Between Kings, page 10
part #10 of The City Between Series Series
It was good to see his face, even if I wasn’t exactly seeing the real thing. He had a bit of blood and dirt up around his collar, but he looked like he was in pretty good nick despite that, and I felt the squeeze of my heart relax a little bit. I hadn’t expected to see him dead when I next saw him, but I’d expected it to be a fight in the arena, and it was nice to see him relatively whole.
He said, “Do it quickly: we leave in five minutes whether or not you’re cleaned up, and if there’s a blood trail it won’t matter how far we run.”
“I’ve got it,” said Morgana. Her back was to me; all shifting shadow and deep darkness that moved far too much to be just hair. “I saw how to do this on tv. Just tell me if it’s too tight, because they said that can cause trouble, too. Don’t want your arm to drop off—sorry, forget that. It’s fine. It looks fine. Definitely won’t drop off.”
“How long will it take them to find us?” asked Sarah, her eyes on Zero and her arm resolutely held out to Morgana’s ministrations.
“If they find a trace, a few minutes. If they don’t, we’ve got a good chance to stay hidden for as long as it takes the king to think of a new way to drive us out of hiding. Zombie, do you want to move to the front? I’m expecting more trouble from the rear.”
“Nope,” said Morgana, looking at him over her shoulder. I caught a brief glimpse of deep shadows that covered the lower half of her face, and her eyes burned a deeper kind of darkness. “I’m hungry: the rear is mine.”
“Think you mean the brain is yours,” muttered Sarah. “Right, that’s it. I’m ready to head out. Let’s get moving.”
I shouldn’t have been smiling when I woke up. I shouldn’t have been okay to hear that they were running for their lives. But all I could seem to remember was that I had heard every one of the voices and seen every one of the faces that had been in my house until a few days ago.
Every one of them was alive, even if they were missing a few pieces. And Zero was still there to keep them alive.
I just had to make sure I got them out while they were still that way.
I don’t think it was morbid curiosity that made me slip into Athelas’ room the next morning. I could have just gone downstairs to make coffee and breakfast for myself and JinYeong—an easier task now that the lycanthropes were all with Vesper and, presumably, eating her out of house and home instead of me—but there was still too much I didn’t understand. Still too much I needed to know.
None of what I wanted to know would help me in my quest to find the king’s name, but I couldn’t help wanting to know more about the why of Athelas’ betrayal. It was part of those thoughts that were useful but not reasonable, and I wanted to know exactly how useful they could be.
JinYeong caught me at the door, but only said, “You are going to talk to the old man again.”
“Yeah.”
“I will not make coffee.”
“Good grief, no!” I said hastily. JinYeong might make better coffee than the lycanthropes did, but it still couldn’t be called good. “I won’t be long. I’ve got an idea about what we can do while we’re waiting to hear back from Marazul and Five.”
“Then we will buy coffee,” he said. “And I will go and drink blood.”
While JinYeong went to get a blood bag, I boiled the little jug that someone had brought upstairs to sit next to the lamp by the wall and made tea from one of the teabags that were in a tupperware container in front of it.
No fancy tea for Athelas these days, but it was tea. There were biscuits, too; just like the tea, they weren’t the delightful things that Athelas had been used to eating, but they would hold him over until lunch time.
I took the tea and biscuits in with me when I went into the room. It was stupid, but I preferred to have a physical reason for being in his room. I don’t know why: it wasn’t like Athelas would be fooled by it. Maybe it was because it gave me the illusion of being able to leave as soon as the job I was supposedly doing was done. I only had to wait around until Athelas finished eating his breakfast, and then I could leave.
It gave me a reason to go away again if I needed to. It gave me a length of time I could count down if things were too horrible to stay in there for a long time.
This time, Athelas woke nearly as soon as I entered the room, without any need for me to enter his memories as well.
“Ah,” he said, opening his eyes. “I see that it’s morning once again. How pleasant.”
“Got some breakfast for you,” I said brusquely.
“So I see. The collective household taste seems to have suffered a decline while I’ve been gone—is this what you subject your guests to?”
“Tuatu doesn’t care what tea he drinks,” I said. “And we don’t keep a fae-who-betrayed-us tea selection on hand, so this’ll have to do.”
“I see that you’re combative this morning.”
“Nope. Just not making myself be polite. Are you gunna eat and drink this lot, or not? I can take it away if you don’t want to eat it.”
“There’s no need to be hasty,” Athelas said mildly. “Since I’m awake, I might as well eat. Perhaps you would be kind enough to put the biscuits on the arm of the chair.”
“All right, but if you throw them at me, there’s gunna be trouble.”
“I shouldn’t dream of it. I’m surprised you’re not accompanied by your pet vampire, by the way.”
“I am here,” said a cold voice from the doorway.
“How very maladroit of me,” said Athelas complacently. “Evidently I must make a habit of checking the doorway before I speak amiss.”
“You can see the doorway from where you’re sitting,” I said. There was a clear line of sight to the door from the bureau mirror, which Athelas must have been looking straight at, since I was in front of—and not wider than—the mirror.
“One assumes you did not come to see me for the purpose of being offended,” Athelas said. “Might one enquire exactly why you did come to see me? Ah—are you here to wring more memories out of me?”
“Just asking questions this time,” I said.
“How novel,” said Athelas, sipping his tea with the faintest of grimaces.
“Don’t complain about the tea,” I told him. “Traitors and friend-murderers only get bog standard tea.”
“A logical standard to insist upon. What do you wish to know, Pet? Perhaps I shall answer you.”
“Why didn’t you just kill me when you got rid of my champions?” I asked. “You could have done it then, nice and easy—you wouldn’t even have had to play games with my parents. I was there in their power, and then I was there in your power.”
“There’s no fun in doing things that way,” Athelas said. He was back to his old, grey self again, the way he’d been just before he tried to kill me and left. “When one becomes content merely to kill, life has lost its spice.”
I had the feeling he was just trying to bait me—or maybe that he was trying to wring any kind of emotion from me—so I only said, “Doesn’t look like you’re enjoying life much these days, either.”
“Oh yes, but one’s satisfaction is contingent upon the quality and durability of one’s work, after all! One need not be working presently to appreciate the work of one’s past.”
“Is that how you look at your life before now?” I asked, and I was surprised to find that the first emotion that surfaced above the absolute, barren hopelessness of my soul was pity. “Sitting here, you’re pleased with how things have turned out?”
“One doesn’t like to sound so vain,” he said, but his eyes didn’t quite meet mine. “However, I’m moderately satisfied with the general trajectory of my work.”
“Good to know,” I said, pushing away from the bureau drawers. “C’mon, JinYeong; we’ve got somewhere we need to be.”
“That was relatively painless,” called Athelas after me. “Are you perhaps softening?”
“Nope,” I said, stopping in the doorway and turning a little to look at him over my shoulder. “Just making sure I’m doing things in my own way instead of yours or the king’s.”
Luckily for my peace of mind, Kyle—or maybe it was Kevin—arrived just before JinYeong and I were about to leave. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t done my best to shut Athelas up in his own mind again, but I still didn’t like leaving him alone.
“I’m here to babysit the creepy old tea-drinker,” Kyle said. “I’m not feeding him, though.”
“That’s all right; we’ll be back before lunch,” I said, hoping it was true.
There wasn’t too much we could do until we knew the king’s name—if we ever did find out what it was—and all I had to take JinYeong out for was a chase after certain loose ends that had evaded us until now. We’d been a bit busy trying not to die to follow through on some of our earlier leads.
“No schoolkids today,” I observed to JinYeong, as we left the front yard.
No schoolkids, but there was a group of what looked like yobbos hanging around the house down one and across the street—leaning up against the fence or sitting on the metal top post, all flannel and trakkie daks and narrow eyes.
He chuckled darkly. “I think they were not happy about yesterday.”
“Reckon they know we lost ’em on purpose?”
“Arra.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
Unless I was very much mistaken, the brownies were making absolutely no attempt to blend with their surroundings. It wasn’t so much that they had given up their guise of being schoolkids, or even the fact that a group of twenty-something blokes moving down the street together were downright threatening: the most obvious clue that they wanted us to know that we were being watched was the way they…well, watched us.
They watched us like they were planning on mugging us behind the first convenient car or down the first convenient street. Maybe they were.
“Reckon they want a fight,” I said. “Either that or they just want us to sweat. We’re definitely not gunna lose ’em by diving into a pub again.”
“Clumsy,” muttered JinYeong dismissively. “We will go and drink coffee and make them wait.”
“Suits me,” I said. “You want pancakes?”
“Yes. I will pay.”
“You mean pay, or talk yourself out of paying?”
“Nega arraseo halkae,” he said, sauntering on with his nose in the air and the hand that wasn’t around mine in his pocket.
“You know we don’t have to pretend we’re dating anymore,” I pointed out, since I knew it was no good trying to talk seriously about vamping people when he was in a mischievous mood. “You don’t have to hold my hand anymore.”
“I wish to hold your hand.”
“Okay, I was just saying.”
“I will always wish to hold your hand.”
I shot a look up at him and found that he was pouting.
“What? What did I do?”
“You are supposed to say that you wish to hold my hand as well.”
“Oh. Well, it’s not like I don’t want to!” I protested. “I’m just not used to holding people’s hands.”
JinYeong gave an unconvinced sniff but said, “It is enough. For now.”
We took our time wandering down to the centre of Hobart, the brownies following behind in a loud group that made people cross the street to avoid them, and found ourselves in a small shop that promised coffee and pancakes. The brownies settled across the road again, this time at the outside tables of the pub there, where they fit in very well. The pub owner eyed them uneasily, and I didn’t blame him: they looked like exactly the kind of yobbos who would start throwing stuff into the street if they had a few more drinks.
“There is no news from the leprechaun or the merman?” asked JinYeong, when our coffee and pancakes were brought out to us.
“Nope,” I said. “We’ll catch up with both of ’em after lunch if we haven’t heard anything until then.”
“Then what will we do today? Are we to annoy the brownies?”
“I reckon we’ve got a few things we can catch up on,” I said, grinning at the sudden light in his eyes. “Stuff we didn’t get to do because his royal-pain-in-the-backsideness decided to bung us all into the Heirling Trials.”
“That letter box?”
“Got it in one,” I said approvingly. “That kid we shook down said he checks the P.O. box once a week, so even if we don’t catch whoever’s emptying out the letter box he delivers to, we should be able to get a good idea of when they’ll be back next. We can also have a bit of a look at whatever is in there.”
JinYeong’s eyes dwelt on me thoughtfully. “You still think it is someone from Upper Management?”
“Not exactly,” I said slowly.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I did think, but I seemed to sense Athelas’ meticulous and secretive hand in everything lately. I fished in my pocket for a moment before my fingers found the irregular shape of a key hiding in there; I put it on the table between us.
“It might be Upper Management. Might be not. But there are still a couple of things that don’t fit yet: Athelas left behind a key, his network badge, and a ring.”
“A ring?” JinYeong’s brows rose. “Here is only a key.”
“Heck,” I said softly. I’d forgotten about the ring, even though I’d automatically mentioned it. It had rolled under the bed in Mum and Dad’s room while I was grabbing the network badge a little while ago. I hadn’t stopped to scrabble for it because a curious lycanthrope had been watching me, and it had seemed somehow secret.
And now that I thought of it, it tickled away at a memory that wouldn’t quite come out.
I would have to try and winkle both ring and memory out later.
“I’ll show you later,” I said. “Forgot to bring it with me.”
JinYeong turned the key over between his fingers. “This belongs to the old man? I think it is a human thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s even money between him wanting me to find it or just not wanting Zero’s dad to get hold of it. Either way, it might connect to what we’re doing today, or might not. Figured it might come in handy, so I brought it along anyway.”
“There will be something,” he said. “If not today, there will be a moment, a time, when it fits. Until then, we can do nothing.”
“Figured that,” I said gloomily. “Okay, we might as well go find the letter box, I suppose.”
JinYeong leaned back casually and tilted his head very slightly in the direction of the group of brownies. “What of those ones?”
“Let ’em follow us,” I said slowly. “We’ll just have to be careful about finding interesting stuff when there aren’t any people around.”
“Will it be dangerous for them to know what we find?”
“Reckon Athelas is at the end of the line anyway, which would mean that nothing we find out here will make the king any happier if he finds out, too—or help him out at all if he does. And if we deal with the king in the arena—”
JinYeong slid his forearms across the table and leaned on them, crowding the pancakes. “You are still concerned about the old man.”
“I didn’t say that,” I said uncomfortably. “I just meant that—”
“—even if we do find something, it will not hurt him,” said JinYeong, nodding. “Arraseo.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, but it wasn’t exactly as if he was wrong. “It’s rude to tell people the truth like that,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “You do it all the time.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, you put up with a lot. Don’t know why you want to date me.”
“Ah,” he said. “That. I wish to date you so that I can persuade you to marry me.”
I gazed at him for a while before I said, “You’ve got kangaroos in the top paddock.”
He grinned. “Even when you are rude, I love you.”
“Yeah, and that’s the bit I don’t understand,” I said. “It’s all well and good to dance around answering my questions, but—”
“I love you because you don’t bite your friends when you are hurt; you get up and fight, and then fight again,” he said. And then, while I was still staring at him, he leaned just slightly further in and kissed the end of my nose. “And I love you because you are warm.”
“All humans are warm,” I said.
JinYeong leaned his chin on his arms but didn’t take his eyes off me. “They are not warm like you.”
“Pretty sure humans are all equally warm, give or take a few degrees,” I said.
“That is not what I meant.”
There was probably a time and a place for being flustered by your vampire boyfriend, but under the gaze of a score of brownies wasn’t exactly it.
I cleared my throat and said, “Eat your pancakes.”
Chapter Six
We had a pretty leisurely breakfast, then took the brownies for a walk with us up around the outskirts of North Hobart, this time heading more toward the old brewery and Mount Wellington than home. Luckily for me, I’d written down the address we needed to visit—it was a place we’d learned about from an erstwhile pattern-making student called Jonny just a little while before everything went to pieces. The house had apparently burned down, but someone sending letters to the letterbox there had been not only paying the power bills of Morgana’s and my houses but had been taking care of a few others—all of us with either dead or seriously changed parents—not to mention keeping the water connected.
They’d been doing it in such a circuitous way as to make it very hard to know that it was the same person doing it, too—let alone making it possible for anyone to find them. But with the help of Five and Tuatu, JinYeong and I had found that person, on paper at least.
Now it was time to find the person hiding behind the paper, if we could. At the very least, we could find the letter box. Whatever we found there, I was pretty sure it would only lead back to Athelas, though I wasn’t sure exactly how quickly. He was the one who had had Tuatu collecting all the information that had given me the heads-up about someone having paid off the power at not just my place, but Morgana’s and Ralph’s houses, too. I was less sure than ever that it was the smoking gun I’d hoped for—more sure that it was something Athelas had meant me to find all along—but I knew I wanted to know for sure, given what I’d seen in Athelas’ memories.
