“I am enmeshed in nothing,” JinYeong said coldly. “I am doing as I’m told and having fun. When I am not having fun, I will do something else.”
“I see. You’re playing with your food, then. Perhaps you’re aware that my lord is not happy about it?”
I grinned. Whatever other thing they had JinYeong doing, he must have found someone interesting to play with. Zero didn’t let him bring humans home unless they were there to do a job, but I’d seen JinYeong at work, luring women from the other side of the room to where he was—for, I was assuming, the pure fun of it, since he could have simply taken one of them by the hand and drawn them into the street for a quick snack.
“It’s not my concern if hyeong isn’t happy,” said JinYeong. “And when it pleases me to walk away, I shall walk away, regardless of his happiness.”
“Do you really think you can?”
JinYeong threw him an offended look. “Certainly I can.”
“I look forward to it, in that case,” said Athelas, and he was definitely smiling into his tea.
Weird. It sounded like more than just playing with his food. Had JinYeong fallen in love? With a human? That would be…interesting. I mean, it would probably be a bit of a pain in the neck as well, but it would be interesting.
Hang on—was he allowed to be in love? Zero seemed to take a dim point of view on any kind of love, and I definitely couldn’t see him letting JinYeong date a human.
“Pet, can you stop scowling at the blokes on the stairs?” Daniel said, under his breath. “They didn’t mean to knock the antennae off the roof—they were just looking for whatever dead animal’s making the stench up there and started playing. They’ve put it back, and Morgana says it’s fine.”
I blinked a bit, and found that I was looking at two very guilty-faced lycanthropes on the stairs. They each made a slight grimace instead of a grin, and looked significantly more relaxed when I tentatively grinned back at them.
“Sorry,” I said. “The house went a bit weird for a while.”
“Yeah,” said Daniel. “I noticed: you walking through the wall kinda gave it away. It’s been like that for a day or so, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it something we should be worried about?”
“Nope,” I said. “Reckon it’s something they should be worried about, though.”
“The Troika?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
He was still in a good mood about that when we went upstairs to eat with Morgana, and I didn’t blame him. Things were still a bit too raw with me to be exactly happy about stuff like this, but I was conscious of a feeling of lightness. I might have felt a bit lighter if I could figure out if my lightness was because I could keep an eye on the psychos for business purposes, or because I still had a connection with them on a personal level.
Don’t get fond of psychos. It’s a bad idea.
We found a sleepy Morgana waiting for us when we got upstairs, but she brightened when we walked in, and shuffled herself forward, away from her pillows.
“You came back ages ago!” she said. “What were you doing? I wanted to know what was going on—Daniel came back with wounds.”
I looked accusingly at him. “You said you just gave them a look at you!”
“I had to let ’em get close enough to make it worthwhile!” he said uncomfortably, tugging down the sleeve of his t-shirt. There was something there, dark and a bit sticky beneath a patch of something medical. I hadn’t noticed it when I met him at the restoration site, so at least it couldn’t have been too bad. Still…
“Did you make Morgana faint?” I demanded.
“Out like a light!” said Morgana cheerfully.
Well, that explained the bags under her eyes, at least. I glared at Daniel.
“I didn’t know it was there!” he protested. “Anyway, you’re one to talk: what were you doing in the back yard with the—with JinYeong?”
“I wanted to know that, too,” Morgana said, turning traitor and grinning at me. “I’m going to have to get the kids to move the mirrors a bit.”
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll just see me being trounced in training by JinYeong. It’s already embarrassing enough that I can’t beat Mr. Shiny Shoes without people being able to take a gander at it as well.”
“Hand to hand stuff?” asked Morgana. She sounded envious. “I always wanted to be Lucy Liu and beat up people while looking glamorous.”
“Sorta,” I agreed. “But it’s not glamorous. I’m still just trying to avoid grass burn.”
“Did you find out anything useful today?” she asked. “You said you were going to meet with your detective friend.”
“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Daniel, passing around the toasted sandwiches, “but someone went straight into the back yard without coming to see me and trained for half an hour instead.”
“Sorry,” I said, grinning. “But you were up here making Morgana faint, and I didn’t want to walk up the stairs. Oi, Detective Tuatu found out some stuff, so belt up while I tell you now.”
“What, he found a connection between the Palmers and North? Or between her and Upper Management?”
“They’re all connected,” I said, “but we don’t know exactly where the connections are yet. Everywhere Sarah Palmer goes, North goes. Wherever North goes, Upper Management is there. And both of them are trying to keep tabs on the Palmers. It’s gunna be hard to find a way to break the contract if we don’t know why it was made.”
“You better not be leading up to us invading Upper Management now that we know where they are,” Daniel said. “Because I’m not going to do it.”
“Not exactly.”
“You did find it again, didn’t you? I wasn’t just chased around Salamanca by those wallies for nothing, was I?”
“No, we found it,” I assured him. “Or at least, we think so.”
“Hang on, we? JinYeong was with you then, too?”
“You’re not the only one who’s important enough to be followed,” I told him. “He was following me while I was following Upper Management.”
“Flaming fantastic,” he muttered.
“Oi, that’s my thing.”
“Is this going to turn into a Troika job now?”
“Nope,” I said, and hoped it was true. “Only JinYeong’s helping me.”
“Yeah? What’s it costing us?”
“It’s a favour.”
Daniel gazed at me with an open mouth for a very long time.
“You broke him,” Morgana said. She looked like she was considering shoving a piece of her toastie into his open mouth.
“Pet, those three don’t do anything without a cost. None of them do!”
I shrugged. “This time, it’s a favour. No cost.”
“If you say so,” he said unconvinced. “But I’m not poking my nose back into Upper Management’s business if things are going to get complicated.”
“You don’t have to do it,” I said, surprised. “I can go by myself if I need to go. It’s not like we’ve gotta attack or anything.”
“That’s not what I—”
“What if you’re looking at it wrong?” interrupted Morgana. “What if you don’t have to actually go there yet? You’re trying to get leverage, yeah?”
“Yeah. Well, kinda, I suppose.”
“What if the biggest connection is between your client and this private company? What if the Palmers are just leverage to these guys?”
I exchanged a look with Daniel. He said slowly, “It’s possible, Pet. Every time Sarah’s in danger, North’s there. If they’re trying to control her through them, it’s a likely pattern to produce.”
“So if we’re trying to get leverage on Upper Management, we need to know why North is so invested with the family, and what they mean to her,” I agreed. “We’ll probably also need to know why Upper Management wants to keep North under control, but we shouldn’t need to get too close to Upper Management just yet for that.”
/>
“I knew she wasn’t telling us everything,” muttered Daniel. “It’s just like—”
I cleared my throat.
“—just like a lawyer,” he finished lamely. “We’d better go see her again, I reckon.”
“Maybe have a bit of a squiz around Mr. Preston’s office and house if we can, too,” I added. “Oi, Morgana, reckon you can find his home and work addresses?”
“Pay me in coffee: I’ll find you everything,” she said, grinning. “You got a first name for him?”
“Nope. He didn’t tell me. But he’s a lawyer too, and he works here in Hobart. If you combine his name with Selma North and murder trial, I think you’ll find it easy enough. I’d call and ask Detective Tuatu, but I reckon my phone’s tapped.”
It was also why I couldn’t do an internet search without worrying that Zero was going to see what I was up to.
Morgana’s black-rimmed eyes widened impressively. “You’re being tapped already? What did you investigate with those bosses of yours before this?”
“Stuff,” I said. “Anyway, it’s probably them doing the bugging, so…”
“Are you sure the Korean bloke should be hanging around here, then?” she asked. “I mean—”
“That’s what I said,” Daniel said, obviously pleased to find himself agreed with.
“You try and stop him hanging around!” I said indignantly. “Anyway, I told you—he’s helping me. He might be reporting some stuff back to the others as well, but I think he’s trying to annoy Zero at the moment, so it won’t be much. I just won’t take him anywhere really important.”
“It’s too late for him not to know about the new location of Upper Management,” Daniel said pointedly.
“Well, if you’d given me some notice that you were gunna try to get yourself killed, I would have had a chance to make sure I wasn’t being followed!” I retorted. “All right, so we’ll leave Upper Management for a little bit later and focus on asking North a few questions, and having a bit of a sticky-beak around Mr. Preston’s office and house.”
“He’s barely been dead two weeks,” Daniel said gloomily. “Do you reckon there’ll be anything left? The police have been there, but whoever killed him would have been there first to clean up anything interesting.”
“Dunno,” I said. “But we’d better take a look, anyway. He’s connected to North, so it was probably Upper Management who killed him.”
Daniel huffed. “I suppose that means we’re going out again this arvo.”
“Not you,” I said. “It’s not like I’m gunna run into any trouble over at Mr. Preston’s office: they’re just lawyers, and if Upper Management killed him, it’s not likely they’re still interested in his work space.”
“It also means there probably won’t be anything to find,” muttered Daniel.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said stubbornly. “But Behi—those people always think they know more than anyone else, and they’re not too good at thinking like—like normal people. They’re bound to have missed something.”
“I keep feeling like I’m missing part of the conversation,” said Morgana, uncomfortably perspicacious.
“There’s still stuff we’re not supposed to talk about,” I told her. “Even though I’m not a cop. Oh! And that reminds me! You said a while ago that you’d had a cop here before I came along, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “He was checking out the place across the street before Daniel arrived and everything got messy.”
Daniel muttered in the background, but I ignored him. “How long ago was that? Was he taking pictures?”
“Just a month or two ago, not long.”
“He take photos?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He started by trying to run a camera feed through the window, but there must have been something wrong with it, because he was always complaining about stuff not turning out right. After a while, he just started taking lots of photos.”
I exchanged a look with Daniel. He probably already knew what I’d just found out today: Behindkind in general could mask themselves much better on something as relatively low-tech as surveillance video than they could in photographs. Even if normal humans couldn’t recognise them in photographs, other Behindkind could. I was pretty sure now that even Behindkind couldn’t recognise other hidden Behindkind when it came to moving records.
“Why did he stop coming?” I’d been meaning to ask her since I’d heard about the bloke, but what with everything else that had happened lately, I’d only just remembered. “I would have thought he’d find it really useful here.”
“I don’t know,” Morgana said, and she sounded a little bit sad. “He just didn’t turn up again one day. There’s still a flannie somewhere around the room that was his.”
“’Zat all he left?” I asked eagerly. It sounded like this cop had known something of Behindkind. That being so, he was likely dead by now. If he had left anything useful behind, now, that would be something.
To my disappointment, Morgana nodded. “Yeah, just a flannie. It’s why I wasn’t worried or anything—he took everything else with him. He must have forgotten it, that’s all. It should be somewhere over in that corner if I’ve still got it.”
“All right,” I said, my mind very full of questions and potential timelines. It wasn’t that long ago that a body had been thrown at me and Detective Tuatu while we were in a cop’s house. Maybe a month or two. I very much wanted to know if the two things were connected. “I’ll head out as soon as you’ve found those addresses, then.”
Morgana looked very slightly disappointed. “Wasn’t it useful information?”
“Don’t know,” I said frankly. “I think so, but I haven’t got enough other info to be sure. Once I know who to ask a few more questions, it should be easier. You got those addresses?”
“What am I supposed to do while you’re out?” interrupted Daniel. I didn’t know whether he was trying to stop me from talking too much, or just annoyed.
“Sniff out that flannie,” I said, grinning. I couldn’t help it, even though he scowled at me. “Tell Hyacinth we’re still working on it when she comes around, if I’m not back by then. Oh yeah, and put something up on the roof for the kids to eat this evening.”
Daniel grumbled, but I knew he’d do that, too. For a big, bad lycanthrope, it looked like he was pretty much putty when it came to Morgana: if she wanted the kids looked after, he would look after them.
I scarfed down another toastie, while Morgana finished her internet search for North and Mr. Preston, and very nearly gave away the whole thing by texting me the one she found instead of writing it down. When I got over that heart attack, I took the piece of paper from her, trying not to laugh at her crestfallen expression, and tucked it away in my pocket.
“I’ll bring back coffee,” I said.
Chapter Six
I went to Mr. Preston’s office first. Morgana hadn’t been able to find North’s address for me, so it was a good, logical first step. Even if I didn’t find anything else there, I was sure to be able to at least find her address. I couldn’t help feeling annoyed with North: she’d asked me to do a job that needed doing quickly, and hadn’t bothered to tell me all the details. If I’d known she was connected with both Sarah and Upper Management, I would have asked a lot more questions—questions which, I was pretty sure, would be helpful in working out how to break the contract Sarah’s parents were labouring under.
“Flamin’ Behindkind,” I muttered to myself as I double-checked the address Morgana had written down against the number on the side of the building. I was down in Salamanca again, and after wandering through heritage sandstone buildings, past an itinerant blacksmith and the awful Marilyn Monroe-inspired cat and dog statues in bronze, I had found myself by an unmarked door.
The number was right, and it was the right lane, but there was no sign of—well, a sign. Shouldn’t any lawyer worth his salt be advertising? Or, I wondered, remembering a few things that Mr. Preston had told me, had he worked purely fo
r the benefit of Behindkind courts when their law intersected with human law? I knew he’d been paid very richly for taking on North’s case, at least.
The door was open, so I went in. The inside was just as atmospherically heritage-styled as the outside, with wooden floors that echoed footsteps and long carpets that made them boom instead of echo. There was a bad smell in the air, too; or maybe not so much in the air as it was in the walls and carpet. I was pretty sure that was because of the staircase on my left: the grain of the wood in the stairs ran with the possibility that they could lead somewhere else other than an upstairs office, so it was likely that there was something gross and deadly up there.
I left them for last. Just in case there was something up there I didn’t want to meet with until I’d checked down here and could run for it without feeling like I’d missed something important. I saw the receptionist’s desk up ahead through a door at the end of the hall and headed toward that instead. As I did, it seemed like the smell grew worse, which was worrisome.
If it was something upstairs, with all the Between leaking down, it was likely to be something weird but not necessarily something I needed to worry about. If it was down here, it was more likely to be something human and weird that I definitely needed to worry about.
The floorboards creaked underneath my feet, setting the hairs up on the back of my neck as I came around the edge of the doorway, and I stopped with a jerk. There was a dead receptionist behind the desk. She reclined in her office chair with her head tilted back and her eyes open to gaze sightlessly at the ceiling, and I swayed a bit in the doorway, the floorboards moving beneath my feet.
It would have been nice to be able to say it looked like the woman had just fallen asleep. Would have been nice to see that instead of what I actually saw: a bloated and discoloured caricature of a human woman whose eyes had popped nearly all the way out due to decomposition. Something brown and gooey leaked from pretty much every hole on her face; nostrils, eyes, mouth. With the last warm, summery week we’d had, that must have been where the smell was coming from. It coated my nostrils like a paste of spam that had been left out too long in the sun and dredged up an urgent desire to puke from right at the bottom of my stomach.
Between Homes (The City Between Book 5) Page 9