Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8)

by W. R. Gingell

  Someone bit me. It hurt as much as the deck hitting me had hurt, and pushed away the swarming, painless darkness, enraging me. Every part of me hurt, from my skin to my hair ends: a deep, bewildering pain that would have crushed a scream from me if it hadn’t taken away my voice to do so.

  Shadows and a pounding of feet. Wind, high and furious and chilling.

  Screams and the warmth of something pooling around me that would have itched if I had any senses that weren’t raw with pain. Glass smashing.

  Wailing.

  Feet twitching, trying to dance.

  Wailing cut short in a roar that seemed to shake the deck beneath me.

  Another bite, deeper and more painful than the first.

  A cold, hard voice that commanded, “Give it to her!”

  JinYeong’s voice, nearly as cold, saying, “No.”

  That woke me a little, and I found myself beneath a shadow of blood and silk.

  “I will drain you myself and feed it to her!”

  The shadow above me that was JinYeong snarled “Wait!” without politeness, without compunction, and covered me more thoroughly.

  A whisper of voice fluttered through my mind. “My lord, I advise listening to the vampire. It will be soon enough to reassess when we return to the house. Must we discuss the matter here?”

  “I’m not dead,” said a dreadful, grating voice. The sound of it vibrated through my nose and bones, and I heard myself moan again, sharp and high like a dog that had been hit by a car. I tried to say, “Can you lot shut up and take me home now?” but I’m not sure how much I managed to say before I sank into darkness and scent.

  There was a buzz of light and colour in my mind even before I opened my eyes. I breathed, and that didn’t hurt, so I moved, and somehow that didn’t hurt either. Something that had popped out of place in my shoulder last time I was awake was back in place.

  “You said,” said JinYeong’s voice accusingly, “that you would not let go.”

  “You said you wouldn’t bite me again without my permission,” I said, without opening my eyes. How was it that I could see the room without even opening my eyes? How was it that I could see everything in glittering strands and shadows again, shifting between what they could be and what they were?

  I rolled up into a sitting position, my eyes snapping open, and nearly fell over to the side.

  I felt good. Life felt good. That was nice, but also funny, and I laughed into the ridiculous complexity of the room around me.

  “Who’s been decorating?” I asked, lurching around to look at the deeper intricacy that was JinYeong.

  “You should not get up,” he said, pushing away from the wall and crossing the room.

  “Heck!” I said, staring at the sheer bulk of his shadow stretching up and over the wall as he approached. I managed to find the carpet with my feet and stood, swaying. “What’s going on with your shadow?”

  JinYeong sniffed a laugh and said, “Ah, you are drunk again!”

  “I’m not drunk!” I said indignantly, and fell over.

  He grabbed me by the arm and lifted me away from carpet that was moving in a way that carpet shouldn’t be able to move. “Hyeong, I told you—”

  “Can you please tell the carpet to stop moving?” I muttered. To the glittering, icy part of the room that drew around Zero, I said, “Oh, there you are! Did you try to make JinYeong turn me into a vampire?”

  JinYeong managed to get me upright, so I saw Zero’s face, splashed with dry, green blood and taut with worry, as he said, “You nearly died.”

  “Nearly dead is not all dead,” I told him. I was feeling far too alive and fizzy, and that made me worry that I might really have been turned into a vampire. I tilted my head back into JinYeong’s chest and said accusatorily up at him, “You better not have turned me into a vampire.”

  JinYeong surprised me by giving vent to a bloody sort of chuckle. “I think I couldn’t. You are too determined to be a human. I would not try.”

  “You have a remarkable tolerance for vampire spit,” said Athelas’ voice. “And I very much doubt it’s entirely due to your, er…continued exposure, either. Well, perhaps it is in part, but that doesn’t account for all of it.”

  Zero sat down wearily on his couch as if he’d been standing for the last day. He scrubbed vigorously at his face with both hands, but emerged just as weary and grey as he had been, to say, “It’s very puzzling. You should have at least a bit of fae blood in you, but you don’t get sick.”

  “I’m special,” I said, grabbing JinYeong’s arm again to stop myself from falling over.

  He grinned and steadied my head with his other hand. “You are certainly drunk.”

  “Don’t grin at me,” I told him. “I’m not going to date you because you’re cute.”

  “Yes, but I am cute. It is a bonus.”

  “I’m gunna chuck up on your shoes.”

  “Do not throw up on my shoes!”

  Feeling argumentative, I said, “You can’t stop me. I’m allowed to throw up where I want to in my own house.”

  JinYeong sighed. “You are making a ridiculous argument where there is no need.”

  “Yeah, and I’m allowed to do that in my own house, too.”

  This time, he hissed with laughter, and that made me laugh, too. We sat down on our couch, giggling like little kids while Zero looked at us kinda sideways, resigned to the stupidity. He might not have actually been sideways, but it looked that way to me. Maybe I was drunk, after all.

  “How much spit did I end up with, anyway?” I asked JinYeong, since Zero seemed to be getting less taut.

  JinYeong stopped laughing straight away. “You lost a lot of blood. Never do that again.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell the behindkind trying to kill me not to be so rough next time,” I said, sober enough to start feeling sour about that. “Should we go back to the ship and get them while I’m hopped up on spit again? I know where their nest is now—”

  “There’s no need,” said Zero. “They’re all already dead.”

  “Oh,” I said. I was starting to feel less buzzy and more…sleepy, though still in a pleasant way. “Didn’t you need to keep some of ’em alive to find out who gave ’em the stuff they were using?”

  “We tried,” Zero said, with a certain dryness to his voice. “It seems that sirens are sensitive to rejection. Three of them killed themselves before we could stop them, and one died in a…sudden windstorm.”

  “Oh,” I said again, yawning. “That’s nice. I’ll just sit here, then. How did you know where the nest was, anyway?”

  “You told us,” he said. “Over and over again.”

  “In my defence, I was half dead at the time,” I told him, blinking heavily. “They’ve got green blood, eh? You should clean that up: don’t you know that blue and green should never be seen?”

  “Go to sleep, Pet,” Zero said. He looked tired and drawn, and for a bloke as pale as Zero, that’s saying something. “I’ve already seen you nearly die once tonight; I’d rather not see it again.”

  “All right,” I said, hunching up against JinYeong without thinking about it. The brief fizz of energy was fading quickly, but I didn’t like seeing Zero so drawn and grey. I said through a yawn, “But tomorrow we’re gunna have a talk about trauma and the fact that it’s okay to hug someone who didn’t die if it makes you feel better.”

  JinYeong made a small psh noise of discontent, so I patted his shoulder and rolled my head back to yawn at him. “Thanks for not turning me into a vampire. I’m not going to fall in love with you, though.”

  There was another sniff from JinYeong, but this time, the psh sounded much more content, which was weird.

  “You’re all flamin’ weird,” I mumbled, and went to sleep.

  Chapter Twelve

  It sounds stupid to say that I felt disgruntled to find JinYeong absent from the couch when I woke the next morning, but it was true. Zero must have gone out early, too, because I couldn’t feel him anywhere
in the house, and I was still pretty fizzy and extrasensory from the huge dose of vampire spit yesterday.

  “Hang on,” I said to the ceiling. “Did Zero try to force JinYeong to turn me into a vampire yesterday?”

  “I imagine he thought you were better off as a vampire than dead,” said Athelas’ voice.

  I tucked my chin into my chest to level my gaze on him and saw that he was sitting back in his chair, one leg crossed politely over the other. His chin still tilted up a little, as though he’d been staring at the ceiling, too, but his eyes met mine.

  “Sounds like he’s got a habit of that,” I said. “Isn’t that how JinYeong got turned, too?”

  “It seems that each of us are inclined to repeat the same mistakes over and again,” said Athelas, and perhaps he sighed a little.

  “Well, at least you know that I’m not fae enough to be worried by it,” I said, sitting up. Heck. All I could smell was JinYeong’s cologne. Bad-temperedly, I pulled on my hoodie and zipped it up as far as it would go to cover my cologne-soaked clothing. “Where’s JinYeong?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. What are you doing, Pet?”

  “Trying to get rid of the smell,” I said crankily. JinYeong had no business making me smell like him and then vanishing in the morning without a word. We had stuff we needed to do.

  I allowed myself a few minutes to ruminate balefully on the things I wouldn’t be able to do today because JinYeong wasn’t there before puffing out a breath and moving on to what I could do instead.

  To Athelas, I said, “Oi, I reckon it’s about time that we had another session with your little brain worm.”

  “The results were not stellar last time,” he said, after a brief pause.

  “The heck they weren’t! I learned a lot—and you don’t need to worry about me trying to get your memories again. I’m just trying to get my own. That was an accident.”

  “A remarkably proficient accident.”

  “You afraid I’ll pull stuff outta your brain that you don’t want out? That’s flamin’ rich!”

  “Let us say rather that I am unwilling to try today,” said Athelas. “There will be time enough for that in the very near future.”

  “There won’t be time for much in the near future if Upper Management and Zero’s dad have anything to say about it,” I pointed out. “And if you think the king isn’t gunna start paying attention when everyone and their siren is out making trouble on the waterfront, you got another think coming. We still don’t know who was behind that, either.”

  Athelas’ grey eyes rested on me consideringly. “You are supposed to be resting and recuperating. Kindly stop bouncing on the couch.”

  “I have too much energy,” I complained. “And excuse me for feeling a bit antsy while the world is trying to end and take everyone with it!”

  “If you want to use some energy, perhaps you could make tea,” he suggested, an edge to his voice that warned me not to push my luck.

  “I don’t want to make tea, I want to try and figure out my memories,” I said. There was a heavy, restless feeling in me that weighed me down with all the anxiety of the world that shifted around me, spiralling ever closer to the certainty of the Heirling Trials. “Zero’s dad is getting a bit too nosy, and Upper Management is doing everything they can to throw us into the new cycle—when that stuff starts happening, we aren’t going to have time to deal with the murderer. We’ll just be trying to stay alive. Anyway, Zero is gone, which is the perfect time to—”

  “Today is not the time,” said Athelas, his voice silken steel: absolutely unyielding. “I would like to drink tea without the prattling of a pet to distract me. Remove yourself.”

  I sat back in shock, my fingers instinctively curling in on themselves. I hadn’t heard that tone from him in a very long time, and it was still capable of withering my heart in my chest. Today, he could almost be the Athelas who had been captured between floors—the Athelas who had killed me without hesitation six times. What the heck was going on with him? Had Zero been doing the equivalent of throwing him through walls for getting too close to me in his own way?

  “All right,” I said quietly. “I’ll get you some tea. Got some nice bikkies for you, too.”

  He didn’t answer, so I left him to gaze at the ceiling in peace and retreated to the kitchen.

  I boiled the jug and grabbed the shortbreads, sliding glances toward Athelas and then turning my eyes away again each time. Did he feel the keenness of the shortness of time, too? Was that what was eating at him lately? I felt it in the world around me—the movement of Between; the growing threat of Zero’s father; the ever-hovering presence of the King of Behind, always just out of sight but not out of mind; the ratcheting tension in my own house—and behind that continuous, bothersome sensation was the reminder that once it was all over, I would be alone again.

  Zero would be king—Athelas by his side, probably. If I lived, I would be here in my house, alone. JinYeong would be…

  JinYeong would be elsewhere, of course. I’d already told him that I wasn’t going to date him: he wouldn’t hang around after that. Once he was away from me, he’d remember how beautiful he was, and how appealing he was to other women—he’d appreciate someone who was easier to get along with.

  I was feeling pretty raw and gloomy myself by the time I brought Athelas his tea. He was caught in his own thoughts still, so I poured tea and laid out the biscuits for him. No need to disturb him right now.

  As I went to slip away between Athelas’ and Zero’s chairs, making for the staircase, my hoodie sleeve caught against the brushed tweed of his sleeve and that faintest of friction slowed me down. I hesitated, stopped.

  “You don’t need to listen to everything Zero says,” I told him, without looking at him. He seemed to want to be alone, but there was no need for him to be miserable and alone. “It’s all right to want to be around other people. It’s all right to be nice to them while you’re with them, even if you’re only going to leave in the end. You should at least enjoy the time you’ve got left.”

  He didn’t really answer me, but I thought I heard him murmur, “Should I?” to himself, and sniffed a small laugh down at my feet as I climbed the stairs.

  Grumpy old man. Whatever the reason that he was having a bad day, he would probably be better left alone with good tea and biscuits. When he felt better, I would go back downstairs and try again.

  In the meantime, if Athelas wasn’t going to help me, I would do it myself. Little things had been wriggling out of the woodwork of my mind ever since I first started working with Athelas—not much, but a bit here and there. I had a feeling that if I could recreate enough of that night, I might be able to prompt the memory to surface: those little bits and pieces that had worked themselves out of my memory had been a natural result of déjà vu and the disruption of the stifling of memories that I had been doing for so long. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if the memories all came out naturally, on their own, in the end—but we really didn’t have the time for me to let that happen.

  I made my way to my room but left the bookcase-door open. I wanted things to be as accurate as possible, but I also didn’t want to get stuck in my room with the Nightmare if I ended up actually conjuring that instead of my memory of that night. It had been suggested to me that the Nightmare wasn’t just a normal sort of nightmare, and given the dangerous grip that reality seemed to have on a lot of my dreams, I didn’t want to give it a helping hand to kill me.

  I stood in the doorway of my room and drew in a breath.

  First of all, I needed to put my pillow up at the right end of the bed. Since the night my parents died, I’d slept with my feet to the windows and my head toward the door, but I’d started out with my feet toward the door like a normal person. After a Nightmare starts standing at the foot of the bed, just waiting for you to open your eyes, you start trying to do anything that’ll convince it to leave you alone. Changing up the direction I slept in had worked for a little while, and it was mostl
y habit by now, even though it hadn’t worked for years.

  It only took a few seconds to change the pillow; I didn’t bother with the covers, though I did take off my boots. I try to keep my boots clean, but they usually ended up with stuff like blood and guts on them, and I preferred to keep that out of my bed if I could. Maybe that would have been an advantage today, but I figured I could work with things that were a little bit less physically present.

  For instance, I thought as I let myself sink into the mattress, Athelas and his little brain worm were a pretty good prompt—not as good as Zero’s dad, but I didn’t particularly want a prompt that was likely to kill me—and there was no need to have the real thing, after all. If he were really up here, all he’d be doing was making soft, unpleasant remarks and leaving nasty surprises for me in the corners of my mind.

  I could almost hear his voice—that soft, steel voice that I didn’t like.

  Hang on. I really could hear it.

  It said, “You really ought to stop asking for things that will not make you happy, Pet. Life is so much more pleasant when one accepts what is on the surface of life and doesn’t dig too deeply.”

  “Says you,” I said aloud, and as I did, I felt the gathering of Between in my doorway: gathering, collating itself into one whole that was very nearly a real person. My eyes were still closed, but I knew when the figure finished forming itself and stepped into the room, not quite weighty enough to be real but terrifyingly present.

  I opened my eyes.

  He stood where the Nightmare always stood—Athelas, quiet, polite, and tidy—and perhaps it was that unpleasant fact that made the entire room shake and wobble in a twisting of reality and perception, before it settled back to normal. When it settled again, Athelas was there, almost solid and real, and instead of the room around me, my insides quivered a little.

  “I don’t like this,” I said. I felt my chin crinkle and set my jaw to stop it. I had done it—I had to have done it, because there was no-one else here—so why did I feel so vulnerable and powerless?

  “I believe I warned you,” he said. “Things beneath the surface, and so on.”