At the very worst, I expected to find Abigail in the tea shop when we arrived—they’d used the old mad bloke to run messages before, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find that they had a front somewhere else around the city.
She wasn’t there when JinYeong and I trailed in after the old bloke, though. He marched up to the counter, said, “Two!” in a fine spray of spit, and then dashed for the back of the shop, leaving me and JinYeong to pay.
That was fair—he’d used up a good amount of bubble tea helping us fight off the petalmen—so I made JinYeong pay instead of just charming the drinks out of the cashier like he looked as though he was about to do.
I elbowed him at the first sign of his smoulder and said, “Oi. You can’t be charming other women while you’re out with one. Haven’t you learned that in your books yet?”
He blinked a bit and said, “It is necessary.”
“One,” I said, pinching his wallet from his pocket without asking, “it’s not necessary. It’s just bubble tea. Two: of course it doesn’t matter when you’re on the job with me. But if you’re actually thinking about dating—especially someone human—”
“Are you teaching me right now?”
“Only a little bit,” I told him. “I’m not going to get involved if you actually end up dating someone, but you shouldn’t scupper your chances first thing.”
I left him behind, muttering that he was not going to scupper anything, and went back to find the old mad bloke before he did something too bad. I didn’t get there in time: he had made a neat circle of sugar around the table he sat at, prompting one of the servers to glare at him, and he was unweaving the weaved basket chair he sat in when I got there.
“Good grief, it’s like being out with two kids,” I said, plopping myself down in the chair next to him.
“Hotsori,” said JinYeong. He sat beside me and said to the old mad bloke with a distinct undercurrent of threat, “Do not do useless things.”
The old mad bloke crossed his legs beneath him without acknowledging either of us, and sat solemnly until the server brought us our two drinks. He grabbed both drinks with a crow of glee, and started slurping one up straight away. JinYeong, as if he couldn’t quite help himself, tidied the curve of the sugar circle where the server had disturbed it, and that made the old bloke mumble a laugh into his drink.
“Bitey bitey,” he said, dribbling milk.
JinYeong threw me an irritated look, but at my grin he just sat back and folded his arms, raising his eyes to the ceiling for a brief moment.
“Oi,” I said to the old bloke. “You’re looking pretty flamin’ good for a bloke who’s died so many times. Who are you, exactly? You can’t tell me you’re really my neighbour because I’m pretty sure that if I tried to check the name on your deed—”
“No names, lady,” he said solemnly, at once. “I am man. Homo sapiens. That’s why they can’t touch me. I’m an important person.”
“’Course you are,” I said. If he was the Harbinger like Zero and Athelas suggested, he was a very important person. In that light, his repeated brushes with death made perfect sense. Trying for an easier question, I asked, “Where are you staying these days?”
“I’m free!” he said, eyes brightening at once. “Once I was captive but now I’m free!”
“Yeah, you got taken by the fae, didn’t you?”
The old bloke exhaled explosively into his straw, slopping milk tea over the top of the cup and onto the table. JinYeong moved his arms back fastidiously and shot him a warning look, but the old bloke only said, “I am a ninja. I go nowhere I don’t want to go.”
“Okay,” I said. The suspicion that he was the Harbinger—the one meant to usher in the new cycle and support a particular heirling—left me feeling distinctly edgy. He’d been hanging around me for a bit too long, and I wanted to be the King Behind even less than Zero did. “No offense, all right? What are you up to at the moment?”
“You have to come with me,” he said. He finished up his first tea in a death rattle of boba, and burped loudly before he pushed away the empty cup and slid the second cup closer.
“We are with you,” I said, because JinYeong was muttering in exasperated Korean that he hadn’t bothered to translate and didn’t seem willing to engage further. “What do you want?”
“You have to come further with me.”
“Further where? ’Cos if you’re talking about going Between with you—”
“We are not going Between,” JinYeong said flatly. “I do not wish to, and hyeong would kill me.”
“There’s a lot of that going around lately,” I said, throwing him a narrow-eyed look. For some reason, that made him grin and regain some of the jauntiness he’d had earlier in the morning. “If you bunch are going to be knocking down my house bit by bit, we’re gunna have a pro—”
“Time to go!” said the old mad bloke suddenly, darting out of his seat with the second bubble tea still in his hand. He shot out the door, leaving me and JinYeong scrambling to keep up, and trotted back the way we’d come, through to Wellington Court.
By the time we entered the court again, there was no sign of the old galah, just people milling here and there as usual: kids yelling and chasing the pigeons, teenagers jeering at each other, adults fastidiously cleaning off the fixed tables and chairs before sitting down.
And standing with her back against the pole topped by a mosaic-covered sailing ship in full sail, was a girl, watching us. She was nondescript: brown hair in a long bob, jeans that fit in with pretty much every girl her age around us, and a camo hoodie.
“Reckon Abigail sent someone to meet us,” I told JinYeong, catching the girl’s eyes.
“Kurogae,” he murmured.
She must have been one of the few that find JinYeong unaccountably terrifying, because she looked at him once and dropped her eyes; but she didn’t run away when we approached, and that meant she was brave. I mean, brave or stupid. I’m still finding out where the difference is, myself.
“You waiting for us?” I asked her.
“Yep,” she said, pushing away from the pole. “I’m Cadence.”
“Pet.”
That made her frown. Then, with a frankness that gave me a cold start, she asked, “Name, or function?”
It was my turn to stare at her. “What do you know about Pets?”
“Had an owner once—it makes you appreciate your own name a bit more, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure that was true. There was a kind of safety and anonymity when people—fae—didn’t know your name. When you were just a pet, they didn’t pay as much attention to you—they also tended to very badly underestimate you.
“Anyway,” said Cadence, hunching her shoulders a bit. “Abigail sent me to meet you.”
“Too busy to meet up?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t that.
“She wanted to make sure your other friends weren’t with you, this time,” Cadence said. “She knew I’d recognise fae when I saw ’em.”
I jerked my thumb at JinYeong. “What about him?”
“Your boyfriend is fine. Humans are allowed.”
“You weren’t with the group last time.”
“Had a thing. You ready to go? I’m just the fore-guard to make sure we weren’t going to encounter any fae.”
She started off without waiting for a yes, and I followed her with JinYeong, cutting through the dead-end road that ran alongside the TAFE, leaving the giant red fish mural in our wake.
“If you’d been around a bit sooner, you would have encountered a few,” I said, gazing longingly at the motorbikes that lined the old red-brick alley wall on the other side.
JinYeong must have seen that, because he gave a derisive pft of laughter. I mean, yeah, if you can travel via Between, the thrill of a motorbike might lose a bit of its lustre, but they still looked pretty good to me.
“I saw that,” Cadence said, her voice edged with respect. “You should think about joining us�
�we could use people like you.”
That…was interesting. I had expected for Abigail to simply not reply, or to reply with a distinctly short and sharp negative. At the best, I’d expected her to do exactly what she was doing with her precautions, or to have even more precautions than before. I was not expecting casual offers of employment. It was the second time today that someone had done something for a reason I couldn’t fathom, and even if the urge wasn’t quite so strong when my life wasn’t so likely to be in danger, I did want to know why I was being practically welcomed back into the fold.
“Like what, exactly?” I asked, since I couldn’t meet that offer with a suspicious why are you lot being so friendly again all of a sudden? From all that Cadence had seen, we’d run for it as soon as we were attacked, even if we’d faced the petalman out of sight.
“You faced up to one of the flower-growers,” she said, stopping at a door between two motorbikes. “I’ve never seen a human do that before—haven’t even seen many fae do it. And you tricked his little flowermen into following you away from the other humans so that no one got hurt.”
Interesting, I thought, looking at that door. I knew that there was only another alley on the other side of that door: this alley separated from that by a brick wall with a door that went nowhere you couldn’t get by just walking around the end of the wall.
Still, I wasn’t surprised to see the inside of a furnished room when she opened it. JinYeong’s eyes met mine, one of his brows rising, and I shrugged slightly.
“Be careful when you step across,” Cadence said, stepping into the room herself. “It can be a bit disorienting if you’re not used to it.”
“We’ll be careful,” I said solemnly, since it would be rude to laugh in her face. The desire to laugh faded again as it occurred to me that far from being a fob-off from the headquarters that JinYeong and I already knew about, this was showing us another sensitive place. Heck. What was going on? “Is Abigail in here?”
I’d already seen the answer to my question: she wasn’t. The entire room was maybe ten feet by ten, with a couch and two chairs, and a coffee table. Unless Abigail was hiding behind the couch, she definitely wasn’t here.
“There is no door,” said JinYeong in dissatisfaction.
I was about to remark that I’d seen that, when it struck me exactly what he meant: there was no other door than that by which we’d entered, and when Cadence shut it, that one disappeared as well.
Oh. Maybe this appearance of friendly hands shaken in forgiveness was an actual trap.
“What is this?” I asked Cadence, in a friendly sort of a way. There were a lot of weapons that I could grab from here: I could still see the underpinnings of the room that were actually part of the alley it was in the human layer of the world. No need to get nasty just yet.
“Don’t worry,” she said quickly. “It’s just a waiting room. If you want to leave, you can; I’ll open the door for you straight away.”
“No worries,” I said, plopping down on the couch. Ridiculously, I was uneasy again. JinYeong sat beside me, slinging one arm around my shoulders, and grinned at Cadence with enough tooth to make her distinctly uncomfortable, if I was any judge. “Have you blokes noticed the bridge trolls and goblins that have been popping up around Hobart more often lately?”
“We noticed,” said Cadence, after a moment. “We’ve been having a bit of trouble with them ourselves; we’ve got an idea why, too.”
“’Zat why Abigail agreed to see me again?” I asked, but I didn’t really expect an answer.
Cadence began readily, “Nah, that was because—” and then stopped short. More carefully, she said, “I mean, I think Abigail has a favour to ask.”
“Taebak,” said JinYeong, for my ears only. “I thought she would try to kill you.”
“Thanks for the warning, then,” I said to him. At least I wasn’t the only one who found it surprising to be welcomed back. “Nice to know you’re looking out for me.”
“I came with you. Do you think I’ll let her kill you?”
“Thanks,” I told him, with more sincerity. To Cadence, I said, “What sort of favour?”
She shifted a little bit. “I’ll let her tell you.”
She wouldn’t be swayed from that stance, either: I had the feeling that she felt she had slipped earlier and was afraid to say too much more. It was another stiff five minutes for us all before Abigail arrived, pushing through the wall as if it wasn’t there and then closing a phantom door behind her.
“Strike a light,” I said, impressed. “It looks different from this side!”
“Only someone entering can see the door,” Abigail told me. She looked a bit tidier than last time I’d seen her; her red hair was in a ponytail, plaited, then wrapped into a bun, but her clothing was just as plain as ever. The real difference was the fresh scar that ran down her left arm, still puckering as it healed.
“Someone had a go at you?”
“A few goblins,” she said, shrugging. “I got careless. You had a bit of trouble on your way here, too; I saw your text.”
“Came through all right. Just met an old acquaintance and had to run for it. Thanks for sending the old bloke to bring us to the right spot.”
“Turned up, did he?” She looked relieved. “Sometimes he does what he’s meant to do, sometimes not.”
Cadence, bouncing on her toes, said, “Abs, she said they’ve noticed more incursions than usual, too. Bridge trolls and that sort of thing.”
“Thanks,” Abigail said. “You didn’t have to come all this way to tell me that, though. You could have texted that much.”
“Didn’t think you liked leaving a trail of texts and stuff,” I pointed out. “Actually, I didn’t think you’d answer.”
“We don’t like trails,” she agreed, ignoring the second part of my answer. “Where have you been having the most trouble?”
“North Hobart, going toward Lenah Valley. There’s been a bit of trouble up around the old brewery at the bottom of the mountain too, though; and we had some excitement in the Huon Valley, but that came back to an office in North Hobart. Zero suggested that you lot could take care of that sort of thing if you had time.”
Maybe it was a bad way to bring up Zero again, but I had to address the elephant in the room and get it over with before we could get down to business. Maybe there was also a part of me that wanted to poke and see how much I could get away with before something jiggled loose and made it obvious why I had been allowed back in again.
She did stiffen, but that was about all. “That’s kind of the fae lord. Throwing us a bone, is he?”
“Not a bone,” I said. “Reckon he thought you’d do a good job. And I told him it was your right: humans helping humans.”
“I’m flattered,” she said dryly. “We’ll do our best to live up to his expectations.”
Heck. She was just going to take that on face value. I wished I could get rid of the niggling sense that there was more to things than just Abigail being a forgiving sort of person.
“That’s not exactly why I came, though,” I told her. There was time to figure out everything else. “We need a bit of info.”
Abigail looked at me quizzically. “A bit unusual for fae to be asking humans for information, isn’t it?”
“Some humans have been murdered, and we’re trying to figure out who did it. We reckon there are more cases out there, but the cops don’t know about all of them. Zero figured you might know about cases the cops might not.”
“Did he,” said Abigail rather grimly. “So that’s what he wants? I wouldn’t have expected it, but no doubt he has an angle of his own.”
That didn’t sound promising, and her posture wasn’t really encouraging either: arms folded across her chest, hands tucked under her arms, and head down, frowning. I hoped it just meant she was listening.
I pushed on. “You ever hear about a kid whose parents were killed with a series of murders happening in the neighbourhood beforehand? The kid might be de
ad or not, but the parents are almost definitely dead.”
That made her look up and gaze at me for a very long time. “Why would you ask about that?” she asked, at last.
“Met someone like that,” I said, hardly daring to breathe. “Heard about more than one. And maybe someone who escaped it.”
“If you know someone who escaped that, they’re more fortunate than the other cases I’ve heard of,” she said. “I’ve seen, oh, four of those, I think? in our records. And none of them has escaped it yet. They’re not normal deaths, though: no bodies are ever taken to the morgue, and they don’t always find the kid, even though they know there should be one.”
“Yep,” I said, my throat dry. “Those are the ones. Can I see whatever information you’ve got?”
“We’ll discuss it,” she said, which was better than the outright negative I’d half expected. “But it’s not fodder for those other two.”
JinYeong shifted impatiently in his seat, and said, “Who else will do the work, then?”
“You remember they’re the ones investigating the deaths, right?” I said at the same time, poking him gently in the ribs to remind him not to go all toothy on the humans. Luckily, he hadn’t translated any of that. He sniffed and settled back down, his arm settling more heavily on my shoulders. “If you’ve got physical files or evidence, I can look at the stuff and tell them where to go, but why double-handle it if we don’t have to?”
“We’ll discuss it,” said Abigail again.
I had a feeling that it wasn’t the dismissal it seemed: there was more here to discuss than I was seeing at present.
I asked her, “Where are you getting your info about these cases from? I mean, is it stuff I can find on the internet? Because then you wouldn’t have to feel like you’re compromising by actually giving me physical files to look over—you could just point me in the right direction.”
“Maybe if you’re someone who knows where to look and how to find hidden stuff,” she said. Then, after a few moments of what seemed to be a severe struggle with herself, she added, “You’d only find a bit, though. There are a few records—paper records that aren’t on the ’net as far as I know—of cases like that. Other cases, too; other information. We’re not the first humans to band together like this in Tasmania, even if we’re the only ones still alive now. I don’t know about the rest of Australia, or the world, either; but there was a group here in the mid-eighteen hundreds, then again in the twenties, fifties and eighties. None of them last longer than five or ten years, by all that we can make out, but they always seem to make sure they keep the records in a safe space.”
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 10