Between Family: The City Between: Book Nine

by Gingell, W. R.

  “Look at me, being all human and helpful,” I couldn’t help saying.

  Zero pushed ahead of me and JinYeong stayed at my side: I think they were too worried about me being captured again to do anything else. But there was nothing for them to worry about, after all. My sight might have shown me a fuzz of life down here, but the behindkind we found in that awful room were only barely alive: a collection of perhaps twenty diverse behindkind sprawled on the wet marble floor in their own blood and mess.

  All of them looked up as we came in, and I heard snarling from the back though I didn’t think any of the behindkind in here had the wherewithal to make good on that threat.

  “All right, you lot,” I said, before any of the lycanthropes could start growling in response. “This whole house is going to go back into the human world, or the world Behind—wherever it came from. You can either waste time trying to make trouble here, or get out of the house before it goes back to wherever it was Lord Sero pinched it from. I’m pretty sure there’ll be a few of his men back there where it came from, so if you want to escape, now is the time.”

  A blue girl with gills and a tail rasped, “You’re not going to kill us?”

  “Nope. You get out of here in the next fifteen minutes, and you’ll just go back to wherever it was that you came from before you were taken for the trials. Just make sure you’re out of the house if you want to be safe.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Zero asked. He asked it loudly, too; he wanted them all to hear him. “They’ll likely come back and try to kill you later.”

  “We won’t,” said the blue girl, dragging in a breath. “I promise I won’t!”

  “They’re not trying to kill me right now,” I said. “Can’t go slaughtering people who aren’t trying to kill me right now. They’re only half alive as it is.”

  “You may not have the chance later,” he said.

  JinYeong sent him a reproachful look. “Do not try to turn her into a killer, Hyeong,” he said. “She already gave you her answer.”

  “I’m not about to turn into behindkind,” I said shortly, though I wasn’t sure whether I was offering reassurance to JinYeong or showing disapproval to Zero. “Let ’em go; half of ’em can’t even stand up straight.”

  “Very well,” he said, and I didn’t think he was disappointed. Resigned, maybe, but not disappointed. To the motley lot in the room, he said, “You’d be wise not to wait for the king to come along and take survey of the trials when you get out; I suggest running fast and far.”

  I hadn’t thought that more than one or two of them would be able to stand, but at the mention of the king, there was a panicked stir around the room as heirlings and attendants shuffled, lurched, and lunged to their feet, tentacles, or paws, and made for the door as expeditiously as they could.

  “We should leave while we can, too,” Zero said, watching the melee with cautious eyes. Maybe he was still expecting some of them to attack us. “If you think you can take over the whole house this time, that is.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t help sending a lingering gaze around the room. It wasn’t that I sensed anything with the human, magic side of myself, and it wasn’t exactly that the bit of me that understood how Between worked had noticed anything, either. Rather than either of those, it was my simple human nose that was trying to tell me something.

  I smelt blood—a particular kind of blood. And there was none of that kind of blood to be seen in the room, though there was enough of behindkind blood there in general. A few bodies, still, too. The whole place was messed up, and I shouldn’t have been able to smell the blood through JinYeong’s cologne, either.

  “Wait,” I said slowly, and sent a look around the room once more.

  No; not the whole place. There was an empty corner that wasn’t messy or bloody. Just an empty corner, and when I stepped across the room, flanked by the silent shadow that was JinYeong on one side and the hugeness of Zero on the other, it didn’t become any less suspiciously empty.

  I stared at it for a while, then gave a short laugh. It wasn’t an empty corner. It was a corner that was trying very hard to convince people that it was empty.

  “You might as well drop the act,” I said into that corner. “You’re gunna lose control when you lose consciousness, anyway. Might as well come out and say hello.”

  The suggestion of emptiness didn’t immediately disappear; it faded away slowly, sinking into a gloom in which it was clear enough to see a supine figure wallowing in the darkness of the blue blood around it.

  Zero stayed where he was, his hands reflexively clenching into fists, so I was the first one to step over into the corner and verify what we all already knew.

  “Well now,” said Athelas, smiling up at me with blue, bloody lips, “isn’t this a pleasant surprise!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Flamin’ heck,” I said mechanically.

  JinYeong’s right hand closed around my left just as I grabbed at Zero’s leather sleeve with my right. Zero’s lunge forward dragged us both forward regardless, boots skating across moss and mould.

  “Stop!” I snapped at Zero, straining uselessly at his sleeve. “Stop and think!”

  “You’re the one always telling me to tap into my feelings,” he said, low and furious. “Why do you want me to stop and think now?”

  “Hyeong, there are questions to ask,” said JinYeong. “There are many things that need to be made clear.”

  “Oh, I think everything is clear enough, don’t you?” enquired Athelas, laughing gently with what sounded like lungs full of blood. “Such a charming way to meet again!”

  The lycanthropes and the other girls gave us space, Ralph clinging to Sarah but avidly observing. There was no way Zero could be allowed to take revenge right now. Ralph might not be technically alive, but he was still a child and still very capable of taking things in.

  “You’d better bring him with us,” I said, my skin as cold as my voice. I found that I couldn’t bear to look at Athelas, so I looked at Zero instead. “JinYeong is right: there are some questions we need to ask him, and I don’t reckon we’ll get any answers by handing him over to anyone just yet.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of handing him over to the investigators,” Zero said, his voice chilling me still further.

  “We won’t get answers from him if he’s dead, either,” I reminded him. “Bring him along alive; it’s time for us to go home.”

  Zero finally looked at me properly. “As easily as that? What changed?”

  “Your dad died,” I said. “And the houses have kept on merging the whole time—it’s our ceiling in here, now. All we have to do is open the door and walk right out. Nobody has to die right now—we can figure it out later.”

  “I make no promises,” said Zero, but I thought the rather murderous expression had faded from his eyes.

  It wasn’t quite as easy as that, of course: the closed system would try to stop us if it could, but by now the arena was more house than closed system. Lord Sero’s manor was no longer his: even the dungeon around us, all mouldy and damp, had a very house-y sort of ceiling to it and had gotten a whole lot smaller. It was my house, now. And not only was it used to doing what I wanted it to do, it liked doing what I wanted it to do.

  “Get a good hold of Athelas,” I said to Zero. “We’re taking over the house, and I’m not sure if everything is going to be in exactly the same place when I finish.”

  “Fascinating!” murmured Athelas. He was leaking a lot of blood from a lot of places, so I wasn’t sure if he was trying to needle me or if his mind was only half aware of what was going on and he really was fascinated by what was happening.

  Zero, his face turned away from his former butler, tightened his grip enough to make Athelas whiten, but didn’t look at him.

  His voice barely a thread, Athelas added, “So delightful to take part in this unexpected family reunion! I really did expect you to kill me at once.”

  “There’s time yet,” said
Daniel.

  Morgana, distinctly red about the eyes, added, “You might have killed me once, but if you try to do the same to Pet, you ought to know that I’m very fast and very hungry these days.”

  “And yet, here you are alive,” Athelas said, and coughed up too much blue blood to be healthy. “Did you ever manage to stop feeding on your parents, little zombie? They’ve been feeding on you for so long in return that I doubt they outlasted your exodus.”

  “Ignore the old man,” JinYeong murmured in my ear. “When he begins to talk so much, there is a reason.”

  His voice pulled me away from the confusion of thoughts that whirled and bit at the edges of my mind, hurting my heart. “I don’t have time to listen to you,” I said to Athelas. “And JinYeong is right: we need to be acting, not talking.”

  “Mosquito,” said Athelas to JinYeong in a fond sort of a way, and fainted.

  “Everyone needs to be close to me,” I told them. “That means you, Ralph! I’m not going to be fetching you from the walls or a painting, so stay with Sarah and try not to turn rooms sideways.”

  Ralph, looking sulky, muttered something about the house not liking him and he wanted his own house and Sarah said unsympathetically, “Shut up, you little horror. Your own house probably kicked you out because it didn’t like you.”

  “I am a revenant!” said Ralph in icy fury, his skeleton glowing blue and immediately doing away with any appearance of a normal little boy. “How dare you call me a horror!”

  “Revenants are horrors,” she told him, unimpressed by the display. “Eat your biscuit. I know you have one in your pocket.”

  “I don’t eat things, I am dead.”

  “Liar. You just don’t need to eat things,” she said. “Pet is going to do something with the house, and everyone will feel a lot safer if you’re already doing something with your bony little hands.”

  To everyone’s surprise, Ralph took the biscuit out of his pocket and flickered once or twice until he was a little boy again instead of a skeleton.

  I cleared my throat and added, “It’ll probably be best if we all get out of the house and into the front yard as quickly as we can when we get back, too.”

  “We’ll run like the wind,” said Chelsea dryly. “I’ve had enough of vibrating time and space, thanks very much! What do we do now?”

  “Stand there and keep quiet,” I told her, feeling the manor quiver around me as it joined to my own house. “The house is nearly big enough, and I reckon it won’t take long for the arena to perceive it as the winner. When it does, that door should synch up with the human world again.”

  “Should?” queried Zero, his brows rising.

  “Well, that’s the theory,” I said. “Shut up, Daniel.”

  “He didn’t say anything!” Morgana said reproachfully.

  “He looked at me. Here we go: everyone into the hall behind me, now!”

  I felt with a deep, absolute solidarity the moment when my house grew so vast that it pressed up against the outer bubble of the heirling arena; the moment when the arena acknowledged one house, one choice, one possibility. The moment when the dungeon around us grew carpet and became my living room once again, crowding us closer together.

  The house seemed to buzz around me until I felt that buzzing right into my teeth, then settled on its base and just…stopped.

  “Now!” I said, heading down the hall and toward the front door.

  I reached for the door handle, and we did walk out the front door, just like I’d said. The door opened for me with barely a hitch, and I swept it against the wall, stepping out into sunshine with JinYeong close behind and the others between me and Zero.

  I had a suspicion that he might try to stay behind in the house, so I let the lycanthropes exclaim about the sunshine and breeze and reality of the human world while I stepped aside on the patio and waited for Zero to step out with his prisoner.

  Zero hesitated in the hallway as Ralph came out hand in hand with Sarah, wary of the sunlight and inclined to cling to her as if she really was his big sister.

  “You’re so dirty!” I heard her say as she passed. “When was the last time you had a bath!”

  “I don’t bathe, I am a revenant!”

  “Well, you’re a revenant who stinks,” she retorted, her voice fading as she tugged him out into the yard.

  “Go on without me, Pet,” said Zero, his face deep in shadows. “I’ll follow along later.”

  “Hyeong,” said JinYeong. “Come out. It’s no good staying in there.”

  “You gotta come out as well,” I told Zero, bright and firm. I didn’t want him to know I saw and knew the shadows on his face; or that Athelas had already woken again, the same shadow in his grey eyes. “I want to make sure everything has arrived in the human world properly before we go back into the house.”

  “No need on my account!” whispered Athelas. “My lord and I have some matters to discuss.”

  I didn’t wait for Zero to reply again; I reached out and grabbed the sleeve of his leather jacket, and he came along with me as if he had been weighted toward the front and only needed the smallest of extra weight to draw him forward.

  Forward, through the hall, over the doorstep and out onto the patio—and as he came through, the whole house shook once more.

  “Quick!” I said. “Get off the patio!”

  It was only the four of us still on it, and we got off just in time. There was a feeling of immense weight, then vibration, and something heavy and not-quite-right lifted away from the house and sucked itself back into Behind with a devastating power that seemed as though it could have taken us with it if we weren’t solid in a completely different way to it.

  Morgana said in a shaken voice, “That was a bit too close for comfort, Pet!”

  “Yeah,” I said, drawing in a breath. I was going to have to tell her my name at some stage—probably once we were past people threatening me with the use of it. “I mean, maybe it wouldn’t have sucked us in if we were still on the patio, but I didn’t really want to take the chance.”

  “Well done, Pet!” said Athelas, in a bare thread of a voice. “You really are stepping into your birthright!”

  “Nobody flamin’ asked you!” I said fiercely. He had no business bringing such an expression to Zero’s face as he had back in the hallway. “So belt up!”

  “She hits pretty hard,” said one of the lycanthropes confidentially to him. “I’d shut up if I were you.”

  “You shut up, too, Darren!”

  “I’m Dylan.”

  “Both of you flamin’ shut up!”

  “That’s rude,” said Darren. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “I know,” I said. “Sorry. But can we please stop talking to the prisoner!”

  “Oh, is that what I am?” Athelas said with a whisper of a laugh, gazing up at Zero, who wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I could have sworn I was dead meat, as the colloquial goes, but I’m sure you know what you’re talking about!”

  “Put the old man back inside,” said JinYeong, nudging his shoulder against mine. “He is bothersome out here.”

  “I assure you that there’s little likelihood I’ll be less bothersome inside,” said Athelas. He must have been starting to heal at last, because his grey eyes looked sharper now that we were outside.

  “Look, half of us already want to kill you, so you should probably shut up,” Daniel said.

  I didn’t miss the worried look he shot at Morgana, or the way she was clinging to his arm. It nearly made me laugh, because as she had threatened earlier, zombie Morgana could take Athelas on and possibly even win.

  Maybe Athelas was just seeing how many of us he could needle. He said in his politest steward’s voice, “I shouldn’t like to deprive you of the pleasure of your ire.”

  “I’ll find a place for him inside,” Zero said.

  “How delightful,” said Athelas. He hadn’t struggled since Zero had him in his grip; neither did he struggle now.

  “A couple of
you go with him,” Daniel said to the lycanthropes, and three of them split away from the group sniffing around the yard to jog back toward the house. “We’ll wait out here for North. Sarah said she’ll probably be around as soon as she verifies that the Palmer house is free again—with the parents, with any luck!”

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” said Zero, his voice a threatening rumble.

  “Didn’t say you did,” said Daniel, but his eyes met mine briefly and I saw understanding there. “But we don’t know if there were behindkind things pushing into the house while it was settling back here. I assume you don’t want to lose your prisoner because you’re fighting off weird behindkind.”

  Zero hesitated for the briefest moment, and in that moment I saw both regret and amusement flicker across Athelas’ face.

  “Don’t get comfortable,” I told him. “Zero isn’t the one you should be worried about. A few of us heirlings are going to have a lot of questions for you.”

  “How delightful!” he said again. “Will you turn torturer?”

  “Don’t reckon I need to,” I said. “Reckon there’s enough in your head to do that for both of us: I took memories from you before, and I’ll do it again if I have to.”

  For the first time, I felt as though I’d scored an actual hit instead of just amusing Athelas in that twisted way he seemed to enjoy things: his eyes dropped, the amusement utterly vanishing from them, and I saw the slight, bitter smile that passed briefly across his lips.

  “How fitting!” was what I thought he said, but Zero was already dragging him back up onto the patio and into the house by then, three lycanthropes bounding after him with far too much energy given the events of the last few days.

  I felt my phone buzz in my pocket, and when I pulled it out a small fizz of delight curled in my stomach: I had reception bars! I had real, human reception bars, and Tuatu was calling.

  “Oi,” I said by way of answering. “You and North better get over here: we’re out and I reckon Sarah’s gunna want to see her parents as soon as she can. You might want to see how they feel about skeletons too, because she seems to have adopted one.”