He went to say something, but cut it off angrily and said instead, “Then I want to talk to you!”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t really want to go back in the living room right now, anyway. “But we’ve gotta take this woman across to Elizabeth Street first.”
“Can’t she find her own way there?”
I shrugged. “Dunno.”
She looked brighter than she’d looked around JinYeong; like maybe she could see the difference between the sun and a lightbulb by now. There was a tiny bit of a frown between her manicured brows.
“Does she live on Elizabeth Street?”
“Dunno,” I said again. “But she can catch a bus from down there if she needs to.”
“I thought you said she was a friend of yours.”
“Nope. Said she was visiting JinYeong. I don’t know his friends. C’mmon if you’re coming.”
The detective followed me, and if his eyes were still narrow and hard with suspicion, at least he came away from the house.
I took him through the shortcut behind the next house, brushing past foliage and ducking through the hole in the fence with the woman following me obediently. I could understand JinYeong thinking of humans as less than people if this was how he usually saw them.
Pity I couldn’t do something that’d remove his ability to daze people. Bet Google wouldn’t have much to say about that.
By the time we got to the main street, she’d woken up a bit more. I let go of her wrist and walked beside her for a few more steps, and after a while she looked across at me in a puzzled sort of a way, shook her head, and walked on more quickly.
“How did I get all the way up here?” I heard her mutter.
I grinned and slowed down, shoving my hands in my pockets.
“What the heck was that?” asked the detective, stepping in front of me.
I skipped around him and kept going. “Don’t ask me. I’m just out for a walk. You coming or going?”
“Coming,” he said, grimly. “Let’s stop for a coffee.”
“There’s coffee at home,” I said, but when he ducked into the closest café as we passed it, I followed him anyway.
Better than him going back home and knocking on the door.
“Want a drink?” he asked, at the counter. “I’m buying.”
I shook my head. “No thanks.”
I sat at one of the tables outside. There was coffee at home, and I could wait that long: if there was anything I knew after living with Behindkind and travelling through Between and Behind, it was not to accept food and drink from people. Detective Tuatu might not be a goblin, and his food and drink might not put me out like a light, but there were other kinds of compulsion. Like the compulsion of being helpful to someone who has been kind to you. The compulsion to talk to someone who’s buying. That sort of thing.
For someone who says he’s not into teaching humans because they can’t understand, Athelas has taught me a lot in a short time.
The detective came and sat down a minute later. “Still don’t have a name for you,” he said.
I grinned again. “’S’that why you asked if I wanted a drink? So they’d ask what name to call?”
“They don’t call names, here,” he said, resting one booted foot on the next chair. “They bring the drinks to your table.”
“What’d you want to talk to the boys about, anyway?” I asked, shifting my chair so I could still get around his legs if I needed to. Somewhere out there in the street, I’d glimpsed the bristly bush of beard that ducked into a shop; and lately, whenever I’d seen the old bearded bloke, there had been trouble.
Detective Tuatu said angrily, remembering his wrongs, “They’ve been in my station again! And this time they’ve melted the body!”
“Nah,” I told him. “They were annoyed about that, too. They didn’t do it.”
“Why should I believe that?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. You’re the one who wanted to talk to me.”
“Who else would melt a body—how did they melt the body?”
“Yeah, that’s what they want to know as well. They’re trying to find out, but I don’t think it’s working.”
Detective Tuatu opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again as a tiny Chinese girl in an apron put his tea on the table between us. When she was gone, he said, “All right, if they didn’t do it, who did?”
“Beggared if I know. What I want to know is why your lot wasn’t looking after it better.”
“You’ve—they’ve—we can’t even stop them coming in and getting information out of us! How could we look after a body if someone like them came in?”
“Oh, that’s a good point,” I said. “So whoever we’re after, they’re Behindkind.”
“They’re what?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” I told him. It was nice to be cheeky without worrying about losing a limb or a few litres of blood. “Don’t you have security cameras in there?”
The detective looked at me with dislike. “Funnily enough, they weren’t working.”
“Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t surprised. Sympathetically, I added, “Annoying, isn’t it?”
“Annoying? It’s f—it’s suspicious.”
“Oi.”
“You—what?”
“Seen an old bearded bloke hanging around here?”
“Don’t change the subject!”
I grinned at him. “Free country, isn’t it? You have, haven’t you?”
Detective Tuatu said exasperatedly, “He’s as bad as you—no name, no identification, just sheer oddness.”
“Thought I wasn’t imagining things,” I said, in satisfaction. “He keeps turning up in weird places, and I don’t know whether to tell the ps—whether to tell them about him or not. He doesn’t seem to do much, just hangs around and cackles to himself a bit.”
“Don’t tell them,” the detective said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said, and I saw the relief in his face. He really thought my psychos might do the old bloke a mischief. Well, if it came to that, I wasn’t sure myself that they wouldn’t consider him a risk if they knew about him. He was lucky they hadn’t caught sight of him yet.
“Oi,” I said again.
“What?”
“You see anyone there before that corpse got melted?”
“Why am I the only one answering questions?”
I shrugged. “You don’t have to answer ’em if you don’t want to.”
“There’s nothing on the CCTV.”
“Yeah, I know. They were annoyed about that, too. Think they’re trying to run a sp—ah, something that’ll tell ’em who was there before them, but if you saw something—”
“I didn’t,” said Detective Tuatu, but I had the impression he was uneasy about something.
So what, he saw something, but didn’t want to admit to what he’d seen? Might have been something Behindkind.
“What do you mean, they’re running something to find out who was there before them? If the CCTV doesn’t work, how on earth are they going to—” His eyes went very wide. “Have they got surveillance equipment in the station?”
“Nah.” Only magic, and spells, and fae voodoo.
“Then how does it work?”
“Dunno about that stuff,” I told him. “Dunno how it works, dunno what it is.”
He sat back in frustration. “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”
“You don’t ask the right questions,” I told him, grinning again. “You need to fix that. I’ve gotta get back. See you next time.”
“Wait!” he protested, but I skipped past his legs anyway, and left him trying to decide whether to come after me or finish his tea.
He must have decided to finish his tea, because when I got back to my street there was no one following me—well, no one except the old guy with the beard, and I still wasn’t exactly sure he was following me. Me specifically, I mean. If he followed me while the three psychos were around, I might be s
ure of it, but it’s a bit silly for someone to be following just me around.
When I got back inside the house, the walls weren’t splattered with blood, and neither Zero nor JinYeong was dead. Athelas had picked up a book instead of his empty teacup, so I went and took the teacup away.
“We’ll take an early lunch,” Zero said to me. “JinYeong is hungry.”
JinYeong, his sulky mouth pursed around a blood bag and his eyes back to normal, released the bag momentarily. “An chugetdaeyo,” he said to Zero, his voice thick and reproachful.
“Accidents happen,” said Zero briefly. “Even if you didn’t mean to kill her, it’s possible. We’ve already been noticed by a few humans who shouldn’t have noticed us. If we have bodies to clean up, we can’t stay here.”
This time, JinYeong’s eyes flicked over to me.
“What?” I demanded.
His mouth quirked sideways in an unamused, tooth-displaying smile. “Kidaehae,” he said.
“Don’t hurt the pet,” said Zero, and left the room.
There’s no understanding him. One day he makes sure I’ve got a jacket because I’m shivering; the next, he leaves the room when JinYeong is making threatening remarks at me.
That’s flamin’ cold.
I’m stuck between an icy human-fae hybrid and a loco-as-all-heck vampire who doesn’t seem to care who he drains.
It was funny, though. JinYeong had looked ready to murder Zero; it had looked, actually, like he was trying to cause a fight. I’d seen the liquid anger in his eyes, his willingness to fight and kill; and I had seen Zero’s shoulders square, ready to fight. The funny thing was, though, that it wasn’t either of them in all their deadliness that had made the biggest impression on me.
The thing that stuck in my mind the most—the thing I didn’t think I’d forget—it was Athelas, putting down his teacup and crossing one leg over the other, smiling faintly in enjoyment. Like he would have enjoyed watching them fight to the death for the interest of seeing who would win.
Chapter Ten
By the next day, Zero still hadn’t been able to get his spell working, and Athelas was padding around the house with the saintly air of someone who is very conscientiously not saying “I told you so”.
Zero had brought himself to be faintly approachable again when he came to breakfast, and Athelas was looking less saintly. Maybe it helped that I gave them boston beans on toast for breakfast—it’s pretty hard to be icy or saintly while you’re eating glorified beans-on-toast.
Athelas helped himself to a second slice of toast and suggested, “If you’re so sure it’s got to do with the Waystation, why don’t we go back and have a proper look around this time? Below the surface, so to speak.”
Zero shook his head. “They’ve got a habit of knowing when we’re coming and it’s too easy to hide things.”
JinYeong, eschewing the beans and raiding the jam instead, suggested something in an indolent sort of way, shrugging one shoulder up and then down.
“I suppose that’s a possibility,” Athelas conceded. “If they’re expecting to be bothered every so often, it would be wise to have a second location in which to store incriminating evidence.”
“Even the Order Force would occasionally do an audit, and they wouldn’t always be able to avoid someone not on their payroll,” agreed Zero, his eyes a little keener. “It would have to be somewhere connected but not on Behind land; Between would be ideal. Even if one of the Order Force did find something, they’d be unlikely to report it if it wasn’t happening on Behind territory.”
“Somewhere like the house across the road,” I said, serving the tea and coffee. “Only in a different wing, sorta.”
Those bobbing lights hadn’t all been fake ones, a glamour to keep people out. There had been a real bobbing light or two, and they hadn’t been on the side that held the way Between the human world and Behind, either.
That mad old bloke, I thought. He’d been busy for years. Funny that I didn’t start to remember him until recently. Maybe I thought I’d dreamed him.
“Exactly,” said Zero. There was a sharpness to his icy blue eyes; if Zero was a dog, his ears would be pricked up, his snout quivering, and his tail straight out. “I did a routine inspection of the house when we first arrived, but that was when we expected it to be a normal human house with a few weak spots. Now that we know it’s a front for the Waystation fae, and that they’re most likely keeping human prisoners and playing a game of tag with the Order Force, I can look more thoroughly.”
“We’ll need to be more careful this time,” Athelas warned. “We’ve set off enough security magic lately that I’m beginning to wonder if we need to go back to basic training.”
Zero opened his mouth, and I could almost see him thinking better of what he’d been about to say. There was a brief beat of silence before he said instead, “We’ll be more careful. Our timing doesn’t seem to have been very good lately, and I would very much like to know why.”
“I was wondering if you’d noticed the coincidental way in which several events have occurred,” agreed Athelas. “One feels as though one is being watched.”
“One does,” Zero said dryly. “If we’re unfortunate enough to have trouble again today, I’ll have to look into it.”
He said that pretty suggestively, I thought. Did he suspect Athelas of telling someone about their movements? Suspicious psychos.
Athelas looked amused; JinYeong maliciously smug.
Of Zero, JinYeong asked, “Chigeum?”
“We might as well go now,” Zero said, rising. “Our answers are all in that house, one way or another, and we can’t know which direction to move until we have a few more of them.”
“I’ve yet to find that stops you,” Athelas said, making me grin. He got up too, buttoning his soft, plaid blazer, and said to JinYeong, “Shall we, JinYeong?”
JinYeong was already halfway to the front door without waiting for the other two, his stride long and loose. What was he so excited about? They were trying to avoid fights this time, weren’t they?
Athelas, still looking highly amused, followed him.
“Stay here, Pet,” said Zero. “Don’t go out. Don’t cause trouble.”
He shut the door behind him before I could agree, and I said with relish, “Heck yes!”
I could take a long shower and use all the hot water before JinYeong got back to use it.
Gleefully, I charged upstairs to my bedroom, grabbed a few clothes to change into, and dashed back down to the bathroom before any of them changed their minds and came back to demand tea or coffee.
I emerged from the bathroom half an hour later, my hair damp around the edges and my face very pink, and went back upstairs to get my socks. I could feel the grit of stuff under my feet in the kitchen—crumbs, and dirt, and tiny pebbles—and that meant I should vacuum; but since I didn’t have a vacuum cleaner, I would have to make do by wearing socks so I didn’t feel the grit.
What a shame.
I pulled my socks on, leaning against the wall to stop myself falling over, and caught a flutter of something across the road.
The public garbage cans were moving.
Nope, not the garbage cans; something shabby and dark near the garbage cans.
I looked closer; grinned.
It was the bearded bloke again. What was he doing, hanging around on the nature strip near the house across the street?
And had he popped out of the garbage cans, or was that my imagination?
He wasn’t any better dressed today—he was wearing a different shirt, but this one had a hole in it that was as big as the hole in his other shirt. He was still barefoot, too, which struck me as dangerous if he was going to keep nosing around the house across the street.
I mean, everything was dangerous about the house across the street, but the old guy was probably potty enough not to notice anything beyond something stuck in his foot, anyway.
Still, better if Zero and the others didn’t find him wandering a
round the place. He’d probably go away if I gave him a bit of food like I used to. I pulled my boots on over my socks before I grabbed a banana and one of the leftovers containers full of stew, and went to look for the batty old bloke.
I kept an eye out for the detective as I crossed the road. He’d showed up enough lately that I didn’t want to risk getting caught by him, sneaking around the house across the road—especially since it would lead him right to my three psychos.
The street was empty, but I still kept to the green, leafy edges of the footpath once I was off the bitumen. From this side of the road, I could hear the bearded old dude humming something to himself. That wasn’t good. Zero would hear it, too, if it was much louder.
I sneaked around the hedge, looking cautiously left and right, and saw the bearded man poking at a mushroom with a stick.
“Oi!” I called, in a loud whisper.
He snapped around like a tiger snake, beady little eyes dark and deadly, one fist raised. Nope, it wasn’t a fist; he was just kind of making an emu beak with his fingers that looked like it might dart out and peck me.
Ah heck, I thought; but I didn’t say anything. This bloke wasn’t only batty—he was dangerous batty.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, and suddenly the deadly gleam to his eye was gone. “You should be more careful. Might have bitten you.”
I looked at his stiff fingers and tilted my head at them. “What, with that?”
“Of course not,” he said, his arm dropping. “Fingers don’t have teeth. Well. Mine don’t. Someone else’s could, but not mine.”
“Yeah, mine don’t, either,” I said cautiously. I showed him the banana and the leftovers, careful to move slowly. “You hungry?”
“Is it real food?” he asked, a shade of suspicion darkening his eyes again.
“Yeah. Made it myself. Well, not the banana. That came off a tree.”
“They don’t, always,” the bearded bloke said, his eyes darting back and forth.
I looked at him sideways. “Don’t they? Well, this one did.”
He grabbed it straight away, making me jump, and bowed at me. “Million thanks, lady!” he said, and grabbed for the leftovers as well. “Good tuck, good tuck!”
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