Between Frames (The City Between Book 4) Read online

  “Can’t we practise outside next time?” I complained, rotating my shoulder. At least the numbness had worn off, but that just meant it hurt more. “Oi. Where have Athelas and JinYeong gone?”

  There was an emptiness to the lower house that I could feel seeping up the stairs. Now that I was used to people being here with me all the time, the lack of them was like a physical sensation.

  “They had things to do,” Zero said.

  “Right. S’pose you’re not going to tell me what they’re doing, either?”

  “Athelas is visiting the police station and JinYeong is kidnapping someone,” said Zero, his eyes just a touch lighter in colour.

  He was laughing at me. “Oh, very helpful,” I said, sarcastically. “Do I have to cook for the person he kidnaps, as well?”

  Zero considered that. “It won’t hurt,” he said. “If JinYeong tells them to eat, I’m sure they will.”

  And that reminded me. I’d been meaning to ask him for a while now, because I’d already asked JinYeong, and JinYeong didn’t know.

  “How come JinYeong’s persuasion doesn’t work on me, anyway?”

  “We’re not sure,” he said, and stopped short. His face had gone blank, and I was pretty sure that meant he was annoyed with himself for giving away even as little as that. Flamin’ fae. Always worried about giving away too much information. It wasn’t like it was gunna hurt them to tell me, after all. They just didn’t like ignorant humans getting less ignorant. Flamin’ hypocritical, if you ask me. They obviously just liked feeling superior.

  “What about yours?” I asked, but he was ready for that one.

  “What makes you think it doesn’t? Humans don’t remember fae coercion.”

  I sniffed, just to let him know I didn’t believe him, and headed off to the kitchen to cook dinner. Now that the kitchen was clean again, it was just a matter of cooking something that would take a bit less time than the chilli con carne that was meant to have been simmering on the stove for the last five hours.

  That would have been simmering on the stove for the last five hours if it wasn’t for the tar beastie that attacked me.

  Oh yeah. The tar beastie.

  “Oi,” I said through the doorway, the tray of steak I’d taken out of the fridge still in my hands. Good thing I’d stopped at the grocery store long enough to get it; there wasn’t much else the psychos would have thought of as dinner in the fridge.

  “Yes, Pet?” said Zero. He’d settled on the couch with a book spread open on the coffee table, and he was poring over it with a frown between his brows.

  “How’d that thing that attacked me get into the house?”

  Zero actually laughed. It was more of a short chuckle, and it cut off before I was certain I’d heard it, but it was a laugh. “Your questioning lacks focus, not to mention prioritisation,” he said, without looking up. “Next time, lead with the questions that are most important.”

  “I did,” I said. “Whatever it was, however it got in, I figured you blokes were already working on it. I was just curious.”

  “I can think of many questions that should be important enough to be asked first,” said Zero. “None of which involve any investigation we’re working on, or the reasons pertaining to doing so.”

  “If I could understand half of those words,” I began, in an injured tone, “then I’d be—”

  “Don’t pretend ignorance with me, Pet.”

  I nearly asked if he was calling me a liar, but I already knew the answer to that. “Yeah, but you’re not me,” I said. “And you lot keep saying that fae aren’t good at emotions and stuff, so—”

  Zero turned a page. “We’re not good at feeling emotions. We’re very good at reading and manipulating them.”

  “Yeah,” I said again. “But that means you’re not good at empathy, too. So I don’t reckon you’d know what’s important to me anyway.”

  “Your family is important to you,” said Zero. “Your house. Looking after people weaker than you. Curiosity. Surviving.”

  “My family’s dead,” I said flatly.

  “You,” said Zero, turning another page far too soon, “have a habit of making family with people you shouldn’t make family with.”

  “All right, all right,” I grumbled. “So you know some stuff. You know, for an emotionally constipated half-human, you’re pretty flamin’ keyed into feelings.”

  Zero looked up from his book, wholly startled. “What did you call me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “You want steak? ’Cos that’s a priority we’ve all got pretty straight, I reckon.”

  A faint smile came and went on Zero’s face. “It would be much more healthy for you if you reversed your list of priorities,” he said, and went back to his book. “And got rid of the soft heart that’s always taking you into trouble.”

  “Trouble, yeah,” I said, to the top of his head, “but I helped you lot to solve a few problems, didn’t I?”

  I think he muttered something beneath his breath, but since I was pretty sure he’d only deny it if I asked him what it was, I just turned back to the kitchen. By the time the steak had sat for a while, and the veggies were done, hopefully JinYeong would be back with whoever he was kidnapping, and Athelas would be back from his assignment—which, I strongly suspected, was helping Detective Tuatu talk to another detective.

  I was still chopping the veggies when someone knocked at the door.

  “Leave it,” said Zero, before I had a chance to move.

  “The lights are on,” I pointed out, without bothering to speak more softly. “They’ve gotta know we’re at home.”

  “It is not,” he said, very pointedly, “a priority. Kindly lower your voice.”

  “Yeah, but it might be for the person who’s knocking,” I called, tipping my chopped veggies into a saucepan. “You lot got alcohol in the house?”

  “Not for you.”

  “Rude!” I said. “I’ll be old enough to drink in a few days, you know. And it’s not for me, it’s for the sauce I was gunna make to go with the steak.”

  Zero considered that, then said, “Athelas has half a bottle of wine hidden somewhere.”

  “What, does he reckon I’m an alcoholic, too?” I said indignantly, rummaging around in the cupboards.

  “I think he prefers that JinYeong should not know about it. Pet?”

  “Yeah?” I wanted to ask why Athelas didn’t want JinYeong to know about the wine, but there was an undercurrent to Zero’s voice that made me wary. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I beg to differ,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, I’d like you to practise what you were doing last night.”

  “What, cooking? I’m already pretty good at that, so—”

  “The listening,” said Zero, cutting through my voice. “You were trying to listen to what we were talking about last night.”

  Beggar me. Did he notice, or did JinYeong rat me out? Either way, it was no use protesting ignorance to that impassive face.

  I blew out a breath, and then it occurred to me what he’d actually said. “Hang on, really?”

  Physical training, I could understand. That gave me an edge if I was attacked again. Teaching me how to covertly listen to people, on the other hand, gave me an edge I could use against my three psychos, and Zero must know it.

  “I prefer you not to give yourself away if we’ve got visitors.”

  “Hang on—are we likely to have more of that kind of visitors?”

  “Now and then, until I sort out a few things.”

  “Until you solve your murder, you mean.”

  “And if we see how you work, it will make it easier for us to tell if you’re trying to listen to us,” Zero added, ignoring my aside.

  “Right,” I said. That made sense. “Thought you were gunna tell me that I couldn’t be doing it or something.”

  “You can’t,” said Zero. “It’s not possible. But if you’re doing it, you should be doing it under supervision. Athelas will help you.”

  �
��So long as he isn’t going to bash me in the shins every time I don’t grab something sharp and pointy quickly enough,” I muttered. I was still sore, in more ways than one.

  Zero didn’t reply to that, so I turned on the stovetop for the veggies and went back to looking for Athelas’ secret wine.

  The steak was just finished cooking when JinYeong, looking particularly fine and pleased with himself, sauntered through the front door. That was weird, for a start, because like the other two psychos, he usually came into the house by way of Between.

  There was someone with him, though, which explained using the front door. Hang on—there were two people with him. A woman, her chic, untidy bun perched a little askew and her Doctor Who t-shirt just long enough to cover the waistband of her high-waist jeans, and a bloke, scruffy and bearded, carrying enough boxes to build a fort. The boxes had a logo on them, but I was too busy stickybeaking at the two visitors—kidnappees?—to see what it was.

  JinYeong led the two humans upstairs, a very well dressed pied piper, then came down again to look expectantly at me until I dished out his dinner.

  “Zero only said you were kidnapping one person,” I said to him. “I don’t have enough steak.”

  JinYeong shrugged one shoulder at me. Words filtered through Between that said, “If I eat, that’s all that matters.”

  “What are they doing up there, anyway?”

  “Pemil,” he said, grinning at me over his plate.

  “How come it’s a secret?” I demanded. “I could just walk upstairs and look!”

  “Later, Pet,” said Athelas, just a little before it registered in my distracted mind that the wall had become a bit less wall-ish beside me. I don’t know what place he was coming from, but wherever it was, it made the soft patch of kitchen he’d walked through all pink and gold around the edges. “First, dinner. I believe I smell a familiar bouquet…?”

  I meant to see the two humans safely out of the house again, but I fell asleep on the couch after dinner instead. Very pet-like of me, but really the only reason it happens so often is that my psychos are up at all hours and none of them need more than a few hours’ sleep each day.

  And then there was the time when I was dying over and over in my sleep, which tends to disrupt your sleep patterns a bit…

  I woke up to the sound of someone knocking on the front door, long and loud and desperate.

  “I think not,” said Athelas, as I sat up.

  “What? I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “Don’t answer the door. It’s nothing. My lord tells me we’re to practise your hearing. In my room, I have left a certain recording on a loop. I would like you to attempt to hear what it says.”

  “What, we’re starting before breakfast?” I protested, edging toward the kitchen. “I haven’t even had a cuppa, and Zero will want—”

  “I assure you that my lord is content,” said Athelas. “Moreover, Pet, trying to see who is at the door from that window is a useless exercise; Zero enchanted it last night to show nothing.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I protested. “I mean, yeah, I can understand enchanting it so no one can see in, but why enchant it so that no one can see out? What’s the use of that?”

  “I wonder?” murmured JinYeong to himself, in Korean. He was sitting elegantly on the stairs, goodness knows why.

  “No one asked you,” I told him.

  “The recording, Pet,” Athelas reminded me. “Kindly concentrate. What do you hear?”

  “Beggar all,” I said. It was true. I couldn’t hear a thing from Athelas’ room. Even if I strained my ears, all I could hear was the faint noise of Athelas’ trousers as his foot tapped in mid-air, one leg crossed over the other.

  “That’s a shame,” said Athelas. “Since that recording has to do with our investigation. I arranged it particularly for your benefit.”

  Interest flared in me, but there was nothing to grab onto; no immediate sound to pursue. How had I done it the other night?

  Something moved upstairs, a shiver of the house resettling part of itself into Between space, and I heard the squeak of leather as Zero left through the upstairs living room wall. When that sound faded, and the house shook itself back into normality, I still couldn’t hear a thing.

  “There’s nothing,” I muttered. “I can’t hear it.”

  “Perhaps we should have begun with you in your room as we did at first,” said Athelas thoughtfully. “I did not anticipate needing to help you on with something you seemed to have grasped all by yourself.”

  He gazed at me for a long time, his eyes very faintly amused, and it occurred to me suddenly what he was wondering.

  “You think I’m pretending not to know something,” I said.

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “You’re a one to talk,” I said gloomily. “You’re just distracting me so that Zero can sneak out and do dodgy stuff without me knowing.”

  “Dear me!” said Athelas. “Can you tell when we leave the house as well, Pet?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you know?”

  JinYeong chuckled in a sarcastic sort way, and said something that sounded very like, “Worried?”

  “I’ve yet to decide,” Athelas said. “Try again, Pet.”

  “Hang on, that’s it? That’s your teaching? Try again?”

  “What else did you expect me to say, Pet?”

  “Well,” I said uncertainly. “You’re not gunna tell me how I’m supposed to hear it?”

  “Unhappily, it is not a particular skill in which I excel.”

  “How come you’re teaching me, then?”

  “Well, as you so aptly pointed out a moment ago, Zero has left the house on his own business—”

  “Murder business, more likely,” I muttered.

  “—and since I am marginally more useful than JinYeong when it comes to this sort of thing—”

  “Hotsori,” muttered JinYeong.

  “—my lord asked me to supervise you.”

  “Yeah, well I can’t hear anything,” I said. I might have sounded a bit sulky, because I was half-convinced that there was no recording in his room, and the whole thing was just an elaborate ruse.

  “You managed well enough trying to hear us the night before last,” Athelas said.

  “Yeah, but you’re people, and I know you.”

  “Very well. We shall begin again with you in your room while JinYeong and I converse in this room.”

  “Nah,” I said. “That’s too easy.”

  “Easy in what way, Pet?”

  “Well, that’s just acoustics,” I said in surprise. “That beam that runs up through the roof goes through my bedroom. I can hear everything people say in the living room from there. That’d be cheating.”

  Athelas laughed softly. “I assure you, it’s nothing of the kind.”

  “Yeah, but it is,” I said, but I could hear the uncertainty in my own voice. “That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked. Even when—even when my parents were here, I could listen in on their conversations if I wanted to.”

  “If that is so, Pet, perhaps you’ll explain how you’re able to get any sleep in this house?”

  “I mean, I’m not concentrating on the noise all the time,” I protested. “Just when I go over there on purpose to hear something.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “You saying it’s got something to do with Between?”

  “If that’s the way you’d prefer to think of it, by all means.”

  “Well, it’s not like it’s me doing it!”

  “Is it not? I’m sure you know best about your skill set.”

  “Yeah? Then why do you sound so flamin’ sarcastic?”

  “Very well,” said Athelas, smiling faintly. “Perhaps we’ll play a game. For the next few minutes, I will speak with JinYeong about the case we’re working on. If you’re able to hear, you’ll satisfy your curiosity a great deal.”

  “What?” I said, startled. “Wait! I gotta prepare!”
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br />   But I could already see his lips moving, and no sound came out. Mongrel! JinYeong, silent and mocking, winked at me as I tried to scramble some thoughts together.

  I’d heard something first, last time. I’d heard a little bit of conversation coming through Between, and I’d sort of grabbed onto it. But I couldn’t hear anything from Athelas, so—

  Oh. Athelas.

  Last time, I’d had Athelas’ tea strainer, and that’s how I’d heard Athelas’ voice—through the faint sound of a spoon against the metal. After that, it had been Zero’s coffee mug. Maybe I needed another connection?

  What connection could I use? Not Athelas; I couldn’t fetch his teacup without giving it away.

  Vampire spit, though, I thought, looking directly at JinYeong. There was a connection, right?

  JinYeong’s brows went up, and his mouth pursed. What are you looking at? that look said.

  I grinned at him. Just you wait, you flaming blood sucker.

  His eyes narrowed at me, and his lips formed the word, “Mwoh?”

  I saw it, and I heard it.

  “JinYeong, do not bait the pet,” said Athelas mildly. “Allow her to concentrate.”

  “Nae maum daelo hae,” JinYeong told him.

  And Between translated it for me without me even having to think about it.

  “I do what I want.”

  I frowned and looked down just before Athelas’ eyes turned from JinYeong and to me, my heart skipping a beat. Careful. I was pretty sure that as soon as he knew I could hear, Athelas would stop talking about the case. The fun, for him, was talking about it when he knew I couldn’t hear. There was no fun in the Pet actually being able to hear, and there was a lot of trouble from Zero.

  JinYeong said, “Are we really to discuss the issue in front of her?”

  “For now. Did your people install everything we needed?”

  “They said so. They couldn’t lie to me.”

  I tilted my head a bit, still frowning, and let my eyes flick from JinYeong to Athelas. I heard JinYeong’s soft sniff of laughter.

  He said, slow and amused, “Yah. She’s trying so hard, isn’t she?”

  “Indeed,” said Athelas, watching me very carefully in return. “Now; the latest body was found in the bath house of a private club in Salamanca—the sort of place that you can’t get into without being known by the concierge.”