Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  “Flamin’ heck!” I whispered, jerking my knee out of the way of a scalding dribble of coffee from the kitchen island. I dropped down from the bar stool to go out and see what Zero had destroyed out in the backyard, but the back door slammed before I could do more than take a step or two toward the next room.

  Pale with rage, Zero stalked into the living room and picked up Athelas’ chair with one hand, then hurled it clear across living room, kitchen, and right out the window. I ducked; glass shattered; mahogany chair legs splintered.

  When the whole, shocking noise of it ended, I said, “Heck!” rocking on my heels with my arms wrapped around my head. “Oi! Warn me before you do stuff like that, you flamin’ chair-hurler! You nearly sent me sailing out the window!”

  He didn’t come up into the kitchen; he just asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, just got a couple of splinters in me hair, that’s all.”

  “Good,” he said, and then sat down on the step up to the kitchen with his back to me.

  He wouldn’t cry—I wasn’t even sure if he was capable of crying—but he sat there gulping on air in a way that would have been sobs if he had tears to cry.

  “Heck,” I said again, and went to wrap my arms around the back of his neck while he was within reach. I didn’t like to think about how he must have lost all those tears he should have been able to cry. I couldn’t do anything about them, anyway. All I could do was hug him and let my own tears drop on his shoulders if I couldn’t hold them back.

  We were a cheerful lot this morning.

  I stayed where I was until Zero’s breathing went back to normal, and then shoved him over a bit to sit next to him, massaging calf muscles that had been screaming at me for the last couple of minutes.

  “This is your fault for being too big to comfortably hug,” I said. “Even when you’re sitting down you’re flamin’ inconvenient.”

  Zero gave a huffy sort of laugh that sounded almost resigned. “I didn’t ask you to hug me.”

  “I know,” I said. “But that’s not my fault. You’re flamin’ bad at asking for the stuff you need.”

  “I didn’t say that I need—”

  If there had been an explosion in the backyard ten minutes earlier, this time what happened was more of an implosion. The house, the world, and the room around us were each grabbed by the equivalent of the ears and violently hauled inside out, then sealed with the most ear-popping silence that I’d ever had the misfortune to experience.

  “Okay,” I said into that dead silence. “It wasn’t me this time.”

  Chapter Two

  Zero got up with such speed and force that he sent me tumbling to the carpet as he strode toward the front door.

  I scrambled to my feet and took off after him, rattled right to the ends of my fingertips and with my heart beating far too loudly in my ears. “What’s going on? What the heck was that?”

  He didn’t answer me. He grabbed the handle of the front door and turned it, pushing hard; then wrenched at it hard enough to have pulled it from the wood. The door rattled, but didn’t open. He kicked it twice for good measure, too, but all it did was rattle more violently than before.

  “I didn’t do that,” I said. “That wasn’t me, right?”

  Zero didn’t answer that, either. Instead, he strode back up the hall to the back door, then went around to every window in succession, rattling them with too much strength and far too much savagery.

  “Check the windows upstairs!” he snarled at me. “See if you can make them open!”

  I did as I was told, taking the stairs two at a time and running a swift course around the entire upper floor, heaving at windows until my fingers went white and my shoulders popped.

  Not one of them would open.

  I hurried back downstairs to the sound of repeated, heavy impacts, to see that Zero was throwing his entire weight at the door.

  I reckon I counted something like thirty times before he stopped and sagged against the wall, still gulping air in the same kind of dry, almost-sobs he had been doing before, the fist closest to me clenched tight as though he’d start trying to punch his way through the door next.

  “The heck,” I said, dazed. “You really can’t get out, can you?”

  Zero slid to the floor with his back against the hallway wall, his knees bent. “No one can get out,” he said, staring at the wall opposite with blank eyes. “No one out, no one in. That’s how it works.”

  “Not in my house, it’s flamin’ not!” I shot back, alarm radiating through my chest. He looked so lost and beaten, sitting on the ground like that, and we couldn’t afford for him to look beaten. “Get off the floor! We’re gunna sort this out because there’s no way someone’s allowed to lock up my house.”

  “We can’t sort it out,” Zero said wearily. “We’ve got enough food in the house for a few days, haven’t we?”

  “I don’t mean that!” I said. “I mean how the heck is JinYeong gunna get back in?”

  “He won’t be able to,” Zero said. “They’ve started.”

  “They’ve started what? And who are they?”

  “We’ve reached critical mass,” said Zero. “The heirling trials are about to begin, and it seems as though the king is doing things legally this time.”

  “Are you telling me that we’re stuck inside the house until the king comes to kill us? We can’t get somewhere through Between or something?”

  “We can get out of the house,” Zero said. “Just not into the human world. The back door will open once the house has settled into the arena, but only to let us out into the premade closed system Behind; factions will already have been forming this last half hour, and there will be fighters waiting.”

  “Can we get out through the broken window? Might be a sneaky way out.”

  “I’m certain you’ll be able to get somewhere,” Zero said. “I doubt it’ll be anywhere you want to go, however. I told you: the heirling trials are a closed system and anyone locked into it won’t be able to access the human world for the duration.”

  “Okay, but I don’t want to experience the duration.”

  Zero huffed out a tired laugh. “Neither do I, but here we are.”

  “Hang on, what about the window, then? If there are nasties out there, they’ll probably want to be nasty in here before long.”

  “We’ll have to find a way to patch it up to stop anything getting through,” he said, rubbing a hand vigorously over his face. It was a gesture of frustration; he was regretting hurling a chair through it earlier, obviously.

  Still, while it was open, it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick squiz.

  I went to have a bit of a look, and just like the front door that rattled but didn’t open, the window breathed cold air on me from an inky blackness I didn’t particularly like breathing on me.

  “Heck,” I said at Zero, backing away. “We’re really in trouble, aren’t we?”

  He stepped up wearily into the kitchen and upended the table with a groan. I didn’t see exactly what he stuck to it, but it was magic and strong and made the table adhere to the wall so tightly that I couldn’t even feel the uncomfortable fingers of cold air slipping through anymore.

  “That’s a bit less creepy, anyway,” I said. “Are we sure nothing got through while I was upstairs and you were in the other parts of the house?”

  “No,” said Zero. “We’ll have to check the house as well as we can and sleep in shifts for the first couple of nights.”

  “The first couple of—hang on, how long is this thing supposed to take?”

  “As long as it takes,” Zero told me flatly.

  “I s’pose it’s a good thing that the king’s doing it legally, this time,” I said, but it was more of a forlorn hope than anything else and I’m pretty sure I sounded more disgruntled than glad about it. What can I say? I’m a suspicious person at heart. “If he’s not going to interfere with the choice—”

  Zero didn’t even let that hope marinate for a while before he sk
ewered it. “He’s probably hoping the herd thins out before he makes his move again; not every heirling will have been caught up in the trials.”

  “I’m not a wildebeest and I’m not gunna be thinned out,” I said firmly. “If he tries to get into my house—”

  “He won’t try,” said Zero, with the kind of stubbornness that suggests a person is trying to make their audience acknowledge the full extent of the situation. “He’ll just wait until we heirlings find each other in the closed system Between—until alliances form, heirlings die, and there are as few left as possible—and then he’ll likely kill the survivors out there in the layers of the world until the victor emerges. This is exactly what my father was trying to prevent.”

  “Yeah, by taking it on himself to make sure all the heirlings were killed,” I said; but I said it quietly. We both knew who had done the actual killing, and we didn’t really have any more chairs that could be thrown through windows, even if the windows would allow themselves to be smashed now that we were…not in the human world.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m having coffee.”

  Zero gazed at me with the same kind of blankness he’d stared at the hallway wall earlier, but he took the coffee cup I gave him when it was ready.

  He also answered me when I asked, “Reckon they’ll let him get away with it? The king, I mean.”

  “Who do you think will stop him?”

  “Isn’t it against your laws, what he’s been doing?”

  He huffed out an impatient sigh. “Yes.”

  “Yeah, so—”

  “He’s the king.”

  “Yeah, and he’s been breaking the law!”

  “He’s the king: he is the law.”

  “That’s garbage,” I said. “A king is supposed to protect his people from lawbreakers, not become a lawbreaker to keep power.”

  “Once we start judging the king, we’ve opened the door to anarchy.”

  “Yeah, because the worlds Between and Behind are so flamin’ orderly and well-balanced!” I muttered, and left him in the kitchen so I could do one last circuit of the house.

  If I hadn’t seen the empty blackness out the broken window and witnessed Zero trying and failing to open the door and windows, it would have been hard to believe that anything was wrong. I could see everything I could usually see from most of the windows; only the windows facing the backyard were cloudy and uncertain. From the upper storey I could see the street, the neighbouring yards, the backyard; from the lower story I could see the front and side yards all around, a glimpse of the neighbouring roofs above the fence, and the clearness of space across the road that had once been filled with the house across the road.

  That house had disappeared about a year ago, while the four of us were trying not to disappear along with it and after someone had reported the whole place as an outpost of Upper Management—though we hadn’t known it was Upper Management then.

  Athelas had said that it wasn’t him—actually, he hadn’t. Not outright. Who was I trying to fool? He must have been the one who told Zero’s dad; there was no one else who had known what we knew and had had access to Lord Sero.

  He’d even said a tranquil little, “What a shame!” about it happening. Well, not about it happening—about Zero mentioning that they would have to dismantle the waystation themselves. Twisty old tea drinker had probably already been figuring out how he was going to get away and report to Lord Sero without us knowing about it.

  I shivered away the memory and trudged upstairs again with my coffee to have another look at the silent, untouchable human world from a better vantage. It wasn’t creepy until you realised that there was no sound from that sight and that every window was absolutely frigid to the touch. The branches that should have tapped and scraped against the glass just mimed their actions without any sound of their movement reaching me; I felt the shudder of the wind rattling the windows but couldn’t hear the sound of it.

  I perched on the windowsill that gave me a view of the road out front and the house of our new neighbour, my foot propped against the side table there for balance, and sipped my coffee as I tried to call JinYeong.

  I didn’t even get a dial tone for my efforts—just the complete silence of a dead phone. I pulled it away from my ear and checked the battery despite the fact that I’d literally just seen the screen light up as I tried to call. It was fine; everything was fine. I just didn’t have a dial tone.

  Heck. It really was a closed system.

  I finished my cuppa, watching the road for JinYeong, then reluctantly went back downstairs to try and discover why a nippy little breeze was sweeping upstairs from the general direction of the laundry. When the whole house is closed up, a breeze slipping through is a bit of a curiosity; when the whole house is closed up via magic for a combative contest to the death, it gets downright worrisome.

  So I made sure there were no dregs left in my mug and, clutching it a bit tighter by way of having a weapon if I did chance to see something, I went cautiously down the stairs into the hallway, and stopped just outside the laundry room.

  That was when I discovered the old mad bloke paddling happily in the laundry sink with his bare, browned feet, gnawing happily on the fat stick of salami I’d bought to put on pizza later in the week.

  “You loopy old galah!” I said exasperatedly. The arm with the coffee mug relaxed. “Who told you you could sneak into the house and get into my fridge!”

  Not to mention how he’d done it, with Zero in the house!

  “I won’t soil the carpet, lady,” he said, smiling anxiously at me. “See? I’m washing my feet.”

  “Yeah, I saw. How come you went for the salami? It’s full of salt—not much good for you.”

  He wagged the salami at me remonstratingly. “Lady, salt is good for humans.”

  “Yeah, but not too much of—hang on. Salt is what JinYeong said would get rid of fae presence. You sneaky old duffer!”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” he mumbled, but I was pretty sure he was talking to himself more than to me.

  I sighed and asked, “How’d you get in, anyway?”

  “There’s an open window,” he said, admonishing me with the salami. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I didn’t do it; Zero chucked a chair through it. You came through there? Heck, you must have got in pretty quick, then! There were only a couple of minutes between Zero breaking it and the whole house doing…whatever it is that’s happening.”

  “I am quick, but I must have a bath.”

  “Okay, but you better not go making trouble around the house—and don’t annoy Zero. I’ll go let him know you’re here. Don’t move.”

  He blinked at me a couple of times and then splashed one foot in a questioning sort of way, as if making sure it was all right to move just that foot.

  “I meant stay in the room,” I explained. “I’ll be back.”

  Goodness knew where he had been hiding the entire time Zero had been charging around the house to rattle the windows, and then later when he’d been making sure nothing would get through any of the windows or doors.

  I found Zero back in the kitchen, inspecting the edges of whatever he’d done to the kitchen window—carefully checking them for signs of tampering, probably. No doubt he’d felt the bit of a breeze that was still seeping through the place from the laundry.

  “Oi,” I said to his broad back. “We got a problem.”

  JinYeong got back a few minutes after I finished persuading the old mad bloke to get down off the top of the fridge by getting Zero out of the kitchen and into the living room. When I managed to get the old fella to sit on the table instead of the fridge and went back into the living room to make nasty remarks at Zero, who had scared the old duffer up onto the fridge in the first place, there was movement behind my and JinYeong’s couch.

  Zero, concentrating on the heirling sword—which was softly glowing blue—didn’t seem to see it, and it was so swift and silent that I almost missed it, too. Acros
s the room there was someone at the window—a blue-suited figure I recognised at once. JinYeong, his hand dropping, was just turning away from the window. It looked as though he’d been there for a while trying to get someone’s attention and was just about to give up.

  “JinYeong!” I yelped, and dashed across the room before he could turn away fully.

  He almost didn’t see me, either; the lack of sound was the most inhibitive thing about the entire situation, and it looked as though it worked both ways. My mad rush did some good, though; JinYeong’s head snapped around as I made contact with the windowsill and he caught my eyes.

  I beckoned him to come back and to my surprise he hesitated, his body still angled away as if he meant to go anyway.

  I scowled at him and vigorously beckoned him again. “Come back here, you wally!” I snapped.

  JinYeong’s face changed—in fact, it very nearly crumpled in an expression that I didn’t remember seeing on him before. Whatever it was, it sent the blood rushing to his ears and lips, and liquified his eyes.

  “JinYeong?” I said again, uncertainly.

  And then I realised what that expression was: it was relief. Deep, stark-fear-to-bright-hope relief. The actual heck? Had he thought—? He had. He’d thought that we knew he was there and were ignoring him until he went away. What had Zero done last time when he went off on his own that had left JinYeong so sure that we would abandon him at a moment’s notice?

  I didn’t know, but I was going to have words with Zero about that later. There was no way JinYeong should be feeling so insecure about the partnership all three of us had that he thought we’d abandoned him at the first sign of distance.

  In the meantime, it was more important to see if we could communicate with JinYeong at all. Maybe he could do something from the outside that we couldn’t from the inside.

  I jerked a thumb at the room behind me and raised my brows. You know what’s going on?

  JinYeong shrugged; spoke. His mouth moved but I couldn’t tell what he was saying, and it took far too long for me to realise that I couldn’t understand it because he was speaking in Korean, as usual. Only with me here in the arena and him there on the outside, Between didn’t seem to be doing the translating like it normally did.