Between Jobs (The City Between Book 1)

by W. R. Gingell

  I took my coffee cup with me when I left the house for work. There were five of them, after all, and it wasn’t likely that three men would notice one missing mug when there were only three of them to use mugs. Especially when the mugs had already been in the house to start with.

  The muddy remnant in the percolator was scenting the air, too, so it wasn’t likely they’d notice the extra smell. Beggared if I know why they wanted the instant stuff when they had the good stuff in the house, but there you go.

  I made sure one of the upstairs windows was open before I left. It wasn’t like anyone would see me climbing in—there was no one to see me climbing in—and so long as the three psychos were in the kitchen making coffee or eating, I was safe.

  It worked like a charm. The trick is to leave the window open enough to wriggle a finger or two through the crack and open it properly, but shut enough not to look like it’s open. They were all in the kitchen when I got home anyway, probably making coffee. Nice for them, to be able to have it whenever they wanted it, while I had to sneak it like a thief in my own house. Still, it made it easy to sneak in by the window I’d left open in the upper floor at the back.

  As I was creeping beneath the kitchen window to avoid being seen, I grinned to hear JinYeong’s voice—complaining again, was he?—and Athelas’ reasonable voice saying something like, “…and it’s an old house that was previously occupied. You have to expect to find hairs in the drain.”

  Whoops. Guess I’d have to be more careful about clearing out the drain if I ever got the chance for another shower. I couldn’t go to work stinking, anyway; but maybe I could use the public showers if I went at a time when the druggies weren’t all down there shooting up.

  Zero’s voice briefly mentioned something about the kitchen floor but I was too far away to hear clearly by then, the comfort of my bed calling to me like siren song. I was careful about climbing over the bathroom window anyway. I mean, even if my shadow had fallen over it, they wouldn’t have seen it from the kitchen, but when you’ve got three psychos in your house it pays to be careful.

  Half an hour after I got safely into my room, they all came upstairs again. I swear I could smell coffee, too. I looked down sadly at the empty coffee cup I’d brought back upstairs. JinYeong was muttering to the wall outside, from the sounds of it. The others must have been ignoring him, because he continued to mutter from the time I slid gently onto the carpeted floor until I eased myself onto the squishy beanbag that had been in my room so long it had almost become one with the carpet. I could have listened to music through my earphones, but I couldn’t settle myself to it. Not with those three psychos in the house.

  And maybe it was nice to hear voices around the house again, I dunno. They were still psychos, but their voices filled the house and danced through the walls, chasing shadows and coldness away. Maybe they even chased away the Nightmare—I hadn’t had that since they were in the house, and I usually had it every couple of nights, when I woke screaming and kicking.

  Hey, a plus side to having psychos in the house! Who knew they could frighten off night terrors with the sound of their voices?

  So instead of listening to music, I listened to JinYeong complain and tried to puzzle out what the ringing, metallic scrapings were that sounded at even intervals, like the clashing of sword blades on telly. They couldn’t be having a swordfight in there, could they? No, there would have been other noises.

  I let that thought settle for later, because Zero was talking again, cutting through JinYeong’s murmur. “Did you find that coffee cup?”

  Whoops. Apparently fae males do notice if you borrow one of their cups.

  Athelas sounded mildly interested. “What coffee cup?”

  “There were five and now there are only four. Weren’t you looking for it earlier?”

  “There are only four,” Athelas said. “I wasn’t looking for a fifth.”

  The metallic scraping stopped. “Are you sure?”

  “Reasonably,” said Athelas. His voice sounded amused. “They’re a set. And they’re all in the cupboard.”

  “You tell him,” I muttered, beneath my breath.

  “All right,” Zero said, and the metallic scraping began again.

  Wait. Was he…was he sharpening knives in the living room or something?

  “What should we do about the house across the road?” That was Athelas again.

  I bet he was. I bet he was sitting there and sharpening knives. Exactly what you expect psychos to be doing in your living room.

  “Mark it unsafe for human consumption,” said Zero. “Make sure it gets put on the register.”

  “Should we?”

  “Aniyo,” JinYeong said, a clear negative.

  “It’s protocol,” Zero said.

  I heard a short, hissed laugh that might have come from JinYeong. He said something in a tone of voice that I found a bit too scornful to be using on someone as big and dangerous as Zero—particularly when that big, dangerous person was sharpening knives.

  Was he trying to start a fight? Did that mean he really had been trying to kill Zero like they’d said the first time I saw them? Why was he working with him, then?

  “It might well be protocol,” Athelas said, “However, I’ve yet to learn that Enforcers who gave up the gold are expected to hold to protocol.”

  “I didn’t give up the gold.” There was a silence from the scraping again. “I put it on the shelf for a few years. I’m still with the Enforcers.”

  “Did they ask you to do this?” Athelas sounded genuinely curious. “Is this an official investigation?”

  “Do you think I’d let you two help if it was?”

  “Mwoh?”

  Zero’s voice was emotionless. “I’m not going to fight with you, JinYeong. What did the human lab say about the samples?”

  “Amukodo obseoyo,” said the vampire; and this time he sounded sulky.

  “He left no trace at all?”

  “Ne.”

  “There’s nothing surprising about that,” Athelas said. “He’s left nothing at any of the previous scenes. Why should he be careless now?”

  “I know.” The scraping began again. “I was hoping he might slip up in the human world.”

  “The house is really more Between than human; the murderer must have been pretty comfortable.”

  “Yes,” said Zero briefly. I think he was still annoyed about it, though; the scrapings sounded louder and faster than before.

  “Do you think the humans knew about it? The ones who lived in this place were murdered—which, of course, is unsurprising.” Athelas’ voice held what was almost a shrug. “Living in a susceptible house, it was only a matter of time before something got through and killed them.”

  I scowled. Well, excuse my parents for being murdered. If it was so unsurprising, why didn’t someone stop it?

  “Humans usually think susceptible houses are haunted,” said Zero. “If they were aware of anything at all, they probably thought the house was haunted.”

  Superior psychos, weren’t they? Humans this and humans that.

  But I still leaned forward in my beanbag, eager to hear more.

  Athelas, his voice still amused, said, “Then there’s no need to be too cautious, is there? Humans will avoid the house anyway, and the Enforcers will only be an annoyance to us if we report the place.”

  “Us? I thought you were only here to find me. I didn’t think you were interested in doing the work of an Enforcer.”

  “Oh, well! Let us say merely that I find this situation amusing.”

  “You’re in a good mood tonight,” Zero said abruptly. “Are there any bodies I should know about? I don’t want to have to leave this place because you’ve left bodies lying around.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” said Athelas.

  I could hear the smile in his voice. It was jarringly at odds with what Zero had so casually suggested of him—with what I knew was a very good reason not to get too attached to the sound of them around t
he house.

  “Perhaps I’m getting maudlin in my old age,” he added. “Who knows? I look forward to seeing how this turns out.”

  Chapter Three

  For the next few days, everything was weird and slightly panicky, and just a little bit nice, too. I wasn’t used to having psychos in the house. Actually, I wasn’t used to having anyone in the house anymore, so maybe normal people would have been just as disturbing as psychos. I don’t know.

  It was achingly familiar to hear voices around the house again, and that familiarity worried me because my three psychos should definitely have been more off-putting than familiar. They didn’t seem to sleep more than an hour or two (and JinYeong not at all), they cooked (and most often burnt) meals at three in the morning, brought home really weird smells with them, and talked about murder, their investigation, or both. Out of all those things, I think it was the talk about murder that was the most disturbing. It wasn’t so much that they were talking about murder—I mean, they were investigating a murder, after all—it was the way they talked about it.

  Zero was matter of fact and entirely unemotional, discussing the most sickening details with a coolness and detachment that was almost as frightening as the things he was discussing. I couldn’t understand a word that JinYeong contributed to the conversations, but the relish in his voice was obvious, and as far as I’m concerned, being gleeful about murder is only a step or two below gleefully doing murder.

  Athelas…well, Athelas was probably the most disturbing of the three. When they weren’t discussing their own case, Zero would bring up old cases he had already investigated, and present them to the other two. JinYeong and his relish were incomprehensible, but Athelas’ quiet, well-bred voice was chillingly easy to understand as he said things like, “Ah, yes. He was trying to control the flow of blood—a clumsy way to do the thing. A gentle incline does the same thing and it’s less messy. I would not have picked that location.”

  I didn’t seem to be able to stop listening to them, though. Never seemed to be able to settle myself to be able to listen to music when they were in the house, either. Maybe I was just as crooked in the head as them.

  After a few days, they mostly talked in the downstairs living room or the kitchen, instead of the upstairs living room. I knew this in the same way that I knew Zero slept in the narrow little study almost below my bedroom, that JinYeong liked to shower in the early chill of the morning, leaving the heavy stink of cologne to permeate the whole house, and that Athelas routinely made himself a cup of tea every day at six.

  Call it acoustics, or warped design, or whatever you want, but in one corner of my room, you can hear everything that goes on downstairs. I’ve always thought it’s the beam that runs down through my bedroom and into the downstairs area, but I’ve never been really sure.

  When I sit in that corner I can hear everything: footsteps in the kitchen, the click of the kettle being turned on, Zero’s huge snores for the hour or two that he actually sleeps, and the changing patter of water hitting the shower tiles as JinYeong moves around in the shower.

  I couldn’t hear anything of Athelas, who occasionally slept in Mum and Dad’s old bedroom upstairs, but everything else? I heard it all. And after those first few days of having psychos in the house, that corner which I’d mostly avoided when Mum and Dad were alive, was where I sat down every day after work.

  It was more interesting than TV—more disturbing, too. I mean, you know there’s something up when you’re so creeped out by the way people talk that you actually forget most of the time that they’re supposed to be fae, or vampire. How much weird does it take for a person to forget something as weird as vampires, or fae? That’s how weird they were.

  When I sat down in my beanbag one afternoon after work, careful not to be too noisy about it, Athelas was saying, “…and it’s not the same as the others. If we’re to consider it as part of the series, we should wonder why its eyes were looking at that house instead of the one in front of it.”

  Wait, what? Their murderer made a habit of stringing up corpses for the whole world to look at? So that’s what they’d meant when they said there were still another four murders to come!

  “He always makes them look at the house he took them out of,” Zero’s voice said. “It’s part of his signature. Behind, in the human world—it makes no difference.”

  Behind what, exactly? I wondered, pinching a squishy bean from the beanbag between my fingers. Zero or Athelas had said something about that a day or two ago—going behind, things coming through, and that being why weird stuff happened over the road. It was about as comprehensible as JinYeong was.

  “Yes, but he’s never broken a neck before,” Athelas said. “And if the head wasn’t flopping back like that, the eyes would have been looking right into this house.”

  JinYeong, over the sound of the kettle boiling, said something that was as understandable to me as the noise of the kettle.

  “Exactly,” said Zero. “And there’s no one in this house for him to be looking at. The victim wasn’t living here, and neither was anyone else.”

  “Ah,” Athelas said. “No doubt you’re correct. It was merely a thought that occurred to me.”

  “Was it,” said Zero; and it wasn’t a question. It was more of a suspicious what have I missed? kind of mutter to himself. “I would like to know why he changed his signature, though.”

  “Perhaps he’s growing tired of his routine.”

  Routine? This bloke had murdered more people like the man outside my window, and they thought he was getting bored? Who thinks like that?

  “Still nothing from the human lab?”

  “Ne,” said JinYeong; and added something else in a rapid spate of Korean. He didn’t seem as angry this morning; more sulky.

  “I thought your nose was damaged,” Athelas remarked.

  Zero said, “I think I heard something about that, too.”

  I’d heard something about it, too. JinYeong had been complaining about his nose for the last three days; enough so that I now knew the Korean word for nose was something that sounded like ko. Who knew vampires could be such whingy little pouters?

  More talk from JinYeong, close and coldly haughty, but still incomprehensible.

  “Oh, it’s only broken in this house? No, don’t start a fight with me; if we make too much noise the police will come by. What did you find out?”

  I listened in mounting frustration to JinYeong’s voice. At this rate, I was going to have to learn Korean if I wanted to really follow anything that was going on in the house.

  Zero, sharply, asked, “There was other human trace in the house? Not at the hanging site?”

  “Ne.”

  “Blood or something else?”

  “Pi.”

  “Enough of it to mean the human is dead?”

  “Aniyo.”

  “Well, well,” said Athelas, his voice amused. “It seems as though we have our first witness. If we can find them.”

  “JinYeong can follow the blood trail,” Zero said. Of JinYeong, he asked, “You will be able to follow it?”

  “Ne,” agreed JinYeong, though he paused significantly before he answered.

  “Your nose still isn’t working?”

  JinYeong spoke again, sulkily.

  “There’s nothing wrong with this house. If you can’t follow the blood trail yet, we’ll follow the trace of magic I found outside it. It’s strong enough to give us a good trail. We’ll come back to the blood when you’re able to smell it properly again.”

  They talked until about eleven, then went to bed. I only knew that because when I woke up, stiff and sore and confused to find myself in my beanbag instead of my bed, the LED clock said 11.10 and there was only the sound of Zero moving around in his makeshift bedroom. I could have gone to my own bed, but the sound of him moving around was soothing, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep again, hazily certain that I would be sorry about my late bedtime when it came to getting up at five tomorrow.

&n
bsp; I was; but no more than when I stayed up too late reading by the light of my torch. I skipped out of the house in the lull between the beginning of JinYeong’s shower and Athelas’ six o’clock cup of tea, mindful of the faint ‘mwoh?’ I heard from the bathroom and glad that I’d thought to leave the upstairs living room window cracked open again in case I needed to climb back in. It was a cool morning, but I didn’t dare to make a coffee to take along with me now that I knew about Athelas’ early morning tea. If he smelled the coffee or discovered the kettle was a bit too hot…

  So it was already a kind of rotten day. I saw the bearded bloke skulking around when I left, but this time I didn’t trust his presence to herald anything fun or lucky today; not when the three psychos had arrived at the house after I saw him last.

  What’s more, I was already sick of having three psychos in my house, so it was pretty rude of them to show up at my work as well. The boss was in a bad mood as well; he was getting close to one of his fits. They were usually a month or two apart, but lately they’d been closer to two weeks apart, which meant he was gearing up to fire one of us.

  He threw a whisk at me because I wasn’t washing up fast enough for him, then pushed me out of the way and told me to get rid of the rubbish instead. I hate it when he does the washing up himself; all the stuff is done in five minutes, but it’s still filthy dirty, and I have to wash it again when he’s gone. Either that or give the mucky plates and chocolate-ringed mugs to the horrible customers.

  I did as I was told. There are some days when no matter what I do, it’s wrong—and then some days when he loves everyone. He’s a nut.

  It was nice to get out of his sight for a few minutes; it was cool outside, and the alley is always nice to waste a bit of time in. It has some weird architecture left over from when Hobart was first being built; old, bricked up doorways that don’t have stairways attached any more, just hanging there in space. And it’s quiet, you know?