Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  “Reckon you’re gunna be sorry if you don’t let me go,” I said, slurring a little. “’Cos one of the things about people loving you is that they’ll do a lot for you, and I don’t reckon I could stop ’em if they get out.”

  “We’ll begin with your ears,” he said disdainfully, ignoring me. “You don’t use them, so consider it a kindness in me to take the appendages you aren’t using first.”

  “Take my ears off and my friend is gunna take your face off,” I spat at him. “She’s flamin’ hungry these days and you’re not gunna like it if you make her angry.”

  He laughed at me, reaching out to pinch my ear between his forefinger and thumb, and I bit his wrist. I bit flamin’ hard and tasted blood—and as I tasted that blood I knew in an electrifying moment of clarity that what I had just done couldn’t be taken back.

  I could have stopped then, but I bit harder instead. It must have hurt, but Sero only laughed again and contemptuously shook me off. I hit the ground hard and lost the last of my breath in pain as my rib was jolted again.

  “Human until the end,” he said, sneering down at me. “When you’re powerless, all you can do is turn savage and die snarling.”

  I don’t think he expected me to grin with bloody teeth, and I’m flamin’ sure he didn’t expect the laugh that came out, as bloody and wicked as any of JinYeong’s chuckles.

  “Don’t reckon you understand, mate,” I said. “I mean, I’m savage, yeah—savage enough to bite you. But that’s not the important thing about me right now.”

  “The important thing about you right now is that you’re precious to my son,” he said. “And you are no less precious to me thereby. Son—”

  As he spoke, he turned to pace back toward Zero. He tried to turn, anyway; there was a weakness in that turn that had him grabbing at the shoulder of the nearest behindkind, and he only got a few steps away before I called after him.

  “Wanna know what the important thing is?”

  He staggered as he turned back around too, and I could have sworn that there was fear in his cold blue eyes. “What did you do to me, you feral?”

  “The important thing about me today is that I told the vampire I’d go out with him,” I said, still grinning that bloody grin at him. “Kissed him, too, which is probably more important.”

  “Your revolting display is of no interest to me whatsoever,” said Lord Sero, looking ill. “Vampires may kiss humans once in a while, but in the end they have only one desire: to bite and to consume.”

  “Maybe when they think about them as food,” I agreed, staggering to my feet. “But my vampire doesn’t think of me as food, and you’re missing the point. You’re not feeling too well, are you?”

  Through his teeth, he repeated, “What did you do to me, you feral?”

  “Now, if he’d bitten me, you’d be fine,” I said, swaying with my feet sinking in grass instead of crackling against it. Ice was melting. “All that saliva would’ve gone straight to my bloodstream. But the thing about kissing is that saliva gets a bit mixed, and I’m pretty sure you’ve got a bit of vampire spit doing loop-de-loops in your blood now, too.”

  He stared at me in disgusted outrage. “How dare you infect me with that vampire filth!”

  “That’s the funny thing about you lot,” I said, gasping a bit as my injured side went into muscle spasms. “You’re more outraged about being contaminated than you are about potentially dying.”

  “I refuse to die for such a reason,” he ground out.

  “Don’t reckon you’ve got much choice,” I told him, grinning another bloody grin at him.

  “If I am to die, so are you, human!” he spat. “I don’t know exactly what mix you are, but—”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” I said. “But vampire spit doesn’t do that to me—heard you gotta be fae for it to work like that.”

  He stared at me, still clinging to the shoulder of the bloke he’d grabbed, and said thickly, “You must have fae blood—there’s no other strain of behindkind that would have left you looking so human and yet carrying the abilities you carry.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I don’t know about being an heirling through and through, but I’m pretty flamin’ sure I’m human through and through. I’ve been taking in vampire spit for the last year; I’m pretty well adjusted now.”

  Lord Sero’s face worked, and he released his hold on the behindkind to stagger toward me, his sword rising with difficulty. His minions let him come, and that surprised me until I realised that he hadn’t given them any other orders.

  He raised that sword properly, but as if in a trance, and made as if to attack.

  “Nope,” I said again, batting it away. “I’m not going to let you stab me just because I’m a lowly human and you’re a powerful fae.”

  “You’ve all but killed me,” he said. “You little fool, you’ve all but killed me. I can do so much for you if you’ll only swear fealty—you don’t even have the mental capacity to realise how much power you could have behind you.”

  “Know what the funny thing is?” I asked, groaning through another wave of spasms from the muscles around my broken rib. “You’re gunna die from an infection from an unconnected, stupid little human like the unimportant piece of garbage that you are, instead of a glorious death somewhere that your family can spin and make sound good.”

  Even though he’d talked of death, I wasn’t sure he quite believed it yet. But as he grew weaker, it seemed that I grew stronger—or maybe it was just that it was easier to connect with the house. As his strength waned, I saw the connections of the house again: the connections of his house and mine, slowly but surely fusing together. We hadn’t stopped in the sudden, screeching halt I thought we had: my house had still been gently, slowly, taking over. And now I began to see how everything connected again.

  Lord Sero was a lightbulb—connected to the grassy floor, all the threads of his house flowed through him. More importantly, I saw the poison of JinYeong’s spit coursing through his body, a black filigree among the glittering blue connections of the house.

  He dropped to one knee, shoulders sagging. “Wait!” he panted. “Wait! I swear fealty! I swear fealty to you! I and mine are yours to command; all you have to do is save me. You can’t face the king alone, but if you have my backing you’ll yet live to see the change and for centuries after.”

  For once, I was nearly stunned into silence. At last, I croaked, “What?”

  “I. Swear. Fealty,” he ground out. “I will be your man, and you will have at your back countless resources—in your hands countless weapons. Heal me.”

  I didn’t want to be king—I desperately didn’t want to be king. But for a moment I could see a potential future that didn’t involve my sudden and painful death. I didn’t have to be the king: with the amount of power Lord Sero harnessed at my control, I could make sure that everything was put right in the world Behind and Between—including finding the right behindkind to be king. From there, I could make sure everything was put right in the human world as well. I would have the power to change things I couldn’t change as a human. I could support a decent candidate, and I wouldn’t be alone in it; I’d have the actual ability to make sure that the chosen heirling made it safely to the throne.

  I would have the power to do everything that needed to be done to protect my friends and my small family. I would be able to see next year and the year after with what remained of that family. I could even think about properly dating without the possibility of being hunted down while out for something to eat. More than that, I would be able to take something evil and spoiled and turn it into something by which good could be done.

  I could defeat the King Behind and rout the entire Behind legal system while being supported by a good half of the system itself.

  I drew in a deep, shuddering breath, terrified at the strength of my desire to accept that offer. To be able to live, and love, and die when I ought to die instead of dying young while trying to fix problems that were too
big to fix alone, alone.

  I could even see how I could heal Lord Sero—like the house, which was running with Between that circled right around and into him, Lord Sero himself was flowing with Between. If I fed the poison that was running in his veins into the house and then severed him from it, it would be like plucking a flower before it could die from a good dose of weed killer.

  “You’ve got no idea how much I wish I could accept your oath,” I said, still shaken by the strength of that desire and with an aching heart for all that I was giving up. Across the room and through a film of icy flowers, I could see JinYeong, still bleeding from the forehead but on his feet and pressing against the ice. It wasn’t like a relationship with him would ever have been normal, anyway, even if we weren’t worried about dying any day we left the house.

  “You can accept it—you must! You won’t live without it.”

  “Yeah,” I said, with a sigh caught in my throat. JinYeong’s eyes were on me, dark and liquid, unwavering. “Maybe. But at least I’ll die as a human without building on someone else’s corrupted empire. I’ve never much liked walking over bodies, and it’s probably a bit late to start getting used to it now.”

  “You have no choice,” he said through his teeth. “You must accept the oath. I am yours to command and preserve.”

  “Nope,” I said. “That’s one thing I do know about oaths of fealty. They don’t have to be accepted. You can sit there and die while your men watch and try to decide whether or not they’re going to stay with you.”

  I don’t know if it was a plea or if he just couldn’t hold himself up any longer; Lord Sero’s bent knee dropped to the grass beside the other and he slumped forward, supported by the palms of his hands.

  “Save me,” he said, his voice a husk of what it had once been: the brittle shell of a flower about to be tossed into pieces on the breeze. “You won’t live without my support.”

  “It’s already too late,” I told him. I could see the poison lighting up his entire body now. A moment ago I could have saved him. Now, to my relief, I couldn’t. That awful, sticky, heart-wrenching temptation was gone as if it had never been, unable to be called back. I would never again have the chance to handle that kind of power. “I don’t accept your oath of fealty. Moulder away into the ground where your corruption might be able to do a bit of good.”

  A moment later, a thin crack tinkled across the surface of the ice wall around us. I couldn’t help the quick, conscious look I sent at that crack, and in the brief moment it took me to look back at Lord Sero, he was face down on the grass, ice flowers dying around him. By contrast, the thin crack in the wall of ice grew fatter and stretched further, supplementing the truth that the dead flowers had already told me.

  “Heck,” I said, dropping back another step.

  Lord Sero was dead.

  I half expected his remaining behindkind to kill me before the ice could melt and let in JinYeong and Zero with their flanking of lycanthropes and zombie. I mean, yeah, Lord Sero was dead and the minions didn’t technically have to do what he said anymore, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had.

  To help them think twice about it, I said hazily, “Got more spit where that came from. I kissed the vampire for a pretty long time: haven’t seen him in a while. You really want to risk it?”

  They mustn’t have wanted to risk it. Either that, or they were glad that Sero was dead; it took only the next crack of the failing ice wall to send them on their way, running, galloping, or pattering out of the hall and toward the nearest exit.

  I barely saw them go because I was using up too much energy just to keep standing. Sero senior had hit pretty hard, and I still wasn’t sure I hadn’t lost a tooth. I had definitely broken a rib or two: it felt like someone had crumpled up my right lung like a paper bag, and every breath was murder to take. Funny that I hadn’t noticed that particular problem before. There had been pain with each breath, but at least I’d been able to breathe properly. Hopefully I wasn’t going to die now that we’d just got ourselves into a more stable sort of position.

  There was a final crack and the hurrying of footsteps, then I was enveloped in vampire cologne and vampire arms from behind at much the same time. I leaned back into the welcome strength, still struggling to breath, and saw Zero’s face somewhere above me.

  “What did you think you were doing?” he demanded.

  “Killed your dad,” I said. I added, “I’m not sorry.”

  “Nobody’s sorry,” he said. “Sit down, Pet.”

  “Nah,” I mumbled. “No time to rest.”

  “We’re not in a hurry,” he said impatiently. “JinYeong, lower her to the ground.”

  I leaned my head tiredly against JinYeong’s cheek and asked him hazily, “Wanna change your mind? You can get someone out there who’s a heck of a lot less feral and a heck of a lot more beautiful.”

  “I am already beautiful,” he said. “What do I need with someone beautiful?”

  “JinYeong, confine your energy to the situation at hand,” said Zero, his voice a threatening rumble.

  “I am attending to it,” said JinYeong. He wrapped his arms around me a little bit more firmly and I let him do it. It felt warm and comforting, and besides, I was pretty sure you were allowed to hug the person who’d said they were going to date you. Unfortunately, the action pressed my broken ribs a bit too hard into the arms that were wrapped around me.

  I gasped an ouch and JinYeong nuzzled into my neck, then bit me gently. The bright fizz of electricity that bite sent through my veins slipped icily into my ribs and made an unpleasant sort of flutter in there in my lung.

  “Oh, that’s weird,” I said, but there was already less pain in my side. More vampire spit meant faster healing—at least for me.

  “You’re telling us,” Daniel said sourly, appearing around one side of Zero as the surge of energy from JinYeong’s bite strengthened me enough to let me stand alone.

  “Everyone alive?” I asked. It was hard to pay attention to the threads in the house and the faces in front of me at the same time, and there was a fuzz of life down somewhere in the bowels of the house that was niggling at me, too.

  “All good,” said Morgana. “We had a bit of trouble before we came to find you, but that’s all taken care of. I can smell blood somewhere else in the house, though.”

  “Figured you might have had a bit of fun,” I said. Her face was bloodier than JinYeong’s ever had been, and I didn’t like to think about what was staining her black dress darker up near the neck. “But yeah—reckon there are prisoners somewhere further down in the house. We might want to go check on them.”

  “That will be the dungeon,” said Zero, unsurprised.

  “Lord Sero brought a dungeon with him? Flamin’ heck! He likes to go everywhere prepared, doesn’t he!”

  “Apparently not enough,” said Zero. He was far too happy for someone who had apparently just inherited a lot of baggage he probably hadn’t wanted to inherit. “But I suppose I can’t blame him for that; you can’t really fully prepare for a pet.”

  “At least I’m toilet trained,” I said, with some asperity. To JinYeong, I said, “Oi. You’re warned: Pets are trouble.”

  “You are not my pet,” he murmured in my ear. “You are my Ruth and I will not be warned.”

  Zero cleared his throat loudly and asked, “What about the house?”

  “It’s still connecting up with this one, nice and slow,” I said, shifting away very slightly from JinYeong with the sudden realisation that I tended to blush when someone murmured in my ear while embracing me. “We’ll have time for a bit of a poke around before I make sure everything lines up properly. Now that your dad is dead, I shouldn’t have too many problems.”

  JinYeong let me move away, but moved to stand beside me instead, his arm brushing against mine.

  “How’d you get in, anyway?” I asked him.

  “I knew that Hyeong’s father would have his finger in the pie. I thought I would find the pie if I
found the finger.”

  “That sounds flamin’ weird, but okay,” I said.

  “Where was the finger?” inquired Daniel, grinning.

  “Lord Sero owns many manors,” JinYeong said. “I visited many before I found a way in.”

  “You sneaked into Lord Sero’s house?”

  JinYeong, looking almost insufferably smug, said, “I went into many. I am very good at sneaking. Also, I have a friend who is verrry good at making new faces for people.”

  “I notice that it didn’t last too long,” I pointed out.

  “I became emotional,” he said, shrugging one shoulder and sending a glimmering smile in my direction. “I lost my grip on the spell.”

  “Want us to leave you here to flirt while we check out the dungeon?” asked Daniel. He was enjoying himself far too much.

  “No!” I said, at the same time that JinYeong said, “Ne.”

  Still, he followed me when I joined the others.

  Although I was the one who could feel every line and connection in the house, it was Zero who led the way to the dungeon, solidifying my suspicion that he knew this manor much better than he’d let slip.

  I was glad of his leading when we were in the lower floors: there was a darkness and dankness to the air that was more than just physical dark and damp, and I didn’t seem to be able to stop shivering. Even with the light that Zero snapped into place with a click of his fingers, there was gloominess and a feeling of moisture so present that they seemed to seep into my bones.

  “Nice place,” I muttered, as we made our way lower still.

  At last we reached a floor where there was a single corridor, formed from impenetrable marble on one side and iron bars on the other. When we reached the end of it, there was a single door in the barred wall that opened from hinges and had no lock: iron, I was pretty sure. It opened for me, but Zero gave it a wide berth, and the second door, set in more bars of silver, made the lycanthropes whine as they passed through it.