Splintered Life (Shattered World Book 2), page 11
Luca seemed to gaze at him for several minutes that were heavy and suspicious, and then grinned. “You’re telling me someone else put it there after you found the body?”
He didn’t believe Sascha, and Viv wasn’t at all sure that she did, either. It was exactly the sort of thing a fiancé might say in order to cover for his fiancée.
“Probably,” Sascha said, irritably. “Someone has been playing stupid jokes that they think are funny; this is just another one. Look, you don’t—you don’t have to tell Cora that he was murdered, do you? You can’t just keep investigating and not tell her?”
“That depends on what you have to trade,” Luca said promptly.
Sascha’s eyes narrowed on him, and Viv said hastily, “Ignore him. We’re not going to play games—with you or with Cora. Why don’t you want her to know?”
“She doesn’t show it, but she already has trouble sleeping,” he said. “She comes from this world, but she’s not like them, and it shows when no one else is there to see. I’d rather she didn’t know.”
Viv, without promising one way or another, asked, “And what about the jokes?”
Sascha shifted uncomfortably. “It’s just Jazz being stupid: things like putting women’s underwear between pillows in my chair for Cora to find.”
Viv’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a bit much for a joke, isn’t it?”
“I had words with Jazz about it and told him to stop doing things like that.”
“Did it do any good?” asked Viv. It had struck her that if someone wanted to breed resentment amongst the wedding party, all they had to do was make a few superstitions turn the wrong way—or put something in the right room. So far, apart from one body that only Luca thought was a murder victim, there had been only unpleasant and nasty little things happening.
Who most wanted the wedding party to turn on itself and eat its own flesh?
Sascha shrugged, but there was a lingering discomfort on his face, as there had been when he first came into the room—as well as, Viv was rather sure, a very faintly purpling bruise on Sascha’s cheek where he had been hit.
“He wouldn’t admit it,” he said reluctantly. “I lost my temper and tackled him into the pool, and then he accidentally head-butted me, and we’re all pretty annoyed with each other.”
“Someone is baiting you all,” Luca said, surprising Viv by echoing her thoughts. “Don’t look all wide-eyed, Viv; it’s obvious! And it’s obvious that he knows who it is, too. What have you been fiddling with in your pocket this whole time?”
Sascha’s cheeks reddened, but he drew his hand out of his pocket and said, “This,” displaying a length of ribbon that had been cut jaggedly and was fluffy with frayed ends. To Viv, he said, “It’s the joining ribbon for the stefana—a sort of linked crown that we share during the ceremony that’s meant to symbolise our union. Someone cut it apart the other night, and Cora found half of it on her bed like that.”
Luca grinned. “Where did you find that half?”
“It was in my mum’s stuff,” Sascha said shortly. “I’m going to handle it. And if I can’t handle it, Mum’s going to have to leave. She doesn’t know about all the…extra stuff—she just found out some things that she knew were meant to be bad luck and tried to put a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. She’s been bringing things into the villa that make trouble, as well; I’ve been clearing them out whenever I see them. She wouldn’t have known that they could actually hurt someone with all the magic and Between making bigger possibilities around here. She wouldn’t go that far.”
“That’s the thing about parents,” Luca said. “You think they wouldn’t do something and then you have two knives and a silver thimble in your stomach.”
“I’ve already told her that we’re going to have a talk about it,” Sascha said. “I’m not going to let her get away with it, and I’m not going to let her torment Cora. Mum wouldn’t kill someone. She just makes them wish they were dead,” he added, with a humourless twist of the lips. “If that man really was murdered, you need to look for someone else.”
“We’ll look at alibis first,” said Luca; but he seemed satisfied, because he folded his arms over his chest and pretended to go to sleep again, the shadows crawling around him.
Sascha’s eyes, dark and worried, stared into the shadows, but Viv looked away. She already had enough problems with shadows, these days; she didn’t need more of them.
Still, she couldn’t sleep again, and the remaining hours of the morning passed her by silently and slowly, in increments of dark and light that seemed to be breathable. The solidness of it all lingered uncomfortably around her, adding to her unease. The wedding party, much like the engine of the car earlier, had seemed to be fine from the polished and painted outside, but now that someone had jiggled the lid of the boot, it was also disintegrating from the hidden, wormy centre.
What exactly, she wondered, was it that they were going to find at the centre?
Chapter 6
Escape the Ordinary
Viv wasn’t sure when it happened, but when she looked over at Sascha’s chair at some stage, a much smaller shadow was in it.
“’Morning,” she said to Cora, as a gentle, summer peachy light flowered from the windows and outlined the other woman’s face. The room lit, delicately and brightly, in tones of peach that turned the stucco and its bare beams into a kaleidoscope, as she sat up.
“There’s tea on the coffee table,” Cora said softly, by way of good morning.
Viv helped herself, aware that she wouldn’t go back to sleep, even if she had wanted to. There was a tight, warm tiredness pulling at the skin of her face, and her shoulder was drawn tight around a hot poker of pain already. The small amount of time she had spent sleeping on the couch had had its effect.
It was a good thing, she thought rather dryly, that Sascha and Cora had stood guard: if it had been up to Viv, Luca could probably have taken over the house, or done whatever he wanted, in the times when she had been asleep without being aware of it.
She couldn’t help glancing over at him as she poured her tea, suspiciously. It was hypocritical of her to feel as though she had to be careful with everything she said around him when she was the one who was supposed to be pretending to be his friend, but Viv couldn’t help it. She didn’t feel exactly bad about it, either; though she did feel as though she was perhaps becoming somewhat more like Jasper than she’d like.
But whatever he had been throughout the night, Luca was certainly asleep now. The shadows around him on the carpet, untouched in their corner by the peachy light from the windows, seemed to churn in a small, threatening sort of way. Viv was rather sure that she saw the movement of velvet legs somewhere near his stomach, too. Luca was having bad dreams again—and it was likely that he was going to make it everyone else’s problem by accident.
She put her teacup on the arm of her couch and went over to pull his blanket up higher, and as her fingers brushed his shoulder, the threatening boil of almost-spider legs seemed to slow and sink back into the carpet. She let her hands rest on his shoulders until the movement stopped entirely, and then sank back down gratefully into the seat beside Cora’s.
Cora said unexpectedly, “Have you told Jasper that you can do that?”
Viv tried not to choke on her tea, but she knew that Cora had seen it, so she didn’t try to pretend that she didn’t understand. “I think he knows that it happens; I think he just doesn’t know why. I don’t know why, either; it wasn’t this easy to get rid of the spiders the first time. I’m not even sure it was me, last time.”
“Is this,” Cora began, as though she was choosing her words carefully, and then she hesitated. She finished, “Is this something that you’re going to put in your report?”
Viv took a moment to make sure that she said exactly the right words, too. “Jasper said that he was more interested in my thoughts and observations than he was in a direct retelling of events. He didn’t say that he needed all my thoughts and observations.”
Cora nodded; she didn’t seem surprised. “So you’re not going to tell him.”
“I feel like I can put things in one of two boxes,” Viv said. “Things that are about Luca, and things that are about me. He has the right to the things I think about Luca, but not the ones about me.”
“It’s the overlap that’s tricky,” Cora said.
“Yes,” Viv admitted. “But he did tell me to use my best judgement!”
Cora gave a genuinely delighted crow of laughter, soft and ringing. “That will teach him to try and make things work for him! We always forget that anything we can use against humans will also work against us eventually—and Jasper was always a very good student in how to get the best use out of humans.”
“I keep wondering what he wants with Luca,” Viv said, tracing a finger around the mouth of her teacup. “I know it was something that made him decide to employ me without knowing anything more about me than that I could keep Luca under control if I learned how. I know that Luca is useful in solving important problems, but there has to be more than that.”
“Oh, at least two other things as well!” agreed Cora. More seriously, she added, “Jasper is…complicated. And I suppose that what he wants with Luca is also complicated.”
“I suppose so,” Viv said, her lips pressing together. She couldn’t say exactly that Jasper was forcing either her or Luca into doing what he wanted them to do, but both she and Luca, in different ways, needed what they got in return from him for doing as he demanded. “I wonder what Luca’s getting out of it that he needs so badly that he’ll stay. He seemed pretty happy to go back to supermax the first time we met, and I’m pretty sure it would be easier to escape from there.”
“I’m annoyed with Jasper, so I’ll tell you a story,” said Cora, with the faintest glimmer of a smile that melted into the halo of peachy light that surrounded her.
This time, it was Viv who chuckled into her tea. She tucked her feet up beside her on the couch and leaned back with a faint breath that came out in tea steam. “All right,” she said, before Cora could change her mind. “Let’s have it.”
“I heard a story of a boy,” Cora said; and now her wide, usually smooth forehead faintly creased between the brows. “Once upon a time he had parents, I heard—and a set of abilities that made him a threat. Then an agent of the former King of Behind sent an assassin after them. The story goes that there were just a few too many possible contenders for the throne, and the agent wanted to make sure that his choice was the only one.”
Viv, already at sea with a history she had never experienced, gathered vaguely that there had been a transfer of power, that it hadn’t been smooth, and that assassinations of contenders to the throne were something that was considered quite normal in the worlds Between and Behind.
And it occurred to her, just as Cora began speaking again, that Cora had just told her that there was another human out there with…extra-human abilities like Viv herself seemed to have.
“He was the sort of assassin who liked to play with his food—and had a grudge against parental figures,” Cora added. Her eyes, faintly unfocused, were on Luca, and Viv felt as though Cora’s voice had dropped a little, as though she was afraid to wake him. It occurred to her, with a cold chill, that Cora was talking about Luca himself. “He gave the parents a choice: they die but their child gets to live, or they allow him to kill the child and escape with their lives. I heard there were only two sets of parents who chose to save their child: this boy’s parents were one of those two sets.”
There was a deep, heavy pit where Viv’s heart should have been. She had to swallow, twice, before she could ask, “What happened to the boy?”
“He disappeared from the human world for more than twenty years. No one knows if he couldn’t get back, or just didn’t want to come back—no one knew about him at all until recently, when he started making waves in the human world as well as the Behind world. And they still don’t know it’s him—the boy that could have contended for the throne. They also don’t know how dangerous he is.”
Was Cora really telling her about Luca? Was it a warning? Why? Viv already knew that he was a murderer and an assassin. She was also very well aware that he didn’t think or act in the way that any other person she knew acted or thought. She was still unsure how much of that was because of Luca’s history, and how much of it was because of the worlds in which he’d had to live and the way he looked at the world.
“Haven’t they tried to send someone to kill him again?” she asked. She suspected that anyone who had been sent after Luca was now providing for the future horticulture of either the human world or the Behind world. “Even the new king—isn’t it bad policy to have someone around who might be a threat to your throne?”
“Not many people know about it,” Cora said. “And the new king…has a surprisingly different way of looking at things. I’m not expecting any more government-funded deaths, at any rate. As for the boy, I suspect he’s tried to keep it hidden for his own reasons.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t want to think about it,” said Viv, her eyes caught on Luca’s sleeping face. Luca had been telling the truth—or a version of the truth—when he told her that he had killed his parents, after all. A child, traumatised and horrified at the death of his parents—and knowing that they had died for him—he had begun to blame himself for it. “Maybe it’s too painful.”
“Maybe,” Cora’s voice said, and now instead of the pensive note there was a dry, almost amused sound to it. “Or maybe it’s an inconvenient truth at important moments.”
Such as when someone wanted to hire an otherworldly—no, behindkind—assassin? wondered Viv. It probably wouldn’t be very easy to persuade behindkind employers to hire you to kill other behindkind when you were a human. She had only been in contact with Behind and Between for a couple of weeks, and she had already seen the level of contempt with which some behindkind looked at humans.
She had also, Viv thought, remembering Denise and Jenny, with a pang, seen the contempt and lightness with which some humans regarded behindkind. If behindkind thought of humans as weak and barely better than chattel, at least some humans—Luca was probably not that much of an outlier—thought of behindkind, each and all, as corrupt, deadly, and worthy of death.
She couldn’t help asking Cora, “Is this something I’m supposed to know?”
Cora gave a small, ladylike grin. “What Jasper doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she said. “I don’t believe any good comes of sheltering humans from the dangers out there—it’s one of the reasons I’m quitting Forex for good. For a human-run company, they’re very concerned about making sure they’re the only humans that really know what’s going on in the human world, and what other worlds touch on theirs.”
“Do many of you marry humans?” Viv asked. “I thought that’s why you were leaving the company.”
“Well, yes!” Cora said, with a confidential sort of voice. “But that’s not something I put on the paperwork, I can tell you! The company doesn’t like office romances, and even if I didn’t meet Sascha at work, I met him because of work—and that’s close enough. I do approve of office romances—or at least of romances that pull the human world and the behindkind world closer to understanding each other better—and I’d rather they didn’t use me as a reason for more rules.”
There was a stirring from Luca’s corner, and his voice said in a rough, not-quite-awake tone, “I wasn’t sleeping. You don’t have to drink your tea so loudly.”
“You don’t want any, then?” Viv said, happy to be maliciously compliant. Regardless of whether or not Cora had been speaking of Luca, it wouldn’t be wise to forget the pressure of the knife against her throat. She had allowed herself to be lulled into an amicable type of comradeship with Luca before, and it hadn’t gone well; if a moderately abrasive personal relationship would prevent that kind of thing from happening again, Viv was happy to be malicious in her compliance.
“Never trust the little woman with the curls and the teapot,” Luca said, his eyes opening, bright and unclouded. “She’ll misinterpret everything you say and deny you tea.”
Viv pressed her lips together primly to stop herself replying, and then lost the delightful sense of glee at being further maliciously compliant when her phone began to ring. She couldn’t help the way her hand automatically went to touch the pocket it was in, so she took out the phone and turned the sound off until all that could be heard was a buzzing.
Cora politely pretended not to hear it.
Luca did not. “Dare you to answer it,” he said.
“Check on the car instead,” said Cora, who seemed to be watching them with an air of great enjoyment. She passed a full teacup to Viv, and Luca sat up, his eyes brightening. “I see it’s finished the oil you left out for it: how did you know?”
“It was a guess,” said Viv. She found that it was faintly unpleasant to have that particular suspicion confirmed, and rubbed the arm holding the teacup rather briskly to try and rid herself of the urge to shiver. She passed the full teacup to Luca, who took it but peered into it rather insultingly and then sniffed it cautiously before sipping. “I suppose that means it’ll be ready to work this morning, then?”
“It can wait for breakfast,” Luca said, over the top of his teacup. His eyes might be bright, but his face was gaunt with tiredness, and it somehow made his eyes seem bigger and more unsettling than usual. “Someone is making waffles, and the lunch lady won’t make them for me.”
“She probably doesn’t want you on a sugar high,” Viv said, as she left the room to check on the car.
It hadn’t changed much from the outside since last night, except that all of the oil in the container beside it had vanished, leaving behind a faintly oily residue and a few drops in the bottom. Viv tried not to think too hard about how the car had consumed the oil, and let her eyes run over the car. It seemed perhaps a touch brighter in the paintwork and the metal trimmings, and when she opened the boot lid again, there was no sign of either moth or silken cocoon. The engine, in fact, looked as though it had been washed and detailed, and every sign and speck of road-wear had vanished.
