Between Walls (The City Between Book 6)

  Between Walls

  The City Between: Book Six

  W.R. Gingell

  Copyright © 2020 by W.R. Gingell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Created with Vellum

  For The Kid and Kid Number Two.

  This book has no tractors, but will hopefully still enthrall.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Newsletter Sign Up

  Chapter One

  Change is a funny thing. Sometimes it creeps up on you like someone’s flamin’ pong of a cologne, overtaking the room in miniscule, unseen increments until it’s in your lungs and hair and clothes, tinging the air in the room with a faint blue cast.

  Sometimes it’s obvious, like the murderous look that the vampire tosses at the huge, white fae at the head of the table over breakfast. Or the cold, emotionless look with which the fae meets that fiery glance, and the blunt words, “Don’t show your teeth at me unless you want them ripped out of your head, JinYeong.”

  Sometimes it’s soft and subtle, like the fae steward with the brown waistcoat murmuring, “Perhaps we could refrain from unpleasantness at the breakfast table, my lord? The pet has barely settled in again.”

  And then sometimes it’s something as big as your former owners coming to rescue you and a leprechaun who got caught up in someone’s anti-Family machinations instead of leaving you to die with the dropbears, even though they’re no longer contractually obliged to do it.

  “I want to meet your human friend,” said Zero at the breakfast table that morning, roughly a week after the Great Dropbear Incident. Maybe it was in deference to Athelas’ plea, but he had turned his chilling blue eyes away from JinYeong’s liquidly murderous ones.

  “No,” I said. “Givus the jam, JinYeong.”

  Across the table, the vampire turned his eyes from Zero and let them rest on me. He considered me for far longer than it should have taken to decide whether or not he was going to comply, then picked up the jam in a desultory fashion and put it down precisely in front of me.

  To Zero, he said, “I have met the friend. You do not need to.”

  There was that idea of change again: JinYeong being weird. Well, weirder than usual.

  “Pet,” said Athelas, on something of a sigh. “Is it really necessary to argue upon every point?”

  “Yeah,” I said, because sometimes…sometimes the change is so faint that if feels like nothing has changed at all.

  It wasn’t so much that everything needed to be argued, it was just that I was still trying to figure out the things I should be objecting to. It made me more martial than usual, but so far I hadn’t found a good way to differentiate between the things I should object to, and those that were fine. Mostly, over the last week, I’d fallen into the habit of doing what I was told when it came to Zero’s orders on Behindkind stuff, and pushed back on everything that had to do with humans. My three psychos weren’t the best judges of what was best for humans, but it hadn’t stopped them deciding stuff anyway. Usually their decisions left humans out in the cold when it came to trouble with Behindkind: that was exactly what I was here to stop.

  Or at least, that was what I’d come to believe.

  “Anyway,” I said to Athelas, feeling as though I needed to defend myself. “Unpleasantness at the breakfast table isn’t my fault: JinYeong’s being snippy again.”

  He was being more than snippy, actually; he was being downright stroppy.

  “I’ll give you credit for not starting the fight,” conceded Athelas, and I was left with the impression that, in some way or other, he still blamed me for the unpleasantness.

  That was flamin’ rude, because I hadn’t even been downstairs yet when stuff started flying around the house; including JinYeong, who went flying through a wall. I’d been sleeping in because I’d about had it with pretty much all the inhabitants of my house and didn’t really feel like getting them breakfast. I didn’t know exactly what had started the fight, but I did know that JinYeong was looking pretty worse for the wear when I got downstairs, and that Zero was looking slightly less ice-like than usual, which meant he’d been getting exercise.

  “I will wait to meet your friend,” said Zero, and if before I’d got the idea that Athelas hadn’t changed his mind earlier, I had that feeling much more strongly now. Zero hadn’t decided that he didn’t need to meet Morgana; he had just decided that he didn’t need to do it right now.

  Well, that was something, anyway.

  Pushing it a bit, I asked, “Who was that at the door this morning?”

  “Detectives,” Zero said briefly, surprising me.

  I was gunna have to get used to the new state of him actually telling me things. Maybe when I got used to it, I’d be able to start working on learning when he was telling me part of the truth, and all of it, ’cos I hadn’t been clever enough to work that into our interim agreement.

  I felt Athelas’ gaze on me and flicked my eyes over to meet it. As usual, he was looking serene and a bit amused; I wouldn’t have bet very highly against him knowing exactly what it was I was regretful about.

  “Perhaps you’ll remember that we had another death in the area recently, Pet,” he said.

  He wasn’t just talking about a death; he was talking about a Death—the latest in a series of similar murders that had begun in my area with a dead body outside the window. Which series was, itself, part of a series of similar murders all over the world; and, apparently, all through the trifle of layers that was Behind (the fae world), Between (the weird, squishy bit between us and them), and the human world. The victims had been a mix of Behindkind and humans, which was why my three psychos were involved in the first place even though they didn’t care about the fate of humankind in general or humans in particular. In fact, the killer was one of the very few Behindkind I knew—and I was assuming he was Behindkind, because what else could he be?—who didn’t seem to discriminate between human and Behindkind.

  Yanno. For what that’s worth.

  “I remember,” I said. That last body had been just over a month ago, before I left home and adventured by myself and came back home. A lot had happened between then and now, but I wasn’t likely to forget it: like the first body I’d seen, it was pretty memorable—a human hanging in front of a house, its insides on the outside thanks to a long, deep slash from neck to lower stomach, dripping gore on the grass. Throat cut almost right through the neck.

  It had also looked just like one of my old friends, but that had only been a glamour, thank goodness.

  “Thought you blokes had already looked into it,” I said. “What were you doing while I was out of the house, anyway?”

  “It was a singularly enlivening time,” said Athelas. “I believe that none of us were bored, if that was what you were suggesting.”

  “I was suggesting—”

  “We have been looking into it,” Zero said, before I could continue. “But we are in need of a significant amount of evidence that has…gone
missing.”

  “What, Upper Management stole it before you could? Flamin’ rude, that!”

  “My lord was of the same opinion,” said Athelas, holding out his teacup when I proffered the teapot. “We fancied we’d have to do something about it.”

  “Yeah, can’t have other Behindkind pinching stuff before you pinch it,” I said, and I wasn’t completely tongue-in-cheek. If it came right down to it, at least my Behindkind were trying to do something about the deaths. Upper Management seemed determined to hide what was happening—hide it, or profit from it; I wasn’t sure which one, yet. Either way, they were good at making sure there were no witnesses or records left behind of stuff they didn’t want left behind, and they were pretty deeply entrenched in the police force in Tasmania, too.

  “What’d you do about it, anyway?” I asked. “You go knocking on their door or something? I don’t recommend that; it’s flamin’ dangerous.”

  “We’re aware of that,” Zero said, with a cold, blue look in my direction. “That situation wasn’t of our making, and I would have chosen another way to bring about that outcome. Walking into the bowels of Upper Management by yourself wasn’t the best choice.”

  JinYeong gave an impatient mutter, and when Zero turned an icy gaze on him, said aloud, “We did not need your outcome; we did it by ourselves.”

  “Perhaps this would be a good time to mention,” said Athelas lightly, “that as exotic as the scent of harpy undoubtedly is, it is making even the banshees restless.”

  “Thought Zero got rid of those?”

  “I did,” Zero said, his eyes narrowing. “They came back.”

  “Hang on,” I said, catching up with the implication. I turned an accusing look on Athelas. “You saying I stink?”

  “As painful as it is to me to admit, Pet—”

  “You,” said JinYeong, pointing his knife at me, “certainly stink. More than before.”

  “That’s flamin’ rich!”

  “First you smelled of dead person—”

  “Daniel bought me those clothes.”

  “—now you smell of harpy again.”

  “Well, you always stink, so—” I stopped. This morning I had put on the clothes I’d worn to confront Richard the harpy; maybe they needed to be washed again. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll wash my clothes and take a shower.”

  “Bath,” Athelas suggested. “And perhaps soak.”

  “For three hours,” JinYeong said, his eyes narrowed at me.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d think the pretty little git was trying to pick a fight with me. I’d been mostly ignoring him for the last few days; I was still pretty cranky at him for pretending to be my friend when he was just following Zero’s orders. Maybe he didn’t like being ignored.

  “Yeah, fine; I’ll soak,” I said. “What did the detectives bring you, Zero?”

  “Information,” he said. “Enough to start us on the trail of the murderer again, anyway. More evidence will arrive later: the physical evidence will be sent to us—”

  “And the body?” asked JinYeong, brightening.

  “You were just complaining about me smelling like a dead person!” I protested.

  “Yes, but you are alive. I object to you smelling dead.”

  “Double flamin’ standards, that is. Anyway, you can’t keep a dead body here: I just filled the freezer with that half-a-cow you ordered from the butcher and there’s no way you’re putting a body in our fridge.”

  “I want the body,” JinYeong said, glaring at me. “How can I investigate if I do not have the body?”

  “You can’t have the body,” Zero said. “That was one of the pieces of evidence I haven’t yet tracked down. It was processed for a very simple autopsy and then transferred to a secondary location for a more thorough examination.”

  “Lemme guess; it went walkabout?”

  “It went what?”

  “Walked off.”

  “I fancy you’re confusing this body with a zombie,” said Athelas. I was pretty sure he didn’t fancy anything of the sort, because his grey eyes were dancing.

  “Okay,” I said suspiciously, “’Cos I was pretty sure there was no such thing as zombies.”

  I was still pretty sure, if it came to that: Athelas teased me a lot more often than Zero did.

  “Really? Your belief system is remarkably fluid; I should have thought it easy enough to believe after all that you’ve seen over the last six months.”

  I mean, he wasn’t wrong: I’d seen a heck of a lot over the last six months. Still, it had been something of a comfort to me that I’d never seen any of the bodies I came across stand up again and start walking.

  “You mean some of those suckers get up and walk again after you kill ’em?”

  “There’s no need to sound so appalled, Pet,” he said equably. “A very specific set of circumstances is needed to bring about a zombie—much like bringing about a vampire.”

  “Zombies are much harder to make,” Zero said shortly. “You don’t need to worry about them. They need a power source as well as—don’t pull faces at me, Pet.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just gross, that’s all.”

  Athelas laughed gently into his tea.

  “How’d you lot lose a body, anyway?” I asked. I didn’t mean it to, but my voice sounded accusatory. “Woulda thought you were keeping an eye on it so that stuff like this didn’t happen, and I know it wasn’t the last body that we found, ’cos Detective Tuatu texted me about that one this morning.”

  “We were…distracted at the time.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You blaming me for this?”

  “No,” said Zero briefly. “If we were distracted, it was our fault.”

  “Hang on,” I said, realising something. “That one disappeared when we were running around trying to find Athelas, didn’t it?”

  Athelas looked down at his tea with a faint smile, and I had the impression that he was trying very hard not to laugh. “Ah, I wondered if that would occur to you,” he murmured. “Yes, Pet; it was my fault. I have already spoken to my lord on the subject.”

  “It was also your fault,” JinYeong said. “After Athelas, we were running around after you.”

  “Didn’t ask you to!” I said at once. “You’re the one who wriggled your perfumy little way into the house I was—”

  “Good heavens,” said Athelas, faintly startled. “I see you’re still quite annoyed, Pet.”

  “Anyway,” I said. “We’re about a month and a half late, right? And you’ve got no idea where the body is?”

  “There will be another soon enough,” JinYeong said, with a dark certainty that suggested he would be the one providing said body if it didn’t turn up under its own impetus. “We will have evidence enough when that happens.”

  “I prefer not to wait until then,” said Zero, with finality. “For now, we’ll go through the evidence we can find. At least in the human world we tend to find evidence more easily than Between and Behind.”

  “Is that because it’s easier to make humans talk?” I asked. This time I was very careful not to sound accusatory: I was genuinely curious, not trying to shame them.

  “Only partially,” said Zero, surprising me again. “The laws of the physical world are different here—well, perhaps not different, but we tend to examine things Behind in the light of different parts of that physical reality.”

  “Magic instead of forensics,” I said, nodding. “Why not both?”

  “That would require a greater deal of cooperation between the two worlds,” Athelas said. “And a sharing of technology. One doubts that it’s possible.”

  So what you’re saying is that the human forensics provide more evidence than you usually get Behind through magic, was what I wanted to say. I didn’t, because Zero was playing nice and I should be, too. Besides, he might stop playing nice if I was too snide.

  Instead, I said, “I reckon that’s the sort of thing that Upper Management are trying to do.”

 
“Yes,” said Zero, frowning.

  “Very worrisome of them,” Athelas added, speaking what Zero hadn’t.

  “Yeah,” I said, with a heart-felt sincerity that made Athelas look at me in surprise. I explained, “Got nothing against Behindkind and humans working together—”

  “Yes, one feels it would be rather hypocritical of you to feel otherwise,” he murmured.

  “But I reckon it should be working together, not Behindkind enslaving humans or making weird bargains that only benefit Behindkind. I don’t see why we can’t all have cool stuff if everyone can work together.”

  “I see you’re rather more sanguine about the idea than am I,” said Athelas, delicately cutting into his toast with a knife and fork. “May I ask why the worried look, Pet?”

  “Dunno,” I said, “but if there’s anything that would make me sure you’re a psycho like the other two it’s you cutting up jam toast with your cutlery. You know you’re meant to get your hands dirty when you eat toast, right?”

  “My cuffs, Pet!” he expostulated. “I absolutely refuse to sully them with butter fat!”

  JinYeong said offendedly, “Nan aniya!”

  “You’re the psychoest of the lot,” I told him. “At least the other two don’t drink blood.”

  He stiffened very slightly, eyes darkening. It was weird. If he was a human, I’d think I’d really hurt his feelings. Lucky for me, JinYeong is a psycho, not a human, and his feelings are about what you’d expect from a psycho who spends a good portion of his time ripping out throats and drinking blood. It was important not to trust him when he was pretending to be nice.

  “You,” he said. “You, human. Make me kimchi again. There is none left.”

  “My name isn’t human,” I said. “It’s not you, either.”

  “To do JinYeong justice, you’ve not given us another name by which we may call you,” pointed out Athelas, very gently.