Ralph stood just down the hall, his hands clasped together, and said when he saw us, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Oi, kid.”
“What?”
“Don’t go in there, all right?”
He nodded solemnly. “That’s what he said, too.”
“He?” I had a bad feeling about this.
“The fairy that took Mama away. He said that if I went in there, he’d come back and find me and burn my bones.”
Sickness churned in my stomach. I didn’t have memories like that—just nightmares. I wondered if I’d got those nightmares because the murderer had once said something like that to me, and I just didn’t remember it. It was another sharp, jolting reminder that I needed to find some way of bringing those memories back out—some way of letting my mind know it was okay for things to bubble to the surface where I could see them. Simple questioning with Athelas hadn’t got me too far, but maybe…maybe something a bit stronger would do the trick. Something like Zero’s dad’s little brain worms. Just preferably not from Zero’s dad. Maybe that was how I could approach it with Athelas.
“He won’t come back and burn your bones,” I said to him. “Don’t worry.”
“But Mama said for me to stay out first, so I ought to listen to her, oughtn’t I?”
I put my hand on his head and instead of hair beneath my hand, I felt smooth bone. I patted it anyway, just as if there really was hair to ruffle. “Don’t worry about anything else she said: just that bit.”
He smiled up at me in a trusting sort of a way, and I felt a pull at my heart.
Was that how Zero felt when he patted me on the head? Comforting and sort of protective—an older sibling who could see the unfortunate truth the kid couldn’t be allowed to see yet? I found myself frowning and rubbed at the frown with the palm of my hand.
I didn’t know exactly why it bothered me so much: I’d been protesting against the way that Zero took charge of me and kept me in the dark since nearly as long as I’d known him. Maybe it was how uncomfortable that thought was alongside the one Morgana had planted. I think he likes you.
He’d opened up a lot more recently—almost as if he was going to give me the full measure of what I was asking for, just to show me how uncomfortable it was—but that pat on the head that was becoming more and more regular still stuck in the back of my mind. Any sign of physical affection had almost always come from me before now, and I couldn’t deny that there was a change.
Trying to push the discomfort away, I asked Ralph, “You got a computer in here somewhere? Or a TV, anything like that?”
“I put them in the coal cellar,” he said. “So it doesn’t mess up the house.”
“That’s something, anyway,” I muttered. “Oi, kid: remind me to sort you out with an internet connection and power or something next time I come around.”
His eyes lit up. “You’re going to come back again?”
“Yeah, so long as you don’t try and get the house to eat me again.”
“Pet,” Zero said in a low voice. “It’s not wise for heirlings to spend too much time togeth—”
“What, like me and you?”
JinYeong chuckled, low and malicious. “Do not fight, hyeong,” he said, and sauntered away to the front door despite his disreputable condition. “You will not win.”
“I resent the implication that I’m hard to deal with!” I called after him, but he just laughed again and went down the staircase.
Zero, his eyes very light blue, said, “Very well, I yield.”
“Heck, that was quick.”
“We’d best go and see if we can find Athelas,” he said. “You’ve still heard nothing from him?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. You reckon he’s in trouble?”
“I think I sent him somewhere alone when I should have gone with him,” Zero said below his breath. “We’ll find him: he’s unlikely to have run into something that could kill him, but if this house is any indicator, he might be finding it hard to leave.”
I stared up at him. “He went to the other house? The one from his file?”
“I thought it wise to divide our assets,” said Zero rather curtly. “Apparently, I was wrong. Out, Pet. We’d best go see if we can find him.”
“What about the kid?” I asked, in a low voice. “What if someone gets in here?”
“No one knows he’s here, apart from our murderer—and I very much doubt anyone’s going to be able to get in if he doesn’t want them to do so.”
“That’s not enough,” I said stubbornly. “Your dad’s out looking for people like this kid, I’ll bet you—and at least seven humans have already disappeared here for good. What about that thing you did to Morgana’s house? Can you do that?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Wait outside with JinYeong. I’ll work something out.”
We would have gone out by the lane, but when we were nearly out in the street, Zero said softly, “Stop,” and I saw what he’d already seen: out on the street were a couple of loiterers who definitely weren’t human.
“Reckon they’re looking for us?” I asked, gazing at shadows that didn’t match their bodies. Their bodies said normal human male, but their shadows suggested something far squishier and prickly, with powerful shoulders.
“They’re adjuncts of my father,” Zero said shortly. “Whatever they’re here for, they can’t be allowed to see us coming out from this house. Not when we’re so close to an heirling—he’d have the boy burned and salted before we could get back.”
JinYeong shrugged. “It does not matter if they see us come out,” he said softly. “It matters only if they see us come out and live to tell your father.”
“No need to kill people if we don’t have to,” I said. I didn’t think that adjuncts of Zero’s dad deserved any particular consideration, but it certainly wasn’t right to chase down and slaughter them just to make sure they didn’t open their mouths. “We can go back through Vesper’s flat and find a way out from there. She said it was okay.”
“I suppose we should think ourselves fortunate that you endear yourself to other humans so easily,” Zero said to me, interrupting JinYeong’s muttering that it was easier to kill. “JinYeong, stop complaining. There’s no need to expend the energy killing minions when we could just slip out where they can’t see us. The less attention we draw to ourselves, the better.”
“I’m just too adorable for my own good,” I told him, dragging JinYeong along with us toward the wall. He leaped up ahead of me as though he hadn’t had to be dragged across the yard, showing off his vampiric ability to defy gravity, then reached down and snatched me up before Zero could give me the boost he’d briefly knelt to offer.
“Heck,” I said, grabbing JinYeong’s arms to stop myself overbalancing into the uncomfortably tiny space pretending to be a backyard on the other side. Zero joined us in a powerful leap, and used the wall-top as a springboard to disappear over the top of Vesper’s balcony.
His face appeared again for a moment: he said curtly, “Get in here, JinYeong.”
It was only after I lowered my gaze to blink at JinYeong in confusion that I heard the noise—the unmistakeable noise—of battle.
“No!” I said, sharp and pleading. Not Vesper. They couldn’t fight in that little old lady’s flat—she was too weird and nice and alive.
“Up,” said JinYeong, and threw me upward without any sign of effort. He was beside me in a second, the both of us swinging a leg over the balustrade and tumbling onto the balcony. He darted ahead of me into the unit, but dove straight across the living room, and I saw why a moment later.
It wasn’t just one or two Behindkind, and they hadn’t stayed in the street. Athelas, jacket-less and with his arms bloody in tatters from fingers to bicep, equipped with only a single, short sword, slashed and stabbed in Vesper’s kitchen, whirling furiously amidst a group of five or six assorted Behindkind. Through the broken door, I heard the sound of shouting in t
he corridor, and saw Ezri and Cadence scuffle past, swinging hard and fast with cricket bats. Zero’s voice shouted out there, too, so I abandoned the thought of helping the girls and concentrated on Vesper, instead.
She was crouched in her chair, even her feet off the floor as though it was contaminated, knitting furiously with her face turned away from the vicious snarl of teeth, vampire and Behindkind that roiled around her easy-chair and occasionally bumbled into it, shaking her nearly out of her refuge.
I darted across the room, without weapon and almost without thought, and wrenched Vesper’s chair around to face the wall just in time to avoid the sword that plunged into the back of it and emerged inches from her cheek at the front instead.
“Got any more knitting needles?” I asked her, gasping. “Set, please.”
“Anything for you, my dear,” she said, and her voice was barely shaking, though her hands were when she reached into the knitting bag beside her and passed me two very sturdy 15mm needles.
“Keep knitting,” I said before I left her. “JinYeong will make sure they don’t touch you.”
“If I don’t see it, it can’t hurt me,” she said, eyes still on her knitting.
“That’s the spirit,” I said. A Behindkind head loomed behind the headrest of her chair and I sliced at it backhanded with the needle in my right hand: a needle which grew and lengthened and sharpened and took off the creature’s head in a spurt of green blood that I sincerely hoped Vesper didn’t see.
JinYeong, snarling, shoved the body out of the way and whirled to leap on the Behindkind with too many arms that was trying to grapple with him. It took him only a moment to rip out the thing’s throat, so I left him to his gory mess and started toward the kitchen and Athelas. I didn’t make it in time, for as the corridor grew silent outside, Zero plunged through the door and into the bunch around him.
“You girls all right?” I yelled through the door.
“Yeah,” called Cadence, poking her head through the door. Behind her, Ezri raised a supercilious brow but grinned at me anyway. “Just a few scratches and some bruising; caught most of everything with our bats and the big bloke took care of the rest. You good, Pet?”
“Yep,” I said shortly, with my eyes on the kitchen. Zero and Athelas were done with their opponents, but I didn’t like how tattered and bloody Athelas was. A lot of it was blue blood, which meant that it was likely to be his own unless he’d been fighting fae before he got here.
The two girls shouldered their bats and ventured into the unit just as JinYeong started a careful prowl around to make sure all the Behindkind were really dead.
“Well, I s’pose none of them are gunna be reporting back,” I said to Zero. “This is Ezri and Cadence, by the way.”
Zero nodded at them briefly, then called to JinYeong, “All dead?”
“Ne,” JinYeong said, stalking back to us. “The ones from the street are in the corridor, and the street is also clear. Hyeong, this little lady’s house is a mess.”
Zero stared at him. “Yes?”
“You need to fix it. She gave us cake and weapons.”
“I would venture to suggest that we need to do more than fix the unit,” suggested Athelas, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes. Neither did Cadence, because she glared at him and let her cricket bat fall away from her shoulder as if ready to use it again if need be.
“It’s only Vesper,” I said. “She’s been knitting since everything began and she’s very determined not to see things she shouldn’t see. Do anything to her and I’ll finish what the Behindkind started.”
The look I didn’t like vanished and Athelas smiled in genuine amusement. “Will you so, Pet? Should I be fearful for my life?”
“Pet—” began Zero.
“Don’t even bother,” I said, starting back across the room to Vesper. “Figure it out. And fix this flamin’ mess while you’re at it!”
Rather to my surprise—and the open astonishment of the two human girls—they did clean it up. I’m pretty sure they did it with magic, but the important thing was that it got done. While they did it, I crouched by Vesper’s chair as she knitted and gave her back her knitting needles, then chuntered about JinYeong’s pretty face for a little while until her hands moved smoothly as she knitted once again.
Once the unit was clean again and I could turn her around safely, I did so, with JinYeong on the other side to make it a smoother transition than last time. Vesper didn’t stop knitting, but she did slow a little, and she smiled warmly at the others.
“Would you like tea and cake, my dears?” she asked, utterly impervious to our bloody and battered appearance.
“Probably not just now,” I said, with a worried eye on Athelas, who was swaying a little and still dripping blue blood. None of those drips reached the floor thanks to whatever magic Zero had done, but there was enough of it to worry me. “You all right, Athelas?”
“I am perfectly well, thank you, Pet.”
“You don’t look perfectly—” I began, but he was already turning to Zero.
“I’m very sorry, my lord,” said Athelas, and he was as pale as I’d ever seen him. “I rather think they followed me. It was appallingly careless of me, but in my defence I had seen what was done to the house I visited and it occurred to me that something similar might be happening over here. I met with a few…hurdles…in my attempts to get here before the current ones you assisted me with.”
“We’re just glad you weren’t trapped in the house somewhere,” I said cheerfully. “We’re all alive.”
“We’re alive, too,” said Ezri, eyeing my psychos in distinct respect. “That was the quickest fight we’ve ever been in—never come out of one this clean, either. You guys actually do fight against fae.”
“Told you,” I said, grinning at her. “Don’t forget to mention it to Abigail, yeah?”
Ezri snorted, but I was pretty sure that she’d mention it anyway. If she didn’t, Cadence was sure to.
“Were you able to salvage anything?” Zero asked Athelas, ignoring our asides.
“The house,” said Athelas wearily, “was set alight moments before I got there. I made an attempt to save what I could, but I was already too late.”
“Flamin’ heck,” I said, staring at his arms in horror as the extent of his injuries sank in. “You’re burned!”
I hadn’t seen the damage because I thought it was Behindkind blood he was sporting, but now that I knew it for what it was, I felt more than slightly sick. That would be why he hadn’t dropped the single sword he was still holding: it was literally stuck to his hand. I could see the damage to his other hand, too, strips of flesh that must have been pulled away when he lost grip of a second sword.
“You two,” said Zero to Ezri and Cadence, “why were you following my steward?”
“We weren’t following your steward,” said Ezri. “We were following the bunch that attacked you here; we got a tipoff that they were on the move. They’ve been doing some stuff they shouldn’t be doing and we heard they were going to be going after a kid somewhere in the neighbourhood if they could track down their lead.”
“You must have been their lead,” I said to Athelas.
“I do beg you not to belabour the matter, Pet,” he murmured. “I feel sufficiently small about it already. I was…in something of a hurry to get here.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” I said. It was past time to get him back home and look after those burns. “Figured if you got my message you’d want to get over here as quick as you could.”
“I wasn’t in receipt of your no doubt delightful message,” said Athelas. “I was otherwise occupied, but it occurred to me that if the place I visited was in such a mess at such an inconvenient time, yours was also likely to be so and that haste was no doubt necessary.”
“Perhaps we could take this discussion outside,” Zero suggested, with a meaningful look at Vesper, who had gone back to her knitting with all the cheerful self-absorption of someone who is very good at minding t
heir own business.
He and Athelas started for the door without any more ado, followed by the two human girls, but JinYeong, who to my utter astonishment had been badly brewing tea in the kitchen, put that tea down in front of Vesper and carefully allowed her to kiss the un-bloodied skin of his forehead in a grandmotherly sort of way.
I stared at him but he just shoved his hands into his pockets and sauntered out of the door as well, leaving me trailing behind.
By way of comfort, I said to her, “It should keep pretty quiet over there from now on.”
“So I gathered, my dear,” she said, looking away from her knitting again at last. “Look after that pretty boy of yours.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t let him get hurt,” I said, grinning, and joined the others outside.
As I closed the door behind me, Athelas asked from further down the hall, “Why did you join in the fight if it was fae against fae? I didn’t request your help, I believe.”
“You’re welcome,” said Cadence, rolling her eyes.
That put a bit of a twinkle back in Athelas’ eyes. He said, “I won’t acknowledge that you helped if I didn’t ask for it, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s the fae way. We helped because we recognised you. We figured if you were here, then Pet would be, and Abigail has told us to help where we can.”
“You didn’t help when we were fighting the petalmen in the court,” I pointed out. I looked over at the sword still stuck to Athelas’ hand and wondered if I turned it back into what it had begun as, would it drop away without damaging him?
“New orders,” she said, grinning. “Abigail changed her mind for once: we’re to offer help if you need it now.”
“Yeah?” I stared at her. “What changed that?”
“Perhaps it would be better to take this conversation elsewhere,” Zero said, looking around the corridor with a frown.
“Somewhere with tea, preferably,” said Athelas, his face just a little whiter.
“Reckon we’d better go home instead,” I said, a bit grimly. “You need to get this lot looked at, and we can talk once that’s done.”
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 21
