Between Cases (The City Between Book 7)

by W. R. Gingell

  “He’ll be fine; he can heal,” pointed out Ezri.

  “I’m sure I will manage, my dear,” said Athelas.

  “No,” I said, more loudly, gripping his elbow above the burn line. Athelas had a very bad habit of running around while he was injured nearly to death—he was probably even worse than Zero when it came to that. “We will go home, make sure you’re healed, and then we’ll talk about it.”

  JinYeong, chuckling maliciously, took hold of Athelas’ other elbow. “Do as you’re told, old man,” he said.

  “My lord, it would seem that I’m to be carried off; perhaps you could intervene?”

  Zero stared at him, then laughed. “Go home, Athelas,” he said. “In fact, we’ll all go home. Anything that needs to be discussed between us can be done there; the humans may contact us if they wish to debrief.”

  “Hang on, we want to know what all this is about, too!” Ezri said to me, frowning. I didn’t know if that was because they had been so casually dismissed, or because I was making a fuss over Athelas, but I didn’t really care. “And—wait, is that blood around your boyfriend’s mouth? I thought he was human? Do fae drink blood now?”

  “What blood?” said JinYeong silkily, and the girl blinked a couple of times.

  She swore. “I must be seeing things. I could have sworn there was blood all down your chin and throat.”

  “There is no blood,” JinYeong said, a dark red trickle seeping into his collar from his neck and another dripping from his chin to his chest. “You must have imagined it.”

  “Guess so,” she said, frowning.

  “Abigail would have known if he was fae,” Cadence told her. “So would I. He’s already been vetted. Are you really going to go home without telling us anything?”

  “Looks like it,” I said. “What, do you lot leave your injured to fend for ’emselves? I’ll talk with you later.”

  Ezri scowled. “Yeah, but they’re fae.”

  “Absolutely appalling,” Athelas said, sotto voce. “The kind of prejudice one encounters!”

  Zero lifted his eyes skyward and said, “Enough. There has been enough excitement this morning.”

  It seemed like he said it to everyone, and even the humans stopped grumbling. It didn’t stop them from scowling at us until we disappeared Between, though.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was very hard not to say I told you so. I made a heroic effort and didn’t say it, but it was sweet to know that the information that was likely to have given the psychos the best lead they’d ever had in finding their murderer, had been gained directly from humans.

  Not to mention that Athelas had been helped by two human girls to fight off Behindkind, and that had to stick in their gullets a bit.

  I threw a sideways look at Athelas. Now that he was in his chair and had been imbibing tea and biscuits for the last couple of hours, he was actually healing up pretty well. That’s one of the useful things about being fae: you heal up flamin’ quick. The burns up and down his arms were now pink and smooth instead of bloody and fleshy in strips, and he had commandeered his own teacup instead of having to suffer me perched on the arm of his chair and tipping it up for him. I could even very soon ask him about getting my memories back, I thought. If I posed it as useful to the investigation, perhaps I might not even have to bargain for his help.

  JinYeong had seen us home and then headed out again almost immediately with Zero, who hadn’t liked the thought of leaving Behindkind bodies around as a signal to his father, but they both turned up again at about four o’clock; JinYeong to retire to the shower without any sign of emerging soon, and Zero to gulp down coffee and check on Athelas’ burns.

  He must have been satisfied with what he saw, because he sank down into his chair with a fresh cup of coffee and said to Athelas, “Well?”

  “Someone knew I was coming, and they wanted to make sure there was nothing for me to find—no one for me to question,” said Athelas. “Whatever and whoever was in that house, it’s all dust and salt now.”

  Zero heaved a sigh. “We’re going to have to go back over all the deaths that didn’t have peripherals attached, and find the peripheral.”

  “No champion without an heirling, you mean?”

  “Exactly. Now that we know the peripheral will be someone with a significant amount of human blood, they might be easier to find. We’ll also need to make sure that we have access to the humans group’s records: we’re likely to find a few matches there.”

  “They said they were doing a vote,” I reminded him. “We have to wait and see.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, which was a bit worrisome. I didn’t want him ruining the new relationship that seemed to be flourishing between us and Abigail’s group by insisting on something they didn’t freely give. Or by going and just taking it, for that matter.

  “You lot notice anything weird about these kids?” I asked, by way of turning his mind to something else. “The peripheral kids, I mean?”

  Athelas gazed at me with a slightly quizzical expression. “My frame of reference is quite wide, my dear,” he said, “but I’m rather certain that everything about them was, as you have so quaintly put it, weird. Both revenants and zombies could be considered something out of the ordinary way, even in the world Behind. I would imagine that the boy I went in search of today was also…weird.”

  “I meant, how come they’re all from the twenties except me, so far?”

  “A very good question,” Zero said briefly, “and one to which I would like to know the answer. You said the humans seem to think that there were other cycles after the twenties, but from our research, all of the human peripherals that we now know to be heirling deaths occurred in the twenties.”

  “What if it’s not about the ones that are dead?” I asked. “What if it’s about the ones that are still alive?”

  “Are you suggesting ineptitude, or a smokescreen?”

  “Not sure, yet,” I said. “But—”

  “The children we’ve found are all very good contenders as heirlings,” Zero agreed. “Either skilled in using Between or significantly dangerous as Behindkind. Including yourself.”

  “Reckon Ralph could give me a run for my money,” I said. My psychos were often surprised at what I could do when it came to Between, but I was pretty sure Ralph was better again. I couldn’t see myself being able to weaponize my entire house. “But it doesn’t make sense that the ones still around are the best contenders: why leave them around, alive or dead, if so?”

  What if the ones remaining had been the ones no one considered worth much—the ones who weren’t a danger? But then I thought of the nightmare again, and I remembered the bargain that the murderer had struck with each of the sets of parents that I knew of: Die for your child, or they will die for you.

  “What if it’s about the decisions their parents made, not their strength? Morgana and Ralph are both technically dead, and their parents decided to let them die. Mine didn’t, and—”

  “You think the murderer is helping to decide the fate of the Behind throne based on human decisions?”

  I didn’t need to look at Zero’s face to get an idea of the incredulity it must be displaying. I could hear it in his voice.

  “It’s possible,” said Athelas thoughtfully. “But we’ll have to find another case more similar to yours to know for sure. That is where your friends will be able to help us.”

  “Perhaps,” Zero said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “I think it’s far more likely that the murderer is playing games with no losing outcomes for him, and so he’s allowing himself to have fun. No matter what he does—no matter whether the child dies or doesn’t die—the result is the same. A child alone in a house, alive or dead, who will never emerge to fight in the heirling trials.”

  That was fine; he didn’t have to agree with me. I would have to wait and see what Abigail came up with, but I was pretty sure I’d hit on where the difference lay—at least with the kids that were still around, alive or dead. It
was something personal where there ought to be nothing but business—an aberration that had made it invisible to Zero, who tried so hard to ignore his human, personal side.

  How did a person—human or Behindkind—get to be that way? I wondered. Someone who could kill innocents without regrets, but someone who also took revenge on parents who betrayed those innocents? It wasn’t as though I wasn’t very well aware of the duality of Behindkind—and particularly fae—but this was something different.

  I remembered Vesper saying, “The world is full of oddness,” in her warm, thoughtful voice, and then, suddenly, another memory flip-flopped in my head. Athelas, fighting desperately in the kitchen of Vesper’s unit while she knitted defensively over in her corner and tried not to look too closely.

  How had he known?

  If he hadn’t listened to my message, how had he known to come up through Vesper’s room to find us?

  Athelas, who had told me more than once that being badly injured was the best way to gain trust. How had he known?

  My stomach sank like lead, and all desire to ask him to help me regain my memories utterly vanished. I looked up to find his eyes resting thoughtfully on me. He said, as though repeating for the third or fourth time, “Perhaps it is time to revisit our questions about your own experiences, Pet. For example: your champions—you ought to have had them, and yet, curiously, you do not remember them.”

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit here and answer questions with this sickening suspicion sitting in my head. I stood abruptly, said, “Reckon I need a bit of air first,” and went straight out into the backyard, ignoring Zero’s surprise.

  They must have been worried about me—funny how the thought made my stomach twist right then—because Zero came out after I’d been sitting in the afternoon sun for less than five minutes, pulling up grass and wishing my fingers weren’t so cold.

  “You said you could do this,” he said directly, without sitting down. “You need to either get back in there or stop pretending this is something you can do.”

  I just looked up at him, wondering rather numbly if he knew exactly how momentary weakness worked with humans. Even if it had been that, I’d still need time to gather myself before I could jump back in.

  Instead of getting into that with him, I just asked, “What message did you send Athelas? Earlier, when JinYeong got eaten by the house and you sent him a message?”

  “I told him to contact me as soon as possible, since I had to meet with you at the Standforth house and we might need his help.”

  “Did he get that message?”

  Zero gazed down at me, and I thought he was exasperated. “What exactly are you trying to ask, Pet?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said, but the idea was already well and truly festering away, dark and awful. “But earlier, Athelas came right to Vesper’s apartment to find us.”

  The silence continued for a few moments, before Zero said, faintly perplexed, “Athelas was aware of the address, Pet. He fought through my father’s men just to get to us because he knew we were likely to be in as much danger as himself.”

  “I get that,” I said. I climbed rather wearily to my feet, because my neck had begun to hurt and it didn’t look like he was planning on sitting down any time soon. “But what I don’t understand is how he knew to come through Vesper’s apartment? Unless he’s lying about reading my message, how did he know to come that way?”

  “Why would he lie about reading your message?”

  I said, with acid in my stomach, “Exactly.”

  It was the thought that had made me feel so sick that I had to leave the house.

  Properly exasperated now, Zero demanded, “What is it you suspect him of?”

  “Dunno,” I said, even though I did know. If Athelas knew more than what he should know when it came to getting into the houses of murdered heirlings, if he had purposely allowed himself to be injured to throw off suspicion, then…then…

  “Let me set your mind at ease,” said Zero coldly, and I knew that he had understood me perfectly. “If you really must have it, I have a story that is not so different from yours. I woke one night after sneaking into my brother’s room to sleep and found my brother…very dead.”

  “You don’t—you don’t have to tell me this stuff if you don’t want to,” I said. “You can just tell me that you trust Athelas, and I’ll try—”

  Sharp with ice, he said, “Don’t interrupt, Pet. You wanted to know the truth, and you’ll have it now with no complaints! At that time I was ten, and I didn’t know that my brother was using my fondness for him to keep me conveniently close for that time when he would make a push to…change the succession of the Family. So when I found him in pieces in his room in the dead quiet of the night, and heard a whisper of sound behind me, I seized the first sword that would come to me and gave chase to the murderer.”

  “That was when you were in the same room as the murderer,” I said, in cold realisation. “The sword—”

  “Yes. That was the first time the Heirling Sword came to me.”

  “Heck,” I said, very quietly. At least I’d had my parents until I was thirteen, and they’d been good parents. I hadn’t been half an orphan and lost a sibling as well. “You see him?”

  “His shadow, nothing more. Not even a scent of him.”

  “When did you realise it was the same bloke that was murdering other people?”

  “The weapon he used for the kill remains the same,” Zero said quietly. “A bone knife, single-edged.”

  “Heck,” I said once more, sucking in a breath. “That’s what does that—takes a head right off? A bone knife?”

  “That, along with strength, savagery, and a knowledge of where best to cut.”

  “Still sounds like Athelas,” I muttered. I caught the anger in his eyes and said as bluntly as I could, “You thought it was him at first, didn’t you? You had to have.”

  “He seemed a likely choice,” Zero said, and it seemed as though he was less angry. “Under my father’s order, he had already—that’s not important. I was wrong.”

  “Yeah? How’d you find out?”

  “My father had nearly killed him that night during a training session,” said Zero. “I found him in my own suite when I returned, in a state not much better than my brother. I haven’t doubted him since—not when it comes to this.”

  “Yeah, reckon that’d do it,” I said. I’d heard enough about how Athelas was trained to make me pretty sure exactly how injured he’d been, and who had done that to him. I wondered if he had even fought back when Zero’s dad did it. I drew in a breath that was shaky with burgeoning relief, and said, “I’m still surprised someone hasn’t killed your dad yet.”

  “Believe me,” said Zero, without the slightest edge of humour, “my father still has that particular reckoning to come.”

  “Okay, but then what about—”

  “The second floor,” Zero said, with finality, “is the only sensible entrance to that house: the actual entrance is bound up in both the human world and the world Between. I saw it as soon as I got there. If you hadn’t told me which way to come, I would have gone that way regardless.”

  “Okay,” I said. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to be convinced: the thought that Athelas could be more heftily involved in the murders than I’d ever suspected hadn’t exactly been a pleasant one for me, either. But now that I knew my parents had died for me, it had become overwhelmingly necessary for me to do everything I could to find their killer. If I wasn’t going to let the awful drag within me stop me, I certainly wasn’t going to let anything else do it.

  “Then once Athelas has recovered a little more, we’ll begin again,” he said. “And perhaps it would help to remember exactly how badly injured Athelas has been on your behalf—more than once.”

  “I remember it,” I said. “But I also remember that he killed me six times, so don’t pretend that I didn’t have any reason to be suspicious.”

  Zero huffed out a breath that could h
ave been exasperated, but could have been amused. “Very well,” he said.

  I mean, it wasn’t as though I’d wanted to believe any such thing about Athelas, but it also wasn’t as though he wasn’t just twisty and deadly enough to be believable in the role. Still, when I returned to the living room fifteen minutes later with a tea-tray, he looked so fragile that the suspicion made me feel faintly guilty.

  “I trust you’re prepared to continue, Pet,” he said.

  Zero glanced up at me from across the room, but when I said, “Yeah,” readily enough, he went back to whatever cobwebby bit of magic he was doing on a corner of the room.

  “Yeah,” I said again. “But I’ve been thinking about it, and I reckon I’ve got a better way of trying to get some real info. About champions and…other stuff, maybe.”

  “How very useful,” Athelas said.

  If I was going to trust him, I had better do it: no looking back, just cards on the table.

  “My memories,” I explained. “They don’t want to come out: I thought it was just that I didn’t remember stuff, but whenever I do remember something for a little while, the memories try to wriggle away and pretend they’re not important, or real. I don’t think it’s magic, but it’s like my own mind is fighting against me. And two days ago when Zero’s dad had a go at me, there was a bit of memory in my head that I don’t remember having before, but I can’t get it to come back out.”

  Athelas’ grey eyes dwelt on me meditatively. “I see. And you wish to know if there is a way to regain those memories.”

  “Be handy if JinYeong’s mojo really did work on me,” I muttered. “Then he could get the truth out of me. Figured you might have an idea for something that would work.”

  “I have an idea, but I very much fear you won’t find it palatable,” Athelas said. “You once described your encounter with my lord’s father as having a little worm in your brain, I believe.”

  “Heck,” I said, feeling ill again. “I was afraid you’d say that. You know how to do that, too?”

  “Fortunately for you, my dear, I have experience on both sides of that particular magic,” he said. “I can both perform the magic required and explain the process of resisting such attacks.”