Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8) Read online

  That’s a very polite way of saying that his DNA had been savagely rewritten to prioritise blood over everything. Blood to heal, blood to live. He didn’t need to breathe because he could oxygenate his own blood without the use of his lungs. Didn’t need to make his heart beat unless he wanted to because the blood already knew its way around his body.

  Kinda creepy but also very cool.

  Also technically not dead.

  And now that I knew how seriously the insult got under his skin, I wouldn’t be able to use it again. Waste of a good insult, that.

  JinYeong didn’t quite smile, but it seemed to me that his stride became looser, more relaxed: he sauntered along by my side with his hands in his pockets and his face turned slightly toward the sun as if soaking in the warmth of it.

  He was still a bit sauntery as we went up the post office steps, almost purring. I elbowed him in the ribs to remind him not to dazzle everyone in the place, but he just rubbed his ribs and grinned a bit as the girl at the counter blinked in amazement and hastily called us forward.

  “G’day,” I said to her, and was ignored for my troubles. I could have just said hi, but it wasn’t like she was paying attention to me, so it pleased me to be as okker as possible. “Got a couple questions for ya, mate.”

  “We wish to know the name of the man who owns this box,” JinYeong said, his voice soft and persuasive. He took the bit of paper I had scribbled on and passed it to her. “And his phone number. Also his address.”

  “I can get his name and email address,” said the girl, leaning close to the front of the counter with her arms folded. Smiling up at JinYeong, she added, “People don’t need to leave a phone number or an address—just their email. So that’s all we’ve got. I can give you my number, though.”

  “Heck, that was smooth!” I said, startled. “Oi, we just want his email address; you don’t have to give us your number.”

  She shot me an annoyed look and turned back to JinYeong. “Just a second, I’ll get that for you.”

  She typed and clicked away on her computer for a few minutes, then angled herself away from me slightly as she wrote on the back of a parcel card. I didn’t have to see to know that she was writing down her number as well.

  It annoyed me a bit, so I leaned in JinYeong’s direction to crane my head around and see the screen. I saw the name, and below it an email address. [email protected]. That really was all there was: no address, no number. There wasn’t even a name.

  The counter girl couldn’t angle the screen away from me without turning it away from JinYeong as well, but I saw the annoyance in the way she pressed her lips together. She recovered quickly enough to smile at JinYeong as she passed the card to him, though.

  He took it from her, nodded in acknowledgement, and towed me away by the sleeve. Outside, he tore a strip off the bottom of the card and tossed it into a nearby garbage can with a grimace.

  “What?” I said, not exactly sure if I was amused or…relieved? Perplexed? “You don’t like girls making the first move?”

  “Ani. I do not need that bit.” He looked at me from beneath his lashes and added provocatively, “I will like it very much when you make the first move.”

  He left me gaping at him from the stairs and strolled away up the street toward the mall.

  “Oi!” I said, catching up with him. “I wouldn’t be making the first move because you already did it! Gimme that card!”

  He passed me the card, grinning, then shoved his hands back into his pockets. He was far too pleased with himself, I thought sourly.

  “All right,” I said, my voice purposely cold to show that we were going to be talking business and nothing else, “we can guess that the bloke’s name is Jonny. And this email address is a student one. It belongs to someone who’s going to the TAFE here in Hobart.”

  “Ah. We will go to see this Jonny,” said JinYeong, as if he hadn’t just been trying to flirt with me. “I will…talk to him.”

  “Okay, but no biting,” I said, hurrying after him.

  There weren’t as many Jonnys as I’d expected, and as soon as I mentioned the mad dog part of the email to the receptionist there, her eyes lit with amusement.

  “Ah yes,” she said. “That will be Jonny Campbell: they call him Maddog Jonny.”

  “Sounds like a fun bloke,” I said. “He around today?”

  She looked me up and down in a way that was about as pointedly business-like as I’d been earlier with JinYeong. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” she said. “The privacy of our students—”

  “Pretty rich, after you just told us the bloke’s name,” I pointed out.

  That might have been a bit mean of me.

  The receptionist faltered, frowned worriedly, and said slowly, “I did, didn’t I? Why did I do that?”

  “Because I asked very nicely,” said JinYeong, leaning his arms on the counter and observing her with dark, liquid eyes. “You will forget you told us, anyway. You should tell us what we want to know.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, by the computer, it seems that Jonny has a pattern-cutting class right now. You should be able to find him in Block C, room 42. You’ll need to be quick, though: class finishes in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling a twinge of guilt. It was far too easy to do this to people; no wonder JinYeong had gotten into the habit of it. I wondered if I would have ended up the same way if I’d been a vampire.

  JinYeong looked at me sideways as we walked, and said eventually, when we got to Block C, “This one did not give me her number.”

  I couldn’t help the small snort of laughter that came out. “Yeah, I noticed that.”

  “You are still…prickly. Why are you prickly?”

  “Dunno,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. “I just don’t like doing that to people.”

  “Ah,” he said, thoughtful and lingering. “That. Even if I wished to stop it, I could not. It became familiar.”

  “Oh,” I said. So it really did bother him sometimes, did it? “You really can’t help it.”

  “I can help it a little bit,” he said, reminding me of what he had once said about Marazul and his merman form. “And I can make it stronger; but some of it just happens, even if I do not wish it to happen.”

  “And sometimes it just doesn’t happen,” I said, grinning. “Like with me. That’s gotta be annoying.”

  “Ani,” he said, and once again the word lingered. He shot a look at me beneath his lashes and said, “Sometimes you are annoying. That—it is not annoying.”

  “You’re confusing,” I said. “Oi, this is the room.”

  JinYeong followed me into a light-filled room that was overstuffed with scraps of material, wafting bits of pattern paper, and bolts of cloth. A dressmaker’s dummy or two poked out of the mess, headless and eerie, with unfinished garments pinned to them. The mess of material at one end of the jumbled set of desks that had been pushed together turned out to be a bloke, slumping face-forward.

  He was probably only a few years older than me, maybe early twenties, and either he didn’t care about wasting the money he was spending on attending TAFE or he was just too tired to care, because he was fast asleep. I might have thought he was dead, but he was snoring, and let me tell you that was a nice change up for the books. Maybe his teacher had given up on him as a bad job, because he was the only one in the room.

  JinYeong gave a small sniff of laughter and kicked the desk leg closest to him, jolting the table and, by extension, the bloke.

  “Jonny!” I hailed him in a friendly sort of way, sitting down on the desk beside him as he flailed a bit and sat up. “We need to have a bit of a chat.”

  For a second, I thought he was actually gunna run for it. JinYeong must have thought the same, because he grabbed Jonny by the collar before he could do more than start to push away from the desk in a confused jumble of limbs.

  “Okay, if this is about my rent, you’ll get your money tonight, promise!” he said, staring
at JinYeong and then at me.

  “It’s not about the rent,” I said.

  “And I’m not due in court for another two weeks, plus I didn’t do it, so if that’s what it’s about, you can tell the old goat I’ll see him in court!”

  “Nope,” I said. “We want to have a chat about that P.O. Box you own.”

  He slumped again, visibly relaxing. “Oh, is that all! I can’t tell you about that; it’s private. I get paid to not talk about it.”

  JinYeong leaned over, startling Jonny into jerking backward, and said into that frightened face, “I think you should talk.”

  “Look mate, you don’t have to get nasty; I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “Didn’t say you did,” I said. “We just need you to answer a few questions—and I reckon you better be pretty flamin’ truthful, ’cos my friend doesn’t like liars and he’s very good at figuring out when people are lying. Tell us about your post box.”

  “Look, it’s not my post box—it belongs to the bloke who hired me.”

  “Someone hired you to go and rent a P.O. Box for them?”

  “Yeah. I told you: it’s not mine, not really,” he babbled. “I get sent money to cover the cost every year.”

  JinYeong leaned a little closer. “Who hired you?”

  “This is probably gunna sound weird,” said Jonny, trying vainly to move further back in his chair, “but—”

  “You can’t remember his face?” I suggested.

  “How did you know!” he said, awed. “It doesn’t make sense, but no matter how much I think about the bloke, I can’t remember his face—can’t remember his voice, either.”

  “How can you be working for someone you can’t even remember?”

  “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I just took the job to earn a bit of money. It’s not like it takes a lot of energy, and I get paid every week.”

  Indignantly, I said, “You could have been working with drug dealers!”

  “I don’t know that,” he said. “You don’t know that. All I know is that I get paid fifty bucks a week to go and check the mail. There’s hardly ever anything there, anyway—he’s lucky if he gets something once a month. Anything that comes gets forwarded to him.”

  I met JinYeong’s eyes. “What do you mean, forwarded?”

  “Not in the mail,” he said. “That’d be stupid. I drop stuff off into a letterbox round about here. It comes from the post box to me and then stops there.”

  “Who owns the house?”

  “There is no house,” said Jonny. “It burned down years ago. The letterbox and a few trees are about all that’s left. I’m surprised no one’s tried to redevelop it. Mind you, it’s got a bit of a creepy feel, so that might put people off.”

  “I’ll bet,” I muttered. “Oi. Write down the address for us.”

  He looked from me to JinYeong as he scribbled a note on a scrap of pattern paper. “You’re not gunna get me in trouble?”

  “We’re not the cops, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said, grabbing the paper before he could get rid of it.

  “But if you tell anyone that we came to see you,” said JinYeong silkily, “you will be in very much trouble.”

  Jonny swallowed. “Right. Not a word,” he said. “Oh, and if you’re hoping to find this bloke, you might be out of luck: I don’t think he checks his mail too often. Sometimes the stuff I put there is still there the next time I go. I reckon he switches up his days so that he’s harder to catch if someone like you comes along.”

  “We will take care of that,” JinYeong said. “You: forget what we talked about and go back to sleep.”

  Jonny, his eyes suddenly heavy, yawned and stretched, then laid down on the desk again. Before I had a chance to open my mouth, he was asleep and snoring faintly.

  “Flamin’ heck!” I said to JinYeong. “That was quick.”

  “He is no more use to us,” he said, shrugging one dismissive shoulder.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Right. If we can’t find out who it is this way, we’ll find out another way.”

  “Ah,” JinYeong said thoughtfully. “We will send a mail to ourselves?”

  “And people think you’re just a pretty face!”

  “I am a pretty face. I am also—”

  “All right, all right,” I said hastily. “You reckon it’d do much good to just put something in the letterbox at the empty block ourselves?”

  JinYeong didn’t hesitate. “No. It will need that thing—a postmark. And perhaps that person will know if this boy doesn’t deliver it.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said, faintly gloomy. “Right, I suppose it’s back to the post office for us, then.”

  We went back out into a surprisingly warm sunshine; and maybe JinYeong was enjoying that more than vampires are supposed to enjoy sunshine, because when we got back to the post office he stopped at the outside pillars, just a few steps away from the sliding glass doors.

  I stared at him. “What? You don’t wanna go in?”

  “I will wait out here,” he said, and propped himself against the wall. “There is nothing I need in there.”

  He was waiting for me when I got back out. He yawned, catlike, and asked, “Are we going home?”

  I caught the faintly malicious gleam in his eye as he explained, “Hyeong will be annoyed if we are gone longer. He does not approve of me.”

  “What do you mean, he doesn’t approve of you?”

  “He doesn’t approve of me loving you,” JinYeong explained. The gleam was slightly more pronounced now, and I didn’t like that.

  “You already told me that. Don’t go using me to needle Zero,” I told him directly. “If that’s why you like me—”

  “That is just a bonus,” he said, grinning at me. “Are we going home?”

  “Well, you’re gunna be pretty pleased to find out that we’ve got somewhere else to go first,” I said more cheerfully, wriggling my phone at him. It wasn’t that I was pleased, but I was satisfied that I wasn’t going to be used in JinYeong’s constant push to annoy Zero. “I need to get some info off Abigail.”

  JinYeong frowned. “About your family?”

  “Maybe. Hopefully. They’ve got a lot of history there that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else, and I figured they might know something about my great-grandma Anne. You blokes reckon that to be an Heirling, humans have to have a bit of behindkind blood somewhere as well as human, and she went out of state, just like me.”

  He hissed in a breath, thoughtful at once. “Ah. You think she went Behind?”

  “Yeah. And I think there was something I read in one of Abigail’s books earlier—now that I know my parents knew about Behind, it makes sense that my family would show up in history from humans who also knew about it.”

  “You should be careful of the humans,” JinYeong said.

  I stared at him. “Look at you, getting all behindkindy.”

  “I did not mean that. I meant that they are too much like Hyeong.”

  “I know,” I said, but I couldn’t help shooting an approving look at him.

  He grinned. “I told you. My pretty face is a bonus. We will go, but if they ruin my suit, I will be very annoyed.”

  Chapter Eight

  There was no one outside when we got there, so we showed ourselves in.

  “They need to get themselves better security,” I said to JinYeong as we walked cautiously down the hall. It was nice to be able to get in easily, but it was a double-edged sword: if the humans were too startled at seeing us with no notice, there was a pretty good chance we’d get shot by a crossbow—or at the very least take a cricket bat to the side of the head. “Now that I know what sort of magic they’ve got running around the place, it doesn’t take much to get through.”

  “They are probably not prepared for something like you,” said JinYeong, with a laughing glitter to his eyes.

  “Watch out who you’re calling a thing,” I said, a bit more softly. We were getting closer to the area wher
e we might find people: just a bit further down the hall was the office they seemed to use as a meeting room. Hopefully we’d find Abigail before anyone else.

  It took me a moment to realise that JinYeong had stopped walking. I turned an enquiring look on him, and he said, “I will wait. I think they will talk more if you go alone.”

  “You’re basically a fixture today,” I told him, but I left him there to pace in the hallway like a slightly erratic pinball and headed on into the room.

  Abigail was in the office digging through a box of what looked like someone’s garage sale items when I walked in, with Ezri sitting on the desk beside her, legs crossed and lifting a fringed jacket out of the box.

  “You lot need to work on your magic defences,” I said.

  Abigail dropped the paperweight she’d been holding in one bandaged hand. “Pet!”

  Was I mistaken, or did her eyes flare with panic?

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Came to see you about that thing I asked you about,” I said. “Didn’t feel like talking about it on the phone. Don’t know who’s listening, half the time.”

  “I’d be more worried about the friendly listeners than the unfriendly,” she said, rather grimly. “Look—”

  “No time to talk?” I guessed. She still looked vaguely uncomfortable, but that could just have been because I came back again to the headquarters after everything that happened between us a little while ago.

  I had almost not come back again: a tacit way of way of saying, I know you don’t trust me so I’ll pretend that I don’t know where you live. Actually, I was a bit surprised that they were still in the same spot: I would have expected them to move after finding out that I had, as they thought of it, betrayed their existence to my three psychos. I’d figured they wouldn’t trust me not to tell Zero where they were.

  Apparently I was wrong. That was a pleasant surprise.

  Still, Abigail didn’t look too comfortable to have me here, and I shouldn’t let myself be offended at that. It was fair enough.

  “I can come back another time,” I said. “Or you can text me a place and I’ll meet you there.”