All the Different Shades of Blue: A City Between novelette Read online

  “Yes,” I said hastily, ducking my head away by reflex as the tray passed a little too close for comfort. I was far from objecting to being doused with water, but if we would eventually be affected by the music, it was best to waste no time. It didn’t escape my notice, however, that she had again avoided answering my question.

  “Set them out around the outside of the booth,” I told her. “Around the outside of my wheelchair, too; I can’t hear the music all the time, and it can sneak up on me, too.”

  “Pretty handy, isn’t it?” Pet said, laying out a semicircle of glasses. “All this stuff around, just waiting to be used. Reckon they wanted you to try and get out?”

  I frowned. “I don’t think so. Even if they didn’t manage to catch me by surprise, they would have assumed I’d try to hack my way out without worrying too much about goblin music.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t hear it properly,” Pet said. “Reckon you would have decided you could hack your way out before it sneaked into your mind, too? Seems to me that the hope of holding out long enough to hack your way out would be a good way to distract you for long enough to be caught by the music.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to hack my way out anyway,” I said grumpily. “And if I do, it’ll only be by the skin of my teeth. All this—” I waved one hand at the general, Thralled populace of the café, “will have to stay as it is. I might be able to give the two of us a way out, but I can’t save them. The goblins’ll be happy enough with that.”

  Surprised, Pet asked, “What d’you mean?”

  “They’re already lost,” I said. I didn’t want to explain to that big-eyed face that once we escaped from the café, each and every one of these humans would be lost to the human world completely. The only thing keeping the music from taking over completely was the last threads of the protection spell, which had woken to the danger of that load-bearing magic too late. Unfortunately, it was now also thing keeping us in the café. I could have broken the spell that originally kept Pet from leaving, but Protection spells tend to take the approach that once the worst has happened, containment is the only safe procedure. I could already see the layers of it around the café, now that it recognised the foreign, dangerous magic that twined around itself; it was drawing in on itself, tightening its hold on the café.

  To Pet’s expectant face, I said reluctantly, “To escape—if we can escape—we’ll have to shatter the protection spell completely. No one will be able to get out, and it’s unlikely that anyone will survive. The thrall spell in the music will turn inward for power, draining the humans to keep itself running.”

  “That doesn’t work for me,” said Pet. She grabbed two pots of pistachios from the counter and brought them back to our table. “Eat up and figure it out. If this thing is gonna turn on itself like a black hole, you’d better find us another way out. All of us.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Pet didn’t give me a chance.

  She asked, “Did it seem like they waited until I was in here to close off the exit?”

  It was my turn to blink, then think. The timing had been, at the very least, coincidental. Pet was too regular a visitor to be unremarked. At last, I replied, “Perhaps so.”

  Pet grinned. “Bit stupid, aren’t they?”

  If there was anything I’d thought about the goblins who ran the club below, it wasn’t that they were stupid. But I couldn’t help feeling uneasy, because it occurred to me suddenly that despite being trapped in a café with fifteen or so enchanted humans, Pet hadn’t once shown any signs of panic—nor, if it came to that, succumbing to the same enchantment.

  I drew in a breath through my nose, my fingers curling away from the keyboard, and turned in my chair to face her. “Who are you? Really?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I’m a pet.”

  “I thought you meant that your name is Pet.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what they call me.”

  “Why did you say they’re stupid? The goblins?”

  “Well, ’cos of trapping you here without trying to immobilise you properly,” said Pet agreeably. “But mostly ’cos of trying to trap me when they should know whose pet I am.”

  “Who—whose pet are you?”

  “Well,” said Pet, lifting her chin at the window, “his, for starters.”

  I followed her gaze, and let out an involuntary hiss, starting back in my wheelchair. There was a person there, his perfectly creased trousers and impeccably white jumper at odds with the dirty hostel wall across the road behind him. He could have been Korean or Japanese, I wasn’t entirely sure which; but of one thing I was absolutely certain.

  He was a vampire. Unlike human kinds, which are always difficult for me to tell apart, Behindkind are very distinct.

  The vampire rapped on the window, his eyes half-lidded, and pointed at the door. Much to my relief, his gaze seemed to be focused on Pet. I absolutely did not want the attention of this very well dressed and poised vampire. He already looked as though he was annoyed, and vampires aren’t the most well-adjusted Behindkind at the best of times.

  “What?” Pet called through the window. The loudness of her voice made me wince, but none of the Thralled humans around us so much as jumped.

  The vampire’s eyes flickered shut for a moment and then opened again with a distinct gleam of menace. He jerked his head at the door and said something that wasn’t English. It could have been something like, “Mun yolo.”

  “Can’t,” said Pet, turning back to the glasses. The liquid in some of them had already sunk; she refilled those, ignoring the vampire entirely in a way that brought cold chills to my neck.

  The vampire thumped at the window with the side of his fist and jerked his chin at the door again, then turned his head on one side, his eyes narrowly on Pet.

  She stuck out her tongue at him.

  I coughed a laugh into my coffee before I could help it, and thought that Pet might have grinned across at me briefly.

  The vampire bared his teeth and rapped once more on the window, this time with distinct warning.

  “It’s no good doing that,” Pet called to him. “I can’t get the door open.”

  “Ku saramun—”

  “He can’t open it, either. It’s magic.”

  “Ssulmo obnun saramiya.”

  Pet thumped the window with her clenched fist, startling me and the vampire equally. “Better than being a person without manners!”

  “Noh, Petteu!”

  “Oh shut up,” grumbled Pet. “It’s no good whinging at the window; something’s gone weird in here and we’ve gotta fix things before we can get the door open. Why don’t you make yourself useful and bring Zero here?”

  The vampire shrugged and spoke again.

  “Why don’t you know where he is? I thought you were all having a day off—he was still there when I left the house!”

  “Why do you want Zero?” I asked, above the vampire’s reply. “Is he someone who can help open the door?”

  “Dunno,” said Pet, frowning. “But he’s pretty good at breaking stuff, so probably. He’s usually around if I’m in trouble, so I thought he’d be here. Oi!”

  I jumped, but she wasn’t addressing me.

  To the vampire, she said, “If you had a phone, you could have called him.”

  “Nega wae?”

  “I didn’t bring my phone with me. I was just coming out to get coffee for you lot!”

  The vampire shrugged again. “Nan obseo.”

  Pet thumped the window at him and yelled, “Get a phone, you old fossil!”

  He fixed her with a black look and said something I couldn’t understand. From the tilt of his chin, I guessed that he had said he did have a phone.

  “Why don’t you carry it, then?” demanded Pet, confirming my suspicion. “It’s not like you lot can talk via telepathy!”

  She made an annoyed sound, turned her shoulder to him, and said to me, “Sorry. It’s only really Zero that’s useful.”

  The
vampire’s eyes flashed, and I saw the snarl of two crossed incisors. He might not speak English, but he certainly understood it.

  Perhaps he would have fulminated silently at the window if Pet had given him more attention. With her shoulder to him, he prowled across the footpath and leaned elegantly into a parking sign instead, his eyes dark and dangerous.

  “Just ignore him,” Pet advised me. “He’s always stroppy. Funny, though—it’s not his dinner tonight, so I don’t see why he came looking for me. Want me to get a few more glasses?”

  She jumped up and went to get them before I could agree, or ask what dinner had to do with anything, or even protest that I had no desire to be left alone with the vampire—with or without a good few centimetres of glass between us.

  Failing that, I tried not to catch his eye. It’s foolish to catch a vampire’s eye in any circumstances, but this one was already significantly annoyed and I had the distinct feeling that I was somehow exacerbating that annoyance to an unwise degree.

  Unfortunately, as soon as Pet left the booth there was a flash of movement in my periphery. I looked up instinctively, to find that the vampire was watching me with his lips pursed.

  I would have cleared my throat, but I didn’t seem to be able to swallow. That amused him; at least, I saw his mouth curve up at the edge with malicious satisfaction, but there was absolutely no warmth of humour in his eyes. He displayed one wrist to the window, watch-face foremost, and tapped it lightly, one brow raised. Then he solemnly twitched that finger back and forth in the air, remonstratingly.

  He thought I was taking too much time? But it had taken days of testing to have this hack catch on as it had, and I still didn’t know why it had. Even if I could wriggle back into my program, there was no way I could dismantle the hack in a single morning, if I could dismantle it at all. I had no idea what had made it work correctly in the first place; or what the goblinkind had already had working in the background before my own spell took, for that matter. My goblinkind employers had been trickier than I had anticipated.

  Perhaps the vampire understood my panic-stricken look. The other brow went up, and he traced one long index finger slowly across his throat, the pointed tip of one incisor showing from the lips that still curved with such a lack of humour.

  I swallowed, involuntarily this time, and ducked my head to my work once again. If Pet had a vampire at her back, who else did she have? She had said owners, I was sure—and that Athelas she mentioned; who was he?

  I opened my mouth to ask her about it when she came back with a carafe of water, but before I could, she asked, “Oi. Can they can see us in here?”

  “They can,” I told her ruefully. “There’s a system I’ve been wanting to try out—”

  Pet’s voice was gloomy. “Bet you invented a magic-based security system and they paid you to install it.”

  “I did, and they did.”

  “Oh well, I reckoned you might have. Can they hear us?”

  “No. I hadn’t worked that part out yet.”

  “Oi.”

  “What?” I asked. There was a note of hope, or perhaps interest, in her voice. What had she thought of?

  “If they can see us, reckon we better play with ’em a bit.”

  “How exactly can we play with them? If it comes to that, why do you want to play with them? I thought you wanted to get out.”

  “Yeah,” said Pet thoughtfully, “but I reckon they know who I am, and I reckon they should know better than to try and trap me here. Anyway, I just meant that if we want them to think we’re starting to be affected by the music we’ll have to start doing things in a loop, sort of. Remind me to go get water again in five minutes.”

  “Ah,” I breathed, my eyes lighting up. “So that they don’t look too carefully while we’re busy trying to get out, you mean?”

  “’Zactly,” she said. “Oi.”

  I couldn’t help the hiss of laughter. “Yes, Pet?”

  “Remember how you said you could only save us two, and I said you’d better find a way to save us all?”

  For some reason, that made me laugh again. There was little enough amusing about our situation. “I remember.”

  “I s’pose you can’t hack back into your program now that it’s shut you out?”

  My pride stung, I said a little bit shortly, “No. I’d have to get to the original program, and that’s on my computer at home. And if I tried from here, they’d notice as soon as I started fiddling with the system.”

  “Ye-es,” said Pet, slowly. “Maybe we should try to call out, in that case.”

  “Call out?”

  “Well, I can’t get out to get help, so—”

  “What help? How many more humans around here know about Behind?”

  “Just me,” Pet reassured me. “But if we can do a sort of internet call out, maybe Athelas can help from his side.”

  “I can do something like that,” I agreed. “But I’ll need to know where to make the, um…call.”

  “Like a physical address?”

  “Is Athelas Behindkind?”

  “Yeah—fae.”

  “Then a physical address will do.”

  “Hang on,” she said, as if she’d only thought of it. “We don’t have a computer at the moment. Someone sort of blew it up.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Pet looked knowledgeable. “Ah, is that ’cos you’re using the bit of your computer that isn’t really a computer to do it?”

  “Exactly so,” I agreed. I couldn’t help being impressed and a little bit charmed. There was more cunning to Pet than her trusting and trustworthy face at first let on. It was pleasant, moreover, not to have to explain things—even if it was also slightly worrisome. “If he’s at the physical address, I’ll be able to contact him.”

  She glanced around the café suspiciously, then leaned in and whispered it in my ear.

  For my part, I tried to pretend I hadn’t committed it to memory as I mirrored my magic to my typing, and laid in the directions for the call out. I shouldn’t really be thinking of anything but getting out of this café right now. It was bad enough that a pair of straightforward grey eyes had guilted me into doing things in a way that might see us all killed instead of escaping straight away and preserving at least my own and her life.

  The protection spell, laced with my own hack and the goblins’ ambient track, considered the spike of information-laden magic, and allowed it through. Just an outgoing call. Just a normal function of the internet.

  “Good!” I breathed, as the outgoing connection sought and found the right address. Now all I had to do was find something to attach the connection to—something or someone.

  I could see him straight away, a single, powerful plume of Behindkind energy that crackled like lightening. I winced, but connected to it anyway, gasping when the strength of that fae touched the connection.

  It seemed to me that someone said, “Dear me!” in a soft, interested voice; but just then, Pet said, “It worked!”

  I must have been made of stone if I couldn’t be warmed and pleased by the brightness of awe in her voice. My smile must have caught the vampire’s eye through the window, because he looked coldly at me and smirked just slightly.

  I looked away and back to the laptop screen, which now displayed a living room with two full, fat sofas and an old-fashioned, studded leather chair.

  “Oi!” yelled Pet. “Athelas! Where’ve you got to?”

  A murmuring of sound began to the edges of the vision, growing louder, then someone said, quite clearly this time, “Dear me! What trouble have you got yourself into, Pet?”

  “I don’t like the way you say that,” Pet said, indignantly. “Actually, I’ve—well, I’m calling to see if you can help, so I s’pose that’s fair enough. You know that protection spell Zero put on the café?”

  A slender, middle-aged fae came into the frame, holding a teacup and saucer. “I do,” he said. He looked very pleasant, unlike the vampire outside, and I felt, insen
sibly, relieved.

  Then it struck me exactly what Pet had said. Her Zero had put in place the protection spell I had had such difficulties getting around?

  “Yeah, well, someone paid ’Zul to hack it,” she said.

  “Marazul,” I corrected her absent-mindedly. Good heavens! Who exactly was her Zero? And where had he gotten such ancient, powerful magic?

  “Dear me!” said Athelas, a third time. “What an unfortunate time for Zero to have left the house. He was in rather a hurry, so I didn’t like to stop him.”

  It didn’t seem to me that there was any particular meaning to the words, nor to the mild eyes that gazed at us, but Pet said, “It’s all right. ’Zul is a friend. He’s not holding me prisoner. That’s the goblins.”

  “Can you not access Between?”

  “She’s a human,” I pointed out. Of course she couldn’t access Between. Even touching it—even—well, she had touched it earlier, but that was a vastly different thing to accessing Between. Touching Between was impossible, but accessing Between was more impossible.

  Athelas ignored me, his eyes on Pet.

  “Nope,” she said. “Not for getting out; I already had a bit of a go. I can pull things through, but the protection spell has joined up with a thrall the goblins have started up. Reckon it doesn’t want to let anything out.”

  “What a shame,” sighed Athelas. “This is really Zero’s field of expertise. I suppose JinYeong is there with you?”

  “He’s outside. Mostly glaring.”

  “He has been particularly sulky lately.”

  “That’s what I thought!” said Pet, with the pleased air of one who has found herself unexpectedly in the right. Then, as if remembering her situation, she said rather more gloomily, “I suppose you’ll just have to send Zero along when he arrives, then.”

  “I imagine he’ll arrive soon enough,” Athelas said. “Don’t you?”

  Pet, slightly annoyed, asked, “He’s still got a tracker trace on me?”

  “And isn’t it a good thing!” said Athelas, smiling gently. Then he pinched the connection away from himself, away from the house, and let it go.