Lord Sero didn’t need to know that we weren’t coming out because we didn’t need to come out. It didn’t matter what reason he gave to our decision; he just knew we weren’t coming out, so let him stew on that and not think too much about other stuff that he shouldn’t be thinking about. I’d rather he was taken by surprise when we made a break for the outside world.
“I’m disappointed,” said Lord Sero icily. “I had thought I’d taught you better than this; I see that I shall have to administer another lesson.”
“When your kids are a hundred something, it’s probably time to cut the apron strings, even if a fae century isn’t the same as a human one,” I told him.
Ignoring me, he said to Zero, “When I return you’ll regret not listening to reason. I’m not so old that I can’t bring you to heel when I need to do so.”
“You bring pets to heel, not sons,” I told him. “And I’m not the sort of pet that comes to heel, so you should probably concentrate on your butler.”
Lord Sero’s icy eyes were instantly on me, and I wondered exactly what point I’d scored.
Testing the waters, I said, “Oi. Where is your fae butler, anyway? You get sick of him or something?”
For a moment longer, I held his almost painful gaze, then Lord Sero looked back at Zero.
“You’d be well advised to bring your own pets to heel,” he said, and swept away.
“Always nice to have a family reunion,” I said, shutting the louvres and making sure the arm mechanism that closed them clicked shut properly. “What d’you reckon he’s gunna try and do?”
“I don’t know,” Zero said briefly. “But you can be sure it will be something to give as much pain as possible. If he thought we still cared for Athelas, no doubt he’d bring him back here to peel him apart piece by piece until we let him in. It’s a good thing he can’t really get to JinYeong from in here.”
I nearly asked, “What, you’d cave in for JinYeong?” but stopped myself in time, because I’d seen Zero nearly burn a revenant to death for snatching JinYeong away. It hadn’t stopped him being prepared to sever ties with JinYeong when we got stuck in here, but if I looked at that from a Zero point of view, no doubt he’d been trying to do what was best for JinYeong in his own, emotionally constipated sort of way.
“Are you sure he can’t get to JinYeong?” I asked instead. Ever since meeting the first mimic, I’d been on edge, the thought that someone could have JinYeong shut away and was just waiting to make use of him, turning over and over in my mind. I knew that I’d be able to tell if it was really JinYeong, but it didn’t stop me feeling worried about him.
“If my father could have got JinYeong in here, he would never have bothered with something as chancy as a construct,” said Zero. “Even if he didn’t expect a human to be able to tell the difference, he should have expected me to do so. The fact that he didn’t bring the real JinYeong means he couldn’t do so.”
“Well, that’s a relief, I suppose,” I said. “What do you reckon he’s going to do, then?”
“He’s probably going to try and find anyone in this twisty-turny nightmare of a bubble who means anything to us, and bring them back to hurt us,” Daniel said, from the doorway. I hadn’t noticed the other three disappearing, but now the door was full of gloomy lycanthrope. “Any friend, or acquaintance, or family.”
“Good thing we don’t have many friends then, I suppose!” I said cheerfully. “And pretty much every acquaintance of ours in here has tried to kill us, so that helps.”
“Lady, I have never tried to kill you!” said Les anxiously, tugging at my sleeve. I didn’t know where he’d come from, but it was nice to know he hadn’t disappeared into the dirty laundry. “But when there is no bubble tea, what can a human do?”
“Not to worry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean you; you came in with us, anyway. We didn’t meet you by chance.”
“I doubt my father has any idea of who we care about—nor would he have any idea that a lasting alliance could form between heirlings, much less friendship. There is no one with whom he can threaten us.”
“Good thing he doesn’t know you still care about Athelas then,” I said less cheerfully, echoing my own earlier words.
“I don’t—I don’t still care about Athelas!”
“Yeah you do,” I said shortly. “If I still do when he killed my parents, there’s no way you’re not gunna still care. You wouldn’t have thrown his chair through the window if you hadn’t cared.”
“Then let us say I don’t want to care!” he snapped.
“All right, we don’t want to care, but apparently we do, so it’s a good thing your dad doesn’t—”
“Pet, do we have to talk about it now?”
Daniel gave us both a bit of a weird look and said, “Everyone’s waiting in the living room to discuss how we’re going to get out of here because Morgana says you have an idea.”
It took me a moment of looking blankly at the nearly empty doorway to realise that everyone had left while Zero and I were bickering.
Daniel’s grin was irritating. “Are you finished?”
“Yes,” said Zero with an insulting haste, and made a beeline for the door.
“Oi!” I called out, slipping back to the floor. “Wait for me! I haven’t finished yet!”
Luckily for Zero, someone had made me another cup of coffee when I caught up with him in the living room, and that made me feel a lot more mellow as I sat down in my usual chair. There were also a lot of people sitting on the other chairs and the floor, looking at me with varying expressions of interest, eagerness, and bright inquisitiveness. The coffee made me mellow enough not to mind the lycanthrope gaze and kindly enough not to pursue the matter with Zero.
“First of all,” I said. “I reckon Lord Sero managed to make a doorway into the arena. He probably has someone who technically could be an heirling but isn’t, or technically is but doesn’t count, and used them to get through by tickling the arena presets. He couldn’t have gotten into the arena any other way—he couldn’t have got into the arena after it started up without something like that.”
If the lycanthropes could have pricked up their ears in human form, that was what they would have done.
One of them sat up straighter, grinning. “So what are we gunna do? Find the door and get out there?”
“Nope,” I said, with a dark, fierce grin. “Reckon I know a better way. We’re not going outside again.”
“How come you mentioned the door, then?” protested Kyle. “If it’s not important.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “It’s important to me.”
“JinYeong came through in the same manner,” said Zero.
“Bingo,” I said. “The mimics have observed him well enough to mimic him, so he’s in here somewhere. We also know he only just got in during the last couple days, so the arena is still open.”
“How come we aren’t going to one of the doors, then?” asked Morgana, frowning. “Either Lord Sero’s or JinYeong’s? Do you think the doors are guarded?”
“The doors will be one-way,” said Zero. “My father would never leave a way for me to escape—or the other heirlings. He wants an end to this situation.”
“That’s what I reckon,” I agreed. “So we’re not going to go for a door. I just mentioned it because there are probably quite a few of Lord Sero’s men in here by now using the same method, and we’re going to have to account for them. What we’re gunna do is try to grow the house.”
“We’re what?”
“We’re going to grow the house,” I repeated. “There’s no point in going out there for people to take pot shots at us when we can just get the house to grow a bit more and put up with the usual sort of things Between throws at us.”
“Won’t they be able to get into the house eventually anyway?”
Surprising me, Zero said, “They haven’t managed yet; Pet has a better grip on the house than I would have expected. Short of the king himself, I doubt there’s anyone from t
he trials who will be able to get in here.”
“We might get a few more banshees and maybe a bit of trouble when we’re actually travelling through it, but I reckon that’ll be it,” I said, much gratified by this sign of trust. “That’s pretty normal from Between, though. So long as it’s Between and not Behind, we’ll be fine.”
“Only until the banshees start singing,” muttered Daniel, but he didn’t look too worried. I think he just likes to be morose to remind everyone that things can go horribly wrong.
“How does growing the house get us out of here?” asked Sarah. She was sitting cross-legged beside Ralph, who was leaning against her and pretending that he wasn’t sucking his thumb. “We’ll eventually get to be as big as we can get, and that’ll be that. We’d also have to displace or consume the other people in the arena, because if we end up pushing against the outside of the bubble—”
“I’m not too sure about the other people,” I said. “Actually, I’m not too sure about any of it, so it’ll be a complete gamble either way. But we know that when an heirling is out of the running, their house vanishes and their supporters are taken out, too. There aren’t going to be too many people left out there that aren’t Lord Sero’s blokes by now, and if we grow over the next couple of days, we should be able to experiment with what’ll happen.”
Daniel shot me a look that was on the verge of grumpy. “Yes, but how does taking over the arena get us out of it?”
“You know how I said this is just an idea?” I said.
Zero stifled a sigh. “You don’t know exactly how it’s going to get us out of here.”
“Yeah. But I do know it’ll make the arena smaller,” I said, clearing my throat. “One way or another. We’ve just gotta make sure there are as few heirlings left in the arena as possible—and make sure all of ’em are in houses.”
“We’re working on a wing and a prayer?” Daniel said incredulously. “Pet—”
“Life as usual, then, isn’t it?” I said happily.
Chapter Eleven
That night, I dreamed I was a house. Huge and serene and moving, I reached out to the stretchy world around me and pulled it into myself. The world grew smaller and another house drew near, but it was a small house, easily digestible. I took it into myself, shrinking the world even more, and felt a slight tickle from somewhere in the upper floor that might have been indigestion if I was still just a human.
Then, something sharp and smelly grabbed the small part of me that was my human shoulders and shook me awake, roaring in my face with an entire face full of razor sharp teeth. Half asleep, and more house than person, I had only a dazed moment to think, Ah heck, this mongrel’s gunna rip my face off before someone snarled and the creature was ripped away from me.
A small, dainty shadow dripping blood crouched over the creature as I struggled to sit up and get off the couch, and for a moment grew luminescent with the blue flame that was burning up another of the crawlers and the skeleton that straddled it.
Morgana! I kicked and wriggled against the lethargy of being a house and not a person, struggling to get to her, and Morgana’s head snapped up, glittering in blood and gore.
“Stay on the couch!” she snarled, her eyes entirely red, “and let us protect you! Look after the house!”
I stayed on the couch, sinking back into the haze of being house and person together, and heard Zero’s voice rumble, “Get the night crawlers. I have the dustbunnies and I’ve secured the door.”
Then I was dreaming again, or a house again, and human words didn’t mean the things they should have meant. All that mattered was settling into the new space I’d taken and making it my own.
I might really have thought I’d dreamed it all if Zero hadn’t been hunched in the doorway of JinYeong’s bedroom the next morning when I woke up. Someone had cleaned the room while I slept, but there was still the distinct, lingering musk that the night crawlers had brought with them when they invaded, even if all of the blood had gone.
“Thanks for cleaning up the mess,” I mumbled to everyone in the kitchen when I went down to make breakfast.
“Sit down,” Morgana said. “No, stop trying to get into the kitchen and just sit down! You and the house took over about a quarter of the arena last night, Zero says. And I’m already making breakfast, so—”
“I can smell burning.”
“Mind your own business,” she said firmly, and two lycanthropes nudged me toward one of the stools at the kitchen island. “Drink your coffee.”
“Oh,” I said, looking down stupidly at the mug. “There’s coffee there.”
“I didn’t spit in it,” said Ralph, who was sitting in the stool next to mine.
If I’d been more awake I might have been a bit more worried, too. I wasn’t, so I just sipped my coffee and woke up by degrees as the kitchen grew smokier and Morgana buzzed around like a little fire demon. Still, it was nice not to have to cook, even if we were going to have charcoal for breakfast.
Lord Sero was outside in the backyard again by breakfast time. Already tired from my night time exertions, cranky from the complete lack of JinYeong anywhere, and sick with worry at the thought of what that meant, I just scowled out of the new dining room window when one of the lycanthropes came to tell me.
“Lord Sero can flamin’ stay out there as long as he likes,” I said grumpily. “I’m gunna be making renovations to the place, so it’s probably gunna get a bit uncomfortable out there. He’ll move away when he starts to get the idea.”
I wasn’t as confident as I sounded, but I was definitely stroppy enough to be mean-spirited about my attempt. I reckon the house was feeling a bit malicious, too, because when I settled myself in Mum and Dad’s room with a good view over the backyard and experimentally pushed at the Between in the back wall, the entire house grew creepingly and carefully—in fits and starts that seemed to coincide exactly with when Lord Sero wasn’t looking.
It didn’t feel exactly like it was me doing it; like yesterday, it felt as though the house was responding to what I wanted it to do—someone cooperating with me while our interests aligned. It didn’t feel remotely like it had while I slept last night. But at least something was happening.
I’m not sure Lord Sero got the idea, but he did glare at the house with narrowed eyes as soon as the house started creeping up on him and his men, and when there were only a few feet left of space between the house wall and the labyrinth hedge, he gave a swift, short command that had everyone on their feet and into the hedges before I could see what would happen if the wall touched them.
“Good riddance,” said Morgana, from beside me. She wasn’t sitting down, but she didn’t sit down a lot these days; she seemed to prefer to stand or bounce on her toes with a kind of nervous energy. “I suppose he’ll be back, but at least that’s given him something to worry about.”
“That’s the plan,” I said, feeling more cheerful. I liked the idea of worrying Lord Sero without giving him any idea of what exactly we were doing. It helped that I wasn’t one hundred percent sure of what I was doing, myself. I was just trying to get better acquainted with my house and what we could do together. “We’ll probably get a few more visitors now that Sarah’s here in the house being an active heirling, but at least we can get rid of them without going outside.”
“It’s funny,” Morgana said slowly. “I used to feel safe indoors, and now I’d just like to get out. It’s better that we can’t get out right now, though, I suppose; I just don’t like Lord Sero being out there.”
I glanced across at her. “Why? He can’t get to us.”
“I just can’t figure out why he wanted someone actually in the house,” she said. “He could have just threatened to kill JinYeong in front of you if he wanted to get you or Zero to give yourselves up to him, but he tried to get the construct to sneak in, instead.”
“That must be what’s been bothering Zero,” I said. “I suppose it depends on whether Lord Sero knows that Sarah’s in the house—she’s the only o
ne of us who’s agreed to fight in the trials. I can see him wanting to have her killed—or wanting the rest of us heirlings killed—but I don’t see how he can have expected the mimic’s construct to kill all of us.”
“Exactly,” Morgana said darkly. “It’s been bothering me. I can’t think of anything else but that Lord Sero was trying to get to one of us—either you or Zero. But I can’t see Zero wandering off with JinYeong to be walked into something dangerous, and it’s not like you would have gone anywhere with him alone, either.”
“Yeah, nah,” I said mechanically, with the sudden, terrifying thought stuck in my mind that I would have gone with JinYeong if I’d actually thought it was JinYeong. At this point, if I could have seen that he was alive and uninjured and here, I probably would have followed him out of the back door and into the labyrinth without questioning it.
“Good thing the mimics didn’t do a great job at pretending to be JinYeong, I suppose,” I said, for the sake of saying something to cover how terribly vulnerable I felt. “Well, now that they’re both dead we shouldn’t have to worry about any more fakes—and their house should vanish along with all the people they brought with them originally. I wonder if the heirlings they had under oath will vanish, too? It’s not like they agreed to challenge the throne, so maybe the arena will count them as NPCs along with the people who were brought in with the actual heirlings. They aren’t anywhere in the house now, so they must have gone somewhere.”
“Must be nice to be an NPC,” said Morgana. “They get the chance of disappearing with the house once their fighter is gone or has joined up with another group. Us heirlings have to fight, die, or form alliances—and then probably die anyway. I hope they got out.”
“If they got out, they’ll probably still have to fight or die later when the trials are over,” Zero said from behind us. “How much did you take in, Pet?”
“Reckon it was a good twenty metres,” I told him, turning my gaze away from the window and over to him.
“Tired?”
Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine Page 20
