Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8)

by W. R. Gingell

I stared at him, then at Zero. “Good grief, are you that old?”

  “I am not,” said Zero, his eyes lightening in amusement. “Neither is Athelas. I was born near the turn of the twentieth century, and he was born some thirty years before.”

  “Flaming heck,” I said, very distinctly. “Wait until I tell Morgana. She’s gunna love this. Older bloke, my eye!”

  I caught them all looking at me and said hastily, “Never mind, it’s not important. Does that include the twenty years that your dad kept you in stasis or whatever?”

  “Those twenty years were in the nineteenth century, previous to my birth,” said Zero, unmoved by my awe. “I thought you were aware that fae live longer than humans.”

  “Yeah, I just didn’t know how much longer! You’re older than a lot of Hobart!”

  “I,” said JinYeong primly, “am young.”

  “The heck you are. Younger, yeah. Young, no.”

  He just grinned and went back to his pancakes, but was interested enough to say a few moments later, “I will live longer.”

  “Yeah, but will you ever grow up? That’s the real question.”

  “Perhaps I will, perhaps I will not,” he said. “You will have to watch me and see.”

  “Flamin’ fantastic,” I said, but there was no edge to the words. “Hang on, then: who killed everyone before this murderer started, that’s what I’d like to know. You know, after the king’s first Heirling group murder but before you started chasing the murderer.”

  I was too full for more pancakes, but I dipped my finger idly in the maple syrup and licked it anyway, unwilling to get up and clean while there was still discussion to be had. Athelas, eyeing me in disfavour, said, “We have considered the question, Pet, I can assure you.”

  “It’s just that if you two were born nearly four hundred years after the current king started reigning, and there have been unsuccessful cycles before now, it doesn’t make sense for it to be anyone but the king doing it, right?”

  “The current king came to the end of his natural reign some three hundred years after he began,” said Athelas. “Longer than most, but not quite as long as some. I’m told that the cycle he pre-empted was in the early nineteenth century—the eighteen twenties, I believe.”

  “Was the next cycle after that when Zero was supposed to be born?”

  “By the human calendar, it would have been roughly 1880,” said Zero. “My mother was stolen around that time, but I rather fancy my father had underestimated how difficult it would be to join the Heirling cycle when the king already had enough power to see that the previous cycle didn’t happen. He capitulated and aligned himself with the king. Hence the delay in my birth.”

  I squiggled my finger through the syrup again, fizzing with a sudden thought. “Is that when the king’s Enforcers got all tangled up with your dad?”

  I didn’t miss the look that passed between Zero and Athelas, and it annoyed me.

  To my surprise, JinYeong gave a rude sniff of laughter and said, “Even I knew as much, Hyeong. Are we stupid?”

  “What he said,” I said, pointing my syrupy finger at JinYeong. “It’s obvious that your dad would try to get the Enforcers on his side from the inside if he was still trying to get someone from the Family as king. He’d need the info, and it’d mean allies next time a cycle came along.”

  “I’m not sure my father quite understood that killing other Heirlings would prevent the cycle from starting if he did it early enough. I rather think he thought if I was the only one left, it would still begin.”

  “So you reckon it was the king and then your dad, hiring someone out?”

  “Let’s just say that those are questions I’ve asked myself,” Zero said. “At any rate, we need to catch the murderer first to find out.”

  “Heck,” I said. “So you don’t know, either.”

  “We know that the king was responsible for the first cycle that failed,” Athelas said. “Whether he did it himself or commissioned the work is another matter, but we know it was at his behest. The others are less…settled.”

  “So by the time you were a kid, your mum was dead and your dad had his finger in every pie around Behind that had a bit of power.”

  “What a charming way you have of expressing things, my dear,” said Athelas.

  “I’m a naturally charming person,” I said. “Oi, Zero: is that why your dad got you into the Enforcers? He wanted a bit more of a presence there?”

  Zero turned a put-upon look on me, but it was mingled with amusement. “I never told you that my father put me in the Enforcers.”

  “You can’t tell me he didn’t pull strings—or that he wouldn’t have tried,” I said frankly. “Of course he would: what better way to show that you’re the king’s man and not planning on doing any funny business! Anyway, it’s not like you’re not always talking about him being the one behind the Enforcers trying to get you back; it’s a flamin’ easy conclusion to come to. Oi—reckon the king put your dad up to killing the Heirlings ’cos he knew better about what stops a cycle?”

  “No matter how many possibilities you throw at us, we still don’t know the answer,” said Zero, with a touch of exasperation. “It’s likely, but it’s just as likely that my father did it himself in the hopes that it would leave me alone to challenge the king.”

  “But you quit being a cop instead and went rogue with your human friend who didn’t like other humans being hurt,” I said, nodding. “That must have been pretty annoying for him.”

  “If the results are anything to judge by, one presumes so,” murmured Athelas.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Where were you while all of this was going on, then?”

  “Reporting to my lord’s father, of course,” Athelas said. “Very, very carefully.”

  Zero’s blue eyes flicked over at him and then away again. “I thought you were very carefully keeping away?”

  “That too,” said Athelas, with a faint smile. “I didn’t want to learn too much, after all! You know how your father likes to know all the details.”

  Zero nodded silently and went back to his pancakes. Someone who didn’t know him might have thought that he was merely unwilling to talk, but I recognised it for what it was with a touch of sadness. Zero was grateful, but he didn’t want to say so.

  “You lot know you can say thank you, right?” I said, staring around at them all. “And that it’s okay to admit that you need each other every now and then?”

  “It’s not all right,” said Zero, while Athelas said mildly, “I believe I must disagree, Pet.”

  JinYeong threw me a melting look and said, “I need you.”

  “That was not what I meant!” I said, flustered. “All right, if we’re going to be cleaning up messes for a while before the Heirling Trials begin, shouldn’t we be getting this lot done as soon as possible? Why are we waiting?”

  “We’re waiting on the merman,” said Zero, pushing away his empty plate. “And once we have what we need from him, I’ll need some time to prepare for the humans’ inclusion.”

  “One needs to make allowances for the humans in one’s group,” Athelas said, smiling gently at me. “Does not one? It shouldn’t be rushed.”

  I snuffled a laugh and said, “Fine. What should I be doing today, then? Dinner’s already in the crockpot, and all that’s left is the dishes.”

  Zero threw a look in JinYeong’s direction as he rose and said to me, “Come with me, Pet. I think Athelas could do with a bit of a rest today and JinYeong needs to readjust his attitude.”

  JinYeong’s brows went up, but he looked more amused than anything.

  Athelas said mildly, “I do assure you that I’m quite capable of functioning at a normal level, my lord,” but he seemed pretty happy to sit there with his teapot. It could have been just a twinge of guilt that made me think so, but he seemed tireder and greyer now, after breakfast. I put out biscuits for him as well, which he accepted with a faint, almost mocking smile, and I found myself agreeing with Zero that
he needed rest.

  When we left the house, I said to Zero, “You reckon he’s going to be all right?”

  “Of course he’ll be all right,” Zero said. “Athelas has suffered a great deal worse than anything you could inflict upon him.”

  “I know,” I said quietly. “But he’s already had someone messing with his mind—I didn’t mean to do the same thing to him.”

  “I think you’ll find that Athelas is quite proud of you.”

  “Yeah?” He had said well done to me, but I still remembered the dreadful understanding in his eyes as I sank into his memories, and I wasn’t sure if I could forgive myself for having become a person like Zero’s father to him, even for a moment. “Oi, where are we going?”

  “Café,” said Zero briefly. “The merman has another meeting today, so we’ve agreed to meet along Elizabeth Street at the Mago Café.”

  “Nice,” I said, very pleased. That might give me a few minutes to go and check on the Librarian while Zero was close enough to help and not too close to stop me doing what I wanted to do. A sort of unimpressed safety net that would scold me if I got too stupid.

  Marazul was already at a table when we got to the café, his wheelchair taking up one side of the small wooden table and leaving the fixed seat for Zero and me. I let Zero sit down first because I wasn’t planning to stay long anyway, and maybe Marazul took that as a bad sign, because there was disappointment in the hazel eyes that had looked up at me with a cautious sort of hope a moment before.

  I leaned against the table next to his, nodding at him in a friendly sort of a way, and Marazul seemed to let out a breath.

  “Pet. It’s good to see you. Hunting many goblins these days?”

  I couldn’t help grinning, which put a glow into his eyes that would once have set my heart fluttering. I said, “Nope.”

  “Have they got you a new computer yet? I’ve got something that might be useful for you.”

  Zero’s eyes flicked over the messenger bag that was on the table beside Marazul, the flap very slightly askew.

  “Is that what you brought? You didn’t need to; I only asked for the program for our phones.”

  “No,” said Marazul, readjusting the flap of the bag so that nothing could be seen. “It’s just something I agreed to do for another hacker. We’ve been working on it for a while and I didn’t want to trust it to a delivery person. I took the main bulk of it to the location yesterday, and I’ll take the rest today.”

  He looked a bit shifty to me, but maybe I was just a bit suspicious when it came to him these days.

  Zero didn’t seem to take it in any sort of way—except maybe as none of his business. He only asked, “Did you get the program finished?”

  “Done and dusted,” said Marazul. “I hope you’ve been working on something to bind it to, though: I wouldn’t try to attach it to the phones themselves. The program will have an effective range of a metre in each direction, so you’ll need to keep your phones on your person—and the benefit is that someone else’s phone won’t be able to be used against anyone wearing the program if they’re within a metre of the wearer.”

  “You’ll have to show me how to attach it—and I’ll need to know what material will best suit it. I prepared plastic at home, but this…I don’t know what this is, and if I have to work with it—”

  “That’s the electronic signal,” said Marazul. “Don’t try to touch that. Just work with the magic in it; leave everything else alone. As for materials, something plastic will be suitable to—”

  Before they could get too deep into discussions that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t understand, I said hastily, “I’ll go for a bit of a walk, all right? Got something I want to check on.”

  Zero flicked a look at me, but to my gratification, he only asked, “Where?”

  “It’s all right, I won’t go far,” I promised. I just wanted to see if the alley was still there—or at least, the Between version of it. I wanted to know if the Librarian was still there in his library, looking down at the streets every so often to turn up his nose at the ugliness of them. “Not even down to the end of the block. I want to check on something on this side of the road.”

  To my surprise, Zero didn’t argue; he simply nodded and said, “If you’re not back in half an hour, I’ll come for you.”

  That felt good, and I was very nearly as prancy as JinYeong by the time I had walked the half block to get to the alleyway entrance. It didn’t stop me being as cautious as I should be, though: once I got there, I hovered around the entrance for a few minutes before taking a tentative step in.

  To my surprise, my foot fell onto brick without a problem, and the next two steps were easy, too.

  “Flamin’ heck,” I said beneath my breath. I hadn’t actually expected to be able to get back in: I hadn’t expected him to leave it open. Had he, like the other fae I knew, completely underestimated humans to the point that he hadn’t expected me to come back, or had he simply thought that I was under the thumb enough—or just not stupid enough—to try and get back in?

  Well, if so, the joke was on him, because I was definitely stupid enough to come back in.

  I edged myself in carefully, for all that. I didn’t want to be stuck in here, and I didn’t want the Librarian to find me poking around if he hadn’t expected me to come back. On the other hand, if he hadn’t expected me to come back, he should have made sure I couldn’t get back in: that was a good defence, at least.

  I wandered past the tables and set my foot on the first step of the corrugated iron staircase. There was a clear line of sight to my right that showed the way I’d come; another directly behind me that showed the way I’d left the alley the first time. I could see the street through each, and that was a bit of a comfort, even if it was a dangerous sort of comfort to rely on.

  It wasn’t until I was on the first landing that I found myself wondering, what if it had occurred to him that I would come back in? What if he had let me in on purpose?

  “Flamin’ fae,” I muttered. “Always so flamin’ tricky.”

  I took another step despite that, and then another. If he’d meant me to be in here, I would have seen him by now: seen him or felt him, whichever was the more important one. I wanted to see the library again. More than that, I wanted specifically to see the windows again. The Librarian hadn’t seemed to think that I’d be able to see anything but the human world through them, but the roc I’d seen hadn’t come from any strictly human part of the world, and I was pretty sure it was too big to be skulking around Between. I was also pretty sure that the landscape I’d seen was nowhere in my own world.

  If that was the case, there were a few places I wanted to see—or at least a few things I wanted to test if the windows would let me see.

  I was still pretty careful about entering the place, though; I stopped short at the uppermost landing, too, just before it turned to wooden floorboards. I couldn’t feel anything or anyone, and I definitely couldn’t see anyone, but it was still hard to step over the threshold. Maybe it was the very real danger of poking my nose in where I technically hadn’t been invited. Maybe it was just the difference between the cold steel beneath my feet and the warmer wooden boards that felt as though they could almost be living. Either way, I didn’t intend to stay longer than I had to, and I would be running for my life at the first sign of trouble.

  I took that final step over the threshold, and it was easier after that. I still kept a good eye on the library around me, but I didn’t feel as crawly with dread as I had, which made me suspect that there was a prohibition sort of spell on the entrance that I’d managed to overcome.

  “Tricky,” I murmured, and stopped by the nearest window—the one through which I’d seen the underwater landscape. I couldn’t help shooting another look around the room as I did so: it remained empty and silent, and even my scraped nerves couldn’t sense the smallest disturbance to the essence of Between around me.

  I wondered momentarily what this building looked like when
it wasn’t half Between, but that thought seemed likely to make it hard for me to keep seeing things in the way I needed to see them, so I pushed it away and concentrated on the window instead.

  The Librarian had advised me to think about something I wanted to see, since the windows would most likely show it to me.

  I thought about Ralph’s house first—just a fleeting idea that passed through my mind before the actual place I wanted to see—and for a moment I was shocked to actually see the second-floor sitting room from where I had once caught a brief glimpse of the world Behind. Did that mean I was now looking in through the window I had once looked out of? Maybe. Probably.

  It occurred to me a moment later that it probably wasn’t safe for Ralph if I dwelt too long on his house: if the windows had anything like a search history in a computer, it wouldn’t be too safe for me, either. I hesitated a moment longer, but my past experience with behindkind in general and fae in particular suggested that it was extremely unlikely that any such thing yet existed. Of course, it was probably something that Marazul or Blackpoint would want to create, if they heard the idea. Both of them were very good at using magic and technology in conjunction, but the two of them were anomalous enough from other behindkind to cause me to worry less.

  I took in a quick, sharp breath and let it out again. Then I let the thought that it would be nice to know what Zero’s dad was up to, and where he was, float to the top of my mind. I didn’t know where that was, so I just focused on the idea of Zero’s dad in my mind, and that must have been just as good as knowing where I wanted to see, because although the window grew cloudy for a few moments, it cleared soon afterward.

  At first, it was hard to tell what I was looking at. There was so much colour and movement that it was hard to believe I wasn’t looking at a Van Gogh; a moment or two later, it was obvious that I was seeing a dance where ladies in bright, gaudy ensembles danced with men in even more gaudy outfits. Despite the general melee, it was pretty easy to spot Zero’s dad—mostly because he’d grown a canopy of flowers and moss around and over him. He was indoors, too, so it was pretty rude of him; the grass even extended into the dancefloor.