Splintered Sight (Shattered World Book 3), page 10
So that was why BoRa had been friendlier to her than she had expected after their first meeting, thought Viv. There had been a sense of fellow-feeling. And BoRa, as much as she might present otherwise, was obviously aching for company as badly as little SooAh had been aching for her father.
Viv suspected that lunch times were about to get a lot more interesting.
Her tablet buzzed with an email while BoRa and Luca were eyeing each other warily over the last scone, pulling her pensive attention away. Viv picked up the scone and divided it, tossing half onto each of their plates while the email passed through whatever verification, magic or otherwise, that it always did before it loaded, and sat back to read.
You’ve got the right address for Banner Records, it said briefly. But I haven’t been able to turn up anything about the owner, which is suspicious. Potential ties to two of the Melbourne zoos? I’ll dig further. Below are some potential leads for cigars and other specialty shops for records. Email if you need more info, or you can text my personal number. M.
“We’d better go,” she said. “Marazul says the address I found for the record shop is the right one, but that it’s suspicious he can’t find out much about it apart from the fact that it has ties to two of Melbourne’s zoos.”
“You didn’t need him to check that,” Luca said, with one cheek full of scone. “We could have just gone there.”
“We could have just been attacked, too,” Viv pointed out.
“That’s what I’m for,” he said. “Don’t give my job to someone else.”
“That’s not what you’re here for,” she said. She wasn’t entirely sure that it was a good thing for Luca to have been doing the amount of fighting that he had had to do for and around her. Given his primary occupation before coming to the Tea House, that seemed more than slightly dangerous. “You’re here because you know how to find people and—”
“—because you know how murderers think,” said BoRa baldly, less careful than Viv. “Your killing skills are just an added bonus.”
Luca, looking pleased, said, “I’m the complete package. I’m useful in any situation. That’s why we don’t need to be asking questions of a merman lurking in the depths of the internet.”
So Luca had done his own kind of research, had he? No doubt his reserve about dealing with Marazul was because he was a merman. Not for the first time, it occurred to Viv to wonder exactly why Luca was still somewhat friendly with her when he knew that she had some kind of water-behindkind blood in her.
It worried her, not so much because he was friendly, but because she wasn’t entirely sure why he was friendly—or when it might stop. And that was her own fault, she told herself, because she wasn’t being honest about why she was more friendly with him than coworkers needed to be, either. It was a small dishonesty that bled through everything and made her suspicious of everything.
It was also a small, dangerous thing that tended to make her forget, for days at a time, how dangerous Luca really was. Almost as if her closeness with Luca was just as deceptive to her as it was to him. The button for his collar was in her pocket, but it felt odd and out of place there. It hadn’t been so long ago that she had been willing to press the button—had pressed the button—to completely disable him. Could she still do that? Viv wondered.
Then she remembered how Luca had threatened her father, and she thought that perhaps she still could. There was very little sting in Luca’s “I told you so”s about her willingness to use the button when he had to threaten her family to make her do what he’d said she would do.
The thought of Luca on the ground, in pain, pushed her from her reverie. Perhaps she pushed herself out of it.
“We’d better go,” she said again. “It’s going to be busy in the Grid already.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be taking the kid with you?” There was a tilt to BoRa’s chin, but Viv didn’t think it was challenge. BoRa was testing her—or perhaps trying to feel her out—to see what she would do.
“Jasper’s taking a back seat,” she told BoRa innocently. “He hasn’t given me any instructions except that Luca is supposed to be part of whatever I do outside the Tea House with this case.”
“The kid would probably be useful,” pointed out BoRa.
Viv shrugged very slightly. “Maybe.” She didn’t think that she had to say aloud that it was time someone thought of Kyma and remembered that he was just a kid—small, terrified, and in what was essentially a foreign land to him.
But BoRa was still watching and listening, so perhaps she did have to say it out loud.
She added, “He’s a kid. I don’t care what the selkies or the Between people think. I’m not putting him back in danger.”
“Okay,” said BoRa after a moment, pushing herself back from the table and swinging her legs over the bench. “But I’m not babysitting.”
“Bazza will babysit,” said Viv, in hopes that she would be proven correct but by no means sure.
However, when she made it down to the first floor with Luca, heading for the reception desk, Kyma was already with Bazza, who had turned the entire desk into some sort of fort and the hallway leading to the elevator into a shooting range.
She found this out when Luca made a darting snatch at something that hissed through the air towards her, and then held up an arrow.
“Don’t shoot Viv,” he said to Kyma, who had frozen, his shoulders hunched in a flinch and his bow still in one hand. “She’s the one making sure Jasper helps you.”
The selkie said in a rush, “Sorry, Viv! I didn’t know you were coming out!”
“Trying to get me, were you?” remarked Luca.
Kyma didn’t seem to be able to restrain the choke of laughter that broke from him, though his shoulders stayed hunched. “I wouldn’t try to shoot you!” he protested. “BoRa told me about you; I don’t want to be assassinated! Anyway, you helped me at the house, so you’re all right. Viv, are we going out right now?”
“I’m going out,” Viv said. “And so is Luca. You’re staying at the Tea House with Bazza.”
Bazza’s large, round yellow eyes rested thoughtfully on Viv for a moment before he grinned and nodded. There was that sorted, Viv thought in relief. She saw Kyma’s thin body relax at last, as if he had also been waiting for Bazza’s permission to do so.
“What if you find Sponsor Kelly?” the boy asked. “She won’t like me letting you interfere in my Sojourn this much. And what if it’s dangerous?”
“If it’s dangerous,” Viv said, fishing out her phone, which was buzzing in her pocket, “then you definitely shouldn’t be with us! You don’t think Luca’s going to let something assassinate me, do you?”
Kyma’s face crinkled in the same hybrid expression of gruff, stifled appreciation and relief. “All right,” he said, his voice slightly snubby. He was trying, Viv realised, not to sound too relieved or happy. “I’ll look after the Tea House while you’re gone.”
“All right,” she agreed, and to her relief, Luca didn’t say anything.
She checked her phone on the way to the car, with Luca looking unabashedly over her arm at the screen. It was a series of texts from her father; the first she could see in preview contained only a picture, which meant that he was back to sending her articles and random news sources—in an effort, Viv was quite well aware, to continue on with life as if their last in-person conversation and quarrel had never happened.
But they had argued. Fought, really. Viv had tried, as gently as possible, to put her foot down when it came to Dad’s constant, tiny untruths meant to edge her into doing what he wanted her to do without him actually having to ask or tell her to do it. Each lie was so tiny when considered alone but weighed together they dragged down on her like death itself; and Viv had thought that if she was kind, and honest, it would be enough to make Dad at least acknowledge what he was doing. But he hadn’t, and he had got stirred up and angry and so wildly unreasonable that she had had to make a swift, shocked retreat to the Tea House, which now felt something like a refuge from him.
It had taken a couple of weeks, but now the texts had started up again. As if there were never any quarrel. As if there wasn’t any problem that needed to be addressed. No problems, no solutions; just texts. There was no need to answer them now—no need to look at them at all, Viv decided, and slipped her phone back into her pocket so that Luca couldn’t look at them, either.
The address Marazul had confirmed for them was on a street Viv was passingly familiar with—St. George’s Road in the Fitzroy North area—a shop on the corner that was a street down from the library and directly across from the Edinburg Gardens.
Viv managed to find an empty half-hour park just up Reid Street, and they walked back down to the store entrance along the side of the shop that was on Reid. From the outside, it looked like a dingy antiques store, with dusty, glossy windows set into blue- and red-painted walls, cluttered with the detritus of too many decades; from the inside, however, once the ringing of the little bell on the door died away, it was a very different space.
It was, as Viv was coming to expect Between spaces to be, larger on the inside than it should conceivably have been; what did surprise her was the fact that it was a Between space. Somehow she had expected Sponsor Kelly to have been sourcing her vinyl from human providers. She could see through the windows, vaguely, but the windows didn’t allow a great deal of light through, and it seemed to Viv that the light there was, emanated from the records that were stacked in tidy, white-laminated chipboard boxes set on metal stands.
Whatever else was in the store, the obviously important items were the vinyl—and whatever was beyond them around the corner past the boxes, where a velvety kind of shadow softly felted the darkness.
She said in a low voice to Luca, “Behindkind like vinyl?”
“Patrons of great taste from all corners of the worlds choose vinyl,” said a smooth, deep, bass voice that seemed to resonate around the room.
Luca put one finger in his left ear and wiggled it. “That tickles,” he said.
A full, deep cough vibrated the walls, reminding Viv irresistibly of a dark river at night, the cough of crocodiles bouncing off the water. Then the voice added, “Excuse me,” and it sounded more human than it had seemed a moment ago. “I had something stuck in my throat.”
Like what? Viv almost asked. A bone? But the owner of the voice—and possibly the shop—was emerging from the shadows as though slipping into a river in a smooth sort of slide, and his unsettling eyes were on her, stopping the words in her mouth.
Tall and lean, with broad shoulders and a crocodile-skin vest, he was at once extremely Australian and so extremely not what Viv had expected to see. His boots were also made of crocodile leather, and the eyes that had first caught Viv’s attention now blinked once.
The only problem with that was that when he blinked, his eyelids did so vertically.
Sugar, thought Viv. We shouldn’t have come in here.
Was he a crocodile? Was he behindkind? Was he a crocodile behindkind? Were there crocodile behindkind?
But Luca wasn’t bristling like an overexcited cockatoo, nor was he edging in front of her or darting off to the side to pull away attention—which meant that no one was going to start fighting just yet. This, along with the Between feeling to the shop, Viv thought, would be why Marazul hadn’t been able to find much information on the owner or the shop.
Now it only remained to be discovered exactly why Banner Records had affiliation with two Melbourne zoos, and Viv wondered if she really wanted to know the answer to that.
“What can I help you with?” added the man. His nose was also quite long, and that was fitting with everything except the crocodile skin, somehow. The crocodile skin, now that Viv had heard his original voice and seen that uncanny, unhuman blink, had taken on the unpleasant association of cannibalism. “I’m the owner here. You can call me Wal.”
“Viv,” said Viv in return. “This is Luca.”
“You’re looking for something special?”
“Not something,” she replied. “Someone.”
“Ah,” Wal said, tucking his thumbs into his belt loops beneath the two shallow points of his leather vest.
“No biting,” Luca said, shooting a sideways look at the owner of the shop as he sidled away from Viv. “No one else is allowed to bite Viv.”
“You’re not allowed to bite me, either,” Viv reminded him. But she was still comforted by the fact that he didn’t seem to think he would actually need to fight, even if she would have preferred him to stay beside her instead of diving under the record bins.
“We’re here to ask you about one of your patrons,” she explained to the proprietor.
Wal looked her up and down, then did the same to Luca, who was halfway beneath one of the huge bins of records, his head and shoulders completely out of sight despite the fact that the thin, black, metal legs did nothing to hide what was beneath them.
“I don’t talk to enforcers or aligned law personnel,” he said. There was suddenly a great deal of suspicion in his voice.
Luca popped back out from under the bins of records. “We’re not enforcers. We don’t like them, either.”
“You’re wearing one of their collars,” said Wal, his odd crocodile eyes blinking sideways once again and focusing on Luca with an intensity that was just as frightening as Luca’s own feral gaze. “I don’t talk to people on the wrong side of enforcers, either.”
“Talk to me, then,” said Viv. “I’m not an enforcer, and I’m not wearing a collar. I didn’t even know it was enforcer property.”
Rather reluctantly, it seemed to her, Wal tore his eyes from Luca and returned his attention to Viv. He said, “Enforcers don’t always look like enforcers.”
“Yes, they do,” Luca called. “You can’t think Viv is enforcer material. The worst she could be is a honey trap.”
There was a very faint click that Viv was fairly certain was Wal’s teeth. She wished that she could ask him if he was indeed a crocodile. Unfortunately, she was left with the impression that it might be a rude question to ask, and since she still knew far too little of the worlds Between and Behind to be able to set her mind at rest, she refrained.
“We’re trying to locate Ann Kelly,” she said instead. She had the feeling that Wal was someone who respected directness—and she didn’t really have any other way of broaching the issue. “She went missing a couple of weeks ago, and we think she ordered—”
“Don’t go back there!” Wal boomed, making Viv jump. His eyes were once more following Luca, who had somehow wriggled out from beneath the records and was now skulking around in the velvety shadows at the back of the store. “You’re not allowed to touch my tapes! They’re delicate!”
His pale eyes bright, Luca said, “You have tapes?”
“Not,” said the proprietor, “for you.”
“Why not?” demanded Luca. “I have pencils! I know how tapes work! You can’t refuse to sell to me!”
“I don’t have to sell to anyone!” shot back Wal. “Get away from me boxes!”
He really looked as though he was going to grab the back of Luca’s collar, and Viv wasn’t entirely sure who that would turn out most badly for.
“Luca,” she said, with an edge to her voice. “We came here for information. Not cassette tapes.”
“Yes, but they’re here,” Luca said, turning appealing eyes on her. “I can see them right here—look, it’s the Carpenters. I don’t have this one!”
She should not be surprised, thought Viv, that Luca apparently had a fixation on cassette tapes in general and the Carpenters in particular.
“I’m warning you,” said Wal, his voice deepening. “No one is going to like it if I have to throw you out of the shop.”
“You’re acting suspicious,” Luca said, and Viv was quite certain he was still inching towards the boxes of cassettes, even though he seemed more interested in the tapes for the tapes’ sake than for the sake of their investigation. “Why won’t you sell me a tape of the Carpenters? I don’t have this one.”
“You can have mine,” Viv said. “I’ll get it from Dad’s place for you today. But you have to get out of Wal’s boxes. We’re here for information, not to go through boxes.”
That made Luca’s eyes brighten even more, and although he threw a longing look towards the boxes as though he would have torn through them like a terrier after a rat, he did move away from them and towards her.
Wal watched him unwaveringly until he was standing beside Viv once more, but he did seem very slightly more likely to talk, so Viv didn’t waste time.
“Does Ann Kelly order from you?” she asked him. “I know she buys from you, because your packaging was all over her record stacks. But does she do special orders, and has she done any recently?”
“I can tell you that an Ann Kelly orders from me,” said Wal, his feet shifting very slightly for the first time. “I can’t tell you anything else. I don’t talk about our patrons.”
Viv saw Luca’s eyes drop to the proprietor’s feet, and she thought he brightened once more. That was all she needed to confirm her own sudden realisation that Wal probably had an order of Sponsor Kelly’s in the store right now.
“She’s missing,” she told him. “And you’ve got an order of hers sitting in the shop, don’t you? Why don’t you bring it out for us?”
She didn’t know why it would be useful to see what Sponsor Kelly had last ordered, or why Wal would agree to do as Viv suggested, but Viv did have the distinct impression that Wal didn’t want to talk about any possible orders. And no doubt as a result of spending too much time with Luca, she had simply wanted to see what would happen if she prodded him in the right way.
“I don’t know that she’s missing,” said Wal. “And all I’ve got for it is your word. You said you’re not enforcers, so how do you know?”
