Problem was, I thought, rather dizzily avoiding a thorn on one side by catching a scratch on the other side instead, I couldn’t just pull water from Between. I would have to pull somewhere Behind that had water closer to the human world, and if I did that—who knew what else would come?
JinYeong fell back against me, and I stood still just a moment too long in the fight to let him catch himself; a thorn went through the flesh of my upper right arm, drawing a shuddering breath out of me.
Heck. Even if I could get to my phone, Zero wouldn’t get here in time to help. Our only choice was to play at silly beggars with Between and hope that nothing worse than the petalmen came out.
“You see water anywhere?” I panted, to JinYeong.
“Turn,” he said curtly, and when we had made a half-circle, back to back, he said, “Look ahead.”
This time, my indrawn breath was one of relief. If I looked carefully, the change rooms weren’t just dripping with water along their back walls, they were fairly rippling with moisture. That, I was pretty sure, betokened a waterfall somewhere Between. A waterfall meant that there was a pool of water for it to fall into, and a pool of water was exactly what we needed right now.
I stamped my foot into the floor, willing it to pass through carpet and wood to the grass or dirt that was Between the human world and the world Behind, and heard the hollow sound of wooden floorboards instead. But that impact also threw up water, as though the carpet were sodden, and I grinned victoriously.
“Right, you lot,” I said savagely, whipping my blades in a swift, vicious semi-circle in front of me. “Time you went back home.”
I stomped again, and this time instead of the hollow thump of foot meeting carpet-covered floorboards, my foot squished down in damp grass. That damp grass ruffled its way through the carpet, and over by the change rooms the floor sank and became a pool of water, misted with the spray of falling water that now poured noisily from rocks too high to see, softening the sound of our fight.
As soon as the spray misted over the petalmen nearest to the waterfall, they slowed down, sticky and tarry with damp.
“Get ’em all back toward the water,” I yelled, slashing wildly at one of the petalmen and sending it tumbling into water that was still faintly, hairily blue like the carpet had been. The petals disintegrated and spread themselves across the surface like fish food, and the water smoothed and grew ripples instead of carpet.
Beneath my feet I felt alternately wet, squishy carpet and damp grass, and the remaining petalman still fought sluggishly and determinedly to get to us.
Flower petals and mould fluttered in the air and choked damply in our throats as water misted on our skin, and the stinging of thorns still whipped across shins and forearms, but now there was something of a clearness to the room. Side by side now instead of back to back, JinYeong and I pushed the petalmen toward the bog behind them with quick, slashing movements rather than any kind of advanced technique.
I began to think that we might possibly get out of this without dying—maybe even without worse than a few stab wounds.
Then something started singing in the shelving beside the change rooms, high and wailing.
JinYeong snarled, and I saw him shake his head in my peripheral. Banshees, that snarl said.
Banshees. I knew what banshees were, but why were they singing at us? The ones at home wailed a bit, but they didn’t do the kind of singing that made your ears feel as though they were going to burst and dribble down the side of your face.
“Cut it out, you little ratbags!” I yelled, slashing a thorn in half and sweeping the head from the shoulders of the petalman it belonged to with my other sword. The head rolled away, disintegrating into petals as it travelled along the wet ground, but I swayed, a buzzing in my ears where there had been the sound of singing before.
Those little beggars were messing with our heads! And the last few petalmen, without ears or eyes, simply pushed forward, unshaken. One of them thrust too short to pierce my stomach but caught me with a thorn across the wrist, barely missing the artery, and my defensive slice was just a bit too drunken.
“Choshimhae!” snapped JinYeong, but I saw a slight stagger to his step, too.
“You sort out the last two!” I called to him. “I’ll get these little ratbags.”
I heard his short Ne! as I lurched across the floor toward the big industrial-sized vacuum that had been left to gather dust by the counter, its cord snaking across the carpet and unplugged. I grabbed the nozzle in one hand and went for the cord with the other, but a zap of something that was almost Between but maybe not quite shocked me as I snatched up the nozzle, and the vacuum roared into life of its own volition.
And when I say roared, I mean it fairly howled, even above the sound of the waterfall. I heard the faint, panicked gibber of banshees in the shelving and saw white legs and tartan flying as I hauled the vacuum cleaner across the room again, but it was too late for them. I brandished the nozzle threateningly in their direction and yelled, “You lot better belt up if you don’t want to go head-over-heels into the dust catcher!”
I didn’t actually intend to vacuum the banshees up: I was just planning on using the machine to scare them and dull the sound of their wailing. That sounds really smart but would have been, as Athelas told me later, as entirely ineffective against that sound range as the waterfall had been, so it was lucky for me that they were so scared.
Only then the vacuum stretched eagerly and grew. Faster than I could stop it, it snorkelled up every last banshee: I felt them impact against the soft piping as they tumbled helplessly inside the machine, then heard them wailing as they were thrown around and around inside the cyclonic dust catcher.
“Heck!” I yelped, and dropped the nozzle of the vacuum. It didn’t stop at once, which was pretty creepy, but we were more than halfway Between by now, so it wasn’t really surprising.
Maybe vacuums roamed free-range in certain areas of Between.
I would have felt sorry for the banshees if it wasn’t for the warmth that I was pretty sure was blood making an itchy trickle in my ear. It wasn’t like they were dead, either: as I turned to see how JinYeong was getting on, the vacuum’s roar sank and then ceased, and I distinctly heard the sound of a very small person chucking its guts inside the dust catcher.
Ha. That’d teach ’em not to sing stuff at us and make us dizzy. See how they like being too dizzy to stand.
JinYeong was standing—the last one standing, as a matter of fact—so I staggered back toward him, still a bit wobbly on my feet. The banshees could get themselves out of the vacuum.
“You’re a nice mess,” I said, panting, when I got closer. I was a nice mess, too; I could see myself in the darkened mirror of the changerooms behind JinYeong. The waterfall had already segued back into Between where it belonged, leaving the mirrored surfaces behind more sparkling and clean than previously.
It was nice not to have Behindkind blood on me for a change, though: all the blood on me was mine. You gotta fight to survive, but it’s never fun cleaning the blood of dead things off your clothes: I felt oddly grateful to the petalmen for being so distinctly unliving, even while animated.
JinYeong grinned at me, still staggering a bit, and stripped off the remains of his suitcoat along with his tie. He threw them on the pile of gooey petals that was all that remained of our late enemies, then threw himself on the floor and leaned against the wall beneath the staircase, breathing deeply.
“Ah, that was interesting!” he said.
Chapter Five
“Yeah, interesting,” I said, but I laughed a bit as I lowered myself onto the floor beside him, massaging around the slowly blood-seeping arm that had taken the most damage. The floor still felt a bit damp beneath me, but I couldn’t bring myself to care too much. “Oi. You reckon Zero’s dad really wanted you to help Zero? Or do you think he was looking for information?”
“Both,” said JinYeong, laughing softly. “More than that, he knows something we do not.
He knows certainly that the succession has begun again—he is seeking allies for his son.”
“He wouldn’t do that openly if he wasn’t ready to make his move,” I said, going cold with the knowledge of it. Beside me, JinYeong made a soft intake of breath when he moved, and I turned my head to look at him. “You all right? They manage to get you with those thorns?”
My own arm wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, and the vampire spit was already starting to clot the blood and heal it up, but although it was hard to tell between the black muck and my own blood, there was a dull kind of pain around my ribs that suggested a wound I’d have to take a look at later, too. I patted the area absently, which exacerbated the dull burning, and found that JinYeong was watching me, his head leaning against the wall and his eyes only half-open.
“You did not ask my permission,” he said, sotto voce.
“What?”
“You did not ask my permission to kiss me.”
“The heck? You’re always biting me without permission!” I pulled my hoodie away to display the very clear bite mark from a couple of weeks ago that had just started to heal to a soft pink. It would have healed much quicker if it hadn’t been exactly where he bit me every flaming time. “Look at this!”
“Yes, but you said—”
“Okay, okay. I apologise. I’m very sorry to have damaged your flamin’ delicate psyche!”
“I am not damaged.”
I snorted a laugh before I could stop myself. “What garbage! You’re bleeding over most of your torso, including from the ear, by the way. Were those little ratbags singing at us?”
“They sing their prey to sleep,” JinYeong explained, sitting still as I leaned over to wipe away the blood from his ears with my hoodie cuff. He let me turn his head and wipe the other side, too; didn’t even snarl at me, which was a surprise. “My psyche is not damaged.”
“I s’pose that’s something, then. Look, we don’t have time to be waiting for permission when it comes to stuff attacking us. If I’m not already pumped up on vampire spit, we’re going to be in trouble. You’ve got open permission to kiss me, okay? Or bite me, whatever is quicker.”
He seemed to think about that for a few moments before he said, “Kurolgae,” but I had the sudden suspicion that his malaise was because he was injured a bit worse than I’d thought, and a twinge of worry pinched at me.
“C’mmere,” I said, tugging at his shirt.
He leaned closer, but ignored my attempts to check on the slashes around his torso, and instead performed the same office for me that I had done for him a moment ago, wiping away the blood from my ears.
That took too long, and left me sitting awkwardly with my face in his hands as his eyes roamed my face.
“If you sit still, I’ll check to see how bad your wounds are,” I told him, shifting uncomfortably. “I know you heal quickly, but you were just stabbed through the same—”
“If you sit still, I—”
There was a scuttle of very tiny feet from the direction of the vacuum cleaner, and JinYeong’s head snapped around, his eyes narrowing. My own eyes were immediately on the vacuum cleaner, and I pulled away from JinYeong just in time to watch a banshee stagger out of the nozzle.
“Don’t even think about it!” I said to it, but the banshee simply leaned against the vacuum with one tiny hand, considered the world around it in a miserable sort of a way, and threw up violently. Other banshees staggered out past it, tottering here and there as if they were drunk, sending up miniscule static sparks against the dryer bits of carpet and falling on their faces. A couple more of them threw up, too.
JinYeong, his eyes bright with malice, said, “Ah! Now I shall have something to do at home!”
“Hey, at least at home they don’t try to sing us to sleep,” I pointed out. I was pretty sure that having a go at our banshees would lead to outright war, and presently we were reasonably happily co-habiting—if you didn’t count the stuff they threw at JinYeong every now and then.
“I shall vacuum,” said JinYeong, but he said it quietly.
He began to tidy himself up again and I cleaned off my swords with a bit of dirty newspaper. I didn’t know whether they would clean themselves on the way back or whatever, but it seemed rude to use them and not clean them, even if they were only going to turn into wall brackets again. There was already enough mess around the place.
When the swords were clean and more bracket than sword, I rose, shrugging out the tenseness in my shoulders and feeling a slight pinch from the healing gash in my arm. Vampire spit’s the good stuff, I tell you.
“Reckon Zero’s dad really meant to kill us?” I asked, absently touching the sore spot on my ribs again. There had been a flash of memory before, now that I thought of Zero’s dad again—when he had been in my head. What had that been?
JinYeong shrugged. “We didn’t die.”
“Yeah, but only because I was able to pull Between here to us instead of us going to it,” I said, frowning. Flaming heck. The memory was gone, wriggling back into my mind so quickly that I couldn’t even remember what had caused it to come out or what it had been about. Flamin’ wriggly truth worms. “He didn’t know I’d be able to do that. Those petal beasties were pretty flamin’ near to being the end of us before that.”
At least, I hoped he didn’t know I could do that. Zero’s dad being creepy in my head was bad enough: him knowing about me being an heirling would be far worse—I had a feeling that he would wait around personally to see that I died if it came to him knowing that. I very much agreed with Zero that it was better his dad not know.
“He knows something,” I said darkly. “Dunno what he knows, but it feels like he’s pushing buttons to see what pops out.”
He gave a sniffy little laugh. “Of course you would know that.”
“If you’re suggesting that I’m always pushing buttons—”
“I am not suggesting, I am saying.”
I chuckled, feeling the dull throb of it in my ribs for a moment. “Okay, that’s fair. Anyway, whatever he was here for, I’m getting pretty flamin’ tired of people trying to kill us.”
“We didn’t die,” said JinYeong again, far too cheerfully, in my opinion.
“Yeah,” I said. I headed for the stairs at a bit of an amble. I didn’t feel like moving, but I did feel like arguing. “But I feel like that’s such a low bar for how a person’s life should go. Broken arm? Yeah, but I didn’t die. Lose a leg? I mean, I didn’t die, so it must be okay!”
JinYeong made the little hissing sound that was his laugh once again. “Now you are just complaining.”
“I know you blokes are used to this sort of thing,” I said, still willing to argue, “but there isn’t too much more that wouldn’t actually kill me.”
He shrugged. “Your fighting is better these days. And you can do things you shouldn’t do. You will not die.”
“The vampire spit helps, too,” I acknowledged. It seemed as though I could feel the stuff doing loop-de-loops in my veins. Ridiculous, but it really did feel like that: the mainline equivalent of a really strong cup of coffee without the side-effects.
“Maja,” he said, smugly.
And that reminded me. I was going to have to find a more suitable way of getting vampire spit if JinYeong was thinking about trying to date. That was a pain in the neck, but a necessary one. A bit like getting vampire spit in the first place, actually.
I huffed a sigh, looked at the stairs we still had to climb to get back up into the real world, and said, “Oi.”
“Do not poke me; I have a hole there. What is it?”
“What happened to you, anyway?” I asked him. “In the war, I mean. Athelas says you were nearly dead when Zero found you.”
It wasn’t until the silence had stretched out for a few moments of plodding stair-climbing that I looked back to see JinYeong watching me suspiciously.
“What?” I protested. “I’m just curious! I’m not gathering intel to use against you later. Flamin’ heck!
”
JinYeong sniffed a bit, but I got the impression that he was quite pleased. “I shall tell you another time,” he said. “First, we should meet these humans so that hyeong does not throw me through the wall again.”
That was probably fair enough, I thought, emerging from the stairwell with my phone in my hand to text Abigail again. Zero was pretty prone to throwing vampires through walls these days, apparently.
I’d just unlocked my phone to text when JinYeong gave a stifled aish! and covered his nose as a warm, sticky hand grabbed mine.
“G’day, g’day!”
“Flamin’ heck!” I yelped, just barely stopping myself from snatching my hand away and kicking for good measure.
Reckon he knew that, because he grinned at me through a thick, tangled thatch of beard with teeth that had always been unexpectedly white for the general mess of the rest of him. It was the old mad bloke again, of course. He’d been following me around since I came to Tasmania with my family, and although I’d somehow forgotten about him for a few years a while back, he’d been around and very obvious recently.
“Bubble tea!” he said now, and giggled.
“Looks like someone else wanted bubble tea,” I told JinYeong.
He made a very small grimace and flicked a look across at the old mad bloke, then sighed. “I will get you bubble tea,” he said to the old bloke. “But you will drink it somewhere else.”
The old mad bloke gave a gleeful chuckle. “You have to come with me. It costs two.”
“Two what?” I asked him, as he tugged me along the alley and into Wellington Court. We emerged into bright sunshine that surprised me after the cool, musty interior of the abandoned shop below.
“Two!” he repeated, and dragged me all the way across the court and down another alley that led to Liverpool street. There was another bubble tea shop there, I knew, so I wasn’t too worried about the fact that he was pulling me around.
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 9
