Since the room seemed pretty stable for a little while, I took a closer look out the windows. There wasn’t a courtyard in sight, just a sky that was too bright and something glassy and slowly moving below that couldn’t possibly be the sea of slow-moving crystal that it looked like because crystal seas weren’t something that existed.
Not in the human world, anyway.
I shivered a bit with the stray thought that as an heirling my position between worlds was very different these days—wondering suddenly if I would have to go Behind to submit my resignation to the crown. I didn’t think I’d be able to rest comfortably in a world that had crystal seas. It was too alien; too dangerously other.
Even if I had a Zero to stand behind, it was too much.
When I cracked the window open just a bit, even the air smelt and felt different.
“Flamin’ heck,” I said, and shut it again firmly. No way I wanted to be going outside right now. Whatever else happened, I had to try and make sure the house didn’t kick me out while Zero was still coming. Hopefully he wouldn’t find it too hard to get in.
I’d managed to fight my way through a sandstorm along the upstairs landing, nearly nabbed the kid by a coat-rack that turned into a far too affectionate octopus, and slid down the bannisters to avoid a suddenly-lava grand staircase before Zero got there.
Thankfully the outside I could see from the downstairs windows was still courtyard and apartment block out front; it was even more of a relief when I saw Zero drop down into the courtyard and cross it at a run.
The door opened almost before I touched the handle, which made me grin sourly. Apparently the house knew how to behave when someone in authority was legging it across the yard to get in.
There was a deep frown between Zero’s brows when he stepped through the door, but it vanished as soon as he saw me.
“JinYeong?”
“Somewhere in the walls. He doesn’t have to breathe, right?”
He stared at me. “It’s not necessary.”
“That’s good; he’s probably fine, then.” I caught the faint touch of amusement to his eyes and explained, “The walls can get a bit…watery every now and then.”
“All right. Can you stop it if the boy tries to do it again?”
“Mostly, if I’m expecting it.”
“Where is he?”
“In the sitting room,” I said, tipping my head to the left. “He’s been leaving little red trails around the house everywhere.”
“Red?” Zero looked around, and nodded. “No sign of Athelas yet?”
“Not a thread of tweed,” I replied. “You know how the kid’s doing that red thing?”
He strode toward the sitting room. “I’ve got an idea. You did well, Pet. Come along.”
That left me with a pleasantly warm feeling. It was nice to know that Zero wasn’t too worried about JinYeong; I already had a good idea that he was going to be fine, but I didn’t like not being able to see that he was fine.
I followed Zero into the sitting room and found him doing a swift once-over of the place. A few taps on the wall here, a bit of wriggly magic there.
“Can you see the boy?” he asked. “Or even the trail you mentioned? I’ll need to talk to him.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said grimly. “Reckon I can bring him out here. The house is fighting me, but Between is willing to work with me as usual.”
“Do it.”
I reached out my hands to that trail of red and fairly reefed it toward us as if it was a bungee rope. Maybe thinking of it that way did some good, because the kid came flying through the wall and sailed over our heads, startled and struggling all the way. He caught himself lightly against the far windows and alighted on the window-seat that was striped with blue and gold, terrifyingly familiar with his lack of gravity.
“You’d better get out of my house right now,” he said, his feet planted obstinately in a way that made me think of Peter Pan. “I’ve been nice until now, but when it gets dark, it’ll be too late for you.”
“Give us back our vampire,” I told him.
“Leave my house!”
“Give him back,” said Zero, his voice terribly cold. “Or I’ll burn this entire place to the ground and salt the remains.”
“Try it!” the pale boy said, his eyes flashing with red fury. “You’ll burn your friend as well.”
“I think not.”
“Anyway,” the boy said scornfully. “You can’t burn this place down—people have tried before. It just eats the flames, or collapses the bulldozer, or eats the dynamite. Whatever you try to use, it won’t work. There’s nothing in this world that can destroy my house, and I don’t give you permission to be in here.”
“I wasn’t going to use anything from your world,” Zero said, and with a smile even colder than his voice, he snapped a blue flame into being between his fingers.
“Look, kid,” I said. “You don’t know any better, and I know this is your house, but when he goes all quiet like that, it’s a bad sign.”
Maybe he’d already figured that out. At any rate, his eyes grew very large and fixed on the blue flame. At a whisper, he said, “What—what is that? You can’t have that in here!”
“This,” said Zero, prompting the flame into growth until it licked all across his hand and leapt eagerly toward the ceiling, “is fae light. It is very good at eating away at the appearance of things.”
“Put it away!” shouted the boy. “You can’t have it in here!”
“We’ll put it away when you give us back our vampire,” I said.
He was definitely scared now, but his chin was still mulish when he said, “I w-won’t!”
“Very well,” said Zero, and flicked the blue fire at the closest wall.
I don’t know what I expected, but whatever it was, it wasn’t for the entire wall to fairly explode with flames that ate into bricks and plaster like acid through flesh, the entire lot going up with a roaring that sounded suspiciously like screaming.
The boy shrieked, half his face alight in blue flame that lit up a skull as pale and empty-eyed as any sugar skull instead of the flesh and blood that ought to have been there. Behind him, in the reflection of the window, I saw a skeleton burning, burning.
“Stop! Stop! My house! Don’t touch my house!”
“Give us back our vampire, revenant,” Zero said, through his teeth.
If the kid hadn’t been screaming, I might have laughed aloud. Give us back our vampire. Not something I ever thought I’d hear Zero say. Not the us. Not the our. If I was to be really hopeful about it, I’d think we were actually a family. Nothing weird or uncomfortable—just family. The kind of love that would mean I could sit snuggled up with Zero again without worrying about what he’d think of it.
The revenant, its face and torso consumed with blue flame that showed the white bones beneath, howled, “Stop!” once more before that howl devolved into a many-layered screaming that merged with the screaming of the walls, the ceiling, the whole flamin’ house.
And then one of the walls bulged and JinYeong came tumbling through, all cobwebs and slime and mould. I grabbed him by the mucky collar and heaved him away from the wall, and one of his hands closed around my wrist as he scrambled to get away, cursing in Korean.
Zero saw; I know he did. He didn’t stop the flames, though, and the revenant’s wailing grew wilder and higher, screaming without pause for breath.
“Zero!” I yelled. “Stop! JinYeong is out! You don’t have to kill the kid!”
“It’s already dead,” Zero said grimly. “It’s a revenant. The flames show it for what it is.”
I grabbed his arm with my spare hand, JinYeong still staggering beside me, and said again, “Stop! I don’t care if he’s already dead; you’re killing him worse!”
His eyes flickered with a wholly human amusement, and the flames sank, then died.
“Pet,” he said, as the revenant leaped for cover behind one of the couches and began to weep noisily, “you ca
n’t kill something that’s already dead. I was trying to separate it from this world.”
“Yeah,” I said, glaring at him. “That’s killing him. He might not be alive in the same way that we are, but he’s still interacting with the world. And we need to talk to him.”
Zero looked as though he struggled with himself for a moment or two. Eventually, he said stiffly, “I may have over-reacted.”
I exchanged a startled look with JinYeong, who seemed even more disbelieving than me, and said, “Yeah, maybe. Thanks for coming and rescuing us, though.”
JinYeong sniffed, but I was pretty sure he was grateful, too. “That pretend boy is hiding behind the couch,” was all he said.
Have any of you blokes ever tried to coax a revenant out from behind a couch? It’s not easy. Especially after you’ve set fire to his house and half of his face with fae light, showing the extent of his…deadness.
Zero sat down on the other couch to wait it out, and JinYeong vanished into the bathroom to clean himself up, but returned a few moments later because there was no running water. By that time, I was cross-legged beside the couch, peeking around the back of it to catch the red-glowing eyes of the revenant boy.
“You can come out,” I said to him. “We won’t hurt you; just don’t try to get the house to eat us again, okay?”
The revenant, clinging to the fabric of the couch, only wept harder.
“I won’t let Zero throw fire at you again. I won’t let him set the house on fire, either. We didn’t come here to hurt you, we just wanted to talk to you.”
“We did not,” said JinYeong loudly, “expect to be eaten. That was rude.”
“You weren’t invited!” yelled the revenant, making me jump.
“Okay, that’s true,” I agreed. “But feeding him to your house was a bit much, wasn’t it?”
“An over-reaction,” Zero said, in an aside. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was on his dignity about having to apologise earlier.
“Who are you, anyway?” demanded the revenant, wiping its nose on its sleeve.
Goodness knew why: it wasn’t like it actually had bodily fluids to wipe away, if the fae light had actually exposed what it really looked like. I took it as a good sign that it wasn’t actively sobbing anymore, though.
Encouragingly, I said, “We’re just here to talk to you. We’re…investigators. We want to know what happened to you.”
There was the very slightest forward motion: the revenant crawled forward on its hands and knees and crouched just a foot away from the end of the couch, gazing at me. “Really?” it said. “Nobody ever cares about that. They just want the house, and it’s mine.”
“Come out and tell us about it,” I said soothingly. “Start with your birthday first.”
Of all the things that could have made him suspicious, that one didn’t. He said, “April fourth, nineteen sixteen.”
Marazul had already told us, so I knew what his date of birth was—or at least, I knew what the date of birth was for the boy who had supposedly been killed in this house in nineteen twenty-five. It was still weird for me to be looking at his face and having the thought that he had been here nearly a hundred years running around the back of my mind, screaming.
“Your name is Ralph, isn’t it?”
He crawled out properly and crouched there to gaze up at me. “How do you know my real name? No one ever knows my name!”
To my right, I saw JinYeong and Zero become more still than they had been a moment ago—the stillness of predators, yeah, but at least they were trying. I threw a quick look at Zero, and he nodded: they didn’t want to frighten Ralph back behind the couch, so they were willing to let me handle things for now.
“So, what,” I said, turning back to him as he settled himself gingerly on the couch, facing us all, “you’ve been haunting this place for the last ninety-five years?”
“I don’t haunt,” said Ralph the revenant, with dignity. “That’s for ghosts and shades. There’s more of me than a bit of shadow and left-over personality. I have a skeleton.”
“Yeah, sounds like the opposite of creepy,” I said. “I heard that this place was supposed to be haunted, though.”
“People keep trying to move in,” said Ralph sulkily. “And they don’t listen when I tell them that I was here first and that it’s my house. They just keep coming in and making noise and trying to move things, and my house doesn’t work like that. Things have to stay in the same places.”
“Not haunted, then,” I said, nodding. I thought about that for a bit, and grinned. “Bet you show them your skeleton, though, eh?”
“Sometimes,” Ralph said, with a guilty sort of grin. “Mostly, I just let the house eat a few of them and spit them out. Sometimes I keep them here for a while so they get the idea that it’s stupid to hang around.”
I glanced across at the still sodden and visibly irritated JinYeong, and grinned. “Yeah, I see that. What about the ones that don’t come back out?”
“What, the three men and the one with glasses? They went somewhere else when the house swallowed them. I couldn’t get them back out. The one with the glasses won’t leave, either.”
He sounded injured about that, which made it hard to stop grinning. Obviously the investigator that Vesper had told us about had found something to believe in.
I didn’t like to think where the three young men with the cameras had got to, so I asked Ralph instead, “Oi. How come you don’t have water here?”
“In my experience, empty human houses don’t usually have water and power,” Zero said, but he said it quietly so as not to startle the revenant.
“Yeah, but what if the realtors are showing it to people? He said there were people moving in and out: the real estate people must have kept on the lights and stuff so they could show it to people.”
It was weird: even though I still had power and water at my house for those years that I was alone, it wasn’t as though the house got shown to people often. Here, where the house had evidently been rented out and sold so many times, it would have made sense to keep them on. I remembered, suddenly, a water or power bill that I’d seen in amongst the paperwork I’d given to Five-Four-One, and wondered if I should have another look at it.
“The water and lights go when the people go,” the revenant said sadly. “They don’t care about me.”
“Maybe they would if you weren’t always flashing your skeleton at them,” I pointed out. “Some people don’t like that. And if you’re going to be doing eyes-like-coal, they’re going to run first and ask questions later.”
“I like water, too,” Ralph muttered. “They shouldn’t just take it with them when they go. That’s rude.”
“What does a revenant need with water?” asked Zero in a voice that was closer to his normal rumble. The sound of it made Ralph jump a bit, but he didn’t make a leap for it behind the couch again, which was a win.
“I like watching it flow,” he said. “I can touch it, too. I can touch everything: I have a skeleton.”
“How’d you know what you are?” I asked him curiously. If he was anything like Morgana, he wouldn’t have got out much, and even with the way his house was all threaded through with Between—
Hang on.
“Flamin’ heck!” I said, looking around at the squishiness and malleability of the entire house. It was Between, but Between in a way that wasn’t quite the Between I was used to. “You’ve got access to Behind, haven’t you? Not just the Between bit that’s useful for getting the house to eat people.”
“Monsters used to keep coming through,” he said gloomily. “Different ones from me. But then I found that most of them couldn’t hurt me, and I found out how to use the house to protect myself. Now they don’t come in anymore. I think it was a fairy that told me what I am. He had fire that burned the house, too; we nearly died kicking him out.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed it: he’d drawn up his legs and wrapped his arms around them again, just a little kid who had
lived for over a hundred years, and ninety-odd of those years by himself. But we had to ask questions—we had a murderer to stop, and I had questions of my own that needed answering.
And yet suddenly I felt that I hadn’t had too bad of a life, compared with him.
I sat next to him, close enough so that our arms were up against each others’, just sorta nudging him. “Oi,” I said, a bit more gently. “The night that you turned into a revenant—what happened?”
“There was a radio play,” he said, his face lighting up. “It was new and exciting, but mama said I wasn’t allowed to listen to it because I got jam on the knob that morning. I had to be locked in the coal cellar to remember not to touch things.”
“She locked you in the coal cellar for getting a bit of jam on the radio knob?” I stared at Zero and then at JinYeong before remembering that to them, that probably wasn’t so dreadful. Zero’s dad had actively killed his pets to break him of the idea that he could have anything that couldn’t be taken from him. I nudged Ralph a bit more and said to him, “I’m sorry, kid.”
“If I touch things, I make them dirty,” he explained. “Mama has to work very hard to fix them, so I can’t touch things. But sometimes I get excited and forget. If I go in the cellar, it will help me to remember because it’s dirty like me.”
“You’re not dirty, kid,” I said, after I’d recovered from that. Flaming heck! At least I’d had good parents before they were murdered: I didn’t have a messed up childhood and then get turned into a revenant. “What happened after that? After you got out of the cellar?”
“She came into my room later, after I’d had a bath,” he said, wrapping his arms around his knees. He sank into a heavy kind of silence, his mouth becoming a tragic bow, and around us, the house began to whisper and move and bulge.
“Did she come in to kiss you goodnight?” I asked, keeping an eye on the movement. It wasn’t like I thought we were in any danger now that Zero was here with his fae light, but if I had to coax the revenant out from behind the couch every time he got upset, we’d be here far longer than intended.
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 19
