Between Floors Read online

  It was as if they were saying, “Rude, nasty rude!” at me, but in another language that I’d learned a couple of years ago and was just remembering now. I was pretty sure it was, “Rude, nasty rude!” they were saying at me, anyway; even though I didn’t know exactly how I knew it. I kept a good grip on my bat anyway. There were too many of them, and I wanted to have a weapon. They were good cricket bats, too; light and a little bit flexible. I wondered if I’d pinched them from some rich kid’s car as we passed through, and grinned a bit. Maybe Zero could help me put ’em back in the right place when this was all over—or maybe stuff made its way back to where it should be if you tossed it back Between.

  I mean, I doubted it, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  The cave started to grow a bit lighter around us as we walked. It wasn’t lighter in a daylight kind of way, though, which was disappointing; it was lighter in an amber, flickery sort of way that suggested there was a fire up ahead.

  Actually, it was a couple of fires.

  We came around the curve of a cave wall, and there it was below us; a valley as big as a sports oval, with soft, mossy bits all through it. Mossy bits, logs, and very large fires.

  “You lot wouldn’t be so cold if you didn’t go around with mud all over yourselves,” I told them.

  One of them shook a finger at me and said something that probably had a negative in it, then patted its stomach.

  Oh, right. Each of the fires had a decent-sized cauldron sitting over it—they must be communal feeders or something. Not like JinYeong, then. I’d have to ask him if vampires ever had parties.

  Come to think of it, I probably didn’t want to know.

  Beside me, the detective stopped walking. I wondered why, until I realised that I’d stopped walking, and that I still had him by the hand.

  Good, good. I was doing a good job as protector.

  The little tackers began to chitter again, and one of them poked me in the ribs. Dunno how it reached that high, but it made me jump again, so I glared at it and shook my finger in its face.

  “Don’t do that!”

  Something yelled from across the valley, sharp and demanding. There was a wizened old prune standing by the biggest cauldron below, and as I looked, it waved the ladle at us in a vaguely threatening kind of way.

  I swung my cricket bat a bit against the grass-like stuff beneath our feet and wondered if that was a rock formation behind the old prune, or if it was a really big tacker down there. The old prune turned around and bashed at the rock, and the sound echoed across the valley. When it finally stopped, there was an even louder crack. Something that definitely wasn’t rock stood up. Dark, craggy, and as implacable as the cave walls around us, the creature towered, dwarfing the old prune, the fire, and even the hill behind it.

  “That’s not rock,” said Tuatu, with the feverish sort of voice that seems to be trying to convince itself that what it sees isn’t right. “That’s not rock! That’s a person—a troll?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. For all I knew, it could have been a troll.

  The old prune by the cauldron pointed the ladle at us and made a gibber that I thought might be something like, “Off you go, then!”

  Behind us, the little tackers swarmed and pushed, and despite how small they were, I felt myself being forced forward a step from the sheer amount of them.

  Detective Tuatu asked, “Are they—what are they planning on doing with us? I don’t see any weapons.”

  “Dunno,” I said. I didn’t want to hurt anyone who wasn’t trying to hurt me, but I hadn’t yet met anything Between that hadn’t been after my blood—except the plants, I suppose. And just because we couldn’t see weapons, it didn’t mean they didn’t have ’em. Didn’t mean they needed weapons, if it came to that.

  I leaned back into the swarm, making a bit freer with my elbow than I’d had before, and swung the cricket bat to make a clearing behind us as well. I didn’t want to be too rough with them—they were only small—but I didn’t want to be pushed toward that big brute before I knew exactly what he wanted us for.

  Detective Tuatu looked down uneasily at the cricket bat I’d given him, then around at the muttering swarm, and I knew he was thinking the same as me.

  “I can’t—if they’re not trying to hurt us, I can’t—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I bet they’re gunna try to hurt us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’re Between. Everything here wants to kill or maim humans. It’s like a cultural thing.”

  “Oh. Where—where did the bats come from? Before?”

  “Dunno,” I said again. “They were already here. Sorta. And they’re sort of not exactly bats. Well, here they’re not usually bats—here they’re usually stalagmites. I just convinced ’em they’re bats because we needed bats.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” said Tuatu. He was looking a bit sick again. “What are they saying?”

  “I don’t speak the language,” I objected. “I just wander in every now and then and get out before someone tries to kill me.”

  But as before, there was something familiar about the gibbering. If I didn’t listen to it too closely, it almost made sense—like the book titles in Zero’s bookshelf, which were written in a strange script that only made sense when you weren’t trying to decipher them.

  I stopped listening so hard, concentrating on swinging my own cricket bat back and forth with one hand, and feeling the flickflickflick as the top of it lightly swatted grass. That was hard, because the big brute from the middle of the valley started walking toward us, loosening his shoulders as he came, and I didn’t think he was doing that to limber up to shake our hands.

  “Pet,” said Detective Tuatu, the tip of his bat dropping to the ground.

  “Shh!” I admonished him. “Trying to hear over here!”

  The conversation around the cookpot rose in the air, a steady cackle of appreciative, tongue-smacking talk, above which bubbled the suggestion of fatten it up a bit, no I like it tough, young and tender, ah human flesh!

  Ah heck.

  And up the hill toward us, Big Brute kept walking, his ridiculously long stride eating up the space between us while the little chirpers behind us crowded in closer, cutting off escape from the back again.

  Ah heck.

  “Reckon they want to eat us,” I said. He wasn’t carrying a weapon, Big Brute, but looking at the size of him and looking at the size of us, I didn’t think it was gunna matter too much.

  Where was Zero?

  I couldn’t call him on the phone again—probably hadn’t called him in the first place, if my suspicions were correct—and I was pretty sure that yelling for him wasn’t gunna do us much good, either.

  Only Athelas had said something about a tracker trace, hadn’t he? And there had been that time, just a couple of nights ago, when I’d screamed for Zero and he’d shown up.

  Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not.

  Tuatu’s grip tightened convulsively on the handle of his bat. “They want to—they want to eat us?”

  Big Brute stopped a few yards away from us and stooped for a stone as big as my head.

  Behind us, a current of meaning rippled through the chirpers; Tenderise it! smash it! soften it up!

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “They’re definitely gunna eat us. You still don’t wanna fight?”

  “Oh no,” said Tuatu, lifting his bat with a look of fascinated horror. “I’ll fight.”

  “Cool,” I said. “And if it looks like we’re gunna die, yell out for Zero.”

  I don’t really remember how the fight started. There was a staticky sort of pause where I thought I might be really close to wetting my pants and things got muggy and prickly like a hot summer day, then I was screaming and swinging and maybe dying, with blood in my eyes and something liquid in my lungs that burned.

  Big Brute swung and missed because I had been there and suddenly I wasn’t there anymore, faster than it was possible for a human no
t to be there, and—

  Heck yeah!

  I still had my vampire reflexes!

  Long story—nearly turned into a lycanthrope, had to swallow some vampire spit—don’t worry about it. Important thing was, I still had my vampire reflexes!

  Things slowed down a bit, even though my lungs still burned. Tuatu. Where was Tuatu?

  I saw him, swinging and swearing, already bloody and battered; but as soon as I saw him, he went flying, knocked into the cave wall by an arm as huge and rocky as the wall he hit.

  Things got very fast again, and somehow I was screaming and hitting again, bashing Big Brute’s ear as hard as I could—how the flaming heck did I get up here?—then the world spun around me and hit me very hard.

  Someone was groaning like they were dying; probably me. I saw the cave roof above me, fractured into a thousand pieces—or maybe I hit the ground so hard that my eyes broke, I dunno—and Big Brute’s craggy face.

  Face, then hand.

  A hand that still held a rock as big as my head, now poised above me.

  Ah heck. Where was my cricket bat?

  I turned my head, blinking to clear my sight, and saw it just out of reach in the muddy, churned grass.

  Ah heck.

  Something else was missing. Where was Tuatu?

  I looked for him, but saw only splotches of red flung in an arc through the muddy stuff on my cricket bat; I could see them really clearly, and somehow the cricket bat seemed more important than the rock poised above my head, ready to dash out my brains.

  “Pet?” asked a whisper, a deep rumble in the ground, and the world became real and painful around me again.

  “Zero!” I yelled. “Zero!”

  The air did something weird that twanged over my head, and Big Brute froze, rock raised. A dirty hand slapped over my mouth, big and smelly and human, and a voice muttered in my ear, “Shh, shh, ladies can’t be noisy here.”

  I dug my head into the sandy ground, tilting back to see who it was, and a familiar bearded face made a bird’s nest grin at me through the thicket on his face.

  The old bearded bloke. It was the old bearded bloke who had escaped murder and fae in the house across the road from me—when there was still a house there. Mad, dirty, and homeless, he had been following me around since I was a kid, but tended to go to ground when there were a few too many people trying to kill him. I still didn’t know who he was and why he stuck around.

  I definitely didn’t know why he was here, now; or why he was shaking one dirty finger up at Big Brute, who would probably swat him into next month any second.

  Only he didn’t.

  He stayed as he was, frozen, his eyes wary and very intent on the old mad bloke.

  I gurgled a dry laugh into the old bloke’s palm, and tried to blink away the dark strands of hair that were loose from my ponytail. What’s the bet he was their king or something?

  I couldn’t see it, but the one at the cookpot shrieked something, and Big Brute’s hand wavered, undecided. The old bloke shook his finger again, and the hand that had been covering my mouth slipped around to my collar and hauled at me, my shirt hitching up beneath my arms.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Gotta get me friend.”

  “Already dead,” said the old bloke. “Can see the bones.”

  A voice, deep with pain, said, “Not dead, just got a broken arm.”

  I climbed to my feet with the old bearded bloke tugging painfully at me, swaying and nauseous, and saw Detective Tuatu propped up against the rock wall he’d hit. His bat was in splinters, and that struck me as funny, so I laughed.

  “Stop it, Pet!” said Tuatu. He tried to get to his feet by himself, but his arm was definitely broken and he couldn’t use it to help himself up. “Are you all right?”

  It also struck me as funny that he was worried about me when he looked like he did, but since he didn’t seem to like me laughing, I just went over and helped him stand up.

  “Told you to hold onto my hand,” I said. Like it would have made a difference. But it felt good to scold someone for something.

  That made Tuatu laugh, even though he looked like he might throw up, too.

  “Oi,” I said. “If I’m not allowed to laugh, why are you?”

  “Come along, pets,” the old mad bloke said, his crafty old eyes darting back and forth. “Can’t wait here. Pets are good tucker here.”

  “We noticed,” I said sourly. The hand I’d helped Tuatu up with was hurting more than it should be, and I was pretty sure one of my fingers was at an angle it shouldn’t be at, too.

  “Follow, follow, follow me!” the old bloke sang, and twirled away from the valley.

  “Who’s that?” demanded Tuatu. He sounded like he was trying not to lose his temper, so I suppose that was an improvement from him sounding like he was gunna chuck up from the pain.

  “A friend,” I said. “He’s not gunna stab us with anything, anyway. I think.”

  “How did he stop that big beast?”

  I shrugged, and gasped a bit when it hurt. “Dunno. Why don’t you ask him? Oi. I think I’ve dislocated my collarbone or something.”

  “You’ve broken your finger, too,” said Tuatu. “We’ll have to find somewhere safe to stop and patch you up.”

  “That’ll be some trick with your arm like that,” I pointed out, pulling him in the direction that the old bloke was heading. He was our only lifeline at the moment—where was Zero, anyway?—and I didn’t want to lose him. “Reckon we’d better look after you first. Bones aren’t meant to stick out like that.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, but he was pretty punch drunk as he trailed after me.

  I grinned back at him and felt a bit of warm wetness at the corner of my eyes. Blood, or tears? It didn’t matter; I just had to look after Tuatu until Zero found us. He was about as pale as an Islander can get, which was mostly grey.

  “Liar,” I said. “Bit fragile, aren’t you?”

  “I broke it when I was a kid,” he said, with a bit of indignation. “It’s weakened now.”

  “Oh well,” I said, inclined to be generous. “The brute went for you first, so I s’pose you did all right.”

  “Someone needs to teach you a few things about combat,” the detective said. “You nearly bashed my brains out yourself.”

  “Did I?” I looked across at him, and he was serious. “Sorry ’bout that.”

  “I thought you said Zero was teaching you how to fight.”

  “He is. But this was my first real fight—last time I just sorta legged it through with a sword for Zero and those three did all the fighting. I figured I was gunna die so things got a bit fuzzy in there.”

  The detective gave me a bit of a weird look. “Things got fuzzy, did they? I don’t suppose you were a berserker in a previous life, were you?”

  “Prob’ly not. Heck. Where’s the old beggar got to?”

  “Either I’m going potty, or he went through one of the cave walls.”

  “How hard did you get hit?”

  “Pretty hard. Not my head, though.”

  “Then he probably went through the wall. Where?”

  “Over there. The bit with the ferns,” said Tuatu. “I suppose we can assume that it wasn’t Zero on the phone earlier?”

  There was the faintest bit of resistance from his hand, like he didn’t really want to go through another door but didn’t want to pull too hard, in case he hurt me.

  That was kinda irritating but also nice of him.

  My brain recognised that.

  My mouth didn’t. It said, “Scared, huh?”

  “A bit,” Tuatu said evenly. “If that wasn’t Zero, who was it? They sent us right into the middle of an ambush, and I don’t really feel like going through any more doors.”

  “That’s what I want to know, too,” I said. “And I wanna know if Zero knows Betweeners know how to hack phones or whatever, cos I think that’s something he ought to know. C’mmon.”

  The detective pulled back more strongly. “P
et, can we slow down and think about this?”

  “Think about what? Big Brute back there, or the nasty old prune by the cookpot?”

  “Good point,” said Detective Tuatu, and started walking again.

  He was breathing a bit heavily, which was worrying. He was also losing a lot of blood where the bone protruded from his arm, and that was more worrying. If he fainted, I didn’t think the old bloke and I would be able to manage carrying him between the two of us. I didn’t like the idea of leaving a blood trail behind us in Between, either. I remembered how urgent Zero had been about me not leaving blood trails through Between, and it bothered me to be letting Detective Tuatu leave his blood here now.

  Maybe I could ask Zero to do something about that if I ever found him again.

  “I’ll have a look for a way out once we’re away from this lot,” I said, jerking my head back the way we’d come. “Reckon I saw one back there, but the little chirpers pushed us away from it.”

  “Oh well,” said Tuatu, looking at the ferny bit of cave wall where the old bloke had disappeared. “I suppose we can only die, after all.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I said, and pulled us both through the door.

  Sunshine glowed against my face, bright and sudden, warming the well-maintained topiary of a very big garden all around us. We were on a wide, pebbled path bordered by ivy-clad statues and manicured bushes; safe, sunshiny, and nothing deadly within reach of us.

  Flamin’ suspicious.

  Detective Tuatu, looking as suspicious as I felt, limped into the garden beside me, and didn’t complain when I pulled him right into the middle of the path.

  “What’s in this place, then?” he muttered. “Killer statues?”

  “Probably,” I said cheerfully. I glanced around us, careful to stick to the centre of the path and out of reach of anything that might like to grab either of us as I did my reccie, and grinned.

  Right there. There were a couple of ivy vines down the path to our left, between two of the statues. They’d joined up with each other, as if they’d been blown together by a summer breeze and grown together since, but there was something a bit solid to the way they joined together, like etched vine leaves on the wooden seat of an old-fashioned swing set.