Between Jobs (The City Between Book 1)

by W. R. Gingell

  I would have asked them if they wanted tea and coffee as a way of leading in to find out what they’d discovered, but JinYeong got in first.

  He said, “Hyung!” and gave vent to a brief spate of Korean.

  I gave up on asking and started to boil the kettle anyway. They were all obviously caught up in the news JinYeong had shared. I may not have been able to understand his astonishment, but Zero’s brows went right up, pale and surprised, and Athelas’ mouth rounded momentarily.

  Athelas was the first to find his tongue. “Not at all? He didn’t respond to you at all?”

  “Ne.”

  “It’s unusual,” Zero said, more slowly, “but not unknown. There are some humans who aren’t susceptible to vampiric manipulation.”

  Oh. So that’s what it was. JinYeong had been at the police lab successfully wriggling his way in with his sneaky vampire wiles, and the detective wasn’t susceptible to them.

  No wonder JinYeong was so astonished to find someone not doing exactly as he asked them to do. I grinned and poured boiling water happily.

  “Perhaps we should try a little persuasion of the fae kind,” suggested Athelas. “A thrall should do the trick, should it not?”

  He took the cup of tea I offered him and gave me a dreamy smile. I don’t know about other fae, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this is his way of keeping things even. He doesn’t like to be in debt to anyone; if I give him a cup of tea, he gives me a smile. If I make dinner, he compliments me. And sometimes he gives me things for free. I still don’t know whether to be worried about that or not, so I try to make sure the scales are balanced as much as possible, too.

  “Maybe you’re getting old,” I said to JinYeong.

  That made him look as offended as I’d ever seen him look, and say something to Zero that must have concerned me, because he jerked his chin at me.

  “A very good question,” said Athelas, the traitor. “Perhaps you’d care to explain why you were entertaining the detective in our kitchen, Pet?”

  “Reckon I’ll have to get used to looking through the peephole before I open the door again,” I said, hoping I sounded suitably pet-like and apologetic. Just a stupid pet. Don’t know better.

  “That would be wise,” Zero said. His eyes were still on me, and he looked thoughtful.

  I tried hard not to let myself swallow; Athelas was right, I gave away everything I was thinking with my face.

  “Choshimhae, Petteu,” said JinYeong mockingly, and left the kitchen.

  “He says,” Athelas said helpfully, “be careful, Pet.”

  “Yeah,” I said, getting out the biscuits. I’d make them a pie later. That’d make ’em happy again. “Got that idea.”

  There were a lot of stories about vampires when I went to look them up on the library computer’s google search the next day. Stuff like them not being able to go out in the sunlight—false, since JinYeong was more comfortable in the sun than I was—not being able to eat garlic—ha! Garlic was a staple of any food he wanted me to make—stakes; number obsessive; bloodragey when hungry…it went on and on.

  I already knew the sun and garlic myths were just that, myths; but there wasn’t much else that I did know. And since I preferred not to anger JinYeong by something as potentially deadly as stakes, and already knew he tended to be bloodragey when starved for blood, I began my Vampire Experiments with something simpler.

  I mean, I say experiments, but mostly I wanted to annoy him a bit. Sorta payback. And there wasn’t anything really scientific about it, either; I went around the house and took away a piece of every ornament that had more than one bit to it.

  If there was a bowl of decorative fruit, I took away one of the apples; if there were ten miniatures in the hallway, I took away one. I went through the house like a particularly beady-eyed bower bird, picking out this and that, and when I’d gathered a collection that was too big to conveniently hide, I put it all in a cardboard box under JinYeong’s bed. He didn’t sleep there, so if he noticed the missing things, it should take him a bit of effort to find them in order to put things right.

  I considered raiding his sock draw for every second sock, but that seemed like it was going too far, and I was going for something subtler, anyway. The missing items weren’t noticeable if you weren’t the kind of person who noticed, counted, and catalogued every last thing in your mind. Time to see if my pouty little vampire was as obsessive-compulsive as the older stories said vampires were.

  That done, I went happily down to the kitchen again and made an apple pie. Apple pie tastes better with payback.

  I was reading a book in my usual spot on the couch that evening when JinYeong came stalking down the stairs, his back as straight as the crease in his trousers, and dumped the cardboard box on my lap.

  “Haji ma,” he said, and stalked away again.

  Athelas, who was also reading, looked at me over the top of his book, and one of his brows rose very slightly. Over at his desk, surrounded by open files and reference books, Zero’s eyes narrowed—heck yes! A Zero grin! Score!

  Mark two for vampire myths, then. No aversion to sunlight or garlic, but inclined to notice if someone had been in their room, and definitely inclined to obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

  And score one for the pet, I thought, hugging my cardboard box of odd items. Since my reading was already interrupted, I asked Athelas, “The murdered bloke—was he human after all?”

  “It’s too early to tell,” said Zero, closing one book and opening another.

  “Or perhaps we should say it’s too late?” Athelas suggested. “There was very little left of him by the time we got there, after all.”

  “There was a trace of magic,” Zero corrected him. “Maybe enough to run an event reconstitution spell.”

  I looked from Zero to Athelas, and back again. “What, someone did something to the body?”

  Athelas put his book down. “You could say that. By the time we got there, it had completely melted away under the influence of as pretty a piece of spell-work as I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s not as if he wasn’t already in pieces,” I said disapprovingly. “Who went and did that to the poor bloke as well?”

  “That is exactly the issue,” Athelas replied. “And springing from that issue is another: How did whoever disposed of him know to dispose of him before we got there? Or were we simply unlucky?”

  “If I start a Reconstruction spell going, we should have a good idea of what games he was playing—or at least, who he was playing with.”

  “The bloke got murdered,” I pointed out. “So it prob’ly wasn’t him playing the games, if you get what I mean.”

  “Zero,” said Athelas, with gentle humour, “is still more than half convinced that he wasn’t human, and that he had a very powerful glamour on him to prevent both fae and human from recognising as such.”

  I poked at the plastic pear in my cardboard box. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “I’d like to know that, myself,” Zero said. “If I’m correct, this murder looks less like a killing of the sort we thought it was, and more like something else entirely.”

  “A waystation does seem like an odd place for a murder to randomly occur,” agreed Athelas. “But then, it also seems an odd place for Behindkind to be making mischief.”

  “Does it?” asked Zero mildly. “I find it a very good place to be getting up to mischief. They’re Between, so they have one foot Behind and one foot in the human world. It’s very easy to play Behind against the humans if you’ve got an eye to both.”

  Athelas inclined his head. “Perhaps so. However, if the victim was fae and not human, and if he wasn’t murdered by our murderer, why was he killed? If there’s a glamour on him, he was more than likely part of whatever was going on at the waystation. Fae killing fae is…unusual. And in this particular way, too—no, I’m more inclined to think he was certainly human, and that it’s certainly our murderer.”

  “What if your murderer thought he wa
s human, too?” I asked. “Sorta didn’t notice he wasn’t, and killed him? Then it’s still your murderer, even with something weird going on Between.”

  Zero’s eyes rose from his books and rested, curiously, on me.

  “Oh, I think not,” said Athelas. “He couldn’t have made such a mistake!”

  “Neither of us noticed,” Zero said. “Perhaps we’ll get some clarity now that JinYeong is able to properly scent the blood samples he collected from the lab.”

  “Now that his nose is working again,” I remarked. “But didn’t he already follow the blood trace from the house?”

  “Ah yes,” Athelas said thoughtfully, “JinYeong still has blood samples. Did we not already establish that they led us only to the waystation?”

  “JinYeong followed the blood trace we found in the house,” Zero said. “It was human, and there was quite a lot of it. We thought it was a witness, but perhaps it was the real owner of the house. There are other samples from the victim; JinYeong took them two days ago.”

  A dawning apprehension lit Athelas’ eyes. “I see. However, it still leaves me with a few questions. Pet, I believe you said the odd happenings have been occurring for some years now.”

  “Since we moved here,” I said, nodding. “That’s when I was about ten.”

  “Then my first question would be—”

  “Why the secondary blood loss at the scene was from the day of the murder,” agreed Zero. “I was wondering the same thing.”

  “’Cos if there was a fae going around with his face for seven years, where’s the actual bloke been, and why did he only start bleeding that day?”

  “Exactly so,” Athelas said. “Your reasoning isn’t dreadful, Pet. Perhaps if we work on it, we can make a decent Investigator out of you.”

  Zero was short. “Don’t encourage the pet.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can’t tell what us pet’s’ll do if you teach us too much.”

  Those blue eyes rested on me for a moment. I shut my mouth.

  “Shall we pay a visit to the waystation once again?” asked Athelas. “Is that the plan?”

  “Not just yet,” Zero said. “They won’t tell us anything, and if the Order Force isn’t making proper checks we can’t lean on the Waystation by threatening to tell, either. I think we should find out more about what they’re up to before we try to find our witness.”

  “Ah,” said Athelas, smiling. “We might be able to make an informational trade if it’s juicy enough?”

  “Oi,” I said.

  Athelas looked indulgently at me. “Yes, Pet?”

  “Reckon a clever human could escape from fae?”

  Athelas smiled slightly again and said, “I think not.”

  “If there was a distraction big enough, yes,” said Zero, surprising me. “It’s not unheard of. What exactly makes you ask that?”

  “Well, when I came after you blokes—”

  There was an almost inaudible murmur from Athelas that might have said something like My lord. He’s my lord and she refers to him in the colloquial! but I ignored it.

  “—when I came after you blokes, there were a couple of fae who watched me go.”

  “They watched you go?”

  “More like, they opened Between for me,” I corrected myself. “That’s what they said, anyway. And I couldn’t see how to get out until it went wafty, so they were probably telling the truth.”

  I didn’t expect Zero to look so relieved.

  Athelas said, “Now didn’t I say there must have been more to it than the pet finding its own way out? A human, able to make its way Between at will? Nonsense.”

  “It’s still able take things from Between,” Zero reminded him, but he still looked relieved—or maybe just less tight-faced.

  “Anyway,” I said, slightly pointedly, “they kept talking ’cos neither of ’em knew I could hear them, and they said another one had escaped from them thanks to the ambush and all the fighting. They sounded a bit annoyed—reckon the bloke must have given ’em a lot of trouble before this.”

  “Another one,” murmured Athelas. “Well, it certainly does seem to suggest that there was another human there, but we’ve yet to establish that our original victim wasn’t the owner of the house. And even if it is a human, and it was there, it is there no longer.”

  “Unless they caught him again since then,” I pointed out.

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Zero, and went back to his books. “Make dinner, Pet. Don’t bring it in here; I’ll need space to lay out a few things when I begin my spell. We’ll eat at the table.”

  So I made dinner while Zero and Athelas went out to find ingredients—or maybe they went for a walk, who knows? JinYeong went out for a while, too; I saw him skulking through the bushes beside the house, then further down the street. Goodness knows what he was up to: Sniffing stuff, probably.

  It wasn’t until I finished making dinner that I found someone had pinched the apple pie I’d made and left out to cool.

  “Flaming rude!” I said, indignantly.

  Was that why JinYeong had gone out? Because he was eating the pie? I didn’t even get a piece! Next time I was gunna make myself a small one of my own, and the three psychos could do what they wanted with theirs.

  I set the table, still muttering, but none of them seemed to notice when they came back in. They sat down to eat, then went back to what they’d been doing before they went out; Zero to working on his spell, Athelas to watching him, and JinYeong to being moody upstairs.

  The spell Zero wanted to do mustn’t have worked really well for him, because he was still working on it when I went to sleep on the couch that night, and he was polishing stuff again when I woke the next morning.

  Athelas was waiting for tea over on his chair, looking faintly amused at something as usual, so I went and made us all a cuppa. JinYeong wasn’t in the house, but that was no loss. He must have gone out again last night after I went to sleep, because this morning the faint scent of his far-too-strong cologne still permeated from the bathroom. It stunk, but it was still better than JinYeong in the house with the cologne clinging to him and following him wherever he goes.

  I’d given Athelas his tea and biscuits and settled Zero’s coffee next to him when the front door opened and closed, wafting in the scent of JinYeong once again.

  I made a pft of disgust sat down in my chair with my own coffee. What a pong.

  Zero looked up sharply, a knife-edged crease between his brows, just as JinYeong led a human woman by one hand through the kitchen and toward the stairs, a challenge in the tilt of his chin.

  “JinYeong!” said Zero, and it felt like the whole house shook.

  “Ah heck,” I said quietly to myself. Whatever JinYeong was doing with a human woman, Zero wasn’t happy about it.

  JinYeong turned his head, one brow up as if surprised, and changed direction. The woman followed him down the two stairs into the living room with us, her face blank and her eyes wide and starry.

  Ohhhh. So that’s what a person looked like when they were under vampiric manipulation. It must have really freaked out the detective, because I’d been around JinYeong for a while now, and it still freaked me out.

  “Don’t bring humans back here,” Zero said, his voice icy. “There’s blood in the fridge for you.”

  There’s what in my fridge?

  I mean, I know it isn’t really my fridge, and it’s not like I’m paying the power bill, but…but why the flaming heck are they keeping blood in my fridge? Couldn’t JinYeong go to the hospital again?

  Also, where were they keeping it that I hadn’t seen—oh. Yeah. There was an esky at the back that Zero had told me not to touch.

  Gross.

  JinYeong pouted and said something I couldn’t understand.

  I froze where I was, wishing I could run for it. If he was pouting, his eyes should be soft and soulful like they quite often were with that expression.

  They weren’t. They were dark and liquid and ragingly angry.r />
  “If you feed on that human in here, I’ll tear the teeth out of your mouth,” Zero said, his voice dropping an octave and growing very soft.

  JinYeong spat an angry sentence, leaving the woman to sink down on the sofa, and stalked toward Zero with long, predatory strides.

  In his leather chair, Athelas put down his teacup, smiling.

  Zero’s shoulders might have settled into a straighter line, but that was the only sign of aggression he gave. He didn’t even put a hand to the knives I knew he had beneath his leather jacket.

  “There’s blood in the fridge,” he said, again.

  I got up very quietly, my feet silent against the carpet, and crossed the room behind JinYeong, who had neither ceased to make incomprehensible, sibilant remarks in Zero’s direction, nor his advance toward him.

  Athelas saw me. He didn’t try to stop me, only smiled again and went back to watching Zero and JinYeong as they squared up across the living room.

  So I kept walking until I could grab the woman by the wrist and pull her to her feet. She got up in a docile kind of way, and she didn’t resist when I led her across the room; just followed me as if I was JinYeong.

  There was a snarl behind us that set the hairs up on the back of my neck, and a shadow, big and icy cold, that passed between us and the snarl. I didn’t stop walking, and she didn’t, either.

  Then we were out the door, and it was shut behind us.

  “What’s going on?” said a suspicious voice.

  “Flaming heck!” I gasped, reeling back against the door. The detective was there in front of us, his eyes narrow and suspicious. “Don’t do that to me!”

  “Who’s this?” he asked, ignoring that. He scanned the woman up and down, and I knew he could see the dazed look in her eyes. “Did they do something to her?”

  “Nope!” I said, squinting against the morning sunlight. “She came over to visit JinYeong. She’s going now. Wanna give her a lift home?”

  “I need to see those three.”