Between Jobs

by W. R. Gingell

  “A keep-away glamour,” remarked Athelas. “Very useful if you’re up to something.”

  “A spell, was it?” I asked, taking away the empty veggie steamer and dropping it in the sink. “Yeah, well, it worked. No one went too near to the place ’cos of it, but none of us called the cops, either. Wish I knew how to do that.”

  “What about the disappearances?” asked Zero, looking briefly at me.

  Ha, I thought sourly. Not such a useless little human, was I?

  “Were they real disappearances, or rumour?”

  “Real ones,” I told him. I snatched my fingers away from JinYeong’s plate just in time to avoid losing a few, and glared at him. He raised a brow at me and started to eat. I gave Athelas his plate, and said to Zero, “Ask the cops. They were ’round a couple times because people were going missing. They didn’t find anything, though; and some of the people turned up again.”

  Zero slipped the last of his throwing knives into their little belt, and slung it over one shoulder, cross-wise against his chest.

  “You wearing that outside?” I asked dubiously. “People are gunna notice if you go around with knives on you.”

  “I doubt it,” Zero said coolly, shrugging himself into his leather jacket and squaring up to the plate of steak and veg I put in front of him.

  “I’m going with you somewhere that needs knives? Are you gunna give me one?”

  “Pets don’t carry weapons,” Athelas said, in a reminding sort of a way. “If you’re behind Zero, no one will hurt you.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, feeling more cheerful. “I forgot. All right then.”

  Zero said, “Eat your steak. We leave in ten minutes.”

  Outside, Zero’s knives were harder to see. It wasn’t only the summer dusk, either. The knives had been real knives inside the house; sharp at one end and leathery at the other. In the evening sunlight, they looked like tassels of a hybrid cowboy biker shirt, all leathery thongs and studs in a feature slash across the front.

  I opened my mouth to ask him about it, but before I could, Zero put his hand over my mouth and shuffled me across the road to the murdered guy’s house. Beside us, JinYeong strolled along with his hands in the pockets of his perfectly creased trousers, his fluffy jumper glinting in the last embers of the dying sun. He looked amused, and that was annoying.

  Okay, so Zero didn’t want me to ask questions. That was fine. I remembered the little tree on the rock that had pretended it was a tin of cat food, and I remembered a bit about trifle, too. Things like Zero’s knife belt almost made sense.

  Then it struck me that we were actually going into the house, and that made me want to ask why Zero needed knives if we were only going into part of a crime scene. I made an annoyed puff of air into Zero’s palm—and okay, maybe there was some spit in there, too.

  Zero took his hand away, grimacing, and wiped it on his trousers.

  “This where we’re going?”

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “Give me your hand.”

  “What?”

  “Hand.”

  I held up my left hand warily.

  “The other one.”

  I raised the other one, and he closed his left around it.

  “What?” I protested, trying to pull away.

  Zero didn’t answer this time; he pulled me forward and shoved the decorative leather strap from his jacket into my hand. “Hold onto it,” he said. “If you let go, I won’t come back for you.”

  “Back?” I asked, highly gratified despite his assurance that he wouldn’t come back for me if I let go. “Wait, is this the same as the grocery store?”

  “Don’t talk, either,” said Zero. “Be quiet and stay behind me. Don’t let go.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him when he turned away, then yelped as he started forward, pulling me with him. Zero ignored that; just kept walking. Well, I suppose you don’t listen too much to a dog’s yapping when it’s on the leash, do you?

  I stuck my tongue out at him again, and maybe he sensed it, because his head turned almost too quickly for me. I might have looked innocent when his eyes met mine, but probably not.

  I blinked at him and said, “What?” again.

  “Don’t let go,” he repeated, and tugged me forward again.

  We walked through the doorway. Well; Zero walked. I sort of trotted behind him like a kid on a lead, and JinYeong definitely sauntered. It was a doorway, so it shouldn’t have felt so cold. It shouldn’t have been edged in moss and ferns, either. It should have been a door. You know; all straight wooden edges and maybe a few bits of paint scratched off it in places. But the more I looked at it as we stepped through, the less it looked like a door, and the more it looked like a cave mouth.

  “Oi!” I said indignantly, as something dripped down the back of my neck. “Who did that!”

  I looked up at the ceiling, but there wasn’t a ceiling there. It wasn’t even a ceiling that wasn’t sure about itself, like my tin of cat food; it was definitely a cave roof, all wet and slimy and mossy.

  “Oh, that’s weird,” I said, because I could still feel floorboards beneath my feet. When we were in the grocery store, it had mostly looked like grocery store with extra—here it was more like cave that had a bit of root in the human world.

  Zero didn’t give me a chance to look around. He kept moving, climbing what looked like a steep incline toward the side of the cave but felt like stairs beneath my feet, dragging me along. So we were going upstairs? Was that where the blood was?

  When the floor evened out beneath us, Zero snapped his fingers, drawing out a thread of light from the air around us.

  “Oh, cool!” I said, staring at it. “I want to do that!”

  “Mwohya!” complained JinYeong incomprehensibly. “Ddo!”

  “What’s bitten him?” I asked Zero, jerking my chin at the vampire. Then I grinned, because it was funny—he was a vampire, so he was the one who should be doing the biting.

  JinYeong glared at me. “Noh! Mwoh hanun kkoya?”

  “Ay?” I leaned defensively into Zero’s huge, leather-clad side. “What did I do?”

  I wasn’t sure whether Zero was faintly satisfied, or just more stoic than usual. To JinYeong, he said, “You can’t smell the blood, can you?”

  “Ne.” JinYeong scowled at me, and said something that sounded like an insult.

  I made a face at him just in case.

  “It’s not the house blocking your sense of smell?”

  “Ne. Uri jib aniaeyo. Ku yoja daemunaeyo.”

  “All right,” said Zero. “Can you do something about it, now that you know?”

  JinYeong narrowed his eyes at me. “Moh. Manyagae…”

  Hands still in his pockets, he bent at the waist and sniffed at my hair, then my shoulder.

  “Oi!” I said again, pressing myself against again Zero in an effort to get away. “Get off!”

  “Leave him be,” Zero told me. “He needs to differentiate between the blank space and the proper way things should smell.”

  “’Zat what he’s doing?” I asked, scowling at the vampire. “Gross! Don’t breathe on my neck!”

  JinYeong bared a couple of teeth a bit too close for comfort, and drew back. His eyes were glittering with triumph, and he said one deeply satisfied word with a bite to it.

  “Good,” said Zero. “If you’ve got the blood scent, lead us where it goes. Between, Behind, it doesn’t matter. Follow it as far as you can.”

  This time JinYeong took the lead. I saw him ahead, alert and somehow sharper than usual, despite his soft jumper, and gripped the leather strap tightly as the world changed around us. He led us along a way that instead of going anywhere, became something. More cavey and less housey. More cold, anyway.

  I couldn’t feel floorboards beneath my feet anymore; now it was definitely cave floor. Smooth cave floor, but cave floor nevertheless.

  “Trippy,” I said, but neither Zero nor JinYeong answered. “Where’s the light coming from?”

  The
y didn’t answer that, either. Of JinYeong, Zero asked, “Do you still have the blood scent?”

  “Ne,” answered JinYeong.

  Yay for me. I knew a Korean word. That one was yes.

  “Rude,” I said to myself. It was funny. We were definitely in a cave; I could smell it and see it. There were no lights that I could see, and no windows. But it was light and bright, with soft yellow glowing off the mossy green and gliding in gentle pools of water here and there. So where was the light coming from?

  Hoping to touch the moisture there and see if the light came from it, I reached out to the cave wall beside me.

  Something small and hairy yelled “Ahah!” from inside a hole and tried to stab me with a needle. I yelled, and dragged myself back toward Zero by the leather strap, the buckle digging into my fingers.

  “Flaming heck!”

  “Don’t play with the goblins,” said Zero, hurrying me up with one hand on the nape of my neck. “They’ll try to drug you and drag you into their warrens.”

  “Just try it!” I muttered back at the hairy face that was still sticking out of its hole in the wall, snarling at me. “I’ll bring some petrol up here and see how you like a flamin’ bath!”

  It jeered and shook the needle at me as Zero dragged me along in his wake. The sharp feeling of mingled annoyance and fear it had prompted didn’t fade so quickly; I was jumpy and inclined to stick closer to Zero after that.

  The further we went, the colder it got. I asked a question or two, but Zero didn’t answer them, and JinYeong never stopped on the scent. I probably should have been more scared, but there was Zero’s very broad back in front of me, and even though we were in a cave that had been a house, I still felt as though we might be in a house.

  In the grocery store, everything had looked almost right—except for the four-armed blokes, of course—and the oddness was in the smallest details. Here everything looked wrong, but somehow still felt like a house.

  “So that’s why you call it Between,” I said to myself. I almost missed Athelas. He might be as superior as Zero and JinYeong, but at least he explained things every now and then.

  I wondered whether the little dryad-on-a-rock had come from a place like this, and I couldn’t help looking more closely at the cave walls. Those were pictures on the cave walls, weren’t they? Hallway pictures.

  “Hey!” I said. “Someone’s granDad is up on the wall here!”

  One of the goblins was using it for a door, too.

  “I don’t think they’d like that,” I pointed out. “Goblins using their granDad’s photo as a door.

  Zero only glanced back at me briefly. “It is a door,” he said.

  “I s’pose someone hung their picture on a door,” I muttered to myself. What, so we were Between—wherever that was—and something that should have been a picture was a door? Or was it a door that should have been a picture? I wasn’t sure. It looked like a door. Only it looked like a picture, too.

  It was the sort of thing that made you wonder what else was something that it shouldn’t be. Or if anything else was trying to be something it wasn’t.

  No, that wasn’t right. This was nuts.

  I tried to grab some other stuff along the way. I mean, wouldn’t you? I wanted to know if it was the stuff it pretended to be, or if it was—hang on. I’m confused again.

  The cave was littered with stuff anyway. I stayed away from the walls, too scared of getting on the wrong end of a needle from another goblin to risk it, and scanned the floor instead. It was mostly rocks and stuff, but there were pillows here and there, and stuff like watches and hairbands. They didn’t belong in the cave, and they looked like they weren’t too sure about being watches and hairbands and pillows, either.

  I made a grab for a necklace that was spilling over the edge of a glowy, wet, tableaued spar nearby, stretching to the very tips of my fingers to reach it. My fingers closed around the necklace, flipping it up and over the craggy edges of the spar and into my palm in a cool, slithery heap. Got it! I glanced down at it, neglecting to watch my feet, and stumbled over a serration in the ground for my pains.

  It was just a necklace.

  I made a small sound of disappointment and Zero looked back at me sharply. As I caught his eye, guiltily, something cut my finger open.

  “Ow!”

  The necklace flew through the softly glowing light and hit the wall opposite it, slithering to a heap on the cave floor, where it was obvious that it was not a necklace, but a small snake. A snake that looked like a necklace; its tail a poniard, glittering with a jewel of my blood.

  Zero lunged forward and seized it by the neck, and it wriggled once in his big hands before becoming deathly still. I don’t know if he broke its neck or just convinced it that it was very much wiser to be a necklace from now on, but when he threw it at me, it was a necklace again.

  I caught it reflexively to stop it hitting me in the face, and shoved it into one of my pockets. The cut on my finger was already welling with blood.

  “Ow!” I said again, sadly.

  JinYeong’s eyes brightened, and he took a step toward me, one hand reaching for my wrist. “Mashiketda!”

  “Get off!” I protested, before he had a chance to take another step toward me. I stuffed my forefinger in my mouth and said around it, “I’ll do it myself!”

  Lucky I was already half behind Zero, and lucky he’d taken a step forward at the same time as JinYeong. I Mumbled up at him, “Thought you said he couldn’t smell me properly.”

  “He couldn’t,” Zero said, brushing past JinYeong to continue walking. “But blood is blood. Keep your finger in your mouth until it stops bleeding.”

  “I flamin’ will!” I said, stumbling against Zero in my efforts to both walk and keep an eye on JinYeong.

  Zero grabbed me around the neck again to straighten me, sweeping my feet away from the ground for an uncomfortable moment. He said over his shoulder, “JinYeong, the scent!”

  The vampire swept ahead again, his liquid eyes glittering at me too close for comfort in passing. He threw a word or two at Zero, who only said, “As close as you can get without crossing, for now.”

  “Where are we crossing?” I asked. I didn’t think he’d really answer, but he did.

  “You’re not. Don’t touch anything else that you shouldn’t.”

  “What if it’s something I should touch?” I argued. “How do I know what’s good to touch and what’s not good to touch? Yeah, and that thing—is it a necklace or a snake? Because I don’t think necklaces should change into snakes just ’cos they want to, and what if it changes into a snake in my pocket?”

  “It won’t,” Zero said briefly. “Mind your step.”

  Good thing I was minding my step, because right as he said it, the hallway or passageway or whatever it was decided that it was definitely going to be a cave passageway, and opened out into a real cave.

  It wasn’t particularly big, but it smelled fresh and foresty. Beneath my feet were now flagstones of a wide, short courtyard, edged with moss and gleaming with the same glowy moisture as the rest of the cave. They might once have been white with blue veins, but they were now closer to grey with veins of green, merging seamlessly with the greenery around the cave walls. There was less moss to these walls, and more ferns springing delicately from the shadows to fall in a froth of fragrant green.

  Across the courtyard was a single, long step that ran the length of the courtyard, and a wooden platform above that. Ferns trailed down toward it from the roof of the cave, almost obscuring the wall and windows that were there, but I saw the glitter of glass, and a shadow of movement within.

  There was a house in this house that thought it was a cave. It, too, ran the length of the courtyard, and mingling with the moss and ferns were more things that must have originally come from, or maybe still existed in, the house across the road. It took me a while to realise that the wooden frames to the windowed doors I could see were slightly uneven, and looked like they were growing right
around the glass and into the ceiling.

  “Where’s this?” I asked, looking around me. I didn’t realise I was smiling until I saw my face reflected in the glass of the windows across from me; a plain, skinny thing in a place that should have been all beautiful. “Why is it here?”

  “This is Between,” said Zero. “But when I climb that stair and go through the door, it’ll be Behind. Stay out here in the courtyard.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was sorry not to see more of the beautiful interior that was glittering at me through those living wooden doors, but it smelled nice out here, even if it was too cold. That cold now felt like it was starting to seep into my bones, so hopefully Zero wasn’t going to be long.

  “You stay here, too, JinYeong,” Zero said.

  JinYeong responded indignantly, which made me grin.

  Vampires aren’t much above pets, then, are they?

  He caught me grinning and narrowed his eyes at me, which made my grin fade pretty quickly.

  I mean, he’s annoying, but I haven’t got a death wish, and Zero was already stepping up onto the living wooden platform. I feel much safer when he’s between me and JinYeong.

  I sat down on the step and shivered as the cool stone met my jean-clad rear. Why was it so flamin’ cold? If it was nearly Christmas in Australia, shouldn’t Between be warm, too? I peered over my shoulder to see if Zero was just stopping for a minute, or likely to take a while.

  He greeted the fae or whatever it was that met him at the door, their voices rumbling together, and sat down in the chair the other offered him.

  Flamin’ fantastic. He was gunna stay for a while.

  I puffed out a sad breath of air and hunched my shoulders, propping my chin on my palms and my elbows on my knees. It’s not like I’d actually done anything while we’d been here, so why had he brought me along?

  Probably one of those Behindkind Fae things that a mere human wouldn’t understand.

  JinYeong prowled the courtyard in an angry sort of a way, his stride long and quiet, and I shivered a bit; mostly with cold, but partly because my finger still hurt. I turned slightly so I could keep an eye on Zero as well as JinYeong, and saw him speaking with another two blokes.