Between Jobs (The City Between Book 1)

by W. R. Gingell

  Was he following me?

  Yeah, paranoid, I know; but I was still feeling jumpy after my encounter with Zero. Anyway, chances are the more paranoid you are, the less likely you are to be dead, so there’s that.

  I took the long way home, through back gardens and side alleys, just to be sure. By the time I got home I wasn’t only wet and smelly; I was sweaty, smelly, and covered with caterpillars. I wasn’t supposed to have a shower for another day yet, but flies don’t much care about shower day—they don’t much care about making sure I don’t use too much water to stay hidden, either.

  I was probably still paranoid, but I checked out my window when I went up to get clothes. And what do you know, the old bearded bloke was now hanging around the public rubbish bins beside the house across the road!

  A sharp stab of panic made me drop my clothes on the floor. How the heck did he find me? How did he know where I live? He was just crouching there, grinning to himself as he picked out coloured stones from the ones on the footpath, and occasionally looking up at my window.

  Hang on. I picked up my clothes very slowly, a frown pinching between my brows. I knew this old bearded bloke, didn’t I? Maybe without his beard? Maybe not.

  I sat on my bed and peered through the shutter slats at him.

  I did. I knew him. I used to see him when we first came to live in this house. He used to sit near the garbage cans like that, or hang out in the vacant lots further up the streets, where he’d pop up and grin at me every now and then. I hadn’t seen him often at first; just once or twice a month. At first he’d only talk to himself and ignore me, but one day I saw him rummaging for food in someone’s rubbish bins and gave him my lunch.

  After that, I would see him once or twice a week, and the days I saw him were always good days, like he was a lucky charm. If I saw the holey shirt or the gappy grin on any particular day, I could always be sure of seeing something unexpected, or finding a new, hidden place somewhere around Hobart to enjoy.

  And him—well, so long as he could pinch my drink from me, he was happy. It didn’t matter if I was doing my schoolwork outside with a cup of water, or if it was my drink bottle when I went out riding, he always stole it. I don’t know if he even drank what he stole from me, I think it was more the joy of pinching it that made him do it. He always waited until I was looking away, grabbed it, and ran, giggling.

  Maybe it was his way of evening out the food he was given; stealing the drink to go with it. He always returned the glasses, anyway, so it didn’t matter.

  I let out a puff of relieved air. At least I knew he hadn’t followed me home—not exactly. He already knew where I lived. Funny that I hadn’t seen him for the last four years. Funny that I hadn’t remembered him, too; now that I did, I remembered being fond of him.

  Maybe the old bloke had lost his mojo: there was nothing good that followed a sight of him today. I went for my shower, feeling less creeped out, but I’d only pulled a fresh t-shirt over my head when I heard the front door open.

  I froze. I hadn’t even used the fan in the bathroom; there was fog all over the mirror and the air still felt heavy and moist. Worst of all, I couldn’t get out of the bathroom and to my bedroom without being seen by anyone passing through the kitchen.

  What the heck? No one ever came through the house, not even the agent; nobody wanted to rent a house that had been the scene of a double homicide. I was still surprised they hadn’t turned off the power and water ages ago.

  I edged the bathroom window open a crack, and softly swung the door inward to let out as much of the damp air as possible. I would have tried to slip out and leave by the back door, through the laundry, but by then they were already halfway across the kitchen and making their way toward the laundry and me.

  And when I say they, maybe you already know who I mean. Yep. It was those three weirdoes. The sound of their conversation carried ahead of them, JinYeong’s deep, smooth voice an undercurrent to Zero’s crisp tones.

  “It’s no use whining that you got there first,” Zero’s voice said.

  I climbed into the laundry basket and shut the lid with the hasty and fervent hope that none of them would need to use the toilet while they were in the house.

  Do vampires need to use the loo?

  Funny, though. I couldn’t hear the voice of the agent; just Zero again, saying, “I’ve paid the deposit and it’s in my name.”

  Wait, what? What deposit? Did he mean bond? I hadn’t heard them breaking in, and the agent wasn’t with them—they couldn’t have rented the place! Could they? What about all the rumours? Maybe vampires weren’t afraid of supposed ghosts who haunted the house where a double murder had taken place, or of being across the road from a house where even stranger things than the occasional ghost sighting were said to happen.

  JinYeong spat something dismissive in Korean, and Athelas responded, “Yes, but his skills were enough to break through the vampiric wiles you were winding around the real estate agent. The more interesting question is why you didn’t have any trouble getting into the house now that Zero owns it, so to speak.”

  “I’d like to know that, too,” said Zero. I saw him through the gaps in the wicker, wandering past the bathroom doorway to open the linen cupboard. What was he looking for? He didn’t strike me as the sort to be checking for mould. “Once the deposit is paid, a house is usually safe enough from vampires.”

  “It could be the combination of Fae ownership working with the chanciness of only a deposit,” suggested Athelas. “Or perhaps this house’s original owners are distinctly more powerful in death than they were in life.”

  What, they weren’t all vampires? Some of them were Fae? I mean, it didn’t really matter; either they were nutty or I was, and I wouldn’t have put my money either way just yet. Not after seeing them arrive, and meeting Zero this morning.

  JinYeong spoke in some sort of reply, and to my dismay I heard someone take another step toward the bathroom. There was a sick, sudden moment where I was sure I was about to be caught, laundry basket or no laundry basket; then Athelas peered around the doorjamb. Through the wicker I saw a quiet, composed face with grey eyes that smiled as much as the faint lines beside them. Close up, he only looked about forty, but somehow he seemed much older. What was he supposed to be, then? Fae or vampire, or something else?

  I saw his eyes roam the room, glancing across the basket where I hid, and his nose wrinkled.

  “A little damp,” he said, and closed the door. Through the door, I heard his voice say, “I’ll air it out tomorrow.”

  Did that mean they were moving in tomorrow? Maybe I wouldn’t have to stay here all night.

  “You’re not staying here!” But Zero’s voice sounded as uncertain as it did annoyed, and I wasn’t surprised when Athelas pleasantly replied: “I wouldn’t think of leaving you alone.”

  “Thanks.”

  So Fae, or vampires, or whatever, could be sarcastic, too? If you assumed that every one of them wasn’t crackers and actually was what he said he was, that is. They said they were vampires—well, the Korean one was—but I had yet to see them do anything vampirish or fae-like. I was hazy on what would count as fae behaviour, but I was pretty sure I’d know it when I saw it.

  Actually, if I didn’t count the fierce, unreasoning desire to run for it that I’d had the first time I saw Zero face to face, the weirdest thing I’d seen any of them do was when he almost strangled me. And that was really more of a serial killer type of thing than what I’d strictly consider to be a fae thing.

  I was almost convinced—almost—that I’d imagined the weirdness of their arrival.

  None of them visited the toilet that night. It didn’t have to mean they weren’t human, but I heard a percolator going all evening and smelled the coffee, and if they were drinking that much coffee, it should have been going somewhere.

  Wherever it was going, it wasn’t the toilet. I wasn’t able to get out of my basket until they all went out briefly well after dark, because they stayed
in the living room upstairs, outside my bedroom.

  By then, both my legs had gone to sleep and I had to tip the basket over so that I could drag myself out and massage the feeling back into them. I made a bumbling dash for the stairs, muttering, and suddenly heard a voice outside the front door.

  I tumbled into my room, heart pounding, and pulled the bookcase door shut securely behind me. Only then did I stop to breathe, and to realise that there was someone knocking at the door downstairs.

  Luckily for me, it wasn’t them; it was the police on the lawn. Well, part of the police force, anyway—it was the islander detective I’d seen yesterday. He was still in civvies, but there was a leather pouch in one hand; probably his badge. He stood back from the patio, looking up at the windows now that no one was answering his knock, but I only caught a brief glance of him before he ducked back out of my sight and onto the patio again. I heard knocking again, then a silence of nearly two minutes before the front door opened and closed.

  “Hey!” I said. “You’re a cop! You can’t do that!”

  But he was definitely in the house. I heard him moving around through the entry hall below, and then the kitchen. He wasn’t moving very fast, but I had the suspicion he was looking through the things the other men had brought into the house. There wasn’t much, so it didn’t take long; but I heard rapping on the walls, and that was a bit of a worry—what if he decided to rap on the walls up here? And if he was the type to rap on walls, he was probably the type to pace a room for size, too.

  If I was lucky, the other three weirdos would come home before he got too interested in what was upstairs. Stupid of them all to go out at once if they were the sort of people who attracted covert police searches. Not to mention bad timing. They’d only been gone a couple of minutes before the cop arrived.

  I was lucky.

  The front door downstairs opened and closed with a bang just after the detective got to the second floor with me. I heard the detective swear and grinned a bit. Serve him right. See how he felt, having to scarper right quick through the house because someone was going to be coming up the stairs any minute. I don’t know where he went—maybe through one of the windows—but there had been silence in the next room for a couple of minutes before I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  I rolled over eagerly on my bed before I knew what I was doing, surprising myself at my zest to hear their voices.

  Oh well. I wasn’t used to having people in the house. I was bound to be curious about them.

  “Pick up your feet!” said Zero’s voice impatiently. “If he hasn’t gotten away by now, it’s a useless cause and we’ll have to wipe his memory.”

  “That would be a waste when we’ve left the house empty for him to discover a nest of normality,” remarked Athelas. “However, I agree; he’s a reasonably astute detective, for a human. No doubt he’s gone out the window.”

  There was a brief silence where I could imagine JinYeong shrugging, and there were no more obvious footsteps on the stairs. Had they really left the house just so the detective could search it?

  I grinned. Sneaky psychos.

  Wait a minute, though—why was the detective interested in my three psychos? So interested, in fact, that he took the risk of breaking and entering to satisfy his interest? They were interesting to me because they were in my house, but there shouldn’t be a reason for them to interest the local police.

  Or even one detective. For a cop around a murder scene, he wasn’t very interested in the murder that had happened over the road. He was definitely interested in my three psychos, and there was no reason for that. Unless—unless—did he know about them being vampire and fae?

  I knew the answer to that one straight away. Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t have broken into their hou—my house—if he knew that. Not after the way I’d seen the other cops behave around them. Not after the way I’d felt being face to face with Zero.

  Oh. And that was another interesting thing. Since the three psychos had come into my house today, I hadn’t felt that same, instinctive, unreasoning fear I’d felt at first with Zero. I hadn’t felt the urge to give myself up again, either. Was I getting used to them in so short a time, or was it because I had the wall as a buffer between us?

  Maybe it was because no one was actively trying to choke me. Fear was probably a decent response in that situation—which led me right back to the lingering question of whether I’d imagined the whole aura around the three of them when they arrived.

  I rolled back over and huffed a breath at the dark ceiling of my bedroom. Whatever they were, all I had to do was keep out of sight until they finished their investigation, or whatever it was they were doing. It wasn’t like I kept stuff in the fridge, after all; I always ate at the café during work. Hopefully once they solved their murder, they would leave me and my house in peace. I had a brief flash of memory of that bloody corpse outside my window and shuddered. Maybe three psychos were what you needed to investigate a murder like that.

  I fell asleep smiling stupidly at the sound of JinYeong’s voice murmuring below, and the first thing I heard when I woke the next morning was the same voice.

  Oh yeah. I hadn’t thought about the fact I’d have to sneak out to get to work. Had JinYeong been talking all night? He was making a long, caramel-y complaint that flowed easily through the wall and reminded me that I would have to be very careful about moving around in my room from now on. I may not be exactly sure that they were who they said they were, but I was pretty flamin’ sure I didn’t want them to find me here. How long were they going to be renting, anyway?

  “I’m not going to be renting here forever,” said Zero, as if in answer to my thoughts. I grinned and got out of bed to hear a bit better; but JinYeong, who had been interrupted, made another, more reproachful plaint. Zero interrupted that without compunction, too. “Don’t complain to me about the way the house muffles scents; you’re the one who pushed yourself into my investigation. If you want to know why it does what it does, figure it out yourself. This house is in the perfect spot; if everything goes according to pattern, there are still another four murders to take place here.”

  I stopped grinning.

  There’s what? Four more murders?

  “There are often,” said Athelas’ voice, “Between murders to go along with the human ones. Do you think a human house with significant links to Behind is really the best place to stay?”

  “We can get into Between or Behind from here,” said Zero. “It’s ideal for us. It’s also the most susceptible human house I’ve ever been in; I’m surprised they didn’t have things coming through from Between every day.”

  JinYeong, now alert instead of plaintive, spoke.

  “That’s true,” Athelas agreed. “The reports I read mentioned that strange things were always happening in the house across the street. Perhaps it has a susceptibility, too.”

  “Now that’s something to think about,” said Zero, and all sound from the next room ceased completely.

  I sat on my beanbag for a long time after the talking stopped, straining to hear. Why had they stopped talking? Did they know I was there? Had they heard me? Were they waiting for me to come out?

  But it hadn’t sounded like they stopped talking—it had sounded like a window suddenly shut and cut off every noise from the other room. Before that, I had heard the measured tread of someone—Zero, probably—walking up and down the room as he thought aloud, and the soft, thoughtful tap of something against a leather armrest—maybe Athelas tapping a finger against the leather. What sort of thing could make every sound cease so suddenly? Something vampire, or something fae?

  Whatever it was, it made the whole house feel empty. It was only when I glanced out the window that I saw the flash of movement from the house across the road.

  Hang on. Were they in the house across the road? But that was stupid—how could they be in the house across the road? They hadn’t had time to get over there, even if they ran the whole way. Besides, I hadn’t heard
the front door close, and I should have. It was right below my room.

  Was it the same vampire or fae thing that had made the house so suddenly quiet and empty earlier, or—

  Nope. Wasn’t going to think about that until I’d had some coffee. Maybe it would make sense after that. Might as well not waste the time since they were out of the house.

  I pushed open my bookcase door and crept into the living room before I could think too much about what I was doing. They were definitely gone, which didn’t surprise me; but it didn’t leave me feeling any more comfortable, either. It was ridiculous to think they’d got across the road in three seconds flat, but they must have, because they weren’t in the kitchen or any of the bedrooms.

  Neither was my coffee.

  “Some mongrel’s pinched me coffee!” I said aloud in wrathful surprise to the empty kitchen. Coffee was the only thing I kept in the house outside of my bedroom; the only thing worth the risk of detection. I kept it in one of the cupboards above the range-hood, right at the back where it could have been left behind by the previous occupants, if anyone wondered about it.

  If anyone had ever come through the house to wonder about it.

  My little bag wasn’t in any of the other cupboards, either, and it wasn’t until I peeped carefully out the front door that I saw a familiar, metallic edge of packaging sticking out between the lid and the top of the garbage can. It was split at the side; no coffee left in there now.

  I shut the door with an inarticulate growl of rage, glaring around the kitchen. And there—my eyes fell on a deep red cylinder sitting by itself on the island benchtop. Coffee, it said on the side, in silver letters. Drawn to it like a moth to the flame, I took off the lid and inhaled, then stopped to appreciate the aroma.

  Nice. Someone liked good coffee.

  I hesitated before using it; I’m mostly moral. But they were in my house, and they had thrown away my coffee, so it seemed fair to drink theirs. Who throws away perfectly good coffee just because its cheap? They even had their own cheap tin of instant coffee on the bench beside the percolator.