Fell Beasts and Fair

by C. J. Brightley

  “What about your card?” the kid asked. “You can’t get back Behind, can you?”

  “I’ll sort something out,” I said hastily. “No need to worry yourself about me.”

  Athelas looked mildly amused. “What’s this about his card?”

  “He had one,” the kid said. “Someone made it black, though. I think they did it because he wouldn’t kill me.”

  The vampire’s eyes went dark again, and he took a step forward. Lord Sero didn’t move, but his voice was still cold when he asked, “So you were sent to kill Pet?”

  “You’ve scared him again!” the kid said accusatorily. “Look, his wooden leg is drilling holes in the ground!”

  I squeezed my eyes shut briefly and begged the kid, “Please stop trying to help me!” Every time it tried to help me, things got a little bit worse.

  “Someone’s sending people through Between,” the kid said. It didn’t listen real well, for someone with two ears still intact. “Far as I can tell, anyway. It’s what they did to Five-Four-One. They’re using normal Behind people to murder humans, we think. They kick them through without warning, tell them to kill someone, and if they don’t their cards are blackened so they can never get back. But he didn’t kill me. I think that’s what the dropbears were for, to make sure.”

  “Who sent you?” Lord Sero asked. If I wasn’t already feeling icy to my toes, I would have frozen.

  “Can’t know for certain, your lordship,” I said stiffly, professional instinct taking over from personal. I must be crazy.

  “Ya,” said the vampire silkily. “Chugolae?”

  Even the kid looked worried. “He wants to kill you. Are you sure you really don’t know?”

  I cleared my throat. “Might have been a few odd quirks in the money trail of a company I’ve been following the last few months.”

  “What quirks?”

  “Um.” I glanced between Lord Sero and the vampire, unsure of which one I wanted to keep an eye on the most. “They’re a group called Allied Traders; they trade with a few companies on this side of Between.”

  The kid blinked. “There are other humans who know about the Between and Behind?”

  “You’re not the only one, sunshine,” I said, forgetting myself. I turned back to Lord Sero. “I mean, well, your lordship, um—well, they’ve been trading in what they call organic resources, but their holding sites are a front.”

  “No stock at any of them?”

  “Not a sausage. I only caught onto them because they’ve been trying to be a bit clever with their taxes. Last night I told my supervisor about the investigation so I could take it up the chain.”

  “And this morning you find yourself thrown into the human world with orders to kill a certain human or risk never coming home,” said Athelas. He was smiling. “A swift, decisive action.”

  “Got it in one,” I said. My tone might have been a bit sour; I wasn’t smiling about it all, but there was no way I was going to try and stop him from smiling. “And those empty warehouses—”

  “Ohhh!” said the kid. It was angry again. “They’ve been—the people are the stock? I know you said they were selling them, but—!”

  “Interesting.” That was Athelas again. Trust him to find it interesting. “A two-pronged business; Behind, a human stock mill—”

  “In the human world, a murder for hire set up,” I nodded. “It’s probably how they’re paying for their human stock. Want to bet they’re using all normal Behinders for it? If I’m righteous, I can’t go home to tell about it; if I’m a killer, I’m home but in as deep as they are.”

  “Munjae dulkae issoh,” said the vampire silkily.

  “Why two problems?” asked the kid. “We only need to find out who’s been sending Behinders through to kill humans and stop them stealing other humans, don’t we? They’re the same problem.”

  “No, there are two problems,” agreed Lord Sero.

  “Perhaps three,” murmured Athelas, and for what felt like the first time in ages, I grinned a bit.

  Lord Sero shot him a frosty look.

  “A visit to the human front of Allied Traders is in order, I think,” said Athelas, ignoring both the frosty look from Lord Sero and a frowning one from the kid, who didn’t understand the interaction but definitely saw it.

  I grinned a bit more, because I wondered which one of them was going to tell their pet that the second problem was finding out who had hired someone to kill their pet through the intermediary of Allied Traders; or that the third problem was how that person knew this pet was cared for enough to merit being killed.

  “You,” Lord Sero said to me, “You’re coming, too.”

  That wiped the grin from my face. It’s probably part of why he said it. “Your lordship, they’ll kill me if I go there!”

  “They’ll kill you if they catch you here, too,” Athelas said mildly.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Got that idea myself.”

  There’s a certain kind of calm to company buildings Behind. Some of that is because they’re rooted in the surrounding greenery to keep their assorted Fae and Other employees as happy and productive as possible. Part of it is because Fae and Other are tricky folks who love to find tricky ways around business.

  There was a kind of calm to the human offices of Allied Traders, too; but this calm felt like more of a smug calm. Something that got up my nose because it suggested no one could mess with them, and anyone messing with them was going to have a bad time.

  It was a good feeling to break up a bit of that calm the moment I entered the building. It was a smallish two story building, unimpressive concrete on the outside but all white modernity on the inside, and I could feel the edge of Between that hung around it the minute I got in. They weren’t expecting a leprechaun, and they weren’t too happy to have one in there, either; all three of the secretaries in the lower level trotted after me, bleating, as I took the elevator up to the top floor.

  One of them must have managed to warn the top floor, because when the doors dinged open, there was a meeting party. Well, a guy in a suit, anyway. There were a few sleek cubicles up here, with a few sleek humans pretending to work while they stole glances at me, but when they saw that I was a leprechaun, half of them rose to their feet to gawk shamelessly.

  “Good evening, sirs and madams,” I announced. “Please remain in your seats. Your company is being audited.”

  “On whose authority?” demanded the one in front of me. “Stay where you are, everyone. I’ll handle this. Now, I don’t know who you are, but—”

  “You’re the boss, are you?”

  “I am the head of the board,” said the human, drawing itself up. “Who are you, and what authority do you represent?”

  “I’m with the BTA,” I offered.

  It smirked at me, which I found annoying. “Then you’d better sit down while I call your boss,” it said. “I think you’ll find your authority doesn’t go for much around here.”

  “Then I suppose it’s a good thing I’m not here under the authority of the BTA, isn’t it?” That wiped the smug look from its face momentarily, which pleased me so much that I tapped my peg against the floor twice, smartly.

  “But you said—”

  “Didn’t say I was here under the authority of the BTA, did I?” I reminded him.

  “Then whose authority are you—”

  “His,” I said, as the elevator dinged again. I jerked my thumb behind me and cleared the way for Lord Sero, who was filling the elevator doorway behind me. The human swallowed and fell back; and as it did so Lord Sero stepped through the door, Athelas and the vampire flanking him. The human kid trotted in behind them, observing the scene with interest.

  “Are you the head of the board?” Lord Sero’s voice could have shaken the foundations of the building—or maybe it was just me that felt the trembling right to my bones.

  “Yes.” That was a definite tremor in his voice. I had the feeling he knew exactly who and what Lord Sero was. “Why do you want
to know?”

  “I want to know who you’re working with Behind, who authorised a human mill start up, and who gave you the job of killing our pet.”

  “Your—your pet?”

  The kid touched one finger to its eyebrow in a salute. “Hi.”

  “I’m not authorised to give you that information.”

  The vampire JinYeong laughed and said something softly.

  “He says,” said the kid, “that it’ll be more fun finding out this way, anyway.”

  “Pet,” said Athelas, “Show the head of the board into his office for us.”

  The kid shrugged and went and opened the door. The head of the board walked past it, his face almost as white as Lord Sero’s and vanished within. The kid came back to stand next to me and hissed, “Won’t he just call the Behind offices if we leave him alone in there?”

  Athelas smiled faintly.

  I said in an undertone, “That’s what they’re counting on.”

  “Doesn’t make sense to me,” the kid said. “Oi. I think that one’s trying to sneak away.”

  That one was wearing a skirt, so I suppose it was female. She looked like she was trying to back away quietly, but when she bumped into JinYeong, who somehow managed to be behind her without a moment’s notice, she sat down again very quickly.

  One of the trousered ones in another cubicle asked, “Can we go? You’ve got our boss.”

  “You,” said Lord Sero, “will stay. You will all stay.”

  “What did we do?” blustered the human. “We’re employees! We’re not responsible for what our company does!”

  “Employees?” I laughed. I hadn’t spent the last three weeks going over every inch of Allied Traders for nothing. “You’re board members, every one of you!”

  The female tilted her chin. “All right, what if we are? What we’re doing isn’t illegal, and we’re making an unprecedented link between Human and Other kind.”

  “You tried to have me killed!” said the kid indignantly. “That’s illegal over here!”

  “We’re not a human company,” said the female. “We’re a Behind company and we fall under Behind laws.”

  “And it’s not like we’ve done anything but facilitate a thriving industry across borders,” said another of the board members. “There’s nothing you can do to us, legally!”

  “Nothing according to human law,” said Lord Sero, with a white, glittering smile that held no humour. “But we don’t run by human law, either.”

  “We’ve done nothing against Behind law, either!”

  “Between you and the dropbears,” I said to the whites of all those self-righteous, terrified eyes, “I’d pick the dropbears every time. At least they only wanted to eat us; they wouldn’t have tried to tell us to be grateful to help the ecosystem along.”

  “There’s the little matter of coerced murder for hire and tampering with Identify Cards,” Athelas said.

  “You can’t prove that!” said another of the suited ones.

  The vampire laughed again.

  “What an odd notion of our job you seem to have,” said Athelas. “We, on the other hand, have a really very good idea of yours.”

  “Yeah,” said the kid, scowling. “And we don’t like it.”

  “You should go downstairs now, Pet,” Athelas said pleasantly.

  “What? They tried to kill me! I don’t want to go!”

  “Take her out,” said Lord Sero to me.

  Her? It was a she?

  “It,” said Athelas, in a reminding sort of way.

  The kid said, “Oi!” at him.

  “Yes, it!” Lord Sero snapped. “Take it out!”

  I took the kid out. It protested the whole way down in the elevator, but since I was pretty sure I knew what was about to happen upstairs, I ignored the protests and dragged it out anyway. I knew that red look in Lord Sero’s eyes; I’d seen it often enough in the war. Those board members, protesting and self-righteous and convinced of their own innocence, were staring death in the face.

  The kid stopped complaining once we were downstairs—maybe it had expected to be kicked out at some stage. It boosted itself up on the secretary’s desk and crossed its legs beneath it. “They always kick me out,” it said glumly. “I mean, maybe I didn’t want to be there, but if I’m part of the team I should have some of the responsibility, too.”

  “You’re not part of the team,” I said harshly. There was no way this kid should be present for what was going on upstairs. “You’re the pet.”

  “I know they’re going to kill the board members,” the kid said, surprising me.

  I wasn’t sure if I was more surprised to know that the kid had seen through my harshness, or because it did actually know what was about to happen.

  “Zero and them,” it explained. “Athelas explained it to me once; their job is to investigate, judge, and apply the judgment.”

  “Doesn’t bother you?”

  “Yes,” said the kid. “No. I don’t know. But those board members—they’re like animals. No, they’re much worse than that. They think everyone else is an animal, and that they can do what they like with them. Over this side of Between, there’s no other justice but Zero for humans when it comes to Other problems. Human prisons can’t hold them, and there are too many people in Behind who turn a blind eye to that sort of thing to even try cases there. So when they start incorporating that sort of attitude and turning it into a business—”

  “If it needs to be stamped out, there needs to be someone to stamp it out.” I was a lot more certain than the kid; Lord Sero’s unit might be irregular, but it was well within Behind laws. I had no problem with the way they were fixing the problem. “They’re beasts, too; but they’re beasts of another kind.”

  The kid frowned. “The good kind.”

  I thought about that for a minute. In the boardroom upstairs, three bloody emblems of death were tearing through human flesh to destroy every trace of evil from this part of the human world. And if I wasn’t very much mistaken, they would soon go Behind to perform the same office there. Bloody beasts, but very necessary ones in the world of Behind.

  “Yes,” I said. “Beasts of a good kind.”

  About the Author

  W.R. Gingell is a Tasmanian author who lives in a house with a green door. She loves to rewrite fairytales with a twist or two--and a murder or three--and original fantasy where dragons, enchantresses, and other magical creatures abound. Occasionally she will also dip her toes into the waters of SciFi. W.R. spends her time reading, drinking an inordinate amount of tea, and slouching in front of the fire to write. Like Peter Pan, she never really grew up, and is still occasionally to be found climbing trees. Her website is WRGingell.com.

  Don’t Wake the Dragon

  M.C. Dwyer

  There is a game the children in my village used to play—perhaps they play it still; it’s been too long since I left to say for certain—called “Don’t wake the dragon.” Like most childish games, it is fairly silly, and was likely started by an adult who was in need of a little peace and quiet. It goes like this: one child is the dragon. He stands in the middle of the chosen playing field with his eyes closed. One at a time, or in twos, the rest of the children creep by close enough to feel the warmth from his body. If the “dragon” hears their movement, or feels their presence, he can stretch out his arms and capture anyone in reach. These children are promptly “eaten” and have to sit out, and spend the rest of the game jeering and catcalling the dwindling number of survivors. The game lasts until either everyone has been eaten, or the last child is uncatchable.

  I was a magnificent dragon. The others took to blindfolding me, accusing me of cracking an eye and cheating thereby. It wasn’t true; I simply had an almost sixth sense as to where people were. I was nearly uncatchable, too: creeping silently on cat feet and holding my breath until I was past.

  Both skills serve me well in my current profession. But they may have gotten me into my current spot of trouble.

  I
t started innocently enough: I was passing off a purse I’d lifted from an unwary visitor to our fair city. It wasn’t personal, and I didn’t really need the money at the moment—I just liked to keep my fingers limber and lifting purses was good practice. I figured it served them right. If they were naïve enough to wear their money in plain sight, they were obviously in need of a little (expensive) reeducation. And since I usually passed off the spoils to the street kids, I salved my grumbling conscience with the reminder that I was helping to feed hungry bellies and hopefully prevent the creation of more thieves down the road.

  Did I have to steal? Well, I hadn’t started out as a thief. I’d left the village at sixteen when it was obvious no one was likely to marry the misbegotten daughter of a village priestess. Making my way to the big city, I’d had high hopes of finding decent work and a few friends. Little did I know there’s only one line of work readily available to young girls with no protection. I stole food that first week when my stomach would not be quiet, and found—quite by accident—a dropped coinpurse. Returning it was obviously out of the question. If I’d gone to the guardsmen I would’ve been accused of stealing it (never mind the fact that if I had, returning it would be the last thing I’d do) and likely beaten for my trouble. I kept it, and used the bulk of it to rent a tiny room in a rundown but decent part of town. I steal just enough to retain the room and keep my belly full (the odd extra purse notwithstanding), and try to stay out of sight of the authorities. It has served me well for the past six years, anyway, though it’s not the rosy future I had imagined.

  I strolled down the street, glancing at the wares in shop windows and breathing deeply of the smells of candied pecans and pastries from the vendors’ carts. I traded a coin for some of the cinnamon-glazed nuts, and walked down the street munching as I went. That’s when I saw him.

  He was tall, much taller than my own slight frame, with jet-black hair swept back into a tail, and his clothes had an air of subtle wealth—nothing too flashy, but well-tailored and expensive in cloth and design. He looked about him with the air of a tourist, gazing up at the shop signs and not paying much attention to what was happening near his feet.