Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  I motioned for him to stop and pointed at my ears, then shook my head. Can’t hear you. No good trying to write notes to him, either; JinYeong didn’t read English, and I couldn’t read Korean.

  Moodily, he nodded. He’d already guessed that. He jerked his chin at me, and I thought I saw him mouth the words No hae bwa.

  Heck. He thought I could do something about this? He wanted me to try?

  I took in a quick, uncertain breath, then gave a half-shrug and a nod. Might as well try. Zero hadn’t been able to do anything, but I wasn’t even supposed to be able to see Between, let alone use it, so I was already an anomaly.

  JinYeong nodded, bracing himself there with his palms resting on the outside windowsill and his forehead on the glass, eyes on me.

  Heck. He really did think I could do something, and he was waiting for me to do it.

  I stepped closer again and rested my own hands on the windowsill, reaching out to the sight and feel of Between that I’d gotten so used to sensing all around me. It was still there; I could still feel it and touch it. I could even still influence it. But instead of being a mellow, touchable stream of gently moving pieces that I could turn into what I wanted it to be, now it was vibrating; moving so fast and so furiously that it felt as though it would tear itself to pieces—or maybe just turn itself inside out—and then tear back into being again to do it all over again.

  I was no longer in synch with it in the same way that the inside of my house was no longer in synch with the human world I could see through the windows. Here in the house everything was still mellow and gentle; between me and the outside world was a tumbling skirl of Between that couldn’t be contained or stopped.

  And behind that furious movement I sensed emptiness—an awful and vast emptiness that might have been time as well as space, and that separated me and the living room in my house from JinYeong and the outside world in Australia as thoroughly as if I’d taken the entire house into the underworld with me. Heck, it was basically the same thing.

  “No one gets to shift my house into the underworld without my permission,” I said, through my teeth. I rested my forehead against the glass too, meeting JinYeong’s gaze for another brief moment. I saw his lips curl in anticipation and the expectant brightness of his eyes, and felt myself shaken, not quite able to catch a breath.

  He couldn’t be sure I was going to be able to do anything, but he somehow was.

  “Pet, what are you doing?” demanded Zero, alert and alarmed.

  “Now you see something!” I snapped. And, grasping all that fast, furious swirl of Between that would have torn through my physical hands if I’d tried to use them, I shoved it back at itself and the wall and Between with everything I had.

  Ever heard monsoon rain on a tin roof? That battering, shattering, louder-than-screaming assault of sound that comes with the first thunderstorms of the season? It was like that—if the monsoon rain was on both sides of the tin roof instead of just the outside; howling, battering, and trying to shatter against itself.

  Somewhere in the eye of that storm, something shifted, and for just a moment I could have sworn I smelt the faintest whiff of JinYeong’s cologne and felt the smoothness of his forehead against mine instead of glass.

  Then it vanished and the downpour disappeared. Every bit of Between that I had pushed into the wall to try and pry open the shifting mass of Between turned inward and ate itself, then sealed in a fizz of too-quick-to-see motion that sped around the entire house before I could draw in a shocked breath.

  JinYeong seemed to catch his breath, too. He gave me an encouraging sort of smile, and the bitter frustration of having to accept that I hadn’t been able to do what he had trusted me to do seared right through me.

  I didn’t mean to kick the wall as hard as I did.

  Definitely didn’t mean to put a hole in the wall. But now my foot hurt and there was a hole in the wall, so it was definitely me that had done it. Somewhere further along the wall, a banshee yelled, and I pulled my foot out of the powdery mess of gyprock pretty quickly. I didn’t want to get whatever I could catch from one of them biting me. JinYeong’s head tilted as I did so, and for just a moment there was amusement in every line of his pouty little mouth.

  A huge hand grabbed me by the hoodie and jerked me away from the wall. I saw JinYeong bare his teeth, and said nastily over my shoulder at Zero, “What, you can throw chairs through windows but I can’t kick a hole in the wall?”

  “You don’t kick holes in walls.”

  “Maybe I’ve picked up the habit from being around blokes who throw stuff when they’re annoyed!” I shot back, pulling myself away and hunching my shoulders as I went back to the window.

  Zero narrowed his eyes at JinYeong’s glare and stepped closer to the window as well. “Whatever you did, don’t do it again,” he said to me. “You’ve tightened the whole thing.”

  Echoing the disapproval, the old mad bloke’s voice floated into the living room from the kitchen. “Lady, this house is squeezing me.”

  “Sorry!” I called. “I was just trying something! Just eat your salami; it’s gunna be fine.”

  JinYeong levelled his gaze on Zero, then jerked his chin forward. The message was clear: Go away, Hyeong. Zero huffed out a small, sardonic breath, but went back to the couch and the heirling sword.

  JinYeong pulled his phone out of his breast pocket and wiggled it at me.

  “I tried,” I said, but he didn’t seem to understand that, so I took my own phone out and showed him as I tried to call his number. JinYeong’s sharp eyes flicked from my phone to his and back again, and his mouth grew sulky—or perhaps just discontented.

  “I’m not real happy about it either,” I said, tucking my phone away again when it was evident that it wasn’t working. “The Between thing doesn’t seem to work between here and there.”

  “If you can’t communicate with him, let him go away and do something useful,” Zero said, from the couch. “We’re wasting time.”

  “What time?” I demanded. “We’re not doing anything, anyway! And what do you think he can do to help us out there?”

  “He can’t do anything to help us,” said Zero, laying a hand flat on the blade of the sword, which glowed faintly bluer in response. “No one can. He can find somewhere else to stay for a little while; it’s no use hanging around the windows.”

  “He’s my emotional support vampire,” I shot back at him. “And not everything has to have a tangible use, you know!”

  Zero only said crushingly, “JinYeong is no use to us in this situation, tangible or otherwise. He’d be well advised to go to ground for the duration of the trials.”

  “He thinks you might get hurt,” I said to JinYeong, jerking my thumb at Zero. “Don’t listen to him; you’re very useful.”

  JinYeong’s eyebrow quirked, and I saw the faintest hint of laughter to his lips once again.

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “All right, all right, no need to get your knickers in a twist!”

  JinYeong tapped the pad of one finger against the glass and tipped his head back and sideways a bit, lips moving.

  I was fairly sure he’d said the Korean equivalent of I’ll be back, but I was no expert in lipreading, especially lipreading Korean. I must have been right, though, because he backed away, eyes on me, and gave me a final smile before he turned and vaulted over the fence.

  I turned away from the window when I couldn’t see his blue-suited back any longer, and asked Zero moodily, “What are you doing, anyway?”

  “We are working the sword,” said the old mad bloke, popping up from behind the couch. It was very nearly the most complete sentence he’d ever said, and it still made no sense. “While it’s blue, there’s danger.”

  Zero shot a look at him over his shoulder, making the old bloke dance back a few feet and wave a shaking finger in Zero’s direction.

  “Sit down properly or go back to the kitchen,” Zero said. To me, he said, “The sword acknowledges those it
considers worthy to be in the trials.”

  “It goes blue when it approves of someone? Heck, that’s handy.”

  “Blue is good if you want to be king,” said the old mad bloke. It must have suited him to be ignored, because he sidled around Zero’s couch and sidled into the spare chair, too. Before long, he had crossed his freshly washed feet beneath him and was waggling fingers in the general direction of the sword as if he was influencing it by his aura or something.

  “What if it doesn’t go blue but you’re an heirling?”

  “Then you might live through the trials if you give up your right to compete by joining with someone it does go blue for, and make yourself useful,” said Zero.

  “Or maybe you’ll get a knife in your back one night,” said the old mad bloke, momentarily less woo-woo and more shell-shocked. “Fae are always stabby-stabby.”

  I went and got the biscuits to give him something to gnaw on, and asked Zero when I came back, “What about when it’s yellow?”

  “I don’t know. I told you: I’m not the one who made it yellow.”

  “Oh.” That was a bit disturbing, but at least it meant the sword hadn’t picked me, right? “Cool! Guess you’re the one I’ll stick myself to—if you stab me in the back I’m gunna flamin’ complain, though.”

  “No stabbing,” said the old bloke. “I already have too many holes in my shirt.”

  “Oi,” I said to him. “What are we supposed to call you?”

  I’d never known his name, and although I assumed Detective Tuatu must have, there was no real way for me to contact the detective—not that it would stop me from trying later, of course.

  “Don’t give him a name!” Zero said sharply. “It’s no use getting fond of the Harbinger unless you want to be king.”

  The old mad bloke stared at him with wide eyes. He whispered, “Who said so? I didn’t say so!”

  He was pretty earnest about it, too; his hands shook for a good few seconds before he clutched them together on his legs, and he looked as though he might start crying any minute.

  “I didn’t say it, either!” I said hastily. “You don’t have to be the Harbinger if you don’t want to be!”

  “Do not make friends with him!” Zero said exasperatedly. “The sword is already blue, and if you’re going to bind the Harbinger to it as well—!”

  “I just asked what we could call him!” I protested. “I can’t keep calling him the old mad bloke!”

  The old mad bloke wagged his finger at me again, shaky but slightly more normal than before. “Names are dangerous, lady.”

  “Yeah, I know. I didn’t ask you for your name—I asked you what we could call you.”

  “Clever lady!” he said in delight. “I am the Avenger Without a Sword.”

  “That’s a bit long, isn’t it? What about we call you Avva, then—nope, that won’t work. Everyone’ll want to say ‘avva cuppa tea?’ at you.”

  “Nobody in the heirling trials will do any such thing,” said Zero. He seemed to have given up, because despite the comment his eyes were back on the sword instead of us. That was all right. He’d come around later.

  “Without a sword, swordless—oi, what about we call you Les?”

  “A boon!” cried the old mad bloke. “A name has been granted to me!”

  “All right, Les, avenger without a sword—reckon you can stop spilling coffee on the carpet? You can either dance or drink coffee; doing both isn’t allowed in my house.”

  “Yes, lady!” he said happily. “And now, I will do the dishes. Les, doer of dishes, avenger without a—”

  He burbled happily to himself as he disappeared into the kitchen, and I heard him burbling to the little cracked tile above the sink later, too. We’d probably end up with a few broken dishes, but he seemed to like doing the washing up so I let him do it. I didn’t see much point in it: if you might die in the afternoon, why worry about doing the dishes? Still, if you’re going to die in the afternoon and you want to do the dishes, you might as well.

  I nearly didn’t bother to try calling Morgana’s phone—after all, why would it work when I couldn’t get hold of JinYeong? But I tried after lunch anyway because why not? It wasn’t like I could do much more, and Zero was too busy fortifying the house to answer questions with anything other than monosyllables. Not that it was much different to how he’d always been, but now that he’d just started answering questions, I found that I didn’t have much patience for not being answered properly. I’m not sure he would have answered questions even if he wasn’t busy, mind you; the situation had drawn out a few bad habits again. He seemed to find it a relief to do something with his hands, though, so I left him to it and threw myself on the couch to call Morgana even though I knew it was a ridiculous thing to do.

  Only when I tapped her profile and put the phone to my ear, it was actually ringing.

  “Heck!” I said, and nearly dropped the phone.

  “Pet!” squealed Morgana in my ear a moment later, nearly deafening me. “You’re safe! I was so worried!”

  “You were worried! I’m fine—what about you? Is the house—are you guys—”

  “The house went weird and the kids are pretty upset, and now there are people camped outside but it’s actually inside something, apparently. Daniel says that a trial has started.”

  My heart sank. “They got you too?”

  “I suppose so,” she said. “People have been trying to get in through the windows at the front of the house, but when I look out the windows, there’s nothing there.”

  “Yeah, they’re not outside in the human world,” I said, cold right through. “How about your back windows?”

  “Those ones are a bit cloudy still,” she said. “But we can see…things out in the backyard. The kids think we’ll be able to see clearly soon, but I’m not sure any of us want to know what’s really out there.”

  “Daniel’s still there, yeah? What about the others?”

  “Half are here; the other half were off doing something secret. They tried to get in this morning and couldn’t. Daniel says he thinks it’s a closed system, but I already knew there was something wrong. The house isn’t…sitting right in the world.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s the problem. We can’t get out, either—me or Zero. JinYeong’s outside in the human world.”

  She tried to say something, but all I heard was a barrage of thumping, yelling, and almost tangible impacts. When it died down, Morgana said, “That’s the people outside. Outside the house, I mean—they’re still inside whatever this is, and they really want to get into the house.”

  “How many?”

  “We don’t know yet: it’s too hard to see. Enough to make that kind of a racket, and big. They don’t know about the kids, but they seem to know there aren’t many of us here in the house.”

  “You got supplies?” I asked. I didn’t say brains because I didn’t need to; Morgana might be a zombie, but she’d never eaten brains yet, and she was still pretty sensitive about the subject.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t want—I really don’t want to use them, Pet! But I will if I have to.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “Me and Zero will be there in a bit. Just make sure you’ve got everything to hand in case they get in first, all right? And keep Daniel close.”

  “You’re going to go out there?”

  “I’ve got Zero,” I said. “I’d like to see anyone mess with him. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. See you later.”

  I jogged up the stairs to where I was pretty sure Zero was poking around and found him in my parents’ room. He must have found it as unpleasantly reminiscent of Athelas as I had, because he had a frozen, almost pained look to his face, and I reckon he must have been standing in the same place for a while.

  To take his mind off things, I wiggled my phone at him and said accusingly, “You said we can’t contact anyone.”

  “We can’t.”

  “All right, then how come I could call Morgana? She and Dan
iel are trapped in her house just like us.”

  Zero’s eyebrows twitched together for a moment before the momentary puzzlement cleared. “I told you that the heirling trials is a closed system. It could work like that closed system the merman made for us when we dealt with the sirens.”

  “Okay, that’s something,” I said. It was still hard to breathe properly, but at least I could breathe. We weren’t dead yet, and we weren’t likely to be dead if Zero had anything to say about it. I just had to stay behind him. “That’s something, right? We’ve got contact with Morgana.”

  “Contact with the zombie offers us nothing,” Zero said shortly. “We’ll all be best if we stay in our own areas and don’t venture out.”

  “You reckon everyone else is gunna think like that?”

  “Of course not. I told you that we need to reinforce the house against attack.”

  “What about Morgana?”

  “She has a house and she has the wolf.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not used to this world, and she doesn’t eat…the right stuff. And there are already people trying to get into her house, unlike ours.”

  “Pet,” said Zero, after a long, pregnant pause. “Are you trying to tell me that you want to go and find the zombie?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “I wish,” he said, with a flash of heat that was as sudden as it was surprising, “that you would put forth one tenth of the same effort you put toward the safety of your loved ones, toward yourself!”

  “That’s flamin’ rich, from a bloke who helped out a human girl who was on the turn to lycanthrope even though he knew he could die if she bit him.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t bite me.”

  “Garbage. We gunna do this?”

  “What’s your plan? What are you hoping to achieve?”

  “Get to Morgana, first of all. We can probably stay there with her once we get through: hole ourselves in and wait it out like you wanted to do in the first place.”