Between Homes (The City Between Book 5)

by W. R. Gingell

  North’s version of a safe? If so, whatever really important things had been in there were gone: I could see the bare inside of it through the broken lid. I had a quick look at the photos that were scattered around, too, but they were all of the same little girl and sometimes a pair of adults. The Palmers, I would have guessed, though I wasn’t sure why North had their photos. They didn’t look like surveillance photos: they looked like the kind of photos a family friend takes.

  They obviously hadn’t interested the searchers, however. I couldn’t see anything left to sift through.

  Hang on, though. Underneath a wad of carelessly tossed photos was a flicker of royal blue. I leaned over to pinch that sliver of blue between my fingers, and came back up with a scrap of silky material. It was a ribbon: you know, the sort you get for running in races or winning the art competition at school. Just a silky blue ribbon with first place embossed on it. It didn’t look special, but I was pretty sure it must have been if it was locked away in a box of North’s stuff. I put it in my pocket to think about later, and went back out into the main room to frown at the glass of water on the bench.

  It was just…weird. Not broken, for a start, while everything else was. It was a cut glass cup with lots of facets, and there was no reason for it to be where it was. If North had been taken by surprise, she would have dropped it or thrown it as a weapon, not set it down on the bench, regardless of how careless she was as she did so. If she hadn’t been taken by surprise, why was fetching herself a glass of water the last thing she did before being attacked, especially since the sloshed water suggested she had set it down hastily?

  I picked up the glass, holding it up to the light of the window, and at first saw only water and refracted light. Then it occurred to me that there was a small golden gleam somewhere in the depths of it that was just a bit more solid than the spangles of gold the sunlight made. It was tiny, that flash of gold: about an eighth of the size of my little finger-nail, with nothing Between to it or the glass. If I hadn’t held the glass up, I wouldn’t have seen it. Even gazing into it at eye level with lots of light, it could almost have been part of the golden sunset refracting through the water.

  I tried to fish it out, feeling carefully for the flake of gold, and my fingers touched something unexpectedly much larger than the gold. Rectangular and smooth, it was as slick as glass. I pulled it out and gazed at the transparent wafer as it dripped onto the bench.

  What the heck?

  I turned it over between my fingers, trying to work out what it was. The flake of gold seemed to be some kind of a chip, though I wasn’t sure about that, and when I dried it off, I could see very faint scoring marks at the other end of it.

  What the heck was this thing? Why had North hidden it from her attackers?

  I mean, if I kinda squinted at it sideways, those barely-there marks could almost be…

  I felt a grin spreading across my face.

  It was a USB: a tiny glass USB with the same depth as a couple of glass microscope slides and only two thirds as wide. The faint scoring on it was from someone sliding it in and out of a USB port pretty regularly.

  I still didn’t know whether it was something that was helpful to North’s case, or something else entirely, but I did know it was something she hadn’t wanted to get into the hands of whoever attacked her. Question was, who had she left it for? She hadn’t seemed as though she was willing to have anyone but me helping her on the case, which would suggest she’d left it for me, but she couldn’t have known I’d make it here to find it.

  Obviously it was my duty as North’s hired investigator to appropriate it and see what was on it. I was still grinning as I slipped it into my other pocket: despite the fact that North was goodness-knows-where by now, despite the fact that I didn’t even know what I was going to do next.

  There wasn’t much more around the place, so I just did another quick circuit around the house and decided to make a day of it. It was already getting toward evening, and I was pretty sure Daniel would start hassling me by text to know where I was if I didn’t check in soon.

  That reminded me that even if Zero had my phone magically tapped somehow, I could still send a careful text to Daniel to let him and Morgana know everything had gone well, and that I was on my way home. I did that, strolling along with my head bent and my eyes on the phone as I came out of the apartment, and when I nearly walked into someone, my first instinct was to just step aside and keep walking.

  A firm hand grabbed me around the neck, but I’d already seen, if not processed, the extra set of arms on the torso.

  “Ah heck,” I said, for the umpteenth time that day.

  I think my feet left the floor. The four-armed Behindkind shunted me effortlessly across the hall, and I caught a brief glimpse of someone tall and open-mouthed at the end of that hall. I would have hoped that whoever the human was, he had more self-preservation than to try and help, but as the four-armed creature hove me through the doorway of the apartment opposite North’s, I caught the faint but certain flutter of Between to the figure.

  Well. Behindkind. What a surprise.

  Still whoever that Behindkind was, he obviously wasn’t with this lot: they shut the door behind them, and I could suddenly feel carpet beneath my feet again.

  No. Not carpet. Grass.

  I was standing on grass.

  “You lot bring this stuff with you everywhere you go?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

  “I do not bring it,” said a very deep voice that didn’t belong to my current captor. “However, it springs beneath my feet where I go.”

  “Oh,” I said, catching my breath and my balance. And then, because I didn’t know what else to say, I added, “I s’pose that’s pretty convenient.”

  The speaker emerged from the kitchen as I spoke. He was a big bloke—well, if he’d been a bloke, he would have been a big bloke. He was actually fae; sorta golden in a quiet, warm-sand type of way, and he was big even for a fae. He looked nice or something. Maybe he reminded me of someone? I wasn’t sure, but his face was pleasant and open and friendly…and utterly without wrinkles.

  That made me look again, because people should have wrinkles. Even fae should have wrinkles—just enough to show which part of their face does the most moving. There should be faint lines around their eyes to show that they smile, and maybe one or two at the corners of their mouths. Even if they’re inclined to be grumpy beggars, there should at least be a ridge between their brows.

  Even Athelas has lines around his eyes, for pete’s sake! Even Zero has a nearly constant line between his brows.

  This bloke—this fae—he had nothing. Just smooth skin.

  And suddenly I didn’t feel like he was so friendly and warm.

  “G’day,” I said.

  He sat on the couch, dwarfing it, and said, “Talk to me.”

  There was a huge weight of command with it: command that said I should tell him about my life, my connections, my current situation. No, not a weight: a worm. A worm that burrowed into my ear and chewed through my brain looking for truth and lie and gnawing, gnawing, gnawing.

  I talked a lot. I talked about waking up from the Nightmare and drinking coffee. I talked about my annoying friend who was very close to being a big brother, and about how much of a pain it was to do the washing up after I’d fed all his friends. I talked about the previous house I’d been in, the one I’d been kicked out of, and skated around the edges of everything by telling an awful lot about things that weren’t important.

  That helped with the awful, itchy feeling of the worm that was burrowing in my head, and I reckon it must have tired him out, because he said impatiently, at last, “Stop. Where is Lord Sero?”

  “Dunno,” I said. The worm considered that and grew still for just a moment.

  “He didn’t kill you, I see.”

  “I’m a good cook,” I said, off the cuff, as the worm wriggled itself deeper.

  “I see,” he said; and he said it like he really did see. L
ike it made sense to him. “Yes, it’s no use killing a good cook.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed, very cold around the ears. I wanted to put up my hoodie but didn’t dare.

  “What are you doing here today? Is this interference under the aegis of Lord Sero?”

  “North asked me to help with something,” I said. “I said I would, but she didn’t tell me everything I needed to know, so I came to ask her some questions.”

  He considered that for far longer than I was comfortable with. Did he not believe me, or was he going to ask questions about what North wanted help with—stuff I wasn’t comfortable answering, but would probably be dead if I didn’t answer them?

  Dead, or chewed to pieces by the worm in my brain, the worm that had started burrowing, burrowing again.

  “She has an assistant,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’m not with Lord Sero anymore.”

  I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it. One of the fae standing beside the big fae asked, “Should we take care of it, my lord? If it’s unaffiliated—”

  “I’m not unaffiliated,” I said. “I’m with North now.”

  That was true, too. I mean, probably not in the way that he meant it, but what mattered was how it looked to me. That’s what I told the little worm crawling around in my brain, and it seemed to be happy with that.

  “I won’t alienate the North Wind,” the fae said. “Not at this stage. Flesh bag: did you take anything from her place of residence?”

  The truth. Only the truth was safe while the worm burrowed. “Yeah,” I said. “Got this.”

  I held up the ribbon, expecting the worm to bore deeper, looking for the rest of the truth, but it didn’t. Oh. Right, I thought after a sick moment. I had told the truth, and that was all that was demanded of me. The worm wouldn’t specify how much truth I had to tell, just that I had to tell it.

  Just like Athelas, I was free to tell just enough truth to quiet the worm. Enough to confuse. Enough to conceal. I wondered, suddenly and coldly, if Athelas had become the way he was in part because there had once been a little worm crawling around in his head, and he had never been able to get rid of it. Maybe that was why he was so torturous with the truth. Maybe he’d forgotten that he could talk in any other way because he’d been watched and controlled and used for such a long time.

  Maybe there were worse positions in the Behind world than Pet.

  “Useless,” said the fae, and the worm crawled out of my ear again even though there was nothing there when I reached up to feel for it, to crush it to bits. “Throw the fleshbag out. You. Forget.”

  Unlike with JinYeong, I had absolutely no desire to let this Behindkind know his mojo didn’t work on me. I actually kinda expected it to work, since the worm had gotten in. My surprise must have made my face blank enough to be believable, because the fae didn’t even watch as the four-armed man dragged me back out and threw me into the corridor.

  I didn’t look back, either. I just ran for it.

  Chapter Seven

  I only just got inside the house.

  I just barely got inside the house when someone howled, “Who dragged in the body? I’m not cleaning it up!”

  “Rude!” I yelled. I still felt cold and creeped out and wriggly, and it was comforting to yell at something that wasn’t scary. “See if I get you lot any more coffee!”

  “They wouldn’t drink it if you got it now,” said Daniel, from the stairs. He leapt the last couple of steps and strode toward the kitchen. “It’d smell like a dead thing.”

  “Thought you lot liked that sort of thing,” I grumbled. “Don’t you lot roll in dead things?”

  “That’s racist,” he said, but he was grinning. “Only the young ones do that. When we’re older we’ve got more of a sense of humanity back again, and the human side doesn’t like dead things.”

  As if to prove him right, one of the younger lycanthropes shuffled close and rubbed his cheek against my sleeve, giggling.

  “What the heck!” I protested. “Get off!”

  Pressure, against the other arm. I looked around and there was another of the teenaged ones, gazing up at me.

  “You get lost, too,” I told him, but the warmth of lycanthrope on either side had already helped with my cold, creeped out feeling, so I didn’t say it with as much of an attitude as I would normally have done.

  “You okay?” Daniel asked, in spite of that. “I was starting to get worried. I got your text that you were coming and then you didn’t reply.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll give you a rundown once I’ve had a shower. North’s vanished off somewhere and I’m gunna need coffee.”

  “North’s what?” he demanded, stopping sort of the kitchen.

  I kept going for the stairs, ignoring him. “Tell you after. Gotta shower!”

  A flutter of movement was my first notice that someone was watching me from above the bannisters as I climbed the stairs. I looked up curiously, and saw them lining the stairs high above me on both sides: two rows of heads shoved between bannisters, gazing down at me.

  Dust flickered through the very last, golden sunshine of the day, lending a distressed photographic sort of look to the whole scene, and I wondered if I looked the same to them from up there.

  “Didn’t Daniel get you any food?” I asked them.

  “We already ate it,” said one of them, his voice filtering down through the sunshine just like the dust. It was the bold little boy with golden curls who had threatened one of the others with his spoon the other night. He rested his chubby chin on tiny fists and added, “We want dessert.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But you gotta wait until I have a shower: the others said I smell.”

  “We don’t care about that,” whispered a girl, who was just a little bit taller than the boy.

  “You might not, but the boys downstairs care,” I told them. “I’ll bring some cake up after, okay?”

  They didn’t answer, just watched me in silence as I climbed the stairs to get to my own room. Still, I didn’t feel like they were about to drop anything down on me, which was nice. They must still like me more than they liked Daniel.

  I did not expect that I wouldn’t be able to wash the smell out of my hair.

  Or my skin, for that matter. I scrubbed until my skin went red, and washed my hair until the water was threatening to run cold, and I could still smell dead receptionist.

  I huffed my frustration in a spray of water droplets through the golden sunshine that still streamed through the west-facing window, and then yelped when something shuffled over near the door.

  I popped my head around the shower curtain, wondering if I could use the loofah in a deadly enough way to be any use, and saw one of the kids standing next to the door, blinking sleepily in the sunlight. At her feet was a small plastic bucket with cut lemons in it.

  “What the heck?” I complained.

  “He told me to give it to you,” she said, looking down at the bucket. Reckon she must have been a bit miffed about it, because she wasn’t carrying it: she was sort of shunting it across the floor with one foot, sulkily.

  “Who’s he?” I asked, but as the bucket made a small plastic tic! against the bathtub, I smelled the faintest whiff of cologne.

  “He says it will help with the smell,” she said.

  “Right,” I said, and reached out to take the little bucket. She stared at me unblinkingly, so I added, “Thanks. Make sure you shut the door on your way out, all right? I’ll bring up cake later.”

  I retreated back behind the shower curtain, hoping she would take the hint and leave me to my shower. She must have, because although I didn’t hear the door open and close, the next time I looked around the shower curtain she was gone.

  That left me looking down doubtfully at cut lemons, wondering what the heck they were supposed to do about the smell of dead person. Mind you, if anyone would know about dead people, it was JinYeong. I shrugged, and grabbed the first lemon half.

  It actua
lly worked. I mean, I had to squeeze it over my hair as well as the rest of me, and I still did another round of shampoo and conditioner, but by the time I was done I smelled acidic instead of disgusting, and my skin didn’t have the creeping feeling any longer.

  Daniel was waiting for me outside the bathroom with a disapproving look and a mug of coffee when I got out of the shower. I accepted the coffee, ignored the disapproval, and said, “Sorry, forgot to bring some home. I got distracted by a dead person.”

  “The vampire is back,” he said, surprising me by ignoring the open lead I’d given him. Apparently he was more annoyed about JinYeong’s presence than a dead body somewhere.

  “I can’t help it if he comes around here,” I argued. “You’re just lucky he gave me a tip about lemons, or I’d still smell like sticky dead person.”

  “Who’s dead? It’s not fresh body smell on you.”

  “The receptionist at Mr. Preston’s place,” I told him. “She can’t have been dead more than a week and a half, but she was…she was falling apart.”

  “Those are the worst,” he said. “I prefer the fresh ones, even if there’s blood. It sounds weird, but the bloody ones don’t turn my stomach like the weepy ones.”

  I reckon he meant to be comforting, but how comforting is it when the people you know have a preference for a type of dead body?

  “You said something happened to North?”

  “Yeah. I got to her place and everything was tossed over like there was a full pitched battle and then someone went through everything with a knife to find what they were looking for. North was gone, and there were fae in the room across the hall.”

  “What fae?”

  “Dunno, some bloke who said something about bringing grass with him wherever he goes. He was sprouting flowers in the unit, too.”

  “Shingihae,” purred JinYeong’s voice, from the top of the stairs.