Between Decisions (The City Between Book 8) Read online

  “Don’t open it,” Zero answered briefly.

  “What if it’s Palomena? You want your dad to be wondering what you’re up to?”

  “Don’t open it,” he repeated, this time pinioning me with his eyes. “My father already has far too much access to you; I’d prefer that he not get any more.”

  “Might not be a bad idea to let him at me again,” I said thoughtfully. “It’s thanks to him that I got some memories back, after all.”

  “We shouldn’t neglect the fact that my lord’s father might also have those memories as a result of your encounter,” Athelas said mildly. “And if you are saying that you wish me to be more adversarial, Pet—”

  “It’s not that I want it,” I said. “But I know there are other memories—there’s that whole night I can’t remember. I can’t just keep avoiding it.”

  “You certainly can,” he said. “Judging from your young friend Morgana, it is entirely possible to attempt to live your life without stirring up uncomfortable feelings and memories. But since I have no doubt that you’ll prefer to do things otherwise, we had best come to some consensus on how the thing ought to be attempted.”

  “It ought to be attempted when I’m in the house,” Zero interrupted. “And when we can be sure that no one inconvenient is likely to be helped by the memories that spring back up again. In the meantime, we have work to do. We can talk about this later. Athelas, JinYeong: it’s time.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t like it was against the rules, and Zero hadn’t told me I couldn’t do it: it was more that I knew he wouldn’t approve. The problem was, I didn’t think I was wrong, and while I was in that mindset, it wouldn’t be right not to do it.

  It being contacting a not-so-old adversary of ours.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket, and when I unlocked it, Morgana’s number was the first thing that flashed up on the screen. I hadn’t exited out of the phonebook when I locked it again this morning, and my morning’s interrupted decision was still there to be seen.

  A bit sadly, I flicked away that screen and went into my texts instead. One of the last ones I’d received was still there, clear and direct. It said, Thanks for helping me out. I’ll be seeing you. Blackpoint. None of us had actually meant to help him: we’d been chivvied into doing it without knowing we were doing it. But now that he’d escaped, he was probably the only person who could help Abigail and her crew. He was probably the only one they’d accept real help from, if it came to that.

  Well, so long as they didn’t discover that he was actually fae.

  My thumbs hovered over the screen for a few seconds of hesitation, then I started typing. I didn’t type much, but I made sure it was to the point. When I pressed the send button, only a single sentence was there.

  If you don’t want your lot to end up dead, you’d better do something about it.

  Chapter Two

  Zero and JinYeong didn’t come back that night, though Athelas did. I gave up on the other two after midnight and cleared away the dinner I’d made—plated it up into two portions for easy reheating later with the rest in a bigger container. I even found a lid for the container. The banshees had started getting into the cupboards lately, using knives for caber toss and lids for projectiles whenever they were too annoyed about things, so it was no mean feat.

  When the kitchen was tidy, I mizzled away into the lounge room where Athelas sat, reading, and tried to settle on the couch. I’d already had a brief, partially coded message exchange with Abigail via text—during which she’d apologised, as much as she ever did apologise, for making Detective Tuatu think he was being kidnapped—and checked to make sure that Blackpoint hadn’t messaged back. I could have gone upstairs and tried to settle in bed, but that seemed even harder: if I settled in bed, I would fall asleep, and I didn’t want to fall asleep.

  I’m not afraid of falling asleep. I’m afraid of the nightmares. And technically, the Nightmare-with-a-capital-n doesn’t hang around when my psychos are in the house, but ever since I’d gotten a big clump of memory back a little while ago, I’d started getting normal nightmares, too.

  You know, the kind a person gets when they’ve been kidnapped as a kid and then seen a slightly fractured montage of their kidnappers being torn apart by a murderer who is very good at reducing flesh creatures to strips of flesh. Not to be confused with the night that person’s parents were killed by the same murderer—the night I could never properly remember despite my attempts to do so. The night that gave me the Nightmare as well as nightmares.

  I’m special. I get a personal Nightmare, too.

  “Pet,” said Athelas, looking up from his book after ten minutes of me wriggling around on the couch and vainly trying to get comfortable. “Do you suppose you could refrain from flopping around like a landed fish?”

  “I’m trying to get comfortable.”

  “I should have imagined that the last ten minutes would have been sufficient to convince you it’s a vain endeavour.”

  I sat up again, moodily. “The couch is flamin’ uncomfortable tonight, that’s all.”

  “Indeed?” said Athelas, with a slight lift of his chestnut brows. “There is usually a vampire at the other end and significantly less space. One presumes that you are now acclimated to the lack of space and find it difficult to adapt once more.”

  “One shouldn’t be presuming,” I told him grumpily. “Anyway, even when he’s not sitting there, his flamin’ perfume is, and that takes up enough space.”

  It was true: JinYeong may not have sat on the couch with me since two days ago, but his cologne was still very much ingrained, and could be said to be occupying the space I hadn’t allowed him to occupy.

  “Perhaps you would be so good as to make tea, in that case?” he suggested.

  I got up straight away. Athelas hadn’t actually asked me to make tea much lately, which was unusual. He was still probably recovering from the latest fight he’d been in, despite the fact that he looked fine on the outside. He’d also been a bit quieter the last couple days, and that was worrying me in more than one way.

  When I came back with the tea tray he was still reading, but I had the feeling that he wasn’t fully absorbed in his book. Was he trying to avoid conversation with me, or let me know that I could talk and he’d answer?

  “How’s your gut?” I asked, by way of opening up the conversation, as I set the tray on the coffee table and pushed the biscuits closer to him.

  “The same as ever, I believe,” he said, bookmarking and laying his book on the coffee table.

  That put a bit of a damper on the conversation, but he had put his book down—and he’d done it before I poured his tea, too.

  “Well, it was looking a bit ventilated the other day after the fight. Figured you might still be tender for a while.”

  Athelas took his teacup and gazed at me for a few moments before he asked, “Is that your way of telling me not to eat too many of the biscuits?”

  It surprised a chuckle out of me. “Nah. I wouldn’t dare. You know I ask stuff because I’m concerned, right? I don’t have to have an ulterior motive to be concerned.”

  “A most unwise way of proceeding through life,” he said.

  “Better than getting my stomach ventilated every few months,” I pointed out. “Wouldn’t have said that’s exactly healthy, either.”

  I saw the rim of his teacup reflected in the sudden, amused glow of his grey eyes. “Perhaps not.”

  I sipped coffee and he sipped tea, but although there was silence, he didn’t pick up his book again—which meant either that he wanted to talk to me about something that he wanted, or that he wanted to know something.

  At last, into the silence, he said, “You appear to have something on your mind, Pet.”

  I stared at him. “I’ve got lots on my mind: I’m an Heirling without enough behindkind blood to be anything special, and my owner’s dad is always trying to kill me or form weird alliances with me. That’s not to mention that my best
friend is a zombie with an identity crisis and the vampire is—”

  I stopped, and Athelas’ grey eyes grew luminous with amusement or fondness, I wasn’t sure which. Maybe it was both.

  “Yes?” he said encouragingly. “The vampire is…?”

  “A flamin’ pain in the neck,” I said. “That’s not the important thing. The important thing is that I’d have a lot more information—we’d have a lot more information—if I could just shake out a few more memories. I’d be able to find out who killed my parents, and you lot would be able to catch your murderer.”

  “Is this your way of asking me to try again? I was not entirely successful last time.”

  “Maybe,” I said, propping my chin on my palms. “I’ve gotta do something, and apart from Zero’s dad, you’re the one who’s had the most success jolting stuff free.”

  “I’ve already told Zero that if we proceed, I will have to be significantly more adversarial.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  Athelas’ voice was light and questioning. “Are you asking me to try now? I believe my lord said you would be best served to wait until he was back in the house.”

  Both of us knew that Zero hadn’t said anything of the sort—or at least that whatever he had said, he had said as a command. We were not to do anything while he wasn’t in the house, and that had been an order.

  “No,” I said, hardening my heart against that promise of safety. “If you wait until Zero’s back in the house, it won’t matter how adversarial you are.”

  He gazed at me. “Did I not tell you that becoming fond of people was a weakness that few of us can afford?”

  “It’s not because I’m fond of Zero,” I said, rather grumpily. I didn’t want to say exactly what it was, because he wouldn’t approve of that, either. The fact was that when I had JinYeong at my back or Zero in front of me, I didn’t feel afraid—or at least, not afraid enough to lose my head—and I was pretty sure that in order to get more of those sneaky memories, I needed to lose my head a bit.

  That way, I might be able to avoid losing it around Zero’s dad, too.

  “It’s more that I trust Zero not to let me get hurt,” I told Athelas.

  “Even more dangerous, I would have said,” he murmured. “I’m glad to know that trust doesn’t extend to myself; I like to think I’ve taught you better.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said, very bluntly. It was hard to tell if he was genuinely glad I didn’t seem to trust him, or hurt in his own twisted little way. “I just trust you to a different extent. I don’t trust you not to hurt me, but I reckon I trust you to hurt me only as much as necessary.”

  “A foolish trust,” he said sharply. “How many times must I—”

  “All right, all right, I’m an idiot,” I said soothingly. “Feel better? You want more tea before we start, or what? Reckon that lot’s gone cold.”

  “My tea is sufficiently—as a matter of fact, I would like more tea, yes. Thank you, Pet.”

  I may have grinned a bit. Zero often loses patience with me, and JinYeong is as likely to melt down about something inexplicable as he is to confess love from what seem like equally incomprehensible motives, but Athelas very rarely loses his patience, even for a moment.

  Looks like tea really is his Achilles heel.

  “Not enough sleep last night?” I asked him, pouring the cold remnant of tea into the little pot for the old tea leaves and refreshing his teacup. That was nonsense: fae need far less sleep than humans. But even if I wanted to prod at the memories in my head and get out the things that had, apparently, been buried there far too long, I also very much didn’t want to—a state of things that led to me being facetious, inclined to joke about stuff I shouldn’t joke about, and in general an annoying person to be around.

  “Nothing of the kind, Pet. I merely had a brief moment of fellow feeling with my lord. Are you perhaps stalling for time?”

  I gazed at him as I crossed my legs beneath me. “It’s really rude how you tell the truth so politely.”

  “I might return the favour and inform you that it’s highly impolite how often you tell the truth in a rude manner, but since I’m inclined to think that you’re again stalling for time, perhaps we should begin. I shall not go easy on you this time.”

  “Yeah,” I said, with a dry throat. I took a sip of coffee, but it didn’t help much. “That’s what we’re going for, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed,” said Athelas, setting his teacup down despite the steam rolling up into the ceiling. I followed that steam with my eyes and saw it curling around the greenery growing there.

  Heck. How long had there been ferns growing from the ceiling of the house? Just this morning, if the rate they were growing was any indication; otherwise we’d have been choking on them during breakfast.

  “Where should we begin?” asked Athelas, his voice as light and multifaceted as the steam from his teacup. “Your memory of being—what did your young human friends refer to it as? Being out of state?—we already regained. Should we attempt a discovery of the surrounding events, or should we attempt to pull up something else?”

  “Reckon there’s a few specific things I don’t remember,” I said. Like the night my parents died. “But the surrounding events are really clear each time I remember a specific thing. Like all the little things that didn’t make sense—all that stuff I just forced to be normal instead of weird—was easier to shove underneath other thoughts because the big stuff it related to was gone.”

  “Are you saying that you don’t know what you don’t know? That is…not particularly helpful, but I suppose we can attempt much the same kind of interrogation as Zero’s father did—by ignoring your own questions, we might perhaps gain some insight.”

  “What, you reckon it’ll help if you ask me about stuff you want to know about?” I pulled my gaze away from the ferns on the ceiling and looked suspiciously at him. There had been a brief few hours not so long ago where I had suspected him of something so dark and ugly that I didn’t like to think about it again—collusion with Zero’s dad, and a part in the murders that Zero had been trying to solve for so long now—and while I didn’t suspect that now, I knew it was still very wise to suspect him of ulterior motives to…well, everything.

  “I do,” he said tranquilly.

  I looked at him for a while longer before I asked, “What have you been wanting to ask me, then? There must be something you really want to know if you’re gunna be picking the questions.”

  “If I had not just warned you about trusting behindkind too much, I might have plaintively asked why you should imagine me to have an ulterior motive,” sighed Athelas. “Alas! I must remember to be less forthcoming with my warnings.”

  “Rubbish,” I said. “You like giving warnings for the sheer delight of watching people take ’em the wrong way and do exactly what you wanted ’em to do in the first place.”

  “Dear heavens!” Athelas said, sipping his tea. “You appear to have been listening, after all. How inconvenient of you.”

  “I always listen,” I said, one of my legs bouncing a bit in nervousness. It seemed as though the chair behind him was moving very slightly, a movement that churned up the kind of motion-sick feeling you’d get from looking at a wheels-within-wheels setup where the wheels turn in opposite directions. “I just don’t always do what I’m told; it’s different. We gunna start, or what?”

  “We have already started.”

  “’Zat why the house is halfway Between?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I should imagine we’re more than halfway Between! We’re likely to be able to walk anywhere Behind that we wish before long.”

  I flicked a look around the room and then back at him. “Maybe we should try that one day.”

  “If you have a death wish, Pet, I do not. There are far too many people Behind who at this moment would be greatly pleased to find me alone.”

  “I’d be with you,” I pointed out, but I didn�
��t need the creasing around his grey eyes, or the subtle amusement that glowed within them, to realise how ridiculous that was.

  Hang on, though. If he wasn’t too keen to be Behind, why was the house sinking closer every moment? I jerked my chin at the most nebulous of the areas around the living room and asked him, “You do this?”

  “I did not. I wonder if you realise how much you affect the house?”

  “You saying I did it?”

  “Shall we split the difference and conclude that the house itself has done a great deal of the work, under direct impetus from you?”

  “If you want,” I said, shrugging. It wasn’t like I knew better; I didn’t even realise I’d been doing anything.

  “Even so,” Athelas said, as though he perfectly understood my thought. As he spoke, the living room sank a little and began to feel spongy beneath the couches. “Perhaps it would be useful if you attempted to explore just exactly how you’re doing it.”

  “Just blame the pet,” I grumbled, but we were here to puzzle out exactly how I knew the things I did and how I did the things I did, so I tried anyway. I sat quietly on the couch with a feeling of not-quite-reality around me—as if the chair wasn’t exactly in the right spot, or I wasn’t exactly in the right spot of reality to be able to interact with it properly—and explored the feeling of skewed reality, and how it connected to me.

  Something fluttered away in the back of my mind: Athelas, and something very like a worm, burrowing deep into my mind. I ignored them both and focused on the house instead, trying to feel with the part of me that could usually feel Between—trying to use that sense to see exactly how I was connected to the house.

  “Something isn’t right,” I said, gazing around me. The room should have been closed-in, like a normal room, but there were thin patches in reality all around me instead: a moving shadow of deep grey beneath the stairs; a glimmering, beckoning thatch of moonlight cobwebbed in the kitchen entry; the sense that if I climbed up into the rafters, I could keep climbing through the greenery and into some sort of dense, claustrophobic forest. “Things aren’t like they usually are.”