Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8)

by W. R. Gingell

  The memory was there, terrible and present: I took it and I shoved it into the cold spikiness of his mind. I heard him hit the wall as if I’d physically struck him, felt the tug as he took in the memory, but I didn’t want to look. I sank back into JinYeong’s neck instead, shivering, wishing that his warmth could make me feel warm again. I did see when Zero dropped to one knee and then the other, as if his huge body was suddenly too much to bear.

  That made the tears well over again, hot and too big to stay in my eyes. Everything could be fixed. Everything had been fixable until now. They were psychos but every now and then they were still human, except that Athelas had never been human. He had just pretended to be human. Pretended to like me. Pretended to like Ezri, and—

  “Pet!” That was Zero’s voice, short and gritted. “Pet, what is it?”

  I picked my head up from an almost noiseless wail into JinYeong’s neck and met eyes that were as sick as my own.

  “Abigail,” I said to Zero huskily. The words wouldn’t come out right; they stuck in my throat in a hot, choking lump. If Athelas had come to the conclusion that it was time to cut his losses and loose ends both, there was no way he wouldn’t go after Abigail and the humans. Tuatu had the dryad and North, Morgana had Daniel and the pack: Abigail and the others only had themselves, and I knew how little that would mean against Athelas or anyone he and Zero’s father might send after them.

  I pulled away from JinYeong and pulled my boots on, then staggered to my feet, heavy with dread. I wasn’t dead and I needed to think about that, but right now Abigail needed those thoughts more.

  “Abigail,” I said again, panting. “We gotta get to Abigail before he does!”

  I heard a stifled sound from Zero that could have been a guttural “No!”, but he was already turning, already on the run; he surged through Between without regarding walls or doors, or furniture. JinYeong grabbed my hand and we dove through the shifting world after him, JinYeong lean and fast, me stumbling and heavy. It felt as though my legs couldn’t—or wouldn’t—work, and I’d never felt Between drag at me so much as it did right then. So I let JinYeong cut the surface ahead of me and just followed him, one foot after the other and the constant pull of his hand around mine.

  With my free hand, I felt for my phone and pulled it out as we ran. Someone would answer. Someone had to answer.

  I nearly dropped it, and when my hand gripped convulsively around it to stop that happening, I felt the buzz of a message coming through. I looked down at it briefly, hoping for a bright, relieved moment that it might be Abigail herself, or even Ezri.

  It wasn’t. Detective Tuatu’s number flashed up at me, along with a message.

  Pet. What do you know about vampiric pumpkins?

  I stared at it, but couldn’t comprehend it. Later. I’d ask Zero about that later. Right now, I had to get to Abigail, whether in person or by phone.

  I tried to call while we were on the way. Tried and failed more times than I remembered, my phone buzzing with sporadic texts from the detective that would have to be dealt with later but that I didn’t have the energy for right now.

  I was still trying to get Abigail on the phone when we arrived, Zero just barely in the lead and JinYeong once more beside me instead of towing me. I must have gotten quicker as we went, though I could only remember the dragging of time and space.

  I shoved my phone back in my pocket and started for the gates, my heart in my throat.

  “Careful,” said Zero sharply, holding me back with one huge hand that covered nearly my entire upper arm. “The wards aren’t up.”

  I stared at him. “The what?”

  “There were wards here: the same sort of thing that I put up at home but set to be triggered by fae in particular instead of behindkind in general. They’ve been smashed to pieces.”

  “Ah heck,” I said, starting forward again. I didn’t move too quickly, just so that Zero knew I wasn’t about to do anything rash, but I needed to keep moving. I needed to see that Abigail and the others were all right.

  JinYeong, a silent shadow of perfume, flanked me as I stepped through the grass and toward the house. There wasn’t anything different about the place. Nothing to see, I mean. Nothing was different about the awning or the plants, and there was no difference to be seen in the stone gargoyle out the front either.

  So why was it that I already knew what I would see? Why was it that when I walked through the concrete doorway, I could feel the dead emptiness of the place: a lack of life rather than a lack of physical bodies?

  Shivers ran across my skin as I stepped down into the hallway, a constant tremor that ran beneath the skin although I wasn’t remotely cold, and suddenly I knew exactly what it was that I could feel.

  It was Between—no, Behind. And not even the essence of behindkind themselves, but the kind of greasy residue they leave behind when they’ve been in a place. Little bits of Between sloughing off like scales from a fish or skin from a snake.

  I didn’t consciously decide to run, but when I started trotting, and then outright running, my footsteps echoed through the whole of the place, lacking warmth and softness to quiet them. Zero didn’t try to stop me this time; he ran, too, just ahead of me as if he knew exactly where I was going, and we headed straight for Abigail’s office, sprinting around corners that had never seemed so sharp or so cold before.

  I caught myself up at the door, my gaze darting wildly around the room.

  Was she here?

  If she was, was she alive?

  It wasn’t until the dazzle from the sunlight outside faded from my eyes that I saw exactly why the room was so dark. It wasn’t just shadow creeping from the edges of the room to the far-too-textured middle of the room: it was blood.

  So, so much blood.

  There were bodies, too, but they didn’t look much like bodies. With a ringing in my ears and the sound of my own breath far too loud, I saw a foot. A foot, a few fingers that bled into the carpet and merged with a sticky pool of blood that spread out in a glistening trail of what might have been muscles, shredded and useless. There was more, but JinYeong’s shoulder edged in front of me and gave me something else to concentrate on instead.

  There was lantana on his shoulder, a few tiny flowers with the pollen still clinging to the inside of the flower. I looked at that, and JinYeong stuffed his hands into his pockets, surveying the scene as if he had stood there to get a better view. I tried to catch a breath that just wouldn’t come, and beside me, Zero said through a groan, “Too late.”

  I already knew. I knew the style—could you call it style?—of the killings. I had seen it before in my dreams, in real life. I had seen the mess and the welter of blood; I’d smelt the heaviness of blood in the air. I’d stepped on—

  Zero dropped to his haunches, still just slightly in view behind JinYeong, his head bowed as if he had no more energy to hold it up.

  A rumble that was his voice said to himself, “I knew it would end badly. Why did I do it?”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said thickly, wishing that the smell of it all didn’t coat the back of my mouth so completely. “You didn’t do this.”

  “I called them in.”

  “I called ’em in,” I said harshly. “Stop trying to take responsibility for everyone! They knew the risks, and they chose to do this. They would have been doing it even if you didn’t ask them to help out with a case: it’s what they do with their lives.”

  “They didn’t,” he said, and I saw the faintest movement to his huge form. A very slight rocking, back and forth. “They didn’t choose to be in this fight; not this one.”

  I stepped out from behind JinYeong and stared at him, trying to push away the awful feeling that I knew what was coming. “What are you talking about? What do you mean this fight?”

  “They were safe until they got involved with Heirlings,” he said, burying his face in his hands. “No one would have been interested in them if they weren’t trying to help protect Heirlings.”

&nb
sp; “You knew where to come,” I said numbly, dropping down on my haunches in a smaller, mirror version of him. “You knew how to get here. I didn’t tell you that. And you knew what the wards used to be.”

  “Hyeong,” said JinYeong, his eyes dark and warning. “You have been playing games again.”

  “I asked them,” Zero said, as though it hurt to speak. “I told them that if they helped keep you safe, if they joined in this fight, they could have you after I leave. They were meant to keep you safe after…everything comes to an end.”

  When Zero was dead—or the King Behind—and the world Behind settled back beneath the human world like silt in a puddle and stopped muddying the waters.

  “You can’t just give me to—” I stopped and took in a deep breath between my teeth, fighting off the nightmare that was reality. It seemed awful to fight where Abigail and the others had come to such a horrible end. I said quietly, “Thanks for trying to keep me safe. I appreciate it. We’ll talk about this later.”

  I’m not sure he understood. I’m not sure he was in any state to understand anything just then. I wanted to be able to go over and hug him: comfort him, tell him it was all right. But it wasn’t all right. Nothing I could say would make it all right, and I didn’t know how much I wanted to say when a least half of what he was going through was directly related to the dreadful not-rightness of the entire situation. I didn’t have the energy to do it.

  Zero stood, and I thought for a moment that he was going to switch back into his usual, icy demeanour to move around the room and investigate as he always did. Instead, he turned, or flickered, and then he was gone.

  “Ah,” said JinYeong, clicking his tongue. “Hyeong should not be alone right now.”

  “He’ll be all right,” I said. My voice sounded distant and emotionless, and I didn’t seem to be able to make it say more, or mean more. I didn’t know for sure, but I was pretty sure that Zero had at least a few more resources these days to cope with the emotions he was currently dealing with than he’d had in the past. At the moment, maybe more than I did. “He’ll come back.”

  “Ung,” JinYeong hummed, but he didn’t seem entirely satisfied.

  He didn’t leave me, though, and that was enough.

  Zero came back, of course—maybe half an hour later. I don’t know exactly what he did, or where he went, but when he got back, there was a hard, fragile sort of capsule around him. I couldn’t bring myself to hug him, but I did wrap my hands around his wrist for a bit, and he stood still to let me, so maybe it did some good after all. It made me snuffly and teary again, which was maybe a nice change from the cold feelinglessness that had settled over me, but at least Zero didn’t seem as though he was going to sink through the floor any longer.

  JinYeong, who had begun to prowl his way carefully around the room, sniffed a bit but returned to our side of the room without being too obstreperous. There was a narrowness to the look that he shot around the room again, but that could have been because of how dark it had become around the edges.

  “It would seem that we’re too late,” said a female voice behind us, as I was trying to figure out why it was suddenly so dark around the edges of the room.

  Zero turned, sweeping up with the sword that was suddenly and impossibly in his hand while the voice was still speaking, and a silver blade met his, parrying and then disengaging in a single, ringing beat.

  “Don’t kill Palomena,” I said to him, on a sob.

  Zero’s sword dropped. He said, “Please stop crying.”

  “I’m not crying,” I said, wiping away the tears with my cuffs. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  That made him release a breath that was almost a laugh, which loosened my chest enough to make me able to realise that there was a warmth around my shoulders, front and back. I only recognised it as JinYeong’s arm wrapping around me from behind when Zero shot a hard, not-quite-cool look at it. I could have shrugged off the arm, but I left it there instead. Today, I was prepared to accept all the comfort I desperately needed, from JinYeong at least.

  “I would have something to say about that, I promise you,” Palomena said reassuringly to me. She took a lingering, regretful look around the room, and her eyes came to rest on me for a moment before flicking back to Zero. She said, “This is a bit of a shame.”

  “Yes,” Zero said baldly.

  “Maybe it’s not what it looks like,” I said, my tears dry but my voice a bit too wobbly for the professional human I was supposed to be. “Maybe it’s like when A—when we found the dead bloke who wasn’t who we thought he was?”

  “We’ll investigate properly, Pet,” said Zero. “We won’t just assume that everything is as it seems.”

  “Ah,” Palomena said. “Then before you investigate too thoroughly, do you think it would be a good idea to send me away?”

  I think I would have been hopeful if Zero had agreed. He didn’t: he shook his head and said, “There’s no need. Athelas has been…very thorough. We’ll call in the detective to verify the remains by human methods, but I can see the remnants of the work.”

  Remnants, he said.

  The shadows were actually shades.

  I’d thought I was just tired of the mess and death, that there were black spots dancing around the edges of my vision because I was sick and dizzy. That the edges of the room had collected shadows due to the time of day, not because they were peopled with shades of people who had once been alive.

  One of them separated from the wall closest to me, heading for the door, and I briefly saw Ezri’s young face as the shade wafted toward me. She grinned at me, sharp and mocking, just like she’d done when she was alive. As if she knew something that I didn’t know and enjoyed the fact. Or as if she was making that expression at someone else—someone I couldn’t see.

  She was just a kid. Just a kid who’d carried a cricket bat and tried to be tough enough not to die in a strange world that could kill her in a heartbeat.

  I don’t know who she was grinning at, but it seemed as though she looked right into my eyes for those few seconds. Then there was just darkness that seemed to howl and scream: a darkness that joined itself to the rest of the shadow in the room, a darkness that silently howled and writhed and finally bubbled away into the floor.

  “Can you make ’em stop doing that?” I asked Zero, looking away from that roiling mess in the middle of the room that would soon resolve into the remaining mess that was physically there. Shadows—no, shades—were already gathering again around the room to do it all over again.

  “No,” he said, and I thought for a moment that he might actually throw up. His eyes fluttered shut and then open again, and he drew in a breath through his nose, making it pinch in. When he spoke again, his voice was as cold as it had been when I first met him. “Leave the room. It’s no good staying here, and they won’t stop spawning for a few years yet, I’d think.”

  “He could have left them to live,” I said, my chin crinkling again. “He knew they would have died in a few years anyway. Why do it now?”

  “The king must have found out about Blackpoint and his human associates,” Zero said, still in that awful, calm, cool voice. “He might not have thought it worthwhile to seek out a small group of humans if it were only a matter of them helping a human or two, but he wouldn’t put up with one of his own joining them to expose the world Behind.”

  I felt so tired. “Reckon he’s dead too?”

  “We haven’t found him yet,” Zero said.

  “Yeah, but that could mean the king’s got him, couldn’t it?”

  “If the king has him and he is not dead now, he will be dead soon,” JinYeong said. “Perhaps they will keep him alive to get some information, but I think there is not much to tell.”

  Palomena said, warningly, “I’ve heard no news that Blackpoint is anything other than dead, as we reported a little while ago.”

  “Yeah,” I said remembering in the dim recesses of my mind that weren’t occupied with the nightmare around me t
hat we still needed to be careful what we said around her. “He’s dead all right. We already knew that.”

  “I would like to suggest once again that I be retired,” Palomena said.

  When I looked at her, she wasn’t looking at me—or the room, in fact. She was very carefully not looking at the room, as if trying to make sure she saw as little as possible.

  I don’t know if Zero saw it too. At any rate, his gaze rested on her for a few moments before he said, “JinYeong, take Pet out. I need to do a last sweep here with the lieutenant.”

  “I can stay—” I began, but JinYeong tugged at me.

  “There is too much blood here,” he said. “I am hungry. I should not be hungry when my allies die.”

  I stiffened. “What about Vesper?”

  “The little lady is safe,” he said, still gently tugging me away from the smell and the sight of the dead humans. “I gave her a…thing.”

  I resisted the pull for a moment, right on the cusp of the doorway. “You didn’t—you didn’t turn her—?”

  “Pft,” he said, the dismissiveness of it a balm to my soul. JinYeong had done many things, but he hadn’t ever actually lied to me. “She is just like you: she would never let me do that.”

  So I let him pull me out of the room, out of the house, and into the sunshine. And then I sat down with him under a tree and hugged his arm around me with my back to him, shivering away the tears until there remained only an ache in my throat.

  Zero emerged alone before much longer, still edged in ice and barely-contained fury, but he moved as though he had a purpose again, which I suppose meant that he was dealing with stuff. I wondered if I would look like that soon.

  “Home,” he said to us; a single word with a complex meaning.

  I couldn’t bring myself to stir and get up, so maybe it was a good thing that JinYeong got up and pulled me along with him. I’d spent so long anchored to my house and desperate to keep it that I hadn’t ever considered how tight-knit that bond was. Athelas…Athelas had pointed it out more than once, and I’d seen a vague reflection of it in Ralph’s bond with his house—and Morgana’s, if I’d ever had enough nous to realise it—but it was only now that I came to consider exactly what that bond was.