“We all know this is a game of time,” Cadence added. “You know, a game of how long until they get us, one by one—how long until they find us and wipe us out. So we do the same thing: make a cache of records and proof. Then when the cycle starts again, the information is out there for people to find when they band together to fight the fae.”
“What cycle do you mean?”
“We don’t know,” said Abigail shortly. “Whoever came before us didn’t know, either; there are just periods where everything gets worse for no reason that we can tell. More human deaths, more monster sightings, more fae snatching children. The human cell is usually stamped out whenever each cycle gets to its height.”
“That’s…interesting,” I said, exchanging a look with JinYeong. I’d have to ask Zero about when the last trial for a new king Behind had started up, because things running in cycles was too much of a coincidence to actually be one. “So you’ve got access to those documents, and you might or might not give me access to the ones I want to look at?”
“I’ll give access to you under conditions,” she said, and there was that pause again. Whatever it was, she didn’t like what she was about to do. “And it’ll still have to go to a vote first.”
Encouragingly, and to remind her that she had something to bargain with, I said, “Cadence said you had a favour to ask.”
“Yes,” she said, but she was silent for another minute or so before she continued. “I wouldn’t ask you if I had anyone else I could ask. I don’t like that you’re connected to the fae, and I don’t like that you’re letting them boss you around.”
“Thanks a lot,” I retorted, but I grinned, because I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She hated fae a lot and while I couldn’t really blame her for that, she also had a few bitter pills coming to her. For example, her glorious leader that she had tried so hard to save from the fae, was fae. That she apparently needed me to do something for her, and that I was very much involved with the fae, was not as bitter as that fact was likely to be when she learned it.
“You know I’m negotiating my contract with them, right?” I said. “They don’t hold all the cards.”
She stared at me. “What do you mean, you’re negotiating? You can’t negotiate with them.”
“Everything is negotiable. They give; I give. They take, I take. Not gunna lie, though: you gotta make sure you’ve got flamin’ good leverage, and you’ve gotta make sure they’re halfway decent fae.”
“There’s no such thing,” she said flatly.
“I do not negotiate,” JinYeong said directly to Abigail, sounding far too pleased with himself. “I give freely. I chose to do so.”
“That’s what a boyfriend is supposed to do,” Abigail told him. She didn’t sound impressed, though she smiled as though she couldn’t help it. Vampire voodoo: can’t do anything about it. “I thought you didn’t speak English?”
“He just prefers not to,” I said, glaring at JinYeong. He wasn’t supposed to use Between to translate himself around the humans.
“I bet she puts up with a lot from you, too,” Abigail said to him, as if she perfectly understood how annoying he was.
“Here and there,” I agreed. “What’s the favour you want me to do?”
“I told you about the records,” she said, sober at once. “But we’ve got more than that. We’ve got stuff that’s useful for people who can do the right kind of magic. Artifacts, I suppose you’d call ’em: rings, necklaces. We’ve never been able to get much good out of them, but we don’t want anyone else to get use out of them, either.”
There she went again, telling me sensitive information that you shouldn’t tell to people you don’t trust.
“We’ve got ’em,” explained Cadence. “But we already told you that stuff tends to happen to humans like us.”
“And you already noticed that things are starting to get worse around here—the cycle is starting again, which means there’s a good chance that in about a year or two, we’ll all be dead.”
“You want me to keep your trinkets for you so that the fae can’t use ’em?”
JinYeong gave a small, delighted chuckle that made Abigail redden with what looked like a combination of annoyance and flustered consciousness. “Today is a very enjoyable day,” he said, for my ears only.
“Your boyfriend needs to learn that it’s rude to deliberately speak so that others can’t understand,” Abigail said.
He sent her his most dreamy, sparkling smile, and she took only a moment to crack, laughing ruefully.
“He already knows,” I said sympathetically. “He’s just a generally awful sort of person.”
“I am a beautiful person,” said JinYeong, his nose in the air. “I should be forgiven.”
Abigail considered him for another few, rueful moments. “It looks like you usually are. How about it, Pet? Are you willing to keep them for us?”
“I can do it,” I said slowly. “But I reckon I know someone who would be a better fit—and safer.”
“I’m not very fond of introductions,” she said. “And the more people who are introduced to me, the more patterns we put out in the world. We’ve stayed alive by staying small. Your friend would be in danger if you introduced them to us—is that a risk they’d be willing to take?”
“You don’t need to meet him,” I said. “I could pass the stuff onto him. You might already know him: Detective Tuatu, at the Hobart cop shop.”
She stared at me. “You know him? He knows about us?”
“He doesn’t know about you—not yet, anyway. He knows about…well, pretty much everything else. He tries not to get too involved, but he gives me info from time to time. He’d be safe, and he’s…protected. He has a few less ties to the other world than I do, too. No fae to stick their fingers into a bit of jewellery they shouldn’t be touching.”
I was being very strictly truthful, but although Tuatu didn’t have any fae friends, he did have a very interesting sort of relationship with the North Wind. As far as I was concerned, that just meant he was a bit safer than most humans who knew about Behindkind.
“I’ve heard of him,” said Abigail. “We were—that is, a friend of his was part of our group a while ago. He died just before he was going to bring Tuatu in on it: we had him staking out a location from someone’s house.”
“Still haven’t managed to get someone else in there,” Cadence added, with a twisted smile.
“It’s a hospital,” I told them. So that’s what Tuatu’s friend had been up to at Morgana’s house!
Her voice was disappointed. “What? A hospital?”
“Yeah. A sorta prison hospital: it’s where Behi–fae keep prisoners who need to be recovered before they can be sentenced or imprisoned. It’s nothing important.”
“What a waste!” she muttered. “Resources, life—what a reason to die!”
“It caused a bit of a problem for the detective, too. They tried to pin the death on him.”
Abigail’s eyes fastened on me sharply. “And he escaped?”
“It was a bit hard for them to keep framing people for stuff from the inside of the police force after we kicked them out of there,” I pointed out. “They still try to have a go at him every now and then, but he’s pretty well looked after, these days, and they can’t mess with the cops too much at the moment.”
“Level of incidents around the Central Business District went way down a couple of months ago,” Abigail said, as though she didn’t quite believe it. “That was you?”
“It was us,” I said. “Us and the two fae. They’d made a nice little rat’s nest in there that we had to clear out, but once it was gone, they had a harder time using police support. They’ve still got a few roots in the police force, but nothing like it was.”
She drew in a deep breath, and behind her, Cadence shook her head in wonder.
“You should think about joining us,” said Abigail. “If you’re trying to do good around here and you don’t want to be compromising the good you do
, we’re an option.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and I said it with absolute honesty. I was still eager to know exactly why Abigail had chosen to meet with me again—why she even thought to trust me with her artifacts—but I’d wondered, now and then, what would happen once my three psychos found their murderer and went back to wherever they’d come from, leaving me alone in my house. I didn’t think I’d be able to go back to normal life—didn’t know that there was a normal life waiting for me. I didn’t even really know if I’d had a normal life to start with. If everything with Abigail checked out, it might be a good option for me.
Abigail nodded toward JinYeong. “What about him?”
“I go where she goes,” said JinYeong, shrugging.
“I see.” With an honesty that cut right to my heart, she said, “I’ve got the feeling we’ll survive a bit longer with you around, too. We’re good, but we’re only as good as our talents and our experience. You’ve got more experience and you’re somehow stronger and faster, too.”
“Yeah,” I said ruefully, “you probably don’t really want our experiences.”
“Probably not,” she said. “I’ll get back to you about those files, all right? And I’ll think about your friend, too: he’s already pre-vetted, even if we’d prefer it was you.”
Realising that this was the end of our meeting, I stood up and tugged at JinYeong’s sleeve until he got up, too. “I’ll think about it,” I said, since she seemed to expect an answer to that.
Something scratched away in my brain, wanting to be asked, and as we stood there awkwardly, I added, “There was something else.”
Might as well go for it. I looked across at JinYeong, and he met my eyes briefly before looking away, smiling faintly. It wasn’t a promise that he wouldn’t tell Zero, of course, but it was a sign of slightly exasperated resignation. “Cadence says she was a pet, and you’ve got other humans here that you rescued from the fae.”
“It’s our modus operandi,” Abigail said, grinning at Cadence. “Find a fae with a human, free the human. Find a human in danger from otherworldly Things, save the human.”
“Ever deal with people who just…disappear?”
She shook her head. “Can’t. We don’t know where they go: it’s like they disappear off the face of the earth. Sometimes they come back, sometimes not. We only deal with the ones that we can see.”
“Right.” Not much good asking them about my great grandmother, then, I supposed. I said quietly, “Reckon that’s it, then.”
Abigail hesitated for a moment, then said with a speed that suggested she was trying to get it out before she thought better of it, “You might want to check up on the Standforths. Mother Aileen, son Ralph.”
“They’re in one of your files?”
“It’s the only name I remember outright,” she said, “and I don’t remember much about the case other than the names. If the group agrees, we’ll go fetch the files and go from there. For now, you get one name, and if they decide not to give the rest to you, that’s all you get.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I meant it. She was helping, even if she was doing it rather grudgingly.
“It is very interesting,” said JinYeong below his breath and untranslated. “So useful. I wonder why!”
“All right. Make sure you keep remembering to leave your friends at home when we meet again, and I’ll probably be nice then, too.”
“I’ll get the door,” said Cadence.
Definitely a pet once. I shot her a grin and she grinned back, then opened the door for us. No door, then a door: very nifty, that.
“I’ll message you if they want to ask questions or speak with you,” I promised Abigail. “And if you say you don’t wanna talk, I’ll tell ’em that, too.”
She stared at me for a few seconds, and I wondered suddenly if she disbelieved what I said. I added, “I wouldn’t have done it last time if there had been another choice.”
“That’s what I meant about being compromised,” she said, as if she couldn’t help the words tumbling out. As if she’d been wanting to say something the whole time but had been holding herself back. “If they force you to do something—”
I shook my head. “You don’t get it. I made the decision that there wasn’t another choice. They didn’t make me do anything.”
“That’s what we all think at first,” she said, rather sadly. “I’ll get back to you about the decision, Pet. Get home safely.”
I wanted to say more, but what would she believe? We’d already done better than I could have hoped for. I let JinYeong shuffle me through the door and left without trying to convince her further, emerging into the noisiness of Wellington Court on one hand and the busy road on the other.
“C’mmon,” I said to JinYeong, even though he was the one who had propelled us gently back outside. “Let’s get bubble tea for Athelas. I wanna see his face when he gets a mouthful of boba.”
It would probably have been a bit of a subdued walk home if it wasn’t for the fact that JinYeong was still very much strutting along the street; both of us were tired from our fight earlier, and I just considered myself lucky that I was still hopped up on vampire spit. Apart from a bit of stiffness, I was no longer injured.
“What are you so pleased about?” I asked him, but now I was more amused than irritated by his bounciness and there was a bit of a swing to the hand in which I held the bubble tea bag.
“I am a good boyfriend,” he said, buttoning the first button on his holey suit-jacket before coming across the missing one and abandoning that particular effort at dignity.
“Yeah? Where’d you get that from?”
“I am doing what a boyfriend is supposed to do. The woman with the red hair said so.”
“She meant that it’s the base level of what you’re supposed to do,” I told him. “Not something to be boasting about. But here you are, boasting about it.”
JinYeong slid me a sly, sideways look. “I think you don’t know anything,” he said. “When did you have a boyfriend?”
I couldn’t help the laugh that escaped me. “That’s rude and also true,” I said.
I mean, what did I know, really? I knew that I was still thinking about the smile of a merman even though I’d never been on a date in my life, and my only kisses had been with a vampire for the purposes of getting drugged up to fight. What would I expect if I were to go out with someone? What would I expect if I went out with someone who wasn’t even human, if it came to that?
Did mermen even ask people out? Would I have to ask him? Heck, was that even something I was capable of doing?
I was still wondering about that with some interest when JinYeong took the bubble tea bag from me with a quizzical look and stuffed his other hand in his pocket, swinging the bag between us. He was still sauntering a bit.
“What about you?” I asked him. “Did you go out with someone before…all that?”
This time he answered without suspicion. “I went into the military when I was eighteen: I had no time to date.”
“There’s a compulsory draft over there, isn’t there?”
“Not then,” said JinYeong. “Then, we were poor and needed food and a house. My sister was working, too, but she was delicate and the work was too hard for her.”
“That’s a bit rough,” I said. No wonder JinYeong enjoyed receiving smiles and admiration and wide-eyed looks: he hadn’t had the chance for any of that before he went into the military, and then he’d been turned into a vampire while he was there. “What about afterwards, when you were turned?”
“Ani,” he said. “Then, it was too dangerous. I was young in blood and it was too easy to make mistakes. I travelled with hyeong instead.”
Mistakes, hm? The sort of mistakes that left young women dead, I wondered? Probably. It was a good thing JinYeong had met up with Zero at that point, I supposed. If you preferred to be a vampire rather than dead, anyway. And if you wanted to learn how to not kill humans.
I nearly asked him if tha
t was when something had happened to his sister, but he was still swinging the bubble tea bag—still sauntering and enjoying the sunshine like no self-respecting vampire ought to do—and I didn’t have the heart to bring up unpleasant thoughts again.
“Oi,” I said, jabbing him in the side with my elbow, “you’d better stop telling me I don’t know anything, then. It’s not like you’ve ever dated someone.”
He grinned, sharp-toothed and bright. “I learn verrry quickly. You will see.”
It sounded like a threat, but that’s vampires for you: say anything with sharp enough teeth, and you get a bit of bite to it.
“Yeah, we’ll see,” I said.
Chapter Six
“Pet,” said Athelas in pained tones. “What is this?”
“Bubble tea,” I told him. “Got you the brown sugar one because it had a tiger on it.”
“I’m sure that makes sense to you, my dear—”
“I could have gotten you an earl grey,” I continued, “but the tiger won me over. It looked just like you.”
“I’m eternally grateful.”
“Yeah?” I grinned at him. “You haven’t tried it yet.”
“I’ll try it in a moment,” he said, without looking any less pained. He’d even forgotten to cross one leg over the other, so he must have been perturbed. “I assume that you didn’t return home merely to ply us with—” he looked down at the plastic cup, mildly bemused.
“—bubble tea,” I reminded him.
“Bubble tea. Yes. May one ask what the bubbles entail?”
“Boba, apparently. They’re all heavy and squishy with brown sugar syrup, too!”
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 11