Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8)

by W. R. Gingell

  “At first, a rather large mess; at length, an adoring crowd,” said Athelas, sitting down at the table in his usual place to cross his legs. “Zero was especially active; in fact, you might find him on the internet, along with the latest intended victim.”

  Both JinYeong and I stared at Zero, who settled on the bar stool closest to the living room with an expression of irritation.

  “I’ll see about getting the videos taken down,” he said. “The merman can take care of it.”

  “That seems a shame, my lord.”

  Athelas was making a lot of subtle, amused digs for a bloke who had come within an inch of his life the other day, I thought. The thought didn’t stop me from taking full, gleeful advantage of the opportunity, though.

  I filled the teapot and coffee plunger and demanded of Zero, “What did you do? Were you making yourself obvious to humans? Isn’t that against the rules? Was she very pretty?”

  Zero stared at me. At last, he asked in bewilderment, “Was who very pretty?”

  “The girl you rescued,” I prompted him. I glanced at Athelas, and just a look was enough to tell me that I was right. “She was pretty, right?”

  “Almost inhumanly so,” he said, his eyes bright with amusement. “And my lord was sufficiently dashing as to capture the hearts and minds—”

  “—and cameras,” interrupted Zero grimly.

  “—of every onlooker. It was quite the rescue. The girl already has a good following online; I’ve no doubt she’ll have an even bigger one after this escapade.”

  Zero sighed: a big, gusty thing heavy with exasperation. “She was dancing on the top of a building—”

  “Could you hear the music?”

  “No. She was dancing with her phone set up behind her, and she danced right off the edge of the building and down four stories.”

  I shivered a bit, and poured a cup of tea for Athelas, breathing in the warm, calming scent of lavender earl grey.

  “I s’pose you were there to snatch her out of the air, since you’re not talking about her in the past tense.”

  “Almost inhumanly so,” Athelas said once more, with a rather pointed look at Zero.

  “What song was she dancing to?” I asked them, carrying the teacup across the kitchen.

  Athelas accepted his cup of tea with a wondering look. “Must you know, Pet?”

  “Got a feeling about it,” I explained.

  Zero looked a bit suspicious, but JinYeong only leaned his chin on the palm of his hand, grinning and waiting. I don’t know if he was thinking the same thing I was or if he was just happy that I seemed to know something Athelas and Zero didn’t. He likes things that cause trouble.

  “The detective was on the phone with me at the time,” Athelas said. “Apparently he receives notifications whenever something of this kind goes up on the website. We were communicating in real time as the event occurred, and I believe the song I heard was ‘Believe it or Not’. I confirmed it with the detective.”

  “You think it’s important?” Zero asked me. That was nice: I still wasn’t really used to him asking for my opinion on stuff, even stuff I had been the one to ask about.

  “Dunno,” I said. “But the first video we saw had someone singing ‘Walking on Sunshine’ while they walked into thin air on a sunny day. If this one was ‘Believe it or Not’—yanno, where they sing believe it or not, I’m walkin’ on air—and the one with the boy who got hung and strangled in the hook and pully setup was choking to the sounds of ‘Hooked on a Feeling’, I’ve got the feeling that someone thinks they’re funny.”

  “How very interesting,” said Athelas. “And we’ve been told that no one uploads the videos; they merely appear there, music already attached.”

  JinYeong laughed and said a word in Korean that I didn’t understand.

  “Yes,” said Zero grimly. “It does sound like a siren.”

  Chapter Five

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, impressed. “There are modern day sirens who know how to use the internet?”

  “Apparently so,” said Athelas. He didn’t seem surprised, but I didn’t know if that was because he’d already begun to suspect or if he was just trying to seem like he knew what had been going on. “A rather deplorable state of affairs, I would say.”

  “That merman,” JinYeong said darkly. “He has been talking too much.”

  “You can’t just blame everything on Marazul,” I objected. “I mean, yeah, he might sell stuff to dodgy people and do dodgy stuff in general, but he doesn’t like it when people are hurt. He tries to stay away from stuff like that.”

  JinYeong sniffed, and Zero said unemotionally, “You don’t know the merman anything like well enough to say that.”

  “Fought with him for half a day,” I pointed out. I went back to my onions so I’d have something to do with my hands. Talking about Marazul with my three psychos was still awkward-verging-on-uncomfortable. “And even when he dealt with you instead of me, it was because he was scared of you. Besides, we would have known about it before now if sirens had had this kind of ability, wouldn’t we?”

  “I’ve not consorted with many sirens,” Athelas said. “But I believe this sort of thing is generally in their purview.”

  “Okay: a modern day siren who knows how to use the internet. Fine. But why did it just suddenly start trying to kill people in Hobart now? And why like this? Don’t they usually just sing at people?”

  “Sirens don’t usually come to places that are well-inhabited,” said Zero. “They prefer the open seas and a ship or two to tempt sailors away from, one by one. They tend to work alone, which is good for us.”

  “Most interesting,” Athelas said thoughtfully. “The result is similar to the historical norm—the method, however! I would have assumed it to be truly new.”

  “I have never heard of this before,” JinYeong said, with certainty. He tried to pinch another slice of pineapple but retreated with a small snarl when I threatened him with my knife.

  “So we reckon someone gave tech to the siren,” I said. “I mean, apart from Marazul. Why would a siren go to him for this sorta thing? How would it know?”

  Zero folded his massive arms across fully half of the kitchen island, crowding my onion chopping. “We said that the cycle is beginning again; if we can tell, other people can, too. Upper Management, for example—they might be approaching useful people.”

  “Other people who have an interest in the cycle beginning again,” agreed Athelas.

  “Not the king, then,” I said, scraping all of my chopped onions into a bowl. “Reckon he’ll be wanting to poke his nose in and find out what’s happening, though? If people are stirring up sirens and making trouble around town?”

  Zero looked distinctly tired. “Almost certainly.”

  “Then I s’pose it’s most likely to be Upper Management giving stuff to the siren, if the siren isn’t just doing its thing.”

  “Almost certainly,” he said again. “But I’ll check with Marazul first; no doubt he’ll know who is capable of doing something like this. He might have even worked with the person who did it.”

  I set up a skillet almost as big as myself on the kitchen island, impinging on JinYeong’s space in the hopes that he would abandon his place at the island and sit at the table. He didn’t, but he did sit back a bit with watchful eyes and fold his arms across his chest.

  The skillet wasn’t a proper barbeque, of course, but it was the closest thing I had to it.

  “We gotta buy an outdoor barbeque one day,” I said to Zero. “Y’know, after your dad is dead and the king is dead and everyone stops trying to kill everyone else.”

  His eyes went bluer. “Is my father’s death a pre-requisite to that?”

  “Well, that’s up to you,” I said. “You’re the one who thinks he killed your mum.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said.

  “You didn’t have to,” I said. “You can’t be going around trying to find out dirt on your dad and mum, threaten to kill
me because I got the info before you did, and then try to pretend it’s not because you suspect he killed your mum. You’re trying to find proof so you can kill him legally.”

  “I’m not permitted to kill high-level fae,” Zero said shortly. “They have to face the behindkind justice system—unless they’re killed in capture.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll kill him for you,” I said, flippant in my discomfort. “Trade you for info on what was on the USB.”

  I said it as a joke—a way to lighten the mood again—and turned away to get out the tongs and egg-flipper so he could take the opportunity to smooth away the frown from between his brows.

  “The USB,” said Zero, to my surprise, “has remarkably little on it. What it does have concerns my mother…and connected elements.”

  “Knew it,” I said quietly to the cracked little tile over the sink. “Knew that’s what it was.”

  “If you knew that, you might have given it to me as soon as you got it from North,” Zero said, with some exasperation. “Instead of running away and making life hard for everyone.”

  “Yeah, but that’s no way to make trades,” I told him, fighting off a twinge of guilt when I remembered that JinYeong had been the one to pay dearly for that. “Athelas would think badly of me, and I can’t have Athelas thinking badly of me.”

  Athelas said rather plaintively, “You might remember that I’m already persona non grata, Pet. Kindly don’t give my lord any further reason to dislike me.”

  “What about your mum?” I enquired of Zero, ignoring Athelas. “And what connected elements?”

  Zero’s gaze came to rest on me, as inquiring as JinYeong’s had been earlier, but for what I suspected were entirely different reasons. Did he think I’d actually looked at the files Marazul had pulled from the USB? I was pretty sure he was trying to figure out if I was being sincere in my question. I had confused him, at the least, and that was fun. Confusing Zero is always nice: he’s so lofty and so rarely confused that it makes a nice change.

  “If you’re gunna call me a liar, you should do it out loud,” I told him.

  Athelas smiled into his teacup. That was pretty usual: he likes tea and smiling mysteriously, so why not do both at once? Still, there was that pull, or maybe tiredness, of sorrow around his eyes that had been there a lot over the last week, and it worried me.

  Was it just that he was sad about Zero, or was there something else?

  “The USB,” said Zero at last, levelling a very blue look on me, “only had things that concerned my mother’s life before she came to live Behind.”

  “Before she was kidnapped,” I corrected. Zero already knew that, but euphemisms for being kidnapped and married by force didn’t strike me as a good thing to get used to using. “Figured it had to have some info on it about your mum or the murderer, so it’s no big surprise. Looks like you found it surprising, though.”

  “Not surprising,” he said. “Merely limited in its usefulness. As you already said, it was from North, so I couldn’t be completely sure the information on it would be correct, but from what I’ve lately been able to confirm from other sources, it seems to be.”

  “Yeah? What were you able to confirm elsewhere?”

  Again, there was that thoughtful look that made me think he suspected I already knew what I was asking about. “A number of things: the most important of which was that my mother was not alone when she first arrived Behind. How North discovered that from the human side of the world, I’ve yet to discover; she had even come up with a birth record.”

  That made my ears prick up a bit, and I had to work very hard not to look at JinYeong—who, I was very well aware, had his eyes on me. Abigail’s group had records and information very similar to what Zero mentioned being on the USB; they also had some information about me, I was pretty sure. They’d known more about me than they should have, and with what I now knew about fae and names, I had begun to be very curious about whether or not they also knew my name.

  “How’s that help you, though?” I asked. “You’re trying to prove your dad killed your mum, right?”

  “Not precisely,” said Athelas. “My lord’s mother was not fae, and therefore doesn’t fall under protected persons by Behind law. However, if we can show proof that he kidnapped her without a contract in place, we’ll be able to show Exploitation and Endangerment of the world Behind, not to mention that the King Behind frowns upon fae/human relations formed with the idea of producing an heir—as one might imagine. There is, of course, always the argument that the fae at fault simply fell in love, but that is rather hard to prove.”

  “And in my case,” said Zero, without a shred of emotion to his voice, “impossible. Especially if it’s proved that he killed her. The King Behind has been looking for a reason to take care of my father for years; he would jump at this opportunity if he thought it would prevent me challenging him and taking the throne.”

  “You don’t want the throne, though,” I said.

  “It is remarkably hard to convince a power-grasping person that someone else isn’t out to steal that power,” said Athelas, shrugging.

  “You want to try and trace where your mum came from in the human world,” I hazarded, turning back to Zero. “So that you can prove she didn’t leave willingly?”

  “It won’t be easy,” Zero said. “I have no idea of where to look here in the human world, and very little to go on. What I do have, I’ll give to the merman.”

  He looked at me again as he said it, and I felt a tug of unease. He definitely knew I was hiding something from him, but why did he think it was about him or his mum? Did he know that Abigail had records of people who had disappeared Behind? It wasn’t like that was a secret, though; we just hadn’t really discussed it.

  “We might as well ask Abigail to look through her records,” I said, hoping to shift some of the discomfort away from me. “She even had a bit of info on me there.”

  Zero frowned. “They have your name?”

  “Dunno,” I said. “They didn’t tell me that. Thought you said that names weren’t important when it comes to humans.”

  “Normal humans, perhaps,” he said. “Besides the inconvenient fact that you’re an Heirling, we have to consider that you can do things you shouldn’t be able to do.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him through the heat shimmer of steak cooking. “You calling me weird?”

  “You are very weird,” said JinYeong, with certainty. “You should not let people have your name.”

  “No one asked your opinion,” I said sourly, tipping the onions onto the skillet. “Oi, Zero: what are we going to do about the siren?”

  “At any rate, we’ll need to try and find it before more people die,” said Zero. The smell of onions cooking rose on the air, and both he and JinYeong instinctively leaned forward. “See if you can convince your human friends to go out with us. We’ll need to spread ourselves as wide as possible without leaving anyone at risk.”

  “Don’t tell me that even big, bad fae can be lured in by a siren!” I said in disbelief.

  “Not me,” said JinYeong demurely.

  “I didn’t say anything about vampires,” I told him. “And what do you mean, not you? If fae are susceptible, why not vampires?”

  “Because I am too beautiful,” he said. “I will not be tempted. If I wish to look at something beautiful, I shall look in the mirror.”

  Zero’s eyes narrowed very slightly with amusement that he refused to show. “Beauty has nothing to do with it. Sirens lure humans—and behindkind—via sound. No matter how beautiful you think you are, it won’t prevent you from being lured. I suggest that you invest in a pair of earplugs.”

  “What if you’re really good at not being persuaded by sneaky people in general?” I asked.

  “Then you might last long enough to stuff your ears if they’re not already blocked,” Zero said crushingly. “Even Athelas will take precautions now that we suspect a siren.”

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, impressed. It
was one thing for Zero to wear earplugs: despite his cold demeanour, he was susceptible to persuasion in ways that the apparently more gentle Athelas wasn’t. I would never have said that aloud, but I was certain it was true. “All right; want me to give Abigail a call?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Zero. That made me a little bit happy, because there was no reason to wait until tomorrow except to make it easier to co-operate with our human friends, who slept at normal times and worked best during daylight hours. “Make sure the humans know to have something to stuff in their ears if need be—or better yet, something already in their ears.”

  “Boy are you gunna be happy to know about foam earplugs,” I told him. “You can use ’em to block out ambient noise and still communicate by text if you need to. Two bucks a pop at any corner store.”

  “You arrange for the earplugs,” he said. “And get us a meeting with the humans.”

  Athelas went out after dinner, but Zero must have known about it, because he just went out into the backyard to start stretching. Luckily for me, it didn’t seem to be one of those nights where I was the recipient of his training; he went right on to his own training after stretching, and with no Athelas in the house, I gleefully tidied the kitchen as quickly as possible and legged it upstairs, from where I would—hopefully—be able to sneak out in a way that was less obvious than using the front door. He’d never said as much, but I was pretty sure that Zero had some sort of monitor on the front door that pinged him whenever someone came in or out—and that included people who went out without actually opening the door.

  Luckily for me, Zero tended to push himself for longer than he pushed me and was likely to be outside for at least an hour and a half, maybe two. That should give me just enough time to take a bus down to the post office, figure out how to break in, and help myself to their computers to check out a certain P.O. Box’s owner. I still wasn’t ready to tell either Zero or Athelas what I was up to, and I definitely wasn’t going to be inviting JinYeong out at night when he was still looking at me all the time in a way for which I would have loved to kick him. Mostly because, having done so, I wouldn’t be able to explain why I had done it to the others. Since I couldn’t do that, I’d just have to make sure that I didn’t go off on my own with him too often.