“Don’t be silly,” he said, his head jerking backward like I’d suggested she came in to throw a boot at him. “I’m little and dirty, and if I kiss her, she’ll be smudged.”
I managed to stop myself from retorting that kids were supposed to smudge things, because it seemed as though that might offend him. Instead, I switched to the opposite seat and slung an arm around the dishevelled and sticky JinYeong’s neck and said, “What’s a bit of muck between friends?”
JinYeong’s brows twitched up, but it was the revenant’s face that caught my attention: there was a kind of starved look to it that he either didn’t or couldn’t hide. I switched couches again and put my arm around him instead.
“You are making me messy,” he said, in a small voice.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” I said cheerfully. “Not worrying about mess.”
“Feels good,” he repeated, but I wasn’t sure if he was just repeating what I’d said, or if he really meant it. He didn’t move away, though, and his pinched little face seemed a bit warmer.
I patted his arm. “Ralph, if your mum didn’t come in to kiss you goodnight, what did she come in for?”
“She brought in the fairy,” he said solemnly. “The one that killed me.”
There was that stillness from Zero and JinYeong again, but this time it was definitely a predatory stillness.
“The one that you nearly died trying to kick out?” I asked slowly. I’d thought this kid was more aware than Morgana, but it looked as though he was having trouble remembering he was dead. “Or the one who killed you?”
Ralph shivered, even with my arm around him. “It was him, the same one. He killed me but I’m still alive. We kicked him out.”
“You’re doing good, kid,” I told him quietly, wishing I could be more gentle. “Don’t suppose you remember his face, eh?”
“No,” said the revenant hollowly. “I remember his face.”
Chapter Ten
I don’t think any of us actually expected him to say he remembered it, because there was a blank kind of silence from all of us as we stared at Ralph and then at each other.
“Hang on,” I said at last. “You do remember it? You remember the bloke’s face?”
Ralph nodded and pointed at a black-and-white photograph across the room. From a distance it looked like someone had scribbled across it: an autograph, probably.
“It was him,” he said. “But he had a moustache.”
I crossed the room to peer at the photograph and tried not to sigh. Strolling back to the couch, I showed it to Zero and JinYeong, then sat down again next to Ralph.
I pointed at the picture. “Leslie Howard is the one who killed you and your mum?”
“It was him,” he said, shoulders hunching a bit. “He was even black-and-white like in the movies.”
“Must have been scary for you,” I said, still fighting back disappointment. As far as I knew, Leslie Howard hadn’t been in the actual movies until after Ralph was dead: he must have seen the man on telly one time while his house was rented out.
Zero raised his brows at me just slightly, as if to ask why I wasn’t more interested in the identification, and JinYeong murmured to him in Korean. Trust JinYeong to know about black-and-white stage and film stars.
“Never mind what he looked like for now,” Zero said to Ralph. “Tell us about the year that you died. What else happened around then?”
“Lots happened,” said the revenant in surprise, looking up at me and then at Zero. “All of my champions died, one by one, and then—”
He stopped, because Zero had said something I was pretty sure was a Behindkind swear, slow and vicious. To me, he said, “Try to get Athelas on the phone. Leave a message if you have to.”
I took my phone out of my pocket, but asked, “What’s he talking about, champions?”
Instead of answering, Zero said sharply to the revenant, “Your champions died? How many? How did they die? What clan and kind?”
Ralph shrank into me and I put my arm around him again, squeezing his shoulder comfortingly. “They didn’t tell me any of that clan or kind stuff. They just said they were here to protect me and to support me. Mama said not to mind them: she said royalty doesn’t need to mind the servants.”
“Hyeong,” said JinYeong in astonishment. “Did someone stand up for this one secretly? They were all—?”
“How many were there?” Zero repeated, more patiently this time. “How did they die?”
“There were three,” said Ralph. He looked comfortable again, but still rather puzzled. “Mama said they were hanging in front of their houses so they could see their mistakes. She was very upset about it.”
“Anyone gunna stop and tell me what champions are, or am I just supposed to guess?” I said to the room at large. It wasn’t much good asking Ralph, mind you; he might know the right words to say, but it was obvious that he only knew one facet of the things he was talking about. Royalty, huh? Was that how someone had sold it to his Mama to get her on board for whatever it was they were trying to do?
“Champions are what we call any of the Behindkind houses who throw their weight behind a particular heirling,” said Zero, his voice still stiff with shock. “Or, specifically, the fighters they choose to protect their heirling from the other heirlings. If each of the murder cycles was made up of champions…”
To Ralph, who was still looking confused, I said, “For a skeleton, you’re doing a pretty good job of putting meat on the bones of our investigation.”
Ralph giggled and said, “I don’t know what that means.”
“Don’t worry, kid, I’m still trying to figure it out, too. I s’pose someone was trying to get a sneaky leg-up in the competition and didn’t tell anyone they’d found an heirling?”
“It is worse than that,” JinYeong said soberly. “If it was just one here, another there, it would seem natural, an gurae? But it is not just one team of champions here and another there. For this many champions to find this many heirlings—”
“They were all working together. One organisation,” agreed Zero grimly. “Besides the Family, I don’t know who has such a reach.”
“What about a subsection of the same bunch who were running Upper Management?” I suggested. “You blokes didn’t even know about them until they turned up and started making trouble for us with Athelas. If they kept themselves that well hidden, what makes you think they couldn’t keep a whole network of heirlings and champions hidden for as long as it took the king or whoever to find out?”
I had another thought, too, but this one I kept to myself. What if…what if, just like Blackpoint with Abigail’s group and the humans who had allowed themselves to be used by Upper Management, there were humans who had sold themselves to Upper Management for the safety of being cared for and the promise of maybe a throne if they lived? Unlike the Family and the King, Upper Management were very good at working with humans—what if that connection had allowed them a closer look at the human world and other potential heirs?
What if they still had contacts with people like Abigail?
For a brief moment, I understood Abigail’s utter abhorrence at the idea of working with any kind of fae. It was like a cancer: give one bit of leeway and it got into absolutely everything.
“Pet—”
“I don’t know anything about champions,” I said. “If my parents knew, they didn’t tell me. What, you reckon I had some, too?”
“Almost certainly,” he said. “Whether or not they approved, they would have had watchers at the very least. If they made a bargain, they would have had champions for you.”
“Bit of a shame we can’t question the king, eh?” I said shortly. “Reckon he could give us a few answers.”
“It would be as useless as questioning my father,” said Zero, and I shivered from pure reaction. Of Ralph, he asked, “Did your mother tell you who your father was?”
He wasn’t quite young enough to say with confidence that he didn’t have a father, but
he was young enough to look confused by the question. “Mama didn’t tell me,” he said.
“Pet, call Athelas,” Zero reminded me.
“Right.”
I dialled and stepped away from the conversation for a bit of quiet, but there was no answer. I tried again, and this time I left a message when the beeps sounded.
“You better get over here quick, Athelas, or at least answer your phone. Come through unit number nine: Vesper. This kid says he remembers a face and this house likes eating people. Plus there’s a um, champion new lead for us to follow. Also I reckon Zero is worried about you but he won’t admit it, so—”
The phone chirped at me to tell me the message had ended, and I sniffed. Oh well, that would have to do.
I came back into the conversation to tell Zero, “He’s not answering. You sent him a text earlier, too, didn’t you?”
“Before I came. I’ve heard nothing back, either; we’ll have to make a detour on our way home to see if we can meet with him.”
“You’re going,” Ralph said sadly. Not a question; a statement of truth.
“Hang on,” I said. “We’ve still got something else to look at here.”
“Eomma,” said JinYeong, without translating it for the revenant. “Where is its mother?”
I nodded. “Exactly. Oi, kid, is there a part of the house that’s different from the rest?”
The revenant looked at me with big eyes. “Mama’s resting room. I don’t go there anymore.”
“Yeah? What’s different about it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not allowed in there, but it feels different from the outside. A few people went in there and didn’t come out again, but it wasn’t me that did it.”
Great. So there could be a few bodies in there, too.
“We’ll come back and talk to you,” said Zero, already moving toward the door.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Ralph, who was looking distinctly worried, “we won’t do anything to hurt the house or you. We’re just gunna take a look.”
“Is it about the fairy who turned me into a revenant?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Gotta check a few things. One day, I’ll try to introduce you to a zombie I know. Don’t think she’ll be worried about a few bones, so you won’t need to worry about keeping up appearances with her.”
“I’ll show you where it is, then,” he said, and trotted out ahead of Zero.
He led us back into the hall and down the stairs, then in a u-turn that had us walking toward the back of the house along the hallway there. He stopped halfway down and said, “I’m not allowed to go in there, but you can go in. You won’t touch anything, will you? She doesn’t like it when you touch things.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t mess the place up,” I said, because I didn’t think we could promise not to touch anything. “We’ll be out in a bit.”
He hung back there in the hall while Zero opened the door to the resting room, a sorry little spectre in the darkness that seemed to gather the walls around him in a riot of wall-paper patterns climbing over him like vines.
I was happy for Zero to go ahead; I was pretty sure I knew what we were going to see, and I wasn’t anxious to get a look at it too quickly. JinYeong followed close behind me, still smelling of mould and something else that I assumed was the Between equivalent of house digestion juices, shifting his shoulders in irritation that he was still dirty.
“Don’t worry,” I said over my shoulder as we entered the room. “I’ll hose you down in the garden when we get back.”
He made a psh sort of a noise at me, his upper lip lifting in the tiniest of snarls, but that could have been because there was a distinctly musty smell to the room we’d just entered and I’m pretty sure JinYeong likes to be the most strongly smelling thing in any given room.
There was a body, of course, sitting in a chair toward the back corner of the room. She wasn’t really easy to see, draped in shadows that had no real source and clung to everything in the room, but I could tell that she was female by the fringe of her skirt. I could also see that she’d been dead for a long time now, because her body was more skin-plastered skeleton than flesh.
“Flamin’ heck,” I said, rather thickly. “I’m getting pretty tired of finding people’s parents mummified in their houses.”
“She’s not mummified,” said Zero briefly, lifting one of the woman’s dehydrated arms by the black fabric of her sleeve.
“How dare you!” said a female voice at the same time. A shadow detached itself from the wall, soft, sticky strands of something clinging between it and the wall, and wafted behind the body, spreading stickiness as she went.
“I do not like spiders,” JinYeong said, his voice short with dislike. “What is she doing?”
“How dare you touch me!” said the spidery woman from behind the body. She passed along the wall as swiftly as she’d emerged, filaments streaming out from behind her, and circumnavigated us, dulling the sound around us.
“Should she be doing that?” I asked Zero, and my voice sounded a bit more muffled, too.
“She can do as she wishes,” he said coldly. “There’s nothing for us here: we should leave.”
“Heck no!” I said savagely. “We are not going to leave her here to keep telling him what a grotty little thing he is and making him think he deserves to be locked in the coal cellar!”
“Her voice can’t reach him,” Zero said. “In fact, I’d be surprised if he’s been able to hear her for the last fifty years at least.”
I frowned, looking around the room, and said, “Do you mean the cobwebby feel to it? Is that why her body is still here instead of buried?”
“Yes,” he said, on a sigh.
“Lemme guess: that’s something I shouldn’t be able to see?”
“It’s magic; and yes, you shouldn’t be able to see it if you’re not…more than just human. The older the house grows, and the more she weaves herself into this place, the less she can touch the outside world. All she can do at this point is feed the house, which is—”
“—Feeding the kid,” I finished. I jabbed JinYeong in the ribs and said, “Familiar, isn’t it?”
“Everything is familiar,” he said. “Hyeong, why have we not come here before?”
“We weren’t focusing on peripheral cases,” he said. “The method of murder was different and we had no reason to think that they were anything other than ripple effect murders.”
“And they were only humans,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it, but it came out. “All of the peripheral murders—they were all humans, right?”
Zero took a very long time to answer. When he did, it was to ask, “Do you want me to apologise? I prioritised Behindkind deaths, yes, but I didn’t ignore these deaths wholly because they were human. It was more that we didn’t expect them to be so important because they were human.”
“You lot really need to work on that thing you do where you think humans aren’t important, considering every one of your heirlings needs to have at least a bit of human blood in them,” I said.
“Leave this place!” whispered the spider ghost in dark tones. “You will never flourish here!”
“You don’t look like you’re doing a flamin’ lot of flourishing, yourself!” I told it, as it swept around for another layer. “What a bunch of garbage!”
“I layer my nest,” she said, drifting around behind her own body again. “Warm and cosy and perfect. You’re not to touch anything!”
“What about your kid?” I asked her. “He’s outside thinking he can’t come in because it’ll make his mum mad.”
She faltered briefly, then continued on. “He can’t come in. He’ll only touch things and make them dirty. Such an awful little thing, ever since he was born.”
I said bitterly, “Yeah, we heard you shut him in the coal cellar.”
“You can’t let him in here. I was made a promise that I’ll never have to see him again if I stay in here.”
“Funny,” I s
aid, and I think right then that my voice was about as cold as Zero’s. “That’s just what I was about to ask you. I heard that someone might have asked you whether you wanted to save your own life, or his.”
There was a soft, dismissive sound from behind me, where she was still webbing her darkness. “He had no life that wasn’t from me. He’s mine, my flesh and blood; I can do with him what I want. Of course he should die for me.”
“Yeah? And how did that work out for you?”
“It’s not even a human anymore,” Zero said. “There’s no use trying to make it change its mind or understand what it did wrong. It’s a memory with shadows.”
“I know,” I said, with angry tears at the back of my eyes. “But it’s so horrible and that poor kid—!”
“It’s not a kid anymore,” he said.
JinYeong shrugged. “It is not dead, either.”
“Like Morgana,” I said. I didn’t know exactly what a revenant was, apart from looking like a skeleton if you caught it in the wrong light, but there was another connection here. “Technically dead but still alive.”
“I suppose you could say that,” Zero said.
“Then your killer is definitely fae,” I said gloomily. “Dodgy and manipulative about fulfilling bargains. Why am I alive, anyway? Messing with the pattern a bit, isn’t it?”
“We’ll talk later,” he told me briefly. “This thing may not be alive, but it can still answer questions if someone comes to see it.”
“Oh.”
“All is death and decay,” murmured the spider ghost, wafting around us again. “All will be what it once was. Life and death have no meaning.”
I glared at it as it circled. I probably would have let it have a bit more of a mouthful, even though it wouldn’t really do any good, but Zero had already turned around and was walking through the door. JinYeong grabbed me by the hoodie and tugged me back across the room, too, leaving the spider ghost to her endless circles and gloomy predicaments of decay that silenced as soon as we shut the door to her room.
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 20
