Between Homes (The City Between Book 5)

by W. R. Gingell

  That was probably why when I saw the huge shadow over in the corner, I thought it was just the tallboy that was always there. Then it moved, and I tumbled back out through the door in my hurry to get away. I collided with something soft and woolly in the doorway that muttered in Korean as it caught me, and panted, “Heck! How’d he get into my room?”

  “Who is in your room?”

  “Dunno,” I said, but for a horrible moment, I’d thought I was having my nightmare again. That didn’t make sense, because I hadn’t had it since JinYeong came to stay in Morgana’s house. I added, “Thought it was the nightmare again.”

  “I will see,” said JinYeong, pushing past me.

  “It’s fine,” I told him, pulling vainly at the sleeve of his jumper and stretching the knit. I’d just recognised the familiar, broad shoulder line by now: it was Zero, leaning his hips against what looked like my windowsill but was the wall parallel with my bed here at Morgana’s house.

  “Ah,” muttered JinYeong, catching sight of him at the same time as me. “Why is hyeong here again?”

  “Beggared if I know,” I said, beneath my breath. It was already off-putting to find him in my bedroom here—that he was in my bedroom back at home was even worse. Did he know I’d hidden the USBs in there? “What’s he doing in my room, that’s what I want to know!”

  JinYeong silently put one long finger over his lips, and I shut my mouth.

  As we watched, Zero pushed away from the wall and paced slowly around the room, his eyes roaming over the whole place as he walked. Beggar me. He knew something. Suspected something. At the very least, it looked as though he knew I’d not only been in the house, but in my old room.

  He kept strolling until he got to the shelves, and my heart dropped. How did he know where I’d been? Because he definitely knew.

  Zero scanned the shelves until his eyes lighted on the tiny chest of drawers. I would have sworn I saw the faintest lift of his usually serious lips, and he reached for the miniscule drawers. He didn’t bother with the unmanageably small drawer knobs, just tipped the whole thing forward until the heaviest drawer slid out by itself, disclosing the red USB.

  My heart sank a little bit more as he removed the drawer and shook the USB into his palm. It wasn’t like it would be the end of the world for him to take that one, but I’d wanted to keep it. At least it might stop him from finding the other one, and I still had all the hard copies of the images on it. It might be disruptive if he discovered that Athelas was the one who’d been interested in this stuff, though, since he was more likely than me to be able to guess why Athelas would be interested in it.

  I watched helplessly as he held it to the light, turning it between his fingers as he gazed frowningly at it. Like he was trying to make up his mind about something.

  JinYeong’s fingers closed around my arm with deceptive gentleness, and I looked up to meet brown eyes that were dark with warning. I gave the smallest of nods back: I wouldn’t have tried to do anything after the last time, when Zero had given every sign of coming through with the house. I didn’t want him to know we were here—for my sake and the sake of the still-hidden glass USB as much as for JinYeong’s sake.

  A phone rang, distantly, and Zero said, “Yes?” while I was still frantically feeling for my own phone to stop the noise. “North. We have some things to discuss.”

  That was a relief. For a second, I’d thought it was my phone, and that everything was about to smash again like it had when JinYeong grabbed me as I touched Zero’s shoulder that time.

  I let out a breath nice and slowly, and I had the impression that JinYeong was doing the same next to me.

  Zero, still gazing at the USB, said, “There is some question of our exchange.”

  A pause, where I was very sure North was telling him exactly what she’d told me, but probably with a lot more mendacity.

  Zero’s eyes grew lighter blue, amusement breaking through against his will. He said, “Very well. We will be there,” and hung up.

  He looked at the USB for a few seconds longer, and then, to my utter surprise, put it back in the drawer, and the drawer back in the tiny chest of drawers. I looked across at JinYeong in surprise, and he stared back, his mouth dropping open the slightest bit.

  While we were both still caught up in the surprise of it, Zero left the room.

  I said, “Heck. What was that?”

  JinYeong closed his mouth, eyes narrowing, and gazed at the section of wall that had swallowed Zero. “I wonder,” he muttered. “Is he being very stupid, or very clever? Ah, I wonder.”

  “Don’t care!” I said, with feeling. I pulled away from his grip on my arm and crossed the room toward the familiar set of shelves, reaching for the bowl of marbles before it could occur to me that it might not be possible for me to do what I was doing.

  That was probably a good thing, because it meant I grabbed the USB before I knew it wasn’t possible to grab it. JinYeong said something startled in Korean behind me and nudged up to look over my shoulder as I took back the red USB, too.

  I grinned at him, which made him roll his eyes as if I was showing off, and maybe I was. It was just so nice to do stuff they said I wasn’t supposed to be able to do. You know. Because I’m just a feeble little human.

  The grin faded pretty quickly, though. I mean, fine; I’d gotten the USBs back safely, and that was good, but where was I supposed to hide them now?

  “This is the day that just keeps giving,” I said sourly to JinYeong, and shoved the USBs back in my pocket. Looked like I was going to have to go out again.

  “You went out again last night,” said JinYeong broodingly the next morning at breakfast.

  “Yep,” I said. I’d gone to visit an old friend. Well. Not exactly a friend. More of a tree. A friendly tree? But he wasn’t a tree exactly. He was a green man made of moss on the side of one of the buildings that lined the stairwell side of the carpark in Argyle street. It had once given me some advice on how to look after a dryad, and I figured it might be able to hold onto something as small as a USB in one of its crumbly bricks.

  It had agreed to do so after a gentle susurration of slowly growing vines that tickled my hair and planted something small and viney there. I had trotted off home with my extra green hair, comforted in the knowledge that it would brush out on its own in a couple of days, and it seemed to me that someone was following me.

  Luckily for me, it hadn’t been the sandman or any of Upper Management’s people: it was the old mad bloke, wearing a new t-shirt and a battered hat. Well, not new—different. I didn’t think he had access to much stuff that was actually new.

  I’d stopped in at a coffee shop afterward to buy a coffee and a couple of muffins to leave for him: he was looking a bit skinnier than usual.

  I didn’t tell that to JinYeong, of course. To JinYeong, I just said, “You ready to go?”

  “Ne,” he said, straightening his tie.

  I’d noticed he was in a suit again, but it hadn’t occurred to me until now to wonder where he’d gotten it from. “Oi, where’d you get that lot from? Have you been pinching clothes from the shops around here?”

  “I needed a suit,” he said coldly. “All I had were jeans and a wool jumper.”

  “Well, you could have worn that,” I pointed out. “If you hate it that much, you could just get it all mucky while we’re out and about instead of messing up that pretty little suit.”

  “I will not be taken seriously if I go to war in those clothes.”

  “Well, it’s not like I take you seriously in that getup,” I said, flicking his tie. “Why d’you wear a tie, anyway? Someone could strangle you with that.”

  “No,” said JinYeong, very precisely straightening the tie. “They could not. They do not have the ability.”

  One of the lycanthropes said something rude about that from the living room where they were all milling about, restless with the urge to brawl, but JinYeong only grinned and stayed where he was. As if he knew that restless feeling before
a fight and was refusing to be drawn into a confrontation. It was possible that he was refusing to be drawn into a fight because he wanted them to live a bit longer in their extreme twitchiness, but I preferred to think it was because he had just a smidgen of fellow feeling.

  The lycanthropes left before we did, when Daniel came downstairs from having breakfast with Morgana, even the oldest of them playing leapfrog and whooping and galloping down the path like they were the local rugby team going out to murder the opposition on the perfect day for a game.

  JinYeong and I waited until ten on the dot before we left the house.

  “Hope you can sniff out a harpy,” I said to him. “Otherwise we’re in for some trouble.” I already knew he could, but I was sick with nerves, and I was about as inclined as the lycanthropes to be incendiary and snarky when I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “I can sniff out anything,” JinYeong said, with a certainty that should have been comforting but annoyed me anyway.

  “Except me,” I said. And yeah, I know I shouldn’t have, but sometimes I just can’t stop my mouth saying stuff. “You didn’t know I was in the house for at least a week at the start.”

  “That is different.”

  “That’s what you always say,” I argued. “Whenever I ask you about stuff, it’s always that’s different. What’s different?”

  “You,” he said. “You are different.”

  “We already talked about this.”

  “Yes,” said JinYeong. “But you are wrong. It is irritating.”

  “So’s your face,” I said, before I could stop myself. “But you don’t hear me complaining about it.”

  JinYeong stopped in a quick swirl and turn of the heel that put him directly in front of me. He ducked his head until his narrowed eyes were level with mine, and said, “You complain about it all the time.”

  “Yeah, okay, that’s fair,” I said. “Oi. If we don’t die today, let’s get some good coffee afterward. I need coffee.”

  “You already had coffee,” JinYeong said, but he made a neat turn that put him back by my side, and kept walking. “Very well. But if you can’t sleep tonight, I won’t sit with you to frighten away the nightmares.”

  I know I’ve said it before, but I’m pretty sure the most useful thing about Behindkind is that they’re so flamin’ sure they’re superior, that they don’t check for things that any self-respecting human criminal would check for as a matter of habit.

  For instance, when JinYeong and I strolled into the office where the Behindkind Richard sat behind a desk, pretending to be a middle-aged businessman, he didn’t even think to check if I was recording on the phone I had sticking out of the front pocket of my jeans.

  What a galah.

  We hadn’t stopped walking since we entered the shoe store, me and JinYeong. Straight down the stairs, following the scent of harpy that JinYeong had in his nose, without having to do more than show our little card from the clothes shop to the human at the entrance at the bottom of the stairs. There were more humans in the halls when the walk-up mirrors lining the end of the store’s basement let us walk right through them and into what looked like an Alice-in-Wonderland version of a hospital.

  Upper Management might not think much of humans, but as an organisation, it seemed to have a definite penchant for using them as staff.

  Kinda dumb, because they didn’t look at us twice, either. No one looked sideways at us until JinYeong turned precisely at an office door, opened it, and ushered me in ahead of him.

  “Richard,” I said, beaming, to the big, untidy bloke behind the desk. Today was just getting better and better—he was the same Behindkind I’d seen in the hall the day the Family grabbed me out of North’s apartment. “G’day. We’re here to talk about an acquisitions deal.”

  “You’re a human,” he said, starting from his chair. A strong scent of dirty feathers and bird droppings wafted over. His eyes flickered to JinYeong warily, then back at me, wide with recognition. “You’re that human! The one the Family had.”

  “That’s me!” I said cheerfully. “Glad you remember me. This is gunna make things a lot easier.”

  Again. Behindkind really need to rethink their attitude toward humans. The poor wally didn’t even try to call for his security straight away. Just a human and a vampire—nothing to worry about.

  Instead, he let his human appearance drop and said with more of a screeching edge to his voice, “It was a very big mistake to come here, human. Do you want to die?”

  “Yeah, you probably think it’s a mistake,” I said. “But there are about three different questions you should have asked before that one.”

  The harpy laughed, shaking his feathers, and another gust of bird-poop-and-old-feather scent hit us. “I suppose you think your vampire master will save you.”

  JinYeong, with a dangerous smile, his eyes dark and glittering, shut the door behind him and leaned against it.

  “Is that supposed to frighten me?”

  “You’re really not good at the questions,” I said. “I mean, if it were me, I would have asked who I was. Then maybe what I wanted. And I would definitely have asked why a pet you’d seen last with the Family was barging into your office.”

  He tried to laugh again, but it sounded a bit breathless this time. “I don’t have to ask any of that,” he said. “You’re just a human. You’ll be dead before you get out of here.”

  “You reckon? Okay. Ask me what I’m here for, then. Just for fun.”

  “Ya,” said JinYeong from behind me, in a lazy voice. “Stop having fun.”

  He didn’t layer it with Between, so I was left to explain to the increasingly puzzled Richard, “He thinks I’m enjoying myself too much. Right. Down to business, then.”

  “I don’t do business with humans.”

  “Well, that’s a lie. I saw at least ten humans out there.”

  “They’re staff. Some humans are bright enough to appreciate the use in allying themselves with Behindkind. Business and staff are different.”

  “Yeah, and you’ve got a contract with a human family.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If you’re going to be making contracts with humans to make sure you’ve got your mitts on the next harbinger,” I said, grinning at him without humour, “you really gotta make sure you don’t let other people know about it. Especially when it comes to people with Family connections.”

  “You—you—how did you know about that!”

  “Living with Behindkind is useful,” I said to him. “You get to learn which questions are good questions to ask. But you—you’re still asking the wrong questions. What you should really be asking me now is what I want.”

  It’s weird to see a bird swallow. Or maybe it was weird because he wasn’t exactly a bird, and he was just enough human to swallow convulsively and just enough bird for it to look wrong.

  “What do you want?” he asked, in a voice like chalk.

  “I want you to break your contract with the Palmer family,” I said.

  Richard looked toward JinYeong in what was pretty close to helplessness. “Are you going to let a human get away with this?”

  JinYeong shrugged. “I am here for amusement. She does not belong to me.”

  “What—what makes you think I’m going to break a contract at your say so?” he blustered. “There’s nothing you can do to me. There’s nothing you can do to us.”

  “You were there, too,” I said. “That night that Lord Sero’s father turned up—you saw me with the Family. If you want me to tell them that you lot have an eye on the next harbinger and where to find her, keep your contract. Reckon it won’t do you much good, but that’s your business. I can make a call in less than five seconds.”

  “You would be dead once you’d done so,” he said.

  JinYeong gave a small, scornful sniff of laughter. “You would be dead also,” he said.

  The Behindkind’s feathers spread up and around his face. It co
uld have been a ruff to intimidate us, but it gave me the impression that he had been badly frightened.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said to him. “But by then, I reckon you’d have lost your big secret to the Family. And I’m pretty sure that if you’re the one to let that happen, you’ll end up flamin’ uncomfortable even if JinYeong doesn’t kill you.”

  “Even if I do make the call,” he said. “You still have to get out of here alive.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s why I’ll be on the phone with the Family while we walk out of here. Think about it: even if you don’t have a contract, you’re still the only people who know what she is and where she is. And maybe they’ll be persuaded to make a new deal.”

  His side-feathers twitched and turned slightly sideways. A sign of thoughtfulness? That he was listening? Or just that he was likely to attack? I didn’t know. One huge, feathered wing slowly reached toward the desk in front of him, and the hand hidden in the feathers there hefted open what looked like a small filing cabinet drawer in the desk.

  Very slowly now, Richard put a piece of paper on the top of the desk, then lifted his hand above it, palm and fingers flat.

  “Hang on,” I said. “I need to see it first.”

  He snapped his beak, and snatched the paper off the desk, shoving it back into the desk drawer and replacing it with another. This time, he handed it to me straight away, and I didn’t know if his hand shook with anger or fear of what was coming.

  JinYeong took a look over my shoulder, but I didn’t need his nod to know I was looking at the Palmers’ contract. It was exactly the same as the copy North had given me.

  I handed it back to the harpy and said, “Dissolve it. Permanently. If I don’t get a text in the next couple of minutes, I’ll be making the call to Lord Sero’s father regardless. Got it?”

  He didn’t answer me. He was probably too angry. He spread his hand over this paper, and I didn’t know what he did, but there was a hot flash of something and the contract burst into flames.