“I’ll take the pet with me,” said Zero, as I came back into the room, much to my glee. “If only to keep her out of trouble for a little while.”
“A hopeless endeavour, I believe,” Athelas said.
“Rude,” I told them both. They knew I was there, and they still said it—which ought to sound bad but I was pretty happy with it. I’d rather they say stuff where I can hear it than not tell me things and pretend we’re working together.
“If my father should choose to approach again, I’d prefer him to do it when I’m there.”
“Then shouldn’t you be going out to guard JinYeong?” I asked. There was still a scent of him, but he must have already left the house while I was dumping plates into the sink. “He’s the one your dad was trying to recruit.”
Me, he’d just given the creeps and the cold feeling that I ought to be remembering something.
“JinYeong can look after himself,” said Zero. “I told him to be careful. Come along, Pet.”
I came along like the best of pets, and maybe he appreciated that, because he patted me on the head as I passed through the hall ahead of him. I managed not to shy away this time.
I kept an eye out for the old mad bloke as we headed down the street, but he was always inclined to keep out of sight when Zero was around, so I wasn’t surprised not to catch a glimpse of him.
“I suppose there isn’t a lot of use trying to talk to your zombie friend before we go to the trouble and expense of hiring the merman?” Zero asked me, when we got to the main street.
“Probably not,” I said, a bit gloomily. “What do you mean, anyway, the expense? How much does it cost?”
“Nothing in human money,” he said. “Well, not entirely. He’ll want some human money, but he’ll no doubt want some exchange of favour as well.”
I don’t know why that made me feel a sudden chill. It’s not as if I didn’t already know that ’Zul, as a merman, was Behindkind. They all do business in deals and exchanges.
“I can make the deal myself if it’s too expensive,” I said. ’Zul hadn’t asked me anything for unlocking the USB: I hadn’t even thought to question it.
Coldly, he said, “Absolutely not. It’s one thing to let you find your feet when it comes to Behind; it’s another to throw you to the wolves straight away where bargaining is concerned.”
“Marazul isn’t a wolf,” I protested. There were a lot of things in life that I wasn’t sure of, but I was very sure that ’Zul was both warm and kind, even if he was a bit skittish. “He wouldn’t try to take advantage.”
“Behindkind are taught to take advantage of everyone from their youngest days,” Zero told me. “If they don’t, they’re taken advantage of. Either way, the lesson is learned.”
“That’s no way to live your lives,” I told him.
“There is no other way,” he said. “One way or another, we learn.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you’re not always doing that when it comes to me. So you guys can learn to be selfless—and don’t pretend you’re not always doing selfless stuff for me, either. I might not always appreciate the way you do it, but I do appreciate the fact that you want to do it.”
The more I got to know him, the more I understood his outlook: being taught nothing else but backstabbery and cruelty hadn’t made him exactly dark and dangerous like Athelas, but it had twisted his natural protectiveness into something to be feared—and it wasn’t just something to be feared from the perspective of someone facing that protective force.
To my surprise, he didn’t counter with his usual we have an agreement—which I wouldn’t have accepted anyway because right now, technically, we didn’t. Instead, he said ruefully, “This is exactly why I didn’t want to keep you in the first place.”
“Yeah, can’t be having people think you’re going soft, protecting humans and not looking down on them all the time, eh?” I said cheerfully.
“I don’t want you to die.”
“I appreciate that.”
I heard him laugh softly, but there was an edge of uncertainty to it. “Pet, I don’t want you to die,” he said slowly, the words uneven and slightly reluctant. “I don’t know why, or how, or—no, I don’t even know—there is…something we need to talk about.”
I shot an uneasy sideways look at him, because that thought had popped up again: Morgana suggesting that there was more to Zero’s protectiveness than just…protectiveness.
“All right, all right, don’t hurt yourself,” I said hastily. “It’s all right to have feelings, but you can work through them slowly; you don’t have to blurt them all out at once! You don’t want me to die. Beauty. That’s a flamin’ good start.”
He gave another low laugh, this one maybe relieved, and said, “While we explore the similarities between these cases—Morgana, Ralph, the others—you’re going to have to consider your own case.”
“Yeah, it’s similar,” I said, with the smallest inkling of relief. There was already too much going on in my life to want to worry about…other sorts of feelings. “That’s what made me take notice. And you know I’m an heirling now, so these other ones probably are too, which means that the murderer is—”
“Which means,” he interrupted, “that we’re going to have to look at the surrounding incidents to your parents’ deaths as well. We’re going to need to ask you the same sort of questions that we’re asking the others—dig into your parents’ lives just like we’re digging into the others.”
“Oh.” Stupid to think, but that hadn’t occurred to me. I suppose I’d thought of myself as being somehow outside of the questioning—or maybe just part of the people who were asking the questions. Was I starting to get as aloof and entitled as Behindkind? Thinking myself above the other humans who had had awful things happen to them because I understood a bit more of the world that had brought about that loss?
I shivered. I hoped not. At any rate, this was what I’d wanted, right? An opportunity to really start investigating my parents’ deaths—and lives.
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “We can talk about that. I don’t know much, though.”
“Yes,” Zero said meditatively. “That’s very interesting to me: you not knowing…such a lot.”
“Oh,” I said again. It was the first time he’d really asked me about my past: the psychos hadn’t really been interested in that before. It was enough that I was there, that I was the Pet. It was like they hadn’t even thought about the fact that I had a past before that.
Well, maybe Athelas had made a few allusions to it, but that was more in the way of needling, I was pretty sure. Other than that, I had been a peripheral case—best left until the important cases were looked at and lunch was served.
“It will be uncomfortable,” he added. “And it might bring up memories that you’d rather not have. You could go somewhere else for a while—visit your friend and work out things with her.”
“It’s a bit late to be saying stuff like that when we’re already heading out together to ask a merman if he can find out anything about Morgana and the others. Are you trying to back out of helping me?”
“No,” he said, but I was pretty sure he meant yes. “It’s just that asking the kind of questions we’ll need to ask—treating you like a witness—”
He really didn’t think I was capable of dealing with this. I hitched in a short, disappointed sigh, and managed to say without too much rancour, “I’ve been dealing with my parents’ murders for years. Maybe it’s gunna hurt, but what else am I supposed to do? Stay out of it?”
“I can handle it all,” Zero said, more gently than I’d heard him speak. “You don’t need to get involved. Just let me do it.”
“Can’t,” I said laconically. It was the same question he’d asked before, and I couldn’t trust myself to think about it for too long before vetoing it.
“Won’t,” he retorted, with an exasperated sigh of his own. “You don’t trust again easily, do you?”
“It’s not about trust. Would
you let Athelas look into your mum’s death for you?”
He stared at me as if trying to figure out exactly what I’d meant by that. “Of course not!”
“Don’t you trust him?”
“I trust him enough for that, but of course I wouldn’t let him do it.”
“Then why would you expect me to let you do it?”
“Because I am fae, and you are human. You can rail against it as much as you like, but there are reasons why humankind doesn’t live long when they encounter the fae.”
“You and me have already pretty much hashed this out, and I don’t think we’re gunna agree on it,” I told him flatly. “This is something I need to be involved in. I can’t sit back while someone takes over my responsibilities.”
“I’m making them my responsibilities!”
“You don’t have that right. I wouldn’t give that right to anyone who wasn’t prepared to work alongside me instead of over the top of me.”
“Then what about your heirling problem? Will you try and solve that by yourself?”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m not that dumb. I’ll listen to you and take your advice.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” Zero said, his voice dry but amused enough through the frustration to make me feel a bit more comfortable. “In that case, try to talk about it by name as little as possible.”
“Right, I’ll just call it the-job-that-must-not-be-mentioned. Why?”
“JinYeong said it yesterday,” Zero said. “When he told you not to talk about it, and not to pull the Sword from Between. Speaking things into existence is a real thing—speaking them into a more concrete form is a real thing, too. Names, words, concepts; they can all affect the world around you if you speak them too loudly or too often. If you act like they’re true, they could become true.”
“Heck,” I said, shivering. “So don’t go talking about it too much or I could speak it into existence even if I don’t want to do it.”
“And—” Zero hesitated. “Be careful who you give your real name to. The longer you stay as Pet, the safer it is for you: you’re human, but you’ve been in our world a bit too often to be entirely safe.”
“So what, if you have someone’s real name, you can sorta speak stuff at ’em?” I stared at him. “Wait, is this a weakness of Behindkind? ’Cos humans are taught that sticks and stones can break my bones but names will never hurt me.”
“Yes,” said Zero, with a very slight sigh. “Humans are taught that for a reason: a reason they have long since forgotten. By making a bubble of disbelief for themselves, they’ve cut themselves off from the kind of hurt they might otherwise bring on themselves by tossing their names out into the world every which way.”
I grinned. “Who woulda thought it! Humans having a power that Behindkind don’t!”
“It’s a very small power—”
“Garbage!” I said frankly. “It’s huge. I’ve been changing stuff Between by speaking at it—you can’t say that’s not a huge danger to Behindkind, especially if I know their names. What if I tried to change them into something else? Like something not alive?”
“If you did anything of the kind, they’d probably take you by force and make you king,” Zero said, his eyes particularly icy.
“Oh. Right. Got it. Don’t turn Behindkind into stuff, even if I know their names. But it still means they can’t do anything like that to me, right?”
“They don’t have to,” Zero said coldly. “They can just kill you.”
“Nah, in this situation I’m betting I’m gunna be behind you,” I told him. “They’ve gotta kill you first, remember?”
The iciness vanished in a moment, and Zero actually laughed. Several times in one day. Good grief.
“I’m glad to see there’s at least one piece of advice from me that you routinely follow,” he said. “Very well. Have the goodness to follow this advice as well, then: when I bargain with the merman, keep out of it. It’s always wiser to have someone else bargain for you when it’s something you particularly want.”
“Got it,” I said, and gave him the thumbs up. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust ’Zul: I’d trusted Zero first, that was all.
Chapter Seven
We waited outside Marazul’s door for about fifteen minutes, this time. I had a pretty good idea what he was doing during that time, too: I’d bet a good chunk of my non-existent salary that ’Zul was in there getting himself dry and into his wheelchair. Maybe trying to calm down a bit. He definitely seemed to have a bit of a thing about not wanting to be around Zero.
When the door finally did open, it did so of its own volition once again, and we heard a voice from the deep say, “Come in.”
I led the way, which was nice for a change, while Zero gazed wordlessly at the tank walls on either side of us and followed behind. Ahead, the blinds were slanted to let in the sunshine, and shadow and water reflections danced together on the walls. When we entered the living room area, there was already food on the coffee table and a flutter of motion from the kitchen—’Zul rolling around the side of the low kitchen bench with a tray clipped to his wheelchair.
He put a cup of coffee in front of me first, which was weird, considering that there was already food and drink on the coffee table, then put another in front of Zero and one in front of himself. That done, he unclipped the tray and stashed it under the coffee table, and sent a sort of bow, sort of head-bob in Zero’s direction.
“You can drink that,” he said to me.
That would have seemed weird as well, if it wasn’t for the fact that the food and drink on the coffee table, at a second glance, wasn’t quite…right.
In fact, it was murky and gunky with some kind of magic that might have been Between affecting stuff, but might not have been.
I wrapped my hands around the coffee mug, but didn’t take a sip until Zero did, purely out of instinct. I nodded at the other food. “What’s this?”
“That,” he said, smiling at me quickly and consciously as Zero turned his gaze on the tank once again, “is food that you should not eat.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling reflexively. “I gathered that. Why is it so sticky?”
“It’s custom when doing business with fae,” Zero said briefly, turning back to us. “The food is a trap: whoever eats it belongs to the person who prepared it, and must serve seven years.”
“That seems rude,” I said. “But whatever floats your boat.”
“It’s just tradition, these days,” Marzul said. “That’s why the magic is so obvious: it puts people at ease.”
“What, like a haha, I’d never trick you, that’s ridiculous kinda thing?”
It looked like Zero tried not to, but his lips twitched anyway. “Food is the first step in bargaining, and is a sign of trust. He agrees by providing spelled food that he is not to be trusted, and I agree by refusing to eat the food that although I don’t trust him, I still want to do business with him.”
“You blokes have a weird idea of what a sign of trust is,” I mumbled. “Anyway, now that we’ve stared at the poisoned food and decided that no one trusts anyone else, are we going to get on with it?”
Zero gave me a meaningful look—the meaning being remember what I said about not butting in—and turned his attention on ’Zul instead. “We will begin,” he said.
You blokes, they took so long discussing everything that I was almost tempted to start eating the stuff on the coffee table even though I knew what it was. My coffee was long gone by the time they came to an agreement about what would be paid and the extent of the work to be done, and I was left wondering exactly when Zero had arranged all this with ’Zul the last two times I’d gone to him on Zero’s orders.
I mean, it wasn’t like I knew every move that the psychos made, and they left the house whenever they wanted to without telling me where they were going, but I hadn’t really expected there to be such a lot involved in the deal. I thought of my loose deal with Five-Four-One, and grimaced a bit. I hadn’t told Zero about it, an
d with this in mind, I doubted I would. I could already imagine the nagging.
The long and the short of it was that ’Zul would agree to dig into exactly three names and what Zero called their peripherals, and in return would be granted what sounded like a protected status. That made me grin into my empty coffee cup, because an Enforcer-sanctioned hacker was very law-enforcement-and-the-hacker stereotypical.
They finished it all up with a handshake, which would have been very civilised and human if it hadn’t been for the way the entire room went murky like water in a backyard pond as they did so. Interesting, but definitely worrisome.
I started gathering up the empty coffee cups more by habit than anything else, and as I came back from putting them in the sink, Marazul said to Zero, “I was looking into something else for you,” in a reminding sort of a way, his eyes flickering briefly toward me.
Much to my annoyance, this made Zero’s eyes fall meditatively on me, too. More annoyingly, he said, “Wait for me outside, Pet.”
“Okay, but I haven’t been fed, and I’ll chew through my collar if I don’t get fed,” I warned him, and went outside. There wasn’t anything else I could do—and it wasn’t as if I didn’t have ’Zul doing stuff for me that I wasn’t going to be telling Zero about, either.
Fair is fair.
I was a good pet: didn’t even try to listen at the door. Not that it would have done me any good. I felt the fuzziness spring up around the inside of the door as I pushed it shut, muffling the feel of the door from the outside, and knew that someone had put a bit of magic out to keep unwanted ears from hearing what they said.
I waited for Zero downstairs instead, listening to the sound of my stomach rumbling. It wasn’t that long since I’d eaten, but I had a suspicion that it was the vampire saliva still running around in my veins that was making me feel as though I needed to eat again. Maybe a rare steak would be a good idea for dinner tonight. Couldn’t have me sniffing around after blood like JinYeong.
I hadn’t quite finished thinking about that when Zero came downstairs and collected me from the wall I was leaning against, and maybe I was still feeling a bit bloodthirsty, because as we headed back toward home, I said, “Oi. You said you’d been in the same room as the murderer once.”
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 14