“Pet…!” said Zero, and I didn’t know if it was frustration or anger in his voice. “I don’t want to argue about this!”
“You never want to argue about it,” I said flatly. I slid the cake into the oven and slapped the door shut. “You just strut around being strong and invincible and humans die around you.”
“If humans interfere with Behind business, they can only expect to be injured. I can’t play nursemaid to beings who are too stupid to keep out of trouble.”
“They’re not stupid, they’re ignorant!”
JinYeong made his little tch! of amusement, and I glared at him. He only raised a brow at me and went down into the living room with his blood bag.
“JinYeong apparently believes that you are not championing your cause in the best fashion,” said Athelas.
I glared at him, too, for good measure. “Someone being ignorant isn’t an excuse to kill them—or to blame them for being killed! Anyway, if they are ignorant, whose fault is that? There’s no flaming Bureau of Fae Affairs to tell humans what to watch out for!”
“In fact, there is a so-named Bureau,” Athelas said mildly. “But it has nothing to do with informing humans of our business. Pet, perhaps you should remember it is not an insult to mention the fact of superior fae intelligence.”
“Pretty sure it is,” I muttered. “And I’m also pretty sure you lot just got outwitted by a human, so maybe you shouldn’t be so flaming condescending.”
“In what fashion have we been outwitted, Pet?”
“Well, I figured out your murderer before you did,” I pointed out. “Anyway, I didn’t ask you to do something about Mr. Preston this time. I said I’d do something.”
“You will do nothing of the kind,” said Zero sharply. “I’ve told you not to worry about Mr. Preston.”
“You can’t tell someone not to worry about something. You can’t control other people’s feelings.”
“I can do that,” demurred JinYeong from the living room, annoyingly understandable.
“Perhaps not,” Zero said, with finality, “but I can tell you to stop talking about it unless you want me to lock you out of the house. Make coffee.”
So I made coffee, while the blueberry teacake began to smell like hot berry around me, and Zero and the others sat waiting in the living room, oppressively silent. My thoughts, as oppressively noisy, buzzed against each other in the confines of my mind. I had to do something about Mr. Preston. Someone had to do something about Mr. Preston. But Zero had told me not to worry about him, and that meant he was doing something, right?
No, he’d do it. I didn’t need to do anything. If I did something, Zero really would kick me out, I knew. I couldn’t be kicked out. My parents’ house, and—and—the life I had here now—I didn’t want to lose them.
Zero would do something. He always did something. Even when he said he wouldn’t help out, he helped out. All I had to do was sit and wait, and not get myself thrown out of the house, and Mr. Preston would be okay, too.
Chapter Ten
Zero and Athelas were gone when I woke up the next morning. I wouldn’t have admitted it if they’d asked me, but I was a bit relieved: I didn’t want to go back to that house Behind. I didn’t want to see thin-nosed Janna Whiteleaf, and I didn’t want to see the dead-eyed human slaves walking around her house when I couldn’t do anything about it.
“Oi,” I said to JinYeong, who was the only one left. “We’re going out for a walk.”
“Kurae?” said JinYeong, raising a brow, but he got up anyway. “Where shall we go?”
“Gunna visit my friend,” I said.
“Shimshimhae,” he muttered, pouting. “Why should I go?”
“’Cos sitting around here is more boring,” I said, grabbing his jacket sleeve. “C’mmon, we’ll get coffee or something on the way home.”
He mumbled something like nonsense, but let me pull him out onto the street, and he didn’t saunter as much as usual, either. Maybe that was because I was still pulling him along. I let him go when it looked like he’d keep going under his own steam, and trotted on ahead more quickly. Truth be told, there was no reason for me to be in a hurry, but after yesterday I felt subtly as though I’d like to see a human who wasn’t under thrall to the fae. Maybe there was a slight pang of fear that Morgana wouldn’t be safe by the time I got there, too.
Whatever it was, it had me charging up the stairs to get in the front door with JinYeong on my heels, and it was only at the top step that I remembered to turn and frown at him.
“Where are you going?”
“Invite me in, Petteu,” he said. “I will drink coffee.”
“You can’t come in,” I told him. “My friend is human. You’re not allowed to go near her.”
“Your friend will like me.”
“No she flaming won’t!” I said firmly. I still remembered the reverential note in Morgana’s voice when she first saw JinYeong. There was no way I was exposing her to him at close quarters.
JinYeong pursed his lips, but he didn’t seem exactly sulky. “I will come back,” he said, instead of protesting again, like I’d half expected he would.
I breathed a sigh of relief and shut the door on him, but as soon as the door was shut, I saw a shadow moving by the stairs. I jumped and reached for the nearest thing that could be a weapon: a walking stick by the door, sticky with ancient dust.
“Pet!” said Daniel’s voice, indignant and slightly shocked. “What are you doing? You can’t do that!”
I looked at him down the length of the rustiest sword I’d ever seen, and said, “Sorry. Thought you were a peryton or something.”
“Yeah, but you can’t do—” he stopped, looking indignant. “I wouldn’t let a peryton in here.”
“What, could you stop one?” I asked sceptically, putting down the rusty walking stick again.
He settled his shoulders a bit. “Probably not. But I’d make a pretty big mess, and I don’t think it’d get much further than the stairs before I got reinforcements.”
“It’d make a pretty big mess of you as well, I reckon,” I said. The bestiary Athelas had given me agreed with Daniel that there were two forms of peryton: one of them was a giant bird of prey with stag antlers, and the other was a stag with bird of prey wings, antlers, and a giant beak on its otherwise stag body. Either of those forms would cause a pretty bit of damage, I was certain. Especially considering it was only the appearance of the beast that changed, and not the actual body of it. The books had said something about a kind of outside façade that flickered through time and reality and could deceive even most Behindkind eyes, which was scary enough without being a stag-bird hybrid in reality. Daniel had been right: it was possible to see through a peryton’s façade, if you could see accurately—or, I was beginning to suspect, fast enough—and that, coupled with the frame-by-frame study of the surveillance footage with Detective Tuatu, had left an interesting idea tickling over in the back of my mind.
“They’re big, but my jaw’s strong, and my teeth are sharp,” said Daniel. “Why are you here, anyway?”
“Came to see Morgana,” I explained, propping the rusty sword back against the wall, where it became distinctly more walking-stick like. “The others are off doing stuff, so I thought I might as well. Why? Are you trying to kick me out? I met her first!”
“It’s not that,” he said, following me slowly as I ascended the stairs. “It’s just…what do you know about her? Morgana?”
“Not much,” I told him. “I was just using her place to check up and see how you were going.”
“No one needs to check up on me,” he said indignantly. “If anyone should be checking up on anyone, I should be checking up on you! You’re part of my pack.”
I didn’t tell him that I was no longer part of his pack, even if it was true. Instead, I asked, “Why are you asking about Morgana?”
He looked uneasy. “I don’t know. She’s—well, no one checks in on her. For humans, that’s weird. I haven’t seen her pa
rents once since I moved in there.”
“Oh.” I had to think about that for a moment. “I haven’t seen them, either. What about the kids?”
“What kids?”
“She’s always talking about the kids who help her with stuff. They set up her mirrors and rigged everything just right. I reckon they check in on her.”
“I haven’t seen any kids.”
“Yeah. She says they’re hiding at the moment because you’re scary.”
“I’m not scary!” he said indignantly. “What did I do?”
“You’re scowling right now,” I pointed out, heading for the stairs. “And you always look like you’re about to tear out someone’s throat. Or maybe snap at them.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. Anyway, I haven’t met Morgana’s parents, but she did say she’s sick all the time, so maybe not many people know she’s here. Some humans just live like that.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “But for humans, it’s weird. You should ask her about it.”
“Oi!” I said. “I’m a human too, you know!”
“Yeah, but you don’t act like it. You’re more like…I dunno. But you’re not like a human—you’re more like us.”
“Us?”
“Behindkind.”
“Rude!” I said indignantly. “I’m nothing like you lot! I’m a human!”
“All right, all right, no need to get your knickers in a twist!”
“Shush,” I told him. “She’ll hear you.”
“What will I hear?” asked Morgana, as soon as we were in the door.
By way of revenge, I said, “Daniel’s saying bad stuff about you.”
“I was not!”
“He was talking about you, anyway.”
“Pet!”
“So long as he’s talking about making me a coffee, I don’t care,” Morgana said.
“All right, I can take a hint,” said Daniel, and skulked over to the kitchen.
I sat down on Morgana’s bed with her, and for the first time noticed that her usual gothic getup was a bit more gothic than usual. She usually just had a black t-shirt and the black lipstick and eyeliner, dark and dramatic. Today, she had little black wrist-ruffs as well, and the t-shirt she wore wasn’t oversized and carefully ripped—today, it was black and lacy, with small puffed sleeves and a ruff high at the neck to match the ruffs at her wrists.
It prompted me to ask a question I’d been meaning to ask for a while now. Making a vague gesture that included all of Morgana’s makeup and the pretty black ribbons around her wrists, I asked, “How come you wear all that, anyway?”
“Pet!” growled Daniel from the kitchen. “You can’t ask girls stuff like that! I’m not even a—a girl, and I know you can’t ask stuff like that!”
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. What a traitor! He was the one who’d told me no one checked up on Morgana or asked how she was. “I didn’t know. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” said Morgana. “I don’t care. Don’t make faces at her! If I say it’s okay, it’s okay! Mind your own business!”
To my surprise, Daniel only grinned at that. “All right, sorry,” he said.
“I’ve worn it since I was twelve,” Morgana told me. “That’s when it got so I couldn’t walk anymore.”
“Did you have an accident?”
“Normal people don’t ask other people stuff like that, either,” Daniel said, but this time he said it with less of a commanding tone to it.
Morgana’s thin face became less certain. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I don’t remember that time very much. I used to have some memories of it, but I figured out they had to be a dream, so now I know I don’t really remember. Not what actually happened, I mean; I still remember the dream.”
“What sort of dream was it?”
“A bad one,” she said, shuddering. “I woke up one night, and someone was opening the door to my bedroom.”
“From the corridor?”
“Yeah. That was the worst bit. I don’t think I would have been as scared if it had been someone from outside.”
“What about your parents?”
“They didn’t wake up,” she said. “I mean, I know now that it was a dream, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t, because there was no one actually there. But for a couple days after I felt really resentful anyway because it was such a horrible dream and they didn’t wake up.”
“What happened?”
“It wasn’t a someone, it was a monster. It stood over the bed, but sort of surrounded it as well, all inky black up to the ceiling with too many eyes. It said, ‘Call for help,’ but I was really scared, so I couldn’t make a noise. Then it said it again, really softly, and I screamed for my parents.”
Caught up in a memory of my own Nightmare, I asked quietly, “Did they come for you? In your dream, I mean?”
“No one came,” she said. “I remembered thinking, even though I knew it was a dream, that there wasn’t anyone to help me. And the monster said—really calmly, like it didn’t matter—‘They chose not to save you. From now on, you’re dead. If you make too much noise, you’ll regret it’.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said. She was shaking, and if it wasn’t for the bubbling of the kettle in the background, I think I would have been able to hear the little black beads on her wrist ruffles tapping against each other.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t remember anything after that, anyway. I got really sick afterward, and when I got better, I couldn’t walk anymore. My parents called in some people, but no one can really say what’s wrong. I just…get sick a lot.”
“Coffee,” said Daniel, shoving a cup at her. Morgana took it, smiling a big, black-edged smile at him, and he passed another mug to me. “Are you two finished talking about makeup and stuff now?”
“Nearly,” she said. “It sorta stuck with me, what he said. From now on, you’re dead. So when one of the kids brought me some stuff one of the lady boarders left behind, I sort of just went with this style. I like it. I might look like I’m dead, but I’m not: it feels like I’m saying so there to the monster.”
Good for her. I wish I’d been able to do that to the Nightmare, instead of just screaming and flailing.
“You don’t look like you’re dead,” I said.
That made her grin. “Yeah, that’s the joke,” she said. “Hey. How come your partner is staying outside?”
“I told him he wasn’t allowed to flirt with you,” I explained. “Is he still sulking around the front door?”
“Yeah—well, he must be. I didn’t see him leave yet. Do you have to go away again straight away?”
“Nah, he can wait. He doesn’t want to get back to work, either.”
“Is your investigation going badly?”
“It’s a bit tricky, that’s all. We’ve got some footage that isn’t moving fast enough to catch what we need it to catch.”
She nodded knowledgeably, taking me by surprise. “Yeah, security cameras aren’t the best. They’re usually only sixty frames per second because the human eye can’t see faster than that anyway; they like to concentrate on clarity instead. What do you need to see that’s faster than that?”
“What would I have to use if I wanted to capture something that moves faster than the human eye can see?” I asked, dodging the question. “Like a hummingbird or something.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t capture stuff like that on a security camera,” Morgana said. “You need top class equipment for that. Even the high-end security cameras focus on high resolution rather than frames per second—they only need it to capture motion as fast as the human eye can capture it.”
“What about non-human eyes?” I muttered to myself. To Morgana, I said, “So if we wanted to capture something that moves more quickly than we can see, we’d have to buy—”
“—a really expensive setup with slo-mo capture,” she said, nodding.
I didn’t think Zero was short of
money; he could probably afford something like that. Janna Whiteleaf definitely could, and if the camera was being used to catch the Behindkind who was trying to murder her, it was a fair charge.
“I’ll tell ’em what they need to get,” I said. It would mean getting JinYeong to take me down to Janna Whiteleaf’s house, but at least then Zero and Athelas could catch the Behindkind and get away from the place. I wanted to make sure that Mr. Preston was given as much time and attention as he needed, too.
“Actually, I think I’ve got one around here,” she said. “I was going into photography for a while, and I tried a bit of videography, too. Have a look in that sports bag that’s inside the cupboard over there, the one with the buttons on it.”
I found the bag and brought it back to the bed with me. Inside was a sturdy bag with a telescoping tripod strapped on the side, and packed inside that was a black camera that I might have mistaken for a normal camera if it wasn’t so heavy.
“It’s a micro studio camera,” Morgana said. “I only used it once or twice. It’s pretty heavy, but if you use it with the tripod, you won’t have to worry about shakiness or anything.”
I stared at her. “You mean I can just…borrow it?”
“Yeah. I don’t use it anymore. Just bring it back when you’re done so my parents don’t notice it’s missing for too long.”
“Are you sure? Do you just loan your stuff out to everyone?”
“I don’t see everyone,” she said simply. “Just you and Daniel. I mean, and the kids, but that’s it. Who else is going to use it?”
“Okay. I’ll tell my bosses to look after it.”
“There’s an app, too,” Morgana said. “Give me your phone.”
I passed it to her cautiously, but she didn’t try to get into anything else, just went to the app store and downloaded something with a couple swipes of her finger.
“It’s nothing like as good as the camera,” she said. “But if you don’t have the other one set up and you need to catch something in a hurry, you can get some really good footage with this one.”
Between Frames (The City Between Book 4) Page 17
