Between Homes (The City Between Book 5)

by W. R. Gingell

  The troll girl didn’t look particularly soothed. “He’s here a lot, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah. He’s like me—got nowhere else to go. He’s a friend.”

  “Really?” She didn’t sound convinced, either. “Are you sure it’s all right?”

  “He’s saved my life already this week,” I said. “Pretty sure.”

  “All right,” she said. “Just—you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

  “Around a bloodsucking psycho? Yep.”

  That made her grin. “Any news for my lady?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I said. “Anyway, how are you going to get the answer to her?”

  “I have…a way,” Hyacinth said.

  She looked guilty, and that both annoyed and relieved me. It meant that somehow, somewhere, North was safe. It also meant that I wasn’t being told where she was and wasn’t to be given any more information for the time being.

  “Listen,” I said. “If North wants me to be sorting this out for her, she needs to give me a bit more info.”

  “I’ll write it down,” the troll girl said.

  At first, I thought she was doing the equivalent of saying I’ll be sure to let my manager know, ma’am, but her pen was at the ready, just like it was when she waited for my answers. The message would get to North one way or another.

  “I need to know why she has two years’ worth of photos of the Palmers. And I need to know why Sarah Palmer is important to Upper Management.”

  “Very well,” said Hyacinth. “I will take the message.”

  “Is North okay?”

  Hyacinth’s apple cheeks grew a little plumper and rosier. “Yes, thank you. But she likes to do dangerous things and this time it looks like it will be a little more difficult. I have to go now. I’ll come back again tomorrow.”

  I went in, slightly relieved and more than a little bit frustrated. I was beginning to feel like I was doing a lot of running around for not much of a result, and Sarah Palmer couldn’t afford wasted time.

  “Wae?” said JinYeong, from the couch. While I’d been out talking to Hyacinth, he had settled himself on the couch, barefoot and comfortable. Surprisingly, he hadn’t tried to tidy his hair with any of the things in the bathroom that belonged to the lycanthropes—maybe they smelled too much of wolf, or maybe they just weren’t expensive enough—and although the lycanthropes gave him a wide berth, they weren’t glaring at him anymore. Daniel might already have told them the bad news.

  “Nothing,” I said, shoving his feet over to sit at the other end of the couch. “I’m just frustrated and I haven’t got anyone to annoy until I feel better. You haven’t even got a tie I can wreck.”

  “You can’t find a way to help the human?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We will not practise today.”

  I stared at him. “Of course not. You’re still recovering.”

  “We will talk, instead.”

  “Oh,” I said. He was offering to help me talk it out? “Hang on, I’ll go get the coffee.”

  JinYeong must have been feeling pretty knocked about still, because he sipped coffee and let me talk through my annoyance with my lack of knowledge without being more than usually snarky. He didn’t eat much of the lunch I put out for him, either.

  Heck, maybe he was full from my blood. I was still pretty hopped up on vampire spit, so I felt bright and wide awake, and when he fell asleep leaning against me, I was feeling happy enough to just leave him be. I could count on one hand the amount of times I’d actually seen JinYeong sleep, so if he was sleeping now, he probably needed it.

  The lycanthropes eventually settled down to watch tv instead of skulking about and keeping an eye on us, and when Daniel came down to sit on the couch, I felt safe enough to leave them all in the room together and went up to see Morgana.

  We didn’t talk much, just played video games and spilled cake crumbs all over the bedspread, then Morgana tried to show me how to do a smoky-eye makeup look and dissolved into giggles at my complete inability to know which brush I was supposed to use, let alone which colours.

  “Rude,” I said, making a dangerous dash with eyeliner that made me look like a surprised panda. “Heck. This is hard. Never thought I’d say I’m glad I do hand-to-hand training instead of makeup training. Who can even do this?”

  “Not you, anyway,” said Morgana, smudging her own eyeliner with tears of laughter. “Pet, I know you haven’t done this before, but I didn’t think it was possible to be as bad as you are.”

  “I’m expressing existential dissonance,” I told her. “Soon I’ll be a slightly larger clone of you.”

  “Oh, is that what you were trying to do?” she asked, looking at the result with a fascinated eye. “You’re gunna have to practise, Pet.”

  “Heck no,” I said, horrified. “What am I gunna do, half an hour of makeup tutoring and then down to sweat it off in a practise session?”

  She shrugged. “You won’t get better if you don’t practise.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not likely to die if I don’t practise my eyeliner skills,” I said, and made my escape before she could try to convince me otherwise.

  Down in the kitchen, I chopped up a good few kilos of vegetables for pumpkin soup, pondering the pros and cons of finding somewhere that wasn’t Morgana’s house to hide the glass USB until I could figure out how to access whatever was on it.

  The house grew dark about me, and that felt familiar and normal until I lifted my head and saw the sunshine that was still outside the kitchen window but somehow not penetrating the house.

  “What the heck?” I muttered, but then I saw the cracked little tile across the room.

  Ah. The house was darker because this was the time in the afternoon when the shadow from Mount Wellington usually fell across my old house and made everything darker and colder. And that house, for whatever reason, was still trying to paste itself over this house.

  “Heck,” I said to myself, looking around worriedly. It seemed as though every line of Morgana’s house had an overlapping line from my old house—far more than I’d seen over the last few days. “Maybe I’m gunna have to have a word with Athelas.”

  I left my pot of soup simmering on the stove and carefully exited the kitchen, worried about accidentally walking through a wall. It wasn’t like it would hurt me, but I was concerned that it might do something else, like maybe pull that house a bit closer here.

  There was a slow crawl of Between around the whole place, tickling at the edges of my sight until I felt dizzy, but when I checked on JinYeong he was still asleep, and the lycanthropes were playing a violent and noisy game of what was almost soccer out in the back yard.

  JinYeong muttered in his sleep and made a faint noise of pain as he shifted, and I left looking at the house to gaze at him instead. Was that blood on the couch arm, beneath his neck?

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, and went back to the kitchen to dampen a clean hand towel.

  The first thing I saw when I came back out—or maybe it was the first thing my eyes naturally lighted on, like it would have been if I was actually home—was the huge figure of Zero, sitting where I usually sat, with a book open in front of him on the coffee table and a frown between his brows.

  JinYeong was right—he had done a lot of damage. I could still see the slash that made a veiny blue line all the way from Zero’s cheek to the neck of his t-shirt, and if all of Athelas’ healing had only been able to get it to that point, Zero must have been a bit of a mess himself when he got home. There was blood on the floor, too. No one had bothered to clean it up, of course: it remained in the carpet, blue and sticky and far too plenteous.

  “This is your fault,” I said accusingly.

  One of Zero’s brows twitched up by the slightest margin, and I wondered for one cold moment if he’d actually heard me.

  Nah. He was just reading his book. That was all. There was no way he could hear me when I was here in Morgana’s house, and he was there in my house.

  “I
t is,” I said, flopping the wet towel at him in lieu of shaking my finger. “All your fault. If you wanted to stick your nose into the stuff I was looking at, you should have asked. I mean, I might not have told you, but at least it was better than—”

  I stopped, because there was an ache in my throat, and I was pretty sure it was about to come out in my voice. Even if it was to an unhearing Zero, the impulse to hide all human emotion to make sure I was heard was strong.

  “Sometimes I really hate you, you know,” I said.

  Zero’s head dropped, and I heard him laugh. It wasn’t an amused laugh; it was a tired, fed up sort of a laugh. “This house has too many ghosts,” he said, as if to himself. He raised his head, and said into the room, “Stop talking to me.”

  What the heck? He actually could hear me?

  “You’re not my owner anymore,” I said, but I said it quietly, and I was pretty sure he didn’t hear it. His gaze was just slightly to the side of me, so I knew he couldn’t see me, and that was a relief.

  I took a step toward the sofa, toward Zero, and it seemed like I could feel the warmth, the slight disturbance in space and matter that usually came with the presence of someone’s physical body.

  No. That wasn’t possible. If it was, it meant that my house really was trying to come to me. And if my house was trying to come to me, it was also trying to come here—to Morgana. That wasn’t something that could happen; not if I wanted to keep this insane life away from her as long as possible.

  Zero’s eyes scanned the room, unhurriedly and meditatively, from one side to the other. I reached out breathlessly, and for a crazy moment I felt the material of Zero’s shirt and the hint of warm skin beneath. Then a furious swirl of cologne snatched me away, scolding in rapid, unintelligible Korean, and the house shook itself into its proper appearance again, Zero vanishing with every other line of my old house.

  “Oi!” I said indignantly at the stormy whirl of language. “Can you stop flamin’ moving for a second? You’re gunna bleed on your new jumper.”

  JinYeong stood still at once, which would have made me grin if I’d been in the mood to grin, and tipped his head to the side to allow me to clean up the blood.

  “Pretty sure you’re supposed to be sitting still while you recover,” I said, when I was done.

  JinYeong cautiously felt the weepy wound, and said, “It is nothing.”

  His eyes dropped back to my face, and one of his brows went up. A slow, amused curl of the lips banished the remnants of irritation in his face. He said. “You. What have you done to your face?”

  “What? Oh, that. Morgana was trying to show me how to put on eyeliner and stuff. I forgot I needed to wash it off.”

  He made a small tsk. “It is very bad.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I already know that.”

  “I can do it better than that.”

  “Hey, I don’t care what you wear.”

  “That is not what I meant!”

  “You can wear eyeliner if you want,” I said, grinning. “You don’t have to make excuses to me.”

  He glared at me. “I am naturally beautiful. I do not need it.”

  “All right, but you’re naturally bleeding as well, so you should probably sit down again.”

  “No. You keep calling the house to you, and it is not safe.”

  “It’s gone now,” I said persuasively, and JinYeong looked around, slightly disgruntled.

  “See?” I said. “So sit down, and I’ll get us some coffee. And for pete’s sake stop bleeding!”

  Chapter Ten

  Hyacinth came back the next morning, much to my relief. After dealing with my three psychos for so long, I’d come to think there was no limit to what Behindkind would do to avoid giving knowledge to humans if they didn’t think it had any bearing on the situation. And of course, the likelihood of the knowledge having any bearing on the situation was always in the Behindkind’s judgement, not mine.

  So when I heard the knock on the door and went out to see that the troll girl had come back, it sparked a warm feeling in my chest. It would probably be too much to say that North trusted me enough to answer questions that were important in my own estimation, but at least Hyacinth was back again. She hadn’t run away and not come back.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “I have answers for you,” said Hyacinth, beaming.

  I let my relieved breath out very carefully so she wouldn’t see how much I’d been expecting to have to fight for the information. She looked as though she was happy to be here, so maybe she hadn’t been expecting to be able to bring back answers, either.

  “Miss North says she doesn’t know exactly why Sarah Palmer is important, but she knows it has something to do with the fact that the girl escaped Behind to return to the human world without assistance. And she strongly suspects it has to do with the succession.”

  I thought about that for a while, frowning, while an idea tickled at the back of my mind. My psychos had been surprised every time I did something they thought a human shouldn’t be able to do, but as far as I could see, I was far from the only one doing stuff like that. And I hadn’t made it back from Behind without help, either.

  Hyacinth asked hopefully, “Does it—does it mean anything to you?”

  “Sorta,” I said. “Almost. I need to think about it a bit more. What about the photos?”

  “There was already someone there when Sarah got back, Miss North said. You know what they do—the ones who take over lives?”

  “She came back and there was a changeling there pretending to be her?” So Zero had been right. No wonder the Palmers had pulled down the photos—they hadn’t wanted to see the interloper with their daughter’s face in their photos. “It was a couple of years that she was gone, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Miss North says the family gave her the photos because they didn’t want them.”

  “Who would?” I said, shuddering. “Photos of someone else wearing your kid’s face? Heck no.”

  “That’s all Miss North told me about,” Hyacinth said. “Do you have an answer for me?”

  “I see.” I wasn’t sure I did see entirely, and I still didn’t know why North was connected to the Palmers, but I saw enough for now. I was going to have to centre my next steps on Upper Management almost exclusively. It was a pity I couldn’t talk to Zero or Athelas—they knew about Behindkind succession, when they chose to be forthcoming about it. “You can tell her I think I’m very close now. Come back again tomorrow.”

  “What does the little troll girl want?” said JinYeong in my ear, as I closed the door.

  “She’s my liaison with North,” I told him, automatically hunching my shoulder against the tickle. “Are you still bleeding?”

  “I wish to shower, but there is no soap that does not smell of dog,” JinYeong said. “You did not purchase my cologne.”

  “I’m not gunna purchase it, either,” I said frankly. “Having that pong in the other house was bad enough. Come up and meet Morgana: I told her you would. I’ll get you some soap or shower gel or something later on. Hold still for a second.”

  JinYeong stood still as I circled him, nonplussed, and didn’t pull away when I moved the neck of his jumper to check for the gash that had still been bleeding last night. It was gone, and I couldn’t see any other blood.

  “Okay, you’re fine,” I said. “You can come up. But no trying to charm her, and no trying to vamp her, either.”

  “I do not have to try,” said JinYeong, sticking his nose in the air. “It is the natural reaction to me.”

  “Yeah? Then how come my natural reaction is to smack you one in the face?”

  “There is something wrong with you,” he said. “You are broken, I think.”

  “Don’t think so,” I said, with a brief, conscious thought of another pair of warm brown eyes and a smile I’d only seen a few times in a coffee shop. “You’re just not as irresistible as you think you are.”

  “I am exactly as irresistible as I think I am,” he sa
id flatly, following me up the stairs. “You are certainly broken.”

  “Yeah? At least I’m not the one who’s cracked.”

  “Ya!”

  He was still scowling when we got to the room, which made Daniel stand up, his eyes wary.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s living here, too,” Morgana said. “I said he could.”

  “No, I mean what’s he doing in here?”

  “Perhaps I should ask what you are doing?” suggested JinYeong, grinning. “You look so com-fort-a-ble.”

  “Morgana wanted to meet him,” I said, shooting Daniel a warning look and jabbing JinYeong with my elbow.

  “He’s just as beautiful from close up!” Morgana said enthusiastically. To JinYeong, she said, “You’re beautiful.”

  JinYeong, his mouth smug and pleased, raised his brows at me. “You are broken,” he said, so that only I could understand him.

  “You keep telling yourself that.” To Morgana, I said, “Don’t encourage him. He already thinks he’s the world’s gift to women.”

  “Let me know if you want a makeover,” she said to JinYeong. “I’ve got some eyeliner that would look fantastic on you: I bet the camera would love you, too.”

  “Everything loves me,” said JinYeong.

  If he was a bird, he would have been preening. I rolled my eyes, and said to Morgana, “You don’t have to tell him he’s beautiful—trust me, he knows.”

  “Yeah, but sometimes it’s nice to hear it, anyway,” she said. “Are you out investigating or whatever today?”

  “Yeah,” I said, sobering. I didn’t know exactly what or how I would be investigating, but I knew I had to at least find somewhere safe to store my USBs until I was certain Zero wouldn’t commence an all-out attack on Morgana’s place. I had an idea that I might, like the Palmers, one day need some leverage as a human. I couldn’t use the glass USB as leverage if Zero had already taken it by force.

  I mean, I wasn’t sure I was going to use it as leverage, but if I was, Zero was the only one it had any hold over. He’d already proved how much he would do to get his hands on it. I glanced across at JinYeong and found that he was watching me, one brow up questioningly. I smoothed out the frown I could feel forming between my brows and returned his look with two raised brows of my own. He pursed his lips and looked away.