Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  “You should be,” Zero said shortly, cleaning his sword. “We were fighting for half an hour or so—your stamina will increase if you stay alive long enough, but you’ll have to get used to being tired in the meantime.”

  Half an hour. We’d been fighting half an hour?

  “They were a bit tougher than the usual behindkind, weren’t they?” I asked. I hoped so. Heck, JinYeong wouldn’t half be annoyed if I didn’t show back up at the window later on because I’d been so tired from dealing with one bunch of heirlings that the next lot did me in.

  “They weren’t tougher than the usual behindkind, they were just better used to combat. All the training in the world won’t get you ready for the duration of a fight where the other side aren’t just rank and file. They can afford to get the best training and the best in-field practise; they know how to stay alive instead of just throwing themselves on swords.”

  “Okay, well maybe I’m just getting old,” I said, still breathing too deeply but not quite able to catch my breath as I cleaned my swords. “Because that pretty nearly killed me.”

  “You fought extremely well,” Zero said. “You weren’t in any danger of dying, and you won’t be in the next match, either. You might feel as though you are, but once you push through the burn of your arms—”

  “Are you seriously trying to hype me up for the next fight?” I demanded, following him down the left hand lane of the labyrinth. “Push through the burn? What are you, a fitness instructor?”

  Zero cleared his throat a bit—to hide a laugh, if I was any judge—and said, “Do you ever stop making remarks long enough to catch your breath, or should I assume that even a half hour fight isn’t enough to exhaust you despite your claims?”

  “First of all, rude. Second of all, if I don’t keep making remarks you’ll be able to hear my teeth chattering, and that’s flamin’ embarrassing.”

  “Your teeth aren’t chattering,” said Zero, as we left the last, lingering scent of lemon myrtle behind us and turned down a new green-lined lane.

  We squabbled a bit all down the lane while we gathered our breath, then took the left-hand turn at the end of it. By that time, my arms weren’t shaking anymore; I was still walking pretty slowly, though. Maybe that was just because it was impossible to see what was coming at us in here, or maybe it was because things were so unbelievably peaceful. You know things are bad when everything looks peaceful—well, you do when it’s got anything to do with Behind, anyway.

  Les just followed along behind us like a particularly muddy border collie, looking around the world with interest. I hadn’t seen him do the same kind of damage that Zero had done during the fight, but he’d been in the fray all right: flask of tea clutched to his chest with one hand, and what looked like a knobkerry in the other. I don’t know why he went with a blunt weapon instead of a sharp one, but he seemed comfortable with it.

  He didn’t seem to have spilled much tea, either, so I said, “Good job staying alive,” and flashed the thumbs-up at him.

  “Alive is my state; fresh, wriggling bait,” he sang softly to himself.

  “That’s a bit dire,” I muttered, and moved forward to walk with Zero again.

  The old mad bloke lingered behind, still singing to himself, until we came to another T-section of the lanes and he caught up again.

  Much to my surprise, we stopped there while Zero looked up and down the lanes. To our right, the lane seemed marginally more floral and perhaps a bit lighter in tone; to the left, the hedge grew darker and had a shiny black patch between the leaves every so often.

  Maybe it was a hard choice for him. I waited for Zero to make his decision, and found that the old mad bloke was gazing at me as if he was waiting for me to make that same decision.

  Then Zero asked, “Which way?”

  The question sent a thread of pure, shocking terror through me. “You asking me? I thought you knew where you were going!”

  “I have no idea where we’re going,” he said. “I got us away from the place that felt safe, that’s all. You know your friend, and this is a closed system; there are a finite amount of choices that lead to her. Which direction should we go?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. Well, in that case, we might as well go this way.”

  I took us down the left-hand path for no other reason than that there was a bit of shiny black to the leaves on the hedges there. It would be just like the road to Morgana’s place to be dark and shiny and gothic here Behind.

  As we walked, the darkness increased and the leaves on the hedges became draped in moonlit spiderwebs, though there wasn’t any moon to reflect off them. I don’t like spiders, but the sight of the webs cheered me up, anyway; the tickle of hope that I had somehow found the way to Morgana’s house kept me cheerful enough to not mind the thought of spiders crawling around somewhere in the leaves, just waiting to come out.

  And as we walked, it really did feel as though I could sense us getting closer to where we were supposed to be getting; a kind of sixth sense that would be useless anywhere except in the environment we were currently in.

  “Is the closed system supposed to help heirlings?” I asked.

  “No; it just accepts that there are things some heirlings can do and allows those things to happen.”

  I threw a quick look up at him. “So there could be heirlings in here who can’t even use Between?”

  There was a very brief pause before he said, “They won’t be here for long.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was worried about,” I said. And because he looked faintly guilty, I added, “It’s not like you did it; you don’t have to look so upset about it.”

  “I wasn’t—I didn’t look upset.”

  “It wasn’t an insult,” I said, and took the road straight ahead at the next cross-section, still following that vague feeling that this way led to black crepe and Morgana.

  We were nearly at that intangible goal when I realised that Les had disappeared.

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said, more indignant than worried. “The old mad bloke’s gone again.”

  “He can look after himself,” was all Zero said. “Keep going. We shouldn’t stop out here.”

  “I know,” I said; but I didn’t like it. The old mad bloke had survived too much to die here Behind instead of comfortably in the human world. At least in the human world he could get bubble tea and apple pie to make up for the lack of a steady life. “We’ll see if we can pick him up on the way back.”

  A moment later, we turned a blind corner and the back of Morgana’s house was framed between the two hedges before us: stark, almost two-dimensional in appearance, and glowing faintly pearl between the black lines. It looked as though someone had drawn the house on cardboard, cut it out, and made a thin, barely three-dimensional version of it for a pop-up card.

  The array of behindkind that were clustered around the windows and the back door were pretty flamin’ solid, though. If they hadn’t been moving, I would have thought they were just rock formations, and I didn’t like to think about rock formations that could move and fight.

  “Good grief!” I said below my breath. “What the heck are those?”

  “Rock dusters,” said Zero, re-sheathing the smaller heirling sword and bringing out his double-handed broadsword instead. “See if you can find anything heavier to fight with; double-handed if you can manage, single if not. You’ll need something sturdy, and you’ll need to make sure that the smaller ones don’t knock you to the ground for the bigger ones to squash.”

  So that’s why there were smaller ones as well.

  “Perfect,” I said, through dry lips. “Oi, they don’t have weapons.”

  “Their bodies are weapons.”

  “Like JinYeong,” I said, with a small laugh that caught in my throat. Heck. It would have been nice to have JinYeong here too, even if he was only complaining that his favourite suit was going to be ruined.

  Zero ignored my aside and instructed, “Don’t pull back or give way through a mista
ken sense of fair play; rock dusters grind living things to death for the fun of it.”

  “Which one do you reckon is the heirling?” I asked, spotting a promising sort of pruned branch within the hedge. I reached for it and felt a grippy handle within my fingers instead of a branch. “’F’we get that one first, the others might scatter, right?”

  “It’s possible,” said Zero, but his tone was dampening. “Have you got something?”

  “Yep,” I said, hauling on the grippy handle I’d found.

  I could have sworn I tried to pull out a sturdy, mid-sized sword that wasn’t too heavy for me to lift, but not light enough to be smashed. What came out instead was a cricket bat.

  I stared at it, and so did Zero.

  “You really have a type,” he said. “That’ll do. Go for their heads; the rest of them is nearly as hard as rock, but the dome of their heads is as close to shale as you can get in a living being.”

  “Head shot only,” I said. “Got it.”

  They sent a wave of the smaller rock dusters at us as soon as they saw us: a knee-high, bruising avalanche that fairly shook the ground and unsettled me enough to send my back foot stuttering backward.

  “Mind your toes,” instructed Zero.

  I hastily brought my feet back together, and maybe it was instinct, but I turned side-on and found myself in batting position. It was all instinct after that; one of the rock dusters charged right at me and I played a straight shot, sending a rapid jolt of Between down the haft of the cricket bat to hit the rock duster with the suggestion that it was very light instead of very heavy—and lofted the little beggar for six right over the top of the house.

  That seemed to worry the whole group of them, because there was a moment of absolute stillness that Zero broke by saying, “Good job, Pet. Do that to all of them, if you can,” before the smaller rock dusters rumbled forward again, this time more cautiously.

  I wasn’t cautious. I coated my entire bat in the essence-of-be-light Between to make anything I hit light, and played shot after shot: drive, square drive, sweep—anything I could start low and send high. I don’t know where the little beggars went after they sailed over the house or hedges, but none of them came back, and that was good enough.

  Zero left the last of them for me and strode on toward the bigger rock dusters, which was okay by me. There were only about six of the mongrels, but they were huge and I didn’t like my chances against them even if I did have a bat that could make them think they were light.

  I took care of my smaller rock dusters and then hurried into the fight closer to the house with aching arms once again. I might as well have left Zero to do it himself, for all the good it felt that I did. Every hit I managed to get in shook me to my bones but didn’t seem to make much of an impact on the rock dusters, and Zero had already taken care of three of them. He was slowing down a bit now, but he was at a good height to get at their heads, unlike me. The rocky bozos could hit hard, and Zero’s torso was mottled blue and purple where I could see it through the tear in his shirt.

  Obviously, I couldn’t leave the fight, even if it didn’t look like I was achieving much. I ducked under another swing that would have made tomato paste of my brains and darted toward the steps. I needed a height advantage. As I dodged a swing from a rock duster closer to the stairs and skipped right, something heavy and terracotta smashed on the ground a few feet away, sending pottery shards flying.

  I risked a glance up, narrowly avoiding a punch that would have had me on my back permanently looking up, and saw shutters open with a froth of children at each window: windmilling limbs, shoving projectiles at each other, and hanging precariously out into Behind to line up the next unsuspecting victim.

  The kids! Those homicidal, flower pot-wielding little menaces were up at the windows, taking literal pot shots at the rock dusters below, with little thought and probably not too much care whether it was an enemy or a friend that they actually hit.

  Another pot grazed my shoulder and hit the ground with shin-stinging force. I yelped and jumped sideways, instinctively ducking and covering—which probably saved my life, because a ringing clang just above my head took out one of the metal portico supports that framed the back stairs.

  “Heck!” I said, taking the steps two at a time and ducking for cover beneath the now-drunkenly-leaning portico. “Oi! You cockeyed little cabinet dwellers! You nearly hit me!”

  They only giggled, but the next pot shot missed me completely and hit the behindkind at the base of the stairs right on the top of his head, caving in his skull with a sickening sort of wet sound. I wiped his blood from my face and batted away the smaller rock duster that tried to cannonball my legs and tumble me down the stairs again.

  A few feet away, Zero set his sword at shoulder height and shoved it through the eye socket of the last standing rock duster as if it was paper mâché, shifting back briefly at the hips to avoid the last, powerless swing of the duster.

  “That’s flamin’ gross,” I said, then dropped my bat with a yelp as the back door was wrenched open behind me.

  “Pay attention to your surroundings, Pet!” said Zero through his teeth.

  Luckily for me, it was only Morgana and Daniel in the open doorway, not more rock dusters. Morgana, her face absolutely white, cried, “Pet!” and grabbed me as I turned around.

  I allowed it, but warned, “Careful! You’ll get blood all over you.”

  “I don’t care about blood!” she said, but she’d already closed her eyes. “If I can’t see it, it’s not there.”

  “It’ll still get all over your clothes, even if you can’t see it,” I protested, but she kept hugging me anyway.

  “Just let her hug you,” Daniel said. He seemed resigned. “She won’t feel better until she does, and it’s not like it hurts you. You can go wash off the blood afterward when she knows you’re still going to come back alive.”

  “I am right here,” said Morgana, with some dignity. The dignity was slightly ruined by the fact that although she turned her head to glare at him, she still hadn’t opened her eyes. “You should come in before any more of those things start trying to get through the door.”

  “Not to worry; you shouldn’t get any more of those ones coming through,” I said.

  “They’ll be different ones next time,” Zero said, ruining the moment. He took the stairs three at a time in two easy strides, and brushed past all of us to enter the house. “They’ll probably be more dangerous ones, too. Where are your things? We should leave while we can.”

  “We’ve already packed,” Daniel said, following him into the hallway.

  That left me with Morgana, who let go of me while carefully looking away so she wouldn’t see the blood, and wafted down the hall after the other two.

  “Hang on!” I said, far too late. “You’re standing up!”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, still carefully not looking at me. I had a feeling it wasn’t because of the blood this time.

  “All right,” I said, nice and easy, like she might run for it if I wasn’t careful enough. I knew what it had taken to get her on her feet, but I couldn’t regret it when I saw her standing up for the first time since I’d known her. It wasn’t right to expect her not to regret it, though. It was fair enough to not want to eat brains. “What’s the go with the kids? Are they coming with us?”

  “We’ve said our goodbyes,” Morgana said sadly. “We had a bit of a talk while you haven’t been around, me and the kids. I think they’re locked onto the house—Daniel told me that they were all murdered here, and I don’t think they can leave. It’s why they were so annoyed at those things outside.”

  “Yeah, I noticed,” I said, grinning. I pinched someone’s tshirt from the pile of clean laundry on the couch in passing and cleaned my face off so that Morgana could look at me without fainting from the sight of the blood. “They were pretty helpful; got rid of a few rock dusters for me that were pretty flamin’ inconvenient.”

  The next que
stion I had to ask was even more touchy, so I waited until I’d finished cleaning my face before I asked, “What about your parents?”

  “I couldn’t get into their room,” she said quietly, after a moment. “I had to try and explain from outside the door.”

  “If it helps, I don’t reckon there’s anything here in the arena that can hurt ’em,” I told her. If it wasn’t for Morgana’s feelings, I wouldn’t have cared if there was something that could hurt her parents. They’d bargained with Morgana’s life to escape death, and they deserved everything they got.

  The house didn’t echo quite right, a bit like a house that’s empty and ready to be moved out of, and before Morgana had a chance to reply, I heard Zero’s voice saying quite clearly from the kitchen, “We need to leave as quickly as possible. The sooner we get back, the less likely it is that anyone will have found the bodies we left behind us.”

  Morgana shot me an accusing look that banished the uncertainty that had lingered in her eyes, and I said, “We just killed a few fae who found the house and wanted to kill us. We haven’t been going around and killing people for the fun of it.”

  I nearly added, “Well, not all of us, anyway,” but that made me feel weird and squishy on the inside, so I sniffed away the words.

  “We’re ready to go,” Daniel’s voice said, also from the kitchen.

  Zero’s voice asked, “Just you and the zombie?”

  “I have a name,” said Morgana indignantly, starting forward into the kitchen ahead of me in her indignation.

  “We’re coming, too,” said a voice.

  “Yeah, we’re not staying here,” said another.

  I craned my head around the corner and saw five bulging cooler bags stacked together in the kitchen, along with three fat travel bags and six other lycanthropes.

  I opened my mouth to say, “Flamin’ heck, what’s all that!” at the cooler bags, but shut it as soon as Daniel glared at me. They were cooler bags and Morgana was walking—there were brains in those coolers, dead cert.

  Instead, I said, “Three bags for the eight of you?”