Between Friends, page 16
“I reckon I’m gunna have to wrap you up in a bit of Between when you get through,” the shop girl said to him. The apologetic tone to her voice irritated Derrick a great deal.
The bounty hunter wriggled more vigorously. “You can’t; I have to take that bloke in.”
“No, I can,” the shop girl said. “You prob’ly mean you don’t want me to.”
“Oh,” said the bounty hunter. “I suppose that’s true. Anyway, don’t go covering me with Between—it’ll turn into something nasty and that won’t be fun for anyone.”
“Look,” said the shop girl. “I get that you’re not used to talking to people—”
“Don’t meet many people—mostly it’s just the tentacles and spiders and stuff.”
“Yeah; I get that. But if you want me to do anything you say, you’ve got to explain stuff. I can’t just do what you tell me to do if I don’t know why you want me to do it. I might not, even then; but at least I’ll know if I should.”
“Oh, right,” the bounty hunter said. “I’m used to Behindkind just trying to kill me, not talk with me. He’s a murderer, by the way.”
The shop girl’s eyes flicked thoughtfully toward Derrick, who yelled, “It’s a lie! I’ve never done anything to this weirdo in my life!”
“He didn’t do it to me, he did it to the kid whose photo is in my pocket,” said the bounty hunter, still wriggling as though he couldn’t help it. He was free fully to the shoulders now. “And about ten other kids until now. Check my breast pocket.”
The shop girl did so, cautiously, and pulled out a glossy photograph, faceup. Derrick recognised the face straight away: it was the same one he had seen on tv a couple of weeks ago. It was also the one he had seen last week, when he threw dirt over it in a grave that he had made in a small garden hidden between three houses.
The shop girl didn’t get a chance to look at it properly before spiders cascaded through the wall opposite them, two tentacles cascading with them, roiling and turning and churning and slicking right around Derrick without hesitation. He yelled—maybe he screamed—and struggled, but it was no use. The tentacles had him wholly, and they squeezed just enough around his chest to suggest that he’d better stop struggling if he wanted to keep breathing.
The shop girl, as if she’d read his mind, said, “Reckon you’d better stop struggling for now.”
“You said they couldn’t get in!” he yelled.
“I mean, I didn’t expect anyone to get in via spider,” she said, shrugging.
She didn’t look sincere, and it occurred to Derrick to wonder, for the first time, exactly what the shop girl had been doing when she said she had to check things earlier. He squirmed in his moving, slick bonds, fingers clenched and oozing with the same viscous liquid that the tentacles were coated in.
At the door, the bounty hunter collapsed onto the floor in a wet, spidery plop that turned into thick ink on the floor, and rolled away from the mess. Derrick expected him to lunge across the floor at the end of that roll, knives out; instead, he stood, turned back to the door, and thrust his arm through the shifting blackness.
Derrick wasn’t the only one who had thought he might attack: the shop girl watched his movements with a kind of amused surprise, while Derrick used the time to struggle as furiously as he could without drawing attention to himself. If the bounty hunter was stupid enough to waste time in bringing his secretary into the room along with him, Derrick would make good use of the time.
His own brain was moving too quickly to settle. How had they figured out he’d taken the latest kid already? He’d only taken her last night—he hadn’t even had a chance to play with her yet. He saw the moment that the shop girl began to trust that the bounty hunter wouldn’t suddenly dart across the room, and looked down at the photo in her hand instead.
“That’s one of them,” said the bounty hunter over his shoulder, as she scanned the photo. “Someone who didn’t like the idea of her vanishing contacted us while we were already looking for this derelict. We’ve been looking for him all week.”
“He’s behindkind?”
“Nope. Human.” He gave a huge tug and the secretary emerged from the blackness, fully to the waist, her eyes squeezed shut. She gasped a little and opened her eyes as the ink cleared from her face, but didn’t look anywhere but at the bounty hunter. Derrick had the impression that she was trying to avoid looking at the spiders. “You told me that.”
“Yeah, I know, but—”
“Why are we hunting a human killer?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That. I’m pretty sure your speciality is in Behindkind. You’ve got the look.”
The bounty hunter fixed his unsettling eyes on her. “I do? There’s a look?”
“Yeah.” The shop girl’s eyes narrowed a little. “Is your secretary human?”
The secretary said, “Yes,” as the bounty hunter assured the shop girl, “Oh yes.”
“Good,” she said. “I reckon you’re going to need her.”
“She’s very useful,” he said. “She does the connection thing. I just hunt the killers.”
“You can’t prove I did anything,” Derrick said sulkily, ceasing his struggles now that he was noticed again. It wasn’t an admission, but the shop girl’s face closed as if she had taken it as one. He didn’t like people being allowed to accuse him of things. “You won’t find my DNA anywhere near the scene, and you won’t find anything at my house, either.”
“We already got the kid you’ve been keeping at the school,” the secretary said. Her eyes, he had noticed, were usually a warm sort of brown: right now, they were as cold as ice.
“Also, we don’t care about evidence and proving things!” said the bounty hunter happily. “The people who hired us don’t care, either.”
The shop girl shrugged at Derrick. “Looks like they don’t care. D’you care, JinYeong?”
The vampire said “No,” in Korean, but somehow something said the English version of it in Derrick’s head.
Derrick clenched his teeth. Through them, he said, “You’d better let me go now, or you’ll regret it. I don’t go after kids because I can’t take down a man—they’re just more fun.”
“I think we should kill him,” said the vampire coldly.
“Not while he’s tied up,” the shop girl and the secretary said together. The shop girl added, “He’s disgusting, but we’re not murderers.”
The bounty hunter opened his mouth as if to object, but the secretary found solid ground with one foot and then elbowed him swiftly and sharply.
“Anyway,” said the shop girl, “we’re not scared of murderers around here, so you can stop trying to frighten us. I’ve bitten bigger blokes than you.”
Derrick glared at her. “If you knew who I was from the first minute, why play the games?” He was fond of games, but exclusively on his own terms—it was no fun if someone else set the rules.
“I didn’t know who you were,” said the shop girl. “I just knew you were flamin’ bad news.”
“You can’t have,” Derrick said in annoyance. “I’m very good at being a normal person!”
“Interesting thing,” the shop girl said seriously, squatting down to speak face-to-face with Derrick over the soft but distinctly unpliable tentacles. “When someone mentions that their parents were killed by something otherworldly, it usually makes people ask questions. At the least, most people say sorry, or kinda freeze.”
“I don’t care about your parents,” Derrick said bitterly. He was well and truly caught, but there was still time to think of a way to get out if he could only have some peace and quiet in which to think.
“Exactly,” she said. “You didn’t even blink: you just went on to asking the question that you were most interested in. It didn’t even occur to you that you should be sorry about someone’s parents being dead. That reaction isn’t something you can hide—you probably don’t even know you’re doing it, because you haven’t got the right brain connections to realise it’s something you shouldn’t do.”
“You didn’t trust me from the start,” he said obstinately. He hadn’t had a fair go. She’d been determined from the start to turn him over, and he resented that. He was good at looking normal—he was good at blending in.
“I mean, the first thing you did was to try and bully me into helping you,” the shop girl pointed out. “I’ve got a nose for people who need help. But I was only sure when you started asking questions about how to use all the stuff you were finding out.”
“He’s good at blending in,” said the bounty hunter. The compliment was dust and ashes coming from him. “That’s why I was sent to find him. I’m good at finding things that look human and aren’t quite.”
“I’m human!” Derrick said, more incensed at that than anything that had preceded it. “That—vampire bit me! You know I’m human!”
“You’re missing a few important parts,” said the bounty hunter. “You’re not behindkind, but I don’t think you count as human, either.”
“Yeah, that’s the feeling I got,” said the shop girl. “Some humans are less human than a few of the Behindkind I’ve met.”
“I’m human,” said the bounty hunter to her; then, as though he’d thought about it and something wasn’t quite right, he added, “I don’t count, though. We’re glad you’re not dead: we thought you must be friends, or that you’d be dead by the time we got in. Didn’t think we’d get inside in time, but it looks like you two know what you’re doing.”
“You too,” said the shop girl, pointing at the tentacles that wrapped around Derrick. “Good timing, that: I was just gunna kill him if he tried to hurt us.”
“Money gets paid whether he’s alive or dead.”
“We don’t just kill people,” said the secretary, but she didn’t say it as if it was a fact. She said it almost admonishingly, as if she was reminding the bounty hunter.
“Yes! Right!” he said. “We don’t just kill people as our default. Not everyone is trying to kill us.”
“Not everyone,” said the shop girl. “But a fair flamin’ lot of ’em are.”
The bounty hunter’s eyes lit up. “That’s what I told Viv! She says everyone’s experiences are different.”
The secretary sighed, and that small sound seemed to draw the bounty hunter’s attention to the fact that her foot was still stuck in the door. He spun around once again and made a dart to grab her beneath the arms, hauling until she squeaked and popped free of the door.
Her face redder than it had been, the secretary said in something of a pant, “You can put me down, Luca! I’m inside!”
Now that she was inside, the short, brown curls that had been pulled back on either side by combs showed themselves to be a deep russet instead of brown; her rimless glasses were round and very nearly invisible, and her chocolate high-waisted trousers were dotted with moisture that shone very slightly as though she had been touched by the same tentacles that now curled around Derrick. Together, she and the bounty hunter looked as though they’d stepped from the cover of a magazine from the ’40s.
The bounty hunter said, “Sorry about the tentacles—it was the only way we could think of to get in here before he did anything to you both.”
“It’s a flamin’ good reach,” the shop girl said, her face impressed. “They’re bigger than I thought they would be. Do they travel Between, or are they just reaching through? Are they disembodied?”
The bounty hunter’s eyes lit up with the same unsettling, pupil-dilating interest that Derrick had seen earlier. That was a familiar look to him, too; he had caught it on his own face enough time in reflections to understand what it was. Excitement—interest.
“Not disembodied. She can travel Between, but only when it comes to water Between. She reaches when she needs to.”
The shop girl asked, with interest, “You got a pet giant squid?”
“Giant octopus!” said the bounty hunter happily. “Meet Seffy!”
Two more enormous arms curled into the shop, wet and dripping copiously, the smell of salt water bleeding into the air with them. The shop girl patted those tentacles in fascination, gently and fearlessly; the vampire reared back, baring his teeth.
“Technically speaking, she can travel directly through Between without needing water,” added the bounty hunter. “But the thing is that it’s not comfortable for her. She prefers water.”
The shop girl, her eyes alight, said, “I need one. What about magic? Can she use magic?”
The vampire made a sound of irritation and said to the secretary, “Now they will talk forever.”
“Oh well,” said the secretary. She had a tired sort of a voice, like she was used to dealing with the bounty-hunter. “We might as well introduce ourselves somewhere a bit more…private.”
She tilted her head slightly toward Derrick as she spoke, which sparked a surge of mingled panic and indignation in him.
“You can’t leave me here!” he protested. He was more important than that—they couldn’t risk losing him. And in the light of new information, he wasn’t entirely sure that he wouldn’t be lost in the maw of a giant octopus before he could get free and lose himself in the streets of Hobart again. “That thing will eat me!”
The vampire sniffed. “I have eaten this one. Why should you be frightened of it?”
“It’s true,” the shop girl said. “They sell ’em along the street in Busan, all bundled up. Not as big as Seffy, though.”
“Seffy won’t eat you,” said the bounty-hunter. “She’s strictly retrieval. You just won’t like it if she retrieves you and takes you back to where she lives—there’s not much air there.”
“You won’t get your money for me if I’m DOA,” Derrick said, wriggling vigorously. “I’m too important for you to let me die.”
The bounty-hunter’s slightly manic grin made him shiver. “I don’t get paid, anyway. And if it comes to people being important—you’ve only killed about ten people. I’ve killed at least a hundred.”
A small line formed between the secretary’s brow as her eyes shuttered briefly. “We should probably get back,” she said. “We’ve already been away longer than we were meant to be. I’ve got to account for the time we spend away.”
“Coffee, first,” the shop girl firmly. “I wanna know more about the giant octopus.”
“They are good to eat,” said the vampire just as firmly, as he followed her past the counter and down the hall toward the back of the shop.
The bounty-hunter clapped his hands together, swivelling to face the secretary. “They said coffee,” he said, pointing with his joined hands. “We can’t not get coffee.”
“Luca—”
But the bounty-hunter was already swivelling back around and had set off down the hall, leaving the secretary alone with Derrick and the tentacles of the otherwise absent Seffy. Derrick saw the line between her brows grow deeper, her lips pressing together. Whoever she was, the secretary wasn’t a killer like the bounty-hunter—and she wasn’t too happy about the bounty-hunter being a killer.
It was eating away at her, and Derrick knew exactly what to do with that. He said, softly vicious, “He’ll kill you one day, too.”
He saw her nostrils flare, but all she said was, “I don’t take advice from kid-killers,” and followed the others. Derrick heard her footsteps fading along the hall like the last beacon of hope and felt the air chill at least five degrees to the sinister slithering of tentacles.
Something touched his boot, cautiously, curiously, and he shivered, hunching into his bindings. Those bindings moved with him but never loosened, too responsive to be anything from the world that Derrick had thought he lived in until today, and he knew that there was no use trying to get out of them. It wasn’t like he was going to get away. Not today. Today, he was simply going to try to survive. There would be time later to work out this new world into which he’d stumbled—and when he did, he would also figure out exactly how to use it to his own advantage.
And when he did that, not only the bounty-hunter and the secretary would feel his rage—the shop girl and the vampire would regret what they’d done to him today.
PINS AND NEEDLES
(Nothing to say here. You know the score: uncharted territory)
* * *
There were always pins to find in the shop. Marli crawled about on the carpet most days to collect them, her eyes ranging to catch the silver glint that meant she had another one; she carefully poked each pin through her sleeve until she had a whole row of them, then trotted away to find a pincushion or a person willing to receive them. In Marli’s experience, pincushions were more willing but rather less amusing recipients of her pins, especially if she chose to present the pins in the same enthusiastic fashion, point forward.
Someone, at some stage, must have been far too grateful—or encouraging—when Marli found the first pin, and it had become a habit for her to find them even after the reactions ceased to be as exciting.
Mum and dad were usually busy around the shop floor at this time of day, but today they were in the sneaky little sunroom at the back of the house that felt different to the rest of the shop. Marli enjoyed being in there too, but lately she had nearly gotten lost behind the couch, and something had tried to sneak her out the window when it opened more than it should have. She had been less frightened than annoyed, but mum and dad had started keeping the door closed after that, and today there was a guest in there as well.
Guests, Marli knew, were to be left alone unless introduced; in the meantime, there were pins to be found. The pin collecting might not have been so interesting—and might not have kept Marli entertained for as long as it did—if it wasn’t for the friend who was visiting for the day.
There were a lot of friends who visited the shop, and some of them, like the knitting lady, who was here today, came back regularly. Sometimes there was the very short man who sounded angry but always pushed biscuits into her hand and counted pins with her in ways that she didn’t understand, and who seemed to make her pins multiply in ways that weren’t quite normal. There was a man in a wheelchair with hair that smelt of salt and brine when Marli climbed into his lap to put ribbon flowers in his brown curls, and there were always the tumble of boys that were really dogs when they wanted to be, and who never minded if she pulled their hair a bit too much when they played together.
