Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  Zero, looking about as alert and normal as he’d looked in far too long, leaned forward with his arms on his knees, fully engaged. “Fae scholars have debated about the connection between the physical world and the application of science and magic for—”

  “Good grief,” I grumbled. I caught Daniel’s eyes briefly as I turned my attention back to the now slightly-pouting JinYeong, and understood the expression of mingled fondness and rue the lycanthrope wore. Morgana must have been talking about this for longer than a few minutes.

  Even though I knew he couldn’t hear me, I said to JinYeong, “Sorry about that. Morgana and Zero are having a heart-to-heart about how magic is actually just science when people know how to touch the science with the right vibes.”

  JinYeong’s mouth quirked. He might not understand, but he knew when I was being sarcastic. He tipped his head at Marazul and gave an apologetic sort of half-shrug. He might as well have said, This one was useless, too. I shall try again.

  “You don’t have to keep trying,” I said. “And you don’t have to keep kidnapping our friends to get them to try and do something about all of this. We’ll figure out another way.”

  JinYeong grinned at me, his eyes bright and mischievous, and blew me a kiss. Then he sauntered away, leaving Marazul to follow behind him at a much slower rate on the grass.

  “Oi!” I yelled. “I said you don’t have to—flamin’ heck, there he goes! Wonder who he’s gunna bring back next.”

  “So long as it’s not my father, I don’t care,” said Zero. “There’s nothing that can be done to get us out of here.”

  Even Daniel, as naturally gloomy as he was, seemed to find that annoying. “What are we gunna do, then? You know, if we’re not going to try and escape and everything’s hopeless?”

  “Stay in the house,” Zero said briefly. “Barricade ourselves as best we can and try not to die for as long as it takes for the trials to end.”

  “I thought it was fight to the death kinda stuff?” Daniel said.

  “It is—until the sword declares a victor, or until only one heirling is left and the others are dead or have sworn fealty.”

  I said flatly, “No matter what happens, heaps of us are gunna die.”

  “Yes,” said Zero. I wasn’t sure the thought worried him too much, but the look he shot at me seemed to show that he was worried about it bothering me, and that was nice. “We can’t do anything about it; all we can do is survive and try to keep everyone we love alive.”

  “Yeah, but what if—”

  “There are no what ifs!” he said. “The trials are a closed system that require a victor, in some capacity, to unlock.”

  “And I assume we’re not going to be helping anyone to be the victor,” said Daniel. “So it will probably take a while.”

  “You assume correctly,” said Zero.

  I was secretly relieved by how immediately he said it—more by how absolutely he said it.

  “We might as well get comfortable and eat something, then,” said one of the lycanthropes. Kevin, probably. Maybe Kyle.

  “Hope you lot like rice,” I said. “’Cos we’re gunna be eating a lot of it.”

  I made a big batch of rice with a nice, creamy curry to go along with it in hopes of spinning out the food we had. We had a fair bit of rice and coconut cream in the cupboards, along with a lot of milk in the fridge, so I might as well work to our strengths until we could get out into the real world for more food.

  I ate dinner with the half of everyone sitting on the floor in the dining room, keeping an ear out for the half in the living room to make sure no one was stuffing curry down the back of the couch. Mind you, it wasn’t like the ones in the dining room weren’t going to be stuffing curry—they were just more likely to be stuffing it in their mouths.

  I started making tea and coffee while the lycanthropes were still fighting over the last dribble of curry in the pot, hoping to fill up their stomachs for a bit longer. If Zero was determined to keep to his plan, we would have trouble keeping up with the demand for food. Morgana hadn’t eaten dinner, which had made Daniel watch her with a frown between his brows, but her food wasn’t in short supply. I had seen enough brain unloaded into my refrigerator to last any self-respecting zombie for a good fortnight. I didn’t like to ask how much of it was behindkind and how much was animal, either. I wondered, grinning a bit, how long it would be before Morgana realised that she’d already seen blood—a lot of blood—without fainting, and that her zombie form seemed to be lacking the weakness that her human body had had.

  So instead of asking awkward questions, I took tea and coffee out to everyone. We could talk about brains tomorrow. For now, Morgana was walking and the lycanthropes were fed; it was time for coffee.

  I hadn’t realised how few coffee mugs we had, and the cupboard was nearly empty by the time I found myself gazing dumbly at Athelas’ teacup. The hand I had raised to take out another mug shook a little bit, fingers curling back into my palm, but then Zero looked over and I found myself hurriedly pushing the teacup to the back of the cupboard with a shock of worry.

  It was a useless, protective gesture; I didn’t want Zero to break the teacup, too. Which was absolutely ridiculous, because the teacup belonged to the murderer of my parents. I shouldn’t want to have it in the house.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to either take it out of the cupboard and use it or let Zero at it.

  Heck. I wasn’t going to cry right here in the kitchen, was I?

  Nope. I wasn’t going to let it get to me. I was going to get my own coffee, then I was going to check and see that JinYeong hadn’t come back again and take a look at all the windows in the house to see if I could get something, anything through to the outside. If I could get something through to the outside, maybe there was a chance that I could get someone through to the outside.

  And there it was again: that tickly little thought that there had to be something I could do to get us out of here. Some way of seeing the world in just the right way or making it interact with us in just the right way to get out while we could.

  Still caught with the idea, I took my coffee mug upstairs with me and started on the windows in my own room first. I didn’t get too far in there, so I came back out into the upstairs living room, hoping I would be able to get a bit more of a grip on the windows I had used to sneak in and out of the house so often before the psychos came into my life. It wasn’t so much that I thought that those windows would treat me better, as such—more that Between seems to have a thing about recurring patterns, and where there are repeated patterns, it’s easier for…stuff to get through.

  Whether or not you want that stuff to get through is entirely dependent on whether or not you’re the stuff, or whether you know what that stuff is.

  The living room windows weren’t much good, either. I tried out there for a good half hour, always thinking I had a handle on something—that something was about to connect in just the right way—before everything slipped through my fingers and dispersed into a whirlpool again.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t feel what was happening now that I knew what it was; even before Morgana had mentioned anything about vibrations and things being on the right wavelengths, I’d noticed the way that Between was acting. Now that I suspected it was folding back over itself because it couldn’t come to grips with the differently vibrating section of the human world it should have connected with, it was easier to really see what was happening.

  I only wished that it made it easier to do something about it.

  When I couldn’t do more to the windows in the living room than cause them to become a bit less stable than I was comfortable with, I headed on into Mum and Dad’s room. Nothing could be done there, either, but that might have been because I was unsettled by more than the situation I found myself in.

  Still, it was oddly peaceful in there with the faint hum of the household below my feet, despite the fact that the back-facing windows were beginning to show more of what was actually o
utside in the backyard than what was in the human world. I found myself lingering, caught as much by the quiet, mismatching array of items around the room that had been left to loiter in the dust by Athelas as I was by the peace. Somehow, I could still smell the faint scent he always carried with him. I should really start getting rid of some of the things he’d left behind—without crying, preferably. I caught sight of the little collection of items on the dresser top, lit warmly with evening sunlight: a key, a plain banded ring made of what looked like citrine, and a little round badge-type thing that could have been a button pin if I hadn’t known it was actually a small component of a private network—the magical tech by which we’d secured our phones between us and prevented anyone from the outside from being able to hack into our phones. I turned it over in my fingers, wondering if Athelas had meant to keep it or if it had merely been forgotten.

  A lycanthrope voice said from the doorway, “This where we’re sleeping?”

  “Nope!” I said firmly, shoving the badge and key into my pocket and striding out of the room so I could close it in front of that far-too-inquisitive nose. I would have grabbed the ring as well, but I knocked it to the ground and under the bed instead, and I didn’t want to stoop for it while a lycanthrope was looking. “No one sleeps in here.”

  “Bed looks comfy,” he said, eyes narrowing.

  “Your face looks punchable,” I retorted. “No need to judge based on looks, mate. No one sleeps in that room.”

  The grin he sent in my direction was lazy and unphased. “What, you reckon you’re going to sort me out?”

  “Don’t have to,” I said. “I’ll get Morgana to sort you out.”

  That wiped the grin off his face pretty quick. “Hang on, there’s no need to go telling the missus on me!” he protested.

  “The missus?”

  “Alpha’s missus,” he said, surprised. “Zombie girl.”

  “All right, I know who you’re talking about, I was just wondering why the heck you were calling her the missus. The bunch of you are flamin’ old as the hills! You should find some new slang.”

  “I’m not old, I’m only fifteen!” he said. “And my dad used to call my mum the missus all the time, so—”

  My phone went ping!

  “Heck!” I said, interrupting him. “Belt up for a tick, yeah?”

  My phone shouldn’t be making any noises, let alone the ping for a text, because anyone who should be able to text me was already in the house and could yell for me instead. I grabbed it and stared at the lit screen. Not a text—it was a missed call. Tuatu had tried to call me three times in the last hour, and the notifications had all come through right now. Every single one of them—the texts that I had missed from him as well.

  How the heck had they got through?

  Hang on. Hang on. If call notifications from Detective Tuatu had somehow got through, did that mean I could call the detective back?

  I started grinning and fished the badge out of my pocket again. What was the bet that the private network Marazul had made for us was still up and running? What was the bet that Detective Tuatu’s phone had just connected with mine and I’d received backed-up notifications that had been sent over the course of the day?

  “What?” asked Kyle or Kevin, looking worried. “I didn’t do anything, and I’ll tell the missus if you bash me.”

  “Never you mind,” I said. “Just had a thought, that’s all. You go back downstairs; I’ve got a call to make.”

  He stared at me, perplexed. “I thought we couldn’t use our phones to call the human world while we’re in here. Mine doesn’t work.”

  “We can’t,” I said. “That’s why I’ve got an idea.”

  “Still dunno what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t have to,” I told him. “Off you go. I have a private call to make.”

  “No one can make calls!” he called out over his shoulder, stubborn to the end.

  He did leave and go back downstairs, though, leaving me free to unlock my phone and pause for a second before I could bring myself to press the button to call the detective. Every instinct told me to hurry while there might still be a chance that I could get through, while the lead feeling in my stomach told me that I’d missed the window and it was no use hoping it would work.

  When I found my thumb twitching, I hastily tapped Detective Tuatu’s profile. I was so busy trying to make the thumb stop twitching that I almost didn’t notice that I could hear the phone ringing—actually ringing.

  “Heck!” I said, slapping the phone against my ear just in time to hear the detective’s disgruntled voice.

  “Hello? Pet? I’ve been trying to call you all day!”

  “Oi, Tuatu,” I said, bright with relief. So he had kept the token on him! Rapidly, I added, “Don’t throw away that little network chip you got from us, whatever you do!”

  Tuatu said something beneath his breath that was pretty rude. “So that’s why my phone’s been cutting out every time I walk into this part of the room!”

  “You on the move right now?”

  “No, I’m sitting at my table; I chucked the chip into the fruit bowl and forgot about it.”

  “All right; just don’t move away from it while we’re talking, all right? I’ll be cut off if you do that.”

  “Pet, what’s going on? Weird stuff has been happening since this morning and I’ve tried to call you four times in the last few hours.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “North just got very sane and I don’t know what to do with her. I’m terrified.”

  “Yeah, she probably knows that everything’s about to go to pot.”

  “What do you mean, it’s about to go to pot? I’ve never seen her like this! I think her little friend disappeared again, and if she’s got to go through what she went through last time—!”

  “Heck, they got Sarah, too? We’ll look for her in here. Tell North not to worry.”

  “Where is in here?”

  “You won’t understand: just tell North that the trials have started, we’re trapped in the arena with the other heirlings, and that we’ll look out for Sarah. I bet she’s in here, too. I need you to do something.”

  He audibly took a breath. “Are you all right, Pet?”

  “I’m alive, and I’ve got Zero—we’ve also got some lycanthropes and a zombie, so we’re looking good for now. Apparently this is a gladiator, last-man-standing kind of deal, so—wait, that’s not important. What’s important is that I need you to do some stuff.”

  “Yes, sorry. What do you need?”

  “I need you to get one of those chips to JinYeong so we can talk to him. And I need you to find someone for me.”

  “Who? And where am I going to get another chip? The other humans are—”

  “Dead. Yeah, I know. You won’t be able to get back to the house, either, I reckon. Do you think they’ll have some of ’em in evidence in your lockup? Your blokes took evidence, didn’t they? Before everything went to pieces?”

  “I’ll look. What’s the name of the person you need to find?”

  “Don’t know that. I know he owns a particular bit of land in the city; I’ll text you the address. It might take a bit to find the bloke, though; I reckon he’ll be hidden behind a few false names and fake companies, as well as a lot of paperwork.”

  “Is he someone you’re after for one of your cases?”

  “Nope,” I said, busily texting the address while I was talking. I didn’t want to lose the connection midway through our talk and leave him with nothing. “Oh, and you’ll have to be careful when you start looking; it could be dangerous. Make sure North knows that you’re doing it, okay?”

  “I don’t need North’s help to stay safe.”

  “No, but you can’t deny it’s nice to have,” I reminded him.

  He didn’t deny it, but he did ask, “What’s this one done to you?”

  “Gave me a book and sent off a fae lord who was trying to drag me out into the street.”
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  “I can see why you’re so worried about it: he sounds like a dangerous man. Shouldn’t you be getting me to do more to help you out of your current predicament?”

  “Nah, that’s something you can’t help with. And sarcasm aside, it might not sound like much, but the bloke knows my name—he threatened me with it—and I wanna return the favour if I can.”

  Tuatu might have sounded very slightly miffed. “He knows your name, and I don’t?”

  “It’s not ’cos I told him!” I protested. “And you won’t even tell North your first name, so it’s not like you have a leg to stand on!”

  “That’s fair,” he said, after a brief pause. It sounded as though he was smiling. “I’ll look into it for you.”

  “There’s a leprechaun who’ll be able to help you,” I said. “Especially if there’s a money trail to follow. You give him access to your computer systems and the internal and external internet, and he can follow a money trail across the internet. Just give him a lot of choc chip bikkies and a few crisp fifties and he’ll be all yours.”

  There was another pause, but this time it didn’t sound like Detective Tuatu was smiling when he said, “You expect me to take a…a leprechaun who can be bribed into the police department?”

  “You’ve had Zero and Athelas in there,” I said, and my voice caught. “At least Five won’t be pinching bodies and doing weird voodoo in your morgue. He’ll just plug himself into your computers and follow any money trail through the internet until he finds his little pot of gold at the end of the ’net.”

  “Isn’t there anything else I can do? Those three are always getting you into trouble, but this is the first time it’s been trouble I’ve seen North worried about.”

  “She’s right to be worried,” I said soberly. “But there’s nothing you can do from out there. We have to play by the rules to get out, apparently. We’ll see about that, but I don’t reckon anything can be done from the outside. Once JinYeong is all mic’d up we’ll be able to get everyone together if we think we can attempt a breakout.”