Hang on.
Hang on. If I could use stuff from Behind in the human world by bringing it Between, why couldn’t I use stuff from the human world by bringing it Between? I just had to see it the right way, right?
For instance, the paperweight that looked like a gun from my crouching position behind the desk—who said it had to be a paperweight when it was Behind? What if it secretly wanted to be a gun?
“You’re a gun,” I said to it. “You’re not fragile and glass, you’re metal and plastic and deadly.”
“Now that’d be a real trick,” said the peryton, looking almost interested. “Go on, pick it up. I want to see this.”
“Don’t reckon ya do,” I said, because I could already feel the cool certainty of a gun butt against my palm.
Ah heck yes! Human world for all the firepower!
I picked it up, tilting to check for the safety, and flicked that off. Then I touched my finger to the trigger, light and slightly damp with sweat.
The peryton said something that was definitely more human than Behindkind, and stepped forward, so I shot it. It wasn’t my best shot, but I hadn’t been to a gun range in years. Still, it copped him in the shoulder, throwing out quicksilver blood that mutated in the air to become invisible and wriggled away into the carpet without a trace.
The peryton staggered back a step with its hand over its shoulder, glimmering around the fingers with that quicksilver blood. The image of Janna Whiteleaf flickered and died, then expanded into the shape of a stag with wickedly sharp hooves, its wings monstrous but not so frightening as the black-tipped beak.
“Ow!” it said, shocked. “You little—”
“Pet,” Zero’s voice said. “Duck, please.”
I ducked behind the desk and peered through the lower half of it, my heart thundering in my ears. Something bright and stinging flared over the whole room, smacking stickily against the desk and narrowly missing my face, and a mad tumble of teeth and steel and beak screamed into being.
By the time it was settled, and I came out with my gun at the ready, the peryton was on the carpet, enmeshed in the stickiness of something that wasn’t rope, struggling but contained. Zero was sporting a blue-blooded slash across his upper left arm and JinYeong’s suit coat was in tatters from what looked suspiciously like bird claws. Athelas, touching the tips of either sword to the carpet beside him, seemed to glisten just slightly at the temples in the soft light. Had he been sweating?
“Pet,” he said, rather breathlessly, “perhaps you could do me the goodness of not imperilling your life every other week.”
JinYeong spat an “Aish!” at the far wall and ripped off his suit jacket. “Ah, mangyeosseo! Petteu! No daemuniya!”
“I didn’t rip your jacket!” I protested. “And I found the murderer for you!”
“I knew sooner!” he shot back, Between edging the words. “I found that body. I was coming!”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “I didn’t need you, I had Zero.”
“Hyeong!” protested JinYeong. “Punish the pet! She disobeyed orders!”
“I was a good Pet,” I said smugly. “Stayed exactly where you told me to stay, didn’t I, Zero? I can’t help it if you lot left me with a murderer again.”
“We do seem to be forming troubling habits,” murmured Athelas. He cleaned his twin blades on JinYeong’s ruined jacket, drawing a snarl from the vampire that made his eyebrows rise in amusement. “Pet, perhaps you would be good enough to see if JinYeong’s jacket can be saved when we get home. He seems to be more than usually concerned about it—I assume it was a favourite of his.”
“Fine,” I grumbled. “You okay, Zero?”
“I am damaged,” said JinYeong, very clearly. “I need to be fixed.”
“There’s nothing that’ll fix what’s wrong with you,” I told him. “Are you even bleeding?”
JinYeong snarled and turned his shoulder on me, but Zero, interrupting us, asked, “Pet, where did you get that gun? Where did you learn to use it?”
“She told it to be a gun,” said the peryton. It was shaking, but I was pretty sure it was shaking with laughter. “So it became a gun. You’re playing a very interesting game, Lord Sero!”
“I was under the impression that it was Upper Management who was playing games,” said Zero.
“You can’t tell me you didn’t know she could do that!”
“It,” said Zero, chillingly. “This is merely a human pet.”
“Is that why it has the feeling of vampire to it?” asked the peryton. “Or why it had a magic-repelling spell on it?”
“Oi!” I said, insulted. “I don’t smell like a vampire!”
The peryton clicked its beak. “I didn’t say—”
“Enough,” said Zero, with finality. “I’ll have something to discuss with you soon enough, bird. Athelas, keep everyone out of the freezer—when the Enforcers get here, we’ll need to direct them to their latest body. JinYeong, you stay with me and guard this one until the Enforcers arrive. They’ll want to question it.”
JinYeong’s brows rose. I didn’t even have to try to understand him, because his words were clear. “Really, hyeong? You’re going to pass it to the Enforcers without talking to it first?”
“No,” said Zero pleasantly. “I’m going to have a talk with it first. Then I’ll call the Enforcers. Pet—”
“I know, I know—coffee!”
He stared at me. “No. We don’t need coffee. But you need to go below stairs and wait until we’re done up here.”
“You gunna kill it?”
Zero looked over at the peryton, which had gone very still and watchful, the single liquid eye in view unblinking. “I haven’t decided yet. Go below stairs.”
“Yeah, but it was talking about Upper Management and stuff, so there’s probably some things it can tell you.”
“There are many things it can tell many people,” said Zero. “Go below stairs, Pet.”
I went, because I’d protested long enough to be believable, and for Athelas to be busy in the freezer. There was something else I had to do before I left this house, and it wasn’t something I could let my three psychos see me do.
When I got down to the kitchen, the girl with the wide-awake eyes was there already. Beside her was the tall fae who had been in the security room the first time I’d come to the house.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
I couldn’t help glancing at the tall fae.
“It’s all right,” she said. “He’s why I’m like this and not like them.”
“Yeah?” I looked suspiciously at him. “You sure about that?”
“Very,” she said. “What’s happening?”
“Short version—Janna Whiteleaf is dead, and the Enforcers will be here before too much longer.”
“We should go now,” said the tall fae.
“Not before you get all the others,” I said sharply.
“I don’t care about the others,” the fae said. “Just this one.”
“I’ll get them,” the maid said. “I’m not leaving without them. If you leave without them, you leave without me.”
He sighed in frustration, the whisper of it a familiar sound. “They’ll need to be disenchanted. We don’t have time.”
“Then we’ll take them with us as they are and make time,” she said. “Wait here if you don’t want to help me fetch them.”
“I’m coming,” he said. “It will be quicker with two of us.”
I was nearly dancing with impatience by the time they got back, shepherding nearly a dozen humans, each with that glazed look to their eyes. “Hurry it up!” I hissed, opening the front door. “The Enforcers will be here any minute.”
I opened the gate for them as well, but I don’t think I was the one who opened the way back to the human world. That was the fae, who went in the lead, humans following obediently like a row of ducks. The maid stood by the garden gate with me as they passed by, watchful and bright eyed.
I couldn’t he
lp saying, “You’re going to stay with him, aren’t you?”
She nodded, her eyes still on the humans.
“You sure about this?” I asked her. “He doesn’t care about any of them except you.”
“I know,” she said. “But that’s enough for now. If he loves one of us, he can’t hate the rest of us. He wasn’t like this when I first met him, and if he can change so much since then, I know he can change more.”
“Yeah,” I said, a bit gloomily. “That’s what I keep hoping, too. If they can get fond of one of us, they should be able to get fond of the rest.”
She gave the smallest of nods, perhaps a remnant of her training with Janna Whiteleaf. “They just need time. Give it time.”
“Reckon that’s something we’ve just run out of,” I said. I felt a stirring somewhere within the house—the same sort of feeling that the psychos gave off when they were coming into the house through Between. “Reckon the Enforcers just got here.”
“It’s time to go,” said the tall fae, returning to pluck at her sleeve.
“Good luck,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope we don’t see you again.”
“I get that a lot,” I told her cheerfully. “Good luck.”
I was just inside the door again when Zero came down to get me.
“Pet,” he said, his eyes going from me to the front door. “What are you doing?”
“Just coming up to meet you,” I said, trying not to pant. “Had to um, tidy up the kitchen.”
“Is that why I can now only sense a single human in the house?”
“You can’t tidy up humans,” I told him. “Not like crumbs. You can brush crumbs into the sink and under the table, but you can still see humans if you try that.”
“Don’t try to talk me out of questioning you.”
I looked at him unblinkingly, aware of JinYeong padding down the stairs behind him, eyes dark and amused. “I can’t do magic. It wouldn’t be much use letting them go if I couldn’t really release them, would it?”
“That much is true,” said Zero, though I wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with my argument or telling me he believed I was telling the truth—up to a point.
“Well,” I said, allowing the indignation to creep into my voice, “how come you’re so flamin’ suspicious, then?”
“Experience,” Zero said, unperturbed. “JinYeong, is Athelas ready to go?”
“Ye, hyeong. The others have come.”
“Tell them to come down and meet me. I’m not going up to them.”
JinYeong didn’t have to tell them: the next thing I saw was the golden fae flouncing down the stairs with his usual cohort behind him and Athelas threading gently through them to join us.
Without bothering to greet Zero, the fae demanded, “Where is it?”
“It put up a good fight,” said Zero, and I knew that they’d killed the peryton.
And yeah, I know it was a murderer, and I know that they had their own legal right to kill it, but it still made me feel hollow and wobbly in the stomach. Detective Tuatu probably wasn’t going to like it much, either.
The golden fae said furiously, “You killed it?”
“There was no choice,” Zero said flatly, and I heard the truth in there. Whatever else the peryton had or hadn’t told Zero, it had been enough to seal its fate in one way or another.
“You were specifically tasked to capture it alive! How can we interrogate it if it’s dead?”
“You can’t. You’ll have to find someone else if you wish for information about Upper Management.”
“That was not our agreement.”
“Our agreement was that you would provide certain intelligence, and we would provide certain investigative services. We found and executed your murderer in accordance with the agreement and Behind law, but you have as of yet given us no useful intelligence.”
“Your father will be very displeased,” the golden fae said evenly. “I hope you don’t regret it, Lord Sero.”
“My father is always displeased with me.”
“Despite that, he wished to make sure you are aware of certain developments.”
“The only developments I’m interested in are those relating to the information I was promised,” Zero said.
“You should look closer to home, I think,” said the golden fae. “A significant event has occurred while you’ve been chasing your tails.”
“If we’d been given the information I asked for in the first place, we would have done significantly less chasing,” said Zero, his voice a threatening rumble.
“Your father was saddened by the fact that you were not able to make as good a use of the news we gave you as you would have liked.”
The fae lieutenant flicked her eyes toward the ceiling briefly. That, coupled with Zero and Athelas’ reactions when they got home from that particular trip last week, left me feeling like the information they’d been given had been deliberately not very useful.
“Your father wished to make sure you knew that while you’ve been busy protecting fae, the murderer has killed again—an heirling, this time. You’ll need to be prepared.”
“I’ve got no business with heirlings apart from catching the murderer if he’s murdered one.”
“I think you do.”
“Then you should mind your own business and stop telling Zero what his is,” I muttered.
To my surprise, Zero didn’t tell me to shush. All he said was, “Where is the body?”
“Then is our business concluded with this exchange?”
“I think you’ll find I can discover the body by use of my own resources,” Zero said. “There’s no clearing of the debt owed.”
I know I must have looked smug, and JinYeong definitely looked smug. Even Athelas had a faintly irritating air of amusement to him, and all three of those combined must have been too much for the golden fae.
He snapped, “Then I bid you good day!” and marched off toward the nearest door.
Unluckily for him, that was the cleaning cupboard, which, unlike the linen closet in our place, didn’t take him anywhere. He marched back out again, his nose very pinched at the nostrils, like he was trying not to smell something dreadful, and led his sparkling cohort out through the proper doorway instead.
As soon as he was gone, Zero said softly, “Pet, call Detective Tuatu. He’ll know if there’s been another murder.”
I obeyed, and the detective picked up on the second ring.
“I can’t talk, Pet,” he said. “There’s something going on.”
“Let me guess. You’ve got another body like the one you found outside my window.”
Silence. Then, “How did you know?”
“These three want to come and see.”
“Okay. We won’t be moving the body for a while yet. They might as well join the circus. I’ll text you the address.”
“Catch ya later,” I said, and hung up. To Zero, I said, “Yep. They’ve got another one.”
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twelve
The body was hanging from the powerlines when we got there. I think we were in Claremont by then, but it was kinda hard to tell, because Zero took us Between to travel there. It might be quicker and smoother for travelling, but it doesn’t help when it comes to my sense of direction.
Detective Tuatu was waiting for us, but when he made a protest about my presence that Zero summarily ignored, he tightened his lips and left the psychos to it.
“I’ll be over there if you need me,” he said to me, heading back to his co-workers.
Zero and Athelas circled the body, much like they’d done the first time I’d laid eyes on them. It wasn’t strung up outside of someone else’s window this time, so I suppose that was nice. That was the only thing that was nice about it, though. It looked the same as the last time I’d seen one of these bodies: throat cut, stomach slashed open to dangle entrails on the lawn. The head wasn’t hanging, at least; it sorta drooped sideways,
its dead eyes staring straight toward the house it dangled in front of. Even the bloke looked familiar, but it wasn’t until I got a proper look at his face that I knew why.
“Oh, for pity’s sake!” said Zero impatiently, at the same time. “It’s the human from across the road again! How many bodies will we find with his face?”
“Last time it wasn’t a body,” Athelas pointed out. “It was more a pile of ashes and a few body parts. Are you quite sure it’s the same one? He looks somewhat more…dishevelled than the first time we saw him supposedly dead.”
“That’s just all the beard and hair,” I said, with a leaden stomach. Despite the heaviness, I couldn’t quite believe he was dead. Like Zero, I’d thought him dead twice before. “It looks like him, all right.”
“Interesting,” said Athelas, his eyes dwelling thoughtfully on me. “So he escaped once, but he couldn’t avoid the murderer twice.”
“Yeah,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Looks like it.”
“Now that you mention the hair,” he added, his voice growing chilly, “I’m almost certain I saw someone similar outside the house a few days ago. If I’m not mistaken, our leftovers were left out for him.”
I coughed.
Zero said icily, “We will discuss that, and the fact that you seemed not at all surprised that he’s been alive, later.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice barely a mutter. He wouldn’t kick me out of the house for this, would he? I’d known it was a risk to keep quiet about the old mad bloke, but how could I tell them about him? I couldn’t lose the house for this. I’d clung to it for so long now, and I couldn’t lose it. It was home, and safety, and comfort.
JinYeong, ignoring us all, crouched beside the bloody body and touched one finger to the dead man’s blood-soaked cheek, then to his tongue.
A soft hiss of laughter escaped him. “Ku saramun aniya,” he said. “Ah, nomu jaemi isseo!”
“I beg your pardon?” Athelas said.
Between Frames (The City Between Book 4) Page 19
