Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Read online

  “Obviously Lord Sero’s father will be informed of your connection with the sword,” said the golden git disdainfully. “It’s not necessary for the king to know right now. And I have no intention of discussing anything with you, human.”

  “Funny,” I said, the coldness of fear stealing over one cheek and then rapidly down my neck. “Didn’t think you’d actually answer that.”

  He shrugged. “Why would it matter? You won’t be alive to tell anyone, little human.”

  Great, death threats at ten in the morning. Life was a real merry-go-round right now.

  “Shouldn’t you be asking permission to do stuff like that?” I asked, settling my weight back on my left foot and shifting a smidge to the left as I did so. I was close to the end of the tunnel, but even if I did make it out before he caught me, what then? Would JinYeong be back soon? Could I hold out long enough against an actual fae warrior to make it until whenever that was?

  “Lord Sero’s father will certainly order you put to death when he finds out,” he said. “I am merely anticipating that order.”

  He came at me so quickly that I barely had time to settle into my guard, and sliced so strongly into that guard that the sword very nearly flew right out of my hands. I stumbled to the right, my fingers aching with the force of the blow, and didn’t have time to bring up my guard again before I saw the tip of the golden fae’s sword plunging toward my chest.

  I don’t know what I expected it to feel like, but I didn’t expect it to feel like a solid shove in the sternum that sent me stumbling two steps backward while a bloody sword followed me but stopped just short of my chest.

  I stared at that bloody sword tip, then at the back from which it protruded, stupidly. There was a suitcoat there, and the scent of cologne suddenly everywhere, but that couldn’t be right because JinYeong shouldn’t be between me and the golden fae; JinYeong shouldn’t have a sword sticking out of his back.

  The golden fae looked just as disoriented as I felt, his face a study in utter shock over JinYeong’s left shoulder and one of JinYeong’s hands gripping his left shoulder.

  I actually thought JinYeong was dead for a frozen, sick moment. Then he laughed with blood in his lungs, and jerked the golden fae closer with the hand that was on the fae’s shoulder. The sword jolted further through him as he did, sending me scrambling out of the way, and the golden fae only had a moment to make a strangled sound of realisation before JinYeong tore out his throat with his teeth.

  If I’d had time to think about it, I would have thought that JinYeong would bite him. Vampire spit is deadly to anyone with full fae blood, and I would have bet my last clean hoodie that the golden fae was as fully fae as possible.

  I didn’t expect the savagery of throat tearing that reminded me JinYeong was very much not human—or the terrifying self-abandonment with which he had thrust himself through in order to kill the fae.

  The golden fae stumbled back a step and crumpled where he stood, but I saw his eyes and I knew he was already dead before he hit the ground, his neck and chest a welter of spurting and rippling blue blood.

  The Heirling Sword fell from my cold, numb fingers, hitting the concrete with a light thwack of whippy tines and remaining material as it turned umbrella again, and JinYeong staggered, the golden sword hilt-deep between his ribs and darkly dripping with blood where it protruded from his back.

  “Ah heck,” I whispered, because he had done it again and there was no reason for him to have done it this time. Because I was going to have to pull that sword out of his chest so he could start to heal. Because I was going to have to—

  “Blood,” he said as he swayed, his mouth and chin glistening blue.

  I took in a breath that was very nearly a sob and seized the sword hilt, drawing it out as quickly and steadily as I could. He groaned anyway, sinking to his knees, and I caught him before he could fall too much further.

  “Hang on,” I said. “You want blue blood or red?”

  “Blue,” he gasped.

  I let him settle on his haunches before I grabbed the golden fae by the plate armour and hauled him closer.

  “Better be quick,” I said, reefing an arm closer to JinYeong’s nose. “You’ve already done for most of it.”

  He sank his teeth into the fae’s wrist, curled over himself in pain and weakness, and the golden fae grew utterly bloodless as he drank, blue blood standing out in bright contrast against the utter white of his dead face.

  I waited until JinYeong stopped swaying where he crouched and straightened a little, then helped him out of his suitcoat. It was pretty much toast by then, and his shirt wasn’t much better. I would have helped him to wipe his face and clean up a bit, too, but he did it himself with his suitcoat and a surprisingly steady hand, then let me help him up so that we could make use of the council tap at the end of the tunnel.

  The blood came out of his shirt as we washed it—or maybe it just became unnoticeable against the powder blue cotton—and JinYeong slowly struggled back into it, allowing me to help him. Luckily for him it was turning into a warm, sunny day that would see him dry in no time, but his cream suit-coat was a loss, and he knew it. I saw his incisors bared in a silent, annoyed snarl as he threw it back into the tunnel, behind a pile of already mouldering miscellany.

  “Go home,” I said to him. “Athelas will help you heal a bit quicker and you can get some more blood.”

  I meant to turn my back on him and go about my business, refusing to acknowledge that he’d just almost died again, but he caught me by a pinch of sleeve as I turned, nice and light, and that stung me to the heart because he was being gentle with me when he was the one who had just been hurt.

  “Odi ka?”

  “None of your business where I’m going,” I told him angrily, without looking back at him. He had no business taking dreadful risks for me again when I didn’t know why he was making them. “Go home! Get Athelas to look at you and make sure you’re all right!”

  I saw the shrug in my peripheral. “This little thing? It will heal.”

  “You’re still dribbling blood,” I said shortly, shooting a quick look at him. I was perfectly well aware that it wasn’t just a little thing: if I hadn’t been there to pull out the sword, he would have died with it in him. Fae swords and daggers often tend to have anti-vampire enchantments, I’d found. And yeah, if I hadn’t been there he wouldn’t have been in danger, either, but that thought did nothing to improve my mood.

  JinYeong wiped the blood away with the back of his hand, then fished out a handkerchief from goodness knows where to do the job properly. “I drank a lot of blood,” he said. “This is that person’s blood, not mine.”

  It was blue, too; I don’t know why that didn’t register with me. The realisation made the small, shaky, angry part of me a little less shaky and angry, so I only mumbled, “Why are you following me this morning, anyway?”

  JinYeong shrugged with one shoulder, and said something in Korean that made a meaning of there is a suspicious thing about you this morning in my head.

  “Yeah?” I cleared my throat, and this time I turned back to face him. “What’s that, then?”

  He shrugged again.

  I levelled a challenging look at him. “Zero tell you to follow me?”

  JinYeong gazed at me for a few moments before asking, unexpectedly, “Wae? Will it make a difference?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and there was that pinch of anger again. “Zero tell you to follow me?”

  “No,” he said. “I came for my own reasons.”

  “All right,” I said. “You can come with me, then.”

  “You could not stop me anyway,” he said below his breath, but I was pretty sure he was grinning, just a little bit. Again, he asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Going to see a merman about a USB,” I told him. “Look, if you’re coming with me, try and make sure people don’t notice all that down your front, all right?”

  “They will not see,” he said. He seemed quite jau
nty again, despite the fact that I could see through the gash in his shirt to the still-healing wound there. “They will be distracted by my face. You—they will notice you.”

  I looked down and saw the darkness of blood soaking into my hoodie. “Flamin’ heck!” I said crankily, and stripped it off. Luckily I was wearing a black Monkees band t-shirt beneath the hoodie: the blood didn’t show up except for a little spot on Davy’s face, and that could have been interpreted as a psychedelic splash of colour.

  “You know you’ve gotta stop doing that,” I said, as I tossed the hoodie in the nearest public garbage can. “Coming out of nowhere and chucking yourself between me and swords. It’s not flamin’ healthy.”

  JinYeong just shrugged, and kept walking. Usually he exudes a kind of self-satisfaction that’s very hard to bear, but today he just looked content, like he’d done a good day’s work.

  He wasn’t exactly wrong, so I said grumpily, “There’s not always gunna be someone there to pull out the sword and lug a dead fae closer for you to feed on so you don’t die, you know.”

  “Then I shall pull it out myself and crawl,” he said. He shot me a glance beneath his lashes and added, “I do as I please. You can’t stop me doing that, either.”

  Then he sauntered on ahead of me as I briefly halted in a combination of frustration and sudden, completely unexpected fondness. Now, he definitely exuded self-satisfaction.

  Chapter Two

  It’s very hard to feel grateful to a vampire who saves your life out of what seems like pure contrariness, let me tell you. On the other hand, that morning the sheer contrariness of it seemed to make it easier not to make a fuss about him following me. It wasn’t that I trusted him more, exactly. Maybe I distrusted him less, though. Heck, maybe I was grateful, who knows? You should be grateful when someone saves your life.

  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have wanted JinYeong to come with me to visit Marazul, even if I did fully trust him, but I was feeling fairly nervous about the whole thing. Not nervous in the am I gunna die today kind of way, but in a more subtly dangerous way: the kind of nervous that made me wonder if I would still be able to speak when it came to this particular merman smiling at me.

  This merman and I, we’d fought together in the café the golden fae had imprisoned us in—me physically, him electronically—and by the time the whole ordeal was over, I’d felt comfortable and warm with him instead of warm and nervous. But that was a few days ago, and I was rapidly finding that I had to break through this kind of nervousness again every time I saw him.

  JinYeong was dangerous and maybe not to be entirely trusted, but he was a familiar quantity in many ways. I’d had a crush before, but I didn’t remember it being so alien and all-encompassing that I found it hard to breathe when my crush was nearby. I didn’t like it. Didn’t like not being able to do something about it. Didn’t like the way it was hard to focus properly on other things when he was nearby. I wanted it to go away, wanted to be able to stop myself from going to see ’Zul, but he was the only one who could help me with the USB unless I tried to get into contact with Blackpoint.

  Maybe, I thought, maybe I should just try to get over it. Ignore the feelings until they went away—stop going to see ’Zul as soon as the USB was sorted out.

  And maybe I’d have to stop telling off Zero about not being able to handle his emotions when I couldn’t even handle a crush.

  “Where are we going?” asked JinYeong, and I came out of my thoughts to find that he was watching me unblinkingly.

  “I told you—oh, you mean where are we meeting him? His place, this time. It’s not far—and you can sit down while we’re there.”

  I hadn’t been inside ’Zul’s place before, though I’d seen it from the outside. I’d met him a few times in the last two days, running errands for Zero, but I’d always met him at a café or out in the botanical gardens in areas where he could manoeuvre his wheelchair along the wide, smooth paths.

  Today, we were meeting at his house. I had a feeling that if he’d been expecting me he would have tried to meet me outside again, but I didn’t want to chance anyone else getting a look at what I was going to show him.

  His house was easy to find: he lived on the main drag, up in the top floor of a building above a couple of shops. The whole building sat across the road from a café that used to sell the best coffee and was also, incidentally, holding humans captive to feed off their souls.

  The café was gone now: Marazul and I had dealt with it just before Zero showed up to stare coldly at everyone. But ’Zul’s building was still there, dark and tall and scalloped at the top like a gothic Lolita dress in cream and black.

  We had to go up by the fire escape at the back because there was no entrance that I could find along the bottom level. Maybe you were supposed to enter through the shops, but I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t be surprised if ’Zul had tried to hide the entrance: I was pretty sure he was worried about who was going to be paying him a call these days. I was hoping that that reluctance wouldn’t extend to me.

  JinYeong took the stairs at first stoically and then energetically, so the dead fae’s blood must be doing him some good. I tried not to sigh, and, now that the worry that he would suddenly stop and collapse was gone, I started to worry exactly what Zero was going to say when he heard about all of this.

  At the final platform of the fire escape, we walked alongside windows that were opaque with the darkness of moving shadow. There was a little bit of green to that shadow, too. I didn’t like the way it moved, but that could have been because I was used to stuff that shouldn’t be moving, moving—and then attacking.

  Metal vibrated under our feet as we crossed the corrugated platform that ended just past a single, simple door. There was no doorknob on the door, and there was no feel of what I’d come to think of as magic to it, either. There was definitely a decent layering of Between to it that meant I could have tried to push through it, but that didn’t seem polite.

  Besides, JinYeong has a harder time getting into places without an invitation. He can still get in, it just seems harder for him, and he’d had a bad enough day as it was. If I could make life easier for him, I probably ought to.

  JinYeong tilted his chin at the camera outside the door and gave it a sharp-edged grin. I smacked him lightly in the arm and said up at the camera, “Can we come in?”

  I was pretty sure Marazul could hear through it, too. He uses human technology, but he gives it a bit of an edge—a Between edge—which means that stuff that should only be able to do one thing becomes able to do three or four extra things that you wouldn’t expect. I was also pretty sure that he didn’t have to be on his computer to check it.

  There was a pause of about thirty seconds where I wasn’t sure if he would just pretend not to be home, before the door made a heavy clunk sort of sound and cracked open a few millimetres as if it had been released from a magnetic hold.

  “C’mmon,” I said to JinYeong, drawing in a deep breath. It didn’t seem like enough. “Better get on with it.”

  I hesitated over the lintel, but that wasn’t just because I was nervous. It was because as I stepped through the door, it seemed as though I was falling softly into a vast body of water.

  Shadow met and engulfed me as I stumbled in, folding softly around me in ripples of green and blue shadow, cool and quiet. I looked around at the glassy corridor I had entered, and grabbed JinYeong’s wrist, dizzy with wonder and amazement.

  It was water. The shadows in the windows were the movement of water moving against the glass, lit from within and edged in Between of a kind that I hadn’t often seen. That wasn’t too surprising—’Zul also used Between in a way that I wasn’t used to seeing.

  JinYeong, likewise impressed, looked around the whole place, his brows rising as shadows rippled across his face. We stood in a corridor formed from glass walls that formed a smooth arch above our heads, leading further into the space that branched out into a small living room and kitchen further on, but left the rest
of the place for water that continued so far into the distance that it was too dark to see the walls that must contain it.

  Basically, it was the biggest fish tank I’d ever seen.

  We moved into the living room, and here the light became blueish-white with an influx of natural light from the window and the warm white of the fluorescent tubes above. In that light, my skin seemed to glow white, and even JinYeong seemed pale.

  “Ah,” muttered JinYeong, tilting his chin to the far left of the room, where the wall met glass in a smudge of blue shadows, “here is the fish man.”

  “Merman,” I said, without looking at JinYeong, but my heart wasn’t in it. Without meaning to, I took a step forward, and then another until I was close enough to touch the glass. I felt it under my fingers the next moment. I hadn’t meant to do that, either, but I was too fascinated watching ’Zul appear to think of anything else.

  First as a movement of the water, then as a shadow; then a figure that swayed, danced, coiled through the shifting shadows, drawing closer in a series of spirals that grew tighter until he slipped up against the glass in front of me, suspended in shadow and light.

  The scales of his tail caught the light and almost glowed from within, gold in the water that could perhaps just be reached to test the coolness of it, but it was his face that really drew attention.

  In the light of my world, ’Zul’s skin was a gentle, sun-kissed bronze, his eyes honey and warmth, his hair rough and curly and carefree. Here, he was bright, glittering gold in the water, sunlight cooled by the waves that seemed to move around him even though he was in a fish tank instead of the sea. Everything slimmed, smoothed, and embellished; a more beautiful and not-quite-real version of himself.

  I felt a horrible insecurity, a moment where it seemed that I was looking at a changeling instead of the real ’Zul. Then he smiled at me, wide and glad and warm, and my own smile came out to answer it, easing the terrible tightness of my chest.

  A pale set of knuckles knocked imperiously on the glass beside my face, and JinYeong said, “Hajima.”