Between Frames (The City Between Book 4) Read online

  Between Frames

  The City Between: Book Four

  W.R. Gingell

  Copyright © 2019 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.

  Created with Vellum

  For all the people I love, despite their flaws:

  Thank you for loving me, despite mine.

  Contents

  Foreword

  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

  Afterword

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  Chapter One

  It’s always during dinner that stuff happens. More specifically, it’s always during the dinners that JinYeong picks. Ever since I’ve been here in this house, a human pet to two fae and a vampire, there’s barely been a single dinner I’ve started to make for JinYeong that hasn’t been interrupted.

  It doesn’t happen when I cook for Zero. It doesn’t happen when Athelas picks the menu. Just when it’s JinYeong’s turn.

  Maybe it’s a vampire thing.

  Anyway, it was dinner time, and it was JinYeong’s choice of dinner. That meant I was scrounging the fridge for the remains of the kimchi I’d made last month and chopping stuff like chilli and garlic to marinate the meat for chilli con carne. It’s a convenient meal when you don’t know exactly when your owners are coming home; it needs to simmer for at least four hours to be tasty, and the longer, the better.

  Most pets know when their owners get home by the sound of the front door opening and closing. My owners don’t really use the front door a lot unless they’re trying to look normal. Me, I know my owners are home when I feel that pull and snap of reality shifting aside to let them into the house.

  I was chopping red baby chilli when I felt that particular pull and snap, but when I looked up, it wasn’t my owners I saw across the kitchen from me. I saw a Behind creature, all darkness and possibilities.

  Oh great. Now they knew how to get into the house?

  It could have been male. It could almost have been human, but not quite. I saw myself reflected in the hard silver of its eyes; a skinny human girl, all arms and legs.

  It smirked.

  Yeah. Just a human. No need to worry. Even the fact that I had a chopping knife in my hand didn’t worry it. Just a human. It obviously didn’t see that I was chopping chilli.

  That was its mistake.

  It leapt for me, and I went over with a yelp, brandishing my knife. Lucky for me, it knocked the knife out of my hand, otherwise I probably would have fallen on it. Teeth snapped in my face, fetid breath clinging to them, and I kicked as hard as I could at the thing’s torso. The Behind creature didn’t shift, but the world around us did, pulling and stretching and somehow merging with that second layer of reality that Behindkind call Between.

  The mongrel was trying to drag me Between and Behind.

  “Zero!” I yelled. “Zero!”

  The creature snicked its teeth together in what might have been a satisfied smirk and wrapped its long fingers around my neck, throttling the sound out of me.

  Oh. Right. Zero was out of the house, anyway.

  I snatched at the merging of realities around me, trying to pull myself back into the first layer, the human world; but the Behind creature was stronger, and I hadn’t had enough training yet. The world around us—either Between or Behind, I wasn’t sure any more—grew dark at the edges and closed in on the creature’s face, the one spot of vision remaining.

  I couldn’t pull myself back into the human world. I couldn’t kick the creature again, because it had pinned both my legs. And that vicious face grew dimmer as the creature throttled me without bothering to contain my flailing arms.

  Chilli, said my brain.

  I know, I told it. JinYeong’s gonna be flamin’ annoyed.

  No, said my brain. Chilli.

  I choked on my own saliva, my face hot and red, and stopped flailing. Then I gouged my thumbs into the creature’s eye sockets.

  See how you like chilli, you mucky tar beast.

  For a moment everything stopped, and even the creature’s hands froze around my throat. It blinked once or twice, the greasy click of its eyelids tapping against my thumbs like cockroach wings, and began to smile. The fingers around my neck tightened again.

  That’s when the screaming started.

  At first, I thought it was me. Then the creature threw me away from itself, wailing, and tore at its eyes, stumbling in a circle that bled through Between and the human world.

  That’ll teach it to attack someone who’s chopping chilli.

  “Ahshipda!” sighed someone, from behind the distressed creature.

  I hauled in a painful, rattling sort of breath. Great. He must have just got home. My vision was starting to clear up; I could see the slender, besuited figure that was JinYeong. Shoes perfectly polished, suit perfectly creased, hair perfectly brushed.

  So. Flamin’. Annoying.

  “Petteu,” JinYeong said, straightening his tie, “Mwoh hae?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” I said hoarsely, scrambling to my feet. “Just thought it’d be nice to be attacked by a Behind creature. You know. For a change.”

  “Bae gopa.”

  “Yeah, well I’m hungry, too. I was interrupted before I could put dinner on to simmer and make some lunch.”

  The Behindkind creature, still howling, straightened itself. I don’t know what it saw this time, but it wasn’t smirking when it leapt for me, its tarry arms outstretched and its claws deadly sharp.

  I yelped again and ducked, and something swift and grey collided with the Behind creature above my head, knocking it out of Between and into the human world. I got up and hastily trotted myself right back into the human world after them. I’m capable of getting myself from the Between world and into the human world when I’m not being stopped, but I can’t say I enjoy being Between by myself.

  By the time I got back, the Behind creature was in a mangled pile on the kitchen floor, and the entire kitchen was spattered with tar, or blood, or whatever it was that constituted its insides. JinYeong, puffing a breath up at the single lock that had fallen from his perfectly coiffed hair, narrowed his eyes at me, then looked down pointedly at the length of his body. His grey suit was now a black-spotted grey suit, and none of the spots were tidy, either. Even JinYeong’s pouty little mouth wasn’t red anymore; tarry mess coated it, spilling down his chin and throat to make a complete wreck of the white shirt below that.

  I started grinning. “Oh, what a shame! Your suit’s all mucky!”

  JinYeong’s teeth showed just slightly, stained with black. “Yah.”

  “Hey, if you can’t stop biting everything, don’t blame me! You could have chopped off its head, but no, you had to go all psycho vampire on it. I mean, is that even blood?”

  JinYeong shrugged. “Bisutae.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but it was obvious that whatever had been inside the Behind creature, it was similar enough to blood to appeal to JinYeong. I looked around at the mess on the kitchen walls—and worse, on the food I had just been preparing—and made a face.

  “You wrecked dinner,” I said.
/>   “Nega? Nega otteokae? Niga!”

  “Hey, I didn’t kill the thing,” I pointed out. “That was all you. Look, you’ve spread bits of him all over the bench. It’s gonna take me ages to clean it off, and I’ll have to bin every bit of food I’d got ready. That was the last of the kimchi, too.”

  “Aish,” muttered JinYeong, glaring at me. He turned on his heel and stalked into the bathroom. I heard the shower start up a minute or two later; JinYeong hadn’t closed the door, which probably meant he was standing beneath the shower fully clothed. I’d seen him do that once or twice. If there’s anything I’ve learned about vampires in the last couple of months, it’s that they are neat and finicky to the point of OCD when it comes to clothes and house. Well, JinYeong is, anyway. Maybe it’s rude to generalise about vampires.

  Around the bathroom door, I called, “How come you’re back before the others, anyway?”

  I don’t know why I bother to ask him stuff. It’s not like I understand more than a couple of the things he says on any given day, and it’s not like he’s going to talk to me in English, either.

  I heard him say something in Korean, and caught the words busy and stupid. From that he probably meant me to infer that Zero and Athelas were busy, but had expected me to be an idiot and so had sent him ahead.

  “Hah!” I said, poking my head around the door. “Says you!”

  Unfortunately, JinYeong’s dripping jacket was in a soggy pile on the bathroom floor and his shirt was just about to join it when I did so.

  I slapped a hand over my eyes and howled, “Yuck! Close the flamin’ door when you’re going to do that!”

  “Kohjjoh!” snarled JinYeong, and a wet, tarry business shirt hit me in the face.

  I knew what that word meant, too; but even if I hadn’t, the shirt in the face would have been pretty clear.

  “Yuck!” I complained again, feeling for the door knob. I pulled the door shut and yelled through it, “Normal people close the door!”

  He yelled something back, and I heard the word for person in there, followed by a negative, so I suppose he was saying that he wasn’t a normal person. Yeah. ’S’if I don’t know that.

  I turned back toward the kitchen, peeling wet shirt and tar from my face, and grumbled under my breath. This was going to take ages to clean up. And how the heck were Behind creatures getting into the house, anyway?

  Hang on. You don’t know about Behind—or Between. I’m gunna assume you know about the human world, though, so let’s start there. There’s the human world, and the world of the Fae—amongst others. You might think it’d be called Faery or Fairyland, but that just shows how much you know. The Fae world is the world Behind the human world. Still connected to us, still insanely, dangerously close, but sorta behind our world. And then there’s the space between, where it could be here, or could be there, just depending on how it feels. The sort of place where an umbrella might sometimes be a sword, and a stone gargoyle might suddenly become a bit more lifelike. The sort of place where you can die really quickly if you don’t notice the shadowy changes creeping along the street toward you.

  And speaking of death creeping up on people—through the front window, I could see two very familiar figures walking up the street. “Ha!” I said gloomily, toward the closed bathroom door. “Looks like they didn’t trust you not to be stupid, either, Mr Slim-line suit!”

  My other owners were coming home.

  In the lead was Zero, my half-human, half-fae owner. Huge and almost blindingly white, with shoulders as wide as the front door, Zero has a look of pure blue ice that can freeze the sun, and a certain way of saying Pet that does much the same. If I stay behind him, he doesn’t let anyone kill me, though, so that’s pretty nice.

  A step behind him was Athelas, fae steward and tea drinker. If Zero’s roar could shake you to your bones with fear, Athelas could seep a chill into your bones with the softness of his voice. He seems harmless enough, all soft smile, laugh lines, and brown curls, with milk-coffee skin that makes him look sorta warm, you know? But he’s not harmless. I know that because he’s killed me about six times now.

  Yeah, I’m still alive. You’ll get used to that.

  I watched them come up the street while the jug boiled away merrily in the background, giving off the faint stench of tar from a few spots that had splashed on it. They’d probably want tea and coffee when they got in—I could see the blood on Zero from here, and Athelas always wants tea, whether or not he’s bloody. It wasn’t like I could give them lunch with the kitchen in this state.

  Funnily enough, they used the front door today. Usually, they don’t worry about stuff like doors—or walls or, you know, natural laws of nature and that—they just slip Between and pass right through the walls.

  Of course, now that you know about Behind and Between and all that weird stuff, maybe we should go back a bit. Back to this morning, maybe.

  This morning was when something big and magic twitched the whole house sideways and maybe tried to turn it inside out. I grabbed the umbrella, and maybe that seems like an odd thing to be grabbing, but this umbrella isn’t always an umbrella. Sometimes it’s a sword—and right then it was definitely a sword, which meant that whatever was coming through Between was something that shouldn’t be getting into the house.

  Slender fingers pinched my right ear, tugging me away from the sword, but my fingers were already wrapped around the umbrella handle that felt like a sword grip, and I staggered sideways, pulling it out of the stand.

  “Manjiji ma,” said JinYeong, tugging lightly on my ear again.

  “Look, the sword told me to pick it up, so who am I supposed to listen to?”

  “Nae mal dulo,” he said, threateningly.

  “Yeah, but if I listen to you, what about the sword?”

  JinYeong sighed, then reached over me and grabbed the umbrella sword. To my disappointment, it let him take it. I mean, I dunno what it would have done to stop him, but it would have been nice to see him get the magical equivalent of an electric shock again.

  “Darrawa, Petteu,” he said, and pulled me back toward the living room by one wrist.

  “I can walk by myself,” I said, and as I said it, there was a knock at the door.

  Nobody went to answer the front door for two reasons: First, if anyone went to the door, it should have been me, because I was the pet; second, the knock didn’t come from the front door. Nope. It came from the linen closet door, which was already a sign that it was someone we didn’t want in the house.

  If I’d had any say in it, I would have said not to open the door. I didn’t, of course. You don’t ask the pet whether or not you can open the door, and by the time I realised what was happening, our uninvited guests were already inside.

  So I shut my mouth. I might also have scooted just a smidge back behind JinYeong, whose fingers tightened around my wrist. It was the golden fae again; the emissary of the Enforcers, who Zero used to work for, and who were still hoping that he’d come back and join them. And this time, he’d brought a couple more friends with him.

  Around JinYeong’s arm, I saw the tightening of the golden fae’s mouth as he saw JinYeong holding the umbrella. “Why does that thing have the Heirling Sword?”

  Seriously. The bloke has been in the house twice and he’s comfortable enough to insult everyone? I couldn’t help feeling that he’d gotten far too confident for someone who had brought an offer to Zero and had been turned down pretty firmly.

  How come Zero wasn’t kicking him out?

  I opened my mouth to say something rude, but I thought better of it a split second before JinYeong’s fingers crushed my wrist. I kicked the back of his shiny shoes, then poked him in the ribs for good measure. I heard him mutter a complaint beneath his breath, but when I looked up at him, his cheeks were sharp in a dangerous smile directed at the golden fae.

  “Oi. Ask him if he wants anything to eat,” I muttered, tugging at a pinch of his suitcoat.

  JinYeong’s cheeks sharpened just
a touch more, and his lips parted.

  “Hello,” he said in Korean that was layered through Between and very carefully understandable to the golden fae. “Would you care for something to eat?”

  I was a bit disappointed when Zero, with a rumble that nearly shook the house, interrupted to demand of the golden fae, “What business is it of yours who I allow to bear my sword?”

  The golden fae’s female lieutenant went just the tiniest bit pale, which I took as sign of good sense, and exchanged looks with the other two fae behind the golden one.

  The golden fae didn’t seem to be as wise; he just kept on going. “My lord, I really must protest! The Heirling Sword is not a weapon that should be borne by such things as that!”

  He was speaking about JinYeong, but toward Zero, which broke the glaring match between him and JinYeong and took the threat level in the room down by a decent amount.

  I heard the faintest of sighs from JinYeong. “Ashipda!”

  Stroppy blood-sucker. He just wanted to fight. Usually it was Zero he was trying to fight. I much preferred him having a go at the golden fae—I thought the fae could do with a good lesson, too, and I was about as clueless to why Zero wouldn’t allow it as JinYeong apparently was. Maybe it was the big brother in Zero that came out with me, too. He wouldn’t let other people fight me, either—though in my case, that was probably just as well until I got really good at fighting by myself. I mean, I was learning. Trying. When I wasn’t dying and stuff. But there’s a difference between a fully trained Behindkind and a fully trained human. Heck, I was pretty sure there was a difference between a new-born Behindkind and a fully trained human, and I was betting the advantage wasn’t going to be on the human side.

  “JinYeong bears the sword when I wish him to bear it,” said Zero, with finality.