Splintered Path (Shattered World Book 4), page 1
Splintered Path
Shattered World
Book 4
W.R. Gingell
To all the mice that invade my bus house, both real and hallucinatory, every time there’s a bit too much hay in the hay shed.
Thanks for making my nightly trips to let the dog out to pee more exciting. It’s not like I’ve already got heart issues or anything. Glad you blokes are having fun chewing on stuff.
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Cover art by Moorbooks.
Character art by Kelsi Johnson (@scarvenartist).
Copyright W.R. Gingell, 2026. No part of this book may be reproduced without express written permission from the author. No part of this book is authorised to be input or fed to any AI engine.
“Memory is a funny thing.”
— Tony
Contents
1. Don’t Worry, Be Happy
2. Live In The Moment
3. No Guts, No Glory
4. Your Time Is Now
5. Money Can’t Buy Happiness
6. Live And Let Live
7. Dream Big, Start Small
8. Fortune Favours The Bold
9. Leave No Stone Unturned
10. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
11. It’s Never Too Late
12. Today Is The Day
13. Tomorrow Is Another Day
Newsletter
Chapter 1
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Dad had been waiting for her, thought Viv, rather sourly. She washed up a cup and stacked it precariously on top of the already mountainous pile of dishes to her right that she would now have to dry before she could wash any more of the dishes that still clustered on the left side of the sink. He had been waiting for her to fail, or quit, or be fired from her job at the Tea House and move back home again—he couldn’t have amassed so much washing up since the last time she saw it if he hadn’t been waiting for that.
He couldn’t have known that Luca would escape, of course. Dad didn’t know much about Luca except that he made Dad uncomfortable, and it was unfair to assume further unkind motives when Dad had already made it clear that he didn’t like Viv living in the Tea House and away from home.
Viv had never intended to return home; she knew that now. No matter what, even if she lost her job at the Tea House, there had been a deep, stubborn thread of never-going-back that she hadn’t fully acknowledged until Luca escaped from the confinement of the Tea House. That was another thing that probably wasn’t quite fair to Dad, but Viv didn’t think she could help it. Living away from Dad had taught her what even living with Dad hadn’t been able to do: that there was peace, and quiet, and freedom in the world, and that there was another way of living for her that didn’t scrape at every nerve she possessed.
It had taught her that living with Dad had become unbearable. Whether it was all Dad’s fault or whether Viv had her part in it as well, she wasn’t sure; she knew only that it wasn’t a sustainable, healthy life for either herself or Dad.
And now she was back in Dad’s kitchen, doing the washing up that hadn’t been done for at least a week or two, and she was fairly certain that she had just heard a mouse somewhere in the cupboards—or worse, the remaining dishes to be washed. It was as though she had never gone away, and as though the heaviness and shut-in feeling had never lifted at all.
Luckily for Viv, Dad wasn’t in the house at the moment. Tony had called Dad out into the garden to “give him some advice” about the best plants to put in the rooftop garden above Dad’s apartment to bring in birds to the birdfeeder that he had put there recently. Dad, therefore, would be out for at least the next hour giving actually useful advice peppered with a full and complete update of his bodily health, symptoms current and past. Tony would listen, as he always did, with what seemed to be genuine interest and sympathy, and he would take the advice down in writing—it helped him, he said, to remember better.
If Viv had been there with them, she would, perhaps, have been able to spend some time listening to Dad’s voice without having to respond to him. It wasn’t that she particularly needed to hear the latest iteration of his sufferings again—she had heard at least part of it before Tony knocked at the door—but Viv would have liked a chance to listen to Dad’s voice without being distracted by having to listen to what he was actually saying.
It was always so hard to keep paying attention to Dad when she had to work so hard to divide between his complaints to discover which were likely real, which were fearful extrapolations unlikely to be true, and which were symptoms he had talked himself into having because Viv (or anyone else near him) had them. She never had the necessary space left in her mind to be able to actually consider his voice. Just his voice.
And now that she had been told that there was something that he was doing with his voice—now that she knew about things like Voices at all—Viv had been trying to really listen.
That kind of listening wasn’t the work she was here to do today, however. Today, she had asked Tony to distract Dad so that she could go through Dad’s collection of Things to find the police report he always said was there but would, somehow, never let her see. He always said he would let her see it; he was always just going to find where he had put it, but didn’t seem to be able to remember where he had put it, and would check tomorrow.
Viv could have told him where it was, but that wouldn’t have helped. The police report was, with everything else that Dad liked to keep, in the fireplace.
None of it was burned, of course. The fireplace wasn’t a real fireplace: to look at, it was an early 60s, mid-century modern fireplace with a smooth, vast front and two sides that swooped inwards in a concave sweep on each side toward the backing plate, which flat surface had been gilded in some form of gold—either paint or a thin sheet of gold-toned metal. The rest of it had been painted in the same off-white as the wall in which it was set, and while those sweeping sides and the top and bottom were quite real, and quite original, the backing plate of gold that made the fireplace just a little bit too shallow for the wall space it occupied could be removed to reveal a small space behind. Behind it were things that Dad didn’t think should be out in the open—or under his bed, or in the cupboard beside the French windows that looked out onto the tiny patio—but also didn’t think should be in potential reach of an especially determined daughter.
Viv hadn’t gone into the fireplace cache in quite some time—and never without Dad, who always insisted on being there for any opening—but she hadn’t forgotten the knack of shoving in at the bottom of the plate to tilt it first, then lifting and removing it from the top.
Everything was packed into a couple of plastic baskets that stacked on top of each other as though they held potatoes or onions instead of memories and important documents; Viv drew out both baskets and set them in front of herself, and took a moment to fish out the photograph of Mum that had fluttered down into the ashless grate so that she could look at it. She had other pictures of Mum, most of them on her phone, but this one was Mum as Viv somehow best remembered her: Mum when Viv was a little girl.
She had had the same haircut that Viv now did when she was younger. The same curls and chin, though Mum’s hair had been closer to black than brown, and the same lines beside her eyes when she laughed. Her eyes were the same brown as Viv’s, too. It was almost uncanny seeing her own eyes smiling up at her in her mother’s face; the brown cardigan that she wore, and that Viv had stolen away quietly after her death, made those eyes look deeper and more alive.
Tears stung her own eyes, and she tucked the photograph back into the side from which it had fallen. There was no time to get lost in memories. She only had a certain amount of time before Dad came back in to have a cup of tea and a sit-down.
She found the A4 envelope she was looking for below a pile of photographs; still marginally crisp and not yet discoloured, it had the same police stamp in the upper left corner that Viv remembered, but it was much fatter than she recalled. She slid the pile of photographs off it and into the bottom of the basket, careful not to lose any more of them over the side in the shuffle.
She eagerly opened the envelope, only to find that the hefty weight of it was explained by the presence of not one, but two police files. Neither of them were copies; both appeared to be the originals from the police station itself, with the logo of the Australian police on the front, and red-stamped inside with the date and time.
She stared at each of them in turn without really taking in what she was seeing, and realised at last that one of the files was far older than the other. The newer one must be the one she needed; Mum had only died a few years ago, after all, and the other file seemed as though it must be at least twenty years old.
Still, Viv hesitated. The fact that it was not just in Dad’s pile of Things That Were Important, but in the same envelope as the police report of her mother’s death, made her want to read the second file, as well. There was no time to read either of them, of course; Viv flipped through each of the reports, page by page, and took photos with her phone instead. She would look at them later when she wasn’t afraid that Dad, by some sixth sense, would guess what she was up to and come
He had caught her once trying to get into the fireplace for some photographs of Mum, and that had brought on such a long-lasting and severe episode of heart trouble that she had never tried again.
Viv’s hands were shaking and she was feeling far too hot and trapped by the time she finished and slipped the files back into the envelope in the same order she had removed them. She tidied everything else back into the fireplace as it had been, replaced the backing plate, and then carefully cleaned away the dust that had tumbled out in wafts to settle gently on the carpet.
Then she went back to the washing-up, wondering if it was just the swift beating of her heart that made it seem as though there was still something unpleasantly mouse-like scratching away in the small pile of dishes farthest away in the corner.
She could no longer hear snatches of the murmur of Tony and Dad’s voices, so it was probably just as well that she was back in front of the sink to be found, as she had been left, diligently washing up.
Viv had only washed a saucepan free of crusted porridge remains before her phone rang. She dried her hands gratefully on the tea towel she had slung over her shoulder, and slipped her phone out of her pocket with rather pruny fingers. It was probably time she stopped doing the washing-up, anyway. She didn’t need all of it to be done when Dad came back in—she just needed to still be doing it when he did.
The caller ID said, Jasper.
Viv drew in a curious breath before she answered it. She hadn’t seen much of Jasper since the day she had found him on the floor beside Luca’s camp bed, unconscious and barely breathing. She still felt chilled remembering the moment that she had understood that Luca was gone, and that he had very nearly killed Jasper on his way out.
She wasn’t sure if she had felt more horrified or more disappointed in Luca. In fact, with her arms full of very heavy, very lifeless human (and perhaps half-fae) male, Viv hadn’t for quite some time even known what to do. She had made sure that Jasper was still breathing, then she had pulled his cold head and torso as close to her own warmth as she could, and begun chafing his hands and arms.
Viv was just about to lower him gently to the floor and go for BoRa, or perhaps the nurse, when Jasper stirred. It was just a twitch of movement in his left hand at first; and then, so swiftly that it seemed to happen all at once, Jasper’s eyes snapped open, his irises expanding rapidly as he stared up at her, and one of his long, thin hands grasped hers almost convulsively.
She was quite sure that he would deny it when he was recovered enough to realise what he’d done, but Viv was also quite sure that Jasper, with his fingers wrapped so tightly around hers that it almost hurt, had breathed a sigh of relief when he saw her face.
And much to her secret astonishment, he hadn’t fired her, or let her go, or even shuffled her away from the Tea House. He had simply made her accompany him to a series of early morning meetings where she was suddenly back to being Jasper’s Secretary instead of Luca’s Babysitter, and informed her that her afternoons were her own for the next month, so long as she still worked on bettering her Voice.
Meeting with Tony, and therefore Kyma, had given Viv a delightful excuse to both work on her Voice and do her own careful digging into the circumstances of Mum’s death—and true to his word, Jasper had left her alone to do so.
Until this afternoon, nearly a month after Luca had escaped.
The phone rang again, breaking the spell of memory that had held Viv, and she answered the call with a crisp, “What’s wrong?”
“I trust I’m not interrupting anything,” said Jasper’s smooth voice. He sounded faintly amused.
“No,” she said. In fact, a phone call from Jasper could only be a good thing, now that she had what she needed from Dad’s house; it would be far easier to get away from Dad if she had a phone call to excuse her. “I’m free to talk.”
Viv felt the same fresh, sweet feeling of relief, hearing his voice, that she had felt when she realised that Jasper wasn’t going to fire her now that Luca was no longer at the Tea House. She wasn’t sure she would stop feeling it any time soon; because despite the fact that she knew she had other things that Jasper was interested in, she hadn’t been quite, one hundred percent, sure that Jasper would keep her on, anyway.
But he had, and she had remained in her own, delightfully peaceful room at the Tea House. It was true that she was invaded nightly by a small Korean half-fae girl and weekly by that small half-fae girl’s father, but neither of them had the same clinging, weakening effect as Dad did by his unconscious and vaguely vampiric assumption of all of Viv’s ills and pains to become, paradoxically, weaker and more fragile by the consumption of them.
“Your holiday is over, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’ve got to go down and convince the son of an old friend not to break out of the Custody Centre or wherever they’re going to send him for remand before his attorney can get him out.”
“What a nice change,” said Viv. “I expected that you’d be taking me down to the old Melbourne Gaol where they keep the behindkind suspects.”
“He’s only half-fae; I doubt anyone from Behind is worried enough about him to put him in custody,” Jasper said. “Especially not for attempted murder of a human. The old Melbourne Gaol hasn’t been for human use since ’94, if I recall correctly, either.”
“We’re visiting another murderer?”
“Attempted murderer,” Jasper said, without any kind of hesitation to show that he might have been remembering his latest encounter with a murderer. “And alleged, if it comes to that. Can you get to Southern Cross Station in an hour?”
“Absolutely,” said Viv, with more haste than firmness. She could hear Dad’s uneven footsteps approaching from the front of the building, and he would very soon be at the door. “So we’re going right now, then?”
“I think he expected to be given bail, but the judge decided that since the person he allegedly tried to kill is impaired in terms of faculties and in the vulnerable position of living in the same house, it was too risky to let him go,” Jasper told her. “If we don’t go right now, it sounds like he’ll try to break out and make a run for it.”
“Wonderful,” said Viv. “Another upstanding citizen, then. Who was he attempting to kill?”
There was a very slight pause before Jasper said, “His father.”
Patricide wasn’t as unusual a subject at the Tea House as Viv might have expected before working there. Perhaps that should have been expected of a place where three of the four mostly-human adults most often there had problems with their fathers that ranged from manipulation to murder. She could have included the Lunch Lady in the number and made it to five, but she was far less certain about the Lunch Lady’s humanity than she was even of Jasper’s. Bazza hadn’t yet said anything about his parentage, but since Viv wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he had sprung, fully formed, from a mountain somewhere out bush, it hadn’t occurred to her to be curious about it.
At the very least, there had been discussions late at night with BoRa and Jasper. Sometimes all three would meet accidentally in the Lunch Room on nights when sleep was far away, though Viv was more likely to find both of them there together, glowering at each other, than to find either alone; and at that time of night, fathers were fair game for discussion.
Still, when she met Jasper just inside Southern Cross Station and asked him, “Do you really think he tried to kill your friend?” it wasn’t without the unpleasantly shivery feeling of mixed unfamiliarity and unease. Jasper had also mentioned impaired faculties, which put a rather nastier edge on the idea of murder of a father.
“If what I remember about this specific friend remains true, I tend to think that his son would be in hospital rather than prison, if he really tried to kill his father,” said Jasper, and started toward the street outside. “Diminished abilities or otherwise.”
That cost Viv a little pang, and when she realised a moment later that she had felt it because she had been reminded, almost insensibly, of Luca, it was both a worrying and a ridiculous thought.
