“Do you?” Were Zero’s eyes a bit narrower with amusement? Maybe. “You’re a very yappy pet.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Us little ones are always yappy.”
Zero grabbed me by the collar and pulled me forward to measure the stick against my arm.
“How come you’re teaching me now?” I asked him, suspiciously.
Zero looked over the stick he’d snapped off, and trimmed the ends a bit more. “Didn’t you want to learn?”
“Yeah—I mean yeah, but you’ve been putting it off, and—”
“I wasn’t putting it off.”
Coulda fooled me. I didn’t say it aloud, though. “I want to learn; I just didn’t think you were gunna teach me.”
He handed me the stick. “Use this.”
I took it, and saw the possibility in it to be either a stick or something not exactly sticklike that was quite a bit heavier than the stick. I let it be a stick and hoped Zero wouldn’t notice.
“No,” he said. “That’s too light for practise. Change it.”
“What if it doesn’t want to—”
Zero’s eyes narrowed by just as much as a thought, blindingly blue.
I cleared my throat and squeezed the stick until it changed into a baton, leather and heavy and slightly grippy under my fingers. “Got it, boss,” I said.
“Now,” said Zero, and this time the narrowing of his eyes was closer to his version of a grin. “Now—footwork.”
Chapter Six
I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I flamin’ died.
Felt like it by the time I got back inside, anyway. By the clock it was only an hour, but my body was pretty sure it was more like four, and I had the shakes to prove it. Maybe if I’d only been doing the lunges and dodgy footwork he was showing me, it might have been all right; my legs were a bit sore as well, but nothing like my arms. There hadn’t been any comfort in Zero’s body language, either; when we started our drill he was focused but relaxed, and by the end he was still relaxed, but I was pretty sure he was displeased. That made me clumsy as well as weak, and despite Zero’s changing demands as we drilled, my performance didn’t change.
My arms were shaking for the rest of the night, too; and it was no surprise. For all the footwork Zero had made me do, he made me drill with the baton, and none of that drill involved just holding the baton at my side, I can tell you.
The next day was worse, though. I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow, and I only woke when my phone started ringing. The ache in my arm when I reached for it made me yelp, and I might have been a bit cranky when I accepted the call.
“What?” I mumbled into the receiver.
“One of them is at the police station again!” said Detective Tuatu exasperatedly, in my ear.
I groaned, and tried to straighten out my other arm, which felt like it was frozen in a painful crook. “One of what?”
“One of those three!”
“Oh, the psychos.” I groaned again. “I’m dying. I don’t care.”
“You’re—” there was a pause, and the detective asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Told you. I’m dying. Hang on.”
I put the phone down and made myself sit, groaning the whole way, then stretched out my arms despite the ache. I heard Detective Tuatu’s voice chirp once or twice, so I turned on the speaker mode and said, “All right, all right, keep your hair on. I’m just stretching. Zero was training me last night.”
“What training?”
“Baton fighting,” I said. “But he reckons it’s so I’ll be able to handle a sword. I dunno. He won’t let me have a real sword and the baton’s flamin’ heavy.”
“Good,” said Detective Tuatu. “You’d probably cut off your own head.”
“That’s flamin’ rude!” I said. “Zero said that, too. I’m pretty sure it’s harder to cut off my own head than someone else’s, anyway, so I don’t know why everyone’s so worried about that.”
“You shouldn’t be cutting off anyone else’s head, either.”
“What if they’re trying to cut off my head?” I argued. “I should be able to—hang on. Did you say one of ’em was at the police station again?”
He sighed. “Yes. All of yesterday morning, and again today.”
“Ah!” I said. “So that’s where Athelas was!”
“He’s Athelas? The smooth-as-cream one?”
“That’s him.”
“What’s he doing at the police station?”
“Dunno for sure,” I told him. If there was one thing I was sure of when it came to Athelas, it was that you never could be exactly sure what was going on with him. I thought about it for a bit, and said, “Oh, right. You said there was a cover up somewhere in the force. Athelas is probably checking it out.”
“That’s a good way to get killed,” said Detective Tuatu. “They’ve probably got someone following him already.”
I thought back to the bloke with the bright pants who’d been following the detective, and said to myself more than him, “Yeah, it’s a good way to get killed, all right.”
“I mean, I know they can walk through walls and everything, but—”
“You don’t have to worry about them,” I said. “They can look after themselves.”
“Yeah,” he said, but he still sounded uneasy.
I grinned at the wall opposite me. “You’re a nice detective,” I said. “We’ll keep you.”
“That’s another thing,” he said, after another pause. “It’s not healthy, living the way you do. People can’t be kept as pets, or things.”
“I’m hanging up now,” I said, and tapped the red circle while his voice was still protesting from the speaker. I said, “Rude!”
It was lucky he’d called, though; I’d slept through my alarm, and the digital clock on my phone showed a time of eight o’clock. JinYeong and I were due to start work at nine, and I hadn’t even got breakfast for everyone yet.
I grumbled to myself and tried to stand up, but my legs didn’t want to stretch out either, and I lost another ten minutes trying to make them bend at the knee again like they should. When that was done, I trotted downstairs to see who was still in the house. Athelas wasn’t, I already knew, and there was a kind of hollowness to the house that wasn’t explained until I got downstairs and found that JinYeong was the only other person in the house.
JinYeong was sitting at the table with a superior sort of expression on his pointy little face when I found him in the kitchen.
“Where’s Zero?” I demanded grumpily. I didn’t like the feeling of emptiness around the place, and JinYeong’s skinny carcase wasn’t likely to make much of a dent in that emptiness.
JinYeong only raised an eyebrow at me and made a silent moue with his lips.
I looked at him in disfavour while I filled the kettle. “S’pose you want breakfast.”
“Ne.”
“Coffee?”
“Ne.”
“Oh well, at least you won’t talk my ear off,” I said, wincing as I hefted the full kettle back over to its base. It wouldn’t do him any good if he planned on it, of course, but I hadn’t noticed that the lack of a listening ear stopped JinYeong from complaining. “Did Zero already go to work?”
“Ne.”
What a pain.
I noticed that JinYeong’s moue was more amused than superior and demanded, “What?”
“Petteu,” he said lazily, “Choshimhae.”
“Don’t you threaten me,” I said. “I’ll tell Zero.”
JinYeong’s other brow went up, and one incisor showed in a sultry half-grin. “Petteu, iruwa.”
“Your mojo doesn’t work on me,” I said. I mean, I was pretty sure it didn’t, and JinYeong didn’t correct me.
He just slouched a bit more, disgusted and dark-eyed. I looked at him more narrowly, and fetched a blood bag from the fridge.
“Mwoh hanun kkoya?” demanded JinYeong, sitting up straight in surprise.
I shoved the blood bag into his chest. �
�Have something to eat,” I told him. “And don’t look at me like that. It’s creepy. I probably don’t even taste that good.”
“Ani,” mumbled JinYeong, his mouth closing around the opening of the blood bag. He said around it, with a more of a purring than a sultriness this time, “Hangsang mashisso. Petteu do.”
It was probably a good thing I gave him the blood bag to drink before we got to work, because if he’d been surrounded by office ladies yesterday, today JinYeong was mobbed with uniformed ladies from every department. At least four of them had brought coffee for him, and if he’d been surrounded with that much temptation on an empty stomach, I wouldn’t have trusted him not to take a snack behind one of the pallets halfway through the day, even if Zero was in the storeroom.
There was no Daniel for me to work with that morning—I looked at the roster as I came through the staff room, and he wasn’t scheduled on until the afternoon. Rhonda took me with her instead. I knew straight away that it was going to be harder work; Rhonda moved like a very small, very precise robot, her fluffed up hair bobbing along the aisle with a grim determination to take on the world by herself. It was a pity I hadn’t been able to stomach breakfast, or even the smell of it, that morning. I was going to need the energy.
Lucky for me, Rhonda talked almost as fast as she worked and it wasn’t long before I knew at least one weird or scandalous thing about pretty much everyone in the store. If the assistant manager hadn’t been shanghaied by Zero and JinYeong, it was likely he would have been facing an inquiry from loss prevention—probably would be still when he got back, if Rhonda’s knowledgeable look was anything to go by. Shanae from cash office had been sweet on two of the men who only had eyes for Erica from the systems office (“…and it wasn’t just Shanae, either, I can tell you that—the nice little girl we had before her was dating one of them first!”) and Amanda from the deli was using the ladies’ toilet as her own personal bathroom before anyone else started work.
I didn’t try to remember everything, but I did file away a few of the more interesting remarks to report to Zero later; just in case it was important to know that the cleaners had recently changed, or that someone had been urinating all around the back dock.
On my first break I followed Rhonda and sat down with the smokers in the non-bloody end of the alley. None of them seemed to be too concerned that the other end had been a crime scene yesterday, which was about as surprising as Daniel’s unconcern about it. Or maybe the cops had just cleaned it all away so quickly that most of them hadn’t known about it.
But it was pretty odd for a story like that not to go around an entire store, even if only one or two people knew about it to start with. People liked talking about weird and shocking things, and everyone liked to think they’d seen something.
Still, I didn’t want to push things too much; none of them seemed to have noticed that I wasn’t smoking even though I was with them in the smoking area, and I figured it was better not to talk too much.
When they went in, I lingered behind them. From where I was sitting I could see into the window of JinYeong’s office; he was in there with one of the cash office girls—Shanae? I wondered, grinning—and as I glanced up, his eyes met mine.
He made a brief, paddling gesture in the air that was his way of telling me to come up to him. I pretended I didn’t see him, but that made him rap sharply on the window and repeat the gesture, this time more vehemently.
I stuck out my tongue at him and folded my arms across my chest, a clear no.
JinYeong narrowed his eyes at me, but short of leaving his office and coming down, there wasn’t any way of making me do as I was told, and I was pretty sure he was too busy with whatever girl it was he had in the office with him. She must be the one he’d mentioned last night—his best choice for suspect in an office that smelled of wolf.
Well, I had my own investigating to do, and it didn’t have anything to do with sitting in on his interviews. And speaking of investigating, I should probably get back inside. According to the roster, I was supposed to be working with Daniel this afternoon, and even if he wasn’t much use to talk to, at least his work style left me free to sneak around a bit.
I got up and wandered toward the top of the alley where the body had been yesterday, and caught sight of a uniformed person coming into the parking lot. It was Erica.
A touch of breeze tickled the back of my neck, raising hairs, and Erica looked up once, meeting my eyes. She looked away again immediately, ducking her head and walking quickly through the carpark with her head down and her hands gripping the sash of her satchel like she was afraid someone was going to try and pinch it. I mean, this was the kind of area where that might actually happen, but I didn’t think it was likely this close to the supermarket.
Erica, I thought as I watched her rapid pace, seemed to be the nervous sort who saw danger behind every bush. I made a face at the wall across from me, because that could mean I was barking up the wrong tree when it came to motives.
I sighed, but there was another flash of uniformed movement in the entrance of the carpark, and Daniel loped in behind Erica, his stride long and loose, his hands in his pockets and earbuds in his ears. He could have been just coming to work as normal if it wasn’t for the fact that his eyes never left her.
“Creepy kid,” I muttered.
So maybe Erica wasn’t paranoid. Maybe she was just creeped out by the eighteen-year-old kid who was following her around the place.
I narrowed my eyes at Daniel as he crossed the parking lot and entered the store. Funny about that, though; I hadn’t gotten that impression from her yesterday when she said hello to both of us. Maybe Erica was just used to hiding her nervousness around him.
The first thing I needed to do was find out whether or not he was a wolf shifter, then. What was I supposed to do, wave an uncooked steak under his nose? Hang around at full moon?
“Hajima,” said JinYeong, from close beside me.
I jumped, and glared up at him. “What are you, a mushroom? Where did you spring up from?”
“Duroga, Petteu,” he said. If I hadn’t known that he meant for me to go inside, the way he jerked his head at the staff door would have given it away.
“What? I’m not late back from break.”
“Moggolae,” he explained, tugging me away from the milk crate and through the door by the collar. Just inside the door he propped me against the wall and patted at my pockets.
“You want to eat?” I batted away his hands and hissed, “I didn’t bring anything with me! I can’t carry blood around in public!”
JinYeong made an annoyed mutter about food and eating, and pointed upstairs.
“What? Why should I eat with you?” I demanded, finally understanding. “I don’t wanna be part of your fan club!”
He narrowed his eyes at me and opened his mouth to say something that I wouldn’t understand anyway, so I interrupted him.
“Oi. Do that vampy thing of yours and put me to work with Erica this arvo.”
“Wae?”
“Gotta ask her some questions, that’s why. You got your suspects, I’ve got mine.”
JinYeong made a sniffy little laugh, but he looked more amused than disparaging, so I wasn’t surprised when Rhonda came to find me a few minutes after he went back to his office and told me I was doing tickets with Erica.
“Beauty!” I said, and trotted away happily upstairs. I grinned at JinYeong as I passed his office, but he pretended not to see me.
Oh well. I would get the chance to have a bit of a talk with Erica, and that was all that mattered. I still had the feeling that whatever was happening around this store, Erica was the most aware of it. At least, she was the person I’d seen around the store who was the most scared. And yeah, maybe that was because she had a teenaged stalker, but there was nothing that said a teenaged stalker couldn’t also be a wolf shifter, was there? And I could already smell Erica’s perfume again, if it came to that; from the strength of it, she must have bathed in it
.
I knocked on the cash office door and was let in by the woman I’d seen earlier in JinYeong’s office.
I had a quick look at her name tag, and yep! Shanae.
“What are you grinning at?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just glad I’m not working down on the floor anymore.”
“Whatever,” she said. “But you two better not talk all afternoon while I’m trying to do the pays. Just because Cash Office shares space with Systems doesn’t mean we want to hear you talk.”
“Gotcha,” I said, in a friendly sort of way.
Erica, who had turned her head to see who was coming through the door, gave me an expressive look behind Shanae’s back, and said, “Come and sit down. I’ll show you how to tear these.”
She still looked a bit anxious—maybe it was the faint line between her brows that didn’t quite go away even when she was smiling at me—but she didn’t look downright scared in here. Maybe the office was a safe spot for her.
It didn’t smell like dog to me, though, no matter what JinYeong said. Just a flaming nose full of perfume—two kinds.
“These tomorrow’s specials?” I asked Erica, pointing at the brightly coloured sheets piled up in front of her.
Shanae shot me a reminding sort of glare, but Erica nodded. “They go up tomorrow, while the store is still closed.”
“You put ’em up?”
“That’s right. Here, you fold like this then this, and tear them in thirds. Then tear bottom to top: if you layer them and tear from the bottom, they stay in order.”
“Right,” I said. It was an easy job; lots of time for talking, if Shanae didn’t go for me with her pen.
Maybe JinYeong was right—maybe she was a shifter. She was aggressive enough, even if she had the bad taste to go for a vampire.
Just in case, I decided I’d better wait a few minutes before I spoke again. I was all for unmasking wolves in the store, but I’d rather not do it while I was in a room that couldn’t be opened from the outside without the right key if I started screaming for help.
Just as I thought I might be able to risk talking, Erica asked me, “You’re new, aren’t you?”
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