Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  I met those green eyes fleetingly once more, and he smirked at me. The face was completely wrong, but that smirk was pure JinYeong: self-assured, pleased with himself, and utterly smug.

  “Flamin’ heck,” I muttered, and Zero looked down at me. At him, I said, “Tell you later. Just don’t forget what I said about that secret weapon.”

  We had enough problems to be going on with; I didn’t want to give JinYeong’s game away by speaking too loudly. Through the marble of the house I could barely feel where the others were—I couldn’t hope that Lord Sero was similarly ignorant, and I definitely couldn’t hope that he wouldn’t use them as leverage if he was able to take them prisoner.

  “I would ask why you’ve invaded my demesne, but it makes very little difference. You’re in my power now and I certainly won’t be allowing you to leave.”

  “You know that we can fight, right?” I inquired. There was a merry brightness in my blood that I usually only got from vampire spit, and it was very hard not to grin outright. “We’re not just gunna give ourselves up to you.”

  “Bold words,” Sero said, smiling without humour. “I know that your other little friends are somewhere around my receiving room: I’ve already dispatched people to deal with them.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “You know there’s a zombie with ’em? Don’t reckon your blokes will have a fun time trying to take ’em prisoner. I’m also pretty sure that you’ve been losing a lot of muscle lately as the arena shrinks.”

  “Yes, I gathered you’d been busy reducing the arena,” he said. “And I was aware that once you’d taken care of whatever was left out there, you’d turn your eyes on my demesne. I made sure I was ready for you—you really ought not to think I’m so stupid.”

  “The arena shrinks itself,” I said, trying to pay enough attention to Lord Sero while at the same time feeling out the room and the great house for any way to push on with our plan. “I just helped it along a bit.”

  “It was very useful of you,” he said pleasantly. “And gave me the time I needed to make arrangements I might not otherwise have been able to make.”

  “Glad to help,” I told him flippantly, sick to my stomach. I really hadn’t expected him to know what I was doing, much less to be ready for it.

  “Moreover, I have more than enough staff to deal with the assorted rabble in my receiving room. Let us come to some agreement, son: your other heirling friends are going to have to die, but everything else is negotiable. I’m not unreasonable.”

  “We’re not here to negotiate,” said Zero, at last. “We won’t be here for long, either.”

  There was a great and absolute iciness to him that seemed fragile rather than hard. It worried me. I wondered, for the first time, if this house was somewhere he knew well rather than just a house that Lord Sero had commandeered.

  “This estate is bound to me,” Lord Sero said. “You’ll find it hard to get through the house without going through me. I’ll give you all non-essential members back once I’ve killed the heirlings if you give up now, my son.”

  “Got a counteroffer,” I told him, once more briefly meeting and then avoiding the eyes of the yellow chequered fae-who-was-JinYeong. “We’ll take all of our people and Zero’s just gunna come with us. How’s that suit you?”

  “I will not argue with household chattel!” said Lord Sero, his voice tight. He turned his eyes back on his son. “The others go nowhere until I have the heirling sword in hand, the Pet in custody, and you by my side. I’m willing to be gracious and grant you a small concession—nothing more! Take the offer while you can.”

  “We’ll accept no offers from you,” Zero said. “Pet?”

  “Working on it,” I said.

  “I told you,” Lord Sero said coldly. “This house is bound to me; nothing you can do will make a difference. If you won’t come gently, all of your friends will die and you’ll likely be hurt.”

  “You can try to get our friends,” I said. “But I told you: we’ve got a zombie, and she’s pretty annoyed already. Even if you kill us, it still won’t get you the heirling sword.”

  “I’m not going to kill my son, you absolute buffoon,” said Lord Sero, in snarling exasperation. “He will take the throne with the aid of the sword. You are the one who will die, after your human friends.”

  “Yeah, see that’s the problem,” I said. “Your son doesn’t know where the heirling sword is. I’m the one who does. So if you kill me and the others, it’s hooroo to the sword and hooroo to the throne.”

  I saw Zero’s incredulous gaze in my peripheral and turned my head to explain cheerfully, “I took it and hid it while you were washing off the blood the other day. Put it somewhere nice and safe where I can get it later.”

  Zero smiled for the first time since we’d entered the house. “Good Pet,” he said. To his father, he said, “I stand with the Pet. If you want either of us, you’ll have to fight, and I think you’ll find that our friends aren’t so likely to fall easily, either.”

  Lord Sero drew in a deep breath through his nose. It was so similar to what I’d seen Zero do time and time again, that it threw me for a moment. “Let us try to come to an understanding,” he said to me. “You’re always kicking and scratching—there’s no need. I’ll even allow some further concessions: all you have to do is swear fealty to my son. All of the other heirlings and yourself: swear allegiance and there’s no need for us to fight.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “A simple choice,” he said, smiling down at me with dark, shadow-etched lips. “Continue to support my son as you’ve been doing all along—merely make that service official. Swear fealty to my son and I won’t kill your friends. They’ll have to swear to it as well, but they won’t die.”

  “I wish you’d flamin’ make up your mind!” I said bitterly. If Athelas had always been hard to understand, it was because he deliberately made himself opaque and spoke in riddles to hide himself. Lord Sero was almost impossible to understand because he changed his mind at what seemed like a breath of wind, and for no reason that I could tell. Within the last few months he had tried to recruit me, then kill me, tried to recruit me again, and then had gone back to wanting me dead.

  Now we were back to recruitment again?

  “You need to get a grip on yourself,” I advised him. “No one likes to work for a bloke who changes his mind every few days.”

  What I really needed to do was try and make my house keep eating Lord Sero’s house; if we kept talking for long enough, that would probably give me the time to urge things along. I shot a quick look at Zero and he met my eyes briefly.

  “He’s your dad,” I said to him, shrugging. “You talk to him.”

  That was as much of a hint as I could give him. If only I could give the house a bit of a hurry-up…

  “I already signed a contract with the Pet,” Zero said coldly. “I don’t need my father’s help to arrange my household.”

  Hazily, with the part of my brain that wasn’t involved in trying to move the house along, it tickled me to realise that Zero hadn’t said he had a contract with me, but that he’d signed one with me.

  “I could beg to differ, but instead, I’ll command. Take up the family mantle and do your duty by your canton!”

  “I gave that up years ago when I took the gold with the Enforcers,” Zero said.

  I risked pushing at the slow-as-molasses movement of my house, hoping to bring carpet down into the grass and make the room more living room than marble chamber.

  Lord Sero said sharply, “You cannot give up a birthright nor your responsibilities—and stop meddling with the flow of my manor, human!”

  “Didn’t reckon you’d notice, actually,” I said, since it was no good trying to pretend now that I hadn’t been doing anything. The carpet had grown a few inches from the bottom of the stairs and into the grass floor, so he probably would have seen it, even if he couldn’t feel it.

  “You may be the master of your own home, but you are not the master here,” h
e said. “And I think the time has come for you to be separated from my son, at least momentarily.”

  I didn’t understand what he’d said quickly enough; in the instant between the words and the realisation that Lord Sero too could influence his house, the floor reefed itself apart and stole Zero away from me.

  I managed to slow it down—to mitigate the distance Lord Sero created between us—but I was too late to the work, and Zero was on the far side of the hall with his father and the entire mob of behindkind between us before I could do more than stop myself from hitting the wall.

  “One of you, attend to the human,” commanded Lord Sero, turning his shoulder on me. “I wish to converse with my son. Hurt it if the need arises.”

  The behindkind in the yellow chequered suit strode forward lazily and started across the hall, smirking again.

  “Pet, get back to the house!” thundered Zero.

  If it hadn’t been the fae in the chequered suit walking toward me, I probably would have obeyed him. As it was, that fae sauntered the whole way toward me, his cologne wafting before him like a welcoming party, and I stayed where I was, the desire to laugh rising in me again.

  Instead of laughing, I waited until he was right in front of me, then I grabbed him by the ears with a gurgle of laughter, breathing in far too much scent, and kissed him. His arms folded around me straight away, tight and familiar, and when I let him go and he released me just a hesitation later, the face that looked down at me was JinYeong’s own face instead of a pale fae face with green eyes.

  “I missed you!” I said, my hands slipping away from his ears and to his cheeks instead, trying to pretend that there wasn’t a wet warmth in my eyes. “You better have a flamin’ good excuse for disappearing!”

  JinYeong gave the faintest of sighs and said, “I would verrry much like to kiss you again right now but I think there is no time.”

  “Good point,” I said, as Lord Sero’s voice cracked open the air with all the efficacy of a whip.

  “It’s the vampire! Take them, you fools!”

  “I really hope this isn’t your best suit,” I said to JinYeong, with a laugh caught in my throat. “Because it’s a flamin’ bad fit!”

  “I will not regret it if this one is ruined,” he said, his eyes dark and liquid and laughing. “I am already repaid.”

  We turned to face the forward surge of behindkind, JinYeong unbuttoning his suit jacket and me reaching through the livening froth of reality that was Between to do something I’d never done before.

  This time, instead of reaching for a real thing and drawing it through Between to make it into a weapon, I reached right for the weapon itself: the heirling sword, propped up in the built-in wardrobe in my parents’ room.

  It came out, too. I’m not sure I expected it to—I’m flaming sure no one else expected anything of the sort, either. Next to me, JinYeong gave an incredulous laugh; ahead of us, the tumble of behindkind wavered and stopped. Behind them, Lord Sero stared at me with eyes that could have been shards of glass.

  Welp. If I didn’t die in the fight, he definitely had plans for me that I wasn’t going to like. It was no use worrying about that now, though; JinYeong and I had to survive long enough to join Zero, who needed to survive long enough to get to us. I was pretty sure we’d be okay if we could just join together and fight.

  “Heads up!” I called to Zero. Then I threw the sword at him, hilt first, trusting in his long reach and the fact that the sword wanted to be with him to get it there in one piece. It fluttered in the air, yellow and fabricky, then cool, blue steel as the hilt met Zero’s ready hand.

  Behindkind drew back around him, wary and dark-eyed, and I saw the flash of satisfaction in Lord Sero’s eyes as they ran over his son.

  I sniffed and reached more leisurely for two nearby candlesticks that turned seamlessly into twin swords. Lord Sero was very much mistaken if he thought that Zero handling the sword meant that he was taking up the mantle of challenger. Zero handled the heirling sword just as if it were any other sword—a means of fighting his enemies. Maybe that’s why it had kept coming to him when he wasn’t even slightly interested in becoming king.

  I felt the brush of JinYeong’s arm against mine as he stepped forward to draw even with me, and looked across at him to find that his eyes, so bright and familiar in expression, were waiting to meet mine.

  Those eyes said, Shall we?

  “Might as well,” I said aloud. “Otherwise they’ll start thinking they can get away with crashing heirling trials all over the place. Oi.”

  His eyes met mine once again.

  “If we make it through this, I’ll date you. Only to see how it goes, though. Reckon we can get to Zero without getting killed?”

  He shrugged one shoulder, but his eyes were glowing. “There is half a chance. Hyeong will provide the other half, I think.”

  “Oh well, that’s better than I figured,” I said; and, creating just enough space between us that I wouldn’t accidentally cut him, I swept my swords up into a crossed defence to meet the first attack. A wiry, muscly behindkind who looked part-man and part-tree sliced down with such energy that I had to spin away from the blow instead of blocking it. JinYeong lunged past me and directly at the throat nearest, and that fae went tumbling backwards into the oncoming behindkind, gushing blood. I cut and thrust, ducked and parried, and tried to keep even with him, aware in the flurry of battle that if we became separated, our chances would drop considerably.

  I could no longer see Zero above the hulking figures that surrounded Lord Sero, but I saw the blue glow of the heirling sword in the twilight softness of the background of white marble, a beacon to show us the way to press toward. The constant, arterial spray of blood beside me that was JinYeong pushed forward, slowed, pushed forward. Watching me, waiting for me.

  I couldn’t see movement at the great entryway through the crowd, but there must have been a flurry there, because the sound of growling rose until it was a frenzied snarl above the noise of the fight: the lycanthropes, joining the fight. My heart jumped in hope, and for a few moments the fight seemed to turn in our favour, the pressing from the right and left reduced by the number of us fighting. Half of our attackers had turned to fight off the new attackers from the rear, and Zero was pushing in from the side. Now I could fight and press straight ahead instead of always having to watch my flank, and JinYeong seemed to surge forward at my side.

  I hadn’t expected Lord Sero to take part in the fight. He never had while I’d known him, and it never occurred to me until he was right there in front of me that he could possibly be so much annoyed by me, or just determined to see me actually dead, that he joined the fight himself.

  JinYeong saw; tried to get to me. I caught a fractured glimpse of him just as a rock duster swatted him sideways and into the wall, then a hand big enough to circle my throat completely was throttling me from behind and fairly shaking the swords from my hands.

  “Enough!” said Lord Sero, his voice sending ice through my veins and down into the ground. It froze the grass and sent frosty flowers springing up and spreading in a sweeping crackle of ice that slicked the ground and grew to form a wall of stylized white roses around the two of us and all of the nearest behindkind with him, opaque and beautiful.

  Through those roses, I saw Zero on one knee with Daniel beside him in wolf form and Morgana’s slightly misty figure all white and red, crouched over a prone body. I looked wildly around for JinYeong and saw him at last behind the wall of ice, several feet away from the others, a crumpled mass of yellow-and-grey suit. He dragged himself up, blood cascading down the left side of his face from a jagged tear that tore his forehead apart from the eyebrow and down toward his ear, and fell over again only a step closer to the icy wall.

  I struggled furiously to pull away, but the hand around my neck tightened remorselessly and lifted me into the air, then hurled me at the ground. I hit frozen grass with a sickening crack, though I couldn’t tell if the crack was from my head or my ribs
, which seemed to stab me in the side that stuck to the icy ground.

  I couldn’t breathe, but I wasn’t sure if it was because I was wounded or because everything hurt so much. Lord Sero grabbed me by the hoodie and dragged me to my feet, and by then I was breathing by pure instinct. Everything hurt, and when he shook me it seemed as if my entire body spasmed in pain.

  “Be still,” he snarled down at me, as if I could control the pain.

  “Maybe. Stop shaking. Me then,” I groaned.

  Distantly, I heard the roar of Zero’s voice, and his fists against the wall of ice.

  “Another movement and your pet dies,” Lord Sero said to his son, shaking me again. “You will give yourselves up.”

  There was only a moment of silence before I saw Zero throw away the heirling sword. Sarah did the same with her weapon, and the lycanthropes sat, whining.

  “Don’t you flamin’ give yourselves up!” I yelled, sick with pain and outrage. “You flamin’ keep fighting!”

  Lord Sero smiled down at me with savage amusement in his eyes. “It’s amazing how simple things become when one finds the right pressure point. You have a talent for becoming precious to people, it would seem—and now the people who are most precious to you will die.”

  “Let me go,” I said, through my teeth. “You’re gunna flamin’ regret it if you don’t!”

  “I very much doubt it,” he said. To the others behind the ice wall, he called, “I’m going to take apart this little pet of yours piece by piece until you swear fealty to my son. I may even take a few more pieces off after you do, so think hard about how long the Pet can endure and how many functioning parts a human can lose before life becomes unviable.”

  I couldn’t hear anything from behind the ice wall, but it was obvious they could hear us: a furious froth of movement boiled against the ice as soon as Lord Sero started talking, dark around the edges with pain and lack of breath. I saw a fractured moment of JinYeong’s snarling face and Morgana’s red eyes, and rolled my eyes back up to meet Lord Sero’s amused eyes.