It wasn’t like the nightmare would be able to fight through that cloud of perfume, though.
I went to sleep again.
I think I’d probably expected to wake up with the Nightmare again regardless, but I hadn’t expected to wake up the next morning with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I opened my eyes to gentle early morning light and a slightly squishy warmth that was the beanbag around me; another warmth that was far tighter and solid beside me.
“Think I made a mistake,” I mumbled to that muddle of early morning light and perfume. Guilt and regret bit into me, making my insides curdle. “Reckon I should have just let it all sit.”
Beans squished and squeaked as JinYeong bent his neck to peer down at me. “You are still asleep,” he said. “Don’t talk about useless things right now.”
“Tell Zero,” I muttered, the words sticky with sleep. “Tell him I don’t want to do it. I’ll just stay home and we can look at other cases.”
JinYeong made a constant murmur in my ear that was fractions or equations, I wasn’t sure which, because I fell asleep again too quickly. I didn’t wake up until the sound of snarling tore me from peaceful dreams, and the warmth that curled around me was yanked away, spilling me and the beanbag sideways.
I protested my annoyance to the carpet, and sat up in time to see Zero fairly carrying JinYeong toward the door, one huge hand around his throat. JinYeong, dark-eyed but remarkably calm, snarled only a little; and with a self-control I hadn’t expected, didn’t bite the arm that was definitely close enough to bite if he had really fought for it.
I threw the closest cushion at Zero, hitting him square in the back of the head, and he turned around to stare at me.
“That’s my emotional support vampire!” I said crankily. “Put him down!”
“Pet—”
“I was asleep!” I snarled. “And I was warm! Now I have carpet burn and I’m awake!”
“Don’t let the vampire into your bedroom,” Zero said, cold and warning. “In fact, no other men in your bedroom, either.”
“First of all, dad—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“First of all, he’s not a man. Second of all, what the heck kind of a man is ever going to set foot in the house with you lot in here?”
I didn’t like how thoughtful that made him look.
“JinYeong is still a man,” he said at last. “And you shouldn’t be letting him in your bedroom.”
“Fine to say now!” I snapped back at him. “Nobody minded when we were looking for Athelas. Then it was all no, the couch isn’t comfortable enough!”
Zero, taken aback, protested, “I didn’t say that! And things were very different at that point—”
“Tell you what,” I suggested, more awake by the second and still very annoyed to be awake. “You put him down and we can all go downstairs and have breakfast like normal people. Or don’t put him down and I’m going to kick you in the flamin’ shins!”
Zero turned his back and marched out of the room anyway, and I thought I’d have to chase after him to make good on my threat, but he put JinYeong down outside the door, with a care that was as close to sarcasm as I’d seen from him.
JinYeong grinned at me, and then at Zero, who received the look coldly. The coldness seemed to please JinYeong, because he fairly sauntered across the living room and down the stairs, hands in his pockets.
That meant Zero had no one but me to glare coldly at, which he duly did.
“Had the nightmare again,” I explained, taking pity on him. I still wasn’t sold on the idea that he was keen on me, but he was definitely very annoyed at me having someone in my bedroom. And it wasn’t that I wanted to explain myself; it was more that I didn’t want him feeling bad about ridiculous things for no reason.
“I see,” he said slowly. “Then sleep on the couch downstairs. One of us can wake you if it begins again.”
I found that I didn’t like the idea of him telling me what to do even if he was keen on me. Especially if he was keen on me.
“This isn’t something to do with Behind, where I have to obey you,” I pointed out. “I’ll sleep where I’m comfortable sleeping, and unless JinYeong suddenly falls in love with me there’s no problem sleeping next to him.”
Zero, his blue eyes startled, said, “What?”
“Means there’s nothing to worry about,” I explained. “JinYeong gets all mathematicky when I can’t sleep; does wonders when you’re hopped up from a nightmare.”
I started across the room while he was still standing there, and I heard him say, “What exactly do you mean, if JinYeong falls in love with you?”
“Well, it’s like saying if hell freezes over, isn’t it?” I tossed over my shoulder as I went down the stairs. “Nothing to worry about and all that.”
“Is it really?” came Athelas’ voice through the bannisters. “What a lot I’m learning this morning!”
From the sound of that voice, I would have guessed that he was smiling slightly, but when I got into the lower living room and caught his eyes, he was utterly serious.
Eyes roaming my face, he said, “I take it there was a reason JinYeong was keeping you company last night.”
“Got a visit from an old friend,” I told him. How could I go about asking him for help? Would he help? What would he ask as payment if he did? “You’re not gunna scruff JinYeong too, are you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of disturbing myself so much. Perhaps breakfast can wait a little longer, my lord?”
“I’ll stretch and work out first,” Zero said, and strolled toward the back door. He’d been doing that a lot more lately—like he expected to have to fight a lot more than usual soon. That was a sobering thought. Was he preparing to face his father, or was he just doing more work with the Heirling Sword to try and persuade it to stop coming to me so easily?
I plopped down on my side of the couch and blew my cheeks out. The house felt normal again, which was nice. Or maybe it just felt safe again as a result of Zero being home, I wasn’t quite sure.
“You saw the nightmare again, you say?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A bit different this time, though. It told me to ask what I wanted to ask.”
“I rather think you must have seen our murderer at some point, Pet,” Athelas said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Figured.”
“Did you indeed? I would be curious to know why.”
“Heard its footsteps,” I told him, pushing past the wobbly bit of me that tried to make me stop thinking about the memory. “They went—they were squishy. That’s what my footsteps sounded like when I went—when I went out into the living room and found mum and dad. They wouldn’t have sounded like that unless it’d already been out there and come in to see me afterward. Figure that’s why I’ve got the nightmare in the first place.”
“I take it the nightmare doesn’t usually do so?”
“Nope. First time. Still didn’t see its face though: don’t know what that’s about.”
“So very interesting,” Athelas mused. “And yet, we still can’t identify our killer.”
“Yeah,” I said thickly. “Interesting.”
Ask. Ask for help, insisted my mind, but then JinYeong strolled back into the living room from the kitchen, interrupting the moment. He shoved a cup of coffee under my nose, then headed out to the backyard almost without waiting for me to take it.
I said, “Heck,” quietly and thoughtfully. I still wasn’t used to people bringing me coffee instead of me bringing it to them.
I sipped my coffee while Athelas seemed to reflect on his own thoughts, and wondered if it would be too much to make them eat toast for breakfast again.
Interrupting those thoughts, Athelas said, “Apparently we need to have a discussion, Pet.”
“Oh, is that why everyone vanished?” I said, a bit sourly. Maybe not toast, then. “What’d I do wrong this time? If it’s about me learning how you do your healing thing—”
“Ah, is that w
hat it was?” he said to himself, in quiet triumph. “I knew someone had been doing magic in the house, but there was never enough of it to be sure. No, I was not referring to your attempts at healing magic; I was referring to the fact that my lord wishes us to discuss those things pertaining to the death of your parents and your recurring nightmare.”
“He does, does he?” I said briefly dipping under the influence of the same instinct that I always had when someone tried to talk about my parents—dodge, distract, dismiss. Only this time, I saw it in the cold light of day instead of just following it blindly. Zero might be pushing like this out of some hard-headed desire to make me fully understand what I’d taken on, but I was just as determined to do it and I needed to be aware of those slippery instincts that tried to stop me. And I still had something to ask, myself.
Athelas merely waited. I think he had some idea of the tug-of-war going on inside of me.
I said, “I mean, yeah, all right. Just—I don’t know what I’m going to remember. Everything from the night itself is pretty slippery, and I don’t think what I remember happening is all that happened.”
“We’ll come back to the night itself later,” said Athelas easily. “For now, let us consider other matters.”
He stopped, to all appearances deep in thought, and I prompted, “For instance?”
I wasn’t sure I was happy with the way this was going. Surely the first step in figuring out why my parents had been murdered was to make sure we knew all that had happened on the night? If we didn’t, how was I supposed to segue into asking Athelas about finding missing memories?
“For instance,” he continued, as though he had never stopped, “you said that you spent some time with friends out of state. A little unusual, was it not?”
“I s’pose,” I said, taken aback. This was very far from what I’d expected. “Mum and dad didn’t really like me going over to visit friends, so I reckon I must have been a bit surprised when they let me leave the state.”
Athelas tilted his head. “You reckon. Indeed. I’ll move on to something else for now; we’ll circle back later, I believe.”
“Sounds ominous,” I mumbled. I sipped my coffee again, and discovered that the wriggling somewhere in the region of my ribcage was the tie frog, struggling out from under the couch cushion. I rescued it, wondering who had shoved it in there, and asked, “All right, what next?”
“Deaths in the neighbourhood, my dear.”
“Flamin’ heck! You make it sound like we’re the murder capital of the state or something.” There was my mind doing the dodge and distract thing again. It was so hard not to do it! More cautiously, I pressed on. “I mean, there were actually a lot of deaths in Tasmania back then, but they weren’t in my neighbourhood; they were out Kingston way, and up in Launceston, too.”
“We can consider Launceston at a later point. What sort of deaths?”
“Mum and dad wouldn’t tell me,” I said. “They just said people had been killed, so I had to be careful to be inside before dark, and only to travel on the main roads—make sure I shake things up.”
“What exactly would shaking things up entail, Pet?”
“You know, come back by bus if I went out walking, or come back walking if I went out by bus.”
Heck. Five was right—what kind of parents taught their kid how to discourage ambush by coming back home a different way than they came out? Because that’s what that was. Zero had taught me that, too, and my memory had squirreled away that little bit of my past under the heading of unimportant and don’t need to think about it.
Memories, said my mind. Gotta ask about finding sneaky memories.
But Athelas was still asking questions. “Didn’t you see the deaths on television?”
“We didn’t have telly,” I told him. “Saw a picture in the papers, though: someone had drawn a pentagram around one of the bodies and really stirred things up.
“How very interesting!” murmured Athelas. “So that’s why they weren’t seen as part of the pattern. My lord will be very interested!”
“What, you reckon they were the main murders?”
“Of course. We came across a few cases similar to yours and Morgana’s, but not one for every set of murders, so—”
“So that’s why you weren’t sure it was connected.” I frowned down at my toes and asked, “How come they’re being killed? I can understand if someone’s trying to kill off heirlings, but what about all the other deaths around it?”
“That,” said Athelas, “is exactly our problem. Let us continue.”
Chapter Eight
One of these days, I’d be able to walk down the street without being followed. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Now that I knew I was an heirling it seemed less likely: I’d just keep getting followed until the day one of my followers managed to kill me or capture me, or whatever it was the King Behind did to people who were fated to fight for his throne.
Where was I? Right. I was being followed.
Well, we were being followed: me and JinYeong, off to check out the house that Ralph Standforth and his mum used to live in. Early that morning, Zero had knocked at my bedroom door to demand breakfast and sword practise, and while JinYeong and I were training in the backyard, he’d slipped away—to see ’Zul, probably—and returned with an address for us. Of course, he didn’t tell us what he and Athelas were going to be doing while we were off chasing a house, and I found that I had again missed my chance to ask Athelas about how a person could ferret out sneaky memories.
I’d only got a few steps down the street with JinYeong before I realised that we were being followed; luckily for me, I knew who it was that was following us. Today he was wearing a singlet instead of a full shirt, his tattoo faded purple across his shoulder and the hair under his arms sticking out with a wiry exuberance that was just as disturbing as his beard hair.
“The one with the hair is following again,” said JinYeong, faintly irritated. “I do not wish to bite it, but—”
“Heck no!” I said hastily. “You’ll probably catch something nasty if you bite him. He’s not doing any harm.”
“He smells of—do not tell me that I smell also!”
I grinned at him. “One of these days I’ll have you trained to insult yourself. Oi. Why did Zero say to ask the neighbours before we go in?”
“The merman said there were rumours of ghosts,” he told me. He didn’t grin back, but he looked less offended. “Hyeong thinks it will be wise to ask questions first.”
“What do you think?”
“Me? I think that humans think many things are ghosts that are not ghosts.”
“Well, I thought ghosts were people, so that figures,” I said, shrugging. “So long as it’s not another one of those shades—don’t reckon I want to see one of those again.”
We took a bus up toward the old brewery in silence, listening to the wheezing of the engine while person after person got off, and when the bus became empty and we were only a few stops away, I nudged JinYeong with my elbow.
“Oi. Reckon he’s still there?”
JinYeong looked across at me, and it struck me that his eyes were wary. “It is a different person,” he said. “It is not you. Nor the little zombie.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But you’ve gotta admit that the cases are pretty darn similar. And they never found that boy that Athelas is looking into, either.”
“Human police,” said JinYeong, with a small, derisive lift of his upper lip, “are very useless.”
“Hey, you couldn’t find me.”
“You do not smell like a human.”
“First of all, that’s rich coming from a vampire soaked in cologne. Seriously, what are you, marinating? Second of all, you didn’t smell that Morgana was a zombie, either, and I would have thought a dead person would be pretty easy to smell.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I told you. You are pretending you don’t remember. I had not before smelt a zombie, so I did not know what they smelled like. I am not
as old as hyeong.”
“What if this kid was something else, too?”
A brief beat passed before JinYeong said thoughtfully, “Ah. Kurol su isseo.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said gloomily. “Oi. You reckon the murderer offered this kid’s parents the same thing he offered Morgana’s and mine?”
“If we find him, we will ask him,” said JinYeong, showing his teeth very slightly.
“He’ll only be around if he’s been turned into something awful like Morgana,” I said. There were no good outcomes here. “He disappeared somewhere in the twenties. No way he’s still alive in the normal way.”
“Hyeong says that heirlings live longer than natural humans.”
“When they’re not killed by the king or the Family,” I mumbled, not entirely politely. That made sense: the bit of vampire spit that often ran around in my blood kept me faster and stronger, and I could well imagine what a drop of other Behindkind blood could do, especially if it actually belonged in the body. “Hang on, does that mean that—Whoops! this is us! Quick, press the button.”
JinYeong disdained to touch the button, but he did stand up, and the bus stopped for him without us having to say a word. I called out a thanks! to the driver, but she was in her own little hazy world of vampire-glamour and would only gaze after JinYeong as he alighted.
“Looks like you got a new fan,” I said, grinning a bit. I took a quick look around us and added, “Which one is it, again? Number seven? It’s not the block of flats over there, is it?”
It wasn’t that they didn’t look old enough to have been around since the 20s, it was just that until now, all the kids I’d heard of in my situation had been in their own houses—nothing so much as even semi-detached.
JinYeong shrugged. “It is easier to talk to the neighbours like this,” he said.
“Yeah, but which ones should we start with?” There was a building across the road, which might give a good view into the apartments across the street, but the flats next door would probably be more likely to have heard something.
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 16
