Between Jobs (The City Between Book 1) Page 5

  Usually it’s quiet.

  Today, as I hefted the garbage bag into the bin and put the lid on, the old bearded bloke dashed past me at a tottery sort of run, giggling to himself, and disappeared onto Liverpool Street.

  “Heck!” I said, catching myself against the brick wall before I fell over. “What’s got into the mad old coot? Why’s he following me again?”

  Before I had the chance to catch my breath, something huge and heavy fell from the bricked up doorway in the wall above and beyond me.

  I was already ducking when it hit the ground. I took cover behind the rubbish bins as something else hit the ground with a softer thump, and sat down pretty suddenly. It was Zero and JinYeong; and they had, impossibly, leapt through the empty brick wall.

  Zero scanned the wall and JinYeong’s teeth showed in a snarl as he darted a look around the alley itself.

  Oh man. What now? Had JinYeong finally goaded Zero into a fight? No; they were both looking back up at the brick wall.

  I’d been pretty sure they were capable of melting through walls—or bricked up doorways, in this case—but it was another thing to actually see it. And another thing for them to be doing it out in the open, where anyone else could see. Humans aren’t that blind, no matter what my three psychos seem to think.

  Should I try to sneak away? They weren’t looking at me, after all; or even anywhere near me. They were looking at the blank brick wall. The blank, bumpy, porcupiny wa—wait, what? What was wrong with the wall? Were those sticks poking out of the bricked up doorway? Or a person?

  It struggled through the brickwork inch by inch, much more slowly than Zero or JinYeong, until it was free and dangling by one—hand? Stump?—from the doorway.

  What was it? A scarecrow? It looked like one, all stick-like and rangy and borderline nightmare. Someone had twisted a bunch of thorns together and made a nightmare thing. Its arms were too long, or its legs were too short, and on the end of each arm were…

  What the heck were those?

  Were those claws?

  The scarecrow thing dropped from the doorway, creaking like branches in a high breeze. I ducked further behind my rubbish bin, rubbed my eyes, and popped up again.

  Yep. That’s what I’d seen. Now there were more of them; scarecrows with claws for hands, and they were still forcing themselves from the brick walls, one by one. JinYeong snarled again and dropped into a crouch, but Zero only loosened his sword and drew it out nice and slow. Like he wasn’t concerned at all.

  Show off.

  Well, if I’d really been doubting after all this time that they were fae and vampire, I wasn’t wondering any more. Animate scarecrows with claws for hands tend to take your belief to a new level pretty quickly.

  One of them leapt across the alley at Zero, long arms scything, and Zero’s sword swept up to meet it, far too swift and light for the size of it. Claws and wooden arms swung in a complete circle, snicking low and close by Zero’s face. Close enough to give him a haircut if he hadn’t ducked.

  What. The. Heck. Weren’t their arms connected to their backbone?

  Zero swung again, this time faster and harder, and a scarecrow arm went flying through the air, a stabby point of wire jabbing the air at its end.

  Oh yeah. They were scarecrows. Nothing was connected to anything else except by a dag-end of wire or twine.

  JinYeong leaped on the stricken scarecrow, faster even than Zero’s sword. I saw a flash of white teeth—which was stupid, because what could a vampire drink from a scarecrow? Sap?—and the thing collapsed, headless. JinYeong tossed the head at Zero, who batted it away and made a savage cut in the general direction of JinYeong’s head. JinYeong ducked and rolled forward, and another scarecrow head went tumbling across the pavement.

  “More coming!” Zero said sharply. Scarecrows tumbled from the wall, short legs clicking woodenly against the pavement and long arms balancing them. Steel scraped and threw up sparks on the pavement.

  JinYeong turned lightly on the balls of his feet and put his back to Zero’s. Flaming heck. Couldn’t he make up his mind whether he wanted to kill Zero or not? Zero stepped forward one pace, his shoulders aligning with JinYeong’s and his knees bending slightly.

  He was taking it more seriously now. My fingers closed around the handle of a bin lid, though it probably wouldn’t do me too much good as a shield if one of the scarecrows came after me, and inched forward for a better view.

  The scarecrows chattered, a wooden rustling of sound, and spread out around Zero and JinYeong, trailing more sparks along the pavement.

  Zero didn’t give warning; he cut a swathe before him, as quick as thought. Behind him, JinYeong leaped high and fast, his feet kicking against the alley wall. Scarecrows slashed and chattered, shedding chips of wood and straw, and Zero struck between them like lightening, his blade flickering too fast for my eyes to follow. JinYeong darted between both, now high and rolling across Zero’s back, now low and skidding between scarecrow legs.

  They were fast. They were so fast. But there were a lot of scarecrows, and they didn’t seem to be exactly dying, just missing limbs and swinging drunken arms that were off balance because another had been cut or torn off. I didn’t see when it happened, but somehow JinYeong was separated from Zero and driven up the alley toward me. A few of them followed him, but most of them redoubled their attentions on Zero, a thick, unstoppable thicket of wood and metal that mounted up and crawled right over him. There was a groaning of wood, and a sudden yell from Zero, and something bright and shining went flying right over my head.

  It hit the pavement with a clang, raising a few sparks of its own.

  Oh boy. Zero had lost his sword.

  I threw a look at JinYeong, but he was too busy fighting off four of the monsters to have a hand free for the sword, though I was pretty sure he’d seen it flying. The scarecrow monsters ignored it; maybe they thought it was no use now it wasn’t attached to Zero’s hand.

  I looked at it, then at the tangle of wood that was all I could see of Zero.

  He’d be fine, right? That big man, all muscle and speed?

  But then why was my sneaker edging forward? Why was it doing that?

  It’s not like I knew how to fight. These psychos had invaded my house and my life; I didn’t owe them anything. But…well, it was psychos or monsters, wasn’t it? It all came down to whether I wanted the psychos or monsters to win, and now that I’d been living with the psychos for a while, I didn’t think I could let them die and go back to the silence of my house with the knowledge I could have helped.

  My sneaker edged forward again, and a curve of dented metal grew in my vision. One of my hands, shaking, had put up the garbage can lid like a shield. Ah heck. I was going.

  I was going!

  One of the scarecrows leapt for JinYeong’s back as I sprinted past it. Something wooden and clicky swooped over my head, a severed scarecrow arm, and something wicked sharp caught my shirt at the back. I didn’t think; I used the pull as a fulcrum and did my best goal-scoring kick at the hilt of the sword.

  It connected. Oh boy did it connect. I gasped in pain, dragging the scarecrow down with me as I fell, and the sword skittered right into the middle of the scarecrow thicket around Zero. My arm flew up in the fall, rubbish bin lid and all, and clanged very satisfyingly against something wooden.

  I scrambled to my feet, still gasping, and hurled the lid into the melee. I think it took off a head, and I saw JinYeong rising from the clutches of his attackers. He leapt across their backs, snatching up heads and arms, and tumbled over the broad shoulder of Zero.

  As his feet hit the ground, light and sure, Zero said sharply, “Safe, JinYeong?”

  JinYeong was laughing, his eyes bright; the look he threw Zero was almost…brotherly? “Ne,” he answered.

  Reminded by the exchange that I wasn’t as safe as I could be, I ducked behind the rubbish bins again. I didn’t have time to be dying; I had to live to my eighteenth birthday and try to get my parents’ house ba
ck.

  I could have stayed out in the open. Now that Zero and JinYeong were back together, the fight was short-lived and absorbed them both completely. The scarecrows, once a seemingly endless number, were beginning to dwindle. While JinYeong wrenched off arms, Zero cut off heads; a well-oiled machine. Enemies or not, they’d obviously been very good friends, once.

  I left them to it and sneaked back into the café. The boss snarled at me and I was almost glad for it; it was a normal kind of horrible instead of a weird, unworldly kind of horrible I’d just come from.

  I finished work early—well, the boss kicked me out—but I still had to sneak through the window when I got home because a shadow moving across the kitchen window told me that one of them was already home. Athelas, probably. Good thing I’d seen that shadow, or I might have been in trouble.

  I heard the front door open as I sneaked across the carpet in the upstairs living room. That must be Zero and JinYeong back. I crept to the top of the stairs and got down on my stomach to peek through the triangle wedge of space between the stair frame and floorboards.

  They were both still alive, then, I thought, as they stepped up into the kitchen, all bloody and torn as I’d seen them last. Had they been walking around Hobart like that for two hours?

  Flaming psychos.

  Zero had four gashes of dark blue sticky stuff between belt and shoulder, and if they thought that colour of blood was normal to be strolling around town with, they were off in the head. I mean, wander around Hobart all bloody and you’re bound to stand out, but blood that colour?

  Athelas said, more sharply than I’d heard him before, “What happened?”

  Zero stripped off his shirt. “Nothing much. JinYeong and I were following a trace of rogue magic from around the house, and some of the Between denizens objected to it. We lost it after Spiny Men showed up, for some reason, and they’ve fouled it for us now.”

  JinYeong muttered and displayed his own injury through the tatters of his shirt. It was bleeding more sluggishly than Zero’s claw marks, and the blood was thicker, too. Almost black instead of blue. Seriously. Didn’t any of them bleed like normal people?

  “I’ll get you a new shirt,” Zero said. He sat down in one of the kitchen chairs, half in view and half out of view. “It wasn’t particularly useful, but it was nice to get a workout. I haven’t been exercising as much as I should lately.”

  “Poison?” Athelas examined the tears on Zero’s torso, then looked up at Zero himself, narrowly. “There is poison. Not a particularly strong one, but if I don’t treat it, it’ll be uncomfortable. You should have been more careful.”

  I hastily gave myself a lookover for broken skin as Zero said, “No need. I knew you’d be able to draw it out. Look after JinYeong first.”

  “JinYeong can look after himself,” said Athelas.

  Phew. No cuts. I put my eye up against the space again, and saw that Athelas hadn’t moved away from Zero. Not a very obedient steward, was he.

  He added, “He’s technically dead, anyway.”

  JinYeong shrugged and sprawled out elegantly on one of the kitchen chairs. He looked like a portrait of a young nobleman, dying young and beautiful.

  That’s talent. The bloke can even sit in an annoying way.

  Zero threw a look at him. “You’re bleeding on the floor.”

  “Hyung.” There was a reproachful note to JinYeong’s voice.

  “Thank you for getting my sword back to me,” said Zero, with as little expression as he’d told JinYeong he was bleeding on the floor. “I thought I’d lose an arm.”

  JinYeong’s lip lifted slightly. “Jonun aniaeyo.”

  “Then who was it?” Zero sat up straight, frowning, disturbing Athelas’ work—which, to be honest, didn’t look like much. He was moving his hands over the four claw-marks on Zero’s torso without touching them.

  Only, did they look sort of smaller and less bloody than they’d looked a minute ago?

  “You should stop moving,” Athelas said mildly. “Unless you want an extra layer of skin grown somewhere it shouldn’t be.”

  Yeah, they were definitely smaller.

  Zero sat back again, but he said, “Someone kicked my sword toward me. I heard the foot connect, and the rattle across the pavement. I doubt one of the Spiny Men did it.”

  JinYeong said a surprised, questioning sentence from his couch.

  “Nothing? You didn’t smell anything at all?”

  “Ne.”

  “Someone was there.”

  So the all-knowing fae don’t know everything? I felt pretty pleased with myself; I’d heard so much about humans this and humans can’t that, that it was pretty amusing to confound the mighty fae.

  That’ll teach ’em to talk about humans like they were dogs and cats, I thought happily as I stole away to my room to listen from greater safety. It’s not our fault if we can’t walk through walls and fight nightmare monsters without dying. Or appear and disappear. It’s not like it’s something we’re born with. Sorta makes you wonder what kind of natural abilities fae are born with—actually, it sorta makes you wonder if they’re born at all. Maybe they’re hatched. I don’t know. I’m just a stupid human.

  The week after JinYeong’s nose began working well enough to find traces of another human’s blood at the house across the road, I left the window open for myself again. I didn’t really think I’d need it; now that they had a real lead to look into, they were mostly out doing whatever Enforcers or Investigators—or whatever they were—did when they found a lead. So I wasn’t surprised to find the house empty when I got back after work, and I wasn’t shy about using the back door instead of the window, either.

  Turns out it wasn’t really empty, but I didn’t find that out until I’d wandered into the kitchen for coffee, and a narrow-eyed vampire came tearing through from the lower living room, coat flying. I was lucky; I saw his shadow before I saw him, and I was already ducking behind the kitchen island.

  I don’t know what the heck he was chasing, or what he thought he heard, but he skulked around the kitchen for a good fifteen minutes while I crouched in the cupboard beneath the island, my arms wrapped around my knees and expecting the lattice doors to be snatched open at any minute. The worst of it was that I could see him clearly through the lattice, and despite the fact that the cupboard was a lot darker than the kitchen, it felt like I was as easy to see as he was; that he was playing with me.

  JinYeong only stopped prowling around the kitchen when Athelas arrived. I saw him scowling, so I knew who had arrived before I heard the faint tap tap of Athelas’ shiny shoes against the kitchen floor.

  “You seem busy,” said Athelas. He said it in his quietly amused sort of way, and I wasn’t surprised to see a dangerous glitter come to JinYeong’s eyes. He obviously felt that he was being laughed at.

  He said something sharp and annoyed that made Athelas’ brows go up.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” he said mildly. “Aren’t you rather too energetic for this time of day?”

  JinYeong snarled at him and left the kitchen, though I don’t think he went far. Athelas, still smiling faintly, prowled around the kitchen, making himself a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table, crossing one leg over the other. He was very tidy and civilised, and very annoyingly in the way. How was I supposed to get into my bedroom when a slim, dapper fae was sipping tea at the kitchen table, smiling gently at the steam? What did he have to smile about, anyway?

  Maybe he liked annoying JinYeong. I could understand that.

  I sighed, and resigned myself to being stuck in the kitchen until they all went to their own rooms. They didn’t sleep as much as humans, but they almost always went into their own rooms after eleven o’clock anyway. They probably got sick of each other. I could understand that, too. Between Zero’s everlasting sharpening of knives, Athelas’ quiet little digs, and JinYeong’s whinging, they probably each liked their own space.

  Zero arrived not much later; I saw his leather-clad legs appr
oaching the kitchen island before I heard him. JinYeong didn’t seem to have the same trouble. He darted up into the kitchen again at the same time, speaking rapidly.

  Zero listened more closely than Athelas had done, but his reply was nearly as dismissive. “I thought your nose wasn’t working here.”

  “Ne, keundae—” JinYeong spoke again, as rapidly as before, and stopped expectantly. Through the latticed doors, I could see the alertness to his usually casual shoulders. What had bitten him?

  “I haven’t noticed anything,” Zero said, when he’d finished. “And I would have noticed—Athelas would have noticed. Do you know anything about it, Athelas?”

  “I’m inclined to think JinYeong is suffering some ill effects from being unable to use his nose as usu—”

  An indignant outpouring from JinYeong interrupted him.

  “I carefully refrained from saying you were imagining it,” pointed out Athelas, into the lull that followed.

  He had, too. Very carefully. I wasn’t surprised to see the snarling look JinYeong sent him; though I was surprised to see the way Athelas responded. Eyes dancing, his lips tilted in the most indulgent of smiles.

  JinYeong looked away, murder in his eyes.

  “Keep an eye on it,” said Zero, to Athelas, ignoring that little byplay. “Let me know if you notice anything.”

  “Very well,” Athelas agreed. “Do you have some time at the moment?”

  JinYeong began to say something else, a distinct pout to his mouth, but Zero talked over him. “JinYeong and I are going to try and follow that particular magic again. There was an older trace that might not be so difficult to follow.”

  JinYeong smiled at Athelas, more than a little bit smug. Good grief, how old was he? No wonder Athelas liked needling him.

  “Very well,” said Athelas again. “I’ll try our helpful real estate agent again tomorrow, in that case. Perhaps we can learn more about our victim from him.”

  “You might ask something about the previous occupants of this place, too,” said Zero.

  Athelas raised one brow. “Important, is it?”