Between Homes (The City Between Book 5)

by W. R. Gingell

  I got him his chilli and cornbread, and filled one of the random mugs in the cupboard with coffee, then got on with the washing up. The little cracked tile that shouldn’t have been there was still there, and this time it had company: a mix of tiles in the four rows around it were yellow instead of pink, and they all had the same pattern as the cracked one.

  The heck?

  I shot a look over at JinYeong, but he was engrossed in his dinner. More slowly, I washed the utensils, gazing at those tiles, and I thought I saw movement within them.

  I went on to the cups, and heard someone ask, “What’s amiss?”

  It was just Athelas’ voice. It shouldn’t have hurt my heart to hear it, but I felt my chin crinkle briefly. It had been barely a week since I’d seen him—since I’d seen Zero. It was ridiculous to feel the kind of homesickness that was eating holes in my lungs.

  “The house is…misbehaving,” said Zero’s voice, somewhat perplexed.

  I could see the reflection of him in the little cracked tile now, faintly, just as if I was in my house washing up while Zero leaned against the kitchen bench behind me like he used to do. That hurt, too.

  Soapy water swished around my wrists, and through the doorway the constant squabble of noise that was Daniel’s packmates faded into the distance, replaced by the sound of Zero’s voice. The reflection of him grew until it filled all the tiles that shouldn’t have been there.

  “The house must have had more of a connection to the pet than I suspected,” he said. “Did you know it?”

  “I suspected so,” said Athelas. I couldn’t see him, but his gentle, creamy voice was easy to hear behind Zero’s. “If you’ll recall, my lord, I did my best to keep her here.”

  “It.”

  “She’s not here to hear you.”

  “It.”

  “Your father isn’t here to hear you, either.”

  “I’m constantly surprised at exactly how much father gets to hear,” said Zero.

  His face was about as communicative as usual—which is to say, as blank as a piece of paper and about the same colour—but there was an edge of vinegar to his voice. I wondered if that was for Athelas’ benefit, or for the benefit of whoever it was he suspected of listening.

  “For instance, I’m still curious about how the waystation over the road came to the attention of my father. Upper Management had a good outfit there, never raided, but as soon as we showed up and found out what was going on, Family-led Order Force teams appeared.”

  “They do seem to have been well informed,” said Athelas, and there was no discomfort to his voice. “But I’m of the opinion that the origin of all evils can’t be traced to your father.”

  “They might not all originate there, but a good amount of them certainly seem to pass through. What are we to do with the house?”

  “Tame it, one presumes,” Athelas said. “If the pet were here—”

  “If the pet were here we wouldn’t be having the issues,” Zero said shortly. “We’ll have to make do by ourselves.”

  “Yes,” said Athelas, and I thought a faint sigh lingered in the air. “We seem to be doing a great deal of making do these days.”

  “We’ve done more when we were on the road before; a pet is not indispensable to us.”

  “She may well yet be indispensable to the house, however,” said Athelas. “Do you have any idea as to why, my lord?”

  “Nothing concrete,” said Zero heavily. “I suspect it has something to do with the death of her—with the death of its parents.”

  “As do I—yet it occurs to me, my lord, that it is very unlike our murderer not to know that there was a third person in the house. It has also occurred to me that the now very obvious connection our Pet has with this house could have preceded the incident, not been a result of it.”

  I was so caught up in what I was seeing that I didn’t notice the slender hand that reached into the water to pull the plug until the wail of the water draining cut right through the voices and silenced them completely. I didn’t expect the hand; I didn’t expect the gurgle of water spiralling down the sink to be so loud. I mean, who ever heard a kitchen sinkhole wailing? Bathtub drain, sure. Kitchen sink?

  It startled me enough to make me look down at JinYeong’s hand, which was now pinching the plug between two fingers, and when I looked up again, there wasn’t even a flicker of movement to the mismatching tiles to show that I hadn’t imagined it all.

  “What the heck?” I complained.

  “You are finished,” said JinYeong, dropping the plug and wiping his sudsy hand with my hoodie, “so why are you standing there?”

  “Just thinking,” I said. I would have liked to have hit him, but it probably wasn’t a good idea to let him know what I’d just seen if he hadn’t seen it for himself. Or had he seen it? I glanced up at him, but he was only looking at me with one brow up in a questioning sort of way.

  “Better take the kids some food,” I added. I needed some time to think about what I’d just heard.

  “I will help.”

  “You’ll stay down here,” I told him. JinYeong offering to help with anything was suspicious—JinYeong offering to help with something above stairs was even more suspicious. “Talk to Daniel or something. Watch the telly—get some more coffee.”

  I left him muttering by himself, and took the remainder of the chilli and cornbread up to the roof. I could hear the kids stomping around and calling out to each other down the other end of the house as I went up, just as if I could suddenly hear them properly now that I’d spoken to them properly for the first time.

  It gave me an idea, so when I’d left the food up on the roof I came back inside and yelled out, “Food’s up!” Then I made sure I stomped down the stairs heavily enough for them to hear me, and hid out in my room for a while. It was far too early to go back downstairs, now that JinYeong was here as well, and I wanted to check on something.

  Actually, I wanted to check on more than one thing. I wanted to know what Zero and Athelas meant when they said I was connected to my house, and that my house was connected to the murder of my parents. Good thing I knew someone who was likely to know a bit more about it than I did: I’d have to ask Detective Tuatu a few more questions next time I spoke to him. And, for now, make sure I didn’t text him anything that I didn’t want Zero knowing about.

  I also wanted to know why JinYeong was hanging around the house again, because it sure as heck wasn’t because he wanted to make sure I kept doing my fight training regularly.

  But for now, the only thing I could follow up on was the kids.

  I waited for a good ten minutes after I heard them dashing along the corridor upstairs and out onto the roof, before I slipped back out of my room, barefoot, and crept back up the stairs. There was little of Between about the place, but I’d had practise lately in finding all the scraps of it in ordinary life, not to mention the tussle with JinYeong yesterday, and I used the tiny filaments of it in the stairs to soften my footsteps.

  Quiet, I told them. There’s no one here.

  And there really was no sound to give away my walking. It wasn’t that I was afraid of them, exactly. Daniel was inclined to call them murderous little beggars, but that was just because they left their skates on the stairs and weren’t too careful about where they left electrical cords when it came to water. And if it came to that, we never saw them actually doing it: it was another of the reasons I’d almost thought they were imaginary. Still, I could understand why Daniel didn’t like stuff being dropped on his head from two floors above for a joke. Maybe I’d just been a pet for too long: I could understand the impulse to mess with the higher powers, and Daniel did take up a fair bit of Morgana’s time these days.

  But even if I wasn’t exactly afraid of them, I’d been afraid to find out what they actually were: I was so used to stuff I thought was human not being human these days. I was also just a bit afraid they’d catch me spying on them.

  So I stepped quietly, my feet cushioned in silken
strands of Between, and opened the door that led to the rooftop by the tiniest, gold-edged crack.

  When my eyes adjusted to the gold of the evening sunshine, I saw children. Children—nothing more, nothing less. It shouldn’t have made my heart give such a pump of relief, because Morgana had called them children, after all. I settled down where I was to watch them for a bit. They looked happy, not vicious. One of them, with chilli mince all over his chin and two cheeks bulging with cornbread, menaced another with his spoon when the other boy tried to make a play for his bowl, but that was pretty normal. I’d have done the same thing if JinYeong tried to go for my chilli.

  And thinking of JinYeong, it seemed like I could still smell him. That was annoying. I wrinkled my nose, wondering how the smell of him had gotten all over my clothes, then remembered that I’d been sharing the kitchen with him and his cologne for the last hour or so. His cologne tonight was strong enough to have followed someone into an alley and mugged them, then pinched their car for good measure. I scowled, rubbing my nose, and went back to looking at the sunlight-drenched children.

  The golden hour, it’s called, this time of evening. The last, molten sunlight glanced off chubby cheeks and sparkling eyes, and wafted through thin fabric here and there, the perfect picture of cherubs, doused in chilli mince and cornbread crumbs.

  At least I knew they weren’t Behindkind or something from Between: that had been the thing I was most worried about. I was as well aware as Daniel was that the kids weren’t normal. It just wasn’t normal for a gang of kids to be living in an old house without any sign of adult supervision, and the kids themselves didn’t exactly act like normal kids, either. It was nice to see them with my own eyes; to be sure they had voices and faces and bodies.

  Their distinct lack of normality was a different kind, but at least it looked like it was the human kind—maybe the runaway kind. They were wary enough around me and Daniel to make me think they could be afraid of anyone obviously more grown up than they were, and I hadn’t ever heard them interacting with Morgana’s parents, either.

  I might have stayed a bit longer if I hadn’t heard growling from downstairs. That wasn’t unusual, but I didn’t particularly want to go back down and find shreds of JinYeong’s suitcoat strewn through the living room with strips of lycanthrope amongst them.

  I sighed, and eased my way back into the house.

  Maybe it was because I’d been out in the bright, golden sunshine just a few moments before, but the passageway seemed darker than it had on my way up. It was always pretty cold up here on the top level—old houses are like that, all sneaky chills around the ankles and ears—but now it was cold and creepy. I raised my hand to tap on Morgana’s door in passing, just in case she wanted anything, but then I saw, with a small buzz of shock, that the door opposite hers was cracked open.

  I’d never seen it open before.

  That door led to her parents’ quarters. They didn’t like to be bothered, Morgana had explained. They didn’t care if it was noisy in the house, but they didn’t want to talk to people. Her father did something with stocks and the economy and her mum was a romance writer. Which kinda explained how the three of them were able to live in this huge old three-storey heritage house that was meant to take boarders, without fussing too much about whether or not they had boarders. And it also explained all the very expensive technology that was lying carelessly around Morgana’s large suite, half of it forgotten and at least a third of it unused.

  I must have stood still with a stupid expression on my face for a good minute. When I started forward again, my eyes had adjusted to the point that I could make out a face hovering in the gap, a good foot higher than my own.

  It gave me another buzzy sort of a shock, that face. Pale and narrow, with elegant, mournful eyes and elegant, mournful hair done in a Gibson girl style, it was a shadow play of cream and charcoal.

  I cleared my throat and said a gruff, “Hi. I’m Pet.”

  A silky shiver of darkness below the paleness of the face and long neck made me realise that the head wasn’t floating: it was merely attached to a long, graceful body clad in a black silk wrapper.

  “Don’t feed the children too much,” said Morgana’s mother, in a whisper that was just like the movement of silk against silk.

  “Right,” I said. “You want something? There’s chilli mince.”

  But she had already closed the door, without either acknowledging my question or saying goodbye. I stood where I was for a moment longer, until I was jarred out of my reverie by the sound of Daniel’s voice in Morgana’s room, then shrugged and went back downstairs.

  To my surprise, JinYeong was sitting at one end of the red couch, one leg crossed over the other and a very obvious space between him and the lycanthrope nearest. He had a put-upon look on his face, while the lycanthrope had an irritated one—probably on account of JinYeong’s cologne.

  I plopped down on the couch between them, and JinYeong sighed, “Ah. You smell like dead person.”

  “I washed the jeans!” I said indignantly. “Turn your sniffer off if you’re not happy.”

  “You know,” said JinYeong, looking at me beneath his lashes, “that it cannot be turned off. Then you are saying so just to irritate me.”

  I grinned at him. “Ya reckon?”

  “Do not irritate me, Petteu. I shall bite.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’ll just make me faster, won’t it? I mean, I can wreck another one of your ties if you want.”

  He looked at me with narrowed eyes, then stood up and said, “Chamkan nawabwa, Petteu. Cheom iyagihae.”

  “Come out to talk about what?” I asked, but he was already stalking toward the front door. “Fantastic,” I grumbled.

  I got outside to find him leaning against the wall by the door, just where he was out of sight of Morgana’s mirror. He was so perfectly positioned, in fact, that I said, “What? Been scouting out the place, have you?”

  He grinned, because he could see that I was just in the right place to avoid Morgana’s mirror, too. “Wae? Kisseu hallae?”

  “Try kissing me again and I’ll wreck more than your tie,” I said, glaring at him. “Oi. You were over yesterday; if you had something to talk about, how come you didn’t mention it then? How come I’ve gotta come outside with you?”

  “That is the point,” he said, the edges of the words glowing with filaments of Between. “I wish to talk when I wish to talk. I will live in your friend’s house.”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “There is no coffee,” JinYeong said. “And hyeong burns the food every night: I smell of charcoal. I will live here with you.”

  JinYeong living in Morgana’s house was not the sort of thing I was thinking about when I told her I was going to have to make boundaries.

  “Heck no,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed at me, but instead of objecting, he said, “You are having dreams again, I think.”

  “I’m used to it,” I told him. It was true, but maybe not as currently true as it had been while I lived with my three psychos. “It’s the same one I’ve had since mum and dad died.”

  “Shall I frighten it away?”

  “What?” I said, my grin a bit twisted, “Finally admit you’ve got a scary face, do you?”

  “Ah!” muttered JinYeong, as if to himself, but still understandable, “why is it that the old man is always correct? He said you would be dreaming.”

  “If you’re talking about Athelas, I’m gunna tell him you’re calling him old behind his back,” I said.

  “Why can’t I live here? I will be helpful.”

  “I don’t want you to,” I said. It wasn’t that—not exactly. It was more of a nebulous feeling that had something to do with what I’d talked to Morgana about: the feeling that I didn’t want to walk into being looked after again without knowing what it was going to cost me and the people around me. “Anyway, if you’re helping me, I’ll bet you’re helping yourself, too.”

  JinYeong surprised me
by grinning. “Perhaps it suits me, too,” he said. “Why should it not help both of us, Petteu?”

  “No,” I said. “The house is already full of lycanthropes. I’m not chucking a vampire into the mix as well. I told Morgana I’d look after the house and make sure it’s kept tidy.”

  “I will restrain myself from killing the dogs.”

  “Well, that sounds like a fantastic living arrangement,” I said. “But it’s still no. I’ll make you some kimchi this week.”

  “Ah,” said JinYeong, his eyes momentarily fluttering shut. He seemed to fight with himself for a few moments before he said, “I do not require kimchi. I will live here.”

  “Yeah? Got that supermarket kimchi, have ya?”

  He made a very small noise that was close to a growl.

  “Oi,” I said, to distract him. “I need your help.”

  “What trouble are you making now?”

  “Gotta find where Upper Management are keeping themselves these days,” I said. “And what they’re up to.”

  JinYeong’s lips curved. “If you wish for my help—”

  “Nope,” I said. “No bargains. You help if you want, and don’t if you don’t want. I’m gunna do it with or without you. I’m asking for your help; I’m not gunna do a Behindkind swap sort of thing.”

  “That—” JinYeong stopped; said accusingly, “Ya, Petteu! You cannot do that!”

  “Can too. All you have to do is say yes or no. No bargains.”

  “That is a human way of doing business,” he said disapprovingly. “Then if I betray you? You have no protection.”

  “Yep. That’s me: human. I’m doing things my own way now. Are you in or not?”

  “I am out. I refuse.”

  “Okay then,” I said. “See ya.”

  I left him on the doorstep and went back in, but I was pretty sure I could still sense the fuzzy ball of distemper that was JinYeong on the front step for a good ten minutes after I went back in.

  Chapter Four