WET BEHIND THE EARS

  THE WORLDS BEHIND

  BOOK 3

  W.R. GINGELL

  CONTENTS

  1. Blip in the Code

  2. Salt in the Wound

  3. Hitch in the Gallop

  4. Fly in the Ointment

  5. Wheels within Wheels

  6. Tracks in the Sand

  7. One in the Hand

  8. Two in the Bush

  9. The Sound of Silence

  10. Scales in the Eyes

  11. Break in the Clouds

  12. Drop in the Ocean

  13. Balboa in the Sunroom

  Thank You

  BLIP IN THE CODE

  Something black and tarry oozed under Athelas’ door. He turned a page and glanced at the intrusion over the top of his book; one leg that was crossed over the other stirred gently in a measured foot-tap. The blackness beneath the door coalesced from the edges of the doorframe and into a cohesive bulge that grew outward and upward, oiliness slick across the viscous liquidity of it. Quivering and undulating, it grew until it might almost have been a figure, with globby, asymmetrical legs and tapering whips for arms. Twin lumps in the protuberance that seemed to be its head grew until they were the size of golf-balls, then rolled in on themselves as a harder shell slid down and then up again, revealing two misshapen irises.

  Those irises, unchancy and unpleasant, stared at Athelas.

  Athelas placed his book facedown over the knee of his crossed leg and once more regarded the creature of Between. “If you thought to find me asleep at this time of day, you are regrettably misinformed,” he told it placidly. Even if he had not been bombarded by a series of increasingly frantic text messages from the elder Peregrine about a certain gumiho housemate’s actions over the course of the night, Athelas, like any self-respecting fae, required only an hour or two of sleep each night. “If you wish to fight me, you will have to do so while both my eyes are open.”

  Fae, and of far greater years than the monstrosity that was at present blinking bulbous eyes at him, Athelas required very little sleep; so long as he could recharge his energy beside some form of moving water at least once every few months, he would continue to subsist very comfortably on a few hours of sleep every night. The late night and early morning hours, in fact, were favoured waking hours: during that time, Athelas could read without likelihood of interruption.

  Had been able to do so until now, at any rate.

  The creature seemed to think about that and find the argument compelling; it looked around the room and made a gliding, slithering sort of movement toward Athelas’ wardrobe instead.

  “Absolutely not,” Athelas said coldly. Texts, he could and would ignore. He did not wish to sit mumchance while a creature of darkness meddled with the subtle threads of magic within his clothing.

  Rather sulkily, the shifting mass of Between drew one of its whiplike arms back to itself and made a wobbling foray toward the bed.

  “Even less than I want you in my wardrobe, do I want you in my bed,” Athelas told it.

  The Between creature made an unpleasant, bubbling sort of noise that in other circumstances would have alerted Athelas to the fact that he had pierced the lungs of his enemy; then it revolved slowly in the centre of the room as if asking what, in that case, it was permitted to do.

  “Out,” said Athelas, rising to his feet and laying his book in the seat of his chair. “Or I will dispose of you myself. I assure you that I am neither as kind-hearted nor as ignorant as the human child over whom you’ve no doubt been hanging half the night.”

  The Between creature backed up as if alarmed and sucked itself back under the door in a protracted slurp of darkness, leaving behind its eyes to dissolve into their original goo before oozing after the bulk of it.

  Athelas gazed at the unpleasant trail of oily blackness it had left behind it and said, “I really am not a night nurse, and I refuse to perform the duties of one.”

  Still, he was bound to Harrow by a tenuous thread of contract, and even if helping the child with his night terrors wasn’t something Athelas had committed himself to, doing the boy good for his own reasons was; Camellia would undoubtedly look more kindly on him while he was doing good to her protégé.

  The fact that Camellia was no doubt in her own rooms and asleep was, of course, a crimp in that otherwise perfect plan.

  Athelas sighed, then rose and followed the dark stain that the Between creature had left. It trailed out the door and down the hallway toward the third bedroom at the far end. He didn’t need to see the staining to be able to follow the creature of Behind, of course; he had known exactly where it would go before he left his room. Still, he walked fastidiously along the side of the trail in his slippered feet, unwilling either to soil his soles or grind the muck into Camellia’s carpets.

  Harrow’s door was not quite shut; Athelas pushed it silently open and, in the stirring of the early morning air, saw a darkness hovering over the head of the bed that had been pushed up against the wall beneath the window.

  Eyes that glowed a deep, slowly-revolving amber fixed on the boy, and the tapering matte-black fingers that dug into Harrow’s pillow caused it to raise in plumped, confined sections around them.

  “Dear me,” Athelas said to himself.

  This was a different figment altogether. Where the first had gone, he had no idea—the second was more than he had expected to find in a small child’s bedroom, and it was not outside the bounds of possibility that it could have eaten the first.

  The creature looked at him over the child’s cheek as it said softly into the small ear that peeked through too-long black hair, “Look at you: you’ve already infected them. One touch of that sordid little shrivel you call your soul, and it desiccates like razor blades to infiltrate them. You’ll bleed them out from the inside and make them vomit blood.”

  “Very edifying,” said Athelas pleasantly, strolling across the room to the opposite side of the bed and laying a hand on Harrow’s thin, shivering shoulder. “But I have both vomited blood and torn my insides apart a great many times; it’s really very survivable after some practise.”

  The amber eyes roamed over him, and Athelas felt their notice deep within his bones—a prickling of attempted terror through his entire skeleton. It felt as though the creature was summing him up, and perhaps it was.

  After a few moments, the toothy mouth said in a deep voice, “Your soul is as black as coal.”

  “Oh, at least!” agreed Athelas. “And yet, I’m more than a match for something like you, I think you’ll find.”

  It laughed at him. “If you save the human boy from me, who will save him from you?”

  “I’ve no doubt that my very estimable housekeeper is intending to perform that function,” Athelas told it amiably. “After all, what will it matter to you? You’ll be gone before any such problem arises.”

  The amber gaze grew cold and angry, but the creature didn’t again reply. Instead, it turned eyes full of malice onto Harrow and widened its toothy mouth into what was almost a grin. Its pointed chin dipped closer to his sleeping face, and as if the creature had somehow called to a sleeping part of him that he recognised, Harrow’s eyes opened, glistening black in the darkness. Athelas saw reflected in them the vast, curving mouth full of teeth; he saw the deep breath in that Harrow took, and the utter lack of expression in his face.

  Harrow, in fact, knew that his night had become extremely unpleasant, and he was now preparing himself to accept all of that unpleasantness without hope of any succour. That was understandable to Athelas—every dark, wild, hopeless facet of it. What was less understandable was the fact that as Athelas watched, the ceiling above the bed began to churn and roil with black shadows that grew more substance and depth the longer they churned. Where Harrow’s thin face was expressionless and still, shadows passing across it like clouds, that area of ceiling bubbled and writhed and bulged toward the creature that loomed over him.

  Was that, perhaps, wondered Athelas, where the first creature had betaken itself? He also wondered, in that moment of time, if it was possible that he had been wrong about what that particular emanation of Behind and Between was. Regardless of right or wrong, however, there was no chance that the mass of thoughts and possibilities in the ceiling would ever be strong enough to detach itself and fight for the prize in the bed—and the creature below knew it. It laughed, its eyes meeting Athelas’ with a sense of sharing contemptuous amusement—one monster to another.

  It stretched out a surprisingly graceful hand above Harrow’s watching, waiting eyes, and lowered its tapering pointer finger toward the tip of the child’s nose.

  “I think not,” said Athelas coolly, and he reached across the bed to grasp the wrist before that finger could touch Harrow’s nose.

  He saw the smallest twitch of Harrow’s fingers on the side closest to him, and the emptiness of the child’s eyes seemed to focus into something more like sight for the barest instant. That was interesting, but there were other things that Athelas needed to turn his mind to. He felt the brightening tingle of danger and challenge that trickled up his arm and into his blood as his mind processed the solidness of the wrist he had grasped. Nightmares shouldn’t have any kind of physical quality to them, but the nightmares of human children didn’t often contain elements of Between, either—and Athelas had the feeling that Harrow had been having such dreams for so long that he was as intimately acquain
ted with all of the physical elements that might come along with such a form.

  It was a mistake to be so well acquainted with the possibilities of nightmares that you gave them form with the force of that knowledge. It was a mistake that often couldn’t be helped, but it was mistake nevertheless—one with which he was closely acquainted from several different positions. These days, of course, Athelas had nothing to fear from a nightmare form of some other creature.

  Athelas had his own nightmare form.

  He allowed the trickling of Between that ran through the house to accumulate and pool at his feet until it began to climb upward, prickling along his legs and through his blood. Soon, he was more shadow than substance, and the nightmare creature across from him, its wrist still gripped in his fingers, grew somehow more reachable. Athelas had passed Between, and now they were on the same plane, with access to the same weapons. Harrow, by contrast, became slightly cloudier, but Athelas saw himself and the creature reflected in Harrow’s eyes still, a continuum of shadow and sticky blackness with no division to it.

  The boy’s hand, which had twitched as though it might have tried to reach for him, stilled again, leaving Athelas burgeoning with shadows and menace, and wholly perplexed.

  Harrow had once fought back—he had once grasped at life—and for a single instant it had seemed as though he would do so again. Why wasn’t he doing so now when he must be able to see that Athelas was at least equal if not greater in strength than the nightmare that plagued him? Harrow was able, it seemed, to call for help—he was once more, it would also seem, unwilling to do so.

  Athelas left the pursuance of such thoughts for later and, tightening his hold on the nightmare creature, which had not yet seen reason to attempt to resist him, drew in from the house around him more and more magic from the strands of Between that hummed in the air. He felt the strength and vitality of them working through his already magic-laced body and sensed something not quite Between. Something else was there in the vibrations of the house—something silky and soft and very nearly indistinguishable from the Between threads that made up the way the house interacted with the world.

  Something that was powerful and available and coursed through him like a river when he called to it, as enlivening and energising as a real river would have been to him and either painful or delightful, he wasn’t sure which.

  The Between creature snarled in pain and, for the first time, attempted to pull itself away. Athelas didn’t allow it to do so. Instead, he sent the same river of Between and Something Else flowing on and over the creature, drowning it in an excess of the material from which it originated.

  And now, the creature screamed. Screamed as though it was drowning and burning all at once, and Athelas felt, for the few eternities that it took for the creature to either drown or burn, that he also burned. Finally, he released the Between creature, and it sank into a quagmire of molten darkness, seeping through the room and infecting the carpet and the walls while Athelas swayed on his feet with the remnants of the power he had taken in, himself suspended in fire or silk.

  Which was it? he wondered—pain or pleasure?—and in the moment, it didn’t seem to matter whether it was silk or fire that caressed him. He took in a deep breath and tried to release the mingled Between and Something Else that he had taken in, and although it allowed itself to be released, filaments of it clung, left behind as the bulk drained away.

  The muffled sound of the door being closed barely made a dent in the heaviness of the room, deadened as it was with shadow.

  “Close your eyes, Harrow,” said Camellia’s voice, low and commanding, a moment before Athelas was able to grasp the fact that she was there.

  Athelas became aware of the room at its most human level once again, Harrow stiff and unmoving in bed while shadows still walked on unchancy feet, and found himself smiling. The scent of bergamot filled the air, and the darkness at the edges of the room began to abate, curling away from it. Harrow seemed to loosen and relax. His eyes closed once again, and for a few heavy, perfumed moments, the sound of his deepening breath was the only noise in the room.

  Then Camellia said softly, “That should do it. He won’t wake up now.”

  Athelas felt the quiet, penetrating power of bergamot sinking into the shadows that surrounded him, too, and bit back a gasp. He could not afford to be stripped of his defences—particularly not by Camellia, before whom he had already been stripped of far too much, far too often. Before her at least, he needed to maintain a smooth and unblemished front.

  “Desist, I beg you,” he said, with the last fragments of mockery that remained to him. “Remember that we are on the same side—and that I will require some defence to be left to me if I’m to look after the boy.”

  “It can be hard to differentiate you from the shadows, at times,” said Camellia, and it sounded almost like an apology—a travesty that Athelas might have bestirred himself to object to, if only for the goodwill it might buy him, if he had not at that moment been so very raw and exposed.

  The bergamot faded, as did the stinging, acid burn of it at his soul. It struck him that the sensation was not dissimilar to the previous burn of Something Else that he had drawn on from the house itself.

  Athelas laughed softly, rather breathlessly and said, “Dear me! How very interesting!”

  “Harrow needs to sleep,” Camellia said softly, a command that was as deceptively soft as the lingering elements of bergamot that still wafted in the air.

  Athelas managed to catch his breath and moved back across the room softly, opening the door for Camellia and waiting until she passed ahead of him and back out into pale light of the hallway beyond. He had never seen Camellia above stairs before, and although her relationship with Harrow made it absolutely understandable that she should have so ventured now, Athelas still found himself taken aback.

  Camellia’s bounds were something that he had been endeavouring to understand for quite some time now, and the fact that he still had no greater grasp on them than he had had when he first met her grated on him.

  “Do you really think it wise to enter the boy’s room unannounced?” he asked her, as he shut the door quietly behind them both.

  “Because I might find another one of those toothy beasts? Or because I might find you in there?”

  “Either of those reasons will do for now. I fancy you’re not used to dealing with nightmares as potent as the child appears to suffer.”

  “I haven’t had much experience with any kind of nightmares,” Camellia said in a low voice, settling on the balustrade that overlooked the stairs. “I don’t dream.”

  She was a warm, bold patch of plum wool in various shades today, with huge silver earrings that dangled nearly to her purple shoulders and glowed softly in the gentle light of early morning that wafted through the windows across the hall. Her woollen trousers—baji from the closest market, Athelas was quite sure; the type he had often seen Korean grandmothers wearing—pulled away slightly from her ankles as she sat and disclosed a silver anklet. Looking at her—her warmth, her brightness, her so-extremely-presentness—Athelas found it hard to believe that Camellia had had any kind of experience with nightmares at all.

  And yet, the scent of bergamot still clung to him, and he had been disastrously close to undoing for those few moments that they had shared the work of removing the remnant of nightmares from the boy’s room.

  “Then perhaps you might leave this part of the boy’s education to me?” he suggested.

  Camellia regarded him with thoughtful brown eyes for quite some time before she asked unexpectedly, “Do you think you’re going about this the right way?”

  Athelas felt his brows rise, and a tickle of amusement curled up through his throat. “I did, after all, banish the beast,” he remarked. “Even if you assisted with removal of the pieces it left behind.”

  She nodded slowly, as if considering that point against the sum of whatever other arguments she had—and that amused him faintly, too. There were no other points to consider: he had met the beast, he had destroyed it, and he was capable of teaching Harrow how to destroy it. Whether or not the boy was capable of learning as much was another matter; Athelas’ prowess, however, should not be in question.