Cloudy With a Chance of Dropbears: A City Between Novellette (The City Between) Read online

  I poked my head out the window just in time to see the kid streak from the door, right between two of the dropbears. It was howling at the top of its lungs, which surprised the dropbears so much that they just stood where they were for a moment before they lunged into the chase.

  The kid was quick on its feet, I’ll give it that. It wasn’t even trying to fight, it was just running around yelling, waving its sword. I grinned a bit before I realised what I was doing and scowled instead. The dropbears lumbered after the kid, and I saw my lines clearing up. I edged the bow through the window, no longer afraid to have it knocked out of my hands by a high-swiping dropbear, and shuffled my upper body after it.

  Just in time, too. They were in range, and at just the right angle. I lifted the bow—hesitated for a fraction of a second. Kill the kid and you can come back. The kid was still running in circles, but it couldn’t do that for too long in this kind of heat. I didn’t even have to kill it. All I had to do was wait, and the dropbears would do the job. It wasn’t like the kid could make it back into the tree house now.

  It was just a fraction of a second’s hesitation, but in that time, one of them reached out faster than the kid could run and slapped it into the ground. I didn’t hesitate again. My bow came up and I shot; twice at the one hanging over the kid, then at the next, then again, and again. The kid scrambled to its feet, bloody and staggering, and waved at me.

  I nocked the last arrow and roared, “Get down!”

  The kid dropped right to its stomach—who had trained it to do that?—and I snatched back the string on my last shot. I was too quick; my elbow hit the side of the tree house and the shot went wide. Flat on its stomach, the kid grimaced. It looked back at the dropbear and then over at its sword. There was no way it would make it to the sword before the dropbear got to it.

  What else could I throw? What else was there to throw? The kid was going to die, and then I could go home, but what else was there to throw?

  I furiously unscrewed my peg leg and hurled it at the kid. Stupid trustful little thing, it was still looking up at me. It caught the peg leg in its right hand and curled around in the same movement to flick it in the dropbear’s face. The peg leg flickered, grew, shrank again—and hit the dropbear between the eyes. It bounced off, but before it hit the ground the kid was sprinting toward the treehouse.

  What in the green and gold did that kid just do to my peg leg? And why didn’t it hold?

  “Shove over!” said the kid’s voice.

  I shoved over. It climbed through the hole in the floor, panting, and waved a crooked twig at me.

  “Got another one!”

  “What do you expect me to hit with this?” I grumbled. The stick had been crooked, and as an arrow, it was still crooked. “Clean your face up.”

  The kid swiped one hand below its nose, smearing blood. “It’s not broken,” it said cheerfully. “Reckon your leg is toast, though. Sorry about that. I tried to make it be something else, but it was really sure about being a peg leg.”

  “That was a good leg,” I said glumly. The dropbear was out there gnawing on it, stupid beast. “You’ve got a black eye.”

  “I know. I can feel it swelling. What are we going to do about that last one? Can you shoot it through the window?”

  “Help me down to the door at the bottom,” I said. We were probably dead if I missed, anyway; at least out there we were closer to other sticks that might turn into better arrows. “I don’t want to try shooting this thing out of the window.”

  “Yeah,” said the kid, wriggling down through the hole in the floor first. It took the bow and arrow from me, then grabbed my whole leg as it came down and steadied my drop to the floor. A bit of training and this kid might make a good officer’s boy. “We want to give you the best chance.”

  “Best chance, my eye!” I grumbled, steadying my half leg on the kid’s bent knee. “Just get ready to run for another stick before the dropbear gets to us.”

  Then I took careful aim, steadied my wrist, and shot.

  I missed, of course. The arrow was crooked, for all that’s green and gold! But it hit the confinement spell across the playground, and where a straight arrow might have careened sideways due to the spell, this one turned sideways of its own accord for a bare instant before the spell pinged it back across the playground at twice the speed and a terrifying accuracy.

  It went through the dropbear’s head so fast that the bear probably never felt it. Something thunked into the treehouse with a bloody smack! and the bear collapsed into the brown grass, spilling blood.

  “Flaming heck!” said the kid.

  We stared at the dead bear in silence for a few minutes. I was ruminating on the certainty that I would never again in my life make a shot like that, whether or not there was a 4th War.

  The kid must have been thinking of something else, because soon it said unexpectedly, “Oi. What happened to your pants?”

  I clutched at the back of my trousers. “What do you mean, what happened to my pants?”

  “Not there,” it said. “The pocket.”

  My hand slapped the charred bit of cloth that should have been my pocket, and something black and rectangular came away in my hand, shedding tendrils of fabric that floated away on the hot air.

  My card. My card was black as ink—black as hopeless death. Now it wasn’t just Red for Deportment, it was No Return Whatsoever and Kill on Sight.

  I looked down at it, and the kid looked down at it.

  “What’s that mean?” it asked. “That doesn’t look good.”

  “Nothing,” I said. I flicked the card away into the corpse-filled playground and it fluttered for a moment like black ash before it disintegrated. “Don’t need it any more, that’s all.”

  “Wait,” the kid said. Its brow was furrowed. “Black…Athelas said something about black-carding a Behindkind—wait! They’re going to kill you?”

  “D’like to see ’em try,” I muttered. “I’ve still got one more leg.”

  “That thing you said you had to do,” the kid said unexpectedly. “The errand—it was to kill me, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “You were meant to kill me, weren’t you?”

  “What—how did you know?”

  “Makes sense,” the kid said, shrugging. It wandered toward the most freshly dead dropbear and prodded it with one foot. “You remember I said people have been disappearing here and around Tassie?”

  “I remember.” I didn’t look at the kid; for a ridiculous reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I felt ashamed. Maybe it was because of how often I’d actually thought about killing it.

  “Yeah, well some of ’em came back. Dead. None of the dead ones disappeared around here, but they all came back here when they were dead. And then I was pulled here, and there you were, and the dropbears…so… Do they always send you?”

  “What? No, they don’t always send me! I’m just a pay-cheque lep’! I haven’t drawn bow for twenty years, since the last war!”

  “Oh.” The kid seemed to accept that, which irritated me. Why was it still so trusting? “Then that was some flaming good shooting.”

  “Stop trusting people so quickly!” I snapped at it. “That’s how you end up dying!”

  “I’ve got good instincts about people,” said the kid blithely. “So your card is black because you didn’t kill me?”

  I shrugged. “Never did learn to do what I was told. I found something I shouldn’t have found, and someone sent me here because they wanted to make sure I didn’t bring it up somewhere inconvenient.”

  “Oh,” it said. Then, unexpectedly, “Want your leg back? It’s a bit chewed up, but it’ll still work.”

  It brandished the mutilated peg leg at me—when did it pick that up?—and a gobbet of dropbear spit smacked into brown dirt.

  A rush of affection coursed through me. That was a good leg, that was. Lasted through the second half of a war and a dropbear attack. I’d polish up those bite marks nice and shiny and it’d b
e just as good as new.

  “Go on, then,” I said.

  The kid cheerfully tried to screw my mutilated wooden leg back on—all right for it to be cheerful, it was only sporting a black eye and bloody nose; no one was going to kill it on sight—and promptly knocked me over again.

  I glared at it and tried to get up, but something bigger sent me flying head-over-heels with one blow. When I managed to unscramble my limbs and my brains, there were three much larger figures between me and the kid. It wasn’t until I was upright that I realized who they were, and then I wished I’d stayed on the ground.

  I knew them all.

  Massive, silver, and icily furious, that one in the centre was Lord Sero, heir to half the Behind world. Zero. The kid had said Zero. If the kid’s Zero was Lord Sero, then—then that Athelas it’d spoken of—

  My stomach dropped even further. At Lord Sero’s left hand was Athelas, steward to Lord Sero; genteel, pleasant, and smiling politely. And if you don’t know better than to trust that, there’s no hope for you. On Lord Sero’s right was that vampire. Not everyone knows about him; I guess I’m just lucky. I’d never met him before—though I’d seen his tracks—didn’t want to meet him now. He was looking at me like he was curious about how long it would take to drain the blood from someone of my size as opposed to someone of a more average height.

  All three of them. All three of them together.

  I was going to die.

  Great. Twice in one day. If it came right down to a choice between Lord Sero and dropbears, I would have picked the dropbears. At least they were stupid enough to go for a wooden leg.

  I didn’t even have time to blink before Lord Sero had me by the throat. I gaped up at him, completely out of words. What could I say? I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. If he was angry at me for saving the kid, then why was he standing between me and it? If he was trying to protect it, why was he scruffing me?

  So I just sort of choked at him for a moment or two until he said, in icy, fragmented words, “What. Are you doing. With. My. Pet?”

  I choked at him again. This time, it could have sounded like, “What?”

  “Ah, baegopa!” sighed the vampire, around Lord Sero’s shoulder. I didn’t know what he meant by the words, but the cold, sharp-edged grin he shot me was pretty clear. If Lord Sero didn’t choke me to death, the vampire would drain me.

  “Oi!” yelled a voice. I had the feeling it had been yelling for a while, but do excuse me if I was more concerned with the vampire and the fae. “Let go of him!”

  Lord Sero turned, taking me with him. The vampire did too, still showing that half, tooth-edged, and utterly humourless grin, and we all stared at the kid. It stared right back at us, bloody, defiant, and ready to die. It looked so small and helpless.

  Did that little human thing really just raise its voice at the Lord Sero?

  “Let go of him!” it demanded again. This time it kicked him in the shin, too.

  I winced and ducked my head, but Lord Sero only blinked. He looked down at the kid and said in an experimental sort of way, “Bad Pet!”

  “He saved my life!” the kid yelled. “What did you hit him for?”

  Athelas, alone of the four of them, looked amused. “We may have acted rashly,” he said. “Zero, perhaps we should put our good friend the leprechaun down to recover. He seems anxious.”

  “Ajig baegopa,” said the vampire, but he put his hands in his pockets and backed away leisurely as if that’s what he’d been going to do anyway.

  “We’ll get you something else to eat,” Athelas said to the vampire, as Lord Sero put me down on the ground very gently. “Pet will finish preparing the meal when we get home.”

  “I should put holy water in it,” grumbled the kid.

  The vampire looked startled. “Ya! Petteu—noh—”

  “Holy water won’t kill him,” Lord Sero pointed out.

  “No, but it makes him sneeze something flamin’ good,” said the kid vindictively.

  “’S’cuse me,” I said. “But if you’ve decided not to kill me, maybe I could just slip away sort of quietly—”

  “What about your card?” the kid asked. “You can’t get back Behind, can you?”

  “I’ll sort something out,” I said hastily. “No need to worry yourself about me.”

  Athelas looked mildly amused. “What’s this about his card?”

  “He had one,” the kid said. “Someone made it black, though. I think they did it because he wouldn’t kill me.”

  The vampire’s eyes went dark again, and he took a step forward. Lord Sero didn’t move, but his voice was still cold when he asked, “So you were sent to kill Pet?”

  “You’ve scared him again!” the kid said accusatorily. “Look, his wooden leg is drilling holes in the ground!”

  I squeezed my eyes shut briefly and begged the kid, “Please stop trying to help me!” Every time it tried to help me, things got a little bit worse.

  “Someone’s sending people through Between,” the kid said. It didn’t listen real well, for someone with two ears still intact. “Far as I can tell, anyway. It’s what they did to Five-Four-one. They’re using normal Behindkind to murder humans, we think. They kick them through without warning, tell them to kill someone, and if they don’t their cards are blackened so they can never get back. But he didn’t kill me. I think that’s what the dropbears were for, to make sure.”

  “Who sent you?” Lord Sero asked. If I wasn’t already feeling icy to my toes, I would have frozen.

  “Can’t know for certain, your lordship,” I said stiffly, professional instinct taking over from personal. I must be crazy.

  “Ya,” said the vampire silkily. “Chugolae?”

  Even the kid looked worried. “He wants to kill you. Are you sure you really don’t know?”

  I cleared my throat. “Might have been a few odd quirks in the money trail of a company I’ve been following the last few months.”

  “What quirks?”

  “Um.” I glanced between Lord Sero and the vampire, unsure of which one I wanted to keep an eye on the most. “They’re a group called Allied Traders; they trade with a few companies on this side of Between.”

  The kid blinked. “There are other humans who know about the Between and Behind?”

  “You’re not the only one, sunshine,” I said, forgetting myself. I turned back to Lord Sero. “I mean, well, your lordship, um—well, they’ve been trading in what they call organic resources, but their holding sites are a front.”

  “No stock at any of them?”

  “Not a sausage. I only caught onto them because they’ve been trying to be a bit clever with their taxes. Last night I told my supervisor about the investigation so I could take it up the chain.”

  “And this morning you find yourself thrown into the human world with orders to kill a certain human or risk never coming home,” said Athelas. He was smiling. “A swift, decisive action.”

  “Got it in one,” I said. My tone might have been a bit sour; I wasn’t smiling about it all, but there was no way I was going to try and stop him from smiling. “And those empty warehouses—”

  “Ohhh!” said the kid. It was angry again. “They’ve been—the people are the stock? I know you said they were selling them, but—!”

  “Interesting.” That was Athelas again. Trust him to find it interesting. “A two-pronged business; Behind, a human stock mill—”

  “In the human world, a murder for hire set up,” I nodded. “It’s probably how they’re paying for their human stock. Want to bet they’re using all normal Behindkind for it? If I’m righteous, I can’t go home to tell about it; if I’m a killer, I’m home but in as deep as they are.”

  “Munjae dukae issoh,” said the vampire silkily.

  “Why two problems?” asked the kid. “We only need to find out who’s been sending Behindkind through to kill humans and stop them stealing other humans, don’t we? They’re the same problem.”

  “No, there are two pr
oblems,” agreed Lord Sero.

  “Perhaps three,” murmured Athelas, and for what felt like the first time in ages, I grinned a bit.

  Lord Sero shot him a frosty look.

  “A visit to the human front of Allied Traders is in order, I think,” said Athelas, ignoring both the frosty look from Lord Sero and a frowning one from the kid, who didn’t understand the interaction but definitely saw it.

  I grinned a bit more, because I wondered which one of them was going to tell their pet that the second problem was finding out who had hired someone to kill their pet through the intermediary of Allied Traders; or that the third problem was how that person knew this pet was cared for enough to merit being killed.

  “You,” Lord Sero said to me. “You’re coming, too.”

  That wiped the grin from my face. It’s probably part of why he said it. “Your lordship, they’ll kill me if I go there!”

  “They’ll kill you if they catch you here, too,” Athelas said mildly.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Got that idea myself.”

  There’s a certain kind of calm to company buildings Behind. Some of that is because they’re rooted in the surrounding greenery to keep their assorted Fae and Other employees as happy and productive as possible. Part of it is because Fae and Other are tricky folks who love to find tricky ways around business.

  There was a kind of calm to the human offices of Allied Traders, too; but this calm felt like more of a smug calm. It got up my nose because it suggested that no one could mess with them, and that anyone who did try to mess with them was going to have a bad time.

  It was a good feeling to break up a bit of that calm the moment I entered the building. It was a smallish two story building, unimpressive concrete on the outside but all white modernity on the inside, and I could feel the edge of Between that hung around it the minute I got in. They weren’t expecting a leprechaun, and they weren’t too happy to have one in there, either; all three of the secretaries in the lower level trotted after me, bleating, as I took the elevator up to the top floor.

  One of them must have managed to warn the top floor, because when the doors dinged open, there was a meeting party. Well, a guy in a suit, anyway. There were a few sleek cubicles up here, with a few sleek humans pretending to work while they stole glances at me, but when they saw that I was a leprechaun, half of them rose to their feet to gawk shamelessly.