Between Floors

by W. R. Gingell

  “Zero doesn’t care about sleeping on the couch,” I complained.

  He was also comfortable to lean against, and he didn’t smell like a bottle of perfume. Is this what he and JinYeong had been arguing about yesterday, or today, or whatever it was now? Had Zero gone out to find a sign of Athelas next time I dreamed?

  “Hyeongun obseo.”

  “I know he’s not here, I wanted to know why.”

  JinYeong shrugged. “Caja, Petteu.”

  “Fine,” I said grumpily. “But if you snore, I’m gunna kick you.”

  I was pretty sure I was right about the reason for Zero’s absence; JinYeong’s failed mission to the first site would have to be repeated, and although the Sandman had seen JinYeong on another occasion, he hadn’t seen Zero.

  I just didn’t know why it was something they’d argued about—or why they hadn’t wanted me to listen to them. When my psychos didn’t let me hear what they were up to, it was a sure sign it was something I would want to know.

  “I sleep on the wall side,” I said, as I climbed the stairs. “You’ll have to sleep on the open side, and if you fall off, don’t blame me.”

  “Ne, ne, ne,” said JinYeong dismissively, passing me on his long legs and going ahead into my bedroom.

  I opened my mouth to tell him that he’d need me to open the secret door for him, but then I remembered he was the one who’d snuck in there the first time and closed my mouth again. I was definitely too tired for my own good.

  When I caught up with him, JinYeong was already hanging his suit jacket on one of my hangers and hooking the hanger on one of the wardrobe handles. I left him to remove his cufflinks and dropped down on one knee beside the bed.

  “Mwoh hae?” asked JinYeong, sauntering up behind me, rolling his cuffs.

  “I’m checking under the bed,” I said, looking at him over my shoulder.

  Both of JinYeong’s brows went up at the very edges, and I saw the faintest touch of a smile begin in the corners of his lips. Of course. He was scarier than anything I would find under the bed.

  I ducked and looked anyway, a tiny, darting glance that showed carpet with a short cityscape of shoes beneath the shadowed edge. For as long as I could remember, I had checked under the bed every night that I slept in it. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t, and I couldn’t remember starting to do it, either. It was just something that happened every night I slept in my bed, with more regularity than brushing my teeth.

  Maybe that was another layer to why I preferred to sleep on the couch.

  When I climbed to my feet again, the smile was stuck on JinYeong’s face, but the amusement was gone. Great. I’d probably offended him again, somehow. Flamin’ uptight little vampire.

  “Mwoh?” demanded JinYeong in outrage, and I hastily shut my mouth.

  Whoops. Must have said that aloud.

  “You can sleep on top of the covers,” I said to him, by way of tempering the outrage with another, worse one. “You won’t get cold, anyway.”

  He muttered the Korean equivalent of whatever, and stretched out on top of the covers closest to the edge of the bed, bare feet elegantly angled toward the window. I wanted to grumble too, but I was tired and the bed looked comfortable, so I just climbed over JinYeong, without being too careful about not elbowing him, and wriggled under the covers as far toward the wall as possible.

  I went to pull the pillow closer to me, but JinYeong said, “Hajima,” warningly, and since it was better to be without a pillow than share one with him, I shoved it further toward him instead.

  He adjusted it smugly enough to make me think he’d anticipated that, then said “Son,” autocratically, holding up his own hand.

  I muttered, but threaded my fingers through his and let our arms flop down between us. JinYeong’s hand was warmer than I expected from a technically dead person; warm, and softer than my own, which were roughened from hours of double knife practise with Zero. S’pose that happens when your teeth are your weapon.

  I huffed a pent breath into the air and tried not to wriggle. Unlike Zero, the weight I was pulling tonight wouldn’t be too heavy, so there was that. I just wished that JinYeong wasn’t so warm—or maybe that he wasn’t quite so close. A single bed wasn’t big enough for two people, even when they were as skinny as me and JinYeong.

  Some time between trying to resist the urge to scratch my nose and wondering if I’d have to get up and go to the toilet, I fell asleep.

  There was no sensation of falling, or movement; I was just there in the room. A slightly ghostly JinYeong silently muttered a word I was fairly sure was the Korean equivalent of “finally!” and looked around the room with bright eyes. I watched him go, wondering what it was he was doing, and Athelas’ voice sighed, “Ah, here we are again! I wondered how long it would take!”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said, and this time I didn’t look at the moonlight that was pretending to be Athelas.

  Instead, I turned around, and there he was. He was just standing there, but I didn’t trust that. I looked instinctively over my shoulder to see where JinYeong was, and he was already striding back across the room.

  “We’re gunna rescue you,” I said, before Athelas could say anything else. It was far too late for games and questions. I just needed one piece of information. “When you get out this time, try to keep hidden or something so they don’t find you again. We’ll be there as soon as we can. You just have to tell me where you are. Even if you don’t tell me anything else, just tell me that.”

  “Ah,” said Athelas. He was laughing again. “Alas, my current bodily state is much the same as my constructed state in here. I may escape this room, but not that one. Ah, I do wonder!”

  “What do you wonder?” I asked, a bit grimly. JinYeong stood beside me, and I looked up at him. He wasn’t Zero, but he was a bit of comfort. Even the expression on his face was sort of comforting; that half-snarl of distaste, or maybe just irritation. I went to stick my tongue out at him by way of cheering myself up but remembered in time that I wasn’t supposed to be looking at him at all.

  “A question for you, Pet—who is it you keep looking at?”

  Flaming heck.

  I exchanged another look with JinYeong, then sighed, and said, “JinYeong. He came with me tonight. You can’t see him because he’s only partway here—Zero said if they came too close the blokes who’ve got you would know.”

  “Who was it last time?”

  “Zero.”

  “I see,” said Athelas, gazing for a moment at the shiny white floor.

  I would have liked to have known what he saw—and if it was likely to end with him not killing me again.

  “I’m going to tell you something, Pet,” he said.

  “You gunna tell me where you are? ’Cos that’s all I want to know.”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” I said gloomily. “Then it’s probably what weapon you’ve got this time.”

  “It’s related,” he said. “Do you know how it is that I manage to have a new weapon every time you come in?”

  “Something about constructs, probably.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “Hang on—you’ve been making the weapons, haven’t you?”

  “Indeed. I waited for you to come to the conclusion yourself, but apparently I overestimated your intelligence.”

  “Nothing new there,” I said. “That mean I can make weapons, too?”

  “Indeed.”

  I looked suspiciously at him. “Why are you telling me that?”

  “Arm yourself, Pet,” he said.

  “I don’t want to,” I said, but he was already drawing steel from nowhere, and as he did it, I could see how to do it, too.

  I ran for the other side of the room, snatching two pieces of moonlight as I went, and in my hands they became two familiar knives, long, strong and thin. I turned in time to meet a lunge from a single-edged sword, slightly curved and slender, and just barely deflected it. Distantly, in the background,
I saw JinYeong snarling something at me—advice, probably, or his disgust at how badly I was fighting—but I didn’t have time to parse it out.

  Athelas pressed me back and back across the room with slash and lunge, never quite touching skin but never far away, and I stumbled through the moonlight, sending sparkles of dust everywhere.

  It distracted Athelas, but only for a moment. I had one gasping second to breathe before he lunged again. I slashed down; a clumsy parry that should have used both knives but was too lopsided and put me off balance, unnervingly close to Athelas in his lunge. “Stop trying to kill me!”

  “Then kill me,” he said in my ear, and pushed me away.

  The push steadied me, and I put my guard back up, but it shook. “Can’t,” I said.

  “Of course you can. It’s hardly your first kill, now is it?”

  “Haven’t killed anyone before,” I said, panting as I slashed down on another lunge. “Didn’t mean that. Haven’t got the skill.”

  I didn’t have the breath, either.

  A moment of swift, stinging back-and-forth later, I lost one of my knives. Athelas tossed away his single sword and stepped close, tempting me to lunge with my other knife, but my hand dropped to my side. While he was armed, I would defend myself, but I couldn’t attack him.

  He looked at me; a long, expectant look, and I sighed.

  “I’m not going to attack you,” I said, dropping my own knife.

  “Unwise of you,” he said, and there was a gleam of silver in his right hand again.

  I’d almost expected it; at any rate, the knife wasn’t a surprise.

  “Please,” I said. There was the faintest of warmths behind me; the faintest of movements, as if I could really feel JinYeong at my back. “It’s me, Pet.”

  “I know,” he said.

  I felt a shock of hope. Was he not going to kill me?

  “They’ve got me between floors at the police station,” he said softly, and with a single stab through the heart, he killed me. I felt him catch me as I fell, scooping me beneath the arms to fall against his chest, then I was awake.

  I felt warmth before anything else, and a voice buzzing up near my temple about once twelve is twelve, twice twelve is twenty-four, three twelves are thirty-six in a continuous murmur. It was JinYeong’s voice, but it had pushed so far Between that I understood it without having to think about it—without being distracted by the fact that the Korean he was actually speaking was longer.

  Was JinYeong reciting the twelve times table to me?

  “…ten twelves are one hundred and twenty...”

  Yep. He was.

  The arms around me weren’t Athelas’, they were JinYeong’s; and that was weird.

  “Why are you telling me the times tables?” I asked, my voice muffled against his neck. I was pretty sure Zero wouldn’t approve of me being close enough to bite JinYeong’s neck while I still had vampire spit in my system, but I was warm and alive, and the multiplication tables were somehow soothing. A mathematical kind of security blanket.

  “Sleep,” said JinYeong, instead of answering me, the words making English shapes with Between edges. “No biting.”

  “Wasn’t gunna,” I mumbled, and then, somehow, I did fall back to sleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  I woke up slowly, warm and scented and not dead.

  Hang on. Scented?

  Why could I smell JinYeong in my room?

  “What the—?” I muttered, and opened my eyes. Someone’s jawline was there where I should have been able to see my far wall, the colour of milk coffee but not as welcome. There was a warmth around my left hand, too, and somehow or other I had rolled onto my side during the night with my far arm resting on JinYeong’s chest.

  Athelas’ mocking voice said in my head “…always clinging,” and I scrambled to sit up, surprising a huff of air from JinYeong when I accidentally elbowed him in the stomach.

  “Wae?” he groaned.

  I was off-balance enough to say, “Sorry,” automatically, but when I pushed my hair away from my face, I caught the distinct scent of JinYeong’s cologne in my t-shirt sleeve.

  Flaming fantastic. Now I smelled like JinYeong.

  “Next time, take a shower before you sleep in my bed!” I complained. “Everything flaming smells like you!”

  JinYeong smiled lazily at the ceiling. “Ne,” he said. I would have said he sounded smug rather than apologetic, but that’s pretty normal for him.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall. Six thirty? I’d slept that long? I didn’t feel as tired, either. That was nice. It also meant that my brain was working a bit better than it had been.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Where’s Zero? Shouldn’t he be back?”

  “Ah,” said JinYeong, sitting up in one swift, sharp movement. Between whispered a meaning that said surprisedly, “Where did the time go? I slept.”

  “Thought you couldn’t sleep,” I said, shoving my feet into my sneakers. “C’mmon, let’s go get Zero.”

  I’d only just got my shoes on when I felt the house shift a little bit to let Zero back in. I went dashing down the stairs to meet him, JinYeong striding after me, and caught him just inside the door.

  “He said they’ve got him between floors at the station,” I said to Zero, gasping a bit.

  For the first time in the last couple days, I saw his shoulders square up. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Dunno why he told me—he still killed me—but I’m certain he was telling the truth.”

  “Why didn’t you come and tell me? We could have been there by now.”

  This time the question was aimed at JinYeong, who surprised me by shrugging one shoulder, his eyes liquid and dangerous, and tossing a reply at Zero which I couldn’t understand via either of my usual methods. Judging by the tone, it was rude.

  And this time, instead of treating JinYeong like a child, Zero’s ice shattered for the briefest moment. In a snarl, he said, “We do not have time for your childishness! I’m aware that you and Athelas have no love for each other, but you of all people should know how he’s been kept for the last week!”

  “Sorry,” I said, and my voice cracked. We didn’t have time for them to fight; there was no reason for them to fight. Not now that we knew where Athelas was.

  I tugged at Zero’s sleeve. “It was my fault; I fell asleep again. But Zero, if he’s at the police station, why can’t he get out? It’s just Between, isn’t it?”

  Zero took in a deep breath through his nose, and his face was clear and smooth again.

  “Athelas will still be bound,” he said. “Free from the construct, but not the moonlight. They would be fools to allow him to wander Between on something so easy as an open widdershins way. JinYeong—”

  “Chunbihaettda,” JinYeong said, grinning wide and deadly, and entirely without humour. “Petteu?”

  “Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  They didn’t even stop to tell me I wasn’t coming—we went directly Between, with a flash of yellow that Zero took loose in his hand instead of over his back. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him wield that particular sword, but I didn’t often see him take it out of the house, and I wondered why he hadn’t brought his usual weapon instead.

  Between, I could see it flicker from its chosen form of a huge yellow umbrella to its real form of a massive sword. I looked around us nervously, somehow worried that it wasn’t okay for him to be doing that here, and saw JinYeong glancing warily around us, too.

  Well, that was flamin’ comforting.

  Zero strode ahead of us without pause; a fierce, unstoppable force that glowed in the darkness of Between and might have worn a crown if a crown was made of pure light. I was thankful for him, because the part of Between we streaked through was dark and wild, and I saw writhing things that coiled back away at the sight of him and his crown.

  Some of those things resolved themselves into chains between bollards in a parking lot, and that was even more of a relief, because
we must be nearly out of the Between part of the journey—for now.

  We came out in the Maccas parking lot, just on the far side of the bollards and their chains, but Zero didn’t stop to wait for us. He strode on, his crown gone but his walk still purposeful and murderous, and in the human world he swung a yellow umbrella with each stride.

  I ran to keep up, JinYeong at my side, and the front entrance of the police station opened of its own accord without a touch of Between. I didn’t know if that was Zero using magic, or if someone inside had seen us coming, but it spooked me. It was too easy to forget that my psychos had a range of different skills that weren’t necessarily connected with Between, and were even less explainable.

  No one stopped us as we swiftly passed through the hall, nor when we took the stairs to the seventh floor. I saw our shadows ripple across the floor, but there was no sound, and that was chilling, too.

  Not even the door at the entrance to Upper Management stopped Zero. It exploded inward at one look from Zero’s icy eyes, and there they were; human heads poking up out of cubicles with their eyes wide.

  I don’t know if they saw the sword or Zero first. Someone yelled, “Evacuate!” and they bolted en masse down the hallway toward the widdershins way. JinYeong sprang forward with a delighted chuckle that was frightening in its joy, and Zero swept after them, the umbrella flickering just once more before it swung into being as a sword, finally and utterly.

  I dashed after them, forgotten and trailing, and I was only a few steps behind them when Zero roared, “Quickly, JinYeong!”

  JinYeong said something sharp and hasty that sounded bad, and I heard him say, “Ah! Too late!”

  I caught up and saw in disbelief that they were right; the humans had vanished down the widdershins hallway. Properly disappeared, too; not just retreating with the sound of scuffle and fear, but entirely vanished without sight or sound. When I followed Zero and JinYeong further down the hallway, it was just a hallway that led right back to the main room.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. “Why is it a normal hallway? How are we supposed to get to Athelas like this?”

  “They’ve closed it,” said Zero grimly.