Greasy…maybe that was the one Detective Tuatu said was a homeless bloke. Only why had a homeless man been fixated on Erica? Maybe he’d seen her walking to and from work, but it was a fairly big jump from seeing a girl you like and waiting outside the store for her every day for two weeks.
“Did she talk with him? The greasy one?”
“Not at first,” the girl said. “She looked scared and pushed past him. But by the third or fourth afternoon she had an argument with him—half her patience, I say! I would have been screaming at him by the second day. He still kept coming after that, but he stayed at a distance.”
Homeless man had been another of the humans; probably hadn’t even known what he was getting himself into, hanging around a supermarket that was terrorised by a wolf shifter. That was bad luck for him.
“Sounds like she gets all the luck,” I said.
“Yep,” said Carmen, crushing her paper cup. “Beauty’s a curse, right? You should fix your hair before you go back, Pet; it’s all lumpy at the side.”
I muttered about that as she went back to work, but I only had a couple of minutes to call Detective Tuatu before I went back to work, so I decided to sulk later, and went outside to call him in private.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Desperate, ay?” I said to him, combing my fingers through my hair in hopes of loosening the vine.
“What do you want, Pet?”
I picked a few small leaves from my hair. “To talk to you, of course. What do you know about a woman called Erica Knopke?”
The detective’s voice sharpened. “Is she a suspect?”
“Nope. A lead. Lots of death around her.”
“Then why isn’t she a suspect?”
“Because it looks like our someone is killing anyone who gets too close to her. There was one bloke who was keen on another woman and then saw her, plus another bloke who was just keen on her, and then—”
“All right,” said Detective Tuatu. “I’ll do some digging and see what turns up.”
“No, no!” I said hastily. “I don’t need you to dig up stuff, I need you to meet us after work. Zero says I should let on that I’m undercover and that you’re helping: he reckons it’ll make Erica brave enough to talk. She knows stuff she’s not telling, and I think it’s ’cos she’s scared.”
“Oh.” Tuatu was quiet for a while, then agreed. “All right. I’ll meet you in the café on the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool. What time?”
“Three thirty. We’ll be finished by then.”
“All right.”
It was just Erica and me when I got back from lunch, which was nice. Not just because any office was friendlier without Shanae in it, but because it would give me a chance to convince Erica that she should really report Daniel to the police—and if not to the police collectively, to Detective Tuatu individually.
I sat down next to her and asked, “How come you didn’t go out for lunch?”
“There’s too much to do,” she said. “I can eat in here and keep working.”
“It’s because of Daniel, isn’t it?”
“Pet—”
“It’s okay,” I said encouragingly. Was this where I was supposed to tell her that I was undercover? What if she got angry? “You remember I told you I have a friend who’s a cop?”
“I remember,” she said. “But—”
“That wasn’t exactly the truth. I mean, it’s the truth, but I’m not just here for work—I’m helping to investigate from the inside. We know there’s someone bothering you, and we want to make sure it stops.”
Erica gaped at me. “You’re police?”
“Not exactly. I’m just…um, helping my detective friend out. That murder outside the store—”
“I don’t know anything about it!”
“I told you,” I said persuasively. “We’ve got people who can help. What happened that night?”
Yeah, well, maybe not people exactly, but close enough.
“I don’t know anything about it!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about that right now. But you should talk to someone about Daniel. Aren’t you tired of him following you home every day?”
Erica’s eyes filled with tears. “What can I do about it? If I tell the police, they’ll just look at him and think he’s a kid. That’s what I thought.”
“And you might know a bit more than you think, anyway,” I said. “We can work with that. I’m gunna take you to see someone today after work, all right?”
“That detective?”
“Yeah. He’ll make sure there’s someone watching you from home to work and back again so you feel safe enough.”
She clung to my arm. “But won’t you keep walking with me?”
“Yeah, of course. But there will be someone else, as well. Just in case.”
“All right,” Erica said, and she let out a shaky breath. “When are we going to meet your detective friend?”
“After work,” I said. “We’ll meet him at a café in the city centre.”
She was still unsure about it after work, so I was glad she didn’t see Daniel when we walked out together. I mean, he only glared at us, but for the first time since I’d met him, I felt as cold as my three psychos had made me feel when I met them. He really looked like he could happily tear out my throat.
He didn’t follow us, though; or at least, if he did, he did it from a far enough distance that I didn’t see him. But I still felt safer once we got to the café and saw the detective.
I steered Erica through the sliding doors and over to the table he was at.
“This is my detective friend,” I said. “Erica, Detective Tuatu. Detective Tuatu, Erica.”
The detective got up and shook her hand, then sat down again. Erica, a bit reluctantly, sat down too.
“I hear you’ve got a problem with someone who’s a bit clingy,” he said to her. “Let’s have a bit of a talk about how to keep you safe.”
Chapter Ten
The next day, Rhonda put me to work with Daniel as soon as I got to work.
Flamin’ fantastic. Now I could toy with death at work as well as at home.
I huffed a sigh. At least the strand of vine had fallen out of my hair overnight—probably helped on by my tossing and turning—so I was feeling slightly more normal than yesterday. Still, it took a bit of energy to shoot Daniel a big, insincere grin as I approached him and the cage he was working on.
He wasn’t having any of it. “Go away.”
“Can’t,” I said. “Rhonda told me I gotta work with you. You think this is fun for me?”
“Why are you still hanging out with Erica?”
“Right to the point. Nice. Well, there’s this weirdo who keeps following her around, and she’s not too happy about it, so I figure I might as well.”
“Erica and I are none of your business!”
“I don’t care about your business,” I retorted. “But Erica wants me to walk her home, so I’ll walk her home.”
Frustrated, Daniel kicked the cage and snatched a case of dog food out of it. “Why can’t you just hang out with other shifters?”
“I don’t know other shifters,” I said, happily aware that this gave me a very good opening to ask him another question I hadn’t been sure he would answer. “Oi. What about Shanae? Is she one of us as well?”
“There is no us,” retorted Daniel. “You’re not part of the pack. And I’m not going to play twenty questions about who is and who isn’t a shifter. It’s none of your business.”
“It is my business! I’m gunna turn into a wolf soon, and I wanna know who’s gunna freak out if I accidentally change in front of ’em! Anyway, you just told me I should be hanging out—”
“I didn’t mean here! And anybody will freak out when you first change; even other shifters. It’s gross.”
“Well, that’s rude.”
“Are you still eating meat?”
As if I wasn’t throwin
g up everything else I tried to eat. I said, unenthusiastically, “Yeah.”
“Good. I’m not coming to help you out if it doesn’t work out, so you better look after yourself.”
Life didn’t get much better when I got home, either. Zero was there before me, and he was dressed in his loose trousers instead of jeans, which meant I was in for some training again.
I wouldn’t have minded, but it was flaming hard, and no matter how I looked at it, I didn’t see myself getting better with a sword—or a stick, for that matter—that was nearly as heavy as I was.
“What are we doing this arvo?” I asked Zero gloomily, when I came back downstairs after changing. “More stick training?”
JinYeong sniffed a laugh and made a lazy remark at Zero that must have been about me.
“Perhaps so,” replied Zero. “There’s a weight and balance difference that might suit the pet. The single sword is too heavy and a smaller blade won’t be enough if it’s facing a larger opponent.”
Another lazy few sentences murmured from JinYeong, along with an assessing sort of look that ended in a smirk.
“Kamikaze?” Zero’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Yes, I thought so, too, judging by past experience. It should be a good fit.”
“Oi!” I said indignantly. “What are you laughing at? Don’t listen to the vampire. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Zero fished out something brown and battered from his alcove, and threw it at me. I caught the scent of it before I caught the thing itself: it was a cylinder of thick leather, laced with something that wasn’t leather or anything else that I recognised.
It looked like it would be good to chew on.
“Pet,” said Zero, his eyes on me. “It is not food.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, trying not to think about how deliciously chewy it looked. “Is this a wrist guard?”
“Forearm guard. Put it on.”
“Oh. What’s the difference?”
JinYeong gave a derisive laugh, but Zero said, slipping his arm through a similar, but much larger guard and tightening it, “You’ll need all the mobility in your wrist; the guard would prevent that. It needs to be high enough to leave your wrist free, and low enough to protect as much of your forearm as possible.”
“Which arm?”
“Your non-dominant hand. Come out into the garden.”
“Where’s me stick?”
“You have to find your own stick this evening,” said Zero, and strode off toward the back door. “We’re doing a different kind of training today.”
JinYeong chuckled as if at a particularly delicious joke, and I glared at him as I followed Zero. I didn’t like it when JinYeong chuckled. There was something nasty waiting to drop on me, I just knew it.
Zero was waiting for me in the garden when I stumbled out, trying to tighten the laces on my forearm guard as I came. He wordlessly adjusted the guard down a little and pulled the laces tight. I don’t know exactly what he did with the ends of the laces, but everything looked smooth when I looked down, and I might have felt a flutter of something cool against my skin beneath the guard.
“Did you just do magic?” I asked him suspiciously.
“Ready yourself,” he said.
“You haven’t got a—”
Zero reached into the garden and brought out something that should have been a stick but managed to turn itself into a practise sword as he withdrew it.
Hang on. Nope. There were two of them.
Zero tested the weight of them, and I saw his weight shift.
He was gunna attack?
“Hang on!” I yelped. “Where’s me stick!”
“I told you,” said Zero, one of his pretend blades swinging in a lazy circle. “Today you have to find your own stick. You seem to fight more…naturally…when you’re scrambling.”
“What?”
Zero danced forward, pretend blades sweeping in perfect union, and I ran for it. I would have run straight back into the house, but JinYeong was there in the door, grinning. I dodged and scampered up the closest tree, which was near enough to a taller one that I only had to make a very small leap to get there.
Zero sauntered over to the base of the tree, blades lowered, and said. “Come down, Pet.”
“Heck no!” I told him. “Someone comes at me with two swords and I’m gunna run like mad. I’m not an idiot!”
“Come down, Pet.”
Grumbling, I came down.
Zero waited until he saw I was really coming down, then went back to his original spot. He pointed with one sword at the spot where I’d kicked up grass in my flight, and I dropped to the ground in a shower of bark and skulked back to that spot.
“Ready yourself,” he said.
He came at me again, but I felt the slither of something coming through Between behind me, and I dodged left this time. A practise sword whiffled over my head; I ducked and would have gone for my tree again, but there was a hedge of something alive and wavy and green in the way.
Beggar me.
I ran for the house again, ignoring the grinning JinYeong who blocked the door, and plunged right through the wall and Between.
It was a house, but it wasn’t. The walls were white marble and crawling with vines, and there was no ceiling. Leaves fluttered across the floor in the gust of movement as I came through, then turned to dust bunnies as the house turned into my house again.
Kitchen. I was in the kitchen.
I needed knives.
There were no knives within reach, and I felt the whole house twitch as Zero stepped through the wall, tugging at reality.
I darted down the hall toward the front door, and there in the umbrella stand was a cane. Only one, but maybe it could be sharp if I were persuasive about it.
I snatched it out of the stand and said hurriedly, “You flamin’ well better be sharp, otherwise I’m gunna get thrashed to a pulp!”
There was a small click and the cane separated between my hands, a thin crack in a circle at the centre of the cane. I saw it for what it was, grinning, and pulled my hands apart to separate twin blades. They weren’t as long as Zero’s blades; maybe just a little over half a metre each, but they were solid and double edged and so light.
“Come, Pet,” said Zero.
I reluctantly joined him in the kitchen, my twin blades cautiously in front of me. Thanks to the last couple of training sessions, I had an idea of how to put up a guard with a single sword, but this was different.
“You seem to have a very particular affinity for this house,” said Zero. His swords were still moving very slightly, and they were still in a position from which he could attack, so I didn’t lower my guard.
I didn’t know what I was doing, but any guard’s better than no guard, right?
“Yeah,” I said. “Lived here for a long time. And I don’t like turning sticks into stuff. I like bricks and metal and city.”
“Your guard isn’t correct.”
“Yeah? Well, I haven’t done this before. Sorry pardon.”
JinYeong gave a tsk of annoyance and stepped between me and Zero. With one slender hand he twitched my right wrist into place in front of me, blade forward; with the other, he bumped my left elbow into a slightly different position.
Zero moved at once, slicing at my guard. JinYeong leapt for cover with a bright, happy chuckle, and I fell backwards into the living room with a yell.
Somehow I turned the fall into a tumble without losing either blade and without cutting off a limb, and collided with Athelas’ crossed legs.
“Not in the house!” he protested, startled out of his usual composure. “Really, Zero! Pet, if you damage my chair—!”
Zero slashed downward and I yelped, crossing blades above me by instinct. The weight of his blow sent me to my knees again, but my arms held and so did the blades.
Behind me, Athelas sat very still, and I looked up through half-closed eyes to see the edge of Zero’s practise blade just an inch or two from my skull; the point a similar
distance from Athelas’ nose.
That would have given both of us a nice headache.
“Not too bad,” said Zero, and stepped back. This time, the points of his swords lightly touched the carpet. It was the end of his attack. “JinYeong will have to give you some pointers when you get further in; his specialty is twin blades. Either Athelas or I can train you in the beginning elements. For now, we’ll start with the basic attacks, blocks and defences. Outside, Pet.”
I was dripping with sweat by the time JinYeong came back out to call us in. Twin blade fighting might be lighter in terms of swords, but flaming heck it was heavy on the cardio! And maybe Zero was right about it suiting me better; there wasn’t much in the way of safety, but it was fast and frantic and if I could stop enemies from getting too close, there was a good chance I’d be able to kill someone before they killed me. If I didn’t slip in a pool of my own sweat first.
We came in as called, though I didn’t know why until I saw Detective Tuatu sitting in one of the spare chairs. He looked about as comfortable as he’d looked the first time he came over—well, the first time he came over to see the psychos, anyway. He’d been pretty happy picking the lock and sneaking in when they weren’t home.
Anyway.
“Is there some news you want to share?” asked Zero coolly.
“One of the employees visited the police station today,” said the detective. “A boy. I didn’t get his name, but he went above stairs to Upper Management.”
I made a small sound of disgust. “So he was gunna go there yesterday! He must have seen me following him from the start.”
“Who were you following?” asked the detective.
“Daniel,” I said. “That was the one who came to the station, wasn’t it? A kid with brown hair and angry eyes, beanpole kinda look to him?”
“And a studded hoodie,” nodded Detective Tuatu.
“Evidently you require a lesson or two more in tailing without being noticed,” murmured Athelas.
“He probably smelled me,” I said grumpily, wiping away sweat with the cuff of my hoodie. I wasn’t that bad at following people.
Between Shifts (The City Between Book 2) Page 16