Between Floors

by W. R. Gingell

  “Athelas,” I said, hope blossoming in me. “Do you see me?”

  “I see,” he said, on a sigh, and his head dropped as if it were too weary to hold itself up. “Then free me.”

  I went back to the moonlight, ruthless in my hope, and pinched off each of the threads with my teeth gritted against the sound of Athelas’ pain. They disintegrated one by one, allowing Athelas’ legs to drop to the ground first in a gentle waft; then his shoulders. I supported them until the last of the moonlight was undone and I could feel him pushing against me with one hand.

  That was good. He had his balance.

  The hand on my shoulder didn’t leave, though; and I reached out to grab his elbow, worried that he was going to fall. When I looked up at his face, he was watching me, a curious smile on his lips.

  “Thank you,” Athelas said, his voice a shard of ice. “It is much more convenient killing you when my limbs are free.”

  “What?” I fell over, scrabbling to get away, and Athelas laughed.

  Step by step he approached, leaving a trail of half-formed, slurred footprints in blue blood, and I frantically pushed myself up. I was too late; he was on me in a second, pinning me to the floor with one hand, a cool prick of metal sending something warm trickling across my neck.

  “I was wrong,” said that voice of ice, in my ear. “You haven’t killed the Pet—you still have it alive somewhere. Much easier to prod a human into giving away secrets than it is to prod Behindkind, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t know how, but I’d lost him again. For just a few minutes, it really had seemed like he saw me for the Pet again. My hand reached out, quivered, then reached out again to touch him; a futile gesture.

  Cold and hot met in a stab of pain in my neck, red blood gushing to meet blue. My head dropped sideways and far away on the floor was my hand, with a splash of blood on it that burned. How did it get so far away, I wondered; and as I wondered, I died.

  “Awake or not?” said a voice in Korean.

  Something poked me in the cheek—JinYeong’s finger, probably. For a very brief moment, I thought about biting that pretty little finger and seeing if I could draw someone else’s blood, but that reminded me just in time that with JinYeong’s saliva still somewhere in my system, it would be very dangerous for me to draw his blood.

  “I believe so,” said Zero’s voice. “Make coffee.”

  At first I thought he was talking to me, and tried to make my sluggish limbs move, but JinYeong’s voice said, “Ne, hyeong,” with some sullenness, and his presence retreated.

  I opened my eyes, since my limbs were too difficult to manage, and a big, white hand levered me up into a sitting position.

  “Ow,” I said, my voice as rough as though I really had just been stabbed in the neck. It didn’t hurt, but there was a pain somewhere that seemed to be assuaged by saying it, so I said it again.

  “It will fade,” Zero said.

  “That’s good,” I said, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to say. “You blokes just get home?”

  “We’ve been back for an hour or so.”

  “Find anything?”

  “A few friends of the Family who might have known if something was going to happen.”

  “They know of anything?”

  There was silence, and the jug boiled away in the kitchen. “No,” said Zero at last. “Nothing to do with the Family, at any rate. They knew Athelas was likely to be with me, but nothing more.”

  Funny that he was answering my questions. Nice, for a change. I asked him, “That what they said, or what you think?”

  “It’s what they said. At this moment, I have no reason to doubt them.”

  There was a soft noise of contempt from JinYeong as he stepped down into the room with two mugs of coffee. I didn’t know whether he was being contemptuous about the Behindkind’s information, or about Zero’s trust in it, so I just stared at him.

  Why was he so flamin’ pretty, anyway?

  JinYeong narrowed his eyes at me and gave Zero a cup of coffee. “Wae?” he demanded.

  “You’re too flamin’ pretty,” I said. My voice sounded choked. “Don’t know why someone doesn’t punch you in the face.”

  JinYeong, looking offended, thrust the second cup of coffee at me. A small slop of it hit my hand, burning where a splash of my blood had burned earlier, and I sniffled very hard to stop even hotter tears from spilling over as well.

  “Ah, wae irae?” muttered JinYeong, hunching back into his side of the couch.

  Something hit me softly in the side of the face, and a blood red, silken handkerchief fell into my lap. I dabbed at my hand and pushed it back at JinYeong, who took it by one corner as if it were soiled beyond recovery.

  “You dreamed of Athelas again,” said Zero.

  Even more than last time, I didn’t want to talk about it. I said baldly, “Yes.”

  “Did he kill you again?”

  “Yeah. He still thinks I’m someone else with my face. Reckon he’s in the police station.”

  “I see,” said Zero. “JinYeong didn’t find him there—are you sure?”

  “That’s what it looks like. He was still threaded through with moonlight, even though I let him out last time. How come he couldn’t get away himself?”

  “If it’s moonlight, that isn’t how it works. You can continue to be imprisoned in moonlight even if you appear to be free.”

  “That’s flamin’ nice.”

  “He’s the one who told you it was moonlight, was he not?”

  “Reckon he’s lying to me?”

  “Athelas is almost certainly lying to you about most things,” Zero said. “If he thinks you’re one of his torturers, he would be a fool not to do so. Whether or not being imprisoned in moonlight is one of the things he is lying about remains to be seen.”

  “Cajok aniramyeon, wae salajyeossoyo?”

  “Bet there’s other people who want him dead other than the Family, or whatever,” I said, even though the question wasn’t aimed at me.

  “Yes,” agreed Zero. “There are many people who would like him dead—however, the people who would want him tortured are very few. It’s a course of action that carries with it many risks and very few rewards. There is also the matter of what information they’re seeking.”

  “And why use my face for it?” I asked. Zero looked at me frowningly, and I added, “From what he said, someone was there before the first time I appeared, using my face, and then again after he killed me the first time. He killed them, too.”

  “That is something I would very much like to know the answer to,” he said.

  I looked down into my half-empty coffee cup. “I wanna know why I’m dreaming about him.”

  “Nan mariya,” agreed JinYeong. “Wae?”

  “’Cos if there’s someone out there who wants me for something, it means they know a heck of a lot about me as well as you guys. The way Athelas is talking…the way he…”

  “Drink your coffee, Pet,” said Zero abruptly.

  I blinked, finding some hotness behind my eyes, and said, “It was definitely the police station we were in. How come Athelas wasn’t there when…when JinYeong visited, then?”

  “JinYeong tells me there are several layers to the station, leading Between,” said Zero. “It could be that, though JinYeong thinks not—or it could be just that whoever is keeping Athelas is trying to give us false information through you. It’s possible they want us to be looking there.”

  “Still means they know a flamin’ lot about us,” I muttered. “It’s worrying Athelas, too, I think.”

  “I believe we can presume that the reason your face is being used is the same reason that you have been allowed to dream. It would possibly be as well if you expected someone to be listening in on your conversations with Athelas.”

  “Wait, so he was right? I’m being used as leverage to get answers from him, just in a different way than he thinks?”

  “It’s likely,” said Zero, a line deepening betw
een his brows. “At any rate, you should behave as though there is someone listening at all times.”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, as if I’d already been doing that. What had I said to Athelas these two times? There was a sinking in my stomach; I’d said a lot. “Oi.”

  “What?”

  “Is it possible that I’m just getting through by mistake? No Sandman or whatever sending me there, just an accident.”

  “No,” Zero said, and he must have been worried enough about Athelas to be preoccupied, because it wasn’t strictly necessary for him to say, “But it’s not possible for you to be having the kind of dreams you’re having, either.”

  “Right. So it’s not possible, but there’s a lot of not possible things happening, so maybe that’s another one of them.”

  “For that to be so, there would have to be some connection between yourself and Athelas. And in that case, it would be more likely for you to dream of JinYeong, since the connection you have with him is a physical one.”

  “No thanks,” I said. And because I still wanted to say it, even though I felt like rubbish, I mumbled, “Got enough nightmares already.”

  Maybe I didn’t get the delivery right. JinYeong sent me a sultry grin, his eyelids dropped low, and blew me a kiss.

  “Ew,” I said. I looked away, and found I didn’t have any more coffee to drink. Of Zero, I asked, “How do we leverage this?”

  “There’s no necessity to leverage it,” he said. “JinYeong and I will follow up some lines of inquiry from your detective friend today; we’ll no doubt be able to find Athelas from that.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But even if you can, I’m gunna dream like this again, right? So we should have a plan on what to do when it happens.”

  “There’s no need for a plan,” said Zero, his voice icy. “We’ll find him quickly. If you dream again, try not to talk too much, and don’t release Athelas. If you don’t release him, he shouldn’t be able to hurt you.”

  “Yeeeah,” I said slowly. I wasn’t as sure about that as Zero seemed to be. But then, Zero hadn’t seen a contained, unarmed Fae produce a knife out of nowhere, either. “You blokes gunna sleep at all?”

  “There’s no need,” Zero said. “Prepare something we can eat as we go, Pet. We leave in fifteen minutes.”

  Chapter Seven

  It wasn’t that I wanted to go out and follow Zero Between or Behind, or wherever he was going. I definitely didn’t want to be trotting alongside JinYeong, either; he was weird and unpredictable. I mean, he was always weird and unpredictable, but he seemed a bit more weird and unpredictable lately. I had the feeling that as much as JinYeong showed his hackles at Athelas, and Athelas gently needled JinYeong, they both didn’t like anything happening to the other. JinYeong definitely didn’t, anyway. I still wasn’t sure about Athelas.

  So it wasn’t that I wanted to go out and follow them. But as closed off as Zero was, there was still a kind of warmth to his huge presence—the feeling of safety, maybe—that made me feel cold in its absence. And even if I hadn’t exactly welcomed JinYeong, I would have been glad for his slightly stormy presence around the house. I might even have cooked him something nice to eat that wasn’t part of a bribe to keep quiet.

  “Bad pet!” I muttered to myself, boiling the jug again. I would definitely need the caffeine today. I was too tired for how much sleep I had gotten last night, and I didn’t want to risk falling asleep while Zero and JinYeong were out. “Athelas is missing. They gotta find him first.”

  But I found I couldn’t bear to stay around the house by myself, either. I tried for a couple of hours, drinking far too much coffee in an attempt to stay awake and keep off thoughts I didn’t want to have, before I knew it was no good. Then I hopped off my stool at the kitchen island, where I’d been trying, with a caffeine-induced restlessness, to pluck random things out of Between, and decided it was enough.

  I’d go and find Daniel. Or maybe I would talk to Detective Tuatu, who knew? I just didn’t want to stay where I was. Didn’t want to do the kind of busy nothing I had been doing.

  I left the house with another cup of coffee in a travel mug, barely warm through the layers of plastic, and headed off down the street without a very clear idea of where I was going. I let myself drift in the direction of the grocery store I’d worked at briefly, and tried to call Detective Tuatu again.

  To my relief, he picked up after the second ring.

  “Pet?”

  “Oh good,” I said. “You’re alive.”

  “I was just about to call you.”

  “There’s a change for the books! You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. Your friends came to see me last night.”

  “I’m talking about before that. You didn’t answer when I called.”

  “That’s what I was going to call you about. I had some other visitors—or at least, they tried to come in. Pet, what exactly is that plant you gave me?”

  “Why? Something weird happen?”

  “Not any weirder than what usually happens to me when I’m with you, but yeah, sure. It was weird.”

  Grinning in my anticipation, I asked, “Did the dr—the um, plant get really big?”

  Maybe my grin came through over the phone. Tuatu’s voice was annoyed when he said, “What did you give me?”

  “Stopped someone unpleasant from getting into your house, did it?”

  A silence, then a sigh. “Yes.”

  “Well, what are you whinging about, then?”

  “I’m not whinging—”

  “How big did it get?” I wished I’d been there to see it; I’d been pretty sure it would do something like that if there was a physical threat, but I hadn’t known for sure.

  Another silence, then I had the impression that Tuatu was grinning, too. There was a slight difference to his voice; warmth, or ruefulness, maybe. Then he said, “It got so big, Pet! It covered all the windows and the door. But it was still the same size at the same time, so I don’t know if I dreamed it or not.”

  “It’s a dryad. It’s for protection,” I told him. I probably should have told him earlier, but he’d only just come into the world where Between and Behind were things that were possible, and he’d been trying so hard to survive that I didn’t want to burden him any more than he was already burdened. “Protection and wisdom. Reckon if you’re not sure about something, you should ask it a few questions.”

  “Will it talk to me?”

  “Nah, don’t think so. But I reckon you’ll get the answers you need if you ask the right questions.”

  “It doesn’t come from this world, does it?”

  “Far as I know,” I began cautiously, “it’s kinda this world, kinda that world. I found it Between. Reckon it’ll be useful to you.”

  There was another one of those silences, which I’d begun to think of as the detective’s way of figuring out what he wanted to say, before he said, “Thank you.”

  “No worries. Just be careful when you’re away from the house; it doesn’t work if you’re not with it. Make sure you keep wearing that pendant of yours, too.”

  “You said that before. I’ve got a bit of advice for you, too.”

  “Yeah? What is it? Don’t leave the state?”

  “Don’t go back to the police station.”

  I pulled my phone away from my ear and stared at it as if it was the detective himself. “How’d you know I was there?”

  “Think you’re the only one with spies?”

  “You’ve still got a couple friends in the cop shop!” I said, realising it in a sparkle of hope. Best news I’d heard in ages. “Proper ones!”

  “Upper Management isn’t a place you should be poking your nose around. People disappear up there all the time; the whole station knows it, but no one wants to talk about it because it’s too crazy.”

  “Yeah, reckon it’s not too safe for humans,” I said; though the problem really was that Upper Management was exactly calibrated for huma
ns. Exactly for humans. Only for humans. A sort of cheat code for humans to be able to get Between and access the things there. And that was a worrying thought to think; that there were potentially a whole lot more humans who knew about Between and Behind than just me. Not to mention the fact that if I was right, the Behindkind who were really behind whatever was going on at the police station, weren’t necessarily actually at the police station.

  “How are you doing, anyway?”

  His voice sounded wary. “What do you mean?”

  “Your friend that died—he wasn’t a close friend?”

  “Close enough. It’s been a while since I talked to him, but close enough.”

  “Yeah, so are you okay?”

  “I’ll be happier when I find the people that did it.”

  “What did Zero say about that?”

  “Nothing,” said the detective, more sharply. “And I can look after it myself.”

  “All right, all right,” I grumbled. “I was just trying to help.”

  “I told you not to help.”

  “Whatever. Just make sure that if my psychos get info out of you, you get something back. That’s how it works with them. Don’t let ’em cheat you.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said the detective.

  Hopefully he would, too. He’d already mortgaged himself to Athelas a bit too much for my comfort. I asked, “You gunna be arrested, or not?”

  “I get the feeling they’re working on it. I’ll have to be careful from now on—they couldn’t pin the body on me directly, but they’re not above planting evidence.”

  “At least they’re human,” I said. “Well, pretty much all the ones at the station are, anyway.”

  “They’re all human?” asked Tuatu. “I thought—I just guessed that it had to be something more than that, if one of you was there undercover.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Reckon I’ll have to talk to Zero about that. We were expecting to find a lot of fae at the station—well, Athelas was, anyway.”

  “Was he?” asked Detective Tuatu, and I got the impression he was frowning.