BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  THE WORLDS BEHIND

  BOOK 2

  W.R. GINGELL

  Copyright © 2023 by W.R. Gingell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover art by Natasha Snow Designs

  CONTENTS

  1. Poison in the System

  2. Sunlight in the Garden

  3. Fox on the Defensive

  4. Conversation in the Kitchen

  5. Finger in the Pie

  6. Perfume on the Breeze

  7. Fish in a Bowl

  8. Trouble in Paradise

  9. Fox in the Henhouse

  10. Boy in the Halls

  11. Light in the Dark

  12. Blood on the Hands

  13. Steam in the Sunroom

  What’s Next?

  POISON IN THE SYSTEM

  There was no one in the house when YeoWoo returned that morning. That was a vast improvement over yesterday, when the entirety of the two-storey house had somehow been filled with the curious combination of a small, crushed human boy, a very angry housekeeper who smiled through her anger in a worrisome sort of way, and a very nearly dead and far too twisty fae.

  The crushed human boy she could do nothing about—wanted to do nothing about. He was a problem YeoWoo wasn’t equipped to fix; she didn’t have the time to fix him, even if she had had the ability. No, far better to leave him to Camellia, whose understated anger was another thing YeoWoo couldn’t—and didn’t particularly want—to fix.

  When it came to the dying fae, she really could do something. The matter of whether or not it should be done was another thing entirely, and YeoWoo had very nearly left Athelas to die. She wasn’t inclined to interfere in affairs that had nothing to do with her, and in this case, she had very strong reasons for wishing ill on the particular fae.

  Athelas didn’t have the same scruples. He had, in fact, been so far involved in the current crushed state of the human boy, Harrow, that YeoWoo was inclined to think that he would probably be better off dead and incapable of harming anyone else. To let him die, however, would be to get rid of a weapon so very useful to her exactly when she had reason to think that she might find him the most useful. While in the commission of solving the same case that Athelas had so adroitly twisted to further his own interests, YeoWoo had secured a link to tracking down the gumiho she had been seeking for the last few decades. She had already begun making plans for exploiting that link to its best potential.

  YeoWoo, in short, needed Athelas. She had needed him for a very different reason at their first meeting, and she knew exactly why he had needed her then. They had agreed to a partnership of sorts; and now that they had, YeoWoo had every intention of fully using the fae for all he was worth—which, as far as she was concerned, wasn’t much when one considered him in a moral sense. On the other hand, it was partially Athelas’ flaws as a person that made him so useful to her, and YeoWoo had every intention of using him in exactly the way she would have used a poisoned weapon: warily, suspiciously, and fully aware that it could kill her as easily as it could kill her enemy.

  YeoWoo found herself wiping her hands distastefully down the front of her long, silk jeogori, as if she really could feel something lingering on her fingers. She grimaced. She had saved Athelas, of course—it was no use throwing away something that would assist her so greatly—but she couldn’t help feeling that the act of saving him was something that clung to her unpleasantly.

  It didn’t help that Athelas had run rings around her while planning his little play for the eyes of Lord Sero and the Pet. YeoWoo might have been able to overlook some dubious things in the right circumstances, but she hadn’t been given the chance to do so. Athelas had completely bypassed her, made his own plans, and put them into action while throwing into jeopardy the investigation that concerned her so much.

  Not only was he a waste of breath who would use anyone and anything for his own personal ends, he had had the effrontery to imperil her. He had shown not only that he considered Harrow expendable, but that he considered her expendable. YeoWoo found the second of these more personally offensive, but since Harrow was part of her household and under her protection, the first was enough to earn her ire.

  Never mind, YeoWoo thought to herself. It was a useful reminder not to trust Athelas’ blandishments in any circumstances whatsoever, no matter how often they fought together while ostensibly working toward the same goals. YeoWoo didn’t particularly feel like being caught off guard when Athelas decided he was no longer on her side and joined someone else who was more useful to him. At least for now, she still had something over him that should keep him in line—she knew that Athelas was the Steward, a murderer on the run with a bounty on his head, who wished to keep his presence in Seoul a secret.

  Of Lord Sero, who had also become privy to Athelas’ presence in Seoul—if he hadn’t already been well aware—YeoWoo was not afraid. She was quite certain that Lord Sero had no need for any kind of bounty, and that he would far rather arrest Athelas personally than have him taken in by anyone else. YeoWoo still had all the leverage she needed to make Athelas move—so long as she kept him out of Lord Sero’s hands.

  YeoWoo strolled through to the kitchen to see what there was in the fridge that might be turned into a quick meal before she left the house again. No one met her along the way, and no one was in the kitchen either; the lower half of the house seemed entirely empty. This morning was, in fact, blessedly quiet. Athelas must have decided that discretion was the better part of valour presently, because he had left the house before YeoWoo rose. Or perhaps he was dead in his room; YeoWoo wasn’t sure. Camellia was nowhere in evidence—though YeoWoo had come to realise that this didn’t mean she wasn’t in the house; Camellia was absurdly hard to smell, for a human—and that meant that Harrow wasn’t curled up in a corner somewhere, dampening the atmosphere. YeoWoo wasn’t against humans getting the help they needed, but she was against them doing so in her house. It left her responsible for them.

  She neither harmed humans or permitted them to be harmed in her presence, but neither did she roam the streets as an avenger of humankind, either. If she had done so, Athelas would have been absent from the house for a completely different reason.

  He had, thought YeoWoo, smiling maliciously as she poured herself coffee from the percolator, very nearly been so due to the ministrations of Camellia, who turned out to be as proficient with poisons as a very good cook ought to be, while still surprising her behindkind cohabitors with that fact. While she hadn’t expected a proficiency in poisons to be one of Camellia’s skills, YeoWoo felt that she ought to have done so. She couldn’t help feeling that Athelas in particular should have expected something of the sort; it was probably the only thing the sneaky old twister hadn’t expected, and that gave YeoWoo another glimmer of malicious amusement.

  She settled at the kitchen counter with her coffee and two of the lemon and earl grey scones that were somehow always aplenty in the glass jar beside the percolator, and sank into a reverie to consider her morning’s work. It hadn’t been particularly successful, and that both worried and irritated YeoWoo. It should have been easy to get information from her lead now that she wasn’t under the threat of arrest by two of the enforcers’ finest, but it hadn’t been. She had gone to see gumiho elder Peregrine first; he knew something of the gumiho who had killed her family, and he had given what was very nearly a promise that he would speak to her once she was no longer under suspicion of murder.

  After decades of searching for the last perpetrator still living, YeoWoo had homed in on that single thread of hope with laser precision. The current remaining gumiho elders, both dorai and Seoulite, professed to know nothing—and had done so for decades. Peregrine was the first lead she had had in a very great deal of time. Anyone old enough to have been an elder when YeoWoo was turned, however—and therefore involved in the death of most of her family—was likely to be extremely powerful by now. While YeoWoo was hot-blooded enough to need revenge, she was also cold-blooded enough to make sure she got her revenge instead of dying in the commission of it. And it seemed to her that Athelas was just dangerous enough to give her the edge she needed to succeed.

  Unfortunately, Peregrine had been very obviously Not At Home earlier that morning. The shoe shop that served as a front for his house had been closed, its owner nowhere in sight despite the fact that the other shops were open and boasted an intermittent stream of customers in and out. YeoWoo tried to slip through the glassy side of the shop that was shadowed and deep with reflections that weren’t evidence of the scene behind her, but was repulsed.

  Peregrine didn’t choose for anyone to enter, whether by dint of Between or the usual open door, it would seem. YeoWoo would have simply thought it bad timing and waited for him to return, lingering around the outside of the shop and glaring imperiously at anyone who crowded her on the already busy street, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she caught sight of a ripple above her in the almost reflectively yellow-and-black paint in the pylons that held up the subway, and realised that someone had just effectively peeped out of what was the equivalent of a window to see if she was still there.

  Hot with indignation, YeoWoo had
realised that she was being ignored. Peregrine was, obviously, prepared to wait her out—though why that was, she didn’t know. In the first heat of her annoyance, YeoWoo nearly threw caution to the winds and sank into her gumiho self to see if that would be enough to break through whatever protection Peregrine had laid on the shopfront, but it occurred to her just in time that it would only draw the kind of attention she couldn’t afford to draw in her circumstances.

  For whatever reason, Peregrine had decided that he didn’t want to talk to her today. Perhaps it was the same reason that she had originally supposed of him—he disapproved of her. Though if he truly did, YeoWoo was inclined to think that he wouldn’t have tried to warn her off Athelas, as he undoubtedly had done. He wouldn’t have given her hope that he would answer her questions, either.

  No, there was something going on, and whatever it was, it was more important to Peregrine than answering her questions was. She would have to find some reason to make him talk to her.

  And so YeoWoo had come back home, where she sat gloomily eating scones and drinking coffee as she thought her thoughts. The reflection that Peregrine was probably about as one-track minded as Athelas and nearly as ruthless in his pursuance of his ends, was only ameliorated by the fact that Peregrine at least seemed to have some kind of predictability to him—some kind of honour. Athelas, on the other hand…

  YeoWoo found that her thoughts had wandered away from her morning’s work, and irritatedly allowed it. There was nothing more she could learn from going over the events of the morning other than the fact that she would have to find some sort of leverage to use against Peregrine. That was another irritation, because she had a small suspicion that Athelas might have the key to that, as well.

  “How delightfully amusing,” he had said when she found him at the table in the sunroom yesterday evening, slowly and very nearly surely dying. He could barely whisper, but he’d made the effort, and the mockery on his face very nearly made her leave him there without helping. YeoWoo wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t spoken so with that very idea in mind. “You’ll save me, will you?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” YeoWoo said shortly. “What happened?”

  “Ask…our delightful…housekeeper.”

  YeoWoo took a couple of swift steps across the room and leaned out into the hallway to call into the next room, “Did you poison him?”

  “Yes,” said Camellia’s voice from within the kitchen.

  “What did you poison him with?”

  Camellia didn’t answer her directly; she simply said, “He’ll recover more quickly if you give him some of the mint growing on the windowsill. Two or three leaves should do the trick.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “He’ll be sick for three days and perhaps die.”

  YeoWoo jerked herself back into the sunroom, muttering imprecations. Why couldn’t Camellia have done this herself? If she didn’t mean to kill Athelas properly, why not make sure she looked after him right to the end? Why make YeoWoo do it?

  As she stripped mint leaves from the plant growing in its little red pot on the windowsill, she wondered if Camellia had hoped that someone else would be there to leave Athelas to die so that she wasn’t solely responsible for it. She knew exactly why Camellia was so angry; it was possible that she had expected YeoWoo to leave Athelas to die as well.

  YeoWoo pushed the thought impatiently away from her and crushed the leaves in her palm, rolling them between her hands until they were a small, damp green pill that would be easily pushed into Athelas’ mouth, and as easily swallowed.

  She thought he would refuse the dose at first—perhaps that was what he had intended all along—but YeoWoo wasn’t minded to let him refuse. As he moved his head away, she shoved the leaves into his mouth and said, “Eat them,” cuffing the back of his head as she might have done to one of the newer gumiho.

  Athelas very slightly choked, and in choking swallowed the pill, whether or not he meant to. YeoWoo wished it was something far more unpleasant than mint, but since there was very little she could do about that, she merely allowed herself the fun of chivvying him to his feet and dragging him off to his bed—where he could either die by himself or live unpleasantly for the next couple of days.

  She let him drop into bed without so much as helping him out of his shoes or his jacket, too. And Athelas, with the ghost of a laugh, sank without resisting into his pillows, his brown curls untidy against the silk as they very rarely were in day-to-day life.

  “I really do wonder,” he said, in a voice nearly as ghostly as his laugh, “exactly who moved that body.”

  YeoWoo had stood staring down at him for several minutes, trying to figure out exactly what he meant by it. At last she had muttered to herself, “It was that stupid HimChan, of course. He was trying to blame it on me, after all.”

  That answer had satisfied her only for as long as it took her to remember that HimChan wasn’t the cleverest of murderers—he had, after all, walked the streets with a bloody jar of soft human parts blended into the mockery of a smoothie. He had also been under the impression that his beloved’s declarations that she didn’t want to be turned gumiho had been maidenly coyness. He was someone who might have thought it was a good idea to frame someone, but he probably wouldn’t have had the brains to think of her particularly, unless he had done it on the spur of the moment, seeing her move the body.

  That was possible.

  But there was also Athelas and his mocking remark.

  There was no reason to think that Athelas knew anything more about the matter than a vague suspicion he had formed for whatever reason. The irritation of it was that he had made the effort through the fumes of whatever poison was clouding his mind, to say exactly what he had said to her. YeoWoo felt very much as though she were being prodded, and she didn’t particularly like being prodded at the best of times. In this particular case, she liked even less the idea that Athelas was the one doing the prodding, since she had no idea in which direction he wished her to be moving.

  That irritation now sent her out of the house again, unable to sit quietly sipping at her cup of coffee for the remainder of the morning. She would see if she could find out for sure whether or not HimChan had actually moved the body back to the scene of the murder.

  YeoWoo went first to see Lord Sero. Inspector Gu reluctantly gave her the enforcer’s address when she called him, but he didn’t seem to like the fact that she wouldn’t tell him why she wanted to see the other enforcer. YeoWoo had no intention of clouding the issue when it came to a murder she had only narrowly avoided being charged with, especially to the officers who had investigated the murder. Lord Sero was an unconnected party, and far safer to ask.

  On the other hand, since he was unconnected, YeoWoo wasn’t sure if Lord Sero would see her or not. She still wasn’t sure by the time she found herself midway between Heukseok and Sangdo, on the northeast side of the road and sheltered by the sharp elevation of that road, staring up at a red-brick and smooth-cornered house of three stories that looked as though it was wearing a smooth, red hat. It was a house that had probably sprung up in the nineties, given its construction and shape, and the buildings around were of a similar age: square, wide, and built to house families between three or four floors.

  It was a pleasant surprise to find that unlike Peregrine’s house, the way to Lord Sero’s domicile wasn’t barred and locked to her—though someone did put their head out of the window above as she pressed the bell at the door.

  “Hello!” that person yelled. It was the goth girl with ink-black hair and paper-white skin, who had a cold, dense smell of death lingering about her. “You’re the kitsune, aren’t you?”

  YeoWoo stared up at her. There should be more than one set of people living in a building this big, and none of those people should be hanging out of windows to pollute the air with their voices.

  “I’m gumiho,” she said. “What are you? You smell of death.”