Between Kings, page 4
part #10 of The City Between Series Series
“Getting squeamish, are you?” I asked him. “You didn’t mind ripping out the golden git’s throat.”
“Yes, but I was angry,” he explained. “I do not like to eat garbage.”
That made me grin, loosening the knot of worry in my chest. “What, humans taste the best? How’s that for irony.”
“Everybody wants what they cannot have,” he muttered. “Of course human blood is more sweet.”
“Lucky I took a chunk out of Zero’s dad instead of you doing it, then,” I said. The reminder of Zero sobered me a little.
I knew he was taking care of the others—I had to trust he was taking care of them—but not being able to do anything about helping them myself was a lot harder than I’d bargained on. That discomfort kept boiling up unwelcome thoughts to the surface of my mind: unpleasant, unhappy thoughts that maybe I couldn’t trust Zero as thoroughly as I’d assured the others that I could. I pushed those thoughts away because if I was wrong, a lot more than any hope of ever being able to trust Zero had gone out the window: lives would have gone out the window. Lives I cared about—lives that people I cared about cared about.
“All right,” Daniel said, breaking out of his own thoughts at a surprisingly fitting time. The other lycanthropes must have been waiting for him to say something—decide something—because they all seemed to relax a little bit. “We’ll trust you for now—there’s nothing else I can do, anyway. Just give me something useful to do so that I can keep moving, all right?”
“Reckon you can help us scout out the rivulet,” I said. “Come out with JinYeong and me and show us what you know. It’s been a few years since I’ve been down there.”
“We’ll go first,” North said, her skirts sweeping with an impatient breeze. “We have the records the humans sent to us. We can bring them to the merman and ask for assistance—you would like us to look for a human name among them?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tuatu knows; he’s been looking for the same name. I want Marazul to check the human internet for the name as well, so make sure he knows to do that. There’s someone else who might be able to help, but I don’t want to go calling him unless I have to. I’ve got the feeling it’s a one-and-done kinda favour, and I don’t want to waste it.”
JinYeong threw a look at me as North wafted toward the door with Tuatu in her wake: it was questioning and slightly apprehensive.
“Don’t wear your best suit,” I warned him, and caught the faint expression of disgruntled resignation that crossed his face. “The rivulet isn’t the cleanest, and since it’s closed off these days, we’ll probably have to get in by the storm drains around Collins Street. It’s not raining right now so it should be pretty safe, but I don’t reckon it’ll be real clean.”
JinYeong muttered something about damp but didn’t otherwise complain. Daniel only nodded and the lycanthropes, as if they were all on the same inaudible and invisible wavelength, started stirring around the room.
“What about the old man?” asked JinYeong. “Will you leave him alone? I do not trust him.”
“I don’t trust him either, but I don’t reckon he’s gunna get out of what I did to him in a hurry. Maybe Les can—heck, where’s he gone now?”
I ducked my head into the kitchen to see if the old mad bloke had vanished in there, but was distracted by the buzz of my phone against my hip.
I pulled it out of my pocket and picked up the call to hear Detective Tuatu’s voice say, as if through a saucepan, “Ruth? North says to tell you there are—sorry, did you say brownies?”
There was a pause that sounded like it came through a saucepan, too, before I heard his voice again.
“North says to tell you there are brownies out here watching the house: she caught sight of them as we were leaving. I hope that’s useful to you.”
I glanced at JinYeong, who had begun muttering to himself, bright-eyed, then at Daniel, who just looked gloomy. “Yeah, I reckon that’s helpful,” I said. “I dunno why, but it looks like this lot does. Oi! You got your phone working again!”
“Not for long,” he said—or started to say, anyway. The call cut out before he could finish the sentence. I heard a brief shuffling noise, as if there were now a good few people in the saucepan, shoving each other, and then the dial tone.
“All right,” I said to JinYeong, who was loosening his tie. “North and Tuatu saw brownies watching our house, apparently. What do you know about brownies?”
“Brownies belong to the king,” Daniel said shortly. “A spy in every home, that sort of thing. Very good with cooking and cleaning and making bombs out of whatever they can scrounge from the kitchen and garden. Fantastic at listening at doors and sneaking tracker spells into your socks, and very good at knowing how to kill someone and clean up the scene like they were never there.”
“Heck,” I said, my eyes wide. “Thought brownies were meant to be helpful little home bodies.”
“Very helpful,” JinYeong said, stripping off his tie. “Verrry useful. I will not wear my tie; they will strangle me.”
“You reckon they’ll attack us if we go out?”
He shrugged. “Kurol su isseo. I prefer to be prepared. Perhaps they will just follow us.”
“They’re more likely to follow you in particular,” Daniel said to me. “Looks like the king wanted to keep up with what you were doing before he decided to go with the Challenge, and didn’t call off his dogs.”
“We’ll go out anyway,” I said to Daniel. “Me and JinYeong first: they can follow us if they want.”
JinYeong’s brow lifted. “That will make things difficult. Shall we lure them somewhere and kill them? If they discover what we are trying to do—”
“Nah,” I said, grinning. “We’re not going out to look for a name and somewhere to fight; we’re going out on a date.”
His other brow went up. “Now? We are going on a date now?”
“It’s a bit of a weird time to be dating,” protested Daniel, quicker to catch my meaning than JinYeong. “Won’t they be suspicious?”
“If there’s one thing I know about the bulk of behindkind, it’s that they don’t tend to think about human-kind emotions much. You reckon it’s going to occur to most behindkind that we’re worried about our friends, or do you reckon they think we’re just relieved that we’re out here and safe instead of in the Challenge with the others?”
“Good point,” said Daniel, after a brief moment of thought. “And they’re brownies, so they’ll be used to seeing humans doing human things.”
“What about vampires?”
“Reckon they’re used to vampires obsessing over humans,” he said. “It happens all the time: a vampire catches sight of a human they like and then spends the rest of their undead life stalking the human.”
“At least we do not pee on our girlfriends’ houses,” JinYeong said coldly.
“We don’t bite them either, blood-breath.”
JinYeong became faintly smugger. “You could not, even if you wanted to. You would turn your girlfriend into a dog too. I may enjoy biting if I wish, and—”
“We’re not going to discuss biting!” I said hastily. “We’re going to discuss brownies and how to make the best use of them following us. What do you lot reckon? Would they only follow me and JinYeong, or the whole lot of us?”
“Did they follow North and Tuatu?” asked Daniel, withdrawing an annoyed look from JinYeong’s still smug face. “That should tell us. Brownies are really good at improvising when it comes to focusing on or killing their target, but they’re usually blind to anything else.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll ask the detective and you lot can get ready to go out. If me and JinYeong can’t check out the rivulet, the lot of you are gunna have to.”
Daniel only nodded, but JinYeong’s gaze settled on me at once, eyes narrow. “You should get ready, too.”
I made a beeline for the stairs with my phone to my ear, but JinYeong, who could obviously hear that there was no sound on the other side, wasn’t fooled.
His eyes followed me through the bannisters as I went upstairs, and he said firmly, “It is a date.”
“Okay, but I’m not wearing makeup and I don’t have date clothes,” I called back.
“I have already bought them for you!”
Heck, he had, too. I’d had to prevent him from stealing them outright, and I would have preferred to take them straight back to the store after our job was over, but JinYeong would only shrug at me whenever I asked where the receipt was, and I’d finally given up. I still had the clothes hanging at the back of my wardrobe: a pair of dark brown leather trousers, a suede jacket lined with blue silk, and a simple cowl-necked shirt in yellow satin that had each cost more than all the rest of my clothes combined. They were too nice to wear, especially the jacket and shirt, so I never had worn them.
I wasn’t planning on wearing them today, either, but when I tried the leather pants on for the heck of it—they were leather and should stand up to at least as much as my jeans did, right?—they fit so well and felt so comfortingly indestructible that I tried on the satin shirt as well. That felt far less indestructible but looked much nicer than I’d expected it to look when I threw a cautious glance toward the mirror. I hesitated there in front of my reflection for a few minutes, and nearly took the whole lot off again. I didn’t have nice shoes, and even if I had had nice shoes, I wouldn’t have worn them: you can’t fight in high heels.
Well, maybe you can. I can’t. Like double-wielding, high heels are a skill that needs practise—and I had never had the opportunity to practise.
But when I pulled my battered boots on with the grim thought that they weren’t likely to do the outfit a lot of justice, the dark, fashionably-worn brown of the leather trousers blended right down into the battle-worn faded black of my boots, seamlessly matching.
I looked at myself doubtfully in the mirror, very aware of the elegance of the silk shirt that was tucked into the waist of my trousers, which were far more aligned with what I was used to wearing.
It looked good. It also looked perilous, as if a single cut with a blade anywhere around my midsection would see me dead in a moment. This was absolutely not the shirt to be wearing outside if I was preparing to fight someone.
On the other hand…
“Heck,” I muttered, for once in my life taking the time just to look at myself. If brownie-battering-chic wasn’t a thing, I was going to make it one, because the yellow silk suited me like I would never have expected it to do if I was the sort of person who could look at clothing and tell if it was going to suit or not.
Even if I wasn’t going to wear it out, it would be nice to show JinYeong how good his taste was. Maybe even to see how he liked it.
I tried to call Tuatu as I checked on Athelas on my way out—then called North instead when the call didn’t go through. She answered at once and I was able to comfort myself with the information that neither of them was being followed.
Looked like the brownies were waiting just for me and JinYeong.
Athelas was just as unmoving and unnaturally still as he had been earlier when I hung up on North and left the room. Still, when I got back downstairs it was a relief to see Chantelle sitting on the couch looking very human, while the rest of the lycanthropes were in their wolf forms.
“If the old tea-drinker comes down the stairs, I’m running for it,” she warned me.
“Good,” I said. “It’s no good trying to fight him, anyway. Are you staying alone?”
“That’s what the boss says,” she said, but she didn’t seem bothered.
The lycanthropes left as JinYeong was still fiddling with his top button—trying to decide whether or not to button it, by the looks. He caught sight of me in the mirror, then left his button alone to turn and look at me properly.
“Ah,” he said, the sound of it deep with satisfaction. “I knew that would be best.”
“It’s too nice to wear out,” I said, startled and very slightly breathless at that satisfaction.
I was already rocking back on my right foot, and I turned as I spoke, but JinYeong caught my hand and tugged me toward the door.
“No changing,” he said firmly. “We will go now, and we will date.”
“All right, but if I get stabbed because there isn’t enough protection in this, I’m gunna kick you in the shins.”
“I will not let anyone stab you,” he said, releasing my hand outside on the front patio. “And if it is ruined, I will buy more clothing.”
“Thanks a lot,” I grumbled below my breath, and we took to the streets.
We got to the end of the street before we saw the brownies. If I hadn’t been able to sense the clustering disturbance of Between they made, I wouldn’t have been able to tell they were there; the façade of school-children they were currently wearing was as dense as it was well done. I didn’t think it was a fae-type glamour, because I was pretty familiar with them by now, and that thought left me with the further, unpleasant one that there was probably about as much variation in spells and magic as there was in dialect. I had as yet still only experienced a very small selection of that variety.
“Can you see ’em?” I asked JinYeong, beneath my breath. “The sneaky little beggars are good at this.”
“Mm,” murmured JinYeong; an affirmative. “I smell them. There are many—perhaps twenty.”
“So long as we stay to public areas, we’ll be fine, right?”
“They like to do their work inside where it is quiet,” he said. “Shall we lose them in the crowd when we enter the mall?”
“Nah,” I said. “I don’t want them to know we’re onto them too soon—not until we really need to get away. Let ’em follow us and think we’re just dating. All we need to do today is make the brownies think we’re not up to anything much and maybe visit the library. We’ll head down to the rivulet if we get the chance.”
“What is at the library?”
“Old newspapers, for a start,” I said. “Stuff that isn’t on the computers. We can have a bit of a squiz at ’em and see if there’s anything there to help us out.”
“That is not a word,” said JinYeong in disfavour. He repeated it as though he was saying rotten egg: “Squiz.”
“We probably shouldn’t go Between right now, either,” I said gloomily, ignoring him. It would take longer to get into the heart of Hobart if we walked or took the bus—I’d gotten used to the ease of stepping Between and shortening distances, even if it did leave you more open to weird and non-human threats.
“We will take the bus,” JinYeong said grandly, and then refused to jog for the bus that was just pulling up at the stop thirty metres or so away.
Instead, he sauntered up, holding the bus driver’s eyes the whole time, and stepped aboard in a kingly fashion without so much as a thank you.
“Thanks,” I said hurriedly to the bus driver, but he didn’t seem to hear me.
I’m not sure he even asked the rowdy bundle of fake schoolkids if they had tickets—he certainly didn’t warn them that they should be in school, and that was out of character for most of the drivers along this route.
Luckily, the driver’s momentary vampire haze didn’t seem to make it hard for him to actually drive, because we were on our way again in a moment, juddering down toward the city centre and trying not to slip out of the vinyl seats with every bump. JinYeong, at least, seemed to be having difficulties with the seat—my leather trousers had far better grip, and I was at leisure to grin at him doing his best to sit primly in his seat while the bus bounced us around.
He looked far less kingly and more irritated by the time he slid out of his seat for the last time and stalked toward the front of the bus. I followed him, openly grinning, and we found ourselves between the Chinese restaurant and the bakery along Elizabeth Street, looking down toward the mall.
Behind us, the group of brownies tumbled off the bus, shoving each other and giving a good enough impression of schoolkids to make the Chinese man leaning through the restaurant window grin.
“Reckon we better keep moving,” I said quietly to JinYeong. There weren’t too many people on the street here, and I didn’t like the idea of brownies crowding around us as we walked down the road, given Daniel’s characterisation of them as innovative killers.
They didn’t crowd us, though; they just followed along behind, nice and natural, believably obnoxious without being unpleasant.
“I think they are going to follow us very closely,” JinYeong said.
“I reckon,” I said, my eyes on the mall, which was now just across the street. “What’ll they do if we go out of the mall, though? A bunch of schoolkids following two people around is going to be noticed, and I don’t reckon they want to be noticed.”
“They will follow—but perhaps not all of them.”
“Library first, then,” I said. “It doesn’t open until eleven though.”
“Very well,” he said, throwing a quick look around the mall. “Then what shall we do until then? What is first on a date?”
“I dunno,” I said, staring at him. “I thought you knew! I haven’t dated anyone before!”
“I have not dated either,” he said, putting his nose in the air.
“Yeah, but you’ve been out with women before, so—”
I stopped, because he was gazing at me in what looked like absolute perplexity.
“That was for eating,” he said. “All that was needed was a quiet place with not too much light.”
“Heck,” I said. “I should have done some research before we came out. Reckon I’m supposed to be holding your hand, for starters—that’s a normal thing, right?”
I slid my hand into his as I said it, entwining our fingers. At first cool and loose, his hand tightened around mine and grew warm between one breath and the next.
“I like this,” JinYeong said. “We will walk until we know what to do. I think there are no rules.”
“All right,” I said. “Well, that means we can do what we want, right?”
JinYeong considered it, then nodded precisely. “I wish to kiss you beneath the trees over there.”
“Pretty sure that’s the sort of thing that’ll get lots of people looking at us, and not just brownies,” I said, trying to be cooler than I felt. “We’ll get a drink somewhere and walk in the sunshine or something.”
