Between Frames (The City Between Book 4) Read online

  Athelas looked at Zero, who looked away.

  “Don’t ask me,” he said, though I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or Athelas. “I’m going out again. Do as you please. Just don’t leave the Pet without supervision again when the house has recently been opened to Behind.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one who made a mess on the kitchen floor,” I pointed out.

  JinYeong hissed in annoyance and made a grab at me, but I darted behind Zero.

  “You splatter the kitchen with my blood, and you’ll just have more to clean up,” I told him, from behind Zero’s arm. “And there’ll be no one to clean it for you.”

  “You’re so energetic these days!” said Athelas to JinYeong. It sounded like an off-hand remark, but there was a sarcastic look to his eyes that I was pretty sure meant something.

  JinYeong was pretty sure, too. He threw Athelas a stormy, sulky look, but couldn’t seem to decide what part of the remark he could take exception to, so he went back into the living room.

  “Clean the rest of the kitchen before you make tea,” said Zero, and followed JinYeong.

  That left me with Athelas, who said, smiling gently, “China does reverberate so strongly, doesn’t it?” and joined the other two.

  I was about as unsure as JinYeong had been earlier, if he was mocking me or trying to tell me something. Heck, with Athelas, it could be both. So I cleaned the rest of the kitchen without trying to listen to what was happening in the next room, and only started making tea and coffee after I heard Zero going out into the back yard.

  Athelas was sitting in his usual chair when I bought the tray out. I put the biscuits down next to him and poured the tea. He usually does it for himself, but what the heck? I’d been working on my tea making skills, and this was the good stuff. I wanted him to smell the scent of it on the air.

  Athelas’ eyes dwelt on the curling steam for a moment, then rose to meet mine, faintly amused. “Well, Pet?”

  As I put the teapot back down, I asked, “What’s going on with all the armoury fae and stuff, anyway?”

  “Believe it or not, Pet, there are some things which I, too, believe it best for you not to know.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t stop you telling me when you want to.”

  Athelas shrugged one shoulder. “That entirely depends upon the reason for which it is best not to tell you, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe if I think about that for another ten years it’ll make sense,” I muttered. “What’s the current rate of exchange, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Pet.”

  I grinned at him. “Yeah? I’m pretty sure you do.”

  “Stop trying to bribe my steward, Pet,” said Zero.

  I jumped. Flaming heck! I hadn’t even heard him come in. “Wasn’t bribing him,” I said. “I was just um, keeping up with fae economics.”

  “You said you had some groceries to buy,” he said, pointedly.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “We’ll take dinner at the usual time.”

  Usual time, yeah right. There was no usual time—just things like tar beasties breaking into the place and murderers to catch and stuff that meant we ate whenever I cooked.

  I huffed, and got up. “Fine,” I said, heading for the door. “Talk secrets. I’m taking money for the groceries.”

  I had my own stuff to do. I needed to go check up on Daniel, anyway. If they wanted to be secretive about their investigations, I would just use that secrecy to nip off and do what I needed to do.

  And then, I thought, stuffing my hands in my pockets with a good shove that stretched the stitches in the lining, then I would figure out a way to find out what they were up to. I’d just make sure Daniel was okay first.

  When I first met Daniel, I didn’t know he was a lycanthrope. I thought he was just a stroppy teenager. These days, I knew he was a stroppy lycanthrope—one who’d been injured while helping defend me, so I felt obliged to make sure he was all right. Which would have been much easier if Zero hadn’t secreted him away somewhere to stay safe and heal.

  And of course, because Zero didn’t want me finding Daniel, I had to do it quietly. I’d found him a little while ago—even had a good place where I could keep an eye on him—but the problem was, I’d had to tell someone I was a cop to be able to do it.

  Well, I didn’t exactly tell her I was a cop; I just didn’t correct her when she made the assumption that I was one. She was so pleased with herself for figuring it out, and who was I to pop her bubble? Especially not when her room was the perfect place to scope out where Daniel was staying without anybody seeing me. I was betting Zero had spies there.

  I took my time walking there, partly because I wanted to go by a roundabout way so that Athelas and Zero wouldn’t notice if they happened to be looking out the window, and partly because I was wearing sandals instead of my sneakers. I wasn’t used to them, and I’d already started with blisters by the time I got to the end of a couple blocks.

  After that, I took my time because I caught sight of someone in the shop windows across the street—someone who was taking every turning I was taking, and holding back just far enough for me not to be able to tell who it was in the reflections.

  Flaming heck. There was someone following me again.

  Hopefully it was just the old mad bloke who used to live across the road. He was pretty harmless, but he liked to follow me around and pinch food off me. Sometimes I left it out for him on purpose. Which reminded me—I’d have to leave out a bit of food where he could get at it, now that Zero had started warding the house against unexpected visitors.

  I didn’t want the old bloke to think he could get away with following me without me noticing it, though. And if it was Upper Management instead of him, I reckoned I wanted them to know it, too, so I turned left when I got to Palfreyman’s Arcade and nipped past the fountain to hide behind the edge of the toilet block there.

  At least I knew it wasn’t one of the more dangerous Behind beasties; those ones were pretty easy to spot, even through a store window reflection. If I hadn’t been able to see them, I would have felt the edge of Between that they carried with them, too. Sorta like the stink of Faeryland or something. If I’d sensed that, no way I’d be hiding behind the loos, waiting to jump out at—

  Detective Tuatu. It was Detective Tuatu who appeared around the edge of brickwork.

  “Flaming heck!” I said, and came out. “It was you!”

  “What was me?” said the Detective, trying to look like he hadn’t just jumped a mile.

  “Following me. Thought I saw someone.”

  “I wasn’t following you,” said Detective Tuatu. He sounded a bit miffed. “I just walked up behind you. I wanted to check on you, but you were walking too fast to catch up with. I was just about to call you.”

  “Oh. I’m alive.”

  “I see that. You didn’t answer my text messages.”

  “Did you message me?” I made a grab for my phone and fetched it out of my back pocket. The screen lit with messages as soon as I tipped it up, and I grimaced. “Oh. Sorry ’bout that. I was busy dying and cutting through moonlight.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I was a bit busy the last couple of days, that’s all. How’s things, anyway? Someone still trying to frame you?”

  “No one’s thrown another body at me, if that’s what you mean. But one of your…”

  “Psychos?” I suggested, by way of helping him out. I knew why he didn’t want to say owners. Tuatu didn’t like the fact that I was someone’s pet. I mean, it wasn’t me in particular—he would have been upset at any nearly-eighteen-year-old being owned by fae. He was still pretty stressed about the existence of fae, if it came to that.

  “Yes, one of them,” he said, without gratitude. “One of them, the quiet one in tweed, called me the other night. They want help with one of their cases.”

  I nearly said, “They want help?” but it occurred to me at the same time that this was a very good opport
unity to learn what they were up to. There was no way Zero would agree to helping the golden fae do anything unless he’d been offered something very important in return.

  “You find out anything?” I asked, instead. “Come down to the café. I’ll buy you a cuppa.”

  I could still catch up with Daniel afterward. There were a couple things I wanted to ask Detective Tuatu about.

  He looked a bit unsure at that. “Shouldn’t I be buying your cuppa? Have you got any money?”

  “A bit,” I said. I had the shopping money, and as far as I was concerned, a cup of coffee that I didn’t have to make was a fair repayment for doing the shopping. A sorta tax, you know?

  Maybe I’d been living with fae for too long already.

  “Is that what you were messaging me for, then?” I asked, leading the way out of the arcade. There was a coffee shop across the street and up the road a bit; I’d never been in there, but it always looked warm and wooden and leathery, with booths further back in if you didn’t want your voice to carry too far.

  “Yes—I had some follow up questions, and neither of them were answering their phones.”

  “All right,” I said, hauling open the coffee shop door. “Quick, get the last booth at the back!”

  Tuatu just shot me a look, so it was left to me to slide into the booth before another eager customer took it. It was a pretty busy coffee shop—well, maybe it was a café. I could smell food cooking, even if the primary scent was coffee.

  Tuatu slid into the other side of the booth and rejected the menu the waiter tried to give him. “Just tea,” he said. “Earl grey, no sugar.”

  “Coffee, black, no sugar,” I said, and the waiter left us alone. “What’d you find out?”

  “My boss think it’s a once-off,” he said.

  Someone in the living room had said hearts in the plural, I was pretty sure. And it had been fae hearts. Mind you, would the human cops know fae if they saw them, even if they were dead? Their blood was blue, so it should be obvious, but I had a feeling that we humans didn’t always see what was actually there.

  “You reckon there’s more?”

  “They do,” said Tuatu.

  “My psychos?”

  “Yes. And I’ve been digging through digital case files since they left—someone has been hiding similar cases and funnelling them to the same two detectives. There have been more on the mainland, too, being sent to specific detectives in each main city. The detectives here weren’t happy about me nosing around, so I thought one of those three could come and have a word with him.”

  “That’s weird. I thought the psychos were gunna sort that stuff.”

  “You and me both. They said there was some extra muscle behind all this. Something about family business and more access than usual.”

  I hadn’t thought there was much more access to be had than Zero and Athelas usually got.

  “Maybe it’s Upper Management again.”

  The detective looked uneasy. “I certainly hope not.”

  “You said you had some questions. Not just about my psychos helping you get some information, I s’pose.”

  “Yeah.” He hesitated. “I need to know what it was that tore out that heart—well, all of them, since I suppose they were all done by the same…person.”

  “How come? Isn’t that something my lot’s going to be looking for?”

  “Yes, but the way the case files have been hidden makes it easier to look for them if I have keywords. And even if we don’t know about fae and Behind and all that, we’re still capable of looking for a murder weapon if we know what we’re looking for, you know.”

  “Didn’t you get any CCTV footage or anything?”

  “We got it,” said Detective Tuatu grimly. “The footage wasn’t…exactly clear.”

  “Right,” I said, as though I knew what he was talking about.

  Tuatu sipped his tea, and frowned. “Didn’t they tell you? They asked me to make some copies for them so they could have a look at it, too.”

  “Oi. You see the fight?” I asked, by way of changing the subject.

  Tuatu grinned. “I wouldn’t call it a fight. More of a dusting. One of the crime scene boys was getting a bit too bossy for his own good and tried to stop the big one from getting in. If he’d spoken before he acted, it might have been all right, but he just tried to haul him back by the jacket as he passed.”

  “Reckon he wishes he hadn’t, now.”

  “Probably. No bones were broken—and you can thank him for me, if you want. I thought Phillips was going to come out of it with worse than a decent winding.”

  “Zero musta been in a good mood,” I said. “How’d he get blood on him, anyway? He wouldn’t tell me.”

  Detective Tuatu frowned, fiddling with his necklace pendant. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. I don’t seem to be able to remember it properly, and I don’t like that.”

  “One of those things, was it?” I said knowingly. “Reckon there were a few other um, people there, then.”

  “Yes!” he said, pointing the pendant at me. “That was it! There were a few others—they were annoyed about a sword, as far as I could make out.”

  I couldn’t help the way my brows went up. “You saw a sword?”

  “No, they were just arguing about it. Then one of them made a leap for…for Zero. That right! That’s what happened with the blood. Zero chucked him across the crime scene and messed with the blood evidence, and the bloke came after him again. They both got a bit of blood on them. The female one dragged him off, but Zero must have thought she was coming after him instead.”

  Shame. I liked her. “She get hurt?”

  “Not her!” he said, with a bit more enthusiasm. “By the end of it, he had a knife to her throat, but she had one at his stomach. They weighed up for a bit and separated without talking.”

  I grinned. That was pretty normal for both of them. At least I knew what had happened now—and what they’d been doing this morning. The thought of it made me grin a bit more, but while I was congratulating myself and deciding what else I should ask, Detective Tuatu’s phone bingled.

  The screen lit up, and I was pretty sure it said Message from: Thing One. I hid a grimace behind my coffee mug, because I was pretty sure there was only one person Tuatu would put in his phone like that—mostly because he probably couldn’t bring himself to label Zero as The Fae, Pet’s Owner, or Lord Sero.

  Hopefully I was wrong, but…

  Tuatu looked down at his phone, and closed his eyes for a brief, exasperated moment.

  Oh yeah, it was definitely Zero who had texted him.

  He said, “You didn’t know about any of this, did you?”

  “Define didn’t know—” I began.

  “They didn’t tell you anything about it. I wasn’t supposed to tell you about it.”

  I hedged, “Define wasn’t supp—”

  “As in, I was just threatened with dismemberment if I tell you anything.”

  “Whoops. Sorry ’bout that.”

  “Really? Because you’re grinning, and I don’t think you are.”

  “If you don’t tell ’em, I won’t,” I suggested cheerfully. “No need for dismemberment. Just sorta…keep me in the loop.”

  “I’m not telling you anything else!”

  “Spoil sport. All right, so long as you don’t tell ’em you told me anything, you’re golden. I’m not gunna rat.”

  “That makes me feel much better!” Tuatu looked down at his mostly finished cup of tea, and said in a voice of horror, “This was a bribe, wasn’t it!”

  “Nah. It’s only a bribe if you know about it,” I told him. “It was more of a distraction.”

  “Great!” he said. “Now I’ve got to go and tell them what I found out without looking guilty!”

  “You should practise!” I called after him, as he got up and headed for the door. “Tell me about it first!”

  He didn’t take me up on it, of course. I grinned a bit and finished my coffee, t
hen trotted back along my way to Morgana’s place with a warm, sunny feeling even though the days had started to chill off. The coffee was good. I’d have to go back to that café more often. Maybe I could come back on the way home and get coffee for the others. Now that I knew a bit about what they were investigating, I felt more kindly toward them. Hopefully, Tuatu would be sensible enough not to tell them I knew.

  I was feeling the chill of evening on my toes by the time I got to the old three-story place where Morgana lived. It was a relief to step inside, though it wasn’t much warmer in there. At least there wasn’t a cool, sneaky breeze. The place was as quiet as it always was, the wooden stairs echoing beneath my feet without any other sound to soften it. One of these days, I’d probably meet with the other kids that lived here, but Morgana said they were shy, and I’d never seen ’em.

  I let myself into the room on the left-hand side of the third story hallway, and walked into a shiny nest that could have belonged to a bower bird that liked reflective bits and bobs instead of the blue stuff that bower birds usually collect. Mirrors and other shiny patches covered most of the walls, tilted in odd directions to give the perfect view out of all the windows if you sat on the bed.

  On the bed, pale and panda-eyed as always, was Morgana, far too cheerful for her gothic appearance.

  “You’re just in time!” she said. “I got a card game in the mail!”

  “I’m not supposed to play games,” I said, but that was only for appearances’ sake. Actually, I didn’t know how to play most card games, and I’d learned that Morgana was terrifyingly good at poker.

  “You’re just saying that ’cos I whopped you last time,” Morgana said, undeceived. “It’s not poker, anyway. Want a coffee?”

  “Nah, just had one. You?”

  “Please.”

  I went and made coffee in Morgana’s tiny kitchen. And if you’re thinking it’s rude for her to offer coffee and make me get one for her, you’re dead wrong. Morgana can’t walk—well, not most of the time, anyway. She’s got stuff to help her start again, but I’ve never seen her use it. I haven’t seen her out of her bed, if it comes to that, though I s’pose she must get out of it for the loo and to get her dinner. Maybe her parents help her with that stuff, though—but I haven’t met them, even though they live across the hall.