“I’ll call it sir when I give it dinner.”
He glared at me. “We will begin.”
“No. Fun,” I said pointedly, slipping between the fence and a clump of hydrangeas.
JinYeong, circling sideways with all the grace and silence of a panther and something of the eyes, asked suddenly, “You. Why did you mention my sister?”
“Athelas told me about her,” I said.
“That old man!”
“He didn’t say anything nasty about her,” I protested, keeping a wary eye on his hands. He hadn’t reached for anything, but it wouldn’t be long before he did. I knew better than to try and face him when he was weaponless, these days: JinYeong without weapons was a JinYeong who would leap for the throat without caring what weapons his opponent had, because he was quicker than it was possible to attack or defend. And because apparently he would allow himself to be stabbed for a chance to tear out his opponent’s throat.
“I will remind him not to discuss JiAh with people,” he muttered, but he seemed slightly less annoyed than he had earlier.
“He didn’t really discuss her with me,” I said, reaching into the hydrangea bushes and feeling the brief roughness of a growing stake beneath my fingers before it smoothed out into a grippy leather handle. “We were talking about something else and she just sorta came up.”
His head turned slightly to the side, eyebrows winging up. “You were talking about me?”
“Good grief, no!” I said hastily, drawing out the slender sword that had been a stake and passing it to my left hand to reach again with my right for the second. If he was annoyed at having his sister discussed, JinYeong was sure to be annoyed at the thought of me asking questions about him. “We were talking about Zero.”
He scowled. “Why do you want to know about hyeong? I am more interesting.”
“I was gathering intel,” I said, and that seemed to placate him, because he drew two swords from goodness knows where and began a quick, precise attack that didn’t push too hard but left me scrambling to keep up with the pace.
The lack of heat gave me space to think while my body countered the attacks in a series of almost instinctive block-and-attacks. Could Zero be conflating me with JinYeong’s sister? Morgana had really seemed to think that he was falling in love with me, and certainly he had been more approachable, more touchable recently—as if he was making an effort to connect. But was it possible that rather than being in love with me, he was simply remembering things he didn’t particularly want to remember?
“No thinking,” said JinYeong chidingly, tapping me sharply on the side of the wrist with the flat of one blade. “Only fighting.”
“Thought I was supposed to think when I fight,” I panted, retreating to reset my guard. “Thought that was the problem.”
“No purposeful misunderstandings,” he said. “Only fighting.”
And so we fought.
Chapter Four
I texted Abigail after training but left my phone on the coffee table when I went to shower. I still had the number she’d given me, but I had no real expectation of her answering my text. The last time I’d seen her, she was snarling at me for giving her up to the fae—Zero and Athelas, to be precise—and suggesting that I couldn’t be trusted.
Not the best result for a relationship that had looked promising at the start. My psychos might be anti-human, but Abigail and her humans were also very much anti-fae. I mean, I couldn’t really blame them: I was pretty much anti-fae for any fae who weren’t Zero and Athelas, and though I’d never met another vampire, I was pretty sure I’d like ’em even less than I liked JinYeong. Not that I hated him, exactly. Could you call a vampire a frenemy? Probably. I didn’t think I’d want to put up with that from anyone but JinYeong.
But to my surprise, there was a text waiting for me when I got out of the shower, and with Zero’s permission I was very soon walking down the street to follow the terse meeting instructions I’d been sent, JinYeong almost prancing alongside me.
“What are you so happy about?” I demanded, staring for the tenth time at the text that had popped up during my shower. There had been a discussion in the living room while I was in the shower—one that had had me banging on the wall and yelling knock it off! and made a new hole in the wall between living room and kitchen, just where the front hall began.
By the time I got out of the shower, JinYeong was on our couch with his clothes torn and bloody, sucking on a blood bag, and the gaping hole in the kitchen wall was fermenting away with bubbling Between trying to fix it. Zero had already left and Athelas, sitting in his chair, seemed more urbane than usual.
If I’d expected anything from a beginning like that, it would have been for JinYeong, who had obviously gotten the worst of the fight, to be sulking like a child.
He was not sulking. In fact, as we walked down the street, he was prancing.
I looked up from my phone again and glared at him. “Stop frolicking. People are staring.”
“People are staring because I am beautiful. Where are we going?”
“Elizabeth Mall,” I said. I put out my arm to signal to the bus just trundling up, and shoved JinYeong toward it when it pulled up and opened doors with a startlingly loud hiss. “Reckon Abigail doesn’t want to meet us at home base, which means she’s trying to make a point.”
“What point?”
“Well, we already know where they hide out. They’re just being petty and letting us know they don’t trust us to come there anymore.”
JinYeong shrugged and sat down in the back seat. “Let them play their little games. I shall meet them at their headquarters if I wish to.”
“That’s exactly what we don’t want to do,” I reminded him. “We’re supposed to be getting them to trust us again. We’re lucky they’re agreeing to meet with us at all: it’s pretty flamin’ hard to work with people who don’t trust you. Well—just look at me.”
“What are you talking about?” JinYeong asked.
“It’s not like you lot trust me—not really. Zero’s always got at least one plan on the backburner, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still got a tracking spell on me, too.”
“Pft,” said JinYeong, lifting his nose and looking away out the window. “I did not bite that golden idiot when I might have. What else is that but trust?”
“If you’re saying that you trust the golden git, that’s even more insul—hang on. You said that before, but I still don’t understand it. You didn’t have a go at him because you trusted me? How does that work?”
“I was very emotional at that time,” he said matter-of-factly. “I trusted you to know the right thing to do. Mulleon, for some time now I have trusted you—but not with my ties.”
“Maybe if you’d spent less time glaring at me and complaining about me spending time with Zero I would have realised that,” I said coldly, ignoring the bit about his ties. That was just good sense. “It’s not like you don’t have a go at him whenever you feel annoyed at life in general, so it’s a bit dog-in-the-manger of you to object to me spending time with him, but whatever.”
“Yes,” he said stubbornly, “but that is my right.”
“You thought I was pinching your big brother,” I said. I’d wondered that before, but now I was sure. “You want to be able to fight with him whenever you choose without someone else distracting him.”
JinYeong’s eyes flicked across to me with a hint of storm to them. “He is not my brother. That is not what it is.”
“Good grief,” I said. “Sorry I asked. Let me know whatever it is when you find out, okay?”
He grinned at me so suddenly that it startled me, and then he was back to being ridiculously prancy, just in time to saunter down the aisle and alight in a way that might have been described as sprightly.
“Heck,” I said, jumping down from the bus to catch up with him. “Oi! Come back here! They still think you’re my boyfriend, don’t they?”
“I will have bubble tea,” JinYeong said, ga
zing up Elizabeth Mall. “We will have bubble tea. Everyone will have bubble tea.”
He was definitely high and happy about something. I only wished I knew what.
“We can have bubble tea afterward,” I told him.
“If I am your boyfriend, we will have bubble tea.”
“You’re really weird today, you know that?” I said, dragging him away by the sleeve from the two bubble tea shops on opposite sides of the mall. He allowed himself to be pulled up the mall, but made sure I had to pull to move him. We were supposed to meet Abigail at the further end of the mall, nearby the spot where buskers always set up, and although I was happy for them to have time to scope out the place and feel comfortable, I didn’t exactly want to be late.
We stopped before we got there, ourselves. Maybe JinYeong resisted just a little bit more, or maybe it was just that I was growing in caution; whatever the reason, we sort of dwindled to a halt just before the flower cart, between the sushi joint and the shoe shop. No sign of Abigail or any of the kids I knew by face, and it didn’t look like anyone else was behaving particularly suspiciously, either, but there was something not quite right about the mall this morning.
Everything was exactly where it usually was, but was there something a bit extra? Or was it just that the space felt stretched out, somehow: a lot more distance between us and the flower cart than there should be?
Or was it, perhaps, the way the open doorway installation to our right was rippling with something that definitely wasn’t the alley and the sushi shop that should be visible through it?
“Ah heck,” I said quietly, twitching his sleeve gently. “JinYeong.”
He had already stiffened, his eyes liquid with danger and fixed on the flutter of movement in the rectangular space. Flowers sprouted first, all up the sides of the rectangle and then outward along the installation and the paved floor of the mall as well. Grass leaped up between bricks and thicketed around fixed seats and the poles that held up the waving decorative rain cover above us, and as it formed a path directly from the doorway to us, an advanced guard of armoured fae stepped through the installation.
Their master stepped through behind them, towering over them head and shoulders, his skin as pale and glowing as the moon, and I knew at once who it was. Zero’s dad had come to check up on us again at last. Oh heck. What did he know?
“Is he allowed to do that in public?” I mumbled, throwing a look around the mall. People were staring, too; I don’t know if they saw what we saw, but they were definitely looking at the installation that blossomed with flowers.
“It’s Shakespeare in the Mall!” said someone. “I didn’t know that was on today! How are they doing the flowers, do you reckon?”
I supposed that was something. Zero’s dad did look distinctly Shakespearean if you were talking about Oberon: white hair flowed behind and around him on some scented breeze that almost overpowered even JinYeong’s cologne. Cobwebby trousers clung to leonine waist and legs, and the blue of his eyes was almost blinding.
Don’t look in those eyes, I reminded myself.
I mean, at least if there was going to be violence in the mall, the actual people around would think it was all part of the act. It wouldn’t stop us from dying, though—and it wouldn’t stop bystanders from dying, either—so the best we could hope for was concealment.
“Ah, jjajeungna!” said JinYeong in annoyance. If I’d been with Athelas, it would have been a sighed, “How very irritating!”
“If you’re gunna tell me to get behind you, I’ve got some bad news for you,” I told him. I could feel the coldness of the fae’s eyes on me from across the pavement and had to fight hard to keep my own eyes from his. The first step he took that brought him fully out into the mall made me cold to the very bones.
“Kuroliga obseo,” JinYeong muttered. “He would just plant an idea in your mind to stab me in the back. I am wearing my best suit.”
“You really need to stop wearing your best suits when you come out with me,” I said, but there was a trembling deep inside me because I already knew how well Zero’s dad could get into my head, and even if he couldn’t make me do things, he could definitely roam around and pick answers out of my mind. He could also start to wonder why he couldn’t control me, and that was probably about as dangerous as being able to make me do other things.
“It is true. Why do I do that? You don’t appreciate it. Son.”
“What?” I said blankly, even though he was holding out his hand and I knew with absolute certainty that he had just said hand. There was no reason for him to be asking to hold my hand except—
“I can’t protect you like hyeong would,” he said, eyes never wavering from the disturbance of Between that continued ruffling up through the mall around us. “So I will do it my way. Son.”
“Pretty sure Zero wouldn’t approve,” I grumbled, but I gave him my hand and he slid his fingers through mine, holding tighter than his casual stance would have indicated. “He’s been trying to make it look like you lot don’t care about me. If you’re gunna make his dad think I’m your little blood toy, what’s to stop him having a go at you?”
JinYeong made the smallest click of teeth together, a small, savagely joyful noise. “Vampire spit is verrrrry good for you,” he said. “For the fae, it is verrrrry bad. They will not like me to bite them, and they cannot make me do what I do not wish to do.”
“Flamin’ heck,” I said, in the deepest respect. I already knew how dangerous vampire blood was to the fae, but it was still a risky play. “What about if he calls some goons who don’t have fae blood, though?”
“Then we will both have to fight,” said JinYeong. “Noh. You will have to fight very hard.”
“Never known a bloke who can make the word you seem like an insult,” I muttered to myself, but there was no time to argue with him.
Zero’s dad was only twenty feet away and he had started walking toward us, his fore-guard splitting and moving around to flank him instead. You know about that song that talks about cool gales fanning the glade wherever some sheila walks? Well, when Zero’s dad walks into a place, this is what happens: everything sprouts grass and flowers and stuff—his own personal carpet to show how flamin’ important he is. Kinda makes me wonder what happens when the King Behind walks around the place. Who knows, maybe the King is too important to do the walking himself. Maybe he floats on a cloud of his own importance.
I swallowed, and forced myself to lift my phone and tap out a very short text. Abort. Big bad nearby. Don’t approach. I had to press send on it twice because my fingers were cold and the touch didn’t register the first time, but I put my phone in my back pocket as casually as I could. Hopefully, Zero’s dad was about as ignorant as most Behindkind when it came to human inventions; I didn’t want to field any questions about who I’d been texting.
Why was he here? Why? The golden fae was dead: he didn’t know about me being an heirling, right? But if not, why the heck was he here?
“I find it strange,” said Zero’s father, stopping a couple of metres away, “that a pet is allowed to roam so freely.”
He might have stopped, but the carpet of flowers and grass didn’t, bubbling up underneath our feet and sweeping up and over the nearby red wombat statue that kids loved to climb on. It velveted its way up the white posts that supported the wavy plexiglass above, too, turning them flower-spotted green. A few people gasped and applauded, and a few more gathered around.
“What I do and where I go with the petteu is my business,” said JinYeong purringly.
The fae’s eyes met mine in a shock of ice-blue, holding them. “What does your master think of this, human?” he asked, and I could already feel the little questioning worm that he had set wriggling into my mind.
Only this time, instead of burrowing for stray truth, it talked to me.
Little Pet, it said. Why are you so important? There is so little in your mind, but I have been keeping an eye on you and that has been…fascinating.
&nb
sp; The memory of the golden fae’s torn out throat nearly popped back into my head before I could stop it, so I hastily let out the next thought that would have followed it: So you were the one who set up the café with Marazul!
I already knew it, but it was truth he would acknowledge. The derisive laugh I heard was too full-bodied for a worm. It took me a while to realise that it was the fae’s laughter out loud in the real world, and that realisation gave me the sense that maybe I could break free if I really tried, because for a while I’d forgotten about the real world.
So little in here, the worm said again, as if it knew what I had just realised. It probably did, and that meant trouble. Just dead parents and a vampire. Shall I bring you in and see what use I can make of you?
Not much use, me, I thought. Just a human, doing human stuff.
Are you refusing me?
I couldn’t help the indignant, first thought that came out. Heck, I don’t know what you’re asking!
If that wasn’t just like someone related to Zero! Tell you nothing, then get snippy because you don’t know stuff. The little worm started to chew away at the idea of parents, terrifying a fluttering, unfamiliar memory into dreadfully new life, but something warm gripped my chin and turned my whole face away, breaking the eye contact.
I shuddered in the relief of that release from visions of glittering blood, and looked into narrow, liquid eyes instead as JinYeong’s voice said caressingly, “Do not listen to his wriggly little voice, my Petteu. Only listen to me.”
“Only you,” I said, holding his eyes. The worm was gone as if it never had been, and I wondered if its momentary hold had left me more susceptible than usual, because it didn’t seem possible to look away from JinYeong. I didn’t want to, because right then I felt safe and I was still cold from the fear of that little worm that talked and ate. From fear of the dark, unfamiliar memory that had fluttered into view for a sick moment. What was that memory? How was it in my head? Why couldn’t I remember exactly what it had been now that my mind was free?
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 7