Between Cases (The City Between Book 7)

by W. R. Gingell

  I didn’t wait for him to tell me again: me and my backpack, we legged it up and out of the delivery bay, memories crowding thick and fast in my throat, in my head, before my eyes. The sword came with me, but it was an umbrella again before my feet touched the footpath, and I was running, running blindly.

  I don’t know where I went or how I got there, but it was small and wet and had some sort of greenery that took away the city smell and tried to push peaceful thoughts into my head. I unfurled the umbrella in front of me, bright yellow, and it whorled in my vision until it was a vast, gravity-pulling hole into which I tumbled.

  I remembered.

  I remembered my parents pushing me into my room with shaking hands, and the threatening and furious speech from downstairs.

  “You can’t refuse the contract! Who will protect you if you refuse our help? Do you expect that little weak thing to succeed in the trials?”

  “We don’t want a throne, and we don’t want protection. We won’t sell our child to you.”

  “If you don’t sell it to us, you’ll find it as dead as the others one day.”

  “Better than losing her soul to a group like you. We’ll protect her our own way: we don’t need your money or your protection.”

  I remembered one day out on the street, on my way home from the supermarket, when a man with a face like a fly peered at me with his huge eyes and said, “This is the child. Take it.”

  Being bundled into a world that looked as though I saw it through the bottom of a jar, all weird, rounded edges and wrong coloured sky, wrong smelling grass, wrong shadows.

  Being passed around between men and women with too many arms and sharp teeth, screaming; the cruel pinches to get me to stop, and when that failed, the outright beating.

  I remembered…I remembered the room disintegrating into a chaos of screams and blood as my personal nightmare carved a deadly path from the door and right into the centre of the room, while I lay beaten and almost unconscious on the bed, coiling the melee around him as he came.

  I remembered dragging my broken body up and out of the room on the outskirts of that terrifying whirlwind, stumbling out onto the street and nearly in front of a bus somewhere, crazily, in Kingston Beach.

  I had tumbled onto that bus and somehow no-one had seen me—or maybe no-one cared about me—and I hadn’t moved again, pain-wracked with the shuddering of the bus, until it stopped at its final destination and didn’t move again.

  I saw yellow somewhere in the morass of my memories and clutched at it: I wanted out. I didn’t want to see this anymore. I hadn’t had memories of Champions because I hadn’t had Champions—I had had kidnappers. My parents had refused to sell me, refused to let me be used as a pawn in someone else’s game, and the Behindkind had stolen me and taken me Behind rather than give up.

  As the tears slowed and I stared blankly into yellow canvas again, real thoughts began to flow through my mind once again. My parents hadn’t just chosen to die for me, they’d also refused to sell me. I had been so precious to them that they had sold themselves rather than sell me; died rather than have me die for them. Was I allowed to ruin that sacrifice by going my own way, whether or not I brought their killer to justice—or whatever passed for it Behind?

  Just do it, part of me said. Listen to Zero, listen to his dad. At least pretend to help Zero take the throne and forget about digging into your past. Let Zero do it. He said he’d do it, and then you don’t have to worry about his dad.

  No more memories to harrow me. No more digging for said memories. Just trust Zero and rest in the safety that it promised. Honour my parents’ sacrifice by staying alive long enough to enjoy life when everything Behindkind was stripped from my life at last.

  It was so tempting. And there with my forehead resting on my knees and something soft supporting me from the left, I actually considered it. I could live my life, if not free from danger, at least protected from that danger again. I didn’t have my parents, but I did have Zero.

  There was a kind of dead, sickness in the pit of my stomach, because as much as I wanted to do it, I couldn’t. If I did that, who would be there to help the humans? Abigail and her group? How long before they died, too? I would be running away from what I ought to be doing because I was too scared to do it. Worse than Zero, who had stopped doing what he thought was right because it hurt too much to lose people, I would be someone who had stopped doing what I thought was right because I was scared that I was going to be hurt. Because I wanted to feel comfortable and protected.

  I might even lose my soul in a way, as my parents had feared.

  I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to be comfortable. But right now, I couldn’t allow myself to be either, and that thought made me press my head back into my knees and sob again until everything felt hot and tight and feverish.

  When that passed, I felt the soft peacefulness of a breeze slipping around me, and smelled the freshness of some kind of greenery—moss, or maybe clover—as well as the comforting tightness of some kind of an embrace curled around me.

  Perfume tickled my nose as the world became real again, coiling in between the peaceful green that clung to me, and after a little longer, I began to be able to see the real, present world around me again.

  As I came to the knowledge that part of the embrace around me was highly scented vampire, the rest of that reassuring embrace began to slither away in a furling up of greenery that I would have recognised at once if I had been in any condition to do so. The green man had found me again, and instead of advice, this time had given comfort.

  “The heck,” I said quietly to myself, and dashed the back of my hand across my eyes. My face was sticky with tears, and JinYeong’s shirt front was a bit damp with them, too. He didn’t seem to care too much, because he wasn’t muttering about his best suit today, and it seemed like he was reluctant to let me go when I started to disentangle myself from him as well as the remaining vines.

  “Why are you sitting in the street, crying?” he asked, straightening his tie over the patch of teary shirt as I pulled away.

  I sniffed a bit. “How’d you find me sitting in the street crying?”

  “Hyeong sent me to look for you: he said you had been too long. I followed your not-scent. Why are you sitting in the street, crying?”

  “Met Zero’s dad: had a memory,” I explained briefly, trying to unfold my legs to get up. They didn’t want to work—probably a lack of circulation from crouching in street-corners having a mental breakdown while covered in vines—but that was okay, because JinYeong lifted me up by either arm instead.

  “This,” he said, indicating me with a tip of his head, up and down, “does not look like a memory.”

  “It was a pretty flamin’ nasty one,” I told him, rubbing my legs as much for comfort as the desire to have some feeling back in them. “A few pretty nasty ones, actually. We’d better get going. I don’t want Zero’s dad finding me if he’s still around.”

  “We do not have to go home,” he said, releasing my arms but taking one of my hands instead.

  “No,” I said dully, curling my fingers into his. “Better go home and get this over with. Reckon I’ve got a bit of info the other two might find useful.”

  “It would seem that we know why your champions were not slaughtered around you,” said Athelas, when I was done talking. “Our murderer helpfully slaughtered them all for you somewhere between Behind and Kingston, and chose to display the bodies there.”

  “Yeah,” I said thickly, wriggling a bit against JinYeong to sit up properly. He had sat behind me and slung an arm warmly but loosely around my neck as I told Zero and Athelas what had happened, and that had been oddly comforting—the feeling that my neck was guarded—so I hadn’t tried to pull away. He waited until I was still again, then settled the arm back around my neck loosely. “I wanna know why he did that.”

  “Perhaps if you had waited around long enough to discuss the matter—”

  “I was twelve and terrified,” I said, fe
eling another shiver deep in my bones. “I was just lucky the bus I jumped on was direct to Hobart instead of going around Kingston Beach first. It didn’t stop the murderer finding mum and dad at home later, anyway, so I don’t think he wanted to talk.”

  “It must have been an annoying day for him,” said Zero thoughtfully. “First, his quarry disappears with the Champions that he also needs to kill; then, he kills the Champions and his quarry has escaped yet again. I wonder if he had such trouble with any of the others?”

  “I don’t really care how annoying his day was, actually,” I said. “And if he’s working for your dad or the king, I hope one of them punished him for it when he got back, too.”

  Athelas smiled briefly. “I’m quite certain he was punished.”

  “You’re pretty flamin’ happy for a bloke Zero’s dad is making threats about,” I told him.

  “I was quite well aware of what I was doing when I did it,” he said easily. “It seemed to me that it was time to cut ties entirely, since my lord’s father had unfortunately become aware that I was serving his son rather than himself.”

  “Is that why you’re always sneaking out at night? You’ve been feeding Zero’s dad bad information about him?”

  That…was another relief that I hadn’t known I’d needed.

  “Say rather limited than bad,” he temporised.

  “I was well aware of it,” said Zero, his blue eyes on me. As if I’d make accusations again, after what I’d heard from him and his dad! “Obviously he had to know something, but we preferred him not to learn about the heirlings being alive if we could avoid it.”

  “And that reminds me! You lot told me that only an Heirling can grab the sword like that!” I added accusingly. With JinYeong at my back and the other two facing me, I was beginning to feel safer and less wobbly, my face less stiff with the tears that had been there earlier. But I still felt hard done by, and I wanted someone to take responsibility for that.

  Annoyingly cool, Zero said, “Next time you go out, take one of us with you.”

  “It’s a bit late for that now,” I said resentfully. “Your dad doesn’t want to kill me—I just told you! The old mad bloke picked up the sword and threw it to me—he didn’t throw an umbrella at me, he threw the actual sword. He’s gotta be an Heirling, too, doesn’t he?”

  “The Harbinger can fight for a favoured Heirling,” said Athelas. He was as cool as Zero, but there was a tightness to his cool. “They can pick up and retain the sword. Congratulations, Pet. It would seem that the Harbinger favours you.”

  “Oh yay. Lucky me.”

  Zero, his eyes the brightest blue I’d ever seen them, actually grinned. “Now you might have some appreciation for my state of mind over the last eighty years.”

  “First of all—heck. How old are you? Second of all, is that your way of saying now you know how I feel?”

  “I very much doubt you’ll ever have to feel the level of frustration I’ve felt in dealing with you,” he said.

  “Garbage,” I said, jerking a thumb at JinYeong, who was an easy, comfortable target. “I’ve had to deal with him. It can’t be worse than that.”

  Zero opened his mouth at the same time as JinYeong made a startled protest, but I didn’t give either of them time to finish.

  “You can’t say I’m worse than him. You’ve dealt with both of us: be honest.”

  JinYeong openly grinned as I tilted my head back to look at him. Anyone’d think he was proud of being annoying—he probably was.

  “Anyway,” I said, ridiculously comforted as I lowered my chin to look at Zero again. “Abigail gave me that bunch of files and said the police probably don’t have ’em, either, so at least we’ve got something new to look at now that we know we’re looking for dead champions and murdered heirlings. Hopefully we don’t have to fight your dad or the king to get to each heirling before they clean up what the murderer started.”

  “If the police don’t have the records, I rather doubt anyone else has them,” Athelas said. “I’m inclined to think that although Upper Management had firmly ensconced themselves in the local police, my lord’s father has managed to get a toe-hold in Upper Management.”

  “Well,” I said, drawing in a breath that caught very slightly, “s’pose all of this answers the question of exactly how much your dad knows about the cycle starting again, anyway. Good news is he doesn’t want to kill me.”

  Zero, echoing my earlier thought, said, “The fact that he doesn’t want to kill you is more worrying to me.”

  “Rude!” I said, but it came out on another caught breath, and although JinYeong’s arm tightened around my neck, I still felt cold.

  I, too, wanted to know why Zero’s dad was happy to have me alive and near his son when I was also an heirling. I wanted to know what he’d managed to see of those new, horrible memories his worm had dredged up, and why he had urged me to abandon looking for others. I also wanted to know exactly what he wanted of me, because I was pretty flaming sure that it wasn’t just to support his son in a claim for the throne.

  And I was pretty sure that whatever it was, I didn’t want any part of it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Evening came softly and quietly; we each took a file to look at without really discussing it. No one asked me for anything, which was somewhere between a relief and an irritation, so I went upstairs with my file, still feeling raw and damaged. JinYeong even brought me up a mug of coffee later on while I sat in my beanbag chair and stared at the ceiling, unwilling to do anything and trying not to think too much. My brain was a mess of terrifyingly new memories that had taken hold in my mind, a gut-wrenching knowledge that my parents hadn’t been what I thought they were, and lingering sadness from Marazul’s betrayal that morning. The last of those particularly irked me. The rest made sense, but it was stupid to feel sad about a non-relationship with a merman, especially when there were so many other things to think about—so many other things that needed attention.

  Turns out your heart doesn’t shut up talking even when you don’t have the time or brain space to listen to it.

  Luckily for me, my phone buzzed in my pocket with a call when I was only halfway through my coffee and the thoughts I was trying not to think. I took it out of my pocket and looked down at it rather listlessly, but my heart jumped when I saw the caller id. Morgana. It was Morgana.

  I stared at the phone for a couple of seconds longer, then stabbed at the green answer call button before it had a chance to stop ringing, and said stupidly, “What? I mean, hey. Hi. Are you all right?”

  There was a very small sigh, short and exasperated. “You’re the last person who should be worried about other people,” said Morgana’s voice.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, trying not to smile too much. I knew exactly what she would look like right now: sitting upright in bed, her hair up high in some elaborate, black-decorated do, her black-lipsticked lips pursed in mock exasperation even though her eyes were laughing. “It’s the company I’m keeping lately. I’m getting too protective for my own good. What’s up?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, and the answer followed another sigh, this one quicker and less comforting. “Look, Pet, I don’t mind your big boy Zero in the house, but don’t let the one that wears houndstooth come back again. He apparently went upstairs last night and scared the kids and bothered my parents, then went off without a word to anyone else. He left all my mirrors crooked, too—it took us all day to get them right again.”

  “Flamin’ heck,” I said softly. “Sorry. I didn’t know. I’ll have a word with him about that.”

  There was another slight pause before she said, “Thanks.”

  “You could have texted me,” I told her. “Or gotten Daniel to tell me. You don’t have to talk to me until you’re comfortable.”

  “Your partner came to see me yesterday, too,” Morgana said abruptly. “He said you were working really hard to keep me safe for a while there. Thought I should say thanks for that, too.”

/>   The startled thought that Detective Tuatu had gone to see Morgana crossed my mind. “My partner?”

  “JinYeong. He climbed up the outside of the house and stared at me through the window until I opened it. He told me not to tell you but he’s not the boss of me so—”

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, even more startled. “I’m surprised he’s not the one you’re complaining about, then!”

  “He didn’t upset the kids, and he was trying to do me a favour—well, he was trying to do you a favour, but I think he figured it’d help me, too. I’m just surprised your Zero didn’t try to do the same.”

  I would very much have liked to ask her about what she’d said about Zero a couple of weeks ago, that suggestion that had been sticking in my head and making life uncomfortable ever since it had wormed its way into my mind, but I didn’t dare. It wasn’t the right time, and I didn’t want to break the tenuous connection that felt like it had formed again.

  Instead, I asked, “You decided you’re gunna start talking to me again, then?”

  “Maybe a bit,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. Nice and light, as if I was trying not to startle a banshee caught between the jam and the golden syrup with an arm wrapped around each one and far too close to the edge of the shelf. “That’ll be nice.”

  “I don’t mean that I want to see you,” she added, but the hardness wasn’t there in her voice anymore. “But if you need someone to talk to every now and then, I’ll pick up the phone when you call.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  “I’m not going to help with your weird stuff; you’ll have to keep that away from me. It’s just if you want to talk about blokes or makeup or something.”