Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8) Page 12

  “Yeah, but I didn’t die,” Ezri said. “And what do you mean about continuing together?”

  Athelas was talking to Zero—pointedly so—but I noticed that he’d made sure we could all hear. More mildly still, he added, “I would suggest some personally applied magic rather than the item-based, impersonal armoury they’re currently using.”

  “Our armoury has kept us alive pretty well until now,” Abigail said, distrust immediately springing to her eyes. “Why would I let you put any sort of personalised spell on us?”

  “You can do as you please,” Zero said briefly. “The offer is there if you choose to avail yourselves of it. If not, continue on as you’ve been doing.”

  “I’m gunna do it,” said Ezri, her chin sticking out. “I don’t see how it’s any different from us having magic brooches and stuff that weren’t ours to start with. Maybe they won’t be so glitchy if they’re made for us.”

  “Fae magic—” Abigail began.

  Athelas murmured, “It’s all fae magic, is it not?”

  To my surprise, that made Abigail flush a deep, brick red. It didn’t seem to surprise Athelas, though: he gazed at her for a little while longer—enjoying her discomfort?—then looked away, smiling faintly. Zero flicked a look at him but didn’t make it a long one.

  He asked, “Did you find the nest?”

  “There was no nest in sight, my lord. The siren that accosted us seemed quite comfortable, however, so I would have assumed that its nest or friends were in close proximity.”

  “Friends?” Tuatu said sharply. “What do you mean, friends? You said we were dealing with one of them!”

  “You said we have to find the nest,” I said to Zero, my mind running on a different track for the time being. “You reckon that’s why it was strong enough to worry Athelas: it was connected to its nest?”

  Was there a shade of approval in Zero’s gaze when it lit on me? “I suspect so. Athelas?”

  “There was something attached to it,” agreed Athelas. “Not a homing thread as such, but it felt as though there was a connection through which it was gaining power. I would have liked to test the idea, but our young human friend here was quite…useful with her bat.”

  “You blaming me for not being able to do something?” demanded Ezri.

  “I would not dream of it,” said Athelas.

  “This little one is spikey, too,” murmured JinYeong in my ear. “I think you lost a sister.”

  “I think you should belt up,” I muttered, jabbing backwards with my left elbow. There was a soft huff of air and a faint cough as the elbow connected with his diaphragm, but I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know that he was grinning again.

  “Well excuse me for saving your dusty patchwork jacket!”

  “I did, however, have time enough to ascertain that we are indeed dealing with more than one siren,” Athelas continued, unperturbed in the face of Detective Tuatu’s further perturbation. “The creature was certainly communicating with another.”

  Flamin’ heck, I thought, growing cold. I exchanged a slightly guilty look with Abigail. We’d just been walking around without our earplugs in because we had assumed, along with the others, that there was only one siren.

  “I saw you on the app,” Tuatu said, interrupting my thoughts. “You popped up for a few seconds, music and all. If there are more of these things—”

  “What were they playing this time?” I asked him.

  He looked fed up. “’How’zat?’”

  Reckon Ezri and I were the only ones who knew enough about both cricket and music to appreciate that. Did sirens know enough about cricket culture to recognise a cricket bat and pick a song that was a sly cricket pun, or was that just part of the magic?

  “Perfect,” I said. I didn’t try to hide my grin, though it faded quickly enough at my next thought. “Oi, so whatever they’re doing, it simultaneously streams to the internet, overlays a track, and does a sireny little thing to make the person who’s making it do what they want them to do?”

  “That’s about it,” said Ezri. “Felt like I had to dance, and I can’t dance. The music was in my head, and I could see exactly how I could dance right down the end of the pier. Found out the pier was a fair bit shorter than I thought it was once I was free from whatever that needing to dance was.”

  “I’d like to know how they’re influencing you through sight,” said Zero, frowning. “Sirens aren’t particularly well known for their abilities to influence people through sight. They’re usually auditory predators.”

  “My earplugs weren’t in properly,” Ezri admitted. “But when I opened the app to look around, I had a really strong impulse to take ’em out altogether, so I reckon they’re doing something else as well.”

  “Flamin’ wonderful,” I said. “Looks like today’s a bust, then.”

  “Wonderful,” muttered Tuatu, echoing me. “What am I supposed to put in my report, that’s what I’d like to know? I was here officially today.”

  I stared at him. “That’s what you’re worried about? I wanna know how we’re supposed to stop ourselves from jumping over the edge of buildings—”

  “Dancing, more like,” said someone from Abigail’s group.

  “—or dancing over the edge of buildings while we’re looking for these mongrels. Or right off the edge of ships,” I finished. “If they’re still able to get to us using things other than sound, how are we supposed to protect ourselves? It’s all right for you three—”

  “Might I demur, Pet?” enquired Athelas. “I confess that had I been looking at the phone when the child was, I might have had some difficulty myself. I don’t know what has been done with the aid of electronics, but I would have said that their influence was magnified to a dangerous degree.”

  “We did all right,” protested Ezri. “You didn’t try to take a nosedive into the water, and after I got the app closed, I did all right as well. The earplugs are good enough, we just need to figure out another way to see stuff that doesn’t involve camera apps.”

  Zero, ignoring that aside, asked, “You’re certain you didn’t see anything that could have been a nest?”

  “Nope,” said Ezri. She sounded disgruntled, but then, I hadn’t ever heard her sounding really gruntled either.

  “I’m afraid not, my lord,” echoed Athelas.

  Zero looked around at the whole group and asked more loudly, “Did anyone find a nest?”

  All of us shook our heads or muttered a nope into the ground.

  “It is strange,” said JinYeong. “There should be a nest. If they are not at home, there should be a nest. We already did the measurements.”

  “What measurements?” asked Abigail.

  “Sirens can only get so far from salt water before they’re in danger of drying out,” Athelas explained. “That much we know for sure. The detective also managed to find us an area of influence that showed the furthest reach of their power by plotting the attacks onto a map. We covered that area today and found a single siren.”

  “So we need to know how come they aren’t nesting,” I said, nodding. “What if they’ve got extras? Extras like what they’re doing through the camera app to give themselves a bit of visual persuasion?”

  “We don’t know of anything that could do that,” Abigail said. “And we’ve got a few useful things, these days.”

  “I know of nothing that could do it,” agreed Zero. “Off-hand. I’ll do—”

  “—some research,” I finished for him. “Yeah, but what are we going to do today?”

  “Cordon off the waterfront,” said Tuatu, already dialling a number on his phone. “And get a few of the special officers down here to enforce it.”

  “At least we killed one,” Abigail said grimly. “That’s one less to kill when we find their nest, I suppose.”

  A babble of agreement rose around us, but Zero sent Athelas a considering look I had no trouble interpreting. “You killed it?”

  “I very much doubt the creature is dead, my
lord,” said Athelas, his gentle voice somehow cutting through the others.

  “It was a bloody mess when it went into the water,” opined Ezri. “If it lives after that, I don’t want to know what it’ll take to kill those things.”

  “It was undoubtedly injured, but it managed to fall into the water, and I do believe that sirens are known to have water-healing properties, are they not?”

  “It’s suspected so,” agreed Zero. “I’ll do some research when we get home. Pet, where did you put the Behind Kinds book last?”

  “It’s in my room,” I said. “I’ll get it for you when we get back home. What are we gunna do now while the detective’s doing his thing?”

  “Regroup and return with a plan,” Zero said. “We still don’t know exactly where the creatures are hiding, but we do know they’re harder to fight than we first believed, and we now know there’s more than one. We can reckon on them knowing we’re coming next time, too.”

  “They also know a lot about how human electronics work,” said Abigail, a frown creasing her brow. “How have they managed to link themselves with the internet, and how are they opening apps and projecting themselves through them?”

  “Might as well ask us how they’re layering tracks of music over stuff and running it live on an app,” I told her. “I mean, we’ve got someone who might know, but that’s about it. Oi, Tuatu, you better make sure that none of your lot gets too close to the waterfront while it’s being cordoned off—or make sure it’s a few of the ones who know about stuff like this.”

  He nodded, still on the phone, and I heard him say something about hallucinatory drugs and appropriate PPE.

  “We’ll see if we can figure something out to keep ourselves safe,” Abigail said to Zero. “Before we come out with you again.”

  “I’ll say,” muttered a couple of the humans behind her.

  “You can come home with us and figure it out, along with our next move,” I said. “If that’s it for the day, that is?”

  I looked up at Zero enquiringly, but it was Abigail who spoke first.

  “We’re not going anywhere with that lot,” she said, with finality.

  “Okay, no tea and bikkies for you,” I said. “You’ve got Ezri to debrief, anyway. I’ll text or call later if there’s anything else you should know.”

  “I’ll text or call if I come across anything, too,” she said.

  I thought at first that she meant she’d call or text about anything Ezri told them that she thought we might not know. It took a second or two before I realised that she was looking straight at me, and that she was talking about the records I’d asked her to look through.

  “Thanks,” I said, with significantly more sincerity than I would have otherwise felt. “Catch you later.”

  The humans didn’t do the melt away thing that my psychos do, but it wasn’t far off. They weren’t more than a few steps away before they sorta flickered between the trees and were gone.

  Palomena, very carefully not watching them, said, “I believe I’ve fulfilled my duties; perhaps I should go before I see something I’d rather not see.”

  She disappeared with a lot more finesse than the humans, but there was something similar about it despite that.

  “Flamin’ heck,” I said. “The humans really have got a bit of hardware, haven’t they?”

  “They have,” said Athelas thoughtfully. “It’s terribly interesting.”

  “Yeah?” I gazed at him. “Why’s that?”

  “Humans with fae paraphernalia,” he explained. “What else? For humans who have such a chip on their shoulder against the fae, they certainly don’t seem to be worried about making free with fae goods.”

  “Staying alive is a strong motivation,” said Zero. “Are you ready, detective?”

  Detective Tuatu pocketed his phone and said, “Good to go. I hope you lot have a good explanation for this, because it’s not going to be easy to keep people away from the waterfront, even with everything blocked off. Ironically, it probably would have been easier while Upper Management was still running the station: they’d have known the real risks.”

  “They are the real risk,” I said, unimpressed. “C’mmon, you lot. Time for tea.”

  In our house, it’s almost always time for tea. That’s a useful thing when one of your housemates doesn’t technically need to sleep at all and the other two only need to sleep a few hours per night: it makes everyone sit down and rest.

  Or, in this case, discuss the business at hand.

  “I really hope you three have something up your sleeve,” said the detective, half an hour later.

  He sounded a bit sour; maybe I should have put some sugar in his tea. Still, he looked pretty comfortable on the spare chair; he wasn’t trying to fit on the couch with Zero, which would have been far less comfortable. I would have put him next to me again, but JinYeong had already taken his usual spot by the time I got out of the kitchen with the tea tray, and it looked like Tuatu was pretty happy with the spare chair, anyway. Maybe I’d have to relabel it Tuatu’s chair instead of spare chair.

  “We’ll contact the merman,” Zero said.

  Tuatu stiffened a bit, but that was just because he’d had bad experiences with mermen in the past. “What merman?”

  “He’s our tech guy,” I explained. “He’s good at fusing magic and electronics.”

  “How do you know he’s not behind this?”

  Athelas’ eyes danced a little. “To be absolutely honest, we don’t know for certain,” he said. “However, the merman knows it’s in his best interests to help us, and I believe he may even have a motive of his own for assisting to the best of his abilities.”

  “If it’s the one I think you’re thinking of, you’re wrong,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him.

  “No doubt we all have our ideas upon the matter,” he said mildly, and his gaze was on JinYeong. Maliciously, I was pretty sure.

  JinYeong snarled very faintly, more tooth than sound, and said, “We will ask him. If the earplugs are not enough—”

  “And they are certainly not enough,” interjected Athelas.

  “—then it is necessary to find something that is enough.”

  “I’ll visit the merman,” said Zero, with a very faint emphasis on I’ll.

  “I wasn’t offering,” I said pointedly, and to my surprise, that made him grin.

  “Are you rebelling?” he asked.

  “No more than usual,” I said. Maybe I’d been spending too much time with JinYeong: I was getting to be pretty malicious. Mind you, it wasn’t as though Zero hadn’t gone behind my back and corrupted the bloke—or in this case, merman—I was keen on.

  I didn’t know if he’d done it in order to get what he wanted or to prove to me that I couldn’t trust behindkind when it came to being affectionate. I wouldn’t put either motive past him: I’ve never been able to say Zero doesn’t protect me, it’s just that I’ve often had a few things to say about the way that he does it.

  These days, I wasn’t exactly sure why he was protective—wasn’t sure if Morgana was right about him liking me as a woman instead of some sort of useless little sister—but I did still often have a big problem with how he expressed that protection. In Marazul’s case, Zero had done exactly what he thought was the right thing to do. He’d decided that Marazul was a weak link, and he had set out to exploit that link. It was just a shame that he’d been right. Reckon it would have been easier to be blasé about it if he’d failed to corrupt Marazul.

  He’d done the same thing with JinYeong—had tried to, anyway, because with JinYeong, Zero hadn’t been right. JinYeong had actually gone against everything Zero had told him to do, in order to be next to me as a friend when I really needed someone.

  By way of being just a bit more malicious, I put a plate of biscuits closer to Detective Tuatu, careful to make sure I put them on top of a pile of files that we definitely shouldn’t have had. They weren’t police ones, but they definitely had a bit of info in them that they wouldn
’t have had if it wasn’t for police reports.

  Tuatu looked suspiciously at the files but took a biscuit. “Have you been raiding the police station again?”

  “Raiding is a strong word,” objected Athelas. “We do, after all, return the files after we’re finished with them; I dare swear we make better use of them than the police department do, if it comes to that.”

  The detective looked as though he really wanted to negate that suggestion but couldn’t think of how to do it justifiably.

  To make him feel better, I said, “These ones aren’t yours, anyway. They’re from the humans.”

  “They’ve got police files?”

  “You’ve got a really suspicious mind,” I told him, pointing at him with a teaspoon. “They’re not police files, they’re records from the humans you met today: they’ve been making their own records for a couple hundred years now. It’s just that they have a few extra bits that might have come from the police station. You know. Originally.”

  “I thought you said they were dying out and that’s why they want me to keep their little cache for them,” he objected. “It seems to me like they’re doing pretty well, and have been for years!”

  “How do you think we’ve still got the records?” I pointed out. “They’ve been making sure stuff like this gets kept safe for the next time a group forms; they die out pretty often, by the sounds of it.”

  “This is how I end up being trapped in my own home by a tree that changes size and helping out with investigations into sirens along the waterfront,” he complained. “I always want to say no, but there’s never anyone else saying yes.”

  “Yeah, there are,” I said, forgetting that what I was about to say was hardly convincing. “They’re just mostly dead.”

  “Yeah, thanks, I feel much better.”

  “You’ve got a dryad, though,” I said encouragingly. “You’ll be safe enough. And you’ve got the North Wind at your back.”

  “And who’s going to protect me from her, I’d like to know?”