Zero said sharply, “Witnesses?”
“No one, as far as I know,” I said, hoping to sooth the terrible worry that had etched itself between his brows. “He said he was going to tell your dad about me—about me pulling stuff out of Between, but he’s dead now. If he’s dead there’s no problem, right?”
I saw Athelas press his lips together on a smile, but it didn’t do anything to suppress the amusement in his eyes. “There are perhaps a few problems remaining,” he said. “But they’re minor compared with the problem of someone informing my lord’s father that you can affect Between. Very minor, wouldn’t you say, my lord?”
Zero let out a short, exasperated breath. “Minor,” he agreed dryly. “And nothing that need concern us if we’re not implicated. His lieutenant will no doubt take his place.”
That idea perked me up a bit as I drifted off to make everyone a late breakfast: Palomena was a far better liaison than the golden fae, and I had a feeling that she wasn’t quite as much in Zero’s dad’s pocket as the golden fae had been, either.
Much to my surprise, Zero stepped silently up into the kitchen a few minutes after I started frying bacon. I tried not to look at him, but he was watching me steadily, and at last I said, “What?” as I turned over the bacon.
“Injuries? Troll dandruff tends to infect wounds quite easily.”
That made me realise I hadn’t stopped to check for injuries either before or after I got home. Was I getting so used to being bloodied and bashed about that I didn’t even check myself if there was no actual blood dripping?
“Reckon I’m fine,” I said doubtfully. “Nothing’s bleeding, anyway. JinYeong was pretty rough for a while, but—”
He said shortly, “I’m not concerned for JinYeong. Make sure you check properly later.”
I could check for bruises and that sort of thing later, in the shower. Athelas would be able to help with healing those if I didn’t want to go through the trauma of getting vampire spit to speed things up.
“Did you kill the troll alone, or did JinYeong help?” he asked, rounding the bench to fill a glass at the sink beside me.
“Did it myself before he got there,” I said. “It was mostly accidental, actually. The troll tripped on the ground and impaled himself on my sword.”
“Sword?”
“Yeah,” I said, carefully casual. Don’t tell Zero about the sword. Not yet. Not when the golden fae had looked on it as proof definite that I was an heirling. So far, Zero had been able to protest with some strength that I wasn’t one, and I didn’t want that to change. “Could only manage one this time.”
“Good job, Pet,” said Zero, laying his hand briefly on my head. “Make sure you see Athelas about any bruising.”
“You’re acting weird these days,” I told him, my head still warm from the touch. If it hadn’t been for that stupid, lingering memory of Morgana’s voice saying “He likes you!”, it wouldn’t even have felt weird. It would only have been a definite sign that he did actually care about me, even if I didn’t always appreciate the way in which it was shown. “Patting me on the head and stuff. You’ve been doing it for a couple weeks now.”
“You’re the pet,” Zero said briefly. “I was told that one should pat pets.”
I mean yeah but also why start now? He’d been fending off any sign of physical affection since I’d known him, and I wanted to know why he was starting to figure it out now.
I was still wondering that when I went upstairs. A whole different mess waited for me up there, but at least it gave me something to do with my mind other than wonder about ridiculous eventualities.
I slipped through the hidden door that led to my room and made sure it was properly shut behind me. None of my psychos tended to come into my room unless they were waking me up, but I didn’t want to run the chance of them seeing what I had out there lately: the mixed flurry of copied images, bills, purchase deeds, and other apparently unrelated documents. I’d given them to another friend of mine—Five-Four-One, a leprechaun—to tell me what they were all about, but so far, all he’d done was make copies and be mysterious about the fact that they were all connected.
It sounded like garbage, but Five knew what he was doing when it came to finding patterns and following the money. Once someone taught him how to use a computer, he’d be unstoppable.
There was an idea. Maybe I’d have to introduce him to ’Zul.
In the mean-time, all I could do was sort through it all and see if anything made sense to me. So far, I’d been able to find four pieces of information that were directly or tangentially related to me: an old copy of my mother’s driving license, a page from someone’s address book that had both mine and Morgana’s addresses on it, a bill for the power to be paid at my house and a little note that didn’t make sense with my great grandmother’s name on it.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t work out how those four pieces joined together—or how they fit the rest of the pieces of the information Tuatu had gathered for me. I also couldn’t work out why Athelas had set Tuatu to find the pieces. But even if I couldn’t work it out, I knew that I had to try: Athelas had been up to something for the last year at least, in my opinion. The fact that he was up to something that concerned my past, or maybe my present, wasn’t something I wanted to let go. Like Athelas, it was a like a puzzle: a puzzle where there were no straight edges, made up of myriad smaller images and no box to tell you what the whole was supposed to look like. You’d think I’d get used to dealing with things like this, living with my psychos, but it was still a pain in the neck to follow their twisty thinking.
I’d had the stuff out on my floor for the last couple of weeks, just sitting there to be sorted through and obsessed over, and yeah, maybe it was a bit unhealthy, but it wasn’t like I had anyone else to share it with. I didn’t want to let Athelas know I knew he’d been giving Tuatu jobs, and I didn’t want Zero to know I was investigating things on my own. I could talk about it with JinYeong, but he’d probably just sit on the floor and make remarks, then tell me I had to pay for his help.
That day, fresh from beating a bridge troll and visiting a merman, I picked up the same thing I always picked up first: the copy of my mother’s driving license. It wasn’t that I thought it was particularly useful, it was just that I liked to look at the photo and remember her that way. My last sight of her hadn’t been anything as nice, and it was pleasant to have one picture of her solemn face with just the hint of a smile hiding away.
Today felt a little bit different. I hadn’t yet done more than cursorily glance at the information on the license—my mother’s picture had drawn my attention first, and the fact that I’d never seen another photograph of her in my life reoccurred to me as I sipped the coffee I’d brought up with me.
I looked a bit closer at the license, and for the first time, a couple of details jumped out at me. First was the nearly typewriter font they’d used to input the information on the original: I hadn’t seen a lot of driver’s licenses, but I was pretty sure they didn’t use typewriters for that anymore. Weird official font choice, or what?
Mum’s height wasn’t right, either—and her middle name had been misspelled as Anne instead of Ann, which was pretty sloppy.
I frowned. Sloppy, or purposeful? And why did this license look so different? I’d assumed it was different because it was an older license, but it hadn’t occurred to me until now that the person on this license might not be mum at all. Just the height alone could be wrong, and perhaps the middle name being wrong might not be so odd—on its own. Anne with an e instead of without might be a small difference, but add that to the height difference and it was a different beast.
But if not mum, who? The photo was mum, I was sure of it.
And yet, as I gazed at it, I began to be less sure.
I put down my coffee and for the first time, I went through the information on the copy line by line, until I came to the smudgy date of issue.
April 20th, 1925
Flam
ing. Heck.
I’d assumed that it was just mum’s maiden name because it was a photograph taken before she met dad, but with that kind of date, the wrong middle name suddenly made sense: mum had been named after her grandma, minus an e.
That made more sense: mum and dad had never been happy with photographs being taken, and as far as I’d known until finding this license, had never had official ID.
But it still left me wondering what the heck was going on. If it had been weird to find a photocopied driver’s license that belonged to my mum in a bunch of papers that Athelas had been gathering, it was even weirder to find one that belonged to my great grandma in there. How did Athelas know about something even I didn’t—and why had he been gathering the information?
Was he gathering it for Zero or for Zero’s dad, more to the point? I’d be annoyed if it was for Zero, but I’d be downright terrified if it was for his dad. I still remembered what it felt like, having him in my head. I didn’t want him interested enough in me that he was looking up ancestors and driving licenses. What exactly was Athelas up to?
I took another look at the gritty black and white picture, and ran my finger over it thoughtfully. Something had happened to great grandma: that was why mum was named after her. What had mum said happened? She went out of state and no one saw her again.
I had always assumed it was my dad who made the rules—no photographs, nothing around the house that you can’t leave be and never come back for, only cash jobs—because he had been the most careful, the most worried. Now I began to wonder, what if that had come from mum’s side? And if so, what had they been so worried about that it had affected our whole life?
I hadn’t ever thought our life strange until well after mum and dad were murdered. My leprechaun friend Five-Four-One had suggested something of the kind a little while ago. I hadn’t wanted to hear it. Now, with my texts to former friend and current zombie Morgana sitting on read and a copy of a driver’s license belonging to my great grandmother between my fingers, it seemed to me that I was going to have to begin thinking about it. Morgana had locked herself away from the reality of being a zombie by refusing to acknowledge the world outside her house. I was no better: I had focused on the outside world that had gone mad to avoid looking at an inside world that was not as normal as it had once seemed, and had now kaleidoscoped beyond recall.
It was time I began seriously investigating my own past.
I mean, not today, obviously. But soon.
Soon never comes, said a whisper in my head, prickling me with discomfort. I tried to push away the voice. I was going to do it. I had been planning to do it for a long time.
I had even gone so far as to take that USB to Marazul behind Zero’s back—that wasn’t nothing. There might be something on there that had to do with my mother.
Planning, planning, never doing, accused the same voice.
“Shut up,” I said to it, and hurried out of my room again.
Chapter Three
I spent a disturbed night, waking in the wee hours when someone left the house—Athelas, I decided sleepily, since I could still feel Zero and JinYeong somewhere around the house. Sneaky fae stuff, I thought, and went back to sleep, but I didn’t wake until late the next morning, feeling odd and sideways.
JinYeong was lounging on the couch in a soft green shirt that could have used a few more buttons done up when I finally went downstairs. Despite waking late, I’d been going over my papers and pieces of miscellany for an hour or two, trying to convince myself that I was really doing some good—really making an effort to start finding out more about my parents and what web it was that had been woven around them. I didn’t dare to stay upstairs for longer than that, though. It was bad enough that Zero didn’t know I’d taken his USB to ’Zul before I had to hand it over.
Perturbed and sleep-deprived, the last thing I needed to see was far too much vampire chest as JinYeong lounged gracefully on the couch, soulfully reading a book. Good grief. First Zero wandering around in nothing but a towel, and now JinYeong playing a Korean Lothario. What was next, Athelas wearing beach shorts? Weren’t they all getting a bit too comfortable around my house?
“Heard the jug,” I said, finishing up my braid. Were we expecting a guest? I was pretty sure JinYeong wasn’t looking soulful for no reason. “S’pose you lot want tea and coffee and breakfast?”
Athelas languidly waved the paper at me. “It is a pet’s job to fetch these, is it not?”
I stared at him for a bit, trying not to grin. He didn’t need the paper—had no use for a paper. He just liked to have it there as a method of obfuscation, I was pretty sure. I said, “You know you can get those online?”
Not that he’d ever do it that way, the tricky old dinosaur. Nope. He preferred to have something physical—mostly to hide whatever else he was doing. Why was it so hard to dislike him when he was such a dodgy old bloke?
“You heard the kettle?” he reminded me gently.
“You and Blackpoint should have a word,” I told him. Tricky old fae, both of them: always slipping out of this and that. “Reckon you’d get along real well. And maybe he could teach you how to interact with modern technology.”
“Thank you, I’m sufficiently acquainted with Blackpoint. However, considering what he did to the computer upstairs, not to mention JinYeong, I think we’ll have to ask a few questions of that merman friend of yours rather shortly.”
I felt my cheeks go a bit warmer, but that couldn’t be helped. Athelas probably already knew that I liked going to see ’Zul: hopefully that was all he would think of the blush. I’d prefer him not to know about my visit there yesterday.
“Oh yeah?” I said, in my very best carefree voice. It wouldn’t fool him, but I wasn’t trying to: I was just trying to misdirect a little bit. I turned to go into the kitchen and asked over my shoulder as I went, “Zero already sent me to ask about Blackpoint. ’Z’at what you mean?”
“Indeed,” he replied, as I went to deal with the freshly boiled jug.
It would have to be toast today, I decided, preparing the tea tray. Toast was quicker than yesterday’s breakfast, so we could start the day a bit sooner. I’d come downstairs far too late.
In the living room, I heard JinYeong say, “You irritate me,” and Athelas’ affable answer of, “The feeling is entirely mutual,” and wondered what they were trading barbs about this time. Usually they fought about things that involved Zero.
“Reckon I should try to tell the human group about where the bridge troll was?” I called. It wasn’t that I thought it would do much good—I didn’t think Abigail would even agree to meet with me, let alone Zero agree that it was useful—but I was hoping to forestall a fight. I wasn’t against the psychos fighting each other these days, mind you: it seemed a bit less potentially deadly than it once had. But it was still a pain to clean up the house after they’d gone tumbling through it if they didn’t make it to the back yard before starting. “And other thinner places like that where it’s easier for Behindkind to get through?”
“It would certainly free us up for more important things if the humans were agreeable,” agreed Athelas’ voice, to my surprise. “My lord? Do you have a preference?”
A faint whisper of movement by the kitchen doorway made me jump and look up, and I found Zero looking at me quizzically, his eyes very blue.
“Heck!” I said. “How long have you been there?”
“Contact the humans,” Zero said, answering my first question. Heck. That was another surprise for the books.
“I’ll try, but they might not want to talk to me after what happened last time,” I said gloomily, approaching the doorway to include Athelas in the conversation. “I’ll do it, though; even if Abigail only reads the text, she’ll know about it. Then she can decide what to do.”
Zero nodded and, absently it seemed, laid his hand on my head properly rather than just touching it briefly. I flinched a bit but managed not to shy away completely, and looked across the room rather con
sciously to see an expression of amusement on Athelas’ face. Luckily, he was looking at Zero, not at me, so I could duck back into the kitchen and make myself busy getting the tea tray together. Tea first, then breakfast.
I could have sworn I heard the gibbering of banshees faintly as I came back into the living room. JinYeong must have heard it, too, because he frowned, looking away from the book he was reading, and opened his mouth.
He shut it again when I sat down beside him and put the tea tray on the coffee table, but that might have been because I was side-eyeing his stacks of books. It was unusual enough to see JinYeong reading a book, but the fact that the stack closest to me had a series of covers in lurid colours and scarcely less lurid couple clinches was enough to make me say faintly, “Good grief! What are you reading those for?”
I saw Athelas flick a look toward the staircase—was he wondering about the banshees, too?—but he explained, “I believe that JinYeong is conducting a species of inquiry into the female mind. Human female, of course.”
“What, through those?” I had a quick gander at the other stacks, and said doubtfully, “You’ll only get a very partial insight if man-chest covers are all you stick to. Where did you get these, anyway? They have library tags, but you can only get out ten books at a time.”
“The librarian was verrrrry helpful,” said JinYeong, looking at me unblinkingly over the top of his book.
Still checking out the stacks, I grinned. “Female, was she? All right, at least she got you a few others—there are some classics in here as well as the man-chest, so you’ll get a bit of variety. Didn’t she tell you that there’s different kinds of romance?”
Something very small twitched in the house, and Zero said faintly from the hallway, “Athelas?”
“Right away, my lord,” Athelas answered.
“You two are as good as a movie sometimes: all hidden signals and double-speak. You could do a stage show like that,” I said, going through another stack of books. To JinYeong, I said incredulously, “Oi. Are these all romance?”
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 4
