Between Cases (The City Between Book 7) Read online

  At first I thought he was telling me to knock it off, but his dark eyes were fixed on Marazul, and the moment of surprise made me realise what I hadn’t before: ’Zul was either using or perhaps merely exuding a kind of Between that must be similar to what JinYeong exerts upon most other humans. I was, oddly enough, entirely immune to JinYeong’s particular brand of mojo; it looked like I wasn’t immune to the merman brand of the same thing. I hadn’t noticed it before, but then I hadn’t seen ’Zul in his natural habitat before, either.

  I narrowed my eyes at ’Zul and he had the grace to look away, his eyes faintly guilty. Then he caught sight of the tear in JinYeong’s shirt, and he began to look wary as well as guilty.

  With a vibration that made my teeth buzz, I somehow heard him say, through water and glass alike, “Sorry. I can’t help it when I’m in here.”

  “Just when you’re in there?” I asked. It made me uncomfortable to think that he might have been influencing me to like him from the start. It made me more uncomfortable to think that I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Only in here,” he said. “I can’t do it in the human world, but in here it’s the merperson equivalent of B.O.”

  “Tch!” said JinYeong. “Cogitmal.”

  I threw him a look. “You’re one to talk: you always have women trailing after you because you’re flamin’ irresistible.”

  “He can help it a little bit,” JinYeong said coldly, and turned his shoulder in irritation.

  “I’d come out,” said ’Zul, after a very slight hesitation, “but the enchantment on the walls can get a bit messy and it takes me a while to get to my wheelchair.”

  It took a few seconds to realise that what he meant was he didn’t want to struggle into his wheelchair while we watched—and that he probably didn’t want our help to get in it, either.

  “Sorry if it’s uncomfortable for you,” I said. “Us coming here, I mean. I didn’t want to hand this over out in the street.”

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have opened the door for you if it wasn’t all right for you to come in. I haven’t finished with the last thing Lord Sero asked me to do, though: Blackpoint is pretty hard to track down, and I’m fairly certain he can—”

  “—sneak inside computers and hide in the internet. Yeah. Didn’t Zero tell you?”

  He stared at me with his mouth open. “Yes. How did you know?”

  “He sneaked away from an execution team by ducking into a game and having someone smuggle him out of his mansion. Then he blew up our computer, getting out.”

  “Yes,” muttered JinYeong. “My heart was recharged and I did not require it.”

  “It gave him a lot of static,” I added, grinning properly for the first time since I’d entered the tunnel this morning. JinYeong had been attracting a lot of static electricity for these last two weeks after the shock to his heart, but so far it had only meant he gave himself a series of little shocks as it discharged, which was fun for me and not so much fun for him when he tried to take over too much of our couch.

  ’Zul said with some respect, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “You sent a café full of people to safety via email,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but I didn’t know it was possible before I did it.”

  “Now you do,” I said. “S’gunna be very useful, too.”

  “Yes,” he said, but he sounded a bit doubtful. “Very…useful.”

  “Anyway, that’s not what we’ve come about. We’ve come about this USB.”

  “What is it?”

  “We don’t know,” I said, still brandishing the glass USB at him. I’d picked it up from the North Wind, and I was rather sure it held information about Zero’s mother or my family’s murder—or perhaps both. “That’s what I need you for—I don’t know the password and I don’t know how to get to the files without a password.”

  He nodded. “I’ve got a little spell program for that sort of thing; they work better than anything else I’ve used. Is it a job for Lord Sero?”

  “Nope,” I said. “In fact, I’d rather you didn’t mention it to him at all.”

  ’Zul looked faintly ill. “Pet—”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, smiling encouragingly. “I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

  I saw JinYeong’s mouth open in the reflection of the glass and sent him a narrowed, sideways look that he met with a pouty, challenging one, a glint to his eye. Was he going to tell Zero after all? I could have left him behind. I could have gone alone another day but I’d brought him with me today, despite everything. There was a part of me that wanted to see if I really could trust him not to tell Zero stuff that was important to me. A part of me that wanted to believe that the JinYeong who had twice stood between me and the sword of a powerful fae was as trustworthy as I’d once thought him.

  “JinYeong won’t tell, either,” I said. “If he knows what’s good for him.”

  “I shall do as I please,” said JinYeong, but he said it in Korean without the usual translation supplied by Between magic. In other words, for my ears only. He added, “You are not my pet; I am not yours.”

  “You been taking lessons from Athelas in Riddle Speak?” I said, by way of retort, and turned back to Marazul. “It won’t come back to bite you. I’ll make sure.”

  “You can’t promise that,” he said, and there was a half-smile on his face that looked distinctly rueful.

  JinYeong gave vent to a derisive sort of sniff that counted for a laugh when he was trying to be insulting. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “I won’t promise,” I said to ’Zul. “But I’ll do my best. Trust me, I don’t want Zero to know about this any more than you do.”

  “It’s frightening how you think that’s comforting,” he said, but now his eyes were smiling too, even if that smile was as rueful as the one on his lips. “I’ll let you know when I get something.”

  We didn’t stay long, despite my promise to JinYeong that he could sit and rest, and it was a quiet walk back home. I was thoughtful and silent, and so, surprisingly, was JinYeong. In general, his cologne was strong enough to count as an extra personality, but even it seemed diluted and mellow now that we were in the fresh air again.

  It wasn’t until we passed back through the tunnel that I saw the floppy, bent remains of the umbrella I’d used earlier, and spoke almost without thinking.

  “Oi,” I said. “There it is again. The umbrella.”

  It had still been at home when I got back from using it in my drop-bear adventure a while back, though; sitting in the umbrella stand in the hall where it ought to have been and still in its umbrella form. Zero hadn’t mentioned that it’d gone missing, either, and I was pretty sure he would have noticed.

  I nearly picked it up again, but I didn’t know exactly what to do with it when it looked like a busted umbrella. I mean, I might look like I know what I’m doing and what’s going on, but most of the time I haven’t got a clue what’s happening and why stuff works the way it works. I’m just mostly trying not to die, and figuring things out as I go along.

  My problem is that my owners are convinced there’s only one way that Between works—and Between doesn’t always work that way for me. Don’t know if you’ve ever tried to convince three Behindkind that they’re wrong, but it’s not easy. Part of that’s understandable: I’m a human, not Behindkind, and I don’t have anything like their experience when it comes to Behind and Between. My only experience is my own, and although I can understand why they’re always so quick to dismiss me, it never gets any less annoying to be told that something you’ve just done, or seen, or caused, is impossible and can’t have happened.

  It’s not that easy to learn when your teachers need to learn a few things themselves.

  They had told me that Between worked in a certain way, and the way that the sword was behaving here today was at odds with how they had told me it worked. Of course, that was if they were telling me everything, and they had a very bad track record of not tellin
g me everything. They also had a bad habit of protesting that something couldn’t be right until it proved that it was, and that was the habit that worried me the most right now.

  “It is dirty,” said JinYeong. “Don’t touch it. You already made enough mischief today.”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t make mischief when it comes to Zero,” I retorted. “Anyway, I wasn’t going to pick it up.”

  JinYeong turned on his toes and planted himself in front of me, ducking his head to put himself nose-to-nose with me. “There is mischief I could make—”

  “If you’re leading up to trying to blackmail me,” I said, my hand snaking out to grab his tie, “you’d probably better remember that your tie is in reach and I can make another little playmate for the tie frog that’s hanging around Hobart somewhere.”

  His hand fastened around mine, tight but not crushing, and his eyes grew liquid. “Do not dare to turn my tie into a frog again.”

  “But it’s so fun.”

  “It is not fun for me,” he said. “And we have not discussed payment.”

  “Nope,” I said, letting go of his tie. He didn’t let go of my hand, so I pulled it away gently to avoid jolting his injured torso. I shoved it in my pocket instead and added, “Told you: I’m not going to pay you. You either do it or you don’t.”

  I stood there and looked up at him, wondering if that JinYeong really did exist: the one who could do things for me without there being loyalty to Zero behind it. Just because I asked him to do it.

  JinYeong looked around at the tunnel, avoiding my eyes. “My silence is valuable,” he mumbled.

  “If we’re talking about people owing other people you still owe me for pretending to be my friend,” I told him. I hadn’t meant to say it, and it wasn’t really fair to say it in the same tunnel that was still sticky with his blood from earlier in the day. But I wanted to know that I could trust him.

  He huffed an exasperated sigh up at the tunnel roof, then snapped his gaze back to me, canines showing. “Ya. I thought you didn’t want to talk about payment.”

  “You brought it up first,” I pointed out. “And I’m not going to let you nearly die for me and then stab me in the back again, so don’t try to get on my good side, all right?”

  There was a brief silence while JinYeong muttered to himself in Korean without translating it for me. At length he said in a cross voice, “I did not follow you to the house of the zombie because hyeong ordered me to do so. He gave the order after I was already in the house. I followed you because we had become—become allies and I wanted to. I stayed with you because I trust you at my back in the fight.”

  I stared at him, and at last repeated, “He gave that order after you were with me? Why did he say—why did he tell me—why did he make me think it wasn’t like that?”

  JinYeong’s eyes grew stormy and he said, “I wonder.” Aggrievedly, he added, “I even once trusted you and didn’t fight.”

  “When did you trust me and not fight?” I demanded, bewildered as to why it was a grievance or even important. I still wanted to know why Zero had deliberately tried to make a wedge between me and JinYeong—because there was no way he hadn’t done it on purpose, or without at least realising what would come of it.

  “That one,” JinYeong said, pointing accurately at the hillock of what looked like moss in the human world but was the body of the golden fae when seen through Between.

  I frowned, but I did remember trying to stop him going for the golden fae’s throat once before when we were in the house. He must be talking about that, but for the life of me, I couldn’t see why that was so important to him. And it was, evidently, very important: his eyes were unwaveringly, almost unnervingly, fixed on me. I was the one who looked away first, my thoughts tumbling and pinwheeling over each other.

  He said, “If I had fought then, it would have been trouble. I told you that I have very much emotion.”

  “Oh,” I said. There was an imbalance inside of me that tipped back toward the sense of companionship and trust I’d once felt toward JinYeong, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to let it do that.

  “I followed you to the house of the zombie because you are not my pet but my—my—”

  I watched his facial contortions, and asked with an attempt at flippancy, “Is it ’cos I’m a human that you can’t say friend, or what? Spit it out.”

  Even before, he’d stumbled through saying allies.

  “Friend is not correct,” he said stiffly. “We have fought together. We are…allies.”

  “Don’t think that works,” I said, thinking of the vast difference between the worlds to which we owed loyalty. Still, for a while it really seemed as though we’d been facing the world together. “Blood siblings?”

  “No,” he said, with finality.

  “All right,” I said. “We’re allies or whatever. But why’d you keep reporting to Zero if you were only coming along to Morgana’s to be with me?”

  “It is easier to do things with hyeong’s blessing than without.”

  “That’s true,” I had to admit.

  “And I did not tell him everything I learned. Just enough to prevent him removing me.”

  That, I also had to admit, I knew to be true, even if I didn’t do so aloud.

  “We are friends, then?” he asked, and this time he didn’t stumble over the word.

  “That’s what I thought for a while,” I said. The imbalance was swinging more and more to JinYeong’s side, and I was still half afraid to be convinced again. “How do I know you’re not lying about all this?”

  He grinned at me, startling me with the suddenness of it. “I do not lie well,” he said. “I speak before I think—you have not noticed? I told you—”

  “Yeah, too much emotion,” I murmured, my mind reeling. Because it was true. JinYeong had always been quick to act and speak under the impetus of his immediate emotions. Which meant that the mosquito had been telling the truth all along.

  I heaved a very big sigh.

  “You’re really annoying, you know that?” I told him.

  “Yes,” he said, and he was still grinning. “You are also annoying. What is it that I have done now?”

  “It means I’ve got to apologise,” I explained. “I don’t like apologising to you.”

  JinYeong shrugged, pulling at the tear in his shirt. The wound beneath it was very nearly gone, I saw. He said, “I also have some things to apologise for. We will call it equal.”

  “Dunno about that,” I said. “Hang on, if I do apologise, are you gunna apologise as well? ’Cos I want to know what you think you’ve got to apologise for.”

  “You think I…don’t need to apologise?” he hazarded, confused.

  “Nah, I just wanna get your perspective on what you did wrong,” I explained. “But also I don’t want to apologise so—”

  “Another time,” he said, “we will apologise. Today, we will be friends for a little while first and go home.”

  Zero and Athelas were in the living room when we got back, sitting in their respective chairs and each reading: Zero, a book, and Athelas, a file. Zero looked me up and down, past me to JinYeong, and said, “You smell of bridge troll.”

  “Nae mari,” JinYeong said accusingly at me. “You shouldn’t make smells like that.”

  “It was trying to stop me from walking under a bridge,” I said indignantly. There was a little niggle of happiness in me; I turned and nearly opened my mouth to threaten him cheerfully with another tie change, but my eyes fell on the tear in his shirt once again.

  Oh heck. There was more to tell today.

  “That’s what bridge trolls do,” Zero said briefly. “They like bridges. They don’t like people walking underneath their bridges.”

  “Well, I don’t like kids being eaten because they have to walk under a bridge to get to school,” I said. I should be mentioning the golden fae any time now, but my mouth didn’t want to cooperate.

  Zero actually put down his book. “Pet, did you kill a tr
oll?”

  “I tried to work out a payment plan but he wasn’t interested! And for the record, he had a go at me first: I was just trying not to die.”

  Athelas exchanged a glance with Zero and said, as if it was an amelioration, “At least the troll is dead, my lord.”

  “Hang on, am I in trouble for killing it, or not?”

  “You would have been in trouble for fighting it,” Athelas said. “Since you’ve killed the thing, my lord has no issue with it.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” I said, layering my voice with sarcasm. The bad thing was, it actually did make sense to me, these days. Fighting a bridge troll was something that would call attention to myself if both I and the bridge troll lived to tell about it. Me dying because of fighting a bridge troll would also bring about more scrutiny than Zero and Athelas thought comfortable or sensible. The bridge troll dying, on the other hand, brought about no such scrutiny.

  Behindkind weren’t supposed to mess with humans, and although the Behind authorities wouldn’t necessarily stop it, they certainly wouldn’t interfere if someone else did. The death of a bridge troll who had been troublesome to both worlds was a convenience.

  That gave me an idea that I hoped was correct.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Yeah, about dead things.”

  Athelas looked at me over the edge of his file, eyes amused, and Zero, distinctly wary, said, “What is it, Pet?”

  “I killed that golden git,” said JinYeong, pushing past me and throwing himself down on the couch to show the state of his shirt and chest in one grand gesture. “He stabbed me, so I bit him. He is not our problem now.”

  “Good heavens,” said Athelas, his file dropping an inch. He must have been pretty startled. “How delightfully brief. Could you elaborate a trifle more?”

  “What he means,” I said, “is that the golden git has been following me for a while by the sounds of it. He saw me kill the bridge troll and started talking about how he and your dad were wondering why I was being kept, and then he went to stab me and stabbed JinYeong instead.”

  “I do not like being stabbed,” JinYeong added. “It hurts.”