Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  “We already have another change,” said one of the lycanthropes, winking at me.

  Zero shot him a cold look, and he gulped and looked away.

  Daniel said, “We’ve got what we need, and we already know it’s dangerous out there. The lighter we travel, the better; one bag per person. How long did you say we’d be shut up in your house?”

  “I didn’t,” said Zero, to whom the question was addressed. His voice was grim, but that was pretty normal.

  “Only until we figure a way out of the trials,” I said. No one had asked me, but there was no way I was going to be imprisoned in my own house where the only permanent way out was to foray into fairyland and fight to the death. There was no way I was going to let people shut JinYeong out of the house, either. “Once we figure a way out, they can stay in here and fight to the death while we send a message that we don’t want to be heirlings.”

  “We can do that?” asked Morgana, her eyes lighting up. “I don’t want to fight, either.”

  “Coulda fooled me,” said one of the lycanthropes, and was ruthlessly smacked across the ears from about four different directions.

  Morgana’s chin crinkled very slightly and then grew firm. “I told them not to come into the house,” she said.

  “We had a few visitors before the rock dusters,” explained Daniel. “They took us by surprise, especially since they got into the house, so—”

  “You said we shouldn’t stay here for too long,” Morgana said, grabbing one of the bags. “So let’s get going and leave the stories for later.”

  Morgana took another few minutes to say a second goodbye to the ghost kiddies before we left. I don’t think Daniel was too happy about it, but the kids had a tendency to try and drop things on his head from the upper floors when he was on the stairs, so I didn’t really blame him. And even if there were no rock dusters outside, the same sense of menace still hung over the whole house, tickling around my ears like a cold breeze that shouldn’t be where it was.

  I hunched my shoulders, wondering at the familiarity of the feeling, but didn’t have time to figure it out. Zero, who had followed Morgana up to the second level but no further, stuck his head around the balustrade and caught sight of me.

  “Pet,” he said, in a low voice. “You should see this.”

  “Dunno if I want to,” I muttered, but I went up the stairs anyway. Morgana’s house was nearly as familiar as mine: I’d spent a while here not long ago, and if I was judging right, Zero had just come from the bathroom. Given there were now multiple lycanthropes in the house instead of one zombie girl and about a dozen ghosts—none of whom had any basic bodily functions any longer, despite the fact that they seemed to be able to eat—it probably wasn’t going to be very pretty.

  It turned out Zero had come from Morgana’s room, not the bathroom. That gave me a few moments of relief until I followed him through the room and into her little attached kitchen and saw what was there.

  I’m not sure what I expected to see; what I didn’t expect was to feel the renewed knife of cold breeze as soon as I entered. The window there in the kitchenette was inky blackness, just like the window in our kitchen had been before Zero blocked it up, a cold not-breeze billowing the tiny curtains. Apart from that, the kitchen was all black and white and red tiles; nice and gothic, except that the black and white was tile and the red was blood—lots of it. I mean, I suppose that’s gothic, too. It wasn’t supposed to be on the walls, though.

  The real mess was on the floor; four more-or-less human-looking bodies tumbled on top of each other in a pool of blood that seemed to end at about…neck level. In other words, all of the bodies were headless—or nearly headless—the remains of their jawbones and skull cavities loose and dangling like the remains of popped balloons. Some of that popped balloon had made it all the way back into the carpeted part of Morgana’s room.

  I would have said, “Wonder where the brains went,” but I was pretty sure I already knew. Instead, I asked Zero, “You reckon she ate ’em straight outta the skull? Or did Daniel and the others clean ’em out afterward and pack ’em for supplies?”

  “These two are clean,” said Zero, pointing to two of the bodies in turn. “Cleaner, at any rate; no teeth marks.”

  I struggled with my breakfast for a few moments before I said thickly, “So she ate two?”

  “Warm from the body,” he agreed.

  “Thanks for that,” I said, swallowing. I prodded the closest body with the toe of my boot. “Looks like she was hungry.”

  Zero shrugged. “Hungry, or angry. There’s human blood in here, and—”

  “Oh,” I said, because I saw the coffee cups at the same time. One lay partway beneath a body, spilt coffee long over-run and thickened by blood; the other listed drunkenly on the countertop with a broken handle, a slowly-drying stream of coffee leading tackily toward the edge of the counter and the entire lot sprinkled with blood. “Doesn’t look like she had trouble with fainting in here.”

  Morgana had seen something come through her kitchen window while someone prepared coffee for her—something that attacked whoever was there. And true to her word, she hadn’t needed to get to the fridge to make sure she was fed.

  “Well,” I said, when I was pretty sure my breakfast wasn’t going to come back up, “I s’pose at least we know we don’t have to worry about Morgana being dead weight, right?”

  Chapter Four

  You could say it was lucky that we made it home without having to fight again, but by that stage I wasn’t exactly sure who it was lucky for. Judging from the bodies I’d seen in the kitchen back in Morgana’s house, we weren’t short on muscle power ourselves.

  It was a relief, anyway. The old mad bloke was waiting for us on the back step when we got back, too, which sent another spark of relief fizzing through me.

  Daniel said suspiciously, “What’s he doing here?”

  “Waiting for us to open the door, I reckon,” I said flippantly. “Dunno why he can’t get in this time; he seems to be able to get in whenever he wants to any other time.”

  “I mean why is he here at all!” snapped Daniel. “It’s only supposed to be heirlings in here, and—”

  “You’re here,” I pointed out. “And a whole lot of rock dusters who weren’t all heirlings, not to mention the lycanthropes you two brought along with you. It looks like whoever’s with you when this thing starts up is who comes along for the ride.”

  “I thought the trials had to be made up of all the heirlings and only the heirlings,” complained Daniel. “They don’t tell us lycanthropes anything.”

  “You and vampires both,” I said, grinning at Les as I stepped up to open the back door. “That’s what happens when you’re a second-class citizen.”

  “Tell me about it,” he muttered, following close behind me with Morgana sandwiched between us. That was pretty funny, because Morgana probably could have outfought the both of us, judging by the carnage in the kitchen earlier.

  “Maybe someone knows too many names,” I suggested.

  I caught a glimpse of Zero following behind Daniel. He said, “The arena does its best with a series of presets that pull away anyone likely to be an heirling with their surroundings, and plants them in the arena. If the heirling names were known, another heirling, the king, or the harbinger could call them to combat—it would be a mess. Occasionally the harbinger has been known to call two finalists to combat when they were dragging their feet, but heirlings are usually careful not to let their names be known.”

  “Hear that?” I said to the old mad bloke. “You’re supposed to go calling the king and whoever wants to fight by their names so they can fight and leave the rest of the heirlings out of it.”

  Les threw me a suspicious look. “You want to fight, lady?”

  “Heck no!” I said hastily. “I just want to—JinYeong!”

  I heard Daniel groan and there was an accompanying, short sigh from Zero, but I didn’t care because I could see JinYeong slouched beside the win
dow as I came out of the back hallway and into the living room.

  He straightened as soon as he saw me and I grinned and waved at him, crossing the living room at a trot. I might not be able to talk to him in a way that he could hear, but it was nice to see his face anyway. I didn’t want him to think that we’d nicked off and left him alone out there. It might be safer out there than it was in here, but that didn’t make it any less lonely and I was pretty sure that JinYeong was more of a people person than he liked to pretend.

  “Lady,” said Les, tugging at my sleeve confidentially just as I made it to the window. “You really shouldn’t want to fight.”

  “I don’t want to fight,” I said, beaming at JinYeong. There was a flutter of movement to his left, just out of sight, so he must have brought someone with him. “I just want to get my people out of here safely.”

  “Am I your people?”

  “’Course,” I said, surprised. “Gave you apple pie, didn’t I?”

  “Stole it,” he muttered, but he looked pleased anyway. JinYeong scowled at him and he scurried away again, though I wasn’t sure where he went. I never was, anyway; the old mad bloke was basically a larger version of the banshees, who hid in the rafters, skirting boards, and bookcases, not to mention the washing machine.

  Once we were alone again, JinYeong held up his index finger, looking very pleased with himself—as if to say, Just a moment, please. Then, with the air of someone giving a present for which he knows he will receive suitable thanks, he tugged the unseen person into sight—or at least, dragged him.

  Heck. This time, he’d brought Marazul along. Marazul didn’t look very happy about it, but at least it didn’t look like JinYeong had dragged him along by the scruff like he had with Five; he had certainly wheeled Marazul into eyesight, but the fact that the merman seemed startled and discomforted by the action gave me hope it was a new indignity rather than a continuance of it.

  “Don’t do that,” I said, pointing at Marazul’s wheelchair and frowning at JinYeong. “It’s flamin’ rude to drag people around by their chairs.”

  JinYeong cocked his head, one eyebrow rising, and touched the handle of the wheelchair once again as if to ask, This? You’re annoyed about this?

  “Yes,” I said emphatically, nodding so that he wouldn’t be in any doubt. “You can’t just wheel people around without their permission!”

  His eyes narrowed thoughtfully while Marazul looked up at him in exasperation and some trepidation; then JinYeong released the handle with a little flick of his fingers and made the slightest bow toward Marazul, who looked about as flabbergasted as I felt.

  I blinked a bit and gave Marazul the thumbs-up, which he returned tentatively, then I smiled happily at JinYeong. “See! You can stop yourself from being a prat when you want to!”

  JinYeong’s eyes narrowed again, as if trying to decide whether or not to be offended, but I thought I caught a gleam of laughter in the darkness of them anyway. He tilted his head toward Marazul and I saw his lips move in a way that seemed to be, “Jal dwill ko kata.”

  I think it will be fine.

  I couldn’t help the small smile that crossed my lips, or the warmth in my heart.

  “We’ll see,” I said to him, leaning against my side of the window and making an almost mirror image of him. I didn’t dare to hope too much, even if Marazul and I together had defended a café from goblins and rescued a good handful of humans from a slow, siphoning death by emailing them out of the café and into the closest library. If anyone could figure out what to do in this situation, it was probably Marazul; he was very good at wriggling out of dangerous situations.

  I wondered for a brief moment if that was just sour grapes on my part, since Marazul had wriggled out of a dangerous situation by selling me out to Zero not so long ago; but the thought wasn’t as bitter as it had been. JinYeong seemed to have gotten over his dislike of the merman for long enough to ask for his help, too—or had he?

  I took a quick look at JinYeong’s profile, wishing I could see his face properly; he was still there, still close, but his attention was on Marazul. For a brief second, I found myself very nearly as cranky about that as JinYeong had been about being interrupted by Les earlier, and hastily looked away.

  Good grief, what was wrong with me?

  I suppose that once you’ve shared a house with someone for a year they start to work their way into the regular rhythms of your life—enough to make a bit of a hole when they’re suddenly not there any longer. Athelas had left a hole, too, even if it was a different kind of hole.

  It wasn’t as though we had been separated from JinYeong for very long: barely a day in the human world. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t see him, either. He was right there, even if I couldn’t touch him or smell him.

  Good grief, when had I got so used to having him beside me—warmth and all, cologne and all—that I’d become addicted? Because that’s what it must be. I was so used to having my emotional support vampire there that I was going into withdrawal when I couldn’t have him.

  “I’m fine without you,” I muttered at his profile, and tried very hard to concentrate on what I could lipread of his and Marazul’s conversation.

  Far too late, I realised that I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. Why couldn’t I understand at least Marazul? I’d been able to do a bit of lipreading with Five, so why was it even harder to understand Marazul than it was to understand JinYeong?

  It wasn’t until I saw Marazul mouth something I was certain was “Si, si, bene!” that I dredged up the last remnants of the Italian I had learned with mum and realised what was happening. The sneaky merman must have been speaking in Italian the whole time I knew him: he had been using Between to translate everything he said, just like JinYeong did when he wanted to be understood. Only I had known that JinYeong was doing it, and I had taken it for granted that Marzul was speaking to me in English.

  Well. This was just great—the two of them having a conversation; JinYeong in Korean, Marazul in Italian. They understood each other out there, but from inside the house I couldn’t understand either.

  “This is flamin’ garbage,” I said grumpily.

  Zero said questioningly, “Pet?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just something else making life harder. Not sure Marazul will be much help.”

  “I didn’t think he would,” was all Zero said, before turning back to Morgana.

  I managed not to roll my eyes and turned back to the window just in time to see Marazul pull out his laptop, set it up on his knees, and start threading a clever electronic sort of working around the window frame that fizzed as it joined at the top. It made a buzz in the room, too—a buzz that had one of the wolf-form lycanthropes shaking his head and whining, and even Zero looked up in my peripheral, startled and worried.

  “What are you doing, Pet?”

  “It’s not me!” I said, grinning, my eyes on Marazul, who seemed to be struggling with the working.

  At any rate, he was holding onto his laptop pretty tight, and if I had to guess, I would have said he was vibrating slightly, too. He didn’t look worried, but he did look increasingly rueful.

  “’Zul’s having a go at something,” I added. “I don’t think it’s working, but it seems to be doing something, anyway.”

  The buzz took a while to die down, even after Marazul had evidently stopped his working; a slight fuzz of it still hung in the air after Marazul and JinYeong stopped arguing back and forth and turned their attention on me.

  The merman met my eyes as he opened his mouth, then stopped, thought, and started to speak very slowly and carefully—in English. It looked as though he understood what he was seeing and why it didn’t work; that, moreover, he needed to make it easy for me to lip-read.

  I couldn’t understand everything he said, but I got the gist of it. Marazul had thought that he might be able to open up communication by tracking the vibrations of the window as we spoke, but for some reason—“neither side is synched with
the other” was what I thought he said—he couldn’t get it to work.

  JinYeong, his lips compressed and his eyes dark and dangerous, just glared at him.

  “Don’t blame Marazul for not being able to do something,” I said. “It’s not like he hasn’t tried.”

  “What has he tried?” asked Zero. I hadn’t heard him sneak up behind me, but I often didn’t; he’s far too light-footed for someone of his size. “That buzzing might have drawn unwanted attention from outside if anyone was near enough to sense it—I’d rather he didn’t do it again.”

  “Reckon he was trying to read the vibrations from the glass as we speak and feed it into one of his little magic computers,” I said. “He says things aren’t synched up and that’s why he can’t.”

  “Molecules vibrate,” called Morgana, perched upright on the couch with her legs crossed and her back straight and proud. “That’s how living stuff is and behaves and interacts. I suppose with magic it’d be possible to make the outside and inside molecules vibrate just enough out of synch with each other so that we can’t interact. It’s surprising we can still see each other.”

  The look that Zero shot her was equal parts respect and confusion. “Does this apply only to the human world?”

  Morgana shrugged, but said, “Doubt it. The way some of you can…do stuff that you call magic seems to follow a lot of the same principles, even if you don’t know the right words to call ’em.”

  “Who have you been watching do magic?” I asked, huffing a surprised laugh.

  “We’re not just animals you know,” said either Darren or Dylan. “We can do stuff other behindkind can do.”

  “Beaut,” I muttered. “Just what we need, lycanthropes doing magic.”

  Zero left me alone at the window, much to JinYeong’s surprised amusement, and sat down in his own couch, casually displacing a lycanthrope to do so. “What is your position upon magic, then, zombie?”

  “First of all, my name is Morgana. I don’t call you fae boy, do I? Secondly, my position is that magic is just really hands-on science. Basically, I think you behindkind have a really good grip on your physical body and on the vibrations of the world around you. That’s my guess, anyway. Every time you do something with magic, I bet it’s just the vibrations working for you—not to mention the fact that you seem to vibrate on the right level to actually interact with non-physical things.”