frowned. “The good kind.”
I thought about that for a minute. In the boardroom upstairs, three bloody emblems of death were tearing through human flesh to destroy every trace of evil from this part of the human world. And if I wasn’t very much mistaken, they would soon go Behind to perform the same office there. Bloody beasts, but very necessary ones in the world of Behind.
“Yes,” I said. “Beasts of a good kind.”
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Full length books in the City Between series are:
BETWEEN JOBS
BETWEEN SHIFTS
BETWEEN FLOORS
BETWEEN FRAMES
Plus companion novelette, ALL THE DIFFERENT SHADES OF BLUE
Cloudy With a Chance of Dropbears: A City Between Novellette (The City Between) Page 4
