I forced that urge back down and said aloud, a bit thickly, “Oh, right. It’s dead body smell. Why didn’t I know that?”
Maybe because all the bodies I’d come across were fresh? And the ones that weren’t were in a kind of frozen stasis, which must have really put a lid on the smell.
When my stomach was under control again, I made myself step forward once, and then again. After that it seemed like I could keep walking around the desk, even though I didn’t really want to. The computer was behind the desk, too, and once the police got here, I wouldn’t get another chance to look at it.
I skirted around the poor woman as best I could, hitching up my hoodie to cover my nose, but it didn’t do any good. The smell seeped through, right to the skin.
I didn’t know how long she’d been dead, but I reckoned she must have been killed a few days after Mr. Preston was. She must have come back to clean her desk out after the police were done: the drawers on the right hand side of the desk were each slightly open, and there was a box on the desk with a few pens in it. A water cooler stood against the wall beside her, just a normal office one that bubbled when you got a drink. On the floor near her chair was a paper cup that had once been soggy and now was stiff in the form it had taken when it fell to the ground. Around it, and around the base of the receptionist’s chair, there was a stain of water in the carpet.
I remembered Mr Preston’s wild eyes as he told me of creatures crawling up through the drain and coming through the sink, and shivered. She must have thought she was safe here—what human would think something could come after them from the water cooler of all places? Who could have wanted to kill a receptionist who was just coming back for her things? It was just so senseless.
I cleared my throat carefully, just in case my lunch tried to crawl back up my throat again, and tried to breathe through my mouth as I leaned around the dead woman to get at the computer. It didn’t help. It might have even made it worse, because now instead of just smelling it, it was like I was drinking it.
I gagged into my hoodie, but my lunch was pretty much aware of where it was meant to be by now, so I just hunched my shoulders and got on with my search, trying not to look at the poor receptionist. There wasn’t much on the computer apart from basic client files, unless they were hidden by the Behind equivalent of a firewall or something. I didn’t think so, though: Behindkind are usually too much in love with themselves to realise the use of blending human tech with their skills.
Maybe I should be thankful for that.
Still, I managed to get the address they had for North—even if it wasn’t her real one, it was somewhere to start—before I wiped away any fingerprints I might have left and hurried away from the poor dead receptionist to have a quick stickybeak around the rest of the lower floor.
There wasn’t much to be seen; dribbles of Between ran down the walls everywhere like water trails or mould, but they weren’t doing much except being. I wondered if the present, quiet Between was just because it was an older building, and that made me curious. Was it possible that Between could just exist in a kind of benign way? Just being there, without it having to be an opening for death and dismemberment, because the place was old and new at the same time.
Yeah, probably not.
The presence of a dead body along with the trickles of Between was a pretty obvious veto of that idea. Still, it didn’t look like the dribbles along the wall had been responsible for her death: they were there but they were still quiet, like they’d been there for a long time without trying to reach out further into the human world. If I’d had to guess, with my very small experience of Behindkind and Mr. Preston, I would have put my money on it being something to do with the empty water cooler and the deep liquid stain below the receptionist’s chair.
I wished, for a brief, homesick moment that I could see Zero and Athelas’ reaction to the scene and pick their brains, but shoved the thought away energetically. I had Daniel. I had JinYeong. I could ask either of them. I didn’t need Zero. Didn’t need Athelas.
I took a few pictures before I went back down the hall, mindful of the fact that my photos might be something Zero had hacked into as well as my calls. I didn’t want the psychos showing up here while I was still in the process of checking out the whole place, so I made sure I covered up the business cards and anything with Mr. Preston’s law firm’s name on them.
I mean, there was no reason for Zero to be turning up, anyway: now that I was out of the house, he didn’t have to try to keep me safe. He might want to keep me out of Behindkind business, though, and there was no use taking risks, after all. I was still very much confused between the Zero-who-seemed-to-care-about-me and the Zero-who-let-humans-die. There might be some intersection between the two, but if he was willing to let a human die because he didn’t want to get involved with humans, how long would it be before he realised he didn’t really care enough to keep me alive? It was much better not to trust him; much better to learn to trust only myself again.
Which meant that if one of those Zeros did turn up, whichever one of them it was would be more trouble than he was worth. If he wanted to keep me safe, he’d probably kick me out and then do nothing about the receptionist, and that wasn’t fair. She’d been here at least a week, which meant no one had missed her. If no one else was gunna even report her death, I was going make sure it got done.
I paused with my finger hovering over Detective Tuatu’s name in my address book, and slowly put my phone back in my pocket. I still had to check around upstairs. Once the cops came, I wouldn’t be able to poke my nose into things, and while that brought with it certain advantages—being able to ask Detective Tuatu for the cause of death, for instance—it also meant I wouldn’t be able to see what I assumed was the office upstairs.
I didn’t much want to go upstairs after the scene downstairs, but I went anyway. I couldn’t let myself stop doing stuff just because I wished I had a sturdy, white-haired fae in front of me or a vampire next to me. If I did that, I’d be pretty useless as an investigator.
Anyway, the smell of downstairs was too sickening to stay there.
It followed me as I climbed the stairs, and I had the feeling that it would follow me all the way home, too, but at least the overwhelming sogginess of it crawling down into my lungs lessened as I climbed.
As I drew closer to the top of the stairs, the hollow wooden sound of my footsteps grew more solid, and a pattern traced itself through the wood beneath my feet. The stairwell itself rounded and smoothed out, chocolate shadows flowing along the newly curved walls that blended seamlessly into the curved ceiling. There was light, but I didn’t know where it was coming from. I paused to look around and saw pinpricks of light everywhere that looked like glowbugs; tiny, matte luminates in the woody shadows.
Heck. I was definitely walking inside a tree right now. There was no way it was boards beneath my feet anymore. The stairwell opened out again ahead of me, but the entrance was round instead of rectangular or even oval, and I had to duck my head to pass through.
I didn’t exactly expect more dead bodies, but I suppose I expected what I’d seen of Upper Management: a chilly, antibacterial kind of atmosphere that was more human than Between, where fae and humans alike could easily move around. Instead, I found a place that wasn’t human, or even Between—here was a place that was deep Behind. I felt the difference of it as soon as I entered; the deep silence and profound sense of peril and something not quite…right. Or was it just that the place was so utterly inhuman? I hadn’t felt that sense of deep, abiding peril since I’d been lost Behind by myself the first time. Or perhaps the first time I’d laid eyes on the Troika.
The furniture was furniture, but it was also part of the room itself: growing from the floor, growing from the ceiling. More glowing things instead of electric lights, though I was beginning to think that the bugs weren’t bugs, but delicately formed, inanimate replicas. There was a desk, a chair, and even a window. A kind of dumbwaiter, too, by the looks.
<
br /> And, incongruously, a computer.
This must have been where Mr. Preston did his work. I looked around at the room, and although I’d known he hadn’t been telling me everything, I knew now that he had barely been telling me anything. He’d said he didn’t know anything about his clients, that he just did what he was told, but if he’d worked in here there was no way he didn’t know at least a good part of where his clients came from, and how to move around the world Behind.
I went around the room once, being careful to duck below the windowsill as I moved, but there wasn’t much to see. The computer wouldn’t turn on for me, either, but since I was pretty sure that was because it would only work for Mr. Preston, I didn’t try too hard. I didn’t want to give away the fact that someone was here, poking their nose around the place. I opened the dumbwaiter door as well, and found that it wasn’t exactly a dumbwaiter.
Nope, it was a tiny prison. I stared at the very small Behindkind in there, and it bared its teeth at me, pressed against the back of its prison. It could have been a fruitbat if it was back in Australia in the human world. Even here, it looked a lot like a fruitbat: all huge amber eyes and peaky leatherish ears, fur everywhere. Instead of wings it had four arms, all of them waving at me like a huge, demented spider, and legs that were nearly arms, too.
“Flaming heck!” I said, trying very hard not to be repulsed. It probably didn’t care whether or not a human found it appealing. Goodness knew how long it had been imprisoned here. “You’d better get out while you can. Don’t bite me!”
It just snarled at me and gnashed its little teeth again, burbling in some language I didn’t understand. With the thought of JinYeong in my mind, I let the feeling of Between seep into me, and distinctly heard a tiny voice saying shrilly, “The information was correct! The information was correct! I will swear to it in the courts!”
I let the feeling of Between flow out with my words when I said again, very clearly, “You’d better get out while you can. Don’t bite me.”
Its eyes grew wide. “You can’t do that!” it said.
I sighed. “Yeah, people keep saying that. You want out, or are you gunna stay there?”
It darted past me on all six limbs, and sprang to the floor. I expected it to go for the window and fade into the Behind world, but it ran for the stairs instead.
“Oi!” I yelped.
To my surprise, it stopped. “What does the human want?”
“You—are you going out into the human world?”
“I do not wish to die,” it said, as though that was an answer.
“What—what were you doing in there?”
“I am an intelligence unit,” it said. “I receive vibrations. Questions are given, answers are found.”
“Oh,” I said. Maybe I’d been too quick to let it go. But I couldn’t just have kept it in a cage while I forced it to give me answers, after all. “You’re not gunna hurt anyone, are you?”
“I do not wish to die,” it said again. “Humans do not harm me, and I shall not harm them. I shall find a plump lap.”
“You’re gunna find a what?” I asked, startled.
“You may call me for precisely one favour,” it said. “I will answer. Speak the words big ears, big ears, answer my call and I will answer.”
“That seems a bit rude,” I said, but the thing was already scarpering for it.
Heck. Hopefully I hadn’t just let a dangerous ankle-biter out into the human world. And speaking of the human world…
Hardly daring to breathe, I stooped and entered the stairwell again, hoping against hope that I would be able to find the path that led back through Between. It had obviously been made safe for a human like Mr. Preston, but now that he was dead, would it still be so?
Luckily for me, either someone had forgotten to turn off any human-assisting bit of magic, or the little vibration-receiving creature had left the way open enough for me to get out. I tumbled down the last few stairs, feeling the familiar movement of floorboards beneath my feet in heart-stuttering relief, and was hit anew by the smell of death and decay.
I phoned Detective Tuatu on my way out the door, as I was wiping my fingerprints off the doorknob on the inside. There was no reason for the poor receptionist to stay where she was any longer: she deserved to be able to be buried. It wasn’t like I was saying anything that would be useful to Zero if he overheard it, anyway.
“Oi,” I said, when the detective picked up.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to be calling me,” he said. “Pet, I can’t talk now. I’m slightly busy—ow! Can you please keep that thing down!”
“Yeah, but I’ve got a body for you. Don’t you want it? Wait, who’s there with you?”
The line went dead.
“Mongrel!” I said indignantly. He’d hung up on me.
My phone bingled with a text from him. Where? was all it said.
I texted him the address, and the next text was just as short.
Wait there.
The heck I would. I felt as though I needed to get away from that smell before it followed me into my dreams as well.
Can’t, I texted. Got somewhere I gotta be. Bring a mask, it’s ripe in here.
Then I shut the door behind me, wiping off my prints from the outside as well. It was a shame to get rid of anything that might have been useful, but I’d already messed it up by putting my fingerprints over what had been there and I was wary of leaving traces. I was pretty sure Behindkind wouldn’t hesitate to use the human legal system if they wanted to get rid of me. After all, they were using it on North, and I would have thought that was much harder to do.
I mean, I’d rather they didn’t find out about me at all, but if they did, I wanted to cover myself from potential repercussions in the human world.
The evening was golden by the time I got to the place Mr. Preston’s records said North lived. It was out at Sandy Bay and too far to walk if I wanted to get home before dark, so I used up a couple of the last few gold coins I had left on me and took the bus.
I already knew the place was a unit based on the address, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so posh. Instead of being in a heritage kind of building that I would have expected from Behindkind, North’s place was one of the new, modern complexes that had a common garden and a pretty solid gate at the front for the private car park.
“Pretty flamin’ swish,” I muttered, matching my walking speed to the pearl-wearing grandma ahead of me. I wouldn’t even have offered a bet on the likelihood of there being either a security guard or a pin-pad sort of system to get through the door, and I wanted to make sure I got in.
It was a pin-pad system, but I followed smoothly after Grandma Pearl with my hood up and my footsteps quiet, and I don’t think she even noticed me. I took the elevator right up to the top floor, raising my eyebrows at the sheer spaciousness and richness of it, and came out onto a floor that was even swankier than the first floor had been. It was more like an expensive hotel than a block of units, and up here I could understand why North had picked this place instead of something more connected with Between. From here, through the long windows at the end of the hall, was a clear, airy view of the sea and sky and clouds: exactly what you’d expect the incarnation of the North Wind to want to see.
I knocked on the door of her unit, and it just sort of fell inward with a dull thud onto the carpet.
“Ah heck,” I said.
The place was a mess. I don’t just mean a human mess, even though it was that. If you looked at it with normal human eyes, the pot-plants were smashed, spilling dirt all over the place, and pretty much everything in the house that could be smashed, had been smashed. Holes gaped in the walls, with plaster in crumbs and jagged pieces inside and outside of them, and one of the ceiling fans had been torn from the ceiling and now dangled brokenly about half a metre from the carpet.
If you looked at it with the help of the copious amounts of Between that hung over the place like mist, there were weird bodies on the floo
r with dirt for blood and hessian for skin, black blood splattered everywhere, and something soggy and furry and very dead hung from two of the blades of the ceiling fan, dripping on the carpet.
“Ah heck,” I said again. Whatever had happened here, it didn’t look like I was going to get the chance to speak with North today. I just hoped she wasn’t dead.
I mean, could you even kill the North Wind incarnate? I suppose that’s the point of an incarnation, but how do you kill the bit that makes them the North Wind?
I hunched my shoulders a bit against the crawling feeling that had started up again, and took a slow walk around the main room. I didn’t know whether North’s attackers had been looking for North herself, or something around the place, but I wanted to make sure I saw everything there was to see before I went home to Morgana and Daniel and gave them the bad news.
The living room was pretty empty if you didn’t count the dead bodies, and there didn’t seem to be a lot around that was personal, just the broken potted plants and a few dishes. There was a cup of water sitting on the kitchen bench, with a bit of water sloshed around it, like North had been getting a glass of water when her door was smashed in. Hadn’t she seen them coming? That was weird: beside the door was a digital screen that showed a split view of the outside of the unit block, and a slightly cracked view of North’s ceiling, which would once have been a view of the outside of her door. Splinters of Between also protruded from all over the door, as if they’d been smashed in as much as the door had—a Behindkind sort of first warning system, I was pretty sure.
Chilled, I hurried around the kitchen, then went for the bedroom. It was as much of a mess in there: everything that could be torn apart had been torn apart, and in the remains of the mattress an iron box had tumbled across the sheets, coming to rest between wall and mattress and surrounded by padding. Scattered over the mattress and the floor were photos; a good fifty or so of them, torn and dirty from being trod on, some of them with dirt or slime or whatever the searchers had had on their boots or possibly feet.
Between Homes (The City Between Book 5) Page 10