Between Homes (The City Between Book 5) Read online

  “Dunno,” I said. “Maybe?”

  “Come and help me move it, then,” Daniel said. “You can stand in the doorway and tell me when you see Morgana so I know it’s in the right spot.”

  “Reckon that’s safe?” I asked doubtfully. “Now that there’s people like us coming around?”

  “Maybe not, but if I don’t do it she’ll want to know why,” said Daniel. “And we’re already lying to her. C’mon, Pet.”

  The wind picked up as soon as we stepped out of the front door, sending crunchy leaves scuttling along the footpath and under the gate, into the street. I stopped in the doorway, putting up the hood of my hoodie, and caught sight of the gate post.

  It didn’t look exactly different, it just looked…more. Like there was an extra layer to it, or a bit more reality to it. As if there might even be some flickering edge of Between or Behind to it.

  What had the vampire done now?

  “Oi,” I said, trotting down the stairs. “Is there something weird about the gate?”

  Daniel turned away from the mirror and frowned at the gate instead. “What sort of weird?”

  “Dunno. It feels kinda familiar, is all. If JinYeong has put something nasty on it, I’m gunna—”

  “It was left so I could find my way here,” said someone, her voice the same soft rasp of an autumn leaf against the pavement.

  I turned my head, and there was a woman there outside the gate: small and dainty and somehow kinda tumultuous. She had hair so black it was almost blue, and eyes so blue they were almost black. The way she looked at me, with her brows straight and her eyes piercing, made me think she could see straight through me. Heck, maybe she could. She didn’t look like Behindkind, though, and that was the important thing.

  Daniel, striding toward us, scowled at her. “You don’t smell like you should smell.”

  Or maybe not.

  A sharp, diamond glitter sparkled in her eyes. “You don’t look like you should look.”

  I shivered in the freshness of the breeze, and elbowed Daniel. “Oi. You shouldn’t say stuff like that to women. It’s flamin’ rude. You got up me for asking about Morgana’s makeup just a little while ago!”

  “I wish to hire you,” said the woman. “Mr. Preston sent me.”

  I didn’t know what game she was playing, but I wasn’t for hire, and the bloke she said had sent her was very dead. It was one of the bigger reasons I’d been kicked out of my house—refusing to let more humans die because Zero, Athelas, and JinYeong let them die instead of trying to help them.

  Bluntly, I said, “Mr. Preston’s dead.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Well, that was something.

  “Do we have to talk in all this wind?” complained Daniel. He was still looking pretty suspicious, and I didn’t much blame him.

  “My apologies,” the woman said, but she didn’t make a move to come inside or suggest we go sit in a coffee shop somewhere out of the cold breeze.

  I mean, at least the wind dropped, but it wasn’t like she’d done that.

  Hang on, was it?

  Living the life I live, you start being suspicious about the weirdest stuff.

  “Was that you?” I demanded. “The wind?”

  “It’s early, but not out of season,” she said, as if excusing herself. “Usually I wear something milder, but I felt like something more playful today.”

  Great. A woman who wore breezes had come to hire me.

  Hang on.

  Hang on. Maybe this was exactly what I’d wanted: a chance to redeem myself. A chance to fix what had happened to Mr. Preston. Well, maybe I couldn’t exactly fix it, but I could try to find out who had killed the bloke.

  It was funny, though. Meeting a woman who wore breezes for fun was a lot more unsettling when I only had a lycanthrope by my side instead of two fae and a stroppy vampire. And speaking of the lycanthrope—

  Daniel was shaking his head at me emphatically; he’d probably been doing it for a while now. Don’t do it, he mouthed at me.

  What the heck was wrong with him?

  Okay, so he probably wasn’t thinking anything that hadn’t already occurred to me when it came to talking with a woman who was almost certainly not human.

  “What do you mean, you want to hire me?” I asked. That was the most important thing right now. “What do you want me to do?”

  I might as well find out what she wanted: I didn’t have to do it if it was something I couldn’t do, after all. I still had an inkling—or maybe a hope—that it had something to do with Mr. Preston.

  Daniel sighed. I’m pretty used to the people around me sighing at stuff I do, but I shot him a reflexive glare anyway. He made a face at me and folded his arms with a sort of Well, here we go again look.

  Rude. It wasn’t like he was the poster boy for reasonable decisions, after all.

  The woman didn’t answer for a few moments, and when she did, it was to say, “My name is North.”

  “So long as your last name isn’t Wind,” I said, grinning in an uncomfortable sort of way.

  She didn’t grin back, just lifted one eyebrow a bit and waited.

  “What, it is?”

  Daniel swore under his breath. “You’re her?” he said. “You’re the North Wind these days?”

  “The latest incarnation,” she agreed.

  That was too big to think about sensibly, but luckily for me, a small thing that had puzzled me for a couple of weeks seemed to click into place. “You sent Mr. Preston to us in the first place, didn’t you?” I asked. “To Lord Sero, I mean.”

  “I sent him to you and the Troika,” she said. “I’d heard a few things about you all: I thought they might be able to keep him safe for long enough to win my case.”

  There wasn’t much to know about me, but I wasn’t surprised she knew about my psychos. It did explain how Mr. Preston knew a bit more than I’d expected him to know about the world Behind—and the psychos.

  “And now you’re coming to me.”

  “Yes. I hoped you’d recognise Mr. Preston’s name.”

  “Why come to me?”

  “I have a problem of my own. And I would very much like to know who killed Mr. Preston.”

  “No, I mean why me? Why not go directly to them?”

  “Exactly,” said Daniel. “Lord Sero’s the one with power—Pet is human.”

  “I don’t need power for this,” North said. “And what I do need, Lord Sero threw away. So I came to you.”

  “You need me?” I said, disbelieving that I’d understood her correctly. “That’s rubbish.”

  North shrugged, dark blue eyes velvety. “You’re human.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I need help with a human problem.”

  “You’re the one Mr. Preston was trying to defend in court?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know anything about law.”

  “This is Behind law.”

  “Yeah well, congratulations, because I know even less about that.”

  “I don’t need your help with that bit,” she said. “I can get another lawyer. I need your help with the human part of my problem.”

  “Is the human part of your problem still alive?”

  North’s pearly teeth showed faintly in a grimace that was as small as it was fierce, and the wind snaked into my hoodie and across my neck, sharp as a knife. “Yes,” she said. “And she will stay that way.”

  “All right, all right, don’t get your knickers in a twist!” I protested, but I was relieved. She hadn’t called the human it, and she hadn’t said the human was the problem. I wasn’t anxious to tell the personified North Wind that I wasn’t going to get rid of a human for her, even if I wasn’t. I was glad I wouldn’t have to do it.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Come on in. I’ll put the jug on and we can have a nice cuppa.”

  It sounds cheesy to say that North swept into the house, given who she was, b
ut she did kinda sweep into the house. Dust cartwheeled and flurried as she passed through the short passageway and into the sitting room, and a soft breeze teased the ancient tassels that hung from the curtain sashes.

  Daniel went into the kitchen to boil the jug, which was a nice change of pace for me, and left me to sit down facing North and look as professional as I could.

  “All right,” I said, pulling my hood back down. “What do you need from me?”

  “What do you need from us?” corrected Daniel, from the doorway. To North, he said, “We’re pack. You mess with Pet and you’ll have a lot more to worry about.”

  “I don’t need you, little dog,” said North pleasantly. “Mind your own business. I need The Pet.”

  Daniel looked a bit yellow in the eyes, but all he asked was, “Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea. Earl grey,” said North, and turned back to me. “Two months ago, a young human girl, Sarah Palmer, went missing from Glenorchy while she was shopping for new shoes with her mother.”

  I frowned. I’d heard about that. “Turned back up, didn’t she?”

  North’s pearly teeth showed in a happy smile. “Yes.”

  “Same day,” I said slowly, remembering something else I’d seen in the papers a couple of months ago, “The exact same day, a bloke turned up dead in the public loo. The place fell down on him—they said it was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” said North. “And he wasn’t human.”

  “What, it was a freak breeze?”

  She didn’t answer that. Instead, she said, “He took the little girl. That is why he is now dead.”

  “Is that also why you need a lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you do it? Kill the bloke, I mean.”

  “Does it matter to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He tried to kidnap a little human girl.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but it still matters.”

  North puffed out an impatient little huff of air that came close to bowling me over. “You’re a human: you’re meant to care about humans. Why else would I come to you?”

  “Because I also need to know who I’m working for, and what they’re capable of,” I said. “It’s a rule. Sorta. I’m not objecting to you doing it…exactly. I just wanna know if you did.”

  “I could have done it,” she said. “I would have done it. But I didn’t: he was dead when I got there, and the little girl was crouching beside the ruins. I was arrested almost immediately—”

  “A setup,” I said, nodding. Someone had done much the same thing to my cop friend Detective Tuatu not so long ago. “Is the kid okay?”

  “That’s the problem,” said North. “I got her back home safely, but now they’re trying to take her away from her parents.”

  “Who is trying to take her away from her parents?”

  “Upper Management.”

  I bit back the hiss of air that tried to escape, and heard a similar sound from Daniel as he brought in the tea and coffee.

  I caught his eye as he passed me a mug of coffee, but he only said, “Don’t look at me. I’ll just tell you we should stay away from Upper Management and you’ll ignore me anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said, turning back to North. “But this brings me right back to being confused. How do you think I can help when you’re up against Upper Management?”

  “I’m not asking you to keep her safe,” said North, her chin mulish. “I can do that. And I don’t need someone to look after my case—I can take care of that, too. What I need you to do is make Upper Management break their contract with the little girl’s parents.”

  “Oh, right. Easy peasy, then.”

  “Exactly!” she said, a sparkling smile spreading over her face. “I’ve heard about you: you think differently to us. If anyone can find a way to break the contract, it’s you.”

  I sighed. “What’s in the contract?”

  “It’s a standard chattel contract,” said North, the smile vanishing.

  “It’s a what?”

  “Sometimes parents discover that someone is watching them,” said Daniel. He was looking pretty grim himself, and I wondered if it was because he had once been human or because some Behindkind actually didn’t like Behindkind actions much, themselves.

  “I didn’t think humans who discovered about Behind lived very long,” I said. It wasn’t that I’d been told that exactly: I’d just gotten the impression. “Behindkind make deals with them?”

  “If they want the human enough—or if the human is causing enough trouble,” said North. “It’s an investment for Behind, you see: if they’ve got their eye on a human, they like to make sure they get them as quickly as possible. They wait until they’ve got leverage, then they swoop down and offer a contract in exchange for whatever they want.”

  I was pretty sure I already knew where this was going. “And they wanted the kid?”

  “Yes. They’re offered safety from Behindkind at large only by signing a contract that gives the entire family chattel status for a certain period, thus obliging Behindkind to keep them safe as precious goods. The same contract obliges the humans to give up their child if they talk about anything involving Behind.”

  “They talked about it?” I wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or impressed.

  “They broke the contract?” asked Daniel at the same time. He was definitely appalled.

  “No,” said North, her elegant jaw very tight. “There was an extra clause in their contract that they didn’t or couldn’t see: when the daughter turns twelve, the chattel ownership of the child alone becomes permanent, regardless of whether the parents speak up or not.”

  “How—how old is she?” I asked, my voice husky.

  “Eleven,” said North. “Her twelfth birthday is at the end of the month.”

  “And you want—you want us to find a way to break the contract by the end of the month?”

  “I brought you a copy,” she said, producing a gossamer piece of paper from nowhere that I could see. “Study it: find a way to break it. I’ll send my troll assistant around to get your answer the day after tomorrow.”

  I took it in a bit of a stupor, but managed to protest, “It’s gunna take me longer than a night and a day to find an answer!”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I’ll send her every day after that. Just make sure you solve it within a week: if I’m found guilty and put away somewhere Behind, I won’t be able to protect her anymore.”

  “A week—! North, I can’t—”

  “I’ll be busy,” she said, surging to her feet as if she had been still so long that she could no longer bear to sit. A hurricane of wind tore a circle around the living room as she stood, then furled into her skirt. “And they’ll probably try to kill me so I can’t babysit you, too. Make sure you’re finished by the end of the week.”

  “North!” I protested, as she swept toward the door. “I don’t think I can do it in a week!”

  She stopped there by the door, movement somehow in every line of her though she stood still. “You have to,” she said. “There’s no one else.”

  Then she was gone.

  “Well, that’s just fantastic,” said Daniel. “First the Sandman, now the actual North Wind.”

  “I don’t think she’s the actual North Wind,” I said. “That’s the point of being an incarna—”

  “I need to find a way to secure the house,” he said, without listening to me. “If you’re going to be bringing trolls home—”

  “To be fair, I’m not bringing them home.”

  “—and the Sandman’s out to get one of us—”

  “To be fair, probably you.”

  “Then we need to look at keeping the house safe. I’m not having weirdos coming around here and endangering Morgana.”

  “Oh,” I said, more soberly. “Yeah.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. Just—maybe just stop encouraging Behindkind to visit the house, okay?”


  “Encouraging?” I said indignantly. “Since when do I have to encourage Behindkind to stick their snotty noses into my life?”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “All right, we’d best look at this contract. Might as well figure out what we’re up against.”

  “Ah heck,” I said.

  “Just realised, did you?” Daniel said grimly. “We’re gunna do great as private investigators.”

  “Yeah,” I said gloomily. Because as much as this job sounded like it was going to be impossible, there was more bad news. I hadn’t asked North what the pay was.

  I reluctantly wore the dead-person jeans the next morning. They were a good fit, at least—and I couldn’t smell what Daniel and JinYeong evidently could, so I wriggled my shoulders a bit to get rid of the twitchy feeling, and went down to see what there was to eat for breakfast.

  On the way downstairs I saw something smashed on the stairs—pottery that had held a plant, by the looks of the mingled dirt and pottery shards, and the tiny bit of greenery in feathery pieces—and a kinda knee-shaped hole in the wall further down.

  “Kids try to kill you again?” I asked Daniel as I passed him in the kitchen.

  “You need to wash those jeans another couple of times,” he said crankily, limping past me with a breakfast tray for Morgana. “You smell like you’re close to falling apart.”

  “Should fit right in, then,” I said, remembering what JinYeong had said about the house yesterday. Maybe I should be poking around the place for dead rats or something; maybe even dead Behindkind. Hopefully not.

  I called up the stairs after him, “Does Morgana know you’ve been making holes in her parents’ walls?”

  Ignoring that, he said over his shoulder, “I’ve called in sick for the week. That’ll keep the Sandman off our backs from that direction, but we’re gunna have to be more careful while we’re out poking our noses into Upper Management.”

  “What are you talking about, we?” I followed him up the stairs with a fresh cup of coffee. Daniel was good at putting the percolator on, too. All things considered, he was a pretty good housemate—probably from all those years of looking after the pack.

  “You can’t muck around with Upper Management by yourself,” Daniel said. “That’s how you end up dead.”