Between Homes (The City Between Book 5)

by W. R. Gingell

  “Better than both of us ending up dead,” I pointed out.

  “Who’s dying?” asked Morgana, her eyes bright and alive within the dark rims of her makeup.

  “Hopefully no one,” I said. “We’ve got a job.”

  “One with the police?”

  “Not really,” I said. I’d told her I was a consultant, which was better than the lie I had been telling her—and if you squinted the right way, it wasn’t actually a lie. I’d helped out my detective friend Tuatu more than once, even if I didn’t get paid for it, and the Troika were officially consultants. If I had still been with them, it wouldn’t even have been slightly a lie.

  If I’d still been with them, there wouldn’t be any need to lie.

  “You okay?” asked Morgana.

  “Yeah, ’course. Nah, it’s not a police job; we’re trying to figure out a problem for a lady who’s being framed.”

  “What does she want you to do?”

  “Find a way to break a contract.” I’d had a look at that contract with Daniel last night—it was about as easy to understand as human contracts were, which was to say, complicated as it comes. “Someone’s trying to take advantage of a little girl.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Yes,” I said. That was the one thing I was absolutely certain about. This contract was a Behind contract—which meant that sneakiness was not only legal, but expected. It was part of the idea of a Behindkind contract; if you were smart enough to break it, you could do so with no legal ramifications.

  “How are you going to do it, though?”

  “Don’t know,” said Daniel, gloomily. “We’re going to have to get some sort of leverage.”

  “I’m gunna go see Detective Tuatu,” I said. “Maybe he can tell me a bit more about North and this girl she’s trying to protect. Oi, Daniel.”

  He looked suspicious. “What?”

  “You’ve still got friends in Upper Management, yeah? We need to know why they’re going after this family.”

  Morgana, her eyes bright in all their dark, eye-lined glory, said eagerly, “Is that the gang you used to be in? Upper Management? That’s a weird name.”

  “Who said I’m in a gang?”

  “No one,” she said. “It’s just…I dunno, obvious.”

  “I’m not in a gang: I run the gang,” he said, unconsciously arrogant. “And they’re not friends, Pet! They’re trying to—they’re trying to send me a message that I should stay away and stay quiet.”

  “I knew it!” said Morgana. “That’s why you were across the road in the hidden hospital, right?”

  Daniel sighed. “You’re not supposed to know about this stuff.”

  “Maybe we can use that as our in, then,” I said.

  He looked interested. “What, use me as bait? How?”

  “Dunno. Haven’t figured that part of it out, yet. I just reckon we need more information—we don’t even know why they want the little girl. If we know that, maybe we’ll have something we can work with.”

  “That’ll be some job when we don’t even know where to find them.”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking! Oi, what about we split up this morning? I’ll go see Detective Tuatu, and you have a bit of a poke about to see if you can get an idea where Upper Management is these days, or what they’re up to.”

  “What about me?”

  We both looked at Morgana and said as one, “You stay out of it.”

  “No fair!” she said, but she didn’t seem surprised. “All right, just think of me as home base. Call me if you need anything. I can do internet searches and stuff.”

  Detective Tuatu wasn’t at his desk when I went to find him, so I left a message and wandered up to Maccas for a burger. It was a good place to wait. I hadn’t been there long when I looked up to see the detective walking toward me with a frown on his face.

  I grinned; it was good to see him again. “What are you doing here?”

  “Pet, I’ve been messaging you for days! Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “What?” I grabbed for my phone, but the screen stayed as black and reflective as it had been for the last few days since I’d left my house.

  Hang on.

  Hang on.

  JinYeong had been sitting next to me the day after I left, glaring at Daniel, then up at the ceiling at the faint scratching noises from the second floor. I’d gotten up to get coffee for everyone—force of habit, by now—and when I’d gone up the stairs to take some to Morgana, I’d left my phone down there.

  Suspiciously now, I looked at it more closely.

  “Flamin’ bloodsucker!” I said explosively, slapping my burger back down into its wrapper. “He’s done something weird to my phone!”

  “I thought you were dead!” Tuatu said, dropping down on the red-topped stool beside me.

  “Oh,” I said, taken aback. His face was that combination of anger and frustration that I was pretty familiar with. I’d seen it often enough on Dad’s face, a long time ago—and a harder-to-recognise form of it on Zero’s face, too, if it came to that. I felt like I should apologise, but that didn’t seem quite right, either. “Look, if you’re gunna be mad at someone, go fight with the vampire! He’s probably the one to blame!”

  “I’m not mad,” Tuatu said, very carefully. “I am concerned.”

  “Yeah, well—” I began defensively, but there was nothing else to say to that, either. “Thanks, I s’pose. What did you want me for?”

  Tuatu’s brows went up, as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I was messing with him. “I was concerned,” he said again. “That one—Zero—kicked me out, and then I heard you shouting, then nothing. I’ve been trying to get back to the house for the last couple of days, but I don’t seem to be able to get close to it. When I couldn’t do that, I kept trying to call and message you. Did the vampire really mess with your phone?”

  “Probably not,” I said reluctantly. Truth be told, it was my natural reaction to blame JinYeong when something went wrong—and for the most part, it was a pretty spot-on reflex. But JinYeong was the only one of the psychos who’d followed me out of the house, and even if he’d done it to make Zero angry, as I suspected, I didn’t really see him messing with my phone to keep me out of the loop with Detective Tuatu. It was more something that Zero might have done while he was trying to make sure I didn’t get killed or something.

  Only Zero didn’t really care about me—or did he? I was still confused about that. He’d looked after me while I kept within the terms of the contract, and in a lot of ways I’d never felt so safe. But that looking after had been ruthless and careless of anyone other than me, and even if it had genuinely been because he wanted to look after me, I couldn’t let myself be looked after like that. And I still remembered that Zero was the one who had really kicked me out; even Athelas would have let me stay. That wasn’t genuine care: just an icy determination to impose his own will on everyone else.

  Yes, Zero was a much more likely suspect than JinYeong.

  “Then who did it?”

  “Dunno,” I said. “Zero could have done something to make sure I couldn’t contact you because he’s mad.”

  “That makes sense,” he said. “He was pretty clear about me not seeing you.”

  “But here you are.”

  “I wanted to make sure you weren’t dead somewhere.”

  “How’d you find me, anyway? Didn’t say where I was gunna be in my note.”

  “I didn’t: I came in for something to eat.”

  “Oh well, it’s good timing, anyway,” I said. “There’s something I wanna talk to you about.”

  “Is it something for those three?” he asked, his jaw squaring. “Because if it is, I’m not doing it. You shouldn’t be helping them with stuff—you shouldn’t be there, being treated like a pet.”

  “It’s not for them,” I said. “I left that night. Got kicked out, I suppose, or left, or something. I’m still not sure which one it was.”

  Tuatu’s flat islander nose
flattened a bit more as his nostrils flared. “They kicked you out? Have you got somewhere to stay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I’m staying with a friend.”

  His eyes flicked over my face briefly. “You’ve got a friend? Is it that werewolf?”

  “Lycanthrope. Nah, I’ve got a human friend.”

  “Good. You need human friends.”

  “I’ve already got you,” I said. “How many more do I need?”

  “You need human friends who aren’t cops.”

  “That’s no good to me,” I said, grinning, even though I’d thought the same thing myself. “Oi. Buy you a burger if you do some checking up for me?”

  The detective grinned back. “Are you trying to bribe a police officer?”

  “If it’s working, yeah. There’s this lady I’m trying to help. Well. A kid, actually.”

  “What trouble is this kid in?”

  “Behindkind are trying to take her away from her parents. I need to know about the parents as well as about the kid—anything you can dig up about ’em. I need to know why they need the parents, or the kid, or both. The kid’s name is Sarah Palmer.”

  Tuatu frowned. “I thought you said this wasn’t anything to do with those three?”

  “It’s not.”

  “Then why are you trying to make deals with Behindkind?”

  “’Cos they’re messing with humans,” I said. “And these humans don’t know what they’re up against. Anyway, I’m trying to break a deal, not make one.”

  “You don’t know what you’re up against—heck, neither do I! I’m still chasing off otherworldly things with a tiny tree on a pebble because I got into all of this without meaning to. Can’t someone else help the girl?”

  I thought back to North, with her living breeze and her determined chin, and said, “There is no one else. Just me. You don’t have to help if you don’t want—I reckon it’s going to get pretty dangerous.”

  “I’m helping if you are,” said Tuatu, straightening his shoulders. “It’s just—it’s not fair on you. You should be able to rest now. Get some normal into your life.”

  “Don’t think I’ve ever been normal,” I said. “Not much use starting now. Here; have half a burger and we’ll sort out some stuff.”

  Chapter Three

  “This is your big idea for solving the problem?” I demanded of Daniel. “This is it? You’re the one who told me not to tell Morgana anything!”

  And if it sounds like I’m over-reacting, let me tell you what I saw when I looked around the room after I got back from my meeting with Detective Tuatu:

  “Werewolves! You thought it was a good idea to fill the entire lower half of the house with werewolves?”

  “We’re lycanthropes, sweetheart,” said one of them from the group around the telly.

  “Don’t call me sweetheart!”

  “Don’t call us werewolves!”

  “Okay, fair enough. But how the heck is this flying below the radar?”

  “It’s not,” said Daniel. “It’s the opposite of flying below the radar. But c’mon, Pet—what Sandman is gunna have a go at a whole household of lycanthropes? This way we keep Morgana safe, and if things go bad in our investigations, we’ve got backup.”

  “Don’t remember you doing too well against it when we had to fight it last time,” I told him, looking around at the room full of mostly human-shaped lycanthropes. None of the ones in their wolf shape had been very picky about where they changed into their wolf forms, so it was already smelling a bit musty around the place. They were also very noisy. Even the older ones who were a bit more sedate than the young twenty-somethings took up a lot of space in their sprawling, yawning way.

  “That’s because I hadn’t fought one before,” Daniel said indignantly. “Anyway, you were running, too!”

  “I don’t have two-inch teeth and a killer smile, either,” I pointed out. “And you could have told me this was going to happen before I walked in and nearly had a heart attack.”

  “You gave me a heart attack first,” he said. “Inviting the North Wind into the house—not to mention the night you arrived! I thought you were going to tell Morgana about everything.”

  “Nah,” I said. “But she had to know I wasn’t a cop. That’s fair.”

  “She took it all right, didn’t she?”

  “Reckon she was starting to guess.” It wasn’t like I was the most obvious candidate for being a cop, after all. I’d just had my eighteenth birthday a week ago, and I was still pretty skinny and young looking—the dark hair that went everywhere didn’t do much to take away from that idea, and maybe my grey eyes were still a bit too big and hopeful. “And I think she liked that I told her the truth.”

  “Yeah,” said Daniel, looking a bit uneasy.

  I wondered if he was thinking about the fact that he could never be completely honest with her—or if he could actually be wondering what she would say if he told her years later, when things got so complicated or dangerous that he had to tell her or lose her friendship. He seemed to have gotten attached very quickly.

  “You’re not thinking of telling her?” I demanded.

  “No!” he said, too quickly. “No. Just, she’s our friend, and I don’t like lying to her.”

  “Me either,” I said. “But I like her being alive, and if she gets to know too much about us, how likely d’you think it’ll be for her to stay that way?”

  “I know,” Daniel said gloomily.

  To take his mind off it, I said, “Oi. How come they’re all blokes?”

  “The girls are off having a retreat,” he said. “I think they said they were going to Alice Springs, but they all have their phones off, so I can’t contact them.”

  “Don’t you lot connect in your minds or something?”

  He gave me a sceptical look. “We’re not mind-readers.”

  “What about the alpha thing, then?” I protested. I’d been spit-close to turning into a lycanthrope myself, and I still remembered that compulsion to obey the alpha, even if another pull had been stronger in the end.

  “That’s more of a feeling. And yeah, if I projected a feeling strongly enough, they’d probably come running, but there’s enough of us here, and the girls need their time away.”

  Yeah, if they had to put up with lycanthrope musk all the time, they probably did. Just great. As if the pong of JinYeong’s cologne wasn’t enough, I’d have to put up with the stink of lycanthropes as well. Another thought struck me, and I groaned.

  “Ah heck.”

  “What now?” protested Daniel.

  He looked a bit hurt.

  “What am I gunna feed them all?”

  Daniel grinned. “That’s all right,” he said. “They’ll feed themselves. I mean, they’ll eat stuff if you cook it for them, but most of them like to hunt for themselves.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then it’s chilli and cornbread tonight, and I’ll make dinner for ’em every second night, but they have to do the shopping.”

  “You’re on!” said the closest lycanthrope. They’d all been listening and pretending not to. “We like meat. Lots of meat.”

  They all scarfed their food in front of the telly, which wasn’t surprising. I took Morgana hers, and was on my way back down with the empty bowl when there was a flutter in the balustrades above—white or pale yellow. Maybe even more of a feeling than an actual thing.

  “You kids playing around up there?” I called. “Come down for dinner. I made you something.”

  Distinctly, I heard a voice say, “She made us food.”

  “Tastes good, too,” I said to them casually, but I was startled. Up until now, I hadn’t seen so much as a flicker of the kids and I had been almost starting to think that Daniel was eating the food I left out.

  Someone muttered, “I’m not hungry,” like it was a personal insult to be offered food.

  Huh. So there was a JinYeong-type kid up there somewhere?

  “Didn’t make it for you!” I called up to that o
ne. “It’s for the others.”

  A chorus of giggles bounced down the stairwell, and just as I was starting to think they’d come down, the front door banged loudly against the wall downstairs.

  I heard snarling. A lot of snarling.

  “Ah heck,” I said, and pelted back down the stairs, two at a time.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised at what I found when I got back downstairs: JinYeong, prowling through a gauntlet of werewolves in various states of morph, his teeth showing in a dangerous smirk, eyes black and bloody.

  “How did he get in?” demanded Cameron, bristling by Daniel’s left shoulder. At least, I think it was Cameron. It could have been Dylan. “Who’s the moron that invited him in?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “That was me. I didn’t do it on purpose, though.”

  Cameron—or maybe Dylan—directed a smile at JinYeong that was nearly as sharp as JinYeong’s own, and asked over his shoulder, “Want us to chuck him out?”

  “Haebwa,” purred JinYeong at him. “Petteu, mwoh hae? Yeonsub haja!”

  “What practice?” I demanded. “If you’ve come in here to chuck swords at me and chase me around the furniture like Zero, I got news for you!”

  He grinned at me. “Shilloh?”

  “No need to chuck him out,” I said to the lycanthropes, sighing. “He’d just come back in, anyway.”

  So that everyone could understand him this time, JinYeong said, “I have come to practise, but first I need food.”

  “She’s our cook now,” said Daniel. “She doesn’t have to make diddly squat for you.”

  “Also I need coffee,” JinYeong said, ignoring him. He smiled brightly at me. “Please give me coffee, Petteu.”

  That was a new one: I’d never heard him say please before. Mind you, it was in Korean and there is no real please in Korean, but it was about as close as I’d probably ever hear from him.

  “There’s chilli for dinner, too,” I told him. I should probably be encouraging good habits or something.

  JinYeong said graciously, “Ne,” as if he were doing me a favour by eating the chilli, and sat down elegantly at the kitchen table instead of with the rabble in front of the telly.