Between Homes (The City Between Book 5) Read online

  “I thought his mum was human?”

  “Yeah, but his fae bloodline is pretty scary. What do you want to know about Zero for, anyway? He threw you out. You’re here now.”

  “Ya,” said JinYeong, strolling toward us. “Mwohanya?”

  Dark eyes, honey-tinted skin, full lips and an insolent way of walking that made you want to punch him, there wasn’t anything from the top of his perfectly brushed hair to the toes of his shiny, pointy shoes that wasn’t annoying.

  But the most annoying thing? He never speaks in English. Just Korean.

  Good thing for me that I like to be annoying, too, or I would never have learned as much Korean as I have. Or how to use my supposedly impossible skills with Between to understand the things JinYeong chooses to make understandable.

  “We’re trying to decide if we want to talk to you or not,” I said. “What do you want?”

  JinYeong sniffed slightly, then made a disgusted face at the plastic bag. “Igae mwohya?”

  “Clothes,” I said, ignoring his scrunched face.

  “Why,” said JinYeong, suddenly and startlingly understandable with an edge of Between to his Korean, “do you have dead peoples’ clothes?”

  “They’re second hand clothes, not dead peoples’ clothes.”

  “They are dead peoples’ clothes.”

  I looked accusingly at Daniel. “Did you let me buy dead peoples’ clothes?”

  “They’re not wearing them anymore!” he protested, pushing past JinYeong and jogging up the stairs. Over his shoulder, he said, “And they washed ’em first: what more do you want?”

  “Clothes that weren’t on a dead person!” I told him, following him up the stairs and into the house. To JinYeong, who was still behind me, I said, “What are you here for, anyway?”

  He shrugged, sauntering past me, and threw himself elegantly onto one of the couches. He didn’t say much, but I saw his eyes roaming around the room, and when I made myself a cup of coffee he looked meltingly at me until I brought him one too. I left my bag of dead peoples’ clothes on the seat beside JinYeong with the rest of my stuff, and took a cup up to Morgana, too.

  On my way out, I levelled my finger at Daniel and JinYeong in turn and said, “Don’t fight.”

  By the time I got back downstairs Daniel had vanished into his room and JinYeong was strolling in through the back door like he’d been out to see what there was to see in the backyard, so they mustn’t have fought. It was either that or JinYeong had killed Daniel and stashed his body somewhere, but I was pretty sure I would have heard the murder.

  I knew there wasn’t much out in the backyard because I’d already looked, but I didn’t like to think that JinYeong had been snooping, so I said sharply, “Don’t go poking your sniffer around the place.”

  The slightest edge of tooth showed. “I have already poked it into the back yard,” he said, sauntering across the room. “I will poke it into the second floor now.”

  “The heck you will!” I said indignantly. “Get away from the stairs!”

  JinYeong, mockingly, put one foot on the first step.

  “You try and get up there, and I’m gunna choke you with your tie,” I told him.

  JinYeong looked back at me, all liquid eyes and slightly bared teeth, then turned swiftly from the stairs on the front pad of his foot, knees subtly bending to put him in a crouch.

  Ah heck. That was his hunting look.

  Only instead of death in his eyes there was—what?

  A low chuckle confirmed it—JinYeong was laughing. He wanted to play?

  “Try it, Petteu,” he said, and sprang.

  By the time Daniel came out to tell us sourly to stop breaking the living room apart, JinYeong’s tie was halfway off, a good portion of my hair had come out of its braid, and both of us were staggering slightly.

  If you think that I shouldn’t have had much chance against a vampire, you’re right. But a little bit of vampire venom does wonders in the human body—I mean, so long as I don’t bite back—and I was still hopped up and extra fast from the last lot. There was also a lot of stuff around the house.

  Remember how I said there was a way of seeing things, of pulling another version of things through from that deeper elsewhere we call Behind? Well, that’s something I can do: grab a rusted poker that’s a sword in the Behind world, drag it through via Between and use its Behind form in the human world. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I’ve got the feeling it makes a sort of pocket of Between around the thing I drag out, a bit like how JinYeong manages to translate his Korean into English for Behindkind.

  So when I fight, I can have any number of weapons. I mean, I’m still not that well trained at how to use ’em, but boy am I ever good at grabbing them. And despite how untrained I am, I’m apparently wild enough to worry even a psycho vampire, because he’d done a lot of dancing back and forth to get out of my way.

  He was still panting now, hair messy and eyes dark with laughter.

  I said, “Oh, what a shame! Your tie’s kicked the bucket!”

  He stripped it from around his neck and threw it on the couch. “I have another.”

  “Yeah? You come back wearing it and try to get upstairs again, and I’ll wreck that one, too.”

  Usually JinYeong hates being messy—hates his clothes being anything other than perfectly pressed and arranged—but he surprised me by grinning at me, eyes glittering and dark.

  “Try it, Petteu,” he said again, and settled back on the couch to smirk at Daniel, who only snorted softly and went away again.

  I didn’t actually have to make lunch for anyone, but I did it anyway. Maybe it was force of habit. The downstairs kitchen was nice and big, even if there had been dust all over everything the first day I got here, and it was kinda nice to be able to spread out.

  Well, it would have been nice to spread out in if JinYeong hadn’t still been lurking around the place. Or if he hadn’t followed me into the kitchen for what seemed to be the sole purpose of watching me make spaghetti bolognese. I dunno, maybe the psychos had gone back to their default of Zero cooking food. From the smell of it when they first came to live in my house, he was pretty good at charring anything that could be charred, and a fair bit that couldn’t. Maybe JinYeong was just hungry.

  And that reminded me that he hadn’t answered my question much earlier. “Seriously, why are you here?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure if he hadn’t answered before because he didn’t want to, or if he just hadn’t heard me.

  JinYeong shrugged. “If you die now, it was a waste of time to save you,” he said. “Also, you should practise. You still tire quickly.”

  “Rude,” I said, but I wasn’t really annoyed. “If you’re here ’cos of your missing shoelaces, they’re threaded into the bathroom mat—you know, the brown, loopy one.”

  “Ah, so they were there! You should not meddle with my things, Petteu.”

  “Can’t meddle with ’em now,” I pointed out.

  “Why does the coffee taste so bad?”

  “What coffee?” I demanded indignantly. I hadn’t given him coffee since the first cup earlier. “If you don’t like it, you can flamin’—”

  “Hyeong’s coffee,” he said. “It tastes bad. Why?”

  “Oh. I dunno. Maybe he’s got the water too hot or something. Tell him to put the milk in first so he doesn’t scald the coffee. Hang on—how come Zero’s making the coffee? I thought Athelas was meant to do that bit.”

  “That coffee is even worse,” said JinYeong gloomily. “I think he does it purposefully.”

  “He probably does,” I said. “You’re not here because of the coffee.”

  “I want Petteu coffee.”

  “All right, I’ll make you coffee. But I still think that’s not why you’re here.”

  I put the kettle on while the bolognese simmered away, and maybe that made JinYeong’s shrivelled little vampire heart happy, because he smiled at me without any trace of smugness and settled back against the kitchen cupboard
s. He was in the way there, too, but not enough to complain about.

  “I wish to meet your friend,” he said, still easily understandable.

  It was kinda weird. For the last couple of days, he’d been making a distinct effort to make sure I could understand him—ever since I left the house, really. If it had been anyone else but Morgana he was talking about, maybe that thought might have left me more inclined to be nice about my answer.

  As it was, I said sharply, “You’re not going to meet her. Stay away from her.”

  JinYeong’s brows went up, and he pouted slightly. “Your friend will like me.”

  “I don’t care if she will,” I told him, plunging the coffee. I’d already seen Morgana’s reaction to JinYeong’s appearance—it was pretty much on par with the reaction of every other woman I’d seen. “You stay downstairs.”

  This time, just one brow went up. “Wae? Jealous?”

  I couldn’t help the snort of laughter. “Nope,” I said. “Just not gunna let a vampire in to visit my friend who doesn’t like blood.”

  JinYeong muttered to himself, then said aloud, “Why are you cooking? Who are you cooking for?”

  “Me and Morgana—probably the kids, too.”

  He frowned. “Children?”

  “They run around wild upstairs,” I said, passing him his coffee and pouring my own.

  “I did not see them.”

  “They don’t like people seeing them,” I said, but I felt a tinge of unease. I’d never seen the kids, and neither had Daniel. Maybe I was just suspicious from my time with the three psychos, but it seemed to me that living in the same house with them for nearly a week, I should definitely have seen them at least once. More than the flutter of cloth and the echo of feet, that is.

  “I do not smell children,” JinYeong said. He thought about that for a moment, and I saw one of his shoulders shrug up and down, as if he had been debating something within himself. “But this house smells of corruption. There are dead rodents decaying in the rooms upstairs. Maybe their scent is lost in it.”

  “First I’ve got dead person clothes, and now the house smells bad? You blokes are a laugh a minute.”

  “What does the dog smell?”

  “Sweat, apparently.”

  “Mwoh?”

  “Never mind. Shove over, I need to get to the bowls.”

  He leaned away slightly, just enough for me to get to the bowls, and I got out three. It wasn’t like the kids would be down to eat with us anyway, so they could wait until we’d eaten first.

  “Are you feeding the dog?”

  “Daniel likes spaghetti.”

  JinYeong threw me an accusatory look. “I am hungry, too.”

  “Fine,” I said, taking out another bowl. “But you’d better be gone by the time I get back down from taking Morgana hers.”

  “Ne,” said JinYeong, back to his usual, unwilling-to-be-understood self. Maybe he was sulking.

  I ignored him and took Morgana’s lunch up to her, stopping only to drop off a bowl to Daniel. Morgana was in one of her bouncy moods when I got upstairs. I didn’t know why, until she said, grinning, “I saw your partner arrive! Although—hang on, you said you’re not really a cop, so who is he?”

  “Trouble,” I said, passing her a bowl. “I dunno, a friend? He’s caught up in all this, too.”

  Morgana frowned. “Wait, then is he one of the three that kicked you out of your house?”

  “Oh. Only sort of—it wasn’t really JinYeong. He came over here with me to make sure I was okay.”

  Was that really what he’d done? I hadn’t actually thought until now that it might have been a genuinely nice action on JinYeong’s part—the fact that he’d kissed me to make sure he could get into the house at will hadn’t made it the first thought to spring naturally to mind.

  Maybe, I thought now, sitting down thoughtfully at the foot of Morgana’s bed, maybe he was just being like Zero—high handed and pushy in the way he tried to take care of people.

  “You sure?” asked Morgana. “Because you’re frowning, and if he’s going to make problems, I can get Daniel to tell him he can’t visit.”

  “No, no!” I said hastily, swirling spaghetti. If I wanted JinYeong to stop coming to the house, getting Daniel to do something about it definitely wasn’t the best way. “I was just…thinking that I’ll have to make some boundaries or something.”

  Morgana’s face lit up straight away. “Then he did kiss you last week!”

  “What?”

  “I saw him step up into the portico while you were still there, and I reckon he looked—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “He was just trying to annoy me.”

  Morgana blinked a bit. “You reckon? Oh. Don’t you like being kissed?”

  “I dunno. It doesn’t happen that much.” Mind you, it had happened a bit more recently. Only as a vehicle for vampire spit, though, so I didn’t think that counted as real kissing. More like mouth-to-mouth in some kind of weird, Between, back-to-front way. “It’s like I said—he’s just trying to annoy me.”

  “You probably better make those boundaries clear pretty quick, then,” said Morgana. “I know I don’t get out much, but I watch a lot of tv, and—”

  “What’s tv got to do with it?” I asked, bewildered. “I’m just gunna tell him to mind his own business—or at least to ask before he does stuff.”

  “You want him to ask before he kisses you?”

  It was my turn to blink a bit. “You’re really weird, you know that?” I said to her, poking my fork at her. “I’m not talking about kissing.”

  “Oh. What are you talking about, then?”

  “Stuff in general. Even if it’s stuff that is meant to be helpful or kind. People have been doing stuff for me to keep me safe and look after me, but—”

  “You don’t like people looking after you?” hazarded Morgana, through a mouthful of spaghetti.

  “Nah, that’s not it.” I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, if it came to that. Was it the ruthlessness of the care that had bothered me? Zero’s determination to care for me in the way he thought best, with no consideration for what I thought, or who else got hurt? “It was just…wrong. I should get a choice in who takes care of me. Or how they do it. Or at least I should be able to tell them when to stop.”

  “You’re talking about your housemates, right?”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “Forget those blokes,” she said. “They kicked you out because you wouldn’t toe the line. There’s meant to be some negotiation in relationships, even if it’s only between housemates. Me and the kids, we’ve got our own system—I don’t rat on them to mum and dad when they do stuff to upset the neighbours, and they help me out with little things here and there. They know they can’t pinch my stuff, and I know I can’t yell at them.”

  “Negotiation,” I said thoughtfully. “I’ll think about that.”

  I mean, it wasn’t likely I’d get the chance to negotiate with the three psychos, but it might be a good idea to think about it, in any case. If the impossible happened, it might be nice to be prepared for once.

  Chapter Two

  It was a good thing that JinYeong wasn’t still downstairs when I returned, or I might have punched him one for causing me trouble with Morgana. Since he wasn’t, and I couldn’t, I took a stack of bowls and spoons up to the roof with the last of the spaghetti and left it there for the kids.

  “Lunch is up!” I yelled as I went back down the stairs to wash the dishes, but I don’t know if they heard me. If it wasn’t for the regular accidents around Daniel and the occasional echo upstairs, I’d still be inclined to think that Morgana imagined everything to do with the kids.

  That, and the empty plates I’d already brought down from the roof once or twice now. I hadn’t seen her parents yet, either, though, and it wasn’t like they were fake. Maybe it was some weird, human version of Between about Morgana—gathering weird, oddball people who didn’t like to interact with other people, and confin
ing them in a house to sort themselves out around each other.

  It was times like this that I was glad there was so little of actual Between around odd corners of Morgana’s house. There was just enough of it so that I could make a weapon out of most of what was in the living room, but beyond that, nothing. Much safer for humans who couldn’t readily escape from danger, like Morgana. Not like my old house, where every inch had a flicker of the flexible material that edged both the human world and the fae world. Where there was a sword that looked like an umbrella in the hall stand and a way into deep Behind through the linen cupboard.

  Which was why when I had run the washing up water and started washing up, it was startling to look absently at the wall straight ahead and see one cracked tile right at eye level.

  “What the heck?” I said, in shock.

  It was my one little cracked tile. It was one of the tiles above the sink—in my old house. My actual house. The house I had left just a week ago.

  Not Morgana’s house.

  “How did you get here?” I asked it, tapping it with my fingernail. It wasn’t just that it was cracked in a very familiar way, it also very obviously didn’t match: the tiles in the kitchen in the lower level of Morgana’s house were pink, and the one from my old house was yellow.

  I saw a flicker of movement reflected in that cracked little tile and looked over my shoulder instinctively, but there was nothing there. I shivered a bit and backed away from the sink.

  Flamin’ fantastic. As if I needed another element of creepy in my life.

  “What’s biting you?” asked Daniel, from the doorway.

  I jumped, then glared at him. I couldn’t feel much of Between in this house—didn’t know if that was because it wasn’t here, or because I was less sensitive when I wasn’t around the psychos—but it made it a lot harder to know when someone was trying to sneak up on me. I didn’t like that.

  “See?” said Daniel, ignoring my glare. “That’s exactly how you go about not punching someone. Remember how to do that next time I wake you up from a nightmare.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Bringing out my bowl,” he said, waving it at me. “Hey, did your vampire move the downstairs mirror? Morgana said it isn’t quite at the right angle anymore.”