Pet and the troika

Chapter 1

Chapter One
Change is a funny thing. Sometimes it creeps up on you like someone’s flamin’ pong of a cologne, overtaking the room in miniscule, unseen increments until it’s in your lungs and hair and clothes, tinging the air in the room with a faint blue cast.
Sometimes it’s obvious, like the murderous look that the vampire tosses at the huge, white fae at the head of the table over breakfast. Or the cold, emotionless look with which the fae meets that fiery glance, and the blunt words, “Don’t show your teeth at me unless you want them ripped out of your head, JinYeong.”
Sometimes it’s soft and subtle, like the fae steward with the brown waistcoat murmuring, “Perhaps we could refrain from unpleasantness at the breakfast table, my lord? The pet has barely settled in again.”
And then sometimes it’s something as big as your former owners coming to rescue you and a leprechaun who got caught up in someone’s anti-Family machinations instead of leaving you to die with the dropbears, even though they’re no longer contractually obliged to do it.
“I want to meet your human friend,” said Zero at the breakfast table that morning, roughly a week after the Great Dropbear Incident. Maybe it was in deference to Athelas’ plea, but he had turned his chilling blue eyes away from JinYeong’s liquidly murderous ones.
“No,” I said. “Givus the jam, JinYeong.”
Across the table, the vampire turned his eyes from Zero and let them rest on me. He considered me for far longer than it should have taken to decide whether or not he was going to comply, then picked up the jam in a desultory fashion and put it down precisely in front of me.
To Zero, he said, “I have met the friend. You do not need to.”
There was that idea of change again: JinYeong being weird. Well, weirder than usual.
“Pet,” said Athelas, on something of a sigh. “Is it really necessary to argue upon every point?”
“Yeah,” I said, because sometimes…sometimes the change is so faint that if feels like nothing has changed at all.
It wasn’t so much that everything needed to be argued, it was just that I was still trying to figure out the things I should be objecting to. It made me more martial than usual, but so far I hadn’t found a good way to differentiate between the things I should object to, and those that were fine. Mostly, over the last week, I’d fallen into the habit of doing what I was told when it came to Zero’s orders on Behindkind stuff, and pushed back on everything that had to do with humans. My three psychos weren’t the best judges of what was best for humans, but it hadn’t stopped them deciding stuff anyway. Usually their decisions left humans out in the cold when it came to trouble with Behindkind: that was exactly what I was here to stop.
Or at least, that was what I’d come to believe.
“Anyway,” I said to Athelas, feeling as though I needed to defend myself. “Unpleasantness at the breakfast table isn’t my fault: JinYeong’s being snippy again.”
He was being more than snippy, actually; he was being downright stroppy.
“I’ll give you credit for not starting the fight,” conceded Athelas, and I was left with the impression that, in some way or other, he still blamed me for the unpleasantness.
That was flamin’ rude, because I hadn’t even been downstairs yet when stuff started flying around the house; including JinYeong, who went flying through a wall. I’d been sleeping in because I’d about had it with pretty much all the inhabitants of my house and didn’t really feel like getting them breakfast. I didn’t know exactly what had started the fight, but I did know that JinYeong was looking pretty worse for the wear when I got downstairs, and that Zero was looking slightly less ice-like than usual, which meant he’d been getting exercise.
“I will wait to meet your friend,” said Zero, and if before I’d got the idea that Athelas hadn’t changed his mind earlier, I had that feeling much more strongly now. Zero hadn’t decided that he didn’t need to meet Morgana; he had just decided that he didn’t need to do it right now.
Well, that was something, anyway.
Pushing it a bit, I asked, “Who was that at the door this morning?”
“Detectives,” Zero said briefly, surprising me.
I was gunna have to get used to the new state of him actually telling me things. Maybe when I got used to it, I’d be able to start working on learning when he was telling me part of the truth, and all of it, ’cos I hadn’t been clever enough to work that into our interim agreement.
I felt Athelas’ gaze on me and flicked my eyes over to meet it. As usual, he was looking serene and a bit amused; I wouldn’t have bet very highly against him knowing exactly what it was I was regretful about.
“Perhaps you’ll remember that we had another death in the area recently, Pet,” he said.
He wasn’t just talking about a death; he was talking about a Death—the latest in a series of similar murders that had begun in my area with a dead body outside the window. Which series was, itself, part of a series of similar murders all over the world; and, apparently, all through the trifle of layers that was Behind (the fae world), Between (the weird, squishy bit between us and them), and the human world. The victims had been a mix of Behindkind and humans, which was why my three psychos were involved in the first place even though they didn’t care about the fate of humankind in general or humans in particular. In fact, the killer was one of the very few Behindkind I knew—and I was assuming he was Behindkind, because what else could he be?—who didn’t seem to discriminate between human and Behindkind.
Yanno. For what that’s worth.
“I remember,” I said. That last body had been just over a month ago, before I left home and adventured by myself and came back home. A lot had happened between then and now, but I wasn’t likely to forget it: like the first body I’d seen, it was pretty memorable—a human hanging in front of a house, its insides on the outside thanks to a long, deep slash from neck to lower stomach, dripping gore on the grass. Throat cut almost right through the neck.
It had also looked just like one of my old friends, but that had only been a glamour, thank goodness.
“Thought you blokes had already looked into it,” I said. “What were you doing while I was out of the house, anyway?”
“It was a singularly enlivening time,” said Athelas. “I believe that none of us were bored, if that was what you were suggesting.”
“I was suggesting—”
“We have been looking into it,” Zero said, before I could continue. “But we are in need of a significant amount of evidence that has…gone missing.”
“What, Upper Management stole it before you could? Flamin’ rude, that!”
“My lord was of the same opinion,” said Athelas, holding out his teacup when I proffered the teapot. “We fancied we’d have to do something about it.”
“Yeah, can’t have other Behindkind pinching stuff before you pinch it,” I said, and I wasn’t completely tongue-in-cheek. If it came right down to it, at least my Behindkind were trying to do something about the deaths. Upper Management seemed determined to hide what was happening—hide it, or profit from it; I wasn’t sure which one, yet. Either way, they were good at making sure there were no witnesses or records left behind of stuff they didn’t want left behind, and they were pretty deeply entrenched in the police force in Tasmania, too.
“What’d you do about it, anyway?” I asked. “You go knocking on their door or something? I don’t recommend that; it’s flamin’ dangerous.”
“We’re aware of that,” Zero said, with a cold, blue look in my direction. “That situation wasn’t of our making, and I would have chosen another way to bring about that outcome. Walking into the bowels of Upper Management by yourself wasn’t the best choice.”
JinYeong gave an impatient mutter, and when Zero turned an icy gaze on him, said aloud, “We did not need your outcome; we did it by ourselves.”
“Perhaps this would be a good time to mention,” said Athelas lightly, “that as exotic as the scent of harpy undoubtedly is, it is making even the banshees restless.”
“Thought Zero got rid of those?”
“I did,” Zero said, his eyes narrowing. “They came back.”
“Hang on,” I said, catching up with the implication. I turned an accusing look on Athelas. “You saying I stink?”
“As painful as it is to me to admit, Pet—”
“You,” said JinYeong, pointing his knife at me, “certainly stink. More than before.”
“That’s flamin’ rich!”
“First you smelled of dead person—”
“Daniel bought me those clothes.”
“—now you smell of harpy again.”
“Well, you always stink, so—” I stopped. This morning I had put on the clothes I’d worn to confront Richard the harpy; maybe they needed to be washed again. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll wash my clothes and take a shower.”
“Bath,” Athelas suggested. “And perhaps soak.”
“For three hours,” JinYeong said, his eyes narrowed at me.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the pretty little git was trying to pick a fight with me. I’d been mostly ignoring him for the last few days; I was still pretty cranky at him for pretending to be my friend when he was just following Zero’s orders. Maybe he didn’t like being ignored.
“Yeah, fine; I’ll soak,” I said. “What did the detectives bring you, Zero?”
“Information,” he said. “Enough to start us on the trail of the murderer again, anyway. More evidence will arrive later: the physical evidence will be sent to us—”
“And the body?” asked JinYeong, brightening.
“You were just complaining about me smelling like a dead person!” I protested.
“Yes, but you are alive. I object to you smelling dead.”
“Double flamin’ standards, that is. Anyway, you can’t keep a dead body here: I just filled the freezer with that half-a-cow you ordered from the butcher and there’s no way you’re putting a body in our fridge.”
“I want the body,” JinYeong said, glaring at me. “How can I investigate if I do not have the body?”
“You can’t have the body,” Zero said. “That was one of the pieces of evidence I haven’t yet tracked down. It was processed for a very simple autopsy and then transferred to a secondary location for a more thorough examination.”
“Lemme guess; it went walkabout?”
“It went what?”
“Walked off.”
“I fancy you’re confusing this body with a zombie,” said Athelas. I was pretty sure he didn’t fancy anything of the sort, because his grey eyes were dancing.
“Okay,” I said suspiciously, “’Cos I was pretty sure there was no such thing as zombies.”
I was still pretty sure, if it came to that: Athelas teased me a lot more often than Zero did.
“Really? Your belief system is remarkably fluid; I should have thought it easy enough to believe after all that you’ve seen over the last six months.”
I mean, he wasn’t wrong: I’d seen a heck of a lot over the last six months. Still, it had been something of a comfort to me that I’d never seen any of the bodies I came across stand up again and start walking.
“You mean some of those suckers get up and walk again after you kill ’em?”
“There’s no need to sound so appalled, Pet,” he said equably. “A very specific set of circumstances is needed to bring about a zombie—much like bringing about a vampire.”
“Zombies are much harder to make,” Zero said shortly. “You don’t need to worry about them. They need a power source as well as—don’t pull faces at me, Pet.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just gross, that’s all.”
Athelas laughed gently into his tea.
“How’d you lot lose a body, anyway?” I asked. I didn’t mean it to, but my voice sounded accusatory. “Woulda thought you were keeping an eye on it so that stuff like this didn’t happen, and I know it wasn’t the last body that we found, ’cos Detective Tuatu texted me about that one this morning.”
“We were…distracted at the time.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You blaming me for this?”
“No,” said Zero briefly. “If we were distracted, it was our fault.”
“Hang on,” I said, realising something. “That one disappeared when we were running around trying to find Athelas, didn’t it?”
Athelas looked down at his tea with a faint smile, and I had the impression that he was trying very hard not to laugh. “Ah, I wondered if that would occur to you,” he murmured. “Yes, Pet; it was my fault. I have already spoken to my lord on the subject.”
“It was also your fault,” JinYeong said. “After Athelas, we were running around after you.”
“Didn’t ask you to!” I said at once. “You’re the one who wriggled your perfumy little way into the house I was—”
“Good heavens,” said Athelas, faintly startled. “I see you’re still quite annoyed, Pet.”
“Anyway,” I said. “We’re about a month and a half late, right? And you’ve got no idea where the body is?”
“There will be another soon enough,” JinYeong said, with a dark certainty that suggested he would be the one providing said body if it didn’t turn up under its own impetus. “We will have evidence enough when that happens.”
“I prefer not to wait until then,” said Zero, with finality. “For now, we’ll go through the evidence we can find. At least in the human world we tend to find evidence more easily than Between and Behind.”
“Is that because it’s easier to make humans talk?” I asked. This time I was very careful not to sound accusatory: I was genuinely curious, not trying to shame them.
“Only partially,” said Zero, surprising me again. “The laws of the physical world are different here—well, perhaps not different, but we tend to examine things Behind in the light of different parts of that physical reality.”
“Magic instead of forensics,” I said, nodding. “Why not both?”
“That would require a greater deal of cooperation between the two worlds,” Athelas said. “And a sharing of technology. One doubts that it’s possible.”
So what you’re saying is that the human forensics provide more evidence than you usually get Behind through magic, was what I wanted to say. I didn’t, because Zero was playing nice and I should be, too. Besides, he might stop playing nice if I was too snide.
Instead, I said, “I reckon that’s the sort of thing that Upper Management are trying to do.”
“Yes,” said Zero, frowning.
“Very worrisome of them,” Athelas added, speaking what Zero hadn’t.
“Yeah,” I said, with a heart-felt sincerity that made Athelas look at me in surprise. I explained, “Got nothing against Behindkind and humans working together—”
“Yes, one feels it would be rather hypocritical of you to feel otherwise,” he murmured.
“But I reckon it should be working together, not Behindkind enslaving humans or making weird bargains that only benefit Behindkind. I don’t see why we can’t all have cool stuff if everyone can work together.”
“I see you’re rather more sanguine about the idea than am I,” said Athelas, delicately cutting into his toast with a knife and fork. “May I ask why the worried look, Pet?”
“Dunno,” I said, “but if there’s anything that would make me sure you’re a psycho like the other two it’s you cutting up jam toast with your cutlery. You know you’re meant to get your hands dirty when you eat toast, right?”
“My cuffs, Pet!” he expostulated. “I absolutely refuse to sully them with butter fat!”
JinYeong said offendedly, “Nan aniya!”
“You’re the psychoest of the lot,” I told him. “At least the other two don’t drink blood.”
He stiffened very slightly, eyes darkening. It was weird. If he was a human, I’d think I’d really hurt his feelings. Lucky for me, JinYeong is a psycho, not a human, and his feelings are about what you’d expect from a psycho who spends a good portion of his time ripping out throats and drinking blood. It was important not to trust him when he was pretending to be nice.
“You,” he said. “You, human. Make me kimchi again. There is none left.”
“My name isn’t human,” I said. “It’s not you, either.”
“To do JinYeong justice, you’ve not given us another name by which we may call you,” pointed out Athelas, very gently.
“You never asked for one,” I told him. “You just came in and decided you were gunna call me Pet or whatever you wanted to call me.”
“It is better if we go on calling you Pet,” Zero said levelly. He directed a decidedly warning look in JinYeong’s direction. “All of us.”
JinYeong showed his teeth very slightly. “Shilleoh.”
Don’t want to.
“You called me Pet before!” I protested. I didn’t know why I was even arguing. It wasn’t as if I liked being called Pet, but I still found it hard to think about telling any of them my real name.
“I shall not call you Petteu,” he said, putting his nose up. “Because you are a bad petteu.”
I must have accidentally rolled my eyes, because he bared his teeth at me, too.
“All right, don’t get your knickers in a knot!” I told him. “I’ll make you kimchi! You’ll have to wait for it to age, though. I can make you some fresh radish stuff to hold you off until then. Seriously, dunno what’s wrong with you. Any self-respecting vampire shouldn’t like garlic as much as you do.”
“I,” said JinYeong coldly, “am special.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Do not say it like an insult! Hyeong, make her stop saying normal things like insults!”
“Good heavens,” sighed Athelas. “It really seems as though we’re not likely to get any peace at the breakfast table. Bring me another pot of tea when you’re finished with JinYeong and the breakfast dishes, won’t you, Pet. I feel as though I’m going to need the solace.”
I didn’t really need to go shopping that morning, but I went anyway. The house felt too comfortable, too normal: too much like it always had. That was better than the house trying to follow me into another house like it had recently, but when things were supposed to be changing around here, it felt a little bit stifling for everything to be as usual. I didn’t want the usual; I wanted something new.
So of course I went out to buy onions and a tray of snags to go with our half-a-cow on the barbecue. Someone followed me as I went down the road, but that was nothing unusual, either. Still, I’d have to check and make sure I knew who it was following me before I went too far; didn’t want to encourage the wrong sort of stalkers.
As I walked on, gazing discreetly into the reflective glass of the windows of passing houses for a sight at the follower I was certain was there, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. That would be another message from Morgana. I’d been living with her up until a little while ago, and although she hadn’t said anything out of place when I left, I was pretty sure she was hurt that I’d just gone off without so much as a good explanation. I mean, what explanation could I give?
I’m sorry to leave you with the werewolves, but the two fae and the stroppy vampire I live with need me back and they’ve promised to behave this time, so I gotta go?
I’d just told her I was moving back home; I hadn’t expected to hear much from her after that.
Well, that’s not quite true. It was more that I’d decided I couldn’t see more of her; she was already infiltrated with werewolves, and even if they were nice ones, they were still reasonably stinky and carried a pretty good chance of leaving fleas on the couches. Fleas were about the best thing that could happen when you invited Behindkind into the house, too: everything else was downhill from there. It was safer for everyone if I stayed away.
I took out my phone and briefly swiped up to look at the message, but turned the screen off as soon as I saw the name that flashed up. Yep. It was Morgana. I preferred not to see what she wrote: I would have blocked her if I thought it would do any good.
Or maybe there was still a little bit of hope in me that one day I would be able to meet up again with my only real human friend who wasn’t law enforcement, without putting her in danger.
I sighed faintly and put my phone in my back pocket again.
“Oi,” said a rough voice from over my left shoulder. “You ignoring your texts, or what?”
“Don’t you growl at me,” I told him.
It was Daniel, of course: I saw him leaning against the wall of one of those little gardens that are all through North Hobart as soon as I turned around.
Even though his voice was rough, he was smiling. “Long time no see,” he said.
“It’s been less than two weeks,” I said.
“How many messages is it that you’ve ignored now?”
I checked my phone. “Yeah, ’bout that many.”
“I tried to tell her not to bother you.”
“It’s not…it’s not bothering me.”
“Yeah, I know. I told her you wouldn’t talk to her: I told her you probably wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“I don’t mind talking to you,” I said to him, shoving the phone back in my pocket. I started walking again, and he came with me. “I just can’t be talking to her. Zero’s done something to the house to make it safer, and it’s better if I don’t go showing up there again.”
“I’m not the safest person to be around the house, either,” Daniel pointed out. “It’s not like I’m not on the Behind Wanted list.”
“Yeah, but you’re more likely to keep her safe than you are to get her killed,” I said. “Why are you here if you’re not trying to get me to speak with her?”
“Dunno where you got that idea,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’m here for.”
“But you said—”
“I said that I told her you wouldn’t come; not that I wasn’t going to try.”
I looked at him accusingly. “Are you sure you’re the alpha in that house?”
“Nope,” he said, grinning. “But I am when it comes to the wolves, and that’s all that matters.”
“So you say,” I said suspiciously. For someone as small and physically weak as she was, Morgana had a habit of extending a very great field of influence. Over Daniel, at the very least. “I’m not going back to the house.”
“You haven’t heard what I have to say yet.”
“It’s not gunna change anyth—”
“Morgana needs help.”
I stopped walking. “What’s wrong?”
He grinned at me.
“What?”
“You’re really predictable, you know that?”
“What’s wrong, and why can’t you do something about it?”
“I can’t do something about it because I don’t have friends in law enforcement, and because I’m wanted, myself.”
I raised a brow at him. “It’s something that needs the cops?”
“Well, not necessarily the cops,” he hedged. “Maybe. Not yet. It’s mostly a missing person situation, but there are a couple of things that need to be checked before we can involve the cops.”
“Story of your life.”
“Shut up, Pet.”
I grinned at him. “No promises. If I can get Zero to take it on, we’ll come to the house. He wants to meet Morgana, anyway.”
Immediately suspicious, Daniel said, “Why?”
“Dunno; probably wants to see what the pet dragged home. Are you sure this is something you can’t just tell me about and have me go and check?”
“Yeah.” He was serious immediately.
“Who’s the missing person?”
“She says I can’t tell you. You’ve gotta come to the house.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “If this is just a plot to get me to the house so she can make me practise putting on eyeliner again—”
“It’s not, Pet.”
“’Cos if I do this, I’m bringing Zero in on it. I told him I wouldn’t go off and investigate my own cases, and he said he’d help out when I asked for it.”
Well, he had said he would help out on human cases I brought him if they had a Behindkind element to them, but I wasn’t going to mention that little qualifier to Daniel right now; not before I’d even brought the case up with Zero.
“Even if you’ve gotta bring Lord Sero into it,” he said. He was still very serious, and that worried me. Daniel usually fluctuates between annoyed, slightly stressed, and mother hen. “She’s really serious about this.”
“Okay,” I said. “Leave it with me; I’ll come around tomorrow morning. And stop following me, all right? I’ve already got another follower and it’s getting embarrassing, how popular I am.”
I left him there protesting that he wanted to know who else was following me when he had been sure he was the only one, and kept going on my way to the supermarket. That got rid of one of my followers and left me with the same amount I’d thought I had in the beginning: one old mad bloke.
I checked a couple of windows again as I walked, and sure enough, it was him. He’d gotten himself another new t-shirt since I’d last seen him; reckon he thinks of it as a form of camouflage. At any rate, every time he’s supposed to die, he gets a new one.
That probably needs a bit of explanation, but it’s kinda convoluted, so I’ll keep it simple: the old bloke was supposed to have died about a month ago—a body looking like him was the last one we’d picked up from the murderer Zero was chasing. It wasn’t the only time, though; we’d thought he was dead at least three times, and he’d come back alive every time yet with a new t-shirt.
At any rate, if he feels like he wants to follow me, who am I to tell him otherwise? It’s not like I’m gunna put him in more danger than he’s already come through, at least, and sometimes it’s nice to have a weird, raggedy shadow that wriggles his toes in the sunlight through the holes in his shoes as he waits for you to cross the road.
And that reminded me: I’d have to get him another pair of shoes as soon as I could.
One problem at a time, though. I took out my phone again as I walked, and swiped up to look at the message again, this time more carefully. It said, Please, Pet. I just need ten minutes.
I didn’t answer the text then, and I didn’t later on when I found myself pulling my phone out while I waited in line at the cash register, either. I left some food and a bottle of water in a bag next to a bush as I crossed the road, and I didn’t answer the text while I was using the camera of my phone to make sure the old mad bloke picked up the bag, either.
Daniel would tell Morgana I was coming. There was no need for me to answer the message, no matter how much I wanted to know if she was okay. It was better if I still kept contact as little as possible until everything was done. Then I could walk away, knowing that Morgana was safe, and happy, and didn’t need me in her life.
All I had to do was bring it up with the psychos this evening at dinner. Even if the three Behindkind weren’t open to helping humans for the sake of helping them, they seemed open to doing it if it meant keeping me nearby and out of trouble. Well, and keeping the secrets held in a certain USB close to them until they could get their mitts on them, anyway.
And lately I’d thought that for Zero at least, it wasn’t entirely that he didn’t want to help humans: it was more as if the wanting to help had been beaten out of him so badly that he’d never wanted to try again because he already knew it wasn’t going to work and he didn’t want the aftermath.
Maybe that was just me hoping, but I don’t seem to be able to help it. That’s something I’ve learned about myself, I s’pose. I can’t help hoping, but if I can’t help hoping, at least I can make sure I keep my expectations under control. As much as Zero might secretly want to help, that wish is buried deep, and I know exactly how much it takes to pull it out of its grave. I also know that if it comes to a choice between me and Zero, Athelas will follow Zero every time. JinYeong’s the same, the little rat.
Still, things are still just that little bit different these days. And I know that I can say no, now: I’ve got that much strength. I already know the worst that can happen, and I’m not afraid of it anymore.
Or maybe I’m just not afraid of them anymore. I’m not sure which one it is, but it gives me more freedom than I would have guessed.
So I just asked Zero instead of beating around the bush. And I mean, yeah, I made him a flaming good meal and made sure he was already eating before I asked, but that’s more like bribery than appeasement, after all.
When everyone was digging into steak and sausages, I slid a sunny side up egg onto my plate and said, “You lot got a bit of spare time this week?”
I already knew they were fairly busy: I’d seen the boxes of physical evidence as I came back into the house with the groceries, and more of them had been steadily arriving as I cleaned the house all afternoon. The last boxes didn’t arrive until I started making dinner, either.
Zero looked at me briefly over the pile of sausages. “We’ll make time,” he said.
I didn’t mean to smile at him. I must have smiled pretty brightly, though, because he looked back down at his steak-and-egg sandwich and said, “We have an agreement until you finish your demands and bring them to me. I said I would do as much.”
Flamin’ fae. Can’t be seen to be showing emotions. Oh no. You gotta be emotionless and untouchable.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Pet,” he said, with a full mouth. “I suppose you’ve found a case for us.”
I grinned. “Not exactly. But there’s something dodgy going on.”
“Where?” he asked.
“Morgana’s place. Well, she says she’ll explain when we get there, anyway,” I said, shrugging like it was no big deal. “I said we’d look into it.”
But even though I shrugged, I felt like I could have hugged him.
Because sometimes change is just your fae, former owner asking simply, “Where?” when you tell him that there’s something dodgy that needs looking into.

Chapter 2

Chapter Two
When I woke up the next morning, there was a bottle-cap on my windowsill. Under normal circumstances it might have been possible for a bird to have dropped it there, except around here it’s never normal circumstances. And except for the fact that my windows are hidden from the outside by fake shutters and no one on the outside knows there’s a bedroom there.
Oh yeah, and the fact that the bottle-cap was on the inside windowsill.
Maybe I should have been more worried, but it wasn’t like Zero didn’t have a hundred and one protections on the house, and it wasn’t like the house itself didn’t have a particular bent against letting anyone in if it didn’t want them in.
It was just a bottle-cap. Definitely not where it should be, but just a bottle-cap. It didn’t even have anything of Behind to it—that particular sheen of otherness that meant it could be something else if you wanted it to be, depending on how you saw it. For all I knew, it could even have been the banshees that left it.
I put it in my pocket, where it spiked my leg with the little bits of plastic that had once joined it with the seal, and promptly forgot it. It was time to make breakfast for my psychos in some sort of payment for taking on the case for me.
Technically, it wasn’t a case that had to do with fae. They didn’t need to agree to look into it for me even if I asked, because the interim agreement we’d come to only included looking into things that had to do with Behindkind hurting humans, not random cases for random humans that had nothing to do with Behindkind.
I shouldn’t have been so hopeful about what Zero taking the case meant—what it meant that all of them were coming along, actually—but I couldn’t help myself. It sprang up regardless of my reservations: the hope that my psychos weren’t quite as much psychos as they had been when I first met them.
I just had to make sure I was cautiously hopeful: I couldn’t forget that Zero had let a human die when he could have saved the man, or that he was still happy to refer to a human as a pet. That he still thought of humans as lesser than his own kind.
There wasn’t anyone else advocating for humans around here, and if I didn’t do a proper job of it, that was it. No one else cared—no one else knew. I couldn’t afford to be blinded by my closeness to this particular set of Behindkind; not when there were always lives at stake.
All three of them were sifting through evidence downstairs in their own ways when I got down there. They don’t need as much sleep as I do, so they’d probably been doing it all night.
JinYeong, surrounded by physical samples in bottles, plastic baggies, and boxes, was methodically going through each and either sniffing, licking, or touching each one, which was gross but also pretty much par for the course. Athelas, his teacup balanced on the leather arm of his favourite chair, was paging through crime scene photos with a professional kind of interest that’s probably not the profession you’re thinking.
Sitting on the floor with his broad shoulders leaning against the wall beside the bookcase, Zero had his eyes closed and his arms crossed over his chest. There were files all around him, but there were also books, which probably meant he’d been doing magic type stuff to try and follow leads, or was thinking about what sort of magic type stuff would be the most useful in this situation.
I trotted into the kitchen to make them some breakfast, and by the time it was half ready, they were all at the table, waiting, their boxes of evidence abandoned.
“Heck,” I said, when I turned around. “Anyone’d think you lot hadn’t been fed in a month or two!”
“I believe I have already mentioned that I do not list cooking among my accomplishments,” Athelas said. He said it carelessly, but his eyes followed me around the kitchen just as much as JinYeong’s—even, possibly, as hungrily. “I’ve not yet recovered from the time you were away.”
Zero’s eyes went just a shade lighter: he was laughing. “Neither of you starved,” he said.
Athelas, slightly pained—whether at Zero’s assertion or at the smell of the eggs scrambling—said, “Well, my lord, JinYeong could be said to have run away from home.”
“I ate very well,” said JinYeong, with a far-too-smug look in Zero’s direction.
I left the eggs to their own devices while I madly buttered the toast that was popping up from the toaster and starting to smell ready from the grill as well. “Well, you’ve been eating well again for a little while now,” I said. “Just don’t forget that I can go on strike.”
“Believe me,” said Athelas, with a smile lingering on his lips. “None of us will forget that.”
I brought the whole skillet over to the table and went back for the tower of toast. Over my shoulder, with a touch of anxiety, I asked Zero, “You didn’t forget we’re off to Morgana’s today?”
It wasn’t that I expected him to have forgotten exactly: it was more that I was afraid Zero might have changed his mind. From the looks of the living room, which seemed to have exploded overnight with case paraphernalia, they were neck deep in what they were already doing, and they were already a month behind on it. It might mostly have been because we were out looking for Athelas, but at least a bit of it was my fault, too.
“We’ll be ready to go after breakfast,” Zero told me, helping himself to the mountain of scrambled eggs before JinYeong could get to them.
Athelas went for the toast first, declining to get into a scuffle for the scrambled eggs, and piled that toast high with eggs once the other two had decimated them. Since he had behaved better than the other two, I gave him his tea before the others got their coffee, even though it meant I had to wait for my coffee, too.
Zero didn’t say anything, but I saw him looking at me, and stuck out my tongue at him. His eyes went a bit bluer still, and his lips curled just slightly at the edges, making me grin in triumph. Heck yes! Got a real smile outta the ol’ iceblock!
“I wish to have coffee,” said JinYeong, rather thickly, through a mouthful of eggs.
“Isn’t ready yet,” I told him. It was true, but only because I’d deliberately made sure I did Athelas’ pot first.
Maybe he was still sulking about that when everyone finished breakfast, because when Zero rose and made for the door without giving me time to clear the dishes away, JinYeong said coldly, “I have not showered yet.”
“Wanna know the funny thing about that?” I asked him. He didn’t answer, but I told him anyway. “You’ll pong worse afterward than you do now.”
“Do not say that word at me,” he ordered. “I do not like it.”
“Well, I don’t like your per—”
“You have as long as it takes the pet to clear the dishes and wash up,” Zero told him, and added briefly, “We won’t wait for you.”
Like me, he must have suspected shenanigans—or at least sulking.
“I will catch up,” said JinYeong, and disappeared into the bathroom.
To my gleefully ill-natured delight, Zero really did leave without him once I’d finished with the dishes. Athelas and I followed, and perhaps there was another little change around the place, because Zero neither told me to hold onto him or to use the door properly. He didn’t object when I followed him through Between and the door alike, either.
Between: a squishy place that isn’t quite the human world and isn’t quite the world Behind, but holds elements of both those places. Human constructs aren’t quite real when you’re Between, and can quite often be walked through. And when you’re Between, Behind items that look like other things in the human word show their true forms.
We didn’t come right out of Between, either. Zero and the others tend to slip Between to get through inconveniences like doors, but they don’t usually stay there for too long. This time, however, we stayed Between the entire way to Morgana’s house, which shortened the travel time by a good ten minutes. We came out just at the gate, sending leaves scurrying with the suddenness of our arrival. Zero must have known just where to slide back into the human world, because as we kicked through the leaves, we passed from behind the last of the hedge in front of Morgana’s place, and I saw a flash of her watching us through a shard of mirror as we emerged.
I shot a look up at Zero, and thought he looked very faintly smug. He also avoided my eyes, so I’m pretty sure he thought he wasn’t even allowed to have smug feelings—pity knows he doesn’t let himself have any others, so I mean, at least he’s being fair about it.
Athelas, his head turned to gaze over the front garden as we took the path to the front door, displayed very little interest. I would have liked to know what he saw in the garden, but if I’d asked him he probably would have charged me for the information. I kept my eye on him to see if I could figure it out for myself, but he returned his attention to the house when we were under the small awning at the front, and that was that.
Someone, no doubt Zero or JinYeong, had rearranged the mirror there to prevent Morgana from seeing us as well as she normally could. That would annoy Daniel—Morgana would send him down to move it again, which would annoy the kids, who apparently liked to be the only ones who did things for Morgana and also didn’t like Daniel.
The door was already open a crack, so I didn’t bother to knock; I let myself and the others in. There was a scattering of movement from the living room, and a few growls, but those stopped as soon as the first human-form werewolf poked his head around the corner and saw me.
“It’s just Pet,” he said. “You going to cook for us, Pet?”
“Nah, I’m here on business,” I told him.
At my heels, Zero and Athelas stepped into the hallway, which didn’t try to move around them like it might have done if it was connected to Between in the same way that my house was.
Zero looked around at both the werewolves and the house, frowning. He could have been looking for a way to get to Morgana, but I had the feeling that he was almost looking through the walls instead of around at the place. As if trying to understand how and why it had so little of Between to it when he was used to houses—well, places in general—being well connected.
“Upstairs,” I said helpfully, as if he really were looking for Morgana. The mirrors could be confusing if you didn’t know the path they took to reflect a version of the outside world to Morgana. Besides, I didn’t want to encourage him to stay around the werewolves if he was inclined to disapprove of them being where they were.
“Yes,” he said, still frowning. “Who else lives here?”
“A pack of werewolves is enough to be going on with,” Athelas said, looking around rather fastidiously. “They’re rather…a strong presence. And some lingering effects from our Pet’s visit, I should think, to confuse the whole.”
“It’s just a few humans and a werewolf pack,” I agreed, grinning at the few werewolves who had given up watching telly to come and stare at us. “Oh—make sure you’re not too loud in the hallway. Morgana’s parents live on the floor above and she might not want them to know you’re here.”
Athelas smiled slightly and sat down as Zero started up the stairs.
“What, you’re not coming up?” I asked him.
“Oh, I think not!” said Athelas, crossing one leg over the other. He grimaced a little at the dog hair that already clung to his trousers, but appeared to leave it there as a hopeless case with the house so full of lycanthropes. “It will be far more entertaining down here, I rather suspect.”
That was probably because JinYeong had just walked in and the lycanthropes still didn’t much like him. Growls rumbled low and threatening around the living room, and I glared at him, too, for good measure. The annoying mosquito hadn’t worn his suit out of the house as usual. I mean, it wasn’t as if I liked his perfectly pressed, perfectly cut suits—especially not when I was pretty sure he’d never paid for them—but the annoying thing was that he was wearing jeans and a yellow knitted jumper.
I knew those particular clothes very well: I’d bought them for him when I thought he was my friend. When I thought he had bled and very nearly died because he was trying to protect me.
JinYeong met my glare with one raised brow and a very small smirk. “You cannot tell me what to wear,” he said in Between-laced Korean, so that I could still understand him. Then, to my utter astonishment, he said in very careful English, “You. Don’t. Own. Me.”
“I can still put holy water in your shampoo!” I yelled up the stairs after his retreating back, when I’d recovered from the shock.
I followed him, taking the steps two at a time, and came through the door just in time to jostle with Daniel by the foot of Morgana’s bed. The room wasn’t a small one, but it was already looking pretty full with Zero hulking over by the window, not to mention JinYeong’s cologne.
Morgana, looking slightly alarmed beneath her already pale makeup, asked from the bed, “Pet? Who is this?”
Since she already knew JinYeong, I said, “That’s Zero. Don’t worry, he’s house-trained.”
Zero’s eyelids flickered shut for a very brief moment before he shot a cold look at me.
“Wait, is this the one that kicked you out?” demanded Morgana, scowling at Zero.
“Yeah,” I said. “But he asked me to come back, so—”
“That doesn’t count for much,” she said. “It just means he’s clever enough to know what he’s missing.”
She didn’t stop scowling at Zero, and I saw one of his eyebrows tilt up slightly. JinYeong openly smirked.
“He’s come to help you, though,” I said.
I could understand being annoyed with Zero: I often was, myself. But it was a pretty big step for him to be here at all, and I thought that was something that ought to be encouraged.
To my relief, that made Morgana stop scowling at Zero, even if her voice was slightly stiff when she said, “You’d better sit down, then.”
“Pet tells me that you need some help,” he said, without acknowledging either the previous scowl or the cessation of it. He sat down by the window, facing her, and asked, “Is it about the house?”
“What? No,” she said. “It’s a friend of mine: we play City Fae online together.”
Grinning, I asked, “You play what?”
“Don’t judge me!” she said. “It’s actually a really good game; the graphics are great, and so is the world. It’s a kind of urban fantasy cross between an FPS and RPG, but actually it’s an MMO. You can’t just interact with everyone, though; it depends on your level.”
“Pet,” said Zero. “Translate.”
Morgana giggled. “He’s not a gamer?”
“Nope,” I said. To Zero, I said, “Reckon she means your viewpoint in the game is first person—like, you can see your hands but not your body—and it’s an open world, so you can explore everything, but you have to play it online. And you create your character to start with.”
“Right,” said Morgana. “You need an internet connection. So I met this boy online last year; he calls himself Blackpoint, but his real name is Joel Santino, and he’s nineteen. I’d just started City Fae then, so I wasn’t very high level, but I managed to unlock a perk that shot me a few levels higher in the game, and that’s where I met Blackpoint.”
Zero shifted a little. “When was that?”
“Last year about this time. We’ve been playing together for just a bit longer than a year.”
“Did he tell you his real name?”
Morgana made a tiny, chirruping throat-clearing. “No. I um, found it out when I was looking for him. I couldn’t get in contact with him and I got worried, so I started looking for him.”
“When did he disappear?”
“About two weeks ago.”
“Could he have gone away somewhere without telling you? Travel, or—”
“No,” said Morgana firmly. “You don’t understand; he’s like me.”
Zero frowned. “Like you?”
“Sick, I mean. He can’t leave his house: he has cerebral palsy.”
“Did he tell you that?”
Morgana gazed at him curiously. “Yeah, he told me that. Why? Is it important?”
“Yes,” said Zero briefly, but didn’t explain any further. “Then could he have gone to the hospital?”
Morgana shook her head. “It wasn’t just that. You don’t understand: he was in the game all the time. That’s all he ever did. He didn’t leave. Not to eat, not to bathe; not at all. It was always running, and if he was going to be away for more than a few moments, he left a message up so his friends could see. The game’s still running on his computer, but there’s no away message and he’s not answering over there.”
“Pet said that you want us to go and check on him. You have his address?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve got it. I just want someone to go over there and make sure that he’s all right.”
“You don’t think he’s all right?”
“No.”
“And you think there’s something strange about his disappearance? More than usual.”
She looked up at him solemnly. “Why do you think that?”
“You could have gone to the real police.” Zero gazed at her for a few moments longer, and added unexpectedly, “Or did you come to Pet for a different reason?”
“It’s weird,” she said. “Daniel already went to check the house, but he couldn’t get inside. He says no one’s there, but it didn’t look like there’d been a struggle or anything.”
Knowing Daniel, he’d probably found that it didn’t smell like there’d been a struggle—blood, for instance—but that wasn’t something I was going to say in front of Morgana. Unlike me and my psychos, Daniel wasn’t capable of passing through Between easily, so he probably wouldn’t have been able to get inside.
“We’ll check,” Zero said. “But first, tell me about the game.”
Morgana frowned. “Why is the game important? I just want you to go and check his house.”
“We’ll do that,” said Zero, unexpectedly patient. He wasn’t that patient with me. “But first, there are other things I want to know. They may not seem pertinent to you, but they will be to me. You said you were only able to meet Blackpoint because your rank improved unexpectedly by a few levels. He was already high level and that meant you couldn’t interact with him until you got higher?”
“He’s been playing for two years—since the game came out—so he’s technically higher than I am, but when you get to higher levels you can also pick who you interact with.”
“So if you’re a beginner, you can’t interact with anyone who doesn’t want to interact with you, or anyone the game doesn’t want you to interact with?”
“Right,” said Morgana. “It’s completely hierarchical. It also blocks you from advantages, because they make it so that you can’t see them; perks, cheat codes, all that sort of thing. If someone doesn’t want you to see them, you don’t.”
“What is the point of this game?” asked Zero. He had leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, taking up far too much space.
From him, that was practically begging for information.
I shot him a curious look, wondering what it was that had engaged his attention. I hadn’t really gone into this thinking that it had something to do with Behindkind or fae, but given Zero’s reaction, I was beginning to wonder.
“There isn’t one specific goal,” Morgana said, her eyes sparkling. “There are heaps! It’s what makes this game so addictive. It’s hierarchy based, so of course you’re trying to advance, but there are a lot of different ways to do it: you can marry your way to the top of an influential family, or try to partner with the right kind of person; you can work your way up from the bottom with your own guild, or wriggle your way into someone else’s and work your backside off or kill the right people to keep moving up. You can even be an assassin if you want, but I don’t recommend it.”
I shouldn’t have been shocked, but after the last couple of months, maybe it just hit a bit close to home: art imitating life to this extent, that is.
“You can murder your way into power?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “You’ve gotta make sure you don’t get caught, but if you can make the world work for you, you can do it. If you get caught, that’s it.”
“What, you lose the game or something?”
“Yep. It just stops, and the next thing you know, you’re at the start of the game again. You have to start all over again with a new character; you don’t even keep your previous level. Doesn’t matter if you save your progress or if you don’t—you’re back where you began. Do you know what the funny thing is, though?”
“Surprise me,” I told her, though I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be surprised.
“You don’t lose the game because you got caught exactly. You lose it because once you’re caught, you’re visible, and no one will ever work with you again. Even if you don’t face justice, you’re toast.”
“What other things kick you out of the game?” asked Zero. “Loss of face? Marriage into the wrong family? An injudicious alliance?”
Morgana looked at him in awe. “I thought you said you hadn’t played?”
“I’ve run across something similar,” Zero said, with something of ice in his voice.
“Oh,” said Morgana. She looked as though she wasn’t sure if the ice was directed at her or something else. “You can lose the game if you lose face bad enough. Basically you drop dozens of levels and you can never rise again, so you might as well start over; it’s also really easy to lose if you make a bad alliance, especially if the alliance is marriage—if your partner is more powerful than you and they die, you die too. If you join someone’s uprising and it fails, you’re kaput, as well.”
“I see,” said Zero, even more grimly than before. “Has anything unusual ever happened while you were playing the game?”
Morgana gazed at him with black-ringed eyes for a few moments, then asked, “D’you mean did I meet any creeps, or actual weird stuff?”
“Both,” said Zero, after the barest pause.
“Well, there are always creeps, but they were all the normal kind—oh, except that one bloke, but I blocked him straight away. I had a few weird power surges the first time I played, then a couple when I got to the higher levels. There was an attack on my firewalls a few days ago while I was playing the game, too, but—”
“Pet,” Zero said. “Translate.”
“It’s like a security spell,” I said, without thinking. “Stops someone getting into your place and tells you they’re trying. But for a computer.”
Morgana gazed up at him in wonder. “It’s like you’re really old or something,” she said.
“I am really old,” Zero said expressionlessly.
“You don’t look really old.”
“You should know that appearance isn’t everything,” he told her.
It sounded vaguely remonstrating: as if he was telling her something that she, of all people, ought to know. Morgana looked roughly as confused as I felt.
“Yeah, I suppose,” she said, and I saw her look across the room at the mirror on the far side of the room. Reflected there was her face: pale and perfect with makeup, her eyes black-rimmed and dramatic, matching the black lace of her choker.
It was a lot of makeup, but it wasn’t like she’d look significantly different without it, so I didn’t think that’s what he was talking about.
Zero asked, “Tell me about the—the unusual creep.”
“Well, he’s a creep: you know, the sort you find on the internet when you’re a girl who games.”
Zero gave her a brief, perplexed look. “I don’t know what that means.”
“You’re really sheltered, aren’t you?” Morgana said wonderingly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t you spend a lot of time on the internet?”
“None,” he said.
“Oh,” said Morgana, taken aback. “That’s—are you joking me?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, he does stuff like sending messages and pictures and trying to get me to talk to him when he’s in-world. I blocked him everywhere and usually that’s good enough because I’m quite good with stuff like that. This little pervert managed to get through my firewalls and into my message-box even after I blocked him, though. That’s pretty unusual: I still don’t know how he did it.”
“I offered to go visit him,” said Daniel, with a very toothy smile. “She didn’t want me to do that.”
Zero turned a very cold look on him. “You’re here on sufferance. I’d advise you not to make trouble.”
“I didn’t tell him where the guy lives,” said Morgana, frowning a little. She might have misunderstood by whose sufferance Daniel was actually in the house, but she certainly didn’t seem to like Zero threatening him. “So you don’t have to be annoyed at him.”
Daniel opened his mouth to say something, his expression stormy, but I elbowed him in the ribs.
“You don’t know when a little creep like that is going to have a knife,” Morgana explained, at the same time. “And even if they don’t, it’s not worth going to jail for trying to teach them a lesson.”
“Do you know where this little pervert lives?”
Morgana, warily, said, “Depends. If you’re the cops, I’ve got no idea.”
“We’re not the cops,” said Zero. “We’re connected, but we don’t do things on the same level that the police do them. We have a little more…leeway.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’ve got a bit more leeway, too.”
“You take a bit more leeway,” said Daniel, grinning.
“And it’s not exactly legal, the way I do things,” she added.
“I don’t care about that,” Zero said. “Do you know where this person lives?”
“Yes. But what good is that going to do you? It’s my friend I can’t find, and I’ve already written down his address for you.”
“Give me both of them,” ordered Zero.
“Do you think this creepy bloke had something to do with Blackpoint’s disappearance? Why?”
“Because people in power don’t like it when high-level denizens interact with low-level denizens,” Zero said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Don’t worry, he’s just being mysterious for the hang of it,” I said. “You’ll get used to that.”
“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”
Zero, as always the soul of brevity, said simply, “Yes,” and got up. He took the written addresses from Morgana and passed through the door in one movement, leaving me and JinYeong looking at each other. JinYeong shrugged slightly, but his feet shifted toward the door just as Zero’s head popped back through the frame.
“You said there are hierarchies in the game. What are the ranks?”
“There are actually two sets of hierarchy,” Morgana said, gazing up at him. “Character, and Class. You start out as one kind of a character, and everything else is tied to that; you can only change it under certain circumstances. Mostly you have to level up through the classes as the same character: each new level gives you new advantages and disadvantages, but they’re specific to your type of Character. My latest character made a bad alliance just after I got to about the mid-level, so I had to start again. I’m back at servant class right now.”
“How does a servant interact with the world?” asked Zero.
“Servant is pretty good,” Morgana said. “People don’t notice you a lot, so you can get away with a lot if you’re clever about it. Class is a big thing in-game, so you can use that to your advantage. But the bad thing is that you can’t lie if you belong to one of the servant classes, no matter what kind of Character you pick.”
“Hang on, what are the characters?” I asked. I was starting to get a really bad feeling about this game—and about what may or may not have happened to Morgana’s friend. “Bottom to top.”
“It’s kinda rude,” Morgana said. “Human is right at the bottom, then there’s goblin, assorted hobgoblins, werewolf, merperson, fae. I think there’s some hidden classes that have extra perks, but those ones need a cheat code to get. The ranks are servant classes—chattel, indentured, paid, steward—lower noble, middle class noble, upper noble, royalty. It’s hard to get to the higher classes if you pick Human, though. That’s why I play as werewolf.”
Great, I thought, as Daniel coughed a bit beside me. Flamin’ fantastic. The whole game was a fae plant. For what purpose, I didn’t know—I didn’t even know it was possible for them to use computers, if it came to that—but I was betting it was a really bad purpose.
“Very well,” said Zero, and vanished again.
“So what, he’s going right now?” Morgana hazarded, confusion written across her face.
“Looks like it,” I said, shifting toward the door.
“I thought—I thought you could—” She stopped, and sighed faintly. “Will you come back and tell me how it goes?”
I should really call her instead of visiting, but it wasn’t like we weren’t all going to be around for a while, after all. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll come ’round when we know a bit more.”
While I lingered with Morgana and Daniel, JinYeong made an irritated sort of clicking noise in the back of his throat from the foot of the bed, then jerked his head toward the door when I looked at him.
“All right, all right,” I complained. “It’s not like you didn’t take your time this morning.”
“The result,” he said coldly, so that we could all understand, “was worth it.”
I didn’t know whether he was talking about his looks or my annoyance, so I just said, “If you say so,” and brushed past him and out into the corridor.
He was still muttering to himself as he followed me down the stairs, so he must have been talking about his looks. I ignored the muttering and joined Zero, who was standing by Athelas’ chair amidst wary looks from the werewolves.
“Right,” I said, as JinYeong passed fastidiously between a werewolf and Zero. “We going off to see if this bloke’s okay?”
Zero shook his head. “No. That is for yourself and JinYeong—Athelas, too, if he should choose to go. I have another errand.”
“Another errand?”
“There is someone who might be able to clear up a few things about the investigation before we dig too deeply,” he said.
“You, come with me, then,” said JinYeong, and sauntered away again.
“You don’t know where you’re going!” I called after him, but he must have filched the address from Zero’s pocket when he skirted around us, because he fluttered it at me over his shoulder mockingly. Of Athelas, I asked, “You going with Zero?”
“And miss the delight of your interactions with JinYeong?” he enquired, rising at once. “I think not. I shall accompany you. My lord does not require me.”
We caught up with JinYeong outside, me at a trot and Athelas at a smooth stroll that didn’t look nearly quick enough to catch up with anyone.
“Are we to walk through the entire human neighbourhood?” Athelas asked mildly, as we passed through the gate. If there was a barb to his question, I didn’t know what it was.
“Yes,” said JinYeong, with a dark, liquid glance at Athelas that made me very aware that there had, in fact, been a barb. “I shall walk in the human world if I wish to do so. The world Between is boring and dirty.”
I rolled my eyes a bit, but there was nothing new here: JinYeong was always annoyed when he got dirty. A bit ironic for a vampire who likes tearing out throats and draining the blood of his enemies in a glorious, arterial spray, but everyone has their quirks, after all. JinYeong just has more of them than most…people.
Halfway down the street, I pinched the address from between JinYeong’s fingers, prompting a small snarl.
“What?” I asked. “Who knows this place better, you or me?”
His lips pursed but he didn’t try to take the paper back. He did look pretty sour when I badgered him and Athelas onto a bus, though; probably because of the pungent smell of pee to the seats.
“What?” I asked, once again. “It’s halfway across town. You said you didn’t want to take a short cut—look, Athelas isn’t complaining.”
“Please don’t confuse my bewilderment at my surroundings as approval, Pet,” mildly said Athelas. “I don’t particularly like this mode of transport, myself.”
“Well, if you lot don’t drive, you’ve gotta expect to take a bus or two,” I told him. The same went for not going Between when they could—but I left that bit unsaid because sometimes it’s more fun when you know you don’t have to say the annoying thing aloud to have it heard.

Chapter 3

Chapter Three
It wasn’t that I wasn’t expecting a run-down little place stuffed between heritage houses.
I was. I just wasn’t expecting it to be quite so rundown. I expected windows, you know—at the least, a bit of glass or something. I didn’t expect it to look quite as modern as it looked, either. Built from the weird yellow-tan brick that looked more like a façade than real bricks, it was wedged into the space made by the back walls of three heritage houses, just barely visible from the road and the boxiness of it coloured outside the lines; untidy.
The whole place was a wreck. Garbage bags on the front lawn, half a car slowly rusting away near the letterbox, and lawn that was nearly hip high and probably full of snakes. Even kids who were there to tag stuff would know better than to be wading through that grass. Actually, the grass itself was a bit surprising—most of the grass around here wasn’t long grass: it was crab grass.
“Hang on,” I said suspiciously, looking at the whole a bit closer. My eyes tried to skate away over the filth, and I made them concentrate. “Someone’s put a glamour on this place!”
“Well done, Pet!” said Athelas. “Although I suspect you’ve had a great deal of practise seeing these since you learned what they are.”
“Oi! Don’t take back your praise! I did a good job!”
“Perhaps you could add to your good work and fetch out this human for us?”
I grinned at him. “No need to get carried away. So do we go in?”
“I don’t see why not,” Athelas said, after a moment.
“Won’t the person who made the glamour know we’re here?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But I don’t sense an alarm spell attached to the glamour. Besides, it seems likely that the person who made the glamour is the occupant, and we’re in search of the occupant of the house, so it seems worth the risk.”
“It’s not like they’re gunna come running for us, I suppose,” I agreed.
“Indeed,” Athelas said. “And that is why JinYeong will go around the back.”
JinYeong raised a brow, but when we stepped through the gate he melted away and around the back of the house so quickly that I almost didn’t see him go.
“Lot of windows between here and there,” I pointed out, but it wasn’t like he could do anything about it anyway. If there was someone in the house and they tried to make a run for it after their glamour was breached, JinYeong was bound to be quicker than they were.
He was also really good at following a scent.
The door was pretty hard to get through for a door that wasn’t locked and that was hanging off its hinges. It wasn’t that it was hard to open so much as it seemed hard just to step through the thing.
Even Athelas hesitated as he stepped over the threshold, and that must have bothered him because he looked a bit more thoughtful as I struggled to follow him into the main room. It was almost like being pushed against by a very strong wind, but once I’d forced my way through it and joined Athelas in the house, everything was back to normal.
Proper normal, that is; not glamoured normal. It looked like a regular place on the inside. The kitchen was empty and in need of an update from the grungy tiles on the splashback, not to mention the fake-marble laminate bench tops, but it was a normal kind of outdated. A couple of dishes were in the drying rack over the sink, and the window had a few streaks that showed it needed cleaning again soon, unlike the sharp, broken-edged version outside. Even the door looked normal, from here.
And that was a bad kind of weird.
“Don’t reckon he’s here,” I said, opening and shutting the empty fridge, then heading down the hall toward potential bedrooms.
“That was rather the point of us coming out here, wasn’t it?” gently enquired Athelas, but he followed me without investigating any further.
“Nah, I mean, I don’t think he was ever here,” I said. I checked in the second bedroom, just to be sure, but that was it: the whole house. Empty and unremarkable. “This place isn’t set out for someone cerebral palsy—or even with a cane. It’s not connected to the internet, either: there’s a modem plugged in out in the living room, but no lights on. I don’t think the power’s on, actually.”
“A front?” he mused. “The whole house is a front?”
“Reckon. And it’s a front that’s covered by a glamour. They probably didn’t want anyone in the neighbourhood to see that it wasn’t really occupied.”
“Then where,” asked JinYeong, prowling into the room from the direction of the laundry room with a cobweb clinging to one shoulder, “is the human? Is he human? And why did he guard the place so well? And why did the dog not notice this?”
“Daniel,” I said pointedly, “is a werewolf, not born Behindkind, and he says he’s not much good with magic. He probably couldn’t tell it was a glamour; he could only tell that there was no one at home. Reckon he could have gotten in through that door?”
“It gave me pause,” said Athelas, as if that should answer my question.
Maybe it did.
“So all he would have been able to do is check through the windows, and I’m betting he just saw a mess. What do we do now? No one’s lived here in a while, by the looks.”
“Lived, perhaps not,” Athelas said, stooping to pick up the rubbish bin that was sitting beneath the desk in the bedroom we’d ended up in. “But I rather fancy someone has been here, for all that. A human someone, by all appearances.”
“There is a human smell,” agreed JinYeong, looking around narrowly. “It is familiar, but there is no blood to tell by.”
“Heck,” I said, impressed, as Athelas emptied the bin on top of the desk. I wouldn’t have thought to look in the bin. Like everything else around the place, it looked a normal sort of messy; the sort of messy your gaze slides right past without having to have a glamour on it.
I helped him separate the rubbish, and added, “You’re right,” as a waxed cardboard box scuttled away beneath my hand. I picked it up and brandished it at him. “This is a pie that just came out a month ago at Maccas. It hasn’t been here longer than that. D’you reckon it was our missing bloke, or someone else?”
“I would question how someone else could get in,” pointed out Athelas. “Considering the fact that it’s glamoured and this area is almost entirely comprised of humans. It would be some feat. I very much doubt our quarry is himself, human.”
“Then how did the stuff get here, and why does JinYeong smell human?” I asked, homing in on the small scrap of material that I could see beneath the bed. I left the rubbish where it was, and ducked down to pull it from beneath the bed, but instead of being a scrap, it was an entire sleeping bag, dirty and rumpled, but still whole.
I waved it at Athelas and JinYeong, and JinYeong plucked it out of my hand.
“Oi,” I protested, but he gave the whole thing one thorough sniff.
Distastefully, he said in Korean with the edge of Between to make himself understood, “This is dirty and human and also familiar.”
“Reckon you can follow the scent?” I asked him.
“Of course.”
“You go,” Athelas said, making a small, elegant shoo-ing gesture at us. “I will remain here to see what else I might find. I trust you can interrogate any human you find without my assistance.”
“Ne,” said JinYeong, purringly confident.
It’s so flamin’ annoying; he reckons he’s irresistible, and when it comes to humans, he’s pretty nearly right. I shouldn’t complain, not when it makes investigating so much easier, but heck it’s annoying!
Lean and taut and focused only on the scent, JinYeong paced rapidly down the hall and through the wall at the end of it.
“Yikes,” I said, and hurried after him. Into the sudden, soft mossiness of silence, I called, “You sure you should be going Between when you’re chasing scents?”
“The scent comes this way,” he answered, without turning or stopping.
“Zero says that humans can’t get Between by themselves.”
“Yes,” said JinYeong. “But the scent came here.”
“Well,” I said, “I s’pose that means that either Zero’s wrong or your sniffer is broken.”
“You are here,” he pointed out, and this time he did stop. He turned back to me and said accusingly, “You know this.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but I figured you’d just got it wrong and Athelas is right that it’s not a human we’re after.”
He shrugged. “It is possible. But I think it is a human.”
“Okay,” I said. “But if it is, they’re probably about as loopy as the old mad bloke, and we’re gunna have a bit of trouble trying to talk to them.”
“I won’t have trouble,” he said, far too smugly.
“What if they’re like me?” I asked him, grinning.
JinYeong paused for a moment before he said, “Then it will be trouble for everyone,” and kept on his way.
“Rude!” I said, hurrying after him through a hallway that wasn’t quite a hallway anymore but wasn’t really the cleft between hills that it was pretending to be, either. “Oi, where’s this? Did we go too far?”
“We are still Between,” he said. “Here is a piece that touches on fae land, so there is more of grass and flowers.”
His voice was somewhat fastidious, as though JinYeong didn’t care much for nature—or maybe just fae nature.
“Don’t like getting stuff on your shoes, do you?” I asked him, but there was no sharpness to my voice. I touched the grass that grew up a steep embankment on either side of us, and found that it felt very real despite the fact that it looked more like 3-d wallpaper.
I looked ahead again just in time to see JinYeong turning back around, and there was a sharp curve to his cheek as though he’d turned to grin at me and was still doing so. That was weird and also surprising, so I was glad to have missed it.
Maybe I’d have to be sharp again. Couldn’t have JinYeong feeling friendly enough to grin at me without the dark look to his eyes that suggests it’s all a ruse to get you close enough to bite you. It’s a lot safer when you remember there’s a bite at the end of the grin.
I’d caught up with him by the time the cleft in the hill opened out and gave us enough space to walk together instead of in file. When I looked up, the sky was still human sky—or did Behind sky look like human sky? I wasn’t sure—and it was off-putting to tilt my chin back down and find myself looking at the confusing reality that was Between. Here and there, brick and mortar pushed out of a hill, or a foggy, slick window gave a dim view into someone’s house, but for the most part, it was pretty mossy and grassy, with steep hills all around us and windy ways between them.
“What would you see if you climbed to the top of that?” I asked, pointing to the closest hill. I was already pretty sure that all you would see was a creepy continuity of sharp hilltops, right to the horizon. It felt like a maze here without actually being one, and I didn’t appreciate the sense of confinement it gave me.
“That way,” said JinYeong, pointing without hesitation, “is a canton we should not be near. That way is another. There is bog over there, and—”
“Lemme guess, over there is another canton we shouldn’t be near?”
“Ne,” he said, spinning on the balls of his feet, his eyes sharp and searching.
“What?” I asked, but he padded from one end of the small valley to the other without answering, his nostrils flaring.
To himself, he muttered, “Isanghae.”
“What’s up? What’s gone weird this time?”
“Too many scents,” he said, frowning. “Why are there so many scents? And I do not think a human should be coming here.”
“Yeah, what with all the cantons we shouldn’t be going to—”
“And bog.”
“Yeah, and the bog—hang on, bogs aren’t worse than cantons in fae.”
“Yes,” he said flatly. “They are worse.”
“Anyway, it’s no use saying they shouldn’t have come here, because they did. Where did they go from here?”
“There is no scent.”
“You just said there are too many.”
“There is no human scent now,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me. “And too many other scents. Ah! What is this!”
“What’s what?” I asked, as he stalked toward one of the hills that looked as though it might have a similar cleft in it to the one we’d come from.
He stopped short of the actual spot, and for a moment I thought I’d been mistaken. Then I saw the way he’d stiffened, his head turned and his focus intent on the passage between hills. Again, he turned on the balls of his feet, lightly, decisively, and this time he was grinning, his eyes dark and joyful.
“Noh—chunbi?”
“Ready for what? What have you gotten us into?”
“Ssaooyahae.”
“Hang on, we’ve gotta fight? Who’ve we gotta fight now—oh. Ah, flamin’ heck.”
A good half of the things that attack me Between aren’t identifiable, but the three four-armed men who bounded into the valley were pretty flamin’ familiar. I’d seen a few of these particular fae flunkies—usually when some important fae was annoyed about where I was and determined that I shouldn’t be there.
“Lemme guess,” I said, looking around with narrow eyes for something I could fight with. “These blokes belong to one of the cantons we shouldn’t be near?”
It’s always a matter of how you see stuff when it comes to bringing things out of Between—or out of the human world when you’re in Between. You have to know where to look for a weapon, for a start, and then you need to know how to turn it into a weapon when it’s Between.
Lucky for me, I’ve had a fair bit of practise at this sort of thing, now.
As JinYeong stepped forward to meet the four-armed men, snarling, I relaxed my sight a bit and let my eyes rest on the bits of the world around me that were definitely human instead of Behind. Human windows, human garden ornaments—was that gnome solid concrete or was it just trying to keep its head down?—the handlebars of a human bike—and there! There it was!
I don’t know if there was someone playing with the cricket set, but just then, it seemed more important to save my own life than it did to worry about someone’s cricket stumps disappearing mid-game. I grabbed the middle- and off-stumps and brought them up to meet the sword-flashing attack of a four-armed man who was far too close for comfort.
I didn’t have to think about that, either; the guard was there in my reflexive memory, and so was the swift, left-circling spin away that made the flunky step back hurriedly to get out of reach of cricket stumps that were now long, lean swords with edges sharp enough to cut light.
“These ones are mine,” said JinYeong’s voice near my ear, as we passed back to back for a brief moment.
“Greedy,” I said, but I wasn’t complaining. I’d be lucky if I could deal with one of these blokes—I mean, they had four arms and I had two. The dark, bloody shadow that was JinYeong flickered and scuffled somewhere to my right, dark against the green hills, and I still circled left, as wary of the four-armed man as he was of me.
He feinted from his left upper arm as if to slash from my neck right down through my body, but I’d already seen the way his feet were positioned; the tiniest shuffle back instead of forward. So instead of circling to the left and having my head cut off when he changed his stroke, I came in fast and low and ran him through with what had been middle stump.
I didn’t move quickly enough to avoid the flopping arms that thumped down on my back as he died, but I wasn’t slow enough to cop the full weight of his body bearing down on me, either. I sprawled in the churned-up grass and dirt, half covered by a four-armed madman and felt my wrist twinge with the strain.
“Ow,” I said, crawling out from under the mess and very glad that I didn’t have to worry about the two others that JinYeong was looking after.
My sword didn’t want to come out of the bloke, and I nearly left it where it was because when it did come out, the feeling was pretty much the same as it had been going in, and I didn’t particularly want to experience it again.
Still, you never know when you’re going to need a weapon when you’re between, so I gritted my teeth and did it anyway. By the time I was free and it was free, there was a second body on the ground and JinYeong was on the last Behindkind.
Literally on him.
Thumping the last one’s head into the rocky ground for every word, he said in a cold rage, “You. Have. Ruined. My. Clothes.”
They were pretty mucky: the jeans I’d bought him were soaked through with blood at the knees and spattered pretty much everywhere else, and the jumper had a gaping tear on one side with yellow, woollen loose ends floating on the breeze.
The tear framed an equally bad gash in JinYeong’s torso, from the back of his hip and curving toward the front just below his breastbone. That was gunna bother him a bit later.
I grimaced and said to him, pointing at the four-armed man, “Think he’s dead.”
“I know,” he snarled, throwing the head away from him in one last flash of temper. “You, what do you want? Why are you staring at me?”
“You’ve got a pretty big hole in your rib cage,” I said. “You okay? Gunna need blood, or what?”
JinYeong twisted to inspect himself, tch-ing in annoyance, and said something in Korean that I was pretty sure was rude. “It will heal.”
“Then I’m pretty sure we should be leaving now,” I said. “Yanno. If you don’t need blood and we can’t find the trail again and there’s nothing nearby but unfriendly cantons and bogs.”
JinYeong’s eyes were just a little bit more liquid when he looked back at me. “I do not need blood,” he said. “This place is boring and dirty. We will go home.”
“Yeah, we probably better not go out there looking like this, though,” I said, gesturing at my own bloody appearance and then at his. “Got a better way home?”
“There is no other way home but through the bog,” JinYeong said flatly.
“Better than the unfriendly cantons, though, don’t ya reckon?”
JinYeong opened his mouth, closed it again, then said, “My clothes are ruined already,” and stomped away toward what I assumed was the bog.
I followed him, grinning, and soon found myself wading knee-deep in a mixture of mud and moss that was too loose to be called mud. JinYeong, without a word, grimly waded ahead of me, and by the time we pushed back into the human world just a bit short of the kitchen wall, we were both pretty well splashed up to the waist.
JinYeong pushed through the kitchen wall without bothering to go the few steps around the house that would have led to the front door instead. He sploshed past Athelas and Zero, who were eating pizza from the box at the kitchen island, and went right for the bathroom without a word. He seems to think it’s fine to walk around in just a towel and a scowl afterward, but Athelas tells me that if I weren’t here he wouldn’t even bother with that, so he and Zero probably count their blessings these days.
“Well,” I said to Athelas and Zero, throwing the swords down on the kitchen tiles, where they splattered blood and grass and turned back into cricket stumps, “we had fun. How’d your arvo go?”
I called Morgana just long enough after we got back that I wasn’t still panting from a mixture of exhaustion and adrenaline, and I reckon she must have been expecting what I said, because she didn’t sound surprised.
“Daniel couldn’t see anything, either,” she said. “But I’m glad you could get in there, at least. What will you do now?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t talked it over with them. We had a bit of a lead but it went um, cold. Zero might have an idea where to start again, but we haven’t discussed it yet. I gotta have a shower first.”
“How messy was it?” she demanded, her voice astonished. “Daniel said it was mucky, but I didn’t expect you to have to have a shower afterward. Sorry.”
“Just a bit of mud and um, stuff,” I said. “Nothing to worry about. But if Blackpoint hasn’t been living there, it’s probably gunna be a bit difficult to find him again, especially if you don’t have another address.”
“I’ll work on it,” she said. “He could have thought someone was going to come looking for him and managed to lace in a bogus address, but if so, he was really thinking ahead. I couldn’t trace him back directly; there were too many bounce points. I just went with his name and found him in the police system.”
“Pretty sure that’s just as illegal,” I remarked.
“Yeah, but in this case it was quicker and easier,” she said. “He’s too good at hiding his trail. All right, I’ll try the old-fashioned way, but it’ll take ages and probably won’t come up with anything anyway. Oh. I don’t know if it’s important or not, but someone tried to breach my firewall again while you were gone.”
“That same creepy bloke again? Zero visited him, though.”
That had been a surprise to hear while I was getting coffee for myself—and by default, everyone—because although Zero had taken the address, I hadn’t expected him to go and see the bloke today.
“That’s why I told you,” said Morgana. “If he was busy with Zero, I don’t see that he’d have the time for the kind of sophisticated attack that came on after you left. I don’t think he’d have the guts, either.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Zero made him think again about bothering kids on the internet.”
That was reading between the lines. What Zero had actually said was, He peed himself on the carpet. Athelas, smiling faintly, had said, I take it that he annoyed you somewhat, my lord?
I wasn’t exactly sure what Zero had said after that, because I was too busy trying to pinch a piece of pizza while neither of them were paying attention, but I think it was, He was already busy when I got there.
“Was he an old bloke?” she asked.
“Bit younger,” I said. That was reading between the lines, too. Zero had described him as just barely having a beard, which could have meant he was just weedy but probably meant he was youngish as well. “Don’t think you have to worry about him anymore: Zero scared him a bit, I reckon.”
“Yeah, but if it wasn’t him making the attack on my firewall, who was it?”
“Good question,” I said. “I’ll let ya know when I figure it out.”
Since someone had brought pizza home, I didn’t have to get lunch for anyone, which was a nice change. For a little while when a snarly JinYeong came out of the shower, it looked like he might leave the house to look for a snack of his own, but Zero didn’t tell him not to go, which helped. If JinYeong went out looking as cranky as he did, I pitied the human who came into contact with him.
“I will eat pizza,” he said at last.
“’S’pose it’s the right colour at least,” I said. I had already been scoffing pepperoni for the last ten minutes without bothering to take the shower now it was empty. If I left while there was still pizza hanging around, I could be sure there’d be none when I got back. “Oi, Zero; the place we went to was empty.”
“So Athelas tells me. What does your friend want us to do?”
“She reckons she’s gunna try to track him the old-fashioned way. I told her we’d try on our side. What about your bloke?”
“He trawls the game for playmates,” said Zero. “He didn’t know Blackpoint except by name.”
“You sure about that?” I asked. “’Cos—”
“I am very sure.”
“Oh.” I looked across at him and saw the ice in his eyes. “All right, then. What do we do next? If the bloke’s hidden himself away it’s gunna be a bit hard to check on him and see if he’s all right.”
“You lost your track somewhere Between, I take it.”
“The trail led somewhere Between that was better not to go,” JinYeong said, looking up from his pizza at last. “And the trail was human.”
Zero’s brows went up. “I see. You think it wasn’t our quarry?”
“Pretty certain,” I said. “There was a glamour on the place to look like it was derelict, but when we got inside it was pretty normal—it was just empty there. And it can’t have been our bloke because the power wasn’t on, and no computer. Someone had been squatting, so we followed their trail ’cos we didn’t have any other leads.”
“I see,” Zero said again.
“So interesting, isn’t it, my lord?” Athelas said. “We don’t know whether or not our quarry is human, but a human was squatting in the house and led a trail Between. Certainly we are living in er, changing times.”
“Yes,” said Zero, a faint crease between his brows. “That’s exactly what worries me. More, it worries me that there are apparently humans using magic willy-nilly.”
“I’m more worried that there are still people around saying stuff like willy-nilly,” I told him. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Perhaps something we should follow up alongside our interest in the case,” Athelas suggested. To me, it looked like he was trying to hide a smile. “The crown will certainly be interested if they find out about it.”
“Yes,” said Zero, and it seemed to me that he said it heavily.
Something he’d rather not acknowledge, or just something he was worried about? I’m pretty sure he sometimes refuses to acknowledge stuff he just doesn’t want to deal with, whether or not it’s a bad thing.
I asked Athelas, “You didn’t find anything else there?”
“The amount of refuse in the house was not conducive to finding anything useful,” he said. “I left shortly after you did. Your young human friend will have to try a little harder to find something with her skills.”
I didn’t like the way he said your young human friend. With anyone else it might just have been a statement of fact, but coming from Athelas it sounded like every one of those descriptors was in peril of being changed without notice. It’s a skill he has.
“She said she would,” I reminded him.
“I’ll start some enquiries from our end,” Zero said abruptly, surprising me.
I’d expected him to say much the same as Athelas—that Morgana would have to help herself a bit more.
He caught my surprised glance, and looked away. “Whether or not we find him our way, it won’t hurt to have her collecting as much data as she can manage; we still don’t know whether he’s human or fae.”
“Someone’s still having a go at her over the internet, too,” I said. “And we already know it’s not the bloke you visited today.”
“Agreed,” he said, with a certain gleam to his eyes. “I don’t despair of your friend finding a little more on her own, but I have my own sources of information.”
“Yeah? Don’t s’pose you’re going to tell me what they are?”
“Not just yet,” he said, after a slight pause. “I know this is your case, but I have some things I’d like to be sure of before I go too far with what information I give.”
“There’s a change,” I said, grinning; but I wasn’t really upset.
“Perhaps you could employ your mouth with pizza instead of verbal jabs,” Athelas suggested. “Otherwise I could feel that it was a waste to get that pepperoni especially for you.”
I grinned at him and grabbed another piece to show my willingness to comply with demands that were reasonable, and it wasn’t until later when I was up in my room to get myself some fresh clothes that the thought occurred to me. If Athelas had left around the same time JinYeong and I did, and he was only just starting to eat pizza he had brought back home with him when we got back after fighting and slopping our way Between, that meant he hadn’t gone home straight away.
I wondered where he’d been. He would probably just lift his nose at me and point to the pizza if I asked, but I knew exactly how far away that pizza place was—which was not far. I also knew that he could order it on his phone, which would have left him a good hour or so to himself between all of us leaving the house and picking up the pizza for himself and Zero.
He doesn’t like me to talk about it, but I’m pretty sure Athelas goes off and does his own thing half the time when he gets bored with us. I’m pretty sure Zero knows about it, too, so I don’t bother to say anything.
Puzzles, I thought. That was all there was these days: puzzles and riddles and stuff I couldn’t remember. Athelas wasn’t the only thing that left me wondering. There was a bottle-top in my pocket that shouldn’t have been able to find its way into my room, a vampire downstairs who had been acting downright weird for the last week at least, and secrets hidden inside this room itself, not to mention the mysteries that had clung to me since my parents’ deaths.
I took out the bottle-top absently, and let it tumble through my fingers. Somehow or other that made my feet wander as well, and when I looked up, I was standing in front of the place where I had hidden treasures of a different kind.
Ah yes. One of my other puzzles.
I put the bottle-cap back in my pocket and sifted through the bowl of marbles that was on display to make sure that the familiar, rectangular slice of glass was still where it was supposed to be.
It was, and that left me feeling a bit more secure about everything.
It didn’t look like anything special: it was a USB drive but it looked more like a slide of glass that you used to get in those old chemistry sets, just a bit thinner and shorter, with a tiny gold chip in one end. Tiny and all but invisible when nestled in my bowl of marbles, it waited.
With it, I had bargained for help for humans, freedom for myself, and a chance at shaping the world instead of letting it shape me. It was pretty small for something so powerful. I still didn’t know exactly what was on it, but I did know I wanted to find out before I handed it off to Zero, if possible.
I kept another USB in a tiny chest of drawers that was meant to hold jewellery but instead held all of my baby teeth: that USB was less showy and more frustrating. Red and a little bit soft, it had far more easily accessible files on it than the glass USB. Far more easily accessible, but just as incomprehensible.
Perhaps it was time to see if the incomprehensible could be made comprehensible. Or maybe it was just time to see if I could get rid of one of the puzzles that beleaguered my life.

Chapter 4

Chapter Four
I slipped the red USB into my pocket and left the house after the bathroom had aired out enough from JinYeong’s cologne for me to be able to shower without being gassed out. I had a friend I wanted to see.
My friendship with Five Four One isn’t the longest, but it’s a pretty close relationship despite that. You get pretty close with a leprechaun after you’ve fought off dropbears together with an old umbrella sword, a bow made from fibreglass and twine, and the leprechaun’s wooden leg.
It helps if you give the wooden leg back at the end.
The thing you probably don’t know about leprechauns is that they’re scary good at chasing up records—especially if those records have anything to do with where money is, or where money ought to have been and mysteriously isn’t anymore.
The stuff I wanted him to check out was only tangentially involved with money, but I was hoping that would be enough. Well, that and the fact that I would pay him in cash to find out what I wanted to know. Turns out that leprechauns don’t just have a nose for following money trails—they really love smelling actual money.
When I first met him, Five was black-carded and locked out of the world Behind; he now had an apartment in the human world and a small but rapidly growing bit of money in the bank due to discovering he had a nose for following the stocks as well. I’d only known him about a week, but that had been long enough to find out he’d do anything for a twenty no matter how much he had in the bank, ’cos you can’t smell the money you have in the bank.
Also he likes me, so he’ll do stuff for me.
I was hoping he’d be able to make some sense of the stuff on my little red USB. Detective Tuatu had given it to me a little while ago: it was a copy of all the stuff Athelas had asked him to find in the police system. He’d owed Athelas a favour and hadn’t been able to refuse, but he had made a copy of what he’d found to give to me.
Turns out that Detective Tuatu doesn’t like not having a choice in what he has to do, and he’s pretty creative about making sure he gets a word in edgewise. Athelas probably would have approved, in fact, but since I didn’t particularly want him to know that I was checking up on what he was up to, I didn’t think it wise to tell him.
I just took the USB and went to the tumble-down old block of flats where Five was living. For a place as tumble-down as it was, it still had a pretty well functioning communication system—by which I mean when you pressed the ‘talk’ button for any particular flat, the screen only flickered once or twice, and you had a pretty good chance of being connected to the right unit first time around.
Or second, at a pinch; and you don’t always get a wild-eyed bloke in his pyjamas, either. Sometimes it’s a night worker with half her makeup still on and a pleasant kind of sleepy face.
This time, though, it connected me straight away.
It connected me to a grim, bearded face with sharp eyes and a very loud silence that jutted out every bit as much as its beard. Fortunately, it was a silence I knew.
I said, “Gunna let me in?”
“Oh, it’s you,” he said grumpily, as if he hadn’t already been able to see me.
But if you think he was annoyed to see me, you’d be wrong. When Five is actually annoyed by something, his little peg leg starts tapping sharply against the floor, and he sorta stares at you with a dead expression on his face and his small beard fairly bristling with hostility. From Five, grumpiness is tantamount to welcome.
But the biggest sign that he likes me is that he pressed the button to open the grubby sliding door to let me into the lobby.
As usual, the elevator wasn’t working, so I took the stairs two at a time and had to slow down by the third floor because I was already panting. So much for all my training: give me one too many flights of stairs and I’m coughing like a seal at the beach.
I was still puffing a bit when I got to the sixth floor. You could say that Five has a penthouse apartment if you’re going by the fact that it’s the top one and his is the only one up there, but the reality of it is that it’s the only one at the top of an old building that should have been demolished about twenty years ago, and it’s the only one with a tenant because the other ones are all missing a roof, a window, or half a wall.
“Told ya you should’ve moved in with us,” I told him, when he opened the door and the number on the front fell onto the concrete hallway floor with a tinkle.
“Guff!” he told me, in a small, gruff explosion of speech. “Not with those three! No, thank you!”
“Yeah, well,” I said, but I was grinning. It wasn’t like I didn’t know that Zero had absolutely refused to let Five live with us anyway. I would have fought for it if I’d had to, but Five had remained just as certain that he didn’t want to be nearer to my three psychos than he strictly had to be.
“What’s the problem, kid?” he asked me. His sharp old eyes grew a bit sharper under the wild eyebrows. “Those three giving you trouble?”
“About the same,” I said, and added happily, “Brought you some bikkies!”
They were store-bought instead of home-made, but I hadn’t had the time today for baking.
The eyebrows drew together slightly. “How many?”
“Exactly forty-eight,” I said. He doesn’t need exactly forty-eight, but he prefers even numbers and he loves twos and lots of twos.
“You’d better come in, then,” he said. “And if you’re going to ask me to do something, there better be more than a biscuit or two.”
“Or forty-eight,” I said, grinning. “Got you a twenty, as well.”
“Well, there’s something,” he said. He still sounded grumpy, but now it sounded as though he was trying very hard for it. “Don’t worry about trying to shut the door; it won’t close properly when the number’s off.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re telling me, kid! Nothing makes sense since I’ve—well, nothing makes sense. Where does the hot water come from? Mystery! No magic in there!”
“That’s the bit of paper you have to pay a hundred and fifty bucks every quarter for,” I told him, trying not to grin more. “I told you about the water bill and electricity.”
“And the cold blower won’t blow cold anymore.”
“You probably need to change the batteries in the remote.”
“Listen kid, I’ve been in batteries, and I’m telling you—”
“Heck,” I said. “I’ll make the tea; you sit down and I’ll fix the electronics later, okay?”
“This time, explain it better,” he said, scowling at me.
“Yeah, like I’m the one who doesn’t understand!” I said cheekily.
That made him grin, which must have annoyed him, so I pretended I hadn’t seen it and went off into the kitchen to boil the jug and dump my packages of biscuits. He followed me in, but that wasn’t surprising: Five doesn’t have any living room furniture at the moment—I mean, he barely has a living room at the moment—and the couple times I’ve visited, we’ve sat at the kitchen table to talk.
Well, as much as a taciturn old leprechaun talks, that is.
“What is it you want?”
“Got a bit of paperwork for you,” I said, as the jug bubbled away in the background. It was more than a bit of paperwork: hopefully the library still had some paper now that I’d been through and printed out everything on the USB.
I dumped the plastic bag of it on the table with a thump, and pointed at it.
“What’s this?” Five demanded. “I don’t do paperwork. Where’s my console display?”
“You don’t know how to use a human computer,” I objected. “Thought you just needed to see the stuff!”
“Where’s my twenty?”
I grinned, and passed it over. I was almost sure he would have done it without the money, but he likes to pretend he’s a grumpy old man and what’s the point in stopping people having fun? Anyway, it was Zero paying for it, and that was a bit of fun for me.
“What is it?”
“Dunno,” I said. “Figured you’d be able to tell me that.”
“Typical!” he said, but he couldn’t hide the gleam in his eye. He’d caught sight of the top paper—a water bill—and there was already a scent of the game in it for him. “You want me to follow the money?”
“Maybe? Dunno. It’s a whole lot of stuff that someone gathered from police files and databases, and I want to know why. Why he wanted it; what it all leads to, that sorta stuff. Reckon you can find some meaning to it?”
“I can tell you where the money goes,” he said. “That’s all I promise.”
“That’ll do,” I said cheerfully. It was more than I’d had that morning. “When d’you reckon you’ll have answers for me?”
“Hard to say,” he said. At first, I thought he was just being grumpy for the sake of being grumpy, but his face was serious. “I follow it where it goes, but I have to find a pattern first. And I’m not used to dealing with hard copies. If I had my portal and console, I could do a bit more.”
Disappointing, but it wasn’t like I really knew what to expect from this mixed lot, after all. I could wait as long as it took. And try to forget the implication that Five would be able to access human data from a Behind interface.
“All right,” I said. “You figured out how to use the phone?”
“Green and gold! You showed me last time: do you think I’ve forgotten since then?”
“You press the buttons in the same order as the number.”
He glowered at me over the top of his mug. “I knew that. And then I press the red button—”
“Green.”
“Yes, I press the green button and then wait.”
“You got it. Call me when you know anything, all right? I’ll bring you some more biscuits later.”
I got home just as JinYeong did: we met on the doorstep and eyed each other with suspicion. He probably wanted to know where I’d been, and I definitely wanted to know where he’d been—and just as definitely didn’t want to be talking about where I’d been, so I said accusatorily, “You don’t come through the front door! What are you up to?”
“Humans are watching,” he said, his eyes flicking back toward the road, where a human couple were out walking their dog. “And hyeong said we should be more careful these days.”
I opened the door and stepped through ahead of him. “Since when do you obey Zero?”
“I obey needful things.”
“Yeah,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “I remember.”
JinYeong said something in a snarl of Korean that was unintelligible despite the fact that I could usually understand him now, and said bitingly, “You are a bother to me.”
“Yeah, you’ve said that before,” I said. “It’s my flamin’ pleasure!”
One of his eyebrows went up and he grinned, suddenly and startlingly.
“Pet,” said Zero, cold and commanding, “stop needling JinYeong. He has some information we need, and I’d like to get it before the end of the day.”
“Right, sorry!” I called, and left the still-grinning JinYeong in the hallway. “You lot want tea and coffee? Dinner won’t be until later if you’re still sorting out boxes.”
“Biscuits, too,” said Zero forbiddingly, but honestly even a fae lord can’t entirely pull off the forbidding thing when he’s requesting biscuits. Especially the pretty little shortbreads I get.
I popped up into the kitchen to start the jug boiling, feeling as though today was one round of tea and coffee after another, then hung around in the doorway so I could see what it was that JinYeong had been sent out about. To my surprise, they had all decamped to the upstairs living room, and by the time I got up there with my tray of drinks and bikkies they were gathered around the computer, looking perplexed.
Turns out it hadn’t been for information gathering so much as game gathering.
“You been buying computer games?” I asked JinYeong in astonishment, as Zero turned over a rectangular package between his hands.
“Aniyo,” said JinYeong, looking far too pleased with himself. “I did not buy it.”
“Yeah, that’s being real careful,” I mocked. “Zero will be real happy when you’re pulled up for shoplifting!”
“I will not be stopped; I am too charming.”
“Yeah?” I said. “’Cos I know one human detective and one human pet who are both pretty flamin’ immune to your mojo.”
“You are both defective.”
“It’s detective—”
“Pet,” said Zero, on a sigh. “You’re spilling biscuits on the keyboard.”
“Look at you, learning what stuff’s called!” I said admiringly, picking up the couple of biscuits that had slipped off the side of the plate. “Five second rule. They’re fine. Want me to put the game in and start it up?”
“Yes,” Zero said. He still looked faintly disturbed, but whether that was because he had to accept help from me or because of the biscuits, I wasn’t quite sure.
“You look after the tray, then,” I said. It was nice to be able to give orders now and then, especially now that I wasn’t a pet for a little while. Didn’t mean my orders would be obeyed, of course, but I could give them.
Zero accepted the tray with the same rather bemused air, and shifted minutely to allow me to sit on the chair in front of the computer. I saw ghostly reflections of my three psychos in the computer screen as I turned it on, each one helping himself to his own drink from the tray. I was pretty sure that Zero slipped a few biscuits into his front pockets, too.
Lucky for me, it was an easy game to load—either that, or we had a good computer. I haven’t played computer games since I was a kid, and they were pretty different then. I was also pretty impressed that JinYeong had managed to get the game in the right format, until I remembered that he had probably just talked the game shop owner into giving him the right thing.
Open world, Morgana had said. That was true; before we got to it, though, there was a whole range of choices and about half an hour of cut scenes and tiny interactions to teach us how to use the keyboard commands.
I went through it all impatiently, but for my three psychos, it seemed to be a lot more interesting. They hung over my shoulder—or at least, JinYeong and Zero did; even Athelas, who had sat down elegantly after drawing up a chair close to me, leaned forward to gaze at the screen—and watched avidly through the entire length of the cut scenes and exposition.
That made me pay more attention, and as I watched, it occurred to me that if I knew the names of the fae families and factions, this could almost be a primer for Behind as it pertained to the fae. Zero and Athelas at least seemed very familiar with the names; Zero frowned a bit more each time a family or faction was named, and Athelas, a soft reflection in the screen where it was darkest, smiled.
There wasn’t much in it about any other Behindkind, despite the Characters you could choose from. I wondered if that was being kept for the next game, and I wasn’t entirely surprised when, at the beginning of the gameplay itself, Athelas sat back and crossed one leg over the other, still very much amused.
“How interesting!” he said, sipping his tea. “Is it a Behindkind plant, do you think, or is there a game writer out there who knows just a little bit too much for their own good? Those names are…very nearly correct.”
“I’m not sure yet,” Zero said, frowning. “It will be difficult in either case.”
“That mean you’re gunna drop the case?” I asked, rather anxiously.
He shook his head. “We have an interim agreement. I can’t renege.”
“You say that as though you would have reneged if you could,” Athelas said, apparently to himself.
Zero looked across at him coldly.
“I do beg your pardon if I spoke out of turn, my lord.”
“Do you.”
“I was merely indicating to the pet that the way I would act is at odds with the way you conduct yourself.”
“Don’t think he believes that, either,” I warned Athelas. “Oi. Zero, what do you mean that it’ll be difficult either way?”
“If it’s an unauthorised Behindkind enterprise, we’ll be running up against Behindkind law enforcement unless we’re very careful. If it’s a human who knows more than they should…that is something of a problem for you.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
And I did see. I already had a good idea of what was expected to happen to a human who knew too much: it hadn’t happened to me, but it had been threatened a couple of times. Zero was telling me that if it came to a human who knew more than they should, he would adhere to Behindkind guidelines, despite any objections I might have.
If that was the case, it was indeed my problem, and I would have to think about how I was going to handle it when the time came.
“In the meantime, try to remember that you’ll be referred to as pet and that you should so refer to yourself: if we come into contact with Behindkind Enforcers it will be…advisable. We’ve also taken on a job from the Enforcers—”
“Job?” I sat up straight. We were already full up with the murder and now Morgana, and— Wait. Was this job one of those ones? The ones that had to do with helping humans? “What job?”
“—and it would be best for everyone concerned if people still think you’re the pet.”
Zero hesitated, and I could fairly see him struggling to make himself say more. Close-mouthed is one thing: Zero is an air-tight vault hermetically sealed in a room that’s part of a safe-house stashed inside a flamin’ mountain.
I gave him an encouraging smile, but that only seemed to annoy him, so I asked again, “What job? Is it one of the ones that golden git brought us?”
“His name is—”
“JinYeong already told me,” I said. “It sounds like a sneeze and I can’t pronounce it. It’s easier to call him the golden git.”
Zero’s gaze took on a slight frosting of ice. “If you call him anything of the sort to his face—”
“Yeah, you’ll trounce me,” I said gloomily.
“I think my lord was more worried about having to clean up a body,” Athelas said.
“Oh. Well, at least I can fight these days,” I offered. If I couldn’t, I was still pretty good at running away, and I could nip behind Zero quickly enough at a pinch.
“Not your body,” said Zero briefly.
“I would advise learning how to pronounce that particular sneeze,” Athelas said. “But after all, I shouldn’t wish to interfere with that charming insouciance of yours, so consider yourself free to ignore my advice.”
I gazed at him for a few moments, then said, “Don’t you threaten me with the consequences of my actions.”
Athelas sputtered into his teacup, and I turned back to Zero.
“Yeah, anyway: what’s the job?”
“The job is the same one your little friend brought us, though from a slightly different angle.”
“Oh,” I said, a bit glumly. Of course Zero had taken on the job from Morgana; he’d known that it had something to do with Behindkind. Had he already taken it on from the Enforcers before he spoke with her? “When did you learn about that?”
“When your friend told me about it,” he said. “I made some further enquiries this afternoon, since it seemed like a familiar sort of setup. The crown occasionally uses such plants to gauge the response of humans to the existence of Behindkind—or to scout for potentially useful employees. However, this is an unauthorised testing, if test it is. We’ve been tasked with finding the source of the game and apprehending them; the crown believes that humans are likely to be injured by this sort of setup.”
I heard the very faint edge of sarcasm in his voice, and although it made me grin, I still felt comforted. As things stood, it didn’t look too bad. If Blackpoint really was human, it would be worse, but if he was Behindkind, then at least humans were going to be looked after no matter what the outcome was.
“Reckon I should tell Morgana to stop playing the game?” I asked. Giving Behindkind of any sort information about human choices and reactions was bad enough, but people were disappearing. I didn’t want that to happen to Morgana.
“I’ve already warned her to do so,” Zero said. “I called her for further information earlier.”
“How’d you get her number?” My voice was sharp, because I didn’t like them having her number. When I was the only one with Morgana’s number, it felt like I was able to be more of a buffer between her and the psychos, as if I could stop the Between and Behind worlds from affecting her more than they already had.
“It was written on the second piece of paper,” Zero said. He hesitated for a moment, and added slightly stiffly, “I wouldn’t have called her if she hadn’t written it there: I would have kept you as our go-between.”
“Thanks,” I said, a bit mollified. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them, but I didn’t trust the kind of trouble that came along with them—or even the trouble that came along with me by default these days.
“This is your case,” said Zero, looking away. “There’s no need to thank me. Of course you’re the point of entry.”
That was nice, too. It meant that I was being taken seriously as a part of the team, at least when it came to the cases I brought to the psychos.
“That holds up until there’s fae involvement,” he added. “Then, if there should be a misalignment of purposes—”
“I know,” I said grimly. “You’ll go with fae law. I’ve already seen it.”
I still remembered it, too. A whole office full of Behind-allied humans who were trading in bodies and souls; judged, sentenced, and put to death in one day. I wasn’t likely to forget. Behind law dealt severely with lawbreakers when it caught up with them, whether those lawbreakers were human or Behindkind. And when you deal in bodies and souls, you have to expect to pay in the same coin.
I already knew that was what I’d signed up for, and so long as it protected humans who hadn’t done anything wrong, I was willing to go along with it. Especially if it was the only protection humans would get.
I left the three of them to get on with their exploration of the computer world, but by the time I was cooking dinner they’d either finished with it, or, as I suspected from the looks of annoyance on the faces of both Zero and JinYeong, run into a problem in-game that they couldn’t solve with their limited knowledge of computer games.
I nearly grinned and asked them if they needed a bit of help with it, but I remembered in time that they were actually being proactive and co-operative in the investigation and managed to close my mouth instead.
Athelas murmured, “That must have been difficult, Pet!” as he passed me the tray from upstairs.
I choked on a giggle and took the tray. “Dinner’ll be ready in ten,” I said, so I didn’t have to answer him.
Athelas came in later, while I was doing the washing up, and sat down at the kitchen island with his teacup in one hand. I poured him a refill, careful to keep my sud-dripping to the counter and not his teacup, then went back to washing up.
I was pretty sure he was here to say something, but if it came to information being given, I wasn’t prepared to exchange for it. He would have to either tell me or not tell me, whichever one he wanted.
“Perhaps, Pet,” he said at last, “you’re not quite aware of exactly who the golden fae and his entourage are.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re the cobbers that come through the linen closet. What’s wrong with ’em, by the way? Why can’t they use the front door now that they’ve found us?”
Athelas sipped his tea. “Someone took the liberty of attaching a particularly specific strain of poison to the front door when we first arrived. It will have no effect upon humans and most fae, but the golden fae would find himself made very uncomfortable by it.”
“Very uncomfortable, or very dead?”
“In life, I find it’s not so much about people being dead, as wishing they were dead.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “But d’you reckon you could be a bit more specific?”
“Let us say, very uncomfortable and then very dead,” he replied.
“Well, it wasn’t me that did it, so I’m gunna go out on a limb and say it must have been you,” I told him.
“You may say exactly as you choose,” he said placidly. “However, it would behove you to remember that that particular fae is allied with the Family, as are we now, by some bizarre and wholly unfortunate circumstance—”
“You better not be talking about me this time,” I warned him. “If you are, I won’t give you the butter cookies I made.”
“I can’t help thinking sometimes,” he said reflectively, “that you’re far too perceptive for your own good.”
“That means yes, doesn’t it?”
“We are, it seems, once more allied with the Family in a tenuous manner; we are also now, Pet, allied with the King Behind in a manner far less tenuous. The Enforcers are his officers, even if they’re allied more closely to the Family and Zero’s father than the king would like. Should there be unpleasantness between us and our liaison, no matter the outcome, it would bring us into greater scrutiny here than most of us would find…comfortable.”
“Is it anything like scrutiny from Zero’s dad?” I asked. I’d already experienced that particular scrutiny, and I would very much rather never face anything like it again.
Mind you, given my current status in the household, and the likelihood of meeting Zero’s dad again now that we were a bit more officially connected, I was probably likely to face at least the Behindkind again.
And I understood, faintly, why Zero might say that it was safer for me if I maintained my outward appearance of being a pet, even if I wasn’t one at the moment. Like Morgana’s game, the fae tended to think of humans as the lowest of the low, and servants just barely higher; they expected little of me and would likewise suspect little of me.
“Considerably worse,” said Athelas. “But scrutiny from my lord’s father is far more likely at the present, and we’re better equipped to deal with it.”
“Hang on, is Zero’s dad likely to come to the house?”
“I rather think my lord would have something to say about that,” murmured Athelas, gazing into the reflection of his tea. “But after all, there’s no saying that there wouldn’t be an attempt.”
“He better not be growing grass and flowers and stuff all over my carpet if he comes here,” I said, scowling. As if I’d be able to stop him doing it. As if I’d dare to scowl at him if he did. “I don’t wanna have to start weeding the hallways—and that reminds me; which one of you lot has been making dust bunnies come alive in the hallways? They’re chewing on the skirting-boards and leaving the bits everywhere.”
“I rather fancy the banshees have been busy,” Athelas said. “Perhaps you could do something about that when you have a spare moment. They do bother JinYeong so.”
He left his teacup on the counter and got up to go as he said it, before I could say more than a startled, “Oi! What am I supposed to do about ’em?”
I didn’t want to do anything to help JinYeong, either, if it came to that. Maybe I could talk the banshees into moving into his room and setting the dust-bunnies free in there. That was a thought.
I came back out into the downstairs living room after I’d finished the washing up, but they’d gone back to their own case by then, Zero now poring over the files in one of the boxes while Athelas contemplated the ceiling with his cup of tea in hand. JinYeong was back to sniffing stuff and tasting stuff, his eyes far away and bloody, so there must have been some interesting scents in his boxes. I’ve seen his eyes like that before: dunno what he’s seeing, but it’s like watching an almost-human computer process information.
That meant I was on my own tonight when it came to Morgana’s case, and I didn’t have a clue where I was supposed to start. I could always ask Detective Tuatu to do some digging, but if Morgana and her scary good computer skills couldn’t produce a useful address, I wasn’t sure the police department could do it. They were meant to do things by the law—and they restricted themselves to government systems.
Not to mention the fact that there was still a pretty big Behindkind finger in the police pie around here. No, it would be safer if I didn’t go to Detective Tuatu about this. Safer for him, too, most likely.
Zero must have seen me squirming and guessed the reason for it, because when I brought out the hot drinks and biscuits by way of dessert later on, he said, “I’ve made some enquiries about your case: we could have an address as early as tomorrow. Don’t…fidget.”
I took that as a warning not to go off and do anything stupid, but despite my annoyance at the implied insult I felt a little bit warmer. It was nice to know I wasn’t on my own anymore.
I just had to make sure I didn’t trust that warmth too much.

Chapter 5

Chapter Five
I’ve gotten used to fae popping through the linen closet by now, but it’s still a bit of an annoyance to have them popping in after dinner. I never know whether or not to offer them dessert. Even if I do offer it, not all of them will take it. Once upon a time there was a mix-up with JinYeong’s blood snacks and the regular food, and it turns out that fae really don’t like biting into little blood bubbles in pastry. Who would have guessed? A real shame, that.
Still, sometimes it’s fun to offer just to see how horrified they look—or amused, depending on which fae it is.
But when someone knocked at the linen closet door after dinner the next day, the sound was sharp and bright. A nice business-like knock that sounded patient rather than imperious.
So I yelled into the living room, “I’ve got it!” and went to open the door. I was pretty sure I knew who it was. Sure enough, when I opened the door, I didn’t cop a sight of highly armoured, highly supercilious fae captain. Instead, I found myself grinning at a female fae who was just as golden and just as highly armoured, but a lot more fun to be around.
“Let you out on your own, did he?” I asked.
If her captain was an idiot with a name like a sneeze—and, unfortunately, our point of contact with the Behind legal system—this fae was tough, had a surprising sense of humour, and the ability to stand her ground even in the face of Zero’s icy glare, which was something I didn’t get to see too often.
“I’m here to assist Lord Sero with a particular enquiry,” she said, a line of amusement deepening along the lower edge of her cheek. “My captain couldn’t make the journey today.”
“What a shame,” I said insincerely. This was an interesting new development. “Oi, they didn’t tell me your name.”
There was the briefest of pauses, while I wondered if she was going to tell me I could refer to her by her rank, before she said, “You can call me Palomena.”
“Right,” I said. “Want something to eat, Palomena? You’re just in time for dessert.”
“Is there blood in it?”
I grinned. “Not for you.”
“In that case, yes.”
“Coming up!” I said cheerfully. “You might as well head into the living room; they’re all in there, plus a banshee or two, I reckon.”
I ignored JinYeong’s startled mwoh? from the living room, and went back to the kitchen. Palomena was another tea-lover, which rounded out the usual three coffee drinkers to one tea drinker a bit, so all I needed to do was put out another cup for her and hope Athelas wouldn’t mind sharing his pot.
I hurried, because if this was about Morgana’s case, I wanted to be there when the discussions began. I could already hear Zero’s voice from the kitchen, cold and hard and carrying. “Why are you here?”
“Orders, my lord,” said Palomena. She didn’t say it cheerfully, but she said it without hesitation or undue worry. “As I should suppose you would know, since my captain informed you of it when you spoke with him earlier.”
“And I should suppose that your captain remembered me telling him I didn’t require assistance from the Enforcers,” Zero said, his voice sinking into a deeper rumble. Not so much ice now as hard, craggy rock.
“I couldn’t say, my lord,” she said, as I put a few more biscuits and a bit more fruit and cheese on the tray, grinning. “I have my orders from my captain, and that’s all.”
“Your orders—”
“Here we go!” I said cheerfully, before things could get more exciting. In general, I like a bit of excitement, but not when it means the coffee and biscuits are going to get messed up. I pointed with my chin at the soft cheese, and said to the lieutenant, “You’d better get in on the brie before this lot gets at it, or you won’t get a look-in.”
“Don’t feed her biscuits and cheese!” Zero said in exasperation.
“Well, you can’t just put her in a corner, and it’s rude to eat cheese and biscuits without giving any to your guests.”
“She’s not a guest,” he retorted.
“You just want to eat all the cheese,” I said.
Zero very visibly took in a breath, and turned to the lieutenant. “Have you at least brought information with you?”
“I have a potential address,” she said. “We’ve been keeping an eye on City Fae for a month or two now, but we’ve only just been able to pin down the source of those problems within the game and the human world when it comes to usable intelligence.”
“You’ve been looking for Blackpoint, too?” I asked, frowning. “And you found where you think he’s living?”
“Just recently,” she nodded. “Like I said, we’d already had our eye on City Fae, but it took us some time to figure out how to interact with it enough to get usable intelligence. The players seem to develop pretty rabid fascination with the game, and we wanted to be sure that consequences weren’t going to spill over into the human world.”
“Yeah, can’t have humans learning about stuff,” I said, before I could stop myself.
Palomena’s eyes fell on me. They weren’t annoyed or exasperated, just a bit considering. “It’s certainly not safe,” she said. “But after all, life isn’t safe. My job is to make sure that life is kept as…safe as possible for the greatest amount of people.”
“With a bias toward Behindkind?”
Heck. I was really gunna have to try not to antagonise people when they were being nice to me.
To my surprise, she answered me swiftly and honestly. “Yes. Behindkind are always the first priority. But although there’s a hierarchy, humans are still given consideration. It’s the best I can do.”
“S’pose so,” I said. And since she seemed sincere about doing her best, I pushed the biscuits toward her. “Here, have a chocky one. They’re the best.”
“I’ll accompany your team for the investigation of the address I have provided,” she said, taking a biscuit. “If needed, I’ll assist, but please consider me to be an observer only for the time being.”
Zero didn’t say anything, a crushing silence that grew heavier by the moment. Maybe Palomena was used to that, because she let it stretch out and bit into her biscuit as though she didn’t have anything else to be doing. I mean, they were good biscuits, so that probably helped.
When she had finished her biscuit and was delicately brushing the crumbs from her fingers, Zero finally said, “An observer only. We’ll visit the address tomorrow.”
Maybe he was hoping she would leave and we could slip out early before she got back, because I’ve never known night time to be a barrier to any of them going out and getting things done that should usually be done in daylight hours. None of ’em sleep as much as a human—I’m not sure they even need to sleep, though they do sleep a few hours here and there—and they seem to like to take advantage of every hour when they’re on a case.
Palomena must have had the same thought, because she said, “There’s no need to wait on my account. I’m ready to accompany you at any time: I don’t see the necessity of leaving things so long.”
“We need to recharge,” Zero said coldly.
“I see. That’s different, of course. Shall we plan on tomorrow morning, in that case?”
He gave a very small nod. “Certainly. I hope you’ll excuse us from inviting you along while we recharge.”
“Of course!” she said. “I’m quite fresh, as it happens. You can leave me alone here in the house with perfect impunity.”
Good grief! She was actually winning tricks here! This is what happens when you’re powerful enough to stand up to a fae lord: you get to have fun without worrying that it’s gunna get you throttled one day.
Zero gazed at her meditatively for a few moments before he said, “The pet will remain. You should know that I’ve made it impervious to fae Command.”
Ha! I was impervious to it all by myself, and if we were going back to calling me it, I was gunna—
“I don’t foresee the need to Command such a well-trained pet,” said Palomena equably.
“And I don’t care to have my property damaged.”
Was he talking about the house, or about me?
Palomena didn’t seem to have any difficulty in deciding which one. She said, “I’m not in the habit of interfering with other peoples’ pets, and I’m well aware that humans are usually sleeping at this hour.”
Zero nodded shortly. He probably didn’t have any other choice, but I had the feeling he could have made another choice available to himself despite the expert rounding up Palomena had just performed. If he’d really wanted to, that is.
He must have been reasonably sure she wasn’t going to cause problems or kill me in my sleep or anything, because he didn’t ask JinYeong to stay behind, either. That meant he trusted her to a certain extent—or maybe he just wanted to get JinYeong to do something else while she was here with me. It wasn’t like JinYeong needed to recharge, after all.
JinYeong, who knew that just as well as I or Zero, shot a narrow-eyed look at Zero, and for the briefest moment I thought he was going to complain. I saw Palomena watching them with the faintest hint of amusement in her eyes, and it occurred to me, far too late, that Palomena should also be very well aware of the fact that JinYeong didn’t need to recharge.
She didn’t object, either, and that interested me. Cutting her losses, or not worried about what they were up to? More worrying, was it because she was more interested in anything that could be around the house?
“Go to bed, Pet,” said Zero. “You’ll need to be fresh tomorrow morning, early.”
“Right,” I said. So I wasn’t supposed to poke my nose into whether or not Palomena was poking her nose into what was around the house. And since it seemed like Zero was waiting for me to go upstairs, I trailed away toward the stairs without trying to clear up the dessert things. “See you lot tomorrow, then.”
“Yes,” said Zero, and if it sounded like a threat, at least it didn’t seem like it was directed at me. That was nice for a change.
I went to bed as I was told, because even if I’m not a pet anymore, I still know when to do what’s good for me.
I woke to the sticky silence of a house that was nearly empty, but not quite. The sheets were damp and hot under my back, and the air seemed to hum. The hum bent itself around a solid shape a few steps away from the bed, sending a stab of fear right through my heart, and I tried to get up.
It was no use, of course. The nightmare’s always the same: for those first few seconds of terror, I can’t move.
I struggled against it, the breath caught in my throat; struggled vainly. Then the force that lashed me to the bed vanished as that solid figure leapt for me, a gleam of metal glistening in the moonlight. A scream tore from my throat and I threw myself sideways. Something thudded against the wall; me or that black figure, I wasn’t sure which, because I was reaching through space or Between or something else in a frantic search for a weapon—any weapon.
My hand found a hilt and I slashed in a wide, awkward back-handed stroke, my weapon too heavy and unfamiliar to use properly. I was used to light twin blades, not the heavy two-handed sword that was in my hand and should have been downstairs in the hall-stand, pretending to be a yellow umbrella.
The slash passed through the black figure without making contact, even though it was still so much of a presence that I could hear its breath, and the sword buried itself in the wall, leaving a long gash. It stuck there, too, so I reached out with my other hand and slapped it over the light switch, flooding the room with brightness.
Gone.
It was always gone by the time I turned on the light.
Panting, I reefed the sword out of the wall and became dimly aware that someone was shouting my name. A female someone.
“Pet! Pet! Answer me!”
There were no women in this house. Who was—
Palomena. It was Palomena’s voice.
“Pet, you have to tell me how to get in. I can hear you, but I can’t get in. If you need me, you have to let me in.”
“I’m okay!” I yelled back, but my voice cracked, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t fooling anyone.
“I’d like to see that to make sure,” she said. “How do I open the door?”
Heck. The sword was still a sword, and Palomena definitely shouldn’t see it like that.
“Go back!” I whispered to it, too muddled and shaking to focus like I usually had to in order to make things do what I wanted them to do. “Go back! You’re not meant to be a sword where she can see you!”
Palomena must have figured out the trick by herself, or maybe the house decided to let her in, because the door swung open, whispering heavily across the carpet. In the opposing light that opening brought, the flaps of a furled umbrella made odd shadows against the far wall and I breathed a small, shaking sigh of relief.
“Pet?”
Maybe it was because I had stopped screaming that she hung back in the doorway—waiting for permission to come in? Maybe it was because she saw what she wasn’t expecting to see that she just stood there.
It must have looked pretty weird. There I was on the bed with my knees slightly bent to allow for the bounce of the mattress, brandishing a yellow umbrella in one hand and staring wildly in all directions.
“What?”
“What are you fighting?”
“Nightmare,” I said, trying not to pant. My heart was still beating far too quickly, and it seemed like everything in the corners of my eyes was crawling with movement and shadow that shouldn’t have been there.
Palomena’s eyes fell to the umbrella, and she asked quietly, “How did that get up here? Wasn’t it in the hallstand?”
“Nah,” I lied. “The banshees’ve been making nests in everything, so I’ve been bringing stuff up here to clean out and banshee-proof.”
I mean, I’d planned to do something like that, so it was a half-truth.
“You’ll have to teach me that trick,” she said, walking deliberately across the room as if picking her steps carefully. Maybe there were a few too many shadows for her liking, too. Still, as she walked across the floor, they seemed to settle down. “There’s always a problem in the barracks with those little beasts.”
“Yeah,” I said, climbing down from the bed with my fingers wrapped tightly around the umbrella’s handle. Now that the room had stopped moving in the shadows, I could do it without feeling like I was going to step into a roiling pit of vermin or living shadow. “I’ll do that.”
She ran her hand along the cut I’d made in the wall and said, “You’d better come downstairs. No wonder you’re having nightmares—I would if I had to sleep in a little tomb like this, too.”
“It’s not a tomb!” I said, hunching my shoulders. “It’s safe. Well, when there aren’t any figments of my imagination hanging around, that is.”
“Figments?” Palomena, already at the doorway again, half-turned. “I thought you said it was a nightmare?”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if my brain was still scrambled, or if this was a missing step in understanding between the Behind and human worlds. “Nightmare. Figment of my imagination.”
“It may or may not be real, but whatever it is, it’s certainly not a figment of your imagination,” she said, and left the room.
I scrambled after her. “What do you mean, it may be real?”
“Nightmares don’t happen in a vacuum,” she said.
“Well yeah, but—”
“Nor do they take form in a house this closely intertwined with Between without having more substance than even a normal nightmare.”
“Thanks,” I said, a bit sourly. “That’s sure to make it less terrifying next time.”
“You should be terrified,” she said. “Life between two worlds will always be dangerous, and the more frightened you are, the more likely you are to stay alive.”
Disgruntled, I asked, “Call that living?”
She laughed softly and said, “We’re all frightened. And it’s a discussion that is as often had Behind as it is here, but that’s beside the point. You shouldn’t be at ease with Behindkind in the house.”
It was funny though. Following her down the stairs, with the floor solid beneath her feet and her wiry shoulders square against the hallway light, I didn’t feel afraid. I felt as though I could rest for a little while without worrying about something nasty showing up and making off with me.
“You remind me of someone,” I said, trotting down the last couple of steps. Maybe it was habit; I kept on going into the kitchen. “You want pancakes?”
“Don’t you need more sleep? I remember humans being more fragile.”
“I’ll go back to sleep later,” I told her. “I want to cook something right now.”
“I like pancakes,” she said.
She knew better than to hover in the kitchen, which was nice; I heard her moving around in the living room, pacing back and forth, and wasn’t quite sure if that was her being nice. I hadn’t heard fae make that much noise walking before. It felt like she was moving around just enough so that I could have the comfort of someone else in the house, just living.
It was nice.
It was also very convenient, since my phone started buzzing in my pocket while the first lot of pancakes were cooking.
“Yeah?”
I heard muttering in the background, then a loud crack and someone swearing.
“Kid? Kid, are you there! Gold perish it, what’s this contraption doing now!”
“Five?” I said, grinning. I’d know that cranky old voice anywhere. “You really managed to call!”
“Hello? Hello?” bawled his voice, tinnily. “Is someone there? For all that’s green and gold will you behave yourself?”
“You gotta hold it up to your ear!” I yelled, giving up on the hope of not being overheard. “And stop yelling; my ears can only take so much!”
“Right!” he said, still far too loud. “I can talk to you here!”
In the living room, the sound of Palomena pacing ceased.
“Yes, but do you have to yell?”
“You said there were buttons,” he said sourly, at a slightly more bearable level of decibels. “There are no buttons; just little flat circles.”
“Those are the buttons on a touch screen device,” I told him. “Anyway, congratulations on learning how to use a mobile phone; I’m so proud.”
“I found a few interesting things in your paperwork,” he said. “But it’s going to take a lot longer than I thought, because everything’s twisty like a rope and I’m at least eighty percent sure that it’ll end up making one whole.”
“Twisty, I get,” I said. “But what do you mean, it’s likely to make one whole?”
“Rope, I said!”
“Yeah, but—oh! You mean you think it’s all connected.”
“No. It’s not connected. Not yet. But it’s twining round and around, and I’ll be very much surprised if it doesn’t turn out to be all one rope of information.”
I gave up on trying to make that mesh with his first statement. “Okay. Does that mean you know where it all leads?”
“Not the faintest gleam! Early indicators say that it’ll all lead back to one source, but that’s the last step of all. At the moment I’m just trying to trace all the strands back to a general direction. I’m following the money, but it’s a faint trail because it’s not about the money.”
“Right. So you’re pretty sure it’s all going in one direction but you’re not a hundred percent sure yet and you want to be. You also don’t know exactly what direction it’s all pointing in.”
“Got it in one, kid! We already have one connection—the person who was trying to collate all of this. Who was that?”
“Can’t tell you just yet,” I said apologetically. It felt too much like betraying Athelas. “If it looks like that’s an important thing, I’ll let you know.”
I already knew it was important to a certain extent: if Athelas was trying to find information on human websites, it was because it was needed. He also knew who had asked him to do it, since I very much doubted he was doing it off his own bat. And if he was doing it off his own bat, it could only be to protect or help someone.
All of those things were important to know.
And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to tell Five as much.
“Green and gold,” muttered Five. “Well, let me know when you’re a bit less sensitive, and I’ll be able to be more useful. How do I stop this thing chirruping at me?”
“I’ll hang up first,” I said, grinning. “Talk to you later, yeah?”
I hung up, but I’m pretty sure he spent the next five minutes bawling at his phone, trying to find out if I’d really hung up. In the living room, I heard Palomena begin walking again, and went back to my pancakes. I was just in time to flip them before they got a decent coating of charcoal.
If Athelas was protecting someone, it could only be Zero; Zero was the only one he would take so much time and trouble to protect or help, as far as I could see. If he was doing it on orders, there were only two choices: Zero, and Zero’s father. If it came down to a choice between the two, I would have picked Zero for the win. Zero’s father, Athelas seemed to obey from a toxic mix of fear and long servitude—and perhaps some misplaced loyalty—but if I wasn’t completely mad, Athelas served Zero from a sense of loyalty that had more than a decent amount of fondness to it. He probably wouldn’t admit that, not when he knew what being fond of people opened himself up to, but I was still pretty sure about it.
Zero was the most likely person for everything to point at, and I would need to remember that.
I didn’t exactly expect Zero and the others to arrive when they’d said they would, but I didn’t expect the screaming in the background when he called me, either. The call came just a bit after I woke up on the couch, startling me into grabbing the phone before I was properly awake.
“We won’t be home until later,” he said, his voice rumbling below the cacophony. “Go to see your friend and let her know where we are in the investigation; make sure you’re back in a couple of hours.”
“Heck!” I said, sitting up with wild hair and one missing sock. “Is that—is someone being murdered over there?”
Palomena sat up straight in her chair, a sudden golden ray of movement.
“Not yet,” said Zero, and hung up.
“They’ve got a real communication problem,” I said to Palomena, who was looking bright and alert. I was pretty sure she was itching for a fight, and since I liked to think that Zero hadn’t given me more information because he didn’t want Palomena there with them rather than because he’d forgotten he was supposed to be sharing stuff with me these days, I told her, “They’re fine. They’ll be back later, he said.”
“So I gathered,” she said. “I’m inclined to go there myself and see what’s happening.”
I looked at her for a bit before I said, “Reckon you’d already have gone if you were allowed to go by yourself.”
She grinned. “You’re cheeky, for a pet.”
“That’s what I’ve been told. So how come you’re not allowed to go around by yourself? You do something naughty?”
“My captain prefers for me to be under command at all times,” she said, looking away.
She had definitely done something bad. Mind you, something bad to Behindkind could be either something good by human standards or something unspeakably horrible.
“All right,” I said, since it wasn’t like we were sharing everything with her, after all. “You want some breakfast before I go?”
Her eyes came to rest on me again. “The pancakes were enough, and I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of you going off on your own after receiving a call from your owner.”
“Just liaising between Zero and a human,” I said.
“I see,” she said.
She didn’t sound convinced, and since I was pretty sure she’d try to come along with me if I didn’t do anything, I said, “You can use one of those truth spells on me or something. True blue; all I’m doing is going off to visit a human who’s been giving us a bit of info on the bloke we’re after from this side.”
I wanted to say more, but the more you say the more trouble you can get in around this place, so I stopped talking despite the urge.
“I just did,” she said.
Well. That explained tiny twitch in the back of my mind that had been trying to make my tongue talk more than it should a moment ago.
“Rude,” I said. “Right, then; can I go?”
“I’m not your master,” she said. “But I won’t trail along, if that’s what you really want to know.”
Maybe it was rude, but it had to be said. “Don’t reckon he wants you alone in the house.”
“Possibly not,” she agreed. “I’m not sure the house would let me stay, if it comes to that. It’s pretty protective, for a human’s house.”
“What can I say? It’s just too easy to get fond of humans,” I said, shrugging.
“Yes,” she said, her eyes faintly amused. “So I’ve come to believe. I’ll sit outside.”
“Gotcha,” I said and saluted.
I ushered her out in front of me as I left, and I think that might have amused her, too, because she was smiling as she sat down on the bench on the patio. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about Zero being annoyed at me for leaving her in the house, though.
I couldn’t help wondering what had kept them away as I walked to Morgana’s house. I don’t like not knowing stuff; I was also pretty sure that outside of being suddenly attacked, the thing most likely to keep the psychos away was discovering another murder. I had seen enough of the crime scenes the murderer left behind him to know that it was just as likely for a fight to break out there between fae enforcers and Zero, as it was for them to be attacked for a completely unrelated reason.
Technically speaking, it was none of my business if there was another murder: that was their investigation. But there had been a body outside my window the morning that started all of this, and I’d managed to wrinkle out of the psychos the fact that my parents had been killed by the same person. It was kinda personal.
Still, there wasn’t much I could do about it now, and if it they weren’t coming home because they were being attacked and I went calling Zero back while it was happening, I wouldn’t exactly be flavour of the month.
So I pushed it to the back of my mind and concentrated on Morgana. I was aware that I could have called her to touch base, but since Zero had distinctly told me to go and see her, I figured he didn’t want Palomena knowing more about the human side of things than she needed to. He didn’t have to hint twice about that: it was bad enough that Morgana was friends with me and Daniel. She didn’t need more danger in her life.
Daniel waved at me from the top of the house as I came through the gate, which was pretty brave of him, considering there were about seven mischievous kids up there who liked to play dangerous games. He was there to meet me at the bottom of the stairs once I got inside the house, though, safe and sound.
If he’d been looking cheerful when I saw him first, he was looking pretty cranky now. There was also a good bit of green and black moss in a huge smear across his denimed left hip and butt cheek.
I grinned at him. “What happened? The kids try to murder you again?”
It was a joke, but the kids were pretty scary. I still don’t know where they came from or how they got into Morgana’s house to visit her, but I was beginning to think they really did camp out on top of the house.
“I gave ’em dessert last night!” he said in exasperation. “They liked you after you gave them dessert! They tried to send me over the edge of the roof just now!”
“You ever wonder if we should have a word with ’em?” I asked. “They’ve gotta learn that stuff like that’s actually dangerous.”
“You try to have a word with them,” Daniel said. “They won’t come out for me! Not unless they’re trying to push me down the stairs or off the roof! Morgana says they like to play, but this is a bit much, Pet!”
“I’ll see if I can have a word with ’em in a bit,” I promised. “I’ll take ’em some food or something.”
Daniel huffed out a breath and nodded. “All right. Thanks. You get anywhere with Morgana’s friend? I figured you would have called if you’d found him or if you had any news, but—”
“Nothing yet,” I said. “But we’ve got another lead; I’m just waiting for that lot to get back home. Looks like someone Behind has had their eye on City Fae for a while: they’ve given us an address to try. We don’t know if it’s his place or not, though.”
He whistled softly. “That’s not good.”
“Yeah, you’re telling me. Oi, I don’t suppose Morgana’s friend could be Behindkind, could he?”
“It’s the internet. Anyone could be anyone.”
“Yeah, I know, but…” I let that trail away.
“I don’t like the fact that someone in the Family already had their eye on him—if it is him. I don’t like the idea that they’ve been keeping an eye on the game, either.”
“Yeah. Zero already told her to stay away from the game, but it might be an idea to keep away from the friends she’s made in-game, too.”
He nodded. “You staying for a bit with her?”
“Yeah—I’ll go see the kids first, though. I’ll make a bit of fairy-bread and try to bribe ’em. If someone had a coffee waiting for me when I got into the room, that’d be nice.”
“There’ll be macarons as well,” he said, grinning. “A nice healthy breakfast for you. One of the boys found out that Morgana likes ’em and now it’s macarons every second day.”
“They’re getting pretty comfortable, aren’t they?” I said suspiciously. “They know they don’t have to like someone just ’cos you do, right?”
He stiffened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What?” I stared at him. “You’re getting sensitive again, you know that? You got a new werewolf turning, or something?”
“Just—oh never mind! I’ll have coffee for you when you get in.”
“Catch you later; won’t be long.”
I let him go up ahead of me and stopped in the kitchen to make a bit of fairy-bread for the kids. They’re always better behaved when it comes to food. I took it up with me, shedding little hundreds-and-thousands everywhere in my care not to be too loud. Morgana would already have seen me on her little network of mirrors, but I didn’t want to disturb her parents. Her mother was an author and her dad did something with stocks and trading, and I was pretty sure that noise in general would be annoying for either one of those professions. They were also pretty much reclusive; I’d only ever seen Morgana’s mum once, and I’d never seen her dad. Daniel hadn’t seen either of them.
The kids must have heard me coming just as I got to the top of the house, though, because I heard a sudden scurrying and saw the brief flutter of material as the whole crowd of them scarpered off to hide.
They weren’t quite quick enough: I saw the last two of them diving for the cupboard that ran across the covered section of the roof-top, and heard the door squeak shut behind them.
“Come out of there,” I called, taking the last few steps up to the roof and sauntering over to the cupboard.
There were a few giggles and a sharp bang from somewhere inside, but no one answered.
“I saw you all go in,” I told them, tapping against the door with the toe of my boot. “C’mmon. What are you hiding in there for? It stinks.”
It didn’t exactly stink—it was more that it looked as though it should stink. It was a long, built-in cupboard with dirty marks and old nail holes all around it, and a layer of grime that could have been scratched away with a fingernail if you felt like you could comfortably bleach your hands afterward.
It ended too suddenly, too; maybe there had once been a wall where it ended, and it had been demolished years ago to make this long, weird half-room. Whatever it was about the place, it was odd, uncomfortable, and looked as though it should smell. A glamour without being a glamour: you can see the same thing in any bogan area around Tasmania.
“Not coming out!” yelled a voice.
“Well, I’m not going in there.”
That shouldn’t have worked, but the closest cupboard door actually cracked open with a scattering of grime.
“Hurry up, then,” I said encouragingly. “I made you lot some fairy-bread.”
There was a shout from within the cupboard and the fair, curly-haired little boy tumbled out, bringing with him two other kids with the sheer force of his exit. He dived on the plate of fairy-bread, and that was enough to bring the other four out of hiding. It’s weird: when they’re playing tricks on Daniel or running around the place upstairs while you’re downstairs, it feels like there could be at least twenty of the little beggars. There’s only seven, though.
The rest struggled out, eager to pounce on the fairy-bread before it disappeared, and I waited until they were all sitting around the plate and munching before I said, “You really gotta stop trying to push Daniel off the roof and dropping stuff on him from the top of the stairs.”
“We don’t like him,” said one of the kids, through a mouthful of bread.
“Yeah, I guessed that.”
“You’re nice, though.”
“Thanks. Look, do you think you could try not to kill him for a bit? He’s nice when you get to know him. And it makes Morgana happy to have him around the house—and he hasn’t told on you. He could have made things pretty hot for you with Morgana after all you’ve done to him.”
There was a pregnant sort of pause while they all crunched on their fairy-bread. They were kids, so I didn’t expect them to follow the logic enough to actually like Daniel, but it would be enough if they thought there was a possibility of annoying Morgana and getting into trouble with her. They put up with me, but they really seemed to love her.
“Anyway,” I said. “The stuff you’re doing is pretty flamin’ dangerous. You could kill him, you know?”
“If he’s scared, he should go away,” muttered one of the kids.
Must be the JinYeong one.
“Yeah, but Morgana likes him,” I said, pushing that point a bit more. That was actually the problem, as far as I could see: Morgana liked Daniel, and the kids weren’t used to her liking anyone but them. They just needed to see it in a slightly less selfish way. “And you’re always doing stuff for her because you like her and want her to be happy. So why not look after Daniel instead of trying to mess with him? He makes her happy.”
Seven young faces scowled at me with a pretty varied mix of resentment, annoyance, and wariness.
“All right, all right,” I said. “Just think about it, okay? And don’t eat hundreds-and-thousands off the floor. If they drop, just let ’em stay there—someone’s gotta feed the ants.”
They were still picking up hundreds-and-thousands from the rooftop when I went back down to Morgana’s suite; probably picked up a couple of ants while they were at it, but it was extra protein, after all.
“There you are!” said Morgana as I came in, bouncing as much as she could. “What took you so long!”
“Been feeding the kids,” I said. “Took ’em some fairy-bread.”
“I thought you came to see me,” she said, her eyes big and tragic. It’s the dark eyeliner that does it. She grinned a second later, and then a second after that, she was serious again. “Did you find out anything about Blackpoint yet?”
“Nope,” I said, taking the coffee Daniel offered me. She already knew that: Daniel would have told her while I was up with the kids. “We’ve got another address to try, but we don’t know yet if it’s your friend or just someone kinda…connected.”
“I’ll keep digging, too,” she said. She was glum, but not exactly discouraged.
“How much do you really know about your friend? He’s clever, right?”
She nodded. “So clever, Pet! I’m pretty sure he’s not just a gamer; I think he’s a programmer as well. He knew the mechanics of the game too well—even if you’re a really good gamer, you have to learn how to do some stuff new with each game. He did it like it was instinct; like he knew every scenario and line of code in the thing.”
“And he’s good with the same hacking thing you do?”
Morgana took in a thoughtful breath. “He knows his way around a computer—maybe even better than me—but I don’t know how he does it. His style is different, and he’s not predictable: I’ve got the feeling he might have taught himself.”
“Good to know,” I said. “I’ll let Zero know. Oi.”
“What?”
“He ever say anything…weird?”
“He said a lot of weird things. He was a conspiracy theorist.”
“Oh. Well, anything really out there? Like the world being run by leprechauns or something?”
“Nah, he was more of a bloke for the mysterious they. You know: they’re out to get you and if you’re not careful you’re giving them information ’cos they’ve wriggled their way into everything.”
“Bit of a fruit loop, huh?”
“He was pretty sound everywhere else, though,” she said. “It was just that thing. Most people who spend their whole lives in a room are a bit weird. After twenty years or so, you just—”
She saw me looking at her and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know. I’m talking about myself here as well, you know.”
“And when I told you that makeup wasn’t normal—”
“Shut up, Pet,” she said, grinning. “You’re the last person who can talk about normality.”
“Rude!” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You live with three strange men and help the police on cases. That’s not the standard for normality, you know. Cool, but not normal.”
“Blackpoint talk to you much about his theories?”
“No: I think he could tell I wasn’t into them. He’d say something every now and then, but it was kinda hard to tell when he was talking about the game and when he was talking about real life, honestly. I think he couldn’t tell the difference himself, sometimes.”
That, I thought later, as I was walking down the stairs to head home, was a bit worrying. How much had Blackpoint known about Behind? Because if he’d been saying those kind of things to Morgana and he had disappeared, it was pretty likely that he’d been talking about Behindkind when he said they. And like the old mad bloke, it sounded like he had been skating on the edges of reality for a while.
I was still frowning when I shut the front door behind me and stepped out into the fresh morning again. I could see why Zero had been interested in this thing. There were more layers to it than I’d thought at first.
A familiar, holey t-shirt fluttered in my peripheral, disrupting my thoughts. I looked to the left, and found that the bird’s nest in the bushes out the front was actually the old mad bloke’s beard. An eyebrow wriggled at me between leaves, then the bushes rustled and he was off.
What was that? An invitation?
I trotted to the front gate and peered around the bushes, and sure enough, the mad old coot was still just within sight, pouncing on a leaf he had chased down. Yep, he wanted me to follow him.
Heck, why not? It wasn’t like I didn’t have an hour or so on my hands.
I turned out into the street and followed the old mad bloke.

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