Between Homes (The City Between Book 5)

by W. R. Gingell

  “JinYeong,” I said. “You better not be dead.”

  I turned him over onto his back, blood slick beneath my fingers, and his head tumbled to the side, eyes slit open and unseeing. I steadied it with one hand beneath his ear and cheek, and used the other hand to check for a pulse. I don’t know how vampires even have a heartbeat, but I do know they’ve got one—I’d heard JinYeong’s before.

  At first I thought there was nothing, then I felt the flutter of a heartbeat far too faint and far too quick.

  “You flaming better not die!” I said fiercely to him.

  There was a brief flicker of awareness to his slit eyes, and I heard the whisper of a laugh that sounded like, “An chugo.”

  “You better not,” I told him. “What can I—what do you need?”

  JinYeong whispered stickily, “Pi.”

  “Well, you’re in luck,” I said, swiping my cheek across the shoulder of my hoodie to get rid of the wetness there. “Got a fresh supply right here. Better drink up.”

  I leveraged his head up a bit, sick at heart to hear the rattle of his breath when he gasped at the pain, and felt warm blood sink stickily into my jeans as JinYeong’s weight settled against my legs. Usually his teeth don’t hurt too much when they go in, but this time each one hurt like a wasp sting, sharp and burning cold, sinking deeper and deeper. I clenched my fist but didn’t pull away, because JinYeong’s head rested against my stomach in a welter of his own blood, too hot and heavy. He’d taken a heck of a lot more pain to make sure I got away safe. It was the least I could do.

  The pain settled after a while, but in its place came a kind of sick dizziness. Just as I registered the feeling, JinYeong released my wrist and made a sticky mumble in Korean that I recognised as enough.

  “You sure?”

  “Ne,” he mumbled; then, still in Korean, “Wait a little.”

  I don’t know if it was too much of an effort to make himself understood through Between, or if he was just so exhausted and hurt that he’d forgotten about using it as a translator. It was a good thing that I’d learned as much Korean as I had simply for the pleasure of understanding him when he didn’t want to be understood.

  Sometimes spitefulness brings its own rewards, eh?

  “You kill Zero?” I asked him, but I already knew the answer. There was no way JinYeong was here, looking like this, if Zero had been significantly hurt.

  A bloody tooth showed between JinYeong’s lips. “Ma—ani tatchioseo,” he said, in low, drawn-out satisfaction.

  “Oh, you hurt him lots? You’re sounding pretty pleased for a bloke who looks mostly dead,” I pointed out, but he already looked a little bit better.

  Well, maybe not better—maybe just a little bit less dead. More alive? Still bloody and ragged, JinYeong gathered himself together, and let me help him to his feet. I saw the reflection of us in the empty storefront across the footpath, battered and bloody, with clothes in tatters and inky black dripping from our fingers.

  “You could’ve worn something nicer if we were gunna meet for coffee,” I said.

  JinYeong gave a bloody chuckle that didn’t sound anything like as bad as it had earlier, but he still weighed heavily across my shoulders.

  Beggar me. What was I supposed to do with a nearly-dead vampire?

  My eyes fell on the empty shopfront again, all black décor and dark wallpaper, with stairs only just noticeable far back in the darkness. That might work, if I could get Between to be properly useful for me.

  “C’mon,” I said. “We’re going shopping.”

  “Nonsense,” muttered JinYeong, with a faint touch of Between to the word.

  I would have understood it anyway, but it was nice to know he was remembering it again—that he was capable of using it again.

  I shuffled us forward toward the gothic door, looking for the familiar edge of Between that would give me the ability to push right through the door without opening it, and saw a fine filigree of lace around the edges of the door. Only it wasn’t exactly lace—and it wasn’t exactly there, either.

  “Pretty!” I said, reaching out to touch it. It had a kind of shiny jet gleam to it, and I could feel it there, but when I tried to push through the door, everything was just a bit too solid and soggy to let us through.

  “Um,” I said. “JinYeong? Can you—?”

  “Can’t,” he murmured. “Too hard…to hide us.”

  Right. I knew there had to be a reason that the people passing by on their way to the pub weren’t staring at us. JinYeong was doing something to make us unseen, and it was already taking up all his energy.

  “So you’re lace,” I said aloud. “But that’s not useful. I can’t push through lace.”

  “Not lace,” JinYeong said tiredly, in my ear.

  There was a dampness to my skin on the side that he pressed against, which was worrying. It meant the blood had soaked in, and I’d been hoping that he would have started healing by now, not bleeding worse. I probably shouldn’t have gotten him on his feet so quickly.

  “Not lace,” he said again.

  “It looks like lace,” I told him. “Oh! Right! Paper doilies!”

  Paper’s a lot thinner and easier to get through than lace is. And it wasn’t like we were really walking through paper—it was just a way to see the world so that I could get into the Between place where walls weren’t boundaries.

  This time when I dragged JinYeong forward, we stepped Between, and through the door.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Just a bit further, up the stairs and away from the front window.”

  We just made it to the top of the stairs before he collapsed, dragging me to the floorboards with him. There didn’t seem to be much point in moving him from where he fell, so I took off my bloody hoodie and made a pillow of it, then rearranged him until he was half reclining, half leaning against me.

  “Better stay down,” I said. “Tell me when you need more blood.”

  “Don’t need more,” he muttered.

  He was nearly white, though, and when I waved my wrist under his nose half an hour later, he bit into it briefly and carefully. This time, it didn’t hurt, though it still made me dizzy for a few moments.

  “Gotta start carrying chocolate around with me if we’re gunna be fighting Zero these days,” I said, swaying a bit where I sat. There was a fizziness of energy to me, fighting the dizziness, and then I could sit upright again. “Oh, wait—vampire spit. I’m all good.”

  “Sit still,” JinYeong said, short in his weariness. “Can still faint. Because you are human.”

  “Oi.” I poked his cheek, and his eyes opened a gleaming slit.

  “I will bite you.”

  “You already did,” I said, and poked his cheek again.

  This time his eyes didn’t open, but a very slight point of tooth showed. “What?”

  “Thanks.”

  I probably fell asleep, because I didn’t hear my phone going off, and I didn’t remember the slow crawl of the dawn, or even the morning sunshine. By the time I woke up, feeling bright and immediately alert, it was already eight thirty by my phone and JinYeong was still sleeping with a slight but steady up and down of his chest.

  I thought it was a good sign, but I don’t know much about vampires.

  He woke up when I tried to shift a bit of feeling back into the leg his head was resting on, and sighed, “Ah, appa!”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  That made him laugh beneath his breath, though I wasn’t sure why.

  I asked him, “What’d you do that for, anyway?”

  JinYeong’s eyes slit open, dark and reflective. “Do not be mistaken, Pet,” he said. “I only wished to annoy hyeong.”

  “Liar,” I said.

  His brows went up. “Listen, you,” he began.

  “I know you can be nice sometimes,” I explained, without giving him the chance to keep talking. I knew that a good ninety percent of what he’d done when I left the house originally must have be
en because he wanted to annoy Zero, but last night was the first time he’d really done something utterly unselfish. If he’d just wanted to annoy Zero last night, he already had ways that didn’t involve near-death. As far as I could see it, JinYeong had acted on a genuinely good impulse. As if we were really friends, or at least equals. Maybe he’d remembered his sister, I don’t know. Whatever it had been, it hadn’t just been because he wanted to annoy Zero. “So don’t pretend you’re just a monster who likes to twitch other monsters’ tails.”

  “I helped you because I wished to annoy hyeong and because I was once human,” JinYeong said stuffily. “That is all. We are a little bit alike, you and me. Maybe we are companions these days.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “’Cos that’s not the impression I got. I got the impression that you didn’t much care for humans, whether or not you used to be one.”

  JinYeong appeared to ruminate on that for a while before he said, “You are different.”

  “That’s a cop-out,” I told him. “I’m not different. You just know me better than you know the rest of the humans these days.”

  “Anin ko.”

  “Garbage. You just want to keep thinking that way because it’s easier to feed on humans if you don’t have to think of them as a person like me.”

  “I am already a monster,” he mumbled. “So I will be a very good monster.”

  “Maybe we are alike,” I said. “We’ve both got a bad attitude.”

  “It is necessary to be a monster,” JinYeong said, and he was grinning at the ceiling, his eyes reflecting as dark as the paint. “Because I am a monster.”

  “You been taking lessons from Athelas or something?”

  JinYeong mumbled again.

  “You’re still alive, right?” I said, poking his cheek again. “What did you say?”

  He said it in Korean and without any edge of Between this time, sulkily. I thought he might have said You only try to understand the old man.

  “If you’d speak English, I wouldn’t have to try to understand you,” I retorted. “Oi. If you’ve started arguing, you must be feeling better. Maybe you should try sitting up.”

  “I don’t feel well. I will stay here.”

  “Sook,” I said, but I patted his head anyway, because even if he wasn’t still bleeding, the evidence of his fight still spoke loudly in the condition of his clothes. “When you’re feeling a bit better, I’ll get you some clothes.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if that had reminded him. “Where did you put them? Those little things?”

  “You really wanna know?”

  His eyes opened a slit again and glittered dangerously at my grin. “You had them and then you did not. Where are they?”

  “Put ’em in your pocket,” I told him, and now I was laughing. Companions or friends, whatever he wanted to call it, there was certainly something different between us this morning. “Better hope you moved fast enough not to lose any pockets.”

  JinYeong grinned a dark grin at the ceiling once again and said with a satisfied, rolling ‘r’, “I was verrry fast.”

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, impressed. “How’d you do that? There’s not even an ‘r’ in that when you say it in Korean. How’s stuff like that come through Between?”

  “I am talented.”

  “Oh, right, that must be it,” I said, but I didn’t roll my eyes. I dug into his front pocket, surprising a stifled sound out of him, and found the two USBs. “Oh beauty! Here they are!”

  “What are they?” he asked.

  “Never you mind,” I told him. “Just don’t go telling Zero there’s two, okay?”

  “Shall I not?” asked JinYeong, looking up at me. “With what will you pay me?”

  “I told you. This isn’t a Behindkind deal. No paying. No deals. You either do it or you don’t.”

  “Just once again,” he said. “No more.”

  “Okay. Oi, if you’re gunna be okay, I’ll go out and get you some clothes. You can’t walk around Hobart like that.”

  “I will have coffee, too,” JinYeong said, sitting up easily.

  I raised my brows at him, wondering how long it had been since he’d been able to do that, but left it alone. I nearly asked him for his card, but left that alone, too. At least I’d be able to afford decent clothes for him with the money I’d brought from my stash, even if they weren’t exactly as expensive as he was accustomed to.

  When I got back with my bag of clothes and a face-washer or two, still looking around fearfully for a sight of Zero, JinYeong was up and stretching, all ragged and black with dried blood, but whole.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Just get across the road here without stopping the traffic, and we’ll be in the arcade. There’s a toilet block there where you can wash and change.”

  I had to tug him along when he was inclined to snarl at one of the cars for nearly hitting him, but apart from that, it was a simple matter to get him across the road and into the toilet block. No sign of Zero, which I’d secretly been afraid of, though I was pretty sure I saw a familiarly raggedy figure lurking somewhere further up the road. The old mad bloke was still keeping tabs on me, then.

  I’d bought a new hoodie but my jeans were black and didn’t show the blood, so while JinYeong was still in the toilets cleaning and changing into his new clothes, I had a few minutes to call Morgana.

  “Oi,” I said. “Is there room for one more weirdo over there?”

  “Your Korean friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There are still rooms on the second floor,” she said. I could hear the grin in her voice. “He can have the one beside yours, if you like. You gotta bring him up to meet me now, though, right?”

  “I suppose,” I said, sighing. “But if you’re gassed out by his cologne, I’m not taking responsibility.”

  “I’ll get the kids to open all the windows,” Morgana said. The glee in her voice was much more obvious now. “Did you get what you went out for?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, sorta. Maybe. See ya when we get back.”

  “Bring me coffee!” was the last thing I heard as I hung up. By then, JinYeong had finally emerged from the toilets and was sauntering across the road toward me.

  He’d obviously tried to wet his hair and set it in his usual way, but he’d had to wash out too much blood and along with it the remains of his hair wax, and it wouldn’t sit right. He was still trying to fix it as he stepped up onto the footpath, and I knew he could see me grinning.

  JinYeong in a state of disarray, wearing a jumper and jeans instead of his usual sharp-edged suits, was far less annoying than JinYeong perfectly pressed and poised.

  “What is this?” he demanded, plucking at the yellow jumper.

  “It’s a jumper.”

  “It is soft and ridiculous.”

  “You’ve got jumpers at home.”

  “They are cashmere.”

  “You’re just cranky because you don’t look dangerous, aren’t you?”

  JinYeong’s eyes narrowed, molten caramel instead of black. “You bought me jeans. I do not wear jeans.”

  “You don’t, and you’ll probably get arrested,” I pointed out. “What? You look cute. C’mon. Let’s get coffee.”

  His eyebrows went up, but he followed me to the shop and stayed outside while I went in, leaning against the wall with his best smug moue. Maybe he was getting used to the jumper. Maybe he just wanted to lure in someone for a quick snack to top up his reserves.

  The guy who was always there was still there: sitting at a booth with his computer out, his wheelchair snugly tucked underneath the table. I couldn’t help looking at him as I came through the door—couldn’t help smiling back at him when he smiled at me.

  That didn’t stop me noticing the little whispers of Between around his laptop, though. Whoever he was, this bloke knew something about Between and Behind. He was probably Behindkind, if it came to that, but I wasn’t used to Behindkind smiling at me like that.

  I smiled at him agai
n on the way out—couldn’t help that, either, or the warmth in my cheeks—then caught JinYeong’s purse-lipped, impatient look at the window and hurried out. Technically, he was still healing, and the sooner we got back to Morgana’s place, the better.

  When I got out, JinYeong tipped his chin at the café door. “Nuguya?”

  He must have been annoyed, because he didn’t bother with Between translation.

  “Who is who?” I asked, but I knew who he was talking about. JinYeong must have seen the bit of Between in use as well as I had.

  “Ku namja.”

  “I dunno who he is—a regular or something, I reckon. He’s usually in there when I go in.”

  That must have satisfied him, because JinYeong took his coffee and sipped.

  “All right,” I said, to keep his mind otherwise occupied. He’d more than proved himself, after all. “There’s a room for you back at Morgana’s house, if you want. She said you could have it.”

  I actually thought I’d seen JinYeong at his smuggest by now. Turns out I was wrong. This was JinYeong at his smuggest—nose up, lashes lowered, mouth plump and pleased.

  “Zero wouldn’t let you go back, anyway,” I said, to remind him that there was no need to be quite so pleased with himself. I couldn’t help grinning anyway, though. There was a weird little happy feeling somewhere deep in my chest: I hadn’t expected anyone to stand up for me to Zero. Not even JinYeong. Especially JinYeong.

  He shrugged. “I will live in the house of your friend. I will drink coffee every day.”

  “Knew that was the real reason,” I said, still grinning. “C’mon, let’s go home. We gotta find somewhere safe to put these USBs until we figure out how to use ’em.”

  Hyacinth was waiting for us outside when we got back, her little notebook at the ready. She smiled when she saw me, but looked askance at JinYeong, who didn’t seem to appreciate it. He silently snarled at her and went ahead of me into the house.

  “Sorry,” I said to her. “He’s in a mood because he got beaten up last night. He also doesn’t like jeans or yellow, apparently.”