Between Floors

by W. R. Gingell

  JinYeong said something swift and surprised.

  “Not possible, but it’s happened,” Zero said. “Someone has been teaching humans a few tricks. They’ve closed it, and they’ll be running.”

  “Hyeong, ottokaeyo?”

  “We’ll find another way in.”

  “It’s Between; can’t you just go there?”

  “There’s no entrance here. The widdershins hall was fashioned to give humans a way in, but it was also fashioned because there was no natural way in. We’ll find another way in; if we can’t, we’ll force our way in.”

  There was a sickness of failure to my stomach. “Yeah, but can we do it in time?”

  We couldn’t be too late. We couldn’t be; not now that we knew where Athelas was—not when we were so close to rescue. Athelas had undergone too much. I had died too many times. We had to get to him before they did.

  I had—hang on…

  “Quick!” I said. “Put me to sleep!”

  Zero didn’t say what? but he did say, “Why?”

  “’Cos that’s how I can get in!” I said excitedly. “I’m right, aren’t I? Dead cert, I’m right! Right here, right now, that’s the only way to get through into the floors Between. You said it was a different kind of Between—sorta Between awake and asleep instead of Between here and there. That’s our way in!”

  “No,” Zero said, frowning. “Athelas will kill you again. And if he kills you while you’re actually Between, instead of in a construct of it—”

  “Yeah, I figured,” I said soberly. “Reckon I won’t be a construct this time, either; I’ll actually go Between, just like the widdershins hall, right?”

  “I’ll go.”

  “Yeeeah,” I said doubtfully. I wasn’t any too happy about that, either, but as sure as I was that I had to go to sleep to pass through into the floor that held Athelas, I was equally sure that Zero wouldn’t be able to get through with me. “Pretty sure you can’t get in, though. It’s only humans allowed, and they’ve closed off the widdershins way. Sleep’ll get me in, but I’m pretty sure it’ll only be me. It’s all geared toward humans, right? Because it was humans torturing him and they didn’t want you two to be able to get to him if you found out.”

  “How am I to put you to sleep?” he demanded, but it was more of a stall than an actual question. He knew I was right—had probably known since he saw the humans fleeing toward the widdershins hall.

  “Dunno,” I said. “Hit me, or something.”

  “Ne!” said JinYeong cheerfully.

  “Don’t hit the Pet,” Zero said, in a low, warning rumble.

  “Ye, ye, hyeong.”

  “You’ve got a spell, haven’t you?”

  “Nothing that won’t interfere with the job you’re trying to do.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, JinYeong better bite me again, then.”

  JinYeong’s brow went up, and he exchanged a look with Zero. “Ne?”

  “It’ll put me to sleep, right?”

  “No,” said Zero. “You’ve had too much recently; your body is beginning to get used to it. It might make you sluggish for a while, but that’s all. You’ll have to ingest it.”

  “Flaming heck!” I said crossly. I didn’t have time to persuade Zero to hit me instead. “All right, hurry it up.”

  JinYeong shrugged, and there was an upturn to one corner of his lips that should have worried me. It didn’t, because the worst I was expecting was for him to lick his finger and shove it in my mouth again.

  He didn’t.

  He took a swift step toward me, grabbed me by the ears, and kissed me. There was a tickle on my upper lip that must have been his tongue, and I tasted something familiar.

  I didn’t even have time to glare at JinYeong; first I was being kissed, and then I was in another place completely. I should have expected that it would be the same room even Between; the same white shininess, the same grotesque display of torture that was Athelas suspended in moonlight, and yet it was still a horrible surprise to find myself there again. The only difference to the real room Between as opposed to the dream construct was that there was a door.

  Somehow, despite what Athelas had said, I’d kept hoping that when he came out of the constructed dream, he was just imprisoned or something. Zero must have known all along—and now I thought I might really understand that slow, defeated look he’d worn so lately.

  “Man, I hate this room!” I said bitterly.

  “What a coincidence,” rasped Athelas. His real voice was much rougher and softer than I expected. “I find that I don’t care for it myself.”

  I drew in a breath and said, “I’m going to let you down, all right?”

  “Are you really? How bold of you.”

  There was a noise outside, someone at the door, and my mind flew to the staff members who had escaped through the widdershins way. They were coming for Athelas, just like Zero had said.

  I ran for the door, sweeping bars of moonlight up and out ruthlessly as I ran. Athelas cried out, sending the tears to my eyes as I slammed those bars against the door, and then there was a silence that almost deafened me before I heard Athelas’ ragged gasps.

  “How appropriate,” he panted, and then he laughed. “Well done, Pet!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said huskily. “It was all I could think of.”

  “Not at all,” he said, with an affected politeness that didn’t come close to masking his pain. “It was well done.”

  “We’d better be quick,” I said, wiping away tears as I hurried back across the room. “Zero’s waiting, and I think he wants to catch them all before they get away.”

  It was time to free Athelas for real. After that…

  After that…

  Well, maybe it was just best to get on with it. I reached out a hand to the moonlight, and for a wonder, that hand didn’t shake. With a smooth, flowing touch across each one, so much easier in real life than it had been in the construct, I disintegrated each thread into sparkling dust.

  This time when Athelas settled to the floor there was real weight to him, blood spilling out in blue rivulets, and he closed his eyes. My foot edged closer, but I didn’t allow it to take a step forward. I couldn’t trust him not to be faking it. So I waited, tortuously, until he opened his eyes again and blinked at the ceiling, then over at me.

  “I really wasn’t sure whether to expect a corporeal form of you,” he said, almost as if he was talking to himself. “But here you are. So. Very. Interesting.”

  “It’s me,” I said. “I know you don’t believe me, but it’s actually me.”

  “You do it so convincingly!” he sighed. “And yet, I’m unsure! It seems so unlike Zero.”

  “Zero wasn’t really happy about it,” I said. Frankly, I added, “I’m not very happy about it myself, actually; if you kill me this time, I’m really dead. So please stop flamin’ killing me!”

  “I’m aware,” said Athelas, dragging himself up into a sitting position near the far wall. “It seems as though my lord trusts me somewhat more than I expected.”

  I didn’t help him—I didn’t dare. I didn’t know if he’d kill me, and there was no Zero to help me in here.

  He fell back against the wall, and I couldn’t help the way my hand twitched to help him. Maybe he saw it, because he laughed a spurt of blood.

  Wiping it away, he said, “Didn’t I tell you I was bound by moonlight and that hell barred the way? There’s only one way out of this room.”

  “Yeah?” I hung back where I was. I still didn’t trust him. “Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what it is?”

  “I’ve told you over and over,” he said. “And considering that you’re frequently accusing me of withholding information from you, I find your attitude appalling.”

  I dissolved into a sputtering mass of giggles. “Flaming fae! Always getting so flamin’ cut when someone can’t understand them through layers of lies and blarney!”

  “One wonders what human children are taught in school, thes
e days,” said Athelas. His eyes were getting lighter; probably a good sign for his health, but I wasn’t sure about my own.

  “Wouldn’t know,” I said. “Haven’t been to school for years.”

  “You’re claiming reasonable grounds for your ignorance?”

  I huffed a sigh. “You and Zero seriously need to work on saying stuff nicely.”

  “I say things nicely when there’s sufficient motivation,” Athelas said. “As for Zero—well, let us just say that sufficient motivation for him requires a great deal more than worrying about the feelings of one pet.”

  “Fine,” I said, giving up. “But I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ah,” sighed Athelas. “And to think I’d hoped that your humanity would cause you to take the hard road!”

  “What road?” I demanded. “And what’s it got to do with humanity?”

  “My pride won’t allow me to repeat it,” Athelas said. His words were harsh, but his eyes were amused as he said, “You’re a very stupid pet at times.”

  “What, you’ve finally decided I’m the pet, after all?”

  “No,” he said. There was still a laugh in his eyes, but I was pretty sure he was laughing at himself. “I’m no longer sure what to believe. But I’ve decided not to allow such a small thing to affect my actions.”

  “Dunno why you can’t trust me,” I muttered.

  “I do, Pet,” said Athelas; and for the final time, I saw there was a knife in his hand.

  “Ah heck,” I said. Where the heck did he get another knife from? We weren’t in the construct any longer! “Athelas—”

  “There’s no use protesting,” he said. “It really is the only way.”

  “You said you trusted me,” I said. After everything I’d gone through, he was just going to kill me. Again.

  And this time, it would stick: Even Zero couldn’t help me.

  “Isn’t it ridiculous? For all I know, you’re not the pet. But I’ll trust you.”

  “Then put the flamin’ knife down!”

  “That’s no way to break out of a prison of moonlight,” he said, softly chiding, and climbed to his feet.

  I didn’t know I was backing away until I felt the wall behind me, hard and cold, and very certain about being a wall.

  “There’s no way out like that, either,” said Athelas. He didn’t seem to take a step, but he somehow approached, slow and gliding.

  How could he even walk after being pinioned by millions of strands of moonlight? Maybe that’s why he seemed to glide instead.

  He put a hand on my shoulder, and if I’d thought about it, I probably would have expected to cry. I didn’t cry; there was an empty, aching sense of futility to me that dried me right out. Athelas, in the end, hadn’t been what I had always hoped for him to be, and there was no need to cry. All there was, looking up into his tired face, was an aching sense of how much of a shame it all was.

  Athelas’ fingers tightened in a sudden rictus, and he gasped. I didn’t understand until his head dropped an inch, his eyes falling from mine, and I saw the blue staining through his shirt and dripping onto the floor. There was a knife in his chest.

  Then I didn’t understand again, because the knife was angled upward, and the hand around the hilt wasn’t mine—or even Zero’s. It was Athelas’ own hand, fingers white and strained, then loosening as he fell against me.

  I tried to catch him, but he was so heavy and limp that even the wall behind couldn’t help, and we slid to the cold, bloody floor together. I pulled him across my legs, but I didn’t know whether to take out the knife or leave it in, and I’m not sure Athelas knew what to do either, because he looked down at the knife and then at me, and there was confusion in his face.

  “Tell me quickly,” he gasped. “Are you really Pet?”

  “Why are you worrying about that now?” I howled. “What the flaming heck are you doing, stabbing yourself?”

  There was the barest thread of a laugh from him, bloody and soft. “Ah, it is you. Don’t let go of me, will you?”

  “I’m not going to let you go!” I snapped, wiping tears away from my eyes. “Just shut up and concentrate on healing!”

  “That would defeat the purpose,” murmured Athelas.

  “What purpose?” I demanded, but his head dropped against the crook of my elbow, and there was no fanning of breath on my skin. “Athelas!”

  Nothing.

  His cheek was too cool against my skin, but that didn’t mean he was dead—it was too quick to mean he was dead.

  I felt for a pulse in his wrist, but there was nothing there, either.

  Didn’t mean he was dead, I thought, my chin crinkling. Maybe fae didn’t get a heartbeat to their wrists.

  I felt for a pulse at his neck instead, but there was nothing there either, and it occurred to me far too late that the only sort of training I’d had from Zero had involved learning how to kill things, not how to save them. I didn’t even know CPR.

  With a hand that shook, I pulled out the knife. It couldn’t do any worse, now.

  My voice shook, too, when I said, “Athelas? Athelas, you can’t die. You gotta hang on for a bit longer.”

  He didn’t reply, and there was something missing from the Athelas that the last of my temporary vampire abilities had been able to sense a few minutes ago. Something less of shadow, or maybe less of darkness.

  Athelas was really dead.

  Chapter Twelve

  The room was already a blur around me, so when it got blurrier, it took me a while to notice. When I did, I said, “What the heck?” and reflexively tightened my hold on Athelas even though there was nothing I could save him from now.

  It wasn’t until everything mizzled into grey uncertainty and began to reform in a white corridor that I knew what was happening.

  “What’s the use of doing that now?” I snarled, hugging Athelas to me. “It’s too late!”

  I might as well have spared my breath; the room was gone completely, and I sat with my back against the far end of a familiar hallway, Athelas sprawled across me in a slick of blue blood and the hallway stretching away in front of us.

  Still Between, but no longer trapped. What a waste.

  “Do you think, Pet,” said Athelas’ voice faintly, “that you could refrain both from abusing the world at large and holding me quite so tightly?”

  I yelled and dropped him into my lap.

  “And perhaps you could add to your goodness by not jolting me?”

  I looked down at him in shock. Although his head still lolled against my knee, blood wet and staining his shirt, his eyes were half open—and in those eyes there was a distinct gleam of amusement.

  “What the heck?” I said. “You’re alive? But you died! How are you alive? And how the heck are we out?”

  “Pet, I believe the correct response to an acquaintance being alive after being thought dead is congratulations, not complaints,” said Athelas, unconsciously echoing me.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said to Zero,” I said. “Congrats, but how the heck are you still alive?”

  “Ah, must I explain it again?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what it means when you talk about moonlight barring the way, so if—”

  “Hell, not moonlight. I really must speak to Zero about your education. Moonlight and incarceration, for your information, inevitably require self-sacrifice to break free.”

  “For someone who’s killed me five or six times, you’re pretty flaming matter-of-fact,” I said sourly.

  “Ah yes,” said Athelas. There was a shadow of grey to his face again, but this time I knew why it was there. “I would like to point out that if you hadn’t kept coming back to me, I wouldn’t have had to kill you so many times.”

  “Don’t even think about blaming it on me,” I said, but I knew that as much as it hadn’t been my fault, it also wasn’t really Athelas’ fault. He had just been, for the first time since I’d met him, wrong. Very, very wrong. And somehow that was possible, thou
gh it had never occurred to me that it was. “Can’t you—can’t you just say you’re sorry?”

  “With what possible motivation?”

  “That’s how it goes. You say sorry, I forgive you. Nice and easy—it doesn’t hurt.”

  “Pet,” said Athelas, and he sounded exasperated. “Don’t forgive me.”

  “You three can tell me to do a lot of stuff, but that’s not one of the things you’ve got any control over,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we find humans so repulsive—there’s always one hidden element to them that we can’t control.”

  “You could just apologise,” I told him, grinning. “It’s better than choking on your spleen because you were rescued by the pet, isn’t it?”

  Athelas struggled to sit up and gasped a little bit of blood again.

  “What are you doing? Lay back down! You’re not even healed yet!”

  But he fought until he was sitting; and, from that position, bowed to me. Head low and eyes down, for far longer than I was comfortable with.

  “Stop it, Athelas,” I said uncomfortably.

  “If you will forgive me against my will, you must accept such apologies against your will,” he said.

  “Is that what that is? Apologies?”

  “Something akin to it,” Athelas said. “The closest thing of which I’m capable. I tell you again, Pet—don’t forgive me. It won’t do either of us any good.”

  “What do you know?” I said, putting my nose in the air. “You’re just fae. You don’t know about human stuff.”

  Athelas laughed, helpless and disbelieving, and dropped back against the wall by my side. “Remember that I warned you, Pet. Why shouldn’t we continue as adversaries, side by side?”

  “I dunno how fae do it,” I said, “but in the human world adversaries don’t walk side by side.”

  “Do they not?”

  “Not if they’ve got brains. Someone who walks beside you isn’t an adversary; they’re an ally. Look, can you please just flamin’ lie down again until Zero gets here? You’re getting blood on my jeans.”

  “I need some time to recover,” said Athelas. “I do not need to be rescued.”