Between Homes (The City Between Book 5)

by W. R. Gingell

  “That’s all right, then,” said Sarah, her jaw firming up. There was a shine to her eyes that made me understand the picture of North that I’d found hidden away on her dresser. “If Aunty North says she’ll do it, it’ll happen.”

  Nearly everyone arrived at once: North with the Palmers and Detective Tuatu, and Daniel with a black eye and some clothes for me. Daniel gave me a very obvious once-over for injuries, and I returned the favour before I swapped the clothes for his phone.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Killed someone,” I said shortly. “Don’t reckon I got hurt.”

  “Good,” he said, and walked me to the public toilet block so I could change.

  There was a hubbub of noise from the walkway when we got back, and Daniel’s brows went up a bit as we pushed through JinYeong’s curtain of Between.

  “Where is the pet?” demanded Zero’s voice. “JinYeong, get out of my way!”

  “I’m over here,” I said. “And if you’re gunna have a go at me for saving people’s lives, you can flaming well stop right there. I’m not your pet and I can do what I want.”

  He looked me up and down, frowning, then said icily, “Stop causing trouble,” and walked away again.

  “What the heck?” I complained, looking at Athelas, who was sitting where I had been earlier, one leg crossed over the other. “What’d I do? I saved peoples’ lives and I didn’t die!”

  Zero must have heard, but he just kept walking.

  “Oi!” I called after him, dropping my bag of bloody clothes. “That’s flamin’ rude!”

  “Ah,” sighed JinYeong. “So irritating! I will have more coffee.”

  “Hang on, what?” I demanded, but he was already walking away.

  “What bit him?” asked Daniel.

  “Dunno,” I said. “But I think he’s annoyed because his coffee went cold while we were out saving Sarah.”

  Athelas looked amused. “Do you really think so? Then by all means go and buy him some more.”

  “Haven’t got any money on me,” I said, and this time it wasn’t to avoid paying for JinYeong’s coffee.

  “Allow me,” said Athelas, surprising me a great deal. He passed me a twenty, which was also surprising, and explained, “I have a vested interest in JinYeong’s emotional state at the present.”

  “Yeah?” I said suspiciously, but I took the money.

  “Athelas,” said Zero from the street, his voice deep and carrying.

  “You better go before you get in trouble,” I said to Athelas. “I’ll buy JinYeong a coffee and see if he gets any more reasonable.”

  After all, I did kinda owe him, and I very much wanted something warm to drink.

  “Oh, I should doubt that very much,” said Athelas pleasantly. “Do enjoy your afternoon, Pet!”

  “Well, that was flamin’ sus,” I said, as he left. “Wonder what he’s up to.”

  “How does he manage to make stuff like that sound like a threat?” wondered Daniel.

  “That’s what I keep wondering,” I said. “North already take the Palmers with her while I was changing?”

  “Yeah. The detective, too. I think they’re planning something.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you back at the house, then. Some of the boys out there, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Make sure you’re not followed on your way back, all right?”

  “You too,” said Daniel. “They’ll be out for your blood if they see you, and they have people everywhere.”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering all the normal-looking human staff I’d seen at Upper Management. “I’m starting to get that feeling.”

  I caught up with JinYeong in the street, and if he’d looked like he was sucking on a lemon before, now he looked as smug as usual.

  “I’ll get ya another coffee,” I said. “But then we’ve gotta go home the long way around. If they catch up with us again…”

  “I can get us home safely,” he said. “But I must have coffee.”

  “You’re pretty flamin’ fond of coffee these days,” I said, but I wasn’t too inclined to really complain. I still felt pretty high and heady from vampire spit, and I was pretty sure that Zero had only come to the alley with the others to make sure that I wasn’t hurt.

  Maybe not pretty sure. Maybe I just still hoped there was a human part of him that really cared what happened to me, and not just because it said in a contract that he had to make sure I didn’t die.

  Still, it was enough to keep me high and heady until we got to the little two-storey Isle Coffee café again, where the last barista was trying to close the shop for the afternoon.

  “Too late,” I said. “C’mon, I’ll make you some coffee at home.”

  “We wish to have coffee,” said JinYeong to the barista, ignoring me. “You may make it and leave.”

  I left the whole twenty on the counter while JinYeong ordered and went upstairs. I was cold and tired, and it seemed as though I could still feel blood on my hands even though I’d washed it off. I wanted to sit down.

  JinYeong came up a few moments later and threw himself carelessly on the couch beside me. “I am a very good teacher,” he said.

  “Is that meant to be you telling me I did a good job?”

  “You didn’t tell me that I did well,” he pointed out.

  “Fair enough,” I said, and a bit of the cold feeling left me. “Thanks for looking after us.”

  “You did well, too,” he said, as the barista climbed the stairs, like he was granting a concession.

  “Thanks,” I said, and somehow I was grinning again.

  The barista set a tray on the coffee table in front of us, then made a beeline for the stairs again. It wasn’t just a couple of cups of coffee, like I’d expected: there was also a box of chocolates. You know, the expensive ones that come in a huge box and are individually wrapped, that cost more than a decent meal at a burger place. There was a big seal on the front that looked expensive, too.

  “Oi!” I said in surprise. “What’d you order this lot for? I haven’t got the money for it!”

  “Na aniya,” he said, but he looked very pleased with himself as he sat back against the couch. “People like to give me things.”

  “Of course they do,” I muttered.

  JinYeong grinned at me. I tried to roll my eyes, but somehow ended up grinning again instead, and peered over the balcony to check that the waitress had made it back safely down the stairs in the fog she was definitely in.

  What I saw wasn’t what I had expected. “Hang on,” I said. “She’s run for it.”

  JinYeong’s eyes narrowed. “Mwoh?”

  “I mean, literally,” I told him, still gazing after the woman in surprise. Mobile phone to her ear, she was literally running from the café. “What’s the go? Did you bite her?”

  He rose swiftly to his feet, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me down the narrow wooden staircase. I tripped over the stairs and caught myself against the walls, tumbling down the last few after JinYeong.

  “What the heck? Ow!”

  JinYeong grimly pulled me along, ignoring my complaints, and shoved at the front door. It didn’t budge, and I had just a moment to be surprised at that before there was a staticky kind of stillness that made me wonder if I’d suddenly gone deaf.

  In a flurry of movement, JinYeong pressed me down into a crouch, covering my head with his arms and wedging me between his chest and his knees. Something very big and powerful exploded an instant later, and JinYeong’s cologne, edged with dust, filled my nostrils. I felt the impact of small, stinging things; and bigger ones that must have hit JinYeong instead of me, because they didn’t hurt. I don’t know how long it lasted, but when the pressure let off and I could cautiously straighten, my forearms were leaning against JinYeong’s knees and I could see the tattered edges of his blue suit coat fluttering in my peripheral, with blazing edges to the holes. I looked up into JinYeong’s face and he looked down at me, then with outrage at the fiery holes in his
suit jacket. When he looked back at me the outrage was still there. He wagged one finger right in my dusty, confused face, and said in English, “Bad Petteu! You are bad Pet.”

  “What?” I said. I wasn’t sure which was more confusing; JinYeong protecting me from a few cuts and scrapes at the expense of his clothes, or JinYeong speaking English.

  He rose abruptly, tipping me backward into the debris, and stripped off his tattered coat. He surveyed it with pursed lips, and I heard the annoyed “Aight!” that was becoming familiar. As if I was the one who’d set off the explosion and ruined it!

  “What?” I protested. “It wasn’t my fault!”

  JinYeong gazed down at me with impotent dislike, as if he was trying to find the words to speak but couldn’t think of any bad enough. At last, he said “Bad Petteu!” once more and stalked away through the ruins of the shattered glass door, his back rigid with outrage.

  I scrambled to my feet and hurried after him. There was a gaping hole in the back of his shirt, too, with a decent smearing of blood. I told him that, in Korean, but all he said was, “Hangook mal hajima.”

  “How else am I supposed to talk to you?” I argued. “You don’t usually speak English.”

  “Do not understand things I wish not to be understood!”

  “Reckon you’ll have to stop talking altogether if that’s what you want,” I told him. “’Cos whether you talk in Korean or English, I’m gunna understand you.”

  “So annoying!” he muttered in Korean. “The old man is right again! I won’t. I refuse!”

  I gazed up at him suspiciously. “You been drinking something other than coffee?”

  “Hyeong is already angry that you’re out of the house,” he said. “And the old man would cut me open if you didn’t come home. Otherwise, you would be full of holes. No more free help!”

  “I was going to tell Athelas that you’re talking about him behind his back,” I said placatingly. “But since you stopped me from having my eyebrows blown off, I’ll make you some kimchi instead.”

  Sulkily, he said, “I want kimchi jjigae.”

  “Fine, I’ll make you kimchi jjigae.”

  “I still want coffee,” muttered JinYeong, unappeased. “Buy me coffee. We will go to that coffee shop with the good coffee.”

  “Don’t have any money,” I told him. And I had already used the money Athelas gave me, but I could have gotten some more if I’d wanted to.

  Truth was, there was no way I was going to be sitting down with a bloke as good looking as JinYeong in that other coffee shop. For a start, every waitress within cooee would be hanging around the table. Secondly, I didn’t like the idea of the bloke who smiled at me seeing me sitting down with JinYeong, like we were on a date or something.

  I also didn’t know where else Upper Management had people, and now that they seemed to know my face so well, I could probably count on a repeat of the exploding chocolate box if I wasn’t careful.

  “We’ve got coffee at home,” I said. “And you look like you were just blown through a bush sideways, so…”

  “Ah!” he said impatiently.

  “Anyway, I’d rather not hang out in the streets so Upper Management can have another pot shot at us,” I reminded him. “If you know a good way home that doesn’t involve us being followed, now is the time to use it.”

  “You,” said JinYeong coldly, “are a bother to me!”

  “Well, you’re a pain in the neck, too, but what are we gunna do?”

  “Jibae caja!”

  “That’s what I just said,” I told him, but JinYeong was already on the move again, Between blurring the concrete beneath his feet. I caught up with him so I wouldn’t be left behind with no way of knowing which way to go, and grinned across at him. “Thanks,” I said.

  Maybe I was just shaken and slightly discombobulated, but I still felt warm.

  JinYeong seemed to sulk all the way home, and when we got there he vanished upstairs into his room to sulk there, too. I made a face at his retreating back, feeling a bit snubbed, but once I’d gone to let Morgana know things had gone well, I retreated into my own room, too.

  I let myself down on the bed slowly, feeling as though I’d aged a few years in the last few hours, and gazed at the ceiling that wasn’t quite right. It seemed like every time I got back to Morgana’s place these days, my old house was quicker to connect with it. It looked like I wasn’t going to be able to stay here much longer without bringing trouble down on Morgana and her parents.

  I fell asleep while I was still worrying about that, and when I woke up it was twilight. I was in my old house, and Zero was sitting on the edge of the bed at my feet.

  “Flaming heck!” I said, sitting up hastily. I knew I was still at Morgana’s place because I could smell the age and the damp of it, but if I hadn’t been able to do so, I would have thought I was really back at the old place.

  Zero looked around as though he’d heard, but his eyes passed right over the space I occupied. “You’re not really there, are you Pet?” It wasn’t a question; it was more of a plea.

  “Nah, it’s your imagination,” I said. “Maybe the house. I mean, you could be going mad, but I doubt it.”

  He gave a short huff of laughter. “I am almost certainly going mad.”

  “Yeah, but at least there’s no one there to see you,” I said. I mean, it wasn’t like he really thought I was there, after all.

  “You have to come back,” he said. “It’s not safe out there for you anymore. Not now that my father has seen you.”

  “We don’t have a contract anymore. You don’t have to look after me.”

  “I don’t want you to die,” said Zero, and even though he couldn’t see me, even though he didn’t think I was really there, he still didn’t seem to be able to look at the place where I should have been. Instead, he gazed out through the window. “I can’t do that again. I can’t see it happen again.”

  “I don’t particularly want to die, either,” I said. There was a relieved warmth in my chest that came from the knowledge that he really did care enough to look after me even without a contract. But there was a cutting edge of sorrow to that knowledge.

  “Then why won’t you let me look after you without arguing all the time?”

  “Because you think you know best all the time,” I told him sadly. “And you don’t care if someone else gets hurt while you’re looking after me.”

  “That’s on my conscience, not yours.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “You don’t know—you’re not capable of understanding—”

  “We’re getting to the bit where I want to bash you one really quickly,” I said. I said it quietly, but he stopped. Into that quietness, I said, “You didn’t even say you were sorry.”

  That brought his head around sharply, but his eyes still searched and found nothing. “Would that have changed anything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How? Why?”

  “Lemme know when you figure it out,” I said, scrambling off the bed.

  “Pet? Where are you going?”

  “Somewhere not here,” I said.

  “You can’t go,” he said, sounding more perplexed than before. “This is my dream.”

  “Says you,” I said, and left the room.

  I sat on one of the couches downstairs to brood for a while but fell asleep again instead. By the time I woke it was morning and two lycanthropes in wolf form were curled up beside me.

  “Rude,” I said, but it didn’t feel right to wake them up, so when I got a text from Detective Tuatu that said, We need to meet up, I sent back an answer that said, Can’t right now. Got two wolves asleep on me. How about two hours at your place?

  See you then, he texted back.

  I was a bit quicker than two hours. The lycanthropes woke up after about half an hour, and since JinYeong was refusing to put in an appearance downstairs, there was nothing to do but pop my head into Morgana’s room and let her and Daniel know where I was going. I frowned at JinYe
ong’s door on the way out, but that didn’t do any good, so I shrugged and headed out.

  The first thing Detective Tuatu said to me when he opened the front door was, “Did you blow up a coffee shop yesterday afternoon?”

  “Not personally, no,” I said. “Upper Management took a pot-shot at me and JinYeong. How’s Sarah and the Palmers?”

  “Safe,” he said, leading the way down the hall. “And likely to be much safer soon.”

  “Good,” I said, and then, startled, “What the heck?”

  Athelas was sitting at Detective Tuatu’s kitchen table with a cup of tea, one leg politely crossed over the other.

  “Good morning, Pet,” he said pleasantly.

  “Good grief! The dryad let you in?”

  “Yes, I was marginally surprised myself,” he said.

  “What are you here for?” I demanded, helping myself to one of the detective’s coffee cups and starting up the jug.

  “I’m here to offer some advice to the detective.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “That’s what I wanted to know, too,” said Detective Tuatu grimly. He must have taken to heart the last conversation I had with him about Athelas.

  “I believe you’ll find it useful, however.”

  “Thanks,” said the detective. He didn’t look much happier about it. “I hope you don’t expect payment for it, because if so, you can keep your advice.”

  I found a packet of biscuits at the back of the cupboard under the bench and brought them out gleefully as Athelas said, “It adds nothing to the ledger.”

  Yeah, that’s a big comfort, I thought, sniffing as I opened the biscuits. By the looks of Detective Tuatu, he didn’t find it comforting, either.

  “When a person—are you listening to me, Pet?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m listening,” I said, taking a couple of biscuits in one hand and my coffee in the other.

  “I really don’t think you are.”

  “Well, if you’d stop pontificating instead of—”

  “I hesitate to say so, Pet—”

  “Yeah? Doesn’t look like it.”

  “—but you have become even more headstrong and impertinent since you were with us.”