Why was there always a battle going on when they left the house together?
And why did it look like they were losing?
“To the door!” roared Zero.
A massive surge of what looked like oily tentacles rose from the floor around him—or maybe I was seeing things and the battle simply coiled more tightly around him. Either way, it was suddenly a lot harder to see him. I heard Zero roar again, and there were no words to it this time.
I couldn’t see his huge silhouette, either. JinYeong’s snarl rose in the air again, and Athelas panted, “My lord!”
Someone else roared, too; and that must have been me, because my mouth was open and my throat was already raw.
For one frozen second, everyone in that bloody melee seemed to stop and look at me. It occurred to me that since I was howling, I might as well run, too; so I ran, howling, into the mob, with the sword on my shoulder and no strength to lift it from there.
Four armed men scattered before me, yelling in fear. Ridiculous.
But the others, the ones that didn’t look like they had a real body, scattered as well. So I ran, and yelled myself hoarse, gathering a shadow in dark, glistening blood by my right, and another in sparkling silver at my left.
Someone’s hand on my forehead stopped my flight with a jerk, the sword bouncing from my shoulder to rest on dark, blood-stained leather.
“Good pet,” said Zero, and his other hand easily removed the sword from my hands. “Behind me.”
I ducked the blade and his elbow, gripping the familiar leather strap of his jacket; and the shadows that had until then flanked me, flanked Zero instead.
There was a brief moment of utter quiet on my side of that Behindkind wall of fae and vampire.
“Oh, much better!” sighed Athelas, and the world went blood red.
I remember having such a sore arm. I remember the sticky, itchy feeling of blood between my fingers, and the searing pain of something cutting my arm.
Athelas’ houndstooth flickered in my peripheral, and where it flickered there was sudden quiet. In front of me, leather creaked and grew red, though I never saw the sword; and sometimes I saw half of JinYeong’s face, the other half tarred in blood and unrecognisable.
But my arm ached so much, torn nearly out of its socket, and there was so much noise and disturbance that when I realised my arm was flopping against my side, I was grateful to hobble away and find a quiet corner.
There were no quiet corners. There was a sudden lessening of noise, but it didn’t bring any kind of rest with it; just a bloody expense of fallen bodies that wouldn’t stop groaning and keening; bodies that should have been dead but wouldn’t stop moving long enough to die.
I heard myself sob, and looked down at the hand that should have been holding onto Zero’s leather strap.
It was there, and the leather strap was there, dangling its buckle, but Zero wasn’t.
I stared at the torn piece of leather for far too long, trying to understand what it meant, but the only thought that seemed to make sense was that I had been a good pet. I had done as I was told, and they had still left me behind.
A sob caught in my throat again. What was I supposed to do?
“Can’t stay here, anyway,” I said aloud, to try and drown out the groaning of the dying Behindkind around me. I sniffed. “Flamin’ goblins’ll try to stab me with a needle.”
More than that, there was something about the slickness and the smell of it all that made my stomach roil, my mind going back to a night when I had woken unexpectedly. A night when the floor had glistened and the air had been heavy with a scent I didn’t recognise.
A night when my parents—
“Can’t stay here!” I said again, this time louder. I didn’t remember what happened on the night that my parents were murdered. I’d never remembered.
And now my eyes were watering. I’d never get out of here if I couldn’t see properly.
I wiped my eyes and said in a snubby sort of voice, “If they’re not coming after me, I’m gunna get out by myself.”
I didn’t stop to look where I was going because there was nowhere to go that made sense. The long, windowed doors were dark and broken on my way out, so I must have gone the right way there, but there was still no sign of the courtyard or cave when I stood on the wooden platform.
Instead, there was forest. Light, beautiful forest with enough space between the trees to make mysterious shadows and send a cool, scented breeze wafting up toward me.
I looked out at it in despair. The courtyard had vanished as soon as my foot left the marble step; now even that step was no longer visible, a wealth of green, plump grass springing up at the edge of the wooden platform instead.
It wasn’t a case of the forest pretending to be something it wasn’t—it was definitely forest and grass cover. Just like the human world, where everything was absolutely human and real, and utterly unlike the Between area where things could be one thing or another, depending on how they were feeling or how I saw them.
“Ah heck,” I said.
I wiped my bloody hands on my jeans—the stains already would never come out, so why not?—and found that the blood had already dried on them. The strap of leather was stiff with it as well, the stitches dark in blood.
I was probably lucky I hadn’t lost a finger or an ear.
“Ah heck,” I said again, and hastily felt for my ears and nose. They were still there, and still in one piece, but they were sticky. There was a pretty big cut on my arm that wouldn’t stop bleeding, too.
I was going to have to shower like JinYeong did; fully clothed, blood flowing away down the drain, until I could peel the clothes from my body and the caked blood from my face.
That was if I ever got back home. I could almost hear Athelas’ calm voice warning against getting caught Behind, and Zero’s blunt assurance that they wouldn’t come back for me if I let go of him.
“Didn’t let go,” I said, and sniffed. My fist still ached around the leather strap.
I’m not sure how long I stood staring at the waving grass that edged the wooden platform; or how long it took me to realise that the waving of the grass wasn’t from the wind.
“Weird,” I muttered. If it wasn’t wind, what was it?
I crouched at the edge of the greenery, watching the swell of something through the grass, and came to the conclusion, very slowly, that the grass wasn’t moving either. It was a movement of something else that I couldn’t see; something above the grass that could have been a heat shimmer but wasn’t.
I stared at that for a long time, too. I mean, it could have been a sign that there was something else there, some way back into Between—and from there into the human world—but it could also have been something bad about to happen.
It was quieter out on the platform, and easier to ignore the noises from inside the waystation. Maybe I would have stayed there for much longer, but the same comparative quiet also meant that when the sound of someone calling through the forest threaded between the trees, I could distinctly hear that, too.
There were more of them coming.
For the third time, I said, “Ah heck.”
I looked once more at the swaying grass that wasn’t really swaying, closed my eyes, and stepped down from the wooden platform with the sick hope that I would feel cool, hard marble beneath my foot and not the softness of grass.
It was further down than I expected. I jerked forward, eyes flying open, and stumbled into a confusion of flagstone and grass that resolved when I hit the flagstones, hard.
I might have rolled, but it felt more like I collapsed like a sack of rocks.
Quite clearly, I heard someone say, “I thought it’d never step off! Think it’ll be all right?”
I looked wildly over my aching shoulder, but the wooden platform behind me was empty.
“The goblins’ll get it,” said another voice, dispassionately. Obviously it didn’t know there was no one there, and that it couldn’t be speaking. “I do
n’t mind, so long as it’s Between and we don’t have to explain it to the Order Force when they get here. They’re tough on displaced humans at Behind waystations. Did you get rid of the other one?”
“It ran for it when the ambush failed,” said the first voice. “We’ll have to catch it again later; I don’t know how it keeps getting away. Wait—doesn’t it look like that one can hear us?”
“Don’t be stupid,” the second voice said. “I had to open Between for it. There’s no way it can hear us. Not sure why they brought it with them.”
“Yeah? Well how did it get the sword, then?” demanded the first voice belligerently. “There’s going to be a price to pay for that. We were told to keep it safe. They said he’d never find it here, and now they’ll think we gave it to him.”
I turned my eyes back toward the ground very carefully, and pushed myself up from the flagstones, the knuckles on my right fist seeping blood that was my own instead of someone else’s. Zero and Athelas had said not to bleed here, but how could I help it? Even my arm kept welling up, though it didn’t drip like my knuckles were.
I put my knuckles in my mouth, the leather strap pushing into my cheek, and tried not to look back. There were two vague shadows in the corner of my eye that could have been something on the platform, flickering and getting easier to see by the minute, and I didn’t want to see them.
“It probably thought an umbrella was as good of a weapon as it was going to get,” the second said. “It’s a human. Just a human. If the goblins don’t get it, it’ll spend the rest of its life thinking it’s gone mad. Serve it right, pesky little creature.”
My first step upright hurt and so did the second, but I took them anyway. It was very necessary, a small, loud part at the back of my mind told me, to get away from the invisible things that were becoming more visible the longer I stood near them. If I could see them properly, I might not be able to pretend well enough that I couldn’t. I was pretty sure they were Behindkind, and I was very sure they would kill me if they knew I could see them.
When the pain in my knee and ankle settled into a dull throbbing, I started to trot. It was a bit of a drunken trot, sideways and not quite steady, but it covered ground more quickly and lessened the feeling of panic that clawed on the inside of my chest. My face felt stiff, but I didn’t know if that was because of the blood or because of the fear.
It was darker now, too. Did time pass differently Behind and Between? I didn’t know that, either.
It felt like a long time before I began to see knick-knacks on the cave floor and regular pictures on the walls around me, but it can’t have been that long; I only had time for about ten trotting strides. I know that because I was counting them. I don’t know why I was counting, but it made sense at the time.
And soon, like I’d done earlier beside the wooden platform Behind, I heard voices though I couldn’t see anyone.
Athelas’ voice asked, “Where’s the pet?”
Oh, that was weird. Hadn’t it been hours since I lost Zero? Had they only just noticed?
JinYeong’s voice asked a question, too; and gave a small, derisive laugh. I would have liked to have been able to see his smug little face, so I could stick out my tongue at him.
But I couldn’t help feeling glad—they were alive!—and hopeful. Even if I couldn’t see my three psychos, I could feel the smooth give of wooden floorboards beneath my feet instead of the rough stone of the cave floor. It didn’t look right, but it felt right.
I took several more steps forward, but I didn’t start to see bits of the house as I should have by now. I stopped, bouncing on the balls of my feet to test the feeling of wooden boards.
It was definitely wood. So why couldn’t I see the house this time?
I looked around for something—anything—that might give me a clue of how I was supposed to keep going, and something sharp and icy-edged bit my left foot.
I gasped and looked down.
A goblin laughed gleefully, its small fist gripped around a needle that protruded from the general area of my big toe. I kicked it away by reflex, gasping again as the needle tore out of my foot, and a sensation of lethargy seized me by the toes, spreading swiftly upward.
No time to be stuck Between, or I wouldn’t make it home. I looked at the piece of leather in my fist and said to it, “Home, Lassie.”
I knew home was there. I knew exactly what it should look like, too; a dark, narrow room with the blinds drawn and the smell of mildew lingering on the air. A door in the centre of the wall ahead that should be edged in softer grey than the walls around it; beyond that, the landing and the stairs, carpeted to muffle my clumsy steps.
I saw it in my mind as I took the first, dragging step forward. Then, as I took another, and another, I saw it properly. It was soft around the edges, too; like a frosty dawn smudged into condensation on my window, but as I kept walking it grew certain of itself. More and more certain until I was walking in the human world and not Between, the real world as solid around me as Behind had been not so long ago.
I fell against the bannisters as I came to the top of the stairs, my legs briefly giving way beneath me. I couldn’t stop, though. Not if I didn’t want the goblins to drag me back into the coldness of Between, far away from the sunlight of the human world.
So I kept moving forward and down, my feet clumsy against the carpeted stairs; and an age later I found myself without stairs to descend. But that was all right, because Zero was there instead, all silver-bark and bloody in the half-light of the house over the road.
I felt a warmth grow in my stomach, the sight of him familiar and welcome.
“Shall we go back?” Athelas asked.
Oh yeah. Athelas was there, too. I liked Athelas. Where Zero was silver and crimson in my fading eyesight, bright against the maroon living room wall, Athelas was only silver.
Zero, harshly, said, “Didn’t we agree? We said we wouldn’t get fond of her—”
“It.” Was that JinYeong? The mongrel!
“Yes, it—shut up, JinYeong!”
Athelas reminded him mildly, “You were the one who said no names, no humanising pronouns.”
“It was my fault, anyway,” Zero said shortly. “We’ll go back, for all the good it will do. The goblins will have it by now.”
The last, little piece of ice that had been in my stomach, sharp and cold, melted. He was going to come for me, after all. Would have come for me, only I was already out.
“I’m all for going back,” said Athelas, “but I fail to see how it was your fault. The pet came to us.”
“I told it not to let go of the strap.”
“Kurom—”
“It didn’t. Look.” Zero showed them the torn piece of his jacket that had once had a strap attached.
Their voices sounded very far away now, and when Athelas gave his soft chuckle, JinYeong behind him silently laughing into his collar, that was very far away, too. My legs had finally lost the ability to move, and—oh, no; there they went again, one foot after the other.
JinYeong saw me first, and I had the dim satisfaction of seeing the laugh utterly wiped from his face; then Athelas saw me, and his eyes widened for a brief moment. Zero turned last of all, his face unreadable.
“Oi,” I said to him. “Got a bit of your jacket.” Then the floor hit me, or maybe I hit it. There was a garble of voices above my head, but I didn’t really expect them to do anything else but leave me there on the carpet until Zero’s voice said, quite clearly, “Take her, JinYeong. I’ve got the sword.”
There were cool, strong fingers around my wrists, then I was being piggy-backed by someone whose back was disconcertingly slender, for all its muscle. There was expensive, blood-sticky fabric beneath my cheek, which meant JinYeong must actually be carrying me.
“Too skinny,” I Mumbled in his ear, and passed out.
I segued seamlessly from unconsciousness to sleeping, and woke to the sensation of warm weight supplemented by the pleasant, childish feeling of hugging
a favoured toy to myself. That feeling very quickly resolved itself into the realisation that my arms were still wrapped around JinYeong’s neck; myself prone on the couch in all my gore, him clasped against me like a slender, well-dressed teddy bear. He didn’t weigh much more than that, either. His eyes were closed and he was lying perfectly still, as if pained to find himself captive but unwilling to do anything so undignified as struggle.
I snatched my arms away from his neck like I was scalded and he sat up at once, opening his eyes. “Kkaene?”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, but I didn’t expect him to reply, and he didn’t.
He stood and padded away across the living room carpet, leaving dark footprints behind. A moment later, I heard the shower start.
“So you’re awake,” said Athelas’ voice, and I turned my head to see him sitting on the chair that was at right angles with mine.
“Yeah,” I said. Ah man; now I smelled like JinYeong. What a pong. Why did he have to wear so much body spray?
Athelas looked away from his book for one moment, his eyes resting thoughtfully on me. “It’s what JinYeong said.”
“Oh. JinYeong—”
“He carried you over the road. By the time we got back you had a death grip around his neck.”
I sat up carefully, wriggling the toe that had been stabbed by a goblin needle. It still felt a bit numb. Flamin’ goblins. Next one I met was gunna get a good punch in the nose.
“He’s a vampire,” I said. I felt vaguely hard done by. It was bad enough to wake up on one of Mum and Dad’s old sofas all over blood and gore; it was worse to find myself cuddling a teddy-bear like JinYeong. “Why didn’t he pull my arms apart? I’m not that strong.”
“You’d have to ask JinYeong about that,” said Athelas, turning a page with one elegant finger. “If you’ll excuse my curiosity, Pet, why where you clinging around his neck?”
I blinked and looked down at my hands. Zero’s leather strap was still gripped between my fingers, my fist clenched so tightly that it was aching—so tightly that now it seemed I’d forgotten how to release it. “Don’t know. Maybe for the same reason I’ve still got a bit of Zero’s jacket.”
Between Jobs (The City Between Book 1) Page 13
