Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8)

by W. R. Gingell

  “Reckon it was a mistake to come up here,” I said to him, when I caught my breath. I sat up, and the room moved around me like it was on castors.

  “So it would seem,” he said, but he said it so calmly that I could have thought he had come up here for the exact purpose of forcing me to find out what I had just found out. “It’s unfortunate that you couldn’t leave well enough alone, Pet. I’m afraid I can’t let you tell what you’ve learned to my lord.”

  “You said you can’t kill me.”

  “I believe I said that it would be uncomfortable to do so,” he said. “But that was some years ago: the situation is different now.”

  “Yeah? Want to explain that in a way that makes sense?”

  He almost smiled, as if it was just a normal day of me being cheeky to see how far I could go with him, and that hurt, too. He said, “Ask the question, Pet.”

  “I don’t have questions.”

  “That’s very unusual of you.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  I heard the barest breath as he let it out. “Ah, there it is. You’ll have to be more specific, my dear—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Another emotion tried to cross his face and was ruthlessly crushed, leaving him smooth and expressionless. Breathtakingly harsh, he said, “Be. More. Specific. Pet.”

  “Why did you kill my parents? Why did you kill Morgana’s parents? Why would you do something for the king or Zero’s dad?” I waited, for just as long as a sob, but I couldn’t help adding—almost begging—“It was because of Zero’s dad, wasn’t it? You had to? He made you do it to keep the throne for Zero, and you couldn’t—”

  “Don’t attempt to make a good person out of me,” he said sharply. “It won’t work. I killed your parents—tore them apart piece by piece as you slept. The little zombie’s parents, too. Ralph—the others. All of the others.”

  “Zero said you couldn’t have,” I said, through numb lips. “He said you weren’t capable of killing his half-brother—I saw the memory myself! And you were home the day they found the freshly dead serial killer!”

  “You are mistaken,” Athelas said. “I certainly killed the boy—he was about to have my lord killed. My lord’s nurse, on the other hand, I did not kill; it was very remiss of me and I would certainly not choose to be merciful again. The memory you stole from me—well, let us merely say it was fortunate that it was the one it was! Things could have happened…rather differently if you’d managed to pull out any adjacent memories.”

  “What do you mean, you killed him? I saw you—I felt the way you—”

  “Don’t imagine you know anything of me from a single memory! I had killed the Lord Sero’s half-brother before that interview; the knife was given to me and duly left at the scene when I finished. I’ve never known who it was that my lord saw that night when he found me weltering in my own blood, but it was certainly not myself: I was barely conscious. If I find the person, they will receive the same kind of service that was performed on me to rid me of my disobedience—they would undoubtedly have implicated me with the placement of the knife, if my lord hadn’t woken to see them.”

  “Yeah, I saw you get smacked around a bit,” I said. The flippancy rang hollow, but I couldn’t help it. If I hadn’t said it, I would have cried, or screamed, or maybe howled with the sheer, aching betrayal that clawed its way up my throat and seared the backs of my eyes. “Zero’s dad really did a number on you.”

  “I wasn’t as obedient as I might have been,” he said, shrugging. “I was still young and inclined to rebel occasionally. My lord’s father simply made me aware of the consequences of so doing. He took his time with me, as he did with my lord’s nurse: a timely reminder.”

  Athelas looked down at the bedpost again—and again I saw that faint smile. “It…informed my choices as to style, as it happens. As did the knife that was left with my body in an attempt to indict me of the death of my lord’s half-brother: I use it only with certain people, you know.”

  “What certain people?” I asked, trying not to choke on the anger, or the tears, or maybe just the sheer terror. “People you really wanted to suffer? What did my parents ever do to you?”

  “They had you, my dear,” he said. “And your existence was an unfortunate thorn-in-the-side for two very powerful people. I did give your parents the choice, after all.”

  “You don’t cut people in pieces because they’re a problem to your boss. You said certain people.”

  “Still fighting,” he said, the faintest of lines between his brows. “I wonder why you’re fighting so hard when you remember it all?”

  “You were with me,” I said, through the dull pounding of my heart. “The night that JinYeong and Zero had an exploding body—they nearly caught the bloke, and you were here with me.”

  There it was, that faintly amused twist to his lips. “I think you’ll remember that I didn’t wish you to turn on the lights when you woke, Pet.”

  “But you were there.”

  “I was indeed there when you woke—covered in blood, I might add. It is fortuitous that JinYeong is so delightfully suggestible: if he had not sat down in my chair covered in gore, I couldn’t possibly have accounted for the blood already there. I had to rig the entire body to explode just to give myself time to get away and obfuscate the vampire’s senses sufficiently. That was…a very close call.”

  “Reckon that wasn’t the only close call,” I said. “You killed the wrong bloke across the road—twice.”

  “Remarkably bad judgement on my part,” said Athelas. “And it was something of a shame to have to call in the Family to clean out the waystation—Upper Management had done a good job there, and it certainly would have made a nice little distraction. But I couldn’t allow myself to be caught so early—not when there was so much work to be done.”

  “Allow yourself to be caught?” I choked. “Just like you were playing a little joke on someone? What, I suppose you were going to turn yourself in when you’d finished your work!”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Turning myself in would be a ridiculous thing to do: my lord will certainly kill me if he finds out what I’ve been doing behind his back.”

  “Did you kill Mr. Preston, too?”

  “Good heavens, of course not. No doubt Upper Management arranged for that—he was trying to turn whistle-blower, wasn’t he? I don’t concern myself with whistle-blowers.”

  “Just Heirlings?” I said bitterly.

  “Indeed,” he said, inclining his head. “Things seem to have worked out remarkably well in that direction: if I had really killed the old man, for instance, it might have cost us quite significantly. A happy accident, one might say. As it is, the Harbinger still sneaking around the house and favouring Lord Sero—if proximity is anything to judge by—is not a bad thing.”

  “Yeah, well he could be said to be favouring me, too,” I said. “And you know what I reckon?”

  “I’m quite certain you’ll tell me,” he said, with a quick, caught-in laugh that sounded nearly painful.

  “Reckon you didn’t kill enough of us,” I said, with a vicious desire to wipe that smile from his face. “Turning humans into behindkind wasn’t the cleverest idea you’ve had: reckon you’re going to regret the mostly bit of mostly-dead that Morgana and Ralph are, too. I reckon you and Zero’s dad are going to find out that there are still a few Heirlings out there who can stand up and fight.”

  He shrugged. “Stand up and fight, perhaps. Fight well? That is…less sure.”

  “There’s enough to precipitate the Heirling Trials, though,” I said. “And I don’t think either Zero’s dad or the King are very happy about that.”

  Athelas stilled. “Perhaps not. Still, on balance, I believe that my lord’s father will consider himself quite satisfied.”

  “You probably want to start wondering about what Zero’s gunna think,” I said, and saw the smile vanish away completely.

  “As I said,” he murmured. “My lord would
undoubtedly kill me if he knew what I’ve done. Oh, you can be sure he won’t spare me, Pet! Take comfort!”

  “Don’t—” I stopped and started again. “Don’t talk to me like that. We’re not friends. You don’t get to tease me.”

  “I had not forgotten,” said Athelas, and he lifted his chin again.

  “Yeah? I reckon you did, for a while?”

  “I warned you, did I not? I warned you not to trust me. You have only yourself to blame if you’ve been taken in.”

  “I think you’re the one who was taken in,” I said, and I found that I was crying. “I think you got used to me. I think you started to l—”

  I couldn’t see him through the distortion of tears in my eyes, but I heard his voice, grey as stone, absolutely cold. “The ability of humans to deceive themselves is truly breathtaking.”

  “All that stuff—all the stuff you asked the detective to dig up—” No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t force it to make sense in my head. I licked my lips and tried again. “You got him to dig up all that stuff about me and Morgana and—I just—”

  “Pet, I fancy you are trying to buy time. I’m not so green as to allow my prey to lure me into speech so long that I’m caught, thank you.”

  I choked on a laugh, or maybe a sob, and wiped the tears from my eyes. “I’m your prey now, am I? Thanks a lot.”

  “You always were,” he said, and his eyes were as hard as flint. “Don’t flatter yourself that you were more to myself or my lord than a moment’s usefulness. It is no longer convenient to my lord’s father that you live, and I’ve been given a job to do.”

  “Is that what it was with my parents, too? You were supposed to kill me but you killed them instead?”

  Athelas’ eyes flickered away for the briefest moment. “They had the same choice as the others. Save their child or save themselves—they chose to save you. If I recall, they were one pair of only two who did so. I had to abide by my word once given, or you would have died that night.”

  I’m not sure why I did, but I asked him, “You did all of this because Zero’s dad made you do it? All of it?”

  “Do not fancy that my minutest actions were at Lord Sero’s father’s will,” he said. “Promises have been made and sealed, and I will not be unrewarded for my service. I will receive…everything that I am owed.”

  “I won’t let you hurt Zero,” I said, feeling the wobble of my chin again. It wasn’t as if I could stop him, of course: I probably couldn’t even stop Athelas from killing me if he really was going to try it. “You can’t do stuff like this for him when you know he doesn’t want it.”

  He laughed; a soft thing that was more shadow than sound. “It’s for Zero’s sake: he’ll be king of the world Behind.”

  “Yeah? Reckon he’s going to see it that way when he finds out?”

  Into Athelas’ tired eyes, there came a faint smile. “I am quite certain he will not,” he said. “But that doesn’t concern you, Pet.”

  “Yeah it does.”

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  “I understand, all right,” I said. “You killed my parents, and Morgana’s and Ralph’s, and you and Zero’s dad are going to try and force Zero to take a throne he doesn’t want to take.”

  “That was not what I meant,” Athelas murmured. “I am very much afraid that I’m going to have to kill you, my dear. I shouldn’t bother to call for Zero if I were you: he wouldn’t get here in time even if I hadn’t dismantled that tracker spell he always seems to have on you.”

  “That was a pretty flamin’ stupid thing to say,” I said, my mouth dry.

  I didn’t need the spell: I’d never needed the spell. I don’t know if Zero always knew that, and it was just one more way of keeping distance between us—pretending that he needed it to tell him when I needed him—or if he was really as ignorant as Athelas seemed to be.

  “Reckon you’ll regret threatening me,” I added.

  “There are many things I regret, my dear,” he said, and started across the room toward me, swift and predatory.

  “Zero!” I screamed. “Zero!”

  I didn’t have time for any more than that because then Athelas’ long fingers were around my neck, and through the vague, fuzzy lethargy spreading from my neck and outward, I knew he wasn’t just strangling me.

  I saw the veins in my eyes tracing red across my vision and felt the stifled numbness blocking from nose to upper lip as my final thoughts floated free and disconnected. Zero had to come. He had to get here first because if he didn’t, JinYeong would get here first. And if JinYeong got here first, Athelas would kill him in a savage heartbeat.

  One heartbeat, one more flash of red veins.

  Thunderous silence. Depthless suffocation.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first thing I felt was pressure: immense, crushing pressure around my forehead and temples that could have been a band of steel, and a weight on my chest. I heard the breath leave my lungs, thready and final, and there was enough life to me to know that I had to draw in another one before it was too late. But the weight on my chest was too heavy. I didn’t even fight to breathe; didn’t feel the spasms as my body tried to force itself to do so.

  I lay prone and unable to move, until someone snatched me from the carpet and crushed me to their chest, tumbling the world around me and flopping my head to their shoulder.

  “Wake up!” said a voice insistently. “I will not bite: wake yourself up.”

  I must have started to breathe again, because suddenly I was breathing in perfume as the house woke up into tattered, deadly life around me, offering power without limits and safety without question.

  “Wake up!” said that same voice, disrupting the call of the house—or maybe the call of Between.

  Behind that voice, another one commanded, sharp and cold, and I woke with what felt like a terrible surge of electricity, shrieking. I tried to lunge to my feet as I woke, already running, but my arms and legs were tangled with someone else’s, and they held me tight until I stopped trying to push forward and leaned back instead.

  A pair of black, dangerously liquid eyes danced in front of me, and I stopped struggling. I think I sobbed, then I wrapped my arms around his neck, clinging for dear life. I wasn’t dead. How was I not dead? No time to wonder; no time for anything except action. I grabbed at all the bits of Between in the house, the network of power and safety—grabbed them without hands, without touching—and heaved it up and over the three of us like a blanket, sealing off the house inside a suffocating bubble of magic so that Athelas could never get back in.

  I heard a familiar, icy voice say, “Stop her, JinYeong!”

  JinYeong’s chest shuddered with the laugh I heard in my ear. “That—how could I stop it? You could not do it.”

  “That’s why I told you to stop her!” Zero said, even more sharply. “Talk to her! Pet! Pet, listen to me! You need to stop it!”

  It was a sentence, but it didn’t make sense, because if I stopped what I was doing I couldn’t keep myself safe. I couldn’t keep JinYeong safe. I couldn’t close the house around the three of us and keep out whatever Athelas was about to bring down on us now that he no longer had anything to hide.

  Maybe I really was dead. Maybe I was just a revenant of myself now, fighting on instinct. But JinYeong was warm, and his perfume was strong, so I concentrated on that. The confusion of voices commanded, and magic, ice cold and sharp-edged, tried to cut through the denseness of the house magic I had woven around us, but I just made it thicker and more absorptive, and that icy magic sank in without effect.

  I heard the softness of a groan in my ear. JinYeong caught his breath, then said gently, “You are squashing me. It hurts.”

  I don’t know if he or I were more surprised at the suddenness with which the house released us all: the suddenness of a bubble popping, and the freshness of being able to breath properly. I heard another groan, but this one was Zero’s, and I couldn’t look to see if he was all right
, because I was crying in huge, wracking sobs that battered against JinYeong and left me blind and deaf to everything else except the fact that I had come to love Athelas, had found a place for him in my heart, and that he had killed my parents.

  JinYeong let me cry into his neck, one hand behind my head and the other pressing against my ribs, hissing something over his shoulder at the voice behind us that demanded, “Where is Athelas? What did you do to the house, and what has Athelas done to you?”

  Every breath hurt, but every thought hurt much more; I thought that the ache in my throat might even be the end of me, but Zero’s voice, a constant, cold pressure, still pushed to know, “What happened, Pet? There’s magic all over you, and it belongs to Athelas. I need to know what happened.”

  JinYeong moved very slightly; I felt his chin graze my ear as he turned his head to gaze at Zero. “Go away, Hyeong,” he said.

  “Pet, tell me what you know.”

  “I,” said JinYeong, in snarling, heavily accented English, “will tear. Out. Your. Throat. Go away!”

  “Don’t,” I said, my voice thick with tears. “It was Athelas, I told you it was Athelas, and you didn’t believe me!”

  “Athelas did this?”

  “Ask your dad,” I said. Maybe I screamed it over JinYeong’s shoulder, because I was shaking and Zero was pale, and two scented arms tightened around me. “Ask him where Athelas is. Ask him what Athelas did. Bet he’ll tell you now. They’re probably both together now.”

  “My father is—” he stopped, and I saw the same awful uncertainty on his face that I had felt twitching across my own when I first realised that it could only be Athelas. “Athelas was with you that night—and my brother—”

  “Your nurse was probably the only one he didn’t kill,” I said, catching a breath that didn’t give me enough oxygen. “Reckon someone wanted to make sure he got caught for your brother; they came for the knife and you woke up—led you right to him and gave Athelas an alibi instead. And he got home just before JinYeong that night. Left blood all over his chair, too; he says he exploded the body to make sure JinYeong had too much blood on him to be able to smell the stuff already in the house. If you don’t believe me, just look!”