“Rude,” I said, looking at the bloke again. So he could tell fae from human, could he? I would like to know how. “Oi, what did you find?”
“The official police records note that you disappeared for a while when you were younger, not to mention that you died with your parents that night.”
“Checking up on me?” I couldn’t blame them. I was pretty sure Zero and Athelas had been doing the same with them: I had seen a few texts pop up on Zero’s phone with Detective Tuatu’s name on them over the last week.
Ezri looked at me challengingly. “Looks a bit weird, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. I stayed with some friends from out of state when I was younger: maybe that’s what they’re talking about. I don’t know why the police would think I’d disappeared, though.”
“Did you say out of state?” Ezri said sharply.
“Yeah.” I shot a bit of a worried look in her direction, because she sounded very urgent about it, and I didn’t see that my friends from out of state were anything to worry about. “Stayed with ’em for a bit of a holiday, but I don’t remember much.”
“How come you don’t remember much?”
“Dunno, I was still young.”
“How young?”
“About twelve,” I said, and as I said it, I realised how weird that sounded. How come that had never seemed weird inside my head? You say I don’t remember, I was young about stuff that happened when you were two or three, not about stuff that happened when you were twelve.
Ezri said, “Yeah, weird, isn’t it? When you find out you can’t remember stuff from when you were twelve and your brain says it’s cos you were too young. What were your friends’ names?”
It took me a while to open my mouth again, and while I was still trying to find my way to answer that question, Ezri looked at me with cold triumph.
“Can’t remember, can you?”
“I can,” I protested, even though I wasn’t so sure anymore. “Just hang on a minute! It was—there was a bloke—and a—flamin’ heck.”
“Out of state is code,” Abigail said, while I was still staring at Ezri in shock at the further betrayal of my own memory. “That’s what they call it when fae get hold of a human kid and take them off to their own land. When they get back—if they get back—we usually say they’ve been out of state. It’s a coded reference.”
“Who with? What are you talking about?” There was no way it was code, because that meant that enough people knew about the fae to have developed a code. It meant that my parents knew about that code. It meant that I had—it meant that I had—
I shook my head and said defensively, “How do you even know that?”
Abigail hesitated for a moment, then pulled out her phone. “Watch this,” she said, and there was a grin on her face like she couldn’t help it. She pulled up an app that turned her screen green, and used the search function on it to type in something like early Hobart records.
A 3-D book representation appeared, floating in the centre of the app, and Abigail casually flicked it right out and into the air in front of us. She caught it with the effortless ease of practise, and there it was in her hand: real and full-sized, taking up space in reality that it shouldn’t have been able to take up considering it was a book from inside someone’s phone.
“The heck!” I said, staring at Abigail.
She grinned. “It’s something Blackpoint set us up with. It means we can carry a lot more around with us than people think.”
“We’re gunna have to have a talk about Blackpoint one of these days,” I muttered.
“Look,” she said, flipping through the book and holding it open for me. It was a soft-cover book that looked like it had been stitched together a couple hundred years ago; handwritten and squiggly, it was almost illegible. “This is the first record we have—it’s when they started using this code. Alas, we were informed that Anne travelled out of the state some three days later. No word has been had from her a year since, but we all know what out of state entails and expect to see no more of her. Arthur continues to take it badly. There are references after that, but this is the first we found.”
The empty patches in my memory sprouted a sudden, single remembrance. Great grandma Anne, who had disappeared—that copy of her license. And what had mum said?
She went out of state and was never seen again.
The thought left me feeling slightly bitter. Five was right: mum and dad had been hiding things from me. Did that mean my parents knew about a group like Abigail’s? Had they been part of one? Why hadn’t they ever told me about it, if so?
“I’ll look up some more mentions of it,” Abigail said. Maybe she mistook my silence for disbelief. “You should do some digging of your own, Pet.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
“Give us five minutes before you leave the alley,” she said. “We don’t want to be seen with you if we can help it.”
“Rude,” I said, more from habit than conviction. Ezri and the man grinned, but Abigail just sniffed.
Heck, I thought as I watched them walk away. This was something I was going to have to tell Zero, wasn’t it?
I heaved a sigh to myself and headed up the street five minutes later to get myself a latte by way of relaxing. It was probably time I asked Zero to take a gander at my great grandma, too. It wasn’t that I had been trying to keep it from them while they were asking questions, but it hadn’t bobbed up in my mind like it should have. Now that I knew—now that I thought I knew—what had happened to her wasn’t human-related, it seemed doubly important. I would just have to make sure they didn’t know where I’d gotten the information.
When I came out of the café a little later, it felt like a storm was there to chase me home. Maybe it was just the weight of all the new knowledge I’d gained that afternoon mounting on the information from the day previous. It could have been a combination of sheer befuddlement and the extreme likelihood that I was being followed by the old mad bloke as usual, though.
As I came back past the delivery bay at Centrepoint, just before the alley where I’d talked with Abigail, I caught a flicker of yellow and black movement in my left peripheral. There was a mural on the roller door there: a Tasmanian tiger with the words All I wanted was a sheepie. Just one sheepie below it. Sure enough, when I peered into the gloom, it wagged its tail at me and half howled, half whined, scratching at the black painted words, scoring them with its nails.
I grinned, partly in relief, partly in delight. “Hello, boy,” I said, taking a few steps into the gloomy delivery bay. Heck, maybe it recognised me: I’d walked past and smiled at it for a few years now.
It pranced along the roller door, back and forward, forward and back, just like a dog when it wants you to play. I laughed and bounced on the balls of my feet in reply, which sent it into an ecstasy of bouncing and whining.
I knew it was Between acting up, but it didn’t occur me until I was just a few metres away from the tiger that there was usually a reason for Between to start moving around and getting creative with the world.
And that reason was usually something big and probably bad passing by in the human world.
I turned to make a swift and comprehensive run for it before whatever it was that was stirring things up could see me here seeing it stirred up, but the entrance was already dark with something that turned the street outside into a silk-screened version of itself. Around the edges of that screen, shadows coiled and reached out, and I threw a look around for whatever weapon was closest to hand.
The only things I could see were remnants of foam packaging and an old umbrella. I tried a length of the foam first, in hopes that I could make it into a sword, but it turned into a whip edged with teeth that looked more likely to bite me than anyone I could possibly hope to hit by absolute accident if I was stupid enough to try and use the thing.
So I snatched up the umbrella instead, panting, “You flamin’ better not be that sword!” at it in sheer desp
eration. It was solid and secure in my hand straight away; a blade long and true and chased with a glow of yellow that faded only slowly, the grip familiar beneath my fingers.
Ah heck. What was the use of telling me not to pull the Heirling Sword out of Between when it was the only sword that felt like coming out whenever there was an umbrella nearby?
I turned back to the screened-off entrance, the tiger at my back whining in fear, and drew back the sword in a two-handed guard stance from which I could slash as quickly and effectively as possible at my height.
Then flowers sprouted and burped up grass from the entrance of the delivery bay, freezing my lungs.
Heck. It was Zero’s dad. Why was it Zero’s dad?
Before he could step through and see what I held, I tossed the sword into the darkness behind me, where it landed without a sound. That was a relief, I thought; it meant it must have changed back into an umbrella, right? Less relieving was the fact that I now had no weapon to face Zero’s dad—not to mention that it wouldn’t have done me any good to have one anyway. The brief, mad thought that I could test Athelas’ postulation on my missing memories popped up in my mind and terrified me just long enough to make me break into a sweat before I remembered that anything I learned would be given to Zero’s father in the same moment that I learned it. I couldn’t let that happen.
The flowers sprouted forward until there was a path for him all the way to my feet before he stepped through the screen and into the bay. He looked around him as he came, his mouth in a pained sort of grimace, but he mustn’t have felt endangered by me, because he came without his guards this time.
How flamin’ cosy.
He stopped a few feet short of me and took a moment to look around again, turning all the way around and unresponsive even when I shifted a little to put myself opposite him with the side wall at my back and the entrance at my left. It was a small comfort, but better than the idea of having to get past him to run for the entrance.
I think he wanted me to know how very little he thought of me as a threat, because when he was finally done making a show of looking around, he gave the smallest, most mocking of bows, and said, “The pet, I see.”
“Off the leash and in person,” I said, with a shiver sitting in my bones. “You come here often?”
“Humans say such a lot of useless things,” he told me. “I saw a loose pet sniffing around and came to see if it was doing my son harm.”
“I’m out on his orders,” I said. It stuck in my gullet to have to talk about having permission to be outside and being on orders, but that was better than the flowers and grass I could see sticking in my gullet if Zero’s dad decided to see where else those perennially springing flowers could grow. “Just running a delivery.”
His eyes fell to the straps of my backpack. “I see. What are you delivering?”
“Info for a case he’s working on,” I said. He was going to want to see what I had and I wouldn’t be able to say no, but I had to say no. There was no way he could be allowed to see the files I’d gotten from Abigail. Not only would that give him the information—if he didn’t already have it—but it would give away the fact that there was a guerrilla sort of group out there. Abigail’s group were already on a shortened life expectancy; I couldn’t bring about their fall.
“That is very interesting to me,” said the fae.
And now…and now he would tell me to show him what was in my backpack. I had the instinct to reach up and grip the straps of my backpack defensively, but managed not to follow it.
“Yeah?” I said instead. “Didn’t think you cared much about humans and their affairs. Didn’t expect you to want to look at a bit of paperwork.”
He said, “I care very much about what interests my son these days. Open the bag, human.”
“Don’t think Zero would like that,” I said, my left foot shifting back slightly.
“Lady, lady!” called someone, to my left.
I froze again. Oh heck.
The fae’s head snapped toward the entrance, a crazily familiar cleft etched between his brows, and at that very moment, the Tasmanian tiger bounded past behind him with the sword in its mouth and streaked around the corner before he could turn his head back to catch a glimpse of what had moved to his left. I would have been worried about letting loose a Tasmanian tiger on Hobart if I’d had the brain space to be worried by it.
As it was, all I could do was say “What the heck?” in a shaken sort of voice that didn’t have to be faked.
“Lady, lady!” burbled a voice from the screened-off street again, and a familiar figure tumbled right through into the delivery bay, supporting his drunken walk with the tip of the sword I’d last seen in the mouth of a Tasmanian tiger.
“Go back to the road!” I hissed at him frantically, but it was already too late.
Zero’s father laughed, a mirthless, cold thing that sprinkled chips of ice amongst the flowers, and said, “Oh, this is very interesting!”
Was the old bloke grateful for the food and drink; the occasional blanket or t-shirt? I didn’t know, but I wished that he would be grateful elsewhere. He could only get himself and me into trouble in this situation. We needed to be quiet and sit below the radar when it came to Zero’s dad. More than ever, I realised that today.
“Get out of here!” I yelled at him, and Zero’s dad laughed again.
“Stay. Where. You. Are,” he said to me, with a force that ossified my bones, and strode back toward the entrance and the old mad bloke.
The old bloke capered for two seconds, though I could have sworn it was panic in his eyes, not madness, then threw the sword high over the fae’s head, straight at me. If I’d been capable of laughing I would have laughed at the expression of sheer, offended incredulity on the fae’s face as the sword sailed over his head.
I caught it by sheer habit, and it fit me like an extension of my arm, not light but exactly the right weight to level at Zero’s dad without my arm shaking as he turned back to face me. And I did level it at him, because as soon as it touched my hand, my mind was clear and I could move properly again.
“Back off,” I told him, my arm taking on a tinge of the glowing yellow that had swept up the blade as soon as I caught it. “Touch one hair of his scraggly little head and we’ll have a problem.”
Completely undermining that sentiment, the old mad bloke scarpered up and out of the delivery bay, giggling madly, and disappeared. Flaming heck. I was gunna kill him myself next time I saw him, the flea-ridden old troublemaker!
The fae let out a real laugh this time, his eyes glowing with fascination, and I could suddenly see why Zero’s human mum might have found him attractive enough to follow him into Behind to her doom.
“There’s no problem here,” he said to me, his eyes still running over me. It felt as though he was looking at me from the inside out. “You’re a good pet, aren’t you? Very territorial, as I can see. I have no quarrel with that, so long as you’re protecting the right people.”
I couldn’t help laughing. Maybe I was hysterical, maybe I just knew I’d already gone far too far to pull back now. “You’re soliciting me to stand beside your son if he challenges?”
“When he challenges. Yes.”
It made no sense. Here I was, holding the Heirling Sword, and he knew it: there was no way he didn’t know I was an heirling, too. He also knew that heirlings were there to fight other heirlings until only one remained to take the crown. By rights, he should be trying to kill me, not seek collaboration.
“Right,” I said. “Well, I’m his pet and I’ll be by his side contractually, so you don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m sure you’ll excuse me for continuing to worry about such things,” he said, his voice crawling into my mind. Crawling like a worm. “As soon as one of my men returned without his commander and the story of a certain pet wielding the Heirling Sword, I was delightfully curious. I came to you once before to see what you would do: today I have been more successful, it woul
d seem. While my son has never had need of Champions, I do like to ensure that his allies are well vetted.”
The worm, indiscriminate, already sought for truth though he hadn’t given it exact directions; it burrowed, and everything for which it burrowed was connected to that word, champions. Part of my mind wobbled, terrified of being pulled up by the roots with its secrets, and threw up a similar flurry of small, incomplete truths as I had used earlier with Athelas to feed to the worm.
Never met a champion. Only heard the word the other day. Dunno what any of this means.
The worm chewed on that while I wavered, caught between opposing instincts to use this moment to find out everything I could, or to keep throwing up little bits of truth to feed the worm and escape Zero’s father as soon as I could; caught between desire for knowledge and self-preservation. But I didn’t have the luxury of choosing knowledge—not today—because everything I learned was something Zero’s dad also learned.
Unaware of and unaffected by my struggle, the worm burrowed until a memory pierced through the surface of my mind, honed by fear. I knew then that regardless of what I wanted, the worm really was going to find something—both because there was something to be found, and because Athelas had been right: an antagonistic force was far more inclined to invoke memories than a friendly one. I found, with an icy suddenness, that I did indeed know about Champions, and the worm went after that certainty with sharp, sharp teeth.
I knew I couldn’t let Zero’s father see any of what was boiling up to the surface of my mind. “Get out of my head!” I snapped, and slapped that little worm out before it could chew on what it had dredged up. It was too late, far too late, to push back what it had pulled up. Too late to make Zero’s dad think I couldn’t protect myself against him. Too late to do anything but make sure he couldn’t see anything that might help him: that vast wave of memories that pressed up against my mind and made it hard to breathe or think or talk.
“Very well,” he said softly, his words fragmented and hard to understand between rushes of memory. “I would not worry too much about stray memories if I were you, little human. You’ll find me very forgiving if you’re willing to leave behind what is behind and serve only me. Run along: find your master and look after him well. We will continue our conversation another time. And tell that traitor steward that the next time I see him he will wish he had chosen otherwise than he has.”
Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Page 25