Splintered Path (Shattered World Book 4), page 14
“That’s why I’m walking with you,” agreed Luca cheerfully. SooAh had already slipped her hand into his without argument, and he offered his other elbow to Viv, who thought it best not to take it. “Come on, Viv, we’re going somewhere a bit brighter to have something to eat.”
Viv would have protested that there was nowhere safe that would be open at this time of day, but she had the feeling that Luca wasn’t planning on going somewhere exactly human, and SooAh’s excited little skip only confirmed that feelings.
It wasn’t until they were at the old Judging Box along the Yarra that Viv saw that Luca had somehow rid himself of the blue stains on his clothes and face alike, and was looking very dapper and proper.
Luca glanced at her and caught her looking, and grinned. “They won’t throw me out,” he said. “And it’s safe!”
Viv wasn’t sure if it was Luca’s presence or the act of entering the Judging Box itself that made her dizzy as she stepped up and into shadows that glittered. She heard SooAh giggle in delight, and then the door closed behind them and she could see through the Box and out into a new world, as though they were in the vestibule of a wondrously large and glittering house.
“You’d better hold on at first,” Luca told her, offering his arm to her again.
She took it this time, because now she could see that she was looking out on the Yarra, right where it should be. But the Yarra had never danced so slowly or brightly, the amber waters looking nearly solid enough to walk on even though they moved. There were dozens of small shops and storefronts out on the water, outdoor seating shifting along the surface of the water with the dark, shifting hulk of Melbourne behind them.
Viv stepped down cautiously onto the almost-glowing amber surface, and it dipped beneath her foot slightly, as though she’d stepped in moss. Her fingers tightened around Luca’s elbow, but he was ready for it. SooAh was already darting ahead, her fluff of pink tulle tinted darker by the water and her face lit up by the competing jewels of light from the cafés all around.
“You’ll get used to it,” Luca said. His pale hazel eyes had taken on something of the colour of the world around them, and Viv wondered if she had, too, or if Luca just seemed to really fit in place in this otherworldly and unchancy world in a way that he didn’t in the human world. “I know a place, Viv. This way!”
They were fairly in the middle of the Yarra by the time they caught up with SooAh and came to the place that Luca was leading them toward. Viv could look up and down the length of the Yarra and see in the distance the outlines of bridges further along. Somehow it was easier to see the bridges here, even though there was so much else happening.
In front of them was a long, low building of sorts that seemed to have been made from driftwood and river glass. It also had two steps down that were almost certainly made of river water, but she could see through the smokey, rippling windows to the bright interior and the cheerful movement of patrons. The lights along the front of the café glanced off the river glass and sat softly in the turns and curls of the driftwood, creating an inviting front that even Viv felt drawn to in the middle of the oddness of it all.
SooAh happily darted down the steps and into the café ahead of them, making Viv wonder if she had been in this place before. When the little girl made directly for the opposite end of the café without stopping to start climbing up a wall that moved and dipped in and out to make and remove little passageways, she was certain.
Still, it didn’t look safe.
“It won’t eat her,” Luca said. Somehow, he had her hand instead of her having his elbow, and he towed her across the café floor, which dipped and rose beneath them very slightly as they crossed it. “She’ll come back when she’s ready.”
By which Viv gathered that the section was specifically for children and not, as it seemed, some kind of worrisome behindkind creature about to attack the café. She allowed herself to be ushered into one of the soft velvety booths that were all around the room instead, where rippled glass let in bright, round, separated lights in a soft coolness at the back of the booth.
She let Luca order when the waitress came over, too overwhelmed with the surroundings in all of their realness, impossibility, and beauty. There was simply too much to look at all at once, so she let herself concentrate on the coolness of the rippling glass at her side and the warmth of the plush velvet on which she sat for a little while.
Viv tried not to look too closely at the patrons around them, either. It wasn’t that they were unsightly, or that they were ugly—they were the fullness of the things she felt as though she saw from the corners of her eyes these days, and so very solid that she couldn’t deny the strangeness and unchanciness of them.
Even the waitress was a slender, staggeringly tall woman with a willowy frame and huge eyes—just too tall, too slender, too beautiful for a human woman. Viv supposed that she would get used to the difference eventually, but sometimes it was easy to understand the immediate revulsion that made an antagonistic difference between the two worlds. They probably thought the same thing about her.
When the rather terrifying waitress had gone and their drinks were in front of them, with SooAh comfortably in sight in the bizarre puzzle section of the café, Viv sat back and looked around properly. Luca had slid into the booth beside her instead of opposite her, which was worrying for two very different reasons, and she had to look past him to do it. He was gazing at her with an elbow on the table and his hand supporting his head, sipping what she was fairly sure was a Between version of coffee through a bright pink straw. That was also worrisome.
“Is this Between or Behind?” she asked.
“Between,” Luca said, abandoning his straw. “You can still see the city behind it, and if you look through the lights, you can see the edges of the river, too. It’s just that it’s extra here. I wouldn’t take you Behind. Not yet.”
“You said you were going to take us somewhere safe,” Viv said, her voice accusatory. There was nothing safe about Between for Luca when it came to the Forex agents or Jasper, if they were still looking for him, as she was sure they were.
“No one will hurt you while I’m with you,” he said. “They probably wouldn’t if you were alone, either. You’re just more safe with me here.”
“I mean that if Jasper or Forex find out that you’re hanging around me, they’ll grab you again!” Viv said, in exasperation. “You only just escaped! Are you trying to get caught?”
Luca sniffed. “Garbage. Forex are idiots, and Jasper couldn’t catch me unless I let him. The only reason I was in the Tea House was because I wanted to be.”
“That’s not completely true,” Viv said. She still remembered the absolute astonishment and fury that she’d seen in Luca’s eyes when she first used her Voice on him accidentally. “I stopped you leaving the first time. That wasn’t something you wanted.”
“That’s true,” he admitted. “But you couldn’t be there all the time. I’ve escaped from much more difficult places before—and no one has ever captured me without me meaning to be exactly where I was. I have too many spiders.”
“And a Seffy,” said Viv, before she could stop herself. She smiled involuntarily, realising exactly why Seffy had been splashing in the bath when Viv awoke that evening; no doubt there would be blood-stains in the bathtub to clean. Then, because Luca hadn’t told her about the spiders, she asked, “How did you meet Seffy?”
“I stole her from a room in the middle of the sea,” Luca said. “And I nearly drowned while I was doing it. The mermaids made me kiss them for air; they didn’t care that I was just a kid. They laughed at me and killed my dog, too.”
It was the matter-of-fact way he said it, as though it was something decades ago rather than just perhaps twenty years ago, that really chilled Viv. “They made you kiss them for air…?”
“That’s how they play with their food,” he said. “They can pass air to humans and other top-dwellers if they want to, but they like to make it fun for themselves. You can’t…you can’t cry, Viv. You can’t cry about things like this or you’ll never stop crying. It was a long time ago and I got a Seffy out of it.”
“I’m not crying,” Viv said, pressing her fingers to the inner corners of her eyes to prevent the tears from welling up and out, and making a liar of her. She could feel her nose turning hot and reddening. “Did you get lost, or fall into the water? How did mermaids grab you in the first place?”
“I don’t get lost,” Luca said, with dignity. “I was kidnapped. They kept me under the water in such a heavy place for a long time before I found a way out; I found Seffy on the way out and I was drowning by then so I thought we might as well drown together. I forgot she could breathe underwater while I was drowning. She was pink by the time I got her out and I was blue in the face, and luckily for me once I had her out of the room she showed me that she could put me wherever I wanted to be, so long as there was a sheet of Between on both sides.”
Viv, her face still hot with anger and tears in her eyes, found that she was inadvisably caught up in the story, her shoulder rigid and her hand clenched around her drink. She tried to look out the window to give herself time to blink away the tears, but Luca was already gazing at her when she turned back.
“Your nose is red,” he said.
Viv was aware, and mortified. Everyone else in the café could also no doubt see that she was on the point of tears in public. She put a hand up to cover her nose and shifted very slightly to put her back to Luca and the rest of the café. If she had known that she would be tearing up like a child in public, she would have brought some face powder with her to cover up the after-effects.
“No, I like it!” Luca objected, pulling her hand away. “Like a little satin button. You look like a Christmas card.”
Viv cleared her throat and blinked very carefully once again to make the new tears sink back, and felt the welcome relief of a breath of night air that had crept through the window a booth over. The redness of her nose would sink away, too, unless she let herself get too involved in Luca’s childhood tales again.
“It shouldn’t have happened to you,” she said, clearing her throat. “None of it should have. You should have been looked after and kept safe.”
“Everyone thought it was very funny,” Luca said. He said it reflectively, as though it was something mildly interesting, but Viv wondered if he knew how tightly the fingers of his left hand were curled around the straw that he had been using.
She thought she caught the scent of salt, and then something wet and cold wrapped around her leg and, it seemed, Luca’s, squeezing them together.
“Hallo Seffy,” Luca said absently, patting the tentacle where it peeked up over his knee. “They patted me on the back when I got back, all the behindkind; you’re a real man now, and things like that.”
“How old were you?”
“It must have been about my tenth birthday,” Luca said, looking down at the crumpled straw as if suddenly remembering it. He dropped it on the table with a flex of his hand. “Anyway, it was a long time ago, and they did worse things to me than that, but that was the bit that always stayed with me.”
“No wonder you don’t like mermaids and waterfae,” said Viv, feeling as though she was choking on the words. “No wonder you didn’t want to have a relationship after that!”
“It’s not that I didn’t want one,” he said. “I just didn’t want one with someone who would think it was something to slap my back about that I was mermaid-kissed as a kid—and there aren’t many people who think otherwise, Behind. I thought I’d have to wait for a while, but I’d know when I was ready to try, because I wouldn’t mind kissing that person.”
Viv bit the inside of her cheek. “Luca—”
“It was the first time I wanted to try and kiss someone,” he said, turning his attention on the shifting new arrivals that had filtered into the café, much to her relief. He was smiling, and she didn’t think she could bear that smile being turned on her. “Not just then at the park, but since nearly the first time I met you.”
“That isn’t a good measure of compatibility,” she said. “I’m glad you felt safe, but…”
Luca’s eyes, bright and confidential, turned back on her. “And I thought that right at that moment you wanted me to kiss you, too.”
Instead of answering that, Viv said quietly, “You’re supposed to have crushes and feel safe to have them. It’s part of growing up. They don’t need to mean more than that.”
“You’re a bit like Jasper,” he said. “Not in the bad ways. Just in the tricky little ways. We can talk about your father instead, if you like.”
Their cheesecakes and drinks arrived with the same beautiful fae who had taken them to their seats; her brown eyes, large and heavily lashed, must have lingered just a little too long on Luca, because he smiled widely at her and said, “I wasn’t talking to a human about Between. Viv could kill me with a word; she’s more dangerous than anything here tonight.”
The woman’s eyes flicked across to Viv and surveyed her up and down. “I see,” she said, and went away again.
Luca sniffed. “Rude,” he said. “It wouldn’t be any of her business if I was talking to a human about Between.”
“She doesn’t like humans?”
“She doesn’t like humans knowing about Between and Behind,” Luca explained, pushing a tiny fork toward her. “Behindkind are always having an existential crisis about humans learning about them and taking over, as if they don’t kill every human they can get their hands on.”
Viv took the chance to change the subject while she could; talking about Dad was too unpleasantly useless right now. “Speaking about humans knowing things about Behind and Between,” she said, scooping a little bit of the fruit gel off the top of the nearest tiny cheesecake instead of cutting into it. “Is my face cream real face cream?”
Luca finished the piece of cheesecake on his fork before he said carefully, “It’s real. It’s just not exactly—”
“The real thing it’s pretending to be,” Viv said, nodding. “Where did you get it?”
He grinned at her. “There are shops here, too. It’s good, isn’t it?”
“Ridiculously good,” she said. It was a relief to hear a bit of severity back in her voice. “And ridiculously expensive.”
“I didn’t pay for it,” he said.
“I knew it!” Viv said. “Luca, I’m not going to be a receiver of stolen goods!”
She should have told him that he had to take it back, or not to give her things like that—not to give her things at all. But Viv found herself not saying any of those things, and the conversation somehow passed on again to Dad, and then the Tea House, and then on to far too many other things while the wee hours passed away outside the window and the waitress brought a dizzyingly multitudinous series of tiny cheesecakes out. SooAh came and went to eat cheesecakes and get back to her puzzle, while Viv wondered how she had ended up in a Between café with a wanted assassin, discoursing in increasingly animated terms the differences between Behind and human leeches and why cane toad races were an integral part of any real school experience in the 90s.
Luca mentioned his mother once or twice. The things he said still weren’t quite normal things, but they weren’t the unhinged riddles she had heard from him before now; and he said them easily and in context.
She didn’t like blue flowers, he said, but only because she liked living things best. Viv didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t really matter. Luca’s mum didn’t get angry at him when he came home with pollen and blue petals all over him. She had been only twenty-nine when she died, and she had had bad taste in men, she had told him.
Viv didn’t pick at the things he said, but she remembered them. Luca was as calm and bright as she had ever seen him, and she didn’t want to ruin that.
She didn’t tell him about her mother and what she had discovered about herself, however. Viv wasn’t sure entirely why. It could have been the fact that she didn’t want to take away from Luca’s earlier vulnerability by making things about her own troubles—it was bad enough that she’d cried—or perhaps it was because she was enjoying herself and didn’t want to think about difficult and unpleasant things with Luca now that they were both cheerful and comfortable.
Maybe she just didn’t want to make this time come to an end, even though the bright gold of the sun rising had begun to brighten the outside of the café and there had been less movement and Between lights to be seen through the glass for quite some time.
She should have been the one to stand up and say it was time to leave, despite the fact that she was sitting in the inside seat; it shouldn’t have taken Luca’s pale eyes flitting around the room and the decisive shift he made to slide out of the booth to propel her to leave.
“The little ankle-biter is about to get in trouble and so are we,” he said, waiting for Viv to slide across the booth as well. “Well, I’m going to get in trouble. You can stay here if you want to meet the Forex agents; they won’t hurt you, but they’ll be annoying.”
Following his eyes, Viv threw a look over at SooAh and saw that she was staring up at a much larger child with a set chin that Viv knew very well. “I’ll rescue the kid from SooAh,” she said. “And then take her home. What do you mean about Forex?”
“The two people over by the door have just left,” he said. “And their order arrived afterward. They’ve gone to get someone, and if I was going to guess, I’d say it’s Forex. They weren’t paying too much attention to me until…until Jasper took an interest in me.”
“I would have thought they’d try to recruit you,” Viv said, eating one last, regretful mouthful of cheesecake.
“I don’t fit their employment structure,” said Luca, grinning. “But they tried!”
He was lingering, Viv realised. Despite the danger; despite the need to be gone. “Go,” she said, physically pushing him away from the booth. “There’s no point getting caught—or getting in a fight.”
