Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  “Yes, yes, I remember,” I said quickly, and started back down the hall so that I didn’t have to listen. I’d only just got back to a normal sort of equilibrium with Zero after Morgana had put ideas in my head in the first place, and I refused to let go of that tentative equilibrium.

  “And you’ve got the vampire hanging around at the window,” she said, trotting after me. “What are you going to do about that?”

  “Try and let him in, for starters,” I said. “Can’t leave him out there, getting into trouble—and the others say he keeps glaring at them, so—”

  “I mean, what are you going to do about the two of them? Zero’s probably just heroic enough to keep his mouth shut and say nothing if it looks like JinYeong already has you.”

  “First of all, Zero’s definitely not keeping his mouth shut,” I said plaintively. “He’s been throwing JinYeong through walls and warning him off. Secondly, do we have to talk about this?”

  “You’re the one who asked for advice a little while ago,” she pointed out. “I’m just asking if you actually know what you want? If they were both there outside the window with their hearts in their hands and you could only let one of ’em in, which one would it be?”

  “Dunno,” I said. But I did know—sort of. With Zero, I would always be the weak one, the frail one—the one who wasn’t quite as good, or fast, or as much of a person. I couldn’t do anything about it because it was how he thought. No matter what I did, so long as it was his thought process, that’s how he’d see me. And he’d give his life for me—but to him I would always be slightly less of a person than he was. I could love him, but I didn’t think I could ever be in love with him.

  With JinYeong, I was even. He was physically stronger than me, faster and definitely more likely to win in a fight, but somehow he could acknowledge where I was capable of the things he wasn’t. And I knew that in his eyes I was no less of a person for being a human. He knew where he came from too well for that. In a world of half-humans, corrupted humans, and fae, we corrupted humans were most likely to recognise each other. If it came to a choice of being loved without respect or respected and not loved, I wanted to be respected.

  And JinYeong promised both.

  “Liar,” said Morgana, far too sharp. She seemed content enough not to ask anything else, though; maybe she knew I was as confused as she was about her choice to either eat or not eat brains.

  All I knew with any certainty was that if there was a choice between JinYeong and Zero, I would pick JinYeong every time. But was it a choice between them? Did I have to choose anyone? Did I want to choose someone? That was the biggest thing I wasn’t sure about, and until I was sure about it, it didn’t seem fair to try things out with anyone. Especially not when the vampire was already emotionally unsteady and the fae had recently become emotionally unsteady.

  Especially not when the world as we knew it was winding up like a jack-in-the-box, getting ready to leap out in all its dangerous behindkind conflict at human passersby.

  We tried to have a quiet cuppa to while away the time, but lycanthropes don’t really do quiet cuppas when there’s nothing on the telly; they ferret through cupboards and start snarling and fighting at a moment’s notice, then tumble through the whole house, snapping and growling.

  Morgana and I left the kitchen when it looked as though we were likely to be knocked over in the fight, guarding our mugs from flying wolf fur, and went upstairs instead. Luckily for me, Morgana left the discussion of hearts downstairs too; she was happy to sit in the beanbag in my room, displacing a few of the collected papers there, and sip at her coffee while I did the same on the floor opposite her with my back against the wall. I hadn’t slept in or sat on my bed for…well, a few nights now. Hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it, which meant that once the beanbag was taken, the floor was all that was left.

  Morgana seemed happy not to talk at all, in fact. She made a happy little indent in the beanbag with her coffee cup on her stomach and lifted first one foot and then the other to rotate as she observed it. At first, I thought she was just admiring her shoes—I didn’t remember her wearing shoes before—because they were about as goth as she was while still being absolutely beautiful. Then it occurred to me that she was quietly marvelling over the fact that her feet moved—that her legs were at her own command—and I realised that even the most minute movements were beautiful to her.

  I let Morgana delight in the movement of her feet until the coffee was gone and she discovered the stack of papers still behind the beanbag by the simple expedient of putting her coffee cup down on it.

  “Good grief, what’s this?” she asked, slipping them out from beneath the coffee cup. “Hey! This has my address on it!”

  “It’s stuff that Athelas made someone collect for him,” I said. “I found out about it and was able to get my hands on a copy.”

  Morgana’s left foot froze where it was. “I still see him in my nightmares,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t need to say me too, because Morgana already knew; we’d talked about it a few days ago. She’d had a right to know that we found the bloke who was responsible for making her what she was.

  Hoping to turn the subject to something a little bit less fraught, I added, “One of the bits of info is missing, though: a copy of my great-grandma’s driving license. I haven’t been able to find it for a while, and I even moved the couches out there to make sure it wasn’t under anything.”

  Morgana’s mouth compressed in a thoughtful black rosebud. “Could either of them have taken it?”

  “Don’t know what Zero would want with it, and I can’t ask JinYeong about it,” I said. “I thought it might have been Athelas but he would already have known about it without having to see copies again.”

  “Yes,” said Morgana, relaxing a little again. She pivoted her toe and pointed it, then did the whole routine backwards. “That’s something that really makes me curious. This one with my address—the record of your great-grandma—what did he want them for?”

  “We think he was trying to find out who else had access to all of this information,” I said. “Someone’s been paying the power and water bills here for years before the psychos arrived—and yours. A lot of kids like us who were housebound for one reason or another had their electric and water kept on because someone was paying for it.”

  “You think someone has been looking after heirlings?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “And Athelas was looking for that person—to kill them, I suppose. Or maybe just to find out how many heirlings slipped past him.”

  “Why get your detective to do it, though?” she asked. “That’s just asking for trouble, and I don’t think Athelas is stupid.”

  “The detective was a bit too hasty with telling Athelas he owed him,” I said gloomily. “This was the result, I suppose. He couldn’t help but do as he was told and keep quiet about it.”

  “Yes, but anyone can tell that Detective Tuatu is mulish and will do his best to scupper sneaky people,” she argued. “And you have the papers, so obviously—”

  Someone downstairs yelped—a short, sharp, high thing that had Morgana sitting up straight in front of the beanbag, red about the eyes—and I scrambled to my feet, staggering in the sudden distortion of the room around me.

  Something was pulling at the house. Pulling hard and pulling with more than purely physical means.

  “I bet it’s that flamin’ window again,” I said, starting for the stairs at a run.

  There was an almighty crash before I got all the way down, followed by snarling so vicious and wild that I almost stopped running toward it. I tumbled around the corner of the stairs and into the living room, and saw blades—no, claws!—so long and curved that they didn’t seem practical, protruding into the living room and then drawn back.

  A lycanthrope in wolf form went flying through the divide between kitchen and living room, tumbling into the couch, and I heard Morgana switch directions behind me. Without a
word, I darted for the kitchen and she went for the living room.

  I lunged up the slight rise into the kitchen and straight into an instinctive roll, barely avoiding a slashing attempt from the same huge claws I’d seen extend into the living room. It was an undirected attack, but my roll was pretty undirected, too, and I nearly collided with the kitchen island while the claws stabbed into the wall and seemed to be caught for the time being.

  I used that moment to look around and assess what was happening. Nearby, blood pooled in the kitchen from something hairy that was mostly out of sight behind the kitchen island. A quick step around settled my stomach, because although the lycanthrope there was in a bad way, she was still alive. Chantelle, her name was; she was torn and panting hard, and I didn’t think she’d be moving any time soon, but she was still breathing.

  The window was the problem. The broken table listed drunkenly below the window with two broken legs, and in the window…

  Heck. What was it in the window?

  At first glance it could have been a huge protrusion of the kind of reeds that you find beside a dam or a waterhole—fatter and rounder than grass, but smaller than bullrushes—if someone had gotten about half-a-house’s-worth of the stuff and shoved it through someone else’s window. And if that half-a-house’s-worth of grass had grown sly, stupid, muddy eyes, pointed ears with tufts of grass at the tops, and stupidly long arms with elbows that couldn’t help digging into the floor while the huge hands at the end of the other half of them either waved wildly or kept close to the body with huge claws that had already torn chunks out of the room.

  Those claws were ridiculous in their size—almost too big to be useable. Heck, the arms were ridiculous. But it had done a lot of damage with those claws, and it was still only halfway through the window, its almost marsupial body stuck at the back haunches while its free arm jerked in a paroxysm of furious desire for freedom and the other clutched what looked like a lifeless lycanthrope to its reedy chest.

  That body made me think there should be a tail out there somewhere, but if it was anything like the horror that was its arms, I didn’t really want to have the chance to check.

  “Flamin’ heck,” I breathed, unable to stop staring. “It’s a bunyip, isn’t it? It’s a flamin’ bunyip.”

  It was a bunyip that was struggling pretty hard to get its claws out of the wall, too—which meant that I needed to find weapons now. I sent another look around the room, looking for options, and lunged at the knife block.

  A second later I had the chef’s knife in one hand and the santoku in the other; I shook out my shoulders and flicked my wrists outward, and those blades extended until they were the same length and shape, much to my relief. I was used to fighting with twin swords when I fought with two swords, and an unbalanced pair of weapons would have thrown me off completely.

  Hopefully they’d turn back into knives after all of this was done: they were a good set of knives, and I didn’t want to have to buy another set now that I’d got used to them.

  “Pet!” called Morgana, interrupting my thoughts. “Where are you?”

  “Dining room!” I yelled. “Better stay there. There’s a wolf in the kitchen that needs some help, but she’ll be fine until I get this thing out of the window.”

  Plaster and paint exploded as the bunyip finally tore its claws from the wall. I covered my eyes with the crook of my arm to keep off the worst of the chips and dust, but took it away pretty quickly at the first shifting of rubble that meant movement from the arm.

  The bunyip was already drawing back its arm at the elbow, broken ceiling and wall trailing from it. I don’t know what kind of joint it had in there, but it used its elbow as a pivot to sweep and flick those claws at me. I leaped over that sweep, but one of the claws caught the slight heel of my boot and my leap forward turned into another tumble, this one only slightly more deliberate than the first, right past the hairy elbow that was planted where the dining table ought to be.

  I scrambled to my feet, shedding plaster and paint as I rose, and met a fresh onslaught with my blades braced and crossed. I let it knock me to the floor without taking the edge of the blade-like claws and slithered out of my defence to spin in place on my butt and stab through the muscly part of the arm.

  The bunyip yowled high and wild, like a feral cat, and dropped the lycanthrope to swipe at me with the other hand. Luckily for me, it hit with the back of its hand and not the claws, sending me sliding across the floor on my rear.

  Heck. That was gunna be good for the seat of my pants.

  I rolled with the last of my momentum, and heard Morgana’s voice from the living room, too deep and guttural to be quite human.

  “Pet,” it said. “Are you alive?”

  “I’m fine!” I yelled, coughing up dust. “But I hope ripped jeans are gunna come back into fashion because I’m gunna be fashionable for the first time in my life and I don’t wanna waste the opportunity!”

  “I need to get to Chantelle in the kitchen! Can you cover me?”

  “Gimme a sec! Get ready!”

  I vaulted over the bunyip’s elbow again, avoiding the bristly spikes, spun in place to send another stab right through the flesh and muscle there, and wrenched the sword free just in time to duck beneath the fresh attack that action brought on. Low and dusty, I scrambled toward the living room opening and turned back to face the bunyip. For the first time since entering the room, I got a chance to see its face instead of just concentrating on its gangling arms, and the sheer, stupid malevolence of its expression chilled me like the scything blades of its claws hadn’t.

  Stupid was good. Malevolent wasn’t. Malevolent usually meant that something would keep stabbing something that looked dead, even though it was dead. I didn’t like what that meant for the injured lycanthropes in the vicinity. Chantelle wasn’t in too bad of a position, but Kyle—or was it Kevin?—was still in a very bad place. We only had enough manpower to get one lycanthrope out of the battle ground right now, and Chantelle was very definitely alive. I didn’t like to give up on anyone, but the sooner we could get Chantelle out of the line of fire, the better; I would just have to hope that Kyle wasn’t dead, and that the bunyip didn’t become enraged enough to have another go at him.

  The bunyip had another swipe at me; I met the onslaught and redirected it, sending the claws into what was left of the wall between dining room and living room.

  “Go, go, go!” I yelled.

  Morgana shot through behind me and straight into the kitchen, far too quick to be human, and I scrambled onto the kitchen island just in time to bat away another loose, not-quite-properly-aimed swing that passed overhead and took out the upper kitchen cupboards on the same wall as the window.

  I stretched and planted one booted foot on the opposite bench, hacking at the wrist as if it were a vine in the rainforest, and was very nearly knocked flying when the bunyip wrenched its arm away, sending cupboard doors flying off their hinges and into the other rooms. I gave it a good shave along the lower side of the arm as that arm passed over my head and shoved back with my extended leg to retreat along the kitchen island again.

  I couldn’t take the time to look, but I heard scrabbling behind and below me as Morgana tried to move Chantelle—heard the small whimper that movement caused. The lycanthrope beneath the window growled at that, deep and savage, and stirred. He staggered to his feet like a newborn lamb, the pelt on his left shoulder sagging a bit too much to be normal and freely running red.

  “Play dead!” I yelled at him, bright with relief that he was alive but agonisingly aware that any signs of life would draw the attention of the bunyip once again. It seemed to like lively prey.

  He didn’t have the chance to play dead: before I could even jump down from the benchtop, the bunyip curled in with one of those ridiculously long arms and snatched up Kevin, or Kyle.

  I yelled to try and capture its attention, and maybe it decided that things were getting too hot to handle. It looked at me with its stupid brown eyes
and then, lycanthrope in grasp, heaved itself back through the window, reed-like hair slapping against the lopsided window frame as it went. The claws scythed after it like quicksilver, disappearing into the dark in a moment, and I leaped from the kitchen island, slicing too late to get anything but a resounding clang from the last claw.

  I caught myself in the window frame, my boots dusty with rubble from the damage and my right hand catching the remaining wall above the space. From here, I could just see the bunyip as it tried to swim and sink into the darkness as if it were dam water, the suspicion of a tail coiling behind it, sinuous and deadly.

  “Pet!” yelled Morgana.

  I threw a glance over my shoulder and met blood-red eyes that should have been frightening but were too sorrowful to really frighten me. A lycanthrope, halfway between wolf and human girl, was cradled in Morgana’s arms, shivering with her side cut open and bleeding far too much. But back in the darkness of the window was a rapidly vanishing lycanthrope in the clutches of a bunyip, and he didn’t have anyone to help him.

  Heck. Looked like I could only obey one of Zero’s commands: Keep the Others Safe or Not do Anything Hasty.

  “Look after the others,” I said to Morgana; then, seizing on that last flicker of the essence of Kevin or Kyle that nearly snuffed out in the blink of an eye between thinking and jumping, I leapt out into the cold, deadly darkness.

  Chapter Six

  I said it was dark looking out from the window, but it was worse outside the window. Darker. Less real. More like being inside a spherical, bouncy black trampoline where you didn’t know which way was up because there was no up. No sign of the window, either.

  I wasn’t standing on anything, either. I was literally standing on darkness, nothingness; and it definitely didn’t feel solid. Worst of all, I couldn’t sense Kevin any longer, and there was no sign of the bunyip.