Between Shifts (The City Between Book 2)

by W. R. Gingell

  The detective gave vent to a frustrated laugh. “I could charge him with accessory after the fact, or assault and battery, but I couldn’t prove it. What about her?”

  “You don’t need to worry about her.”

  “Did they kill her?”

  “Sort of,” I said, trying to edge him kindly into it.

  “How can you sort of kill someone?!”

  “She got loose and tried to kill me. Zero stopped her.”

  He sighed. “All right.”

  “All right?” That was surprising. I’d expected him to be a lot more upset about it, especially since Erica was dead.

  “I don’t like it, but at least there’s a reason for it. Pet—”

  “Yeah?” Funny, that was the first time he’d called me that. I wasn’t sure whether it was weird or nice.

  “They’ve finished their investigation, haven’t they?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Nothing much,” he said, absent-mindedly touching one finger to the dryad’s branches. I wondered if he could see how the roots reached out to him. “But Athelas is still at the station.”

  I frowned. I’d wondered where he’d gone this morning after I woke up. “That’s weird,” I said. “He didn’t say anything. Wonder what he’s up to.”

  “So do I,” Detective Tuatu said grimly. “A friend of mine said he’d been pulling some old case files.”

  “What sort of case files?”

  “He said he’d talk about it with me later. Am I supposed to water that?”

  “Probably,” I said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s normal like that.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway. Don’t blame me if it dies—I’m a bad gardener.”

  I grinned. “You’d have to do a lot more than be a bad gardener to kill this one.”

  Something like dying, I was pretty sure. That stopped me grinning.

  “Good,” said the detective. “Because I don’t have time to look after houseplants.”

  “This is a houseplant that looks after you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. What are you doing?”

  “I’m going out,” Detective Tuatu said, sliding his keys into his pocket.

  “Cool. Where are we going?”

  “We’re not going anywhere. I have someone to meet—you’re going home.”

  “Who are you meeting?”

  “Someone who messaged me last night.”

  I gave him a sceptical look. “Sure that’s safe?”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” said the detective. “Of course it’s safe.”

  “Sometimes people who look like your friends aren’t your friends,” I muttered. I still remembered the changelings my psychos had dealt with a little while ago.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Is that the friend who told you about Athelas?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m gunna walk with you.”

  Detective Tuatu grinned. “For my protection, or yours?”

  “Neither,” I said. “Just Zero gave me two hours, and I’ve still got about an hour. Can’t hurt.”

  “They still only let you out of the house for a few hours at a time?”

  “Remember how I tried to bite you?”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah. They’re just making sure I don’t try to bite anyone else.”

  “What was that about, anyway?”

  I looked across at him. “You really wanna know?”

  “Oh well, maybe not,” he said, sighing. “You’re not coming in when we get there.”

  “All right,” I said agreeably.

  I followed him up the stairs when we got there, anyway, even though he glared at me.

  “Don’t reckon he’s home,” I said. The day was starting to darken, and most people would have had a light on somewhere around the house by now. More than that, there was a sense of emptiness to the place that I was putting down to my currently heightened senses.

  “He probably hasn’t finished work yet,” Detective Tuatu said. “I have a key; I’ll wait.”

  Maybe there was a slight stressed accent on the word I.

  “Trying to get rid of me?” I asked, grinning. I wasn’t going anywhere; I still had forty-five minutes before Zero expected me back, and I wanted to make sure JinYeong had a chance to get home and uncomfortable before I got back. I didn’t trust myself not to snigger in his face.

  “Why are you interested in my friend’s house?” asked the detective suspiciously.

  “I’m not,” I said. “But I’m interested in why you’re trying to get rid of me.”

  “I’m not trying to—fine. You can come in. But if you start making trouble, I’ll kick you out.”

  “What trouble?” I protested, as he unlocked the front door. “What trouble am I gunna start in someone else’s house? I’ve never even been here before.”

  “You can have a cup of coffee before you go home,” said Detective Tuatu.

  It sounded like he was trying to be stern, so I gave him an encouraging grin and trotted through the door and down the hall.

  “I don’t like it when you grin at me like that,” he said, following me down the hall and into the kitchen. “Boil the jug; I’ll find the coffee.”

  “Oi,” I said, with one eye on the faint steam that was still rising from the spout of the kettle. “Thought you said this bloke wasn’t home yet?”

  “He isn—” he saw the steam and frowned. “He must have gone to the shops for something—or maybe he’s out the back.”

  “Maybe,” I muttered. I popped my head back out of the kitchen and looked suspiciously down the hall.

  The wallpapered vines tracing along the hallway moved.

  Uh oh. Maybe I should have taken the dryad along with us—only I didn’t think it worked as well portably as it did when it was planted, so to speak.

  I kept an eye on the vines, and heard something scratching away further down the hall.

  “This bloke have a dog?”

  “No.”

  “Cat?”

  “No. Why?”

  “What about really big rats?”

  “I’ll make you wait outside if you don’t start talking,” the detective warned me.

  I was gunna say Yeah? You and whose army? but this time when the vines along the hallway moved, it was because a fresh, stirring breeze moved them. Behind those vines, suddenly so leafy and concealing, something scratched or dragged or rattled.

  “Oi,” I said to Detective Tuatu. “Reckon we’d better get out of here.”

  He didn’t move; hadn’t seen the vines, or heard the scratches. Even his voice sounded reluctantly amused when he asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “We gotta go,” I said, and grabbed him by the sleeve.

  It wasn’t my new instincts that made my heart beat fast, or the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Nope. That was good old human fear.

  “There’s something coming, and I’m pretty flamin’ sure we don’t wanna be here when whatever it is gets here.”

  “Something coming from where?”

  There was a thump, this one loud enough that even Detective Tuatu heard it, and a limp body came tumbling through the vines. It hit my leg on the way through, startling a yelp out of me, which made the detective grab my collar and haul me back with him out of the way.

  “’S’okay,” I said, panting a bit. “It’s dead.”

  “How is that okay?” snapped Detective Tuatu. “Don’t touch it!”

  “I wasn’t gunna touch it!” I snapped back, leaning over the body. It was face down, and there was no movement to show it was breathing. “I was just making sure it’s properly dead.”

  Detective Tuatu said tightly, “I really don’t want to know about bodies that aren’t properly dead. Where did it come from, and who is it?”

  “Between,” I said, gently touching the vines on the wall. They were utterly still again, and I couldn’t hear the scratching any longer. “And I dunno who i
t is. You know where your friend is?”

  At least we weren’t going to be attacked, I suppose. But there was still the matter of the body someone had chucked at us, and I was pretty sure that the sound I could hear outside, that wailing in the distance, was—

  “Sirens,” said the detective, who had reached for the body’s shoulder to turn it, despite what he’d just said to me about touching it. His face was grim, his eyes chips of amber.

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “I never called the cops.”

  “Neither did I. You’d better sneak out the back.”

  “Can’t,” I said. JinYeong’s saliva must still have been doing its thing, because I could pinpoint exactly where the cop cars were coming from, and exactly where each one of them stopped. “They’re out there, too. Someone must have given ’em a really good tip.”

  “Get up in the ceiling, then,” said the Detective, crossing the hall to look carefully out the window. “Stay quiet. If you’re quiet enough, they might not find you.”

  Gloomily, I pointed up at the high ceiling. “No recess.”

  Detective Tuatu rolled his lips together, and back out. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have brought you with me. I knew they could do something like this, but—”

  “Hang on,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t matter about who brought us here. The important thing is that I can get us out.”

  “There’s no way,” he said, nodding at the window. “It’s like you said; there’s a dozen cars out there. No way we’re getting out of here through any of the windows or doors—they’re expecting us. Expecting me.”

  “Never said we were gunna go through the doors or windows,” I said happily. Zero said I wasn’t meant to go Between by myself, but this had to count as an emergency, right?

  “What are you talking about?” Detective Tuatu’s voice was uneasy, and there was the slightly white-eyed look of the startled horse about him.

  “Gimme your hand,” I said, grinning. “We’re gunna take a bit of a detour. This lot can have the body, but if I’m not home soon, my psychos will want to know what happened to dinner.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Are you going to drug me?”

  There was a shockingly sudden crash of splintering wood, and the front door snapped in half.

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, and grabbed Detective Tuatu’s hand. “Run for it!”

  I dragged him back up through the hall and through the door of the second bedroom, and right through the mossy wall into Between, the green wall paint sticking to us like tar as we pushed through it.

  “What the heck?” I panted, struggling to pull us both through. What was wrong with Between?

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t proof against my continued wriggling, and even as I heard the muffled sound of policemen running through the house, we were through. Through into a copse of silent trees and mossy hollows that was so lined by ferns and moss that every sound was deadened, even the sound of our voices.

  “What?” demanded Detective Tuatu, his eyes still wild and white around the edges. “What’s wrong? Why did it take us so long? Why are there bits of—of—is that the wall sticking to my arm?”

  “That’s flamin’ rude!” I told him. “I haven’t done this very often, so sometimes it takes a bit longer. You in a hurry or something?”

  I wondered if he knew he was clinging so tightly to my hand that it was going numb.

  He swallowed, and said, “All right, then. How do we get out of here? Where is here?”

  “Not a clue where we are,” I said, peeling off the bit of wall that seemed to be bothering him. We were out of immediate danger, but it wasn’t like I really knew where I was going—I didn’t have a lot of solo experience with Between. And most of that was accidental, too; like the way I got out of each situation.

  I huffed a breath at the dark green shadows around me, then fished out my phone. No signal. Yeah, that was about right. It looked like JinYeong was going to miss out on his choice for dinner tonight, too.

  “Who did you annoy this time?” I asked the detective, slipping my phone away without telling him I had no way of contacting my psychos. He already looked a bit overwhelmed. “Looks like someone’s still got their eye on you.”

  “I don’t know,” Detective Tuatu said tightly.

  “Was that your friend back there?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Didn’t get the chance to see his face.”

  “Bet it was.”

  “What—Pet, what are we going to do?”

  “First? Get home. Zero might start looking for us if we’re too long, I s’pose, but we can’t depend on it. After that, we’ll have to figure out who’s trying to frame you, but first of all we gotta get out.”

  The detective looked around us, his eyes darting toward shadowed hollows and ferny corners. “How? What do we do?”

  “Follow me,” I said to the detective. “Don’t let go of my hand. Watch out for goblins and don’t touch stuff.”

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