For a boy who was dressed in old, pilling, black clothes that had faded almost to dark grey, Harrow certainly had a family who seemed to be well enough off. Wherever the money went, it certainly wasn’t toward making sure Harrow was properly clothed—or properly fed, Athelas was quite sure. Quite a great deal of it had gone to handbags, overcoats, jewellery, and shoes, however; and a very great deal of it must have also gone into that knife.

  The fact that so many of those expensive items still remained in the house was its own sort of information. The house had been turned over, but he didn’t see any blood. If Athelas had had to guess at this early point, he would have said that rather than a sudden attack, he was looking at a sudden flight. Somewhere at the back of his mind was the pleasing thought that he would be able to twit YeoWoo with this particular faux pas: even if sudden flight turned out not to be the case, the most likely explanation at this point was that the family had feared YeoWoo and her possible retribution enough to take Harrow and flee the area to somewhere they could do as they wished without further interference.

  They wouldn’t be the first family to run from the consequences of their own actions when someone a bit too powerful took interest in their scapegoat. They also wouldn’t be the first family to have dabbled too deeply when it came to the world Behind, and to have had to make a run for it. As far as Athelas was aware, there were also other considerations that were more human and lucre-touched than the average behindkind troubles. Gambling, though not legal for Korean citizens, was still legal for foreigners in Korea, and that sort of too-deep dabbling could cause trouble of a humankind if not swiftly attended to.

  At the very least, Athelas thought to himself as he made one last round of the house before leaving, tonight would be very amusing for him. Not only would he have the gratifying news that Harrow was likely not dead to relay to Camellia, he would have the likewise gratifying news that Harrow had disappeared with his entire family to impart to YeoWoo. He was just malicious enough to think that he would enjoy seeing how she took it.

  As he returned to the family space that acted as a lounge room, passing the couch, Athelas trod on a pile that went crack instead of giving beneath his foot. He stopped on a whim and prodded at the pile with the toe of his shoe as he had done earlier at the touch of iron. This time he found nothing so unpleasant as an etched iron blade for dispatching fae; within this particular pile of fripperies was a mobile phone.

  Athelas stooped and caught it up. It was small, foldable, and had a crack in the plastic casing that surrounded the small, single camera. He could have been the one to cause that, but he rather thought it had already been there: it was ingrained with grime already, and when he turned the phone over, there was another crack there—fresher, bigger, and cleaner.

  This was not an expensive phone; nor was it a recent model. Athelas was by no means an extensive user of human technology, but he had a smooth, sleek smartphone that was not only several models, but at least fifteen years further along, than this one.

  “Dear me,” he said lightly. It would seem that his conversation with Camellia later on would be less felicitous than he had hoped for: this was certainly Harrow’s phone.

  The boy would have disappeared with his family in any of the circumstances that Athelas had previously considered—if so, however, he would have done so with his phone on him, as every other member of the family appeared to have done. The fact that he had not done so was both worrisome and problematic.

  Athelas slipped the phone into his breast pocket and patted it once. He would at least bring the phone to Camellia; it was sure to be worth creating the idea in her that that at least, he was investigating properly. She would see that he was investigating thoroughly, and well—with all of his faculties, in fact.

  He was still smiling faintly at that thought when he stepped back into the hall.

  Then he smelt it.

  The faint, clinging scent of jasmine and lilies, with a hint of musk.

  It trickled through the air and down the hall, flowing around the doorjamb and into the hall from the outside door that he had unaccountably left open the slightest crack, with a dark smudge in evidence two thirds of the way up the frame.

  Athelas’ blades slicked down into his hands while he was still staring fixedly at the slightly-open front door, and he strode lightly toward it with the sweat cold on his brow, his swords slicing through air thick with the scent of flowers.

  The old lord was dead. He couldn’t be here. But Athelas knew that scent—he would never forget it. The late Lord Sero, father of the current Lord Sero, had had a perfumed walk that few could rival, and Athelas had lived within the confines of that scented embrace for far longer than he liked now to think.

  The late Lord Sero was now, in the vernacular of a certain someone, pushing up daisies; but prior to this condition, he had spread spring wherever he walked, flowers leaping up ahead of him and in his wake. Jasmine, musk, and lilies—a peculiar combination that had been as unpleasantly clinging as it was recognisable, from the first moment he had met Lord Sero. The day he had been sold.

  Athelas approached the door in the same silent, predatory stride, and tapped it aside with a jolt of magic down the length of his left blade that sent the door sailing open to hit lightly against the outer wall.

  Open space danced in his sight: an empty doorframe, an overgrown garden path winding between trees and toward the gate, and a small garden empty of anything but grass, paving stones, and trees. Athelas trod lightly over the threshold and into the garden, but even the scent was gone by then, dissipating between the trees. He sent a keen look around the place regardless, then stepped back inside and found that there remained no trace of the scent inside, either.

  His eyes narrow and hard, Athelas stalked from one end of the hall to the other, looking at everything anew. His mind had recognised something he hadn’t, from which had sprung the scent of captivity and death. From the far end of the house, he turned and cast his eyes over the whole once more. From here, freshly suspicious, he could see two points of interest. One, that caught his eye immediately through the sliver of living room that he could see, was the fact that the lounge in the living room, though messy, wasn’t the right kind of messy. The seat-pillows were beside it, and the bundle of mess that was caught around them wasn’t clothing or half-packed bag—it was a blanket.

  So that was where Harrow had slept, was it? The phone hadn’t been far away, hidden beneath another mass of someone else’s things.

  The second thing Athelas checked was that something shadowy lingering on the side of the door frame. For the last time, he crossed the hall and approached the door, his knives still out, and bent slightly to observe the mark: four light, long bruises against the doorframe, parallel and evenly spaced. Athelas looked around at the outside of the door frame and saw the fifth shadowy bruise that he had expected. Partly oil and partly Between, those faint shades were the mark of a slender hand reaching out in a single—and probably wholly unexpected—act of resistance.

  Athelas put away his knives. There was nothing more to be done here—no danger remaining. Someone had come and taken Harrow, and his family had packed up and left in the aftermath of the same; if not a return of some other danger, they were no doubt expecting his or YeoWoo’s appearance.

  Athelas found that his mouth was stretched in a smile that was entirely without humour. If the family were expecting him, he would try not to disappoint them.

  Both Camellia and YeoWoo were waiting for him when he got back, as was hot tea and a pleasantly aromatic orange teacake. Athelas found all these delights in the kitchen and received with some wariness the combined attention of both women—particularly in the case of YeoWoo, who looked as though she had news to share that he wouldn’t wish to hear. The alertness of her posture as he entered the room informed him of the fact that she held news, and the glitter of malice in her eyes suggested that it was news he would not wish to hear.

  At the very least, she was undoubtedly planning on trying to involve him in her endeavours, and Athelas was not to be tricked, cajoled, or shoe-horned into helping the case she was currently embarked upon.

  “The entire family is gone,” he said, both to answer the question uppermost in Camellia’s eyes and try to take the wind out of YeoWoo’s sails if he could.

  YeoWoo narrowed her eyes at him and asked, “The boy? His whole family disappeared?”

  “It would seem,” he said, with deceptive gentleness, “that they were afraid of retribution with regards to some…happening with the boy.”

  “Nonsense!” said YeoWoo brusquely. “They must have known I couldn’t prove anything. They wouldn’t have run for that reason.”

  “Humans are a strange lot,” Athelas reminded her. “Prone to panic and inclined to act first and think afterwards.”

  YeoWoo stared at him. “You really think they all ran away because I growled at them?”

  Athelas opened his mouth to twist the knife just a little more, but perhaps Camellia knew what he was about—or perhaps she simply wanted more information.

  She asked, “What’s in your pocket?”

  Athelas’ eyes flicked back to her, and he allowed the silence to grow for a few moments before he answered. Camellia also allowed it to stretch out without giving any further information—such as how she had known there was something in his pocket—and Athelas was just malicious enough to take another few moments removing the phone before he answered properly.

  “This is Harrow’s phone, I take it?”

  She nodded. “He’s had the same one since I’ve known him.”

  “An older model, I would have said.”

  YeoWoo made a very quiet scoffing sort of sound that suggested Athelas wasn’t to be trusted with the identification of electronic devices, and Athelas experienced a momentary, unprecedented desire to inform her that the sentiment was entirely reciprocated, since he was quite certain that YeoWoo didn’t know how to use the microwave in the kitchen, let alone anything so recent as his own touch-screen phone.

  Camellia took the phone from him with a brief whisk of air that managed quite impressively not to initiate any kind of skin-to-skin contact and turned it over between her fingers. “What happened to it?”

  “I stepped on it,” he said. “But I’m certain it was already damaged somewhat. It was beneath a few things near the couch—which it would appear he had been using as a bed.”

  She nodded. There was no surprise or anger in her face, just a small, crinkled v shape between her brows that was more a suggestion of shadows than a real crease. She had already known something of the sort and had already gone through all of the anger that the idea stirred up.

  “They took him from there, I suspect,” he added. He would have liked to have drawn the moment out a little longer, but that suggestion of shadow around Camellia’s brows had managed to make contact where her fingers hadn’t, and its touch was scaldingly hot. “The door hadn’t been broken down, and nothing else was damaged, so I would suggest that a member of the family—or more than one—let in the ones who took him. The couch was disarranged, and he resisted once at the door.”

  Camellia looked up sharply at him, her eyes on him with almost painful intensity, and Athelas looked away from them. “He resisted?”

  “I did mention, I believe,” he said, finding that YeoWoo was watching him with a sardonic look and removing his eyes from her also, “that I had given the boy some reason to refrain from trying to kill himself. I would have called it hope, perhaps.”

  “You did,” Camellia said.

  Her voice told him nothing; he should have been watching her as he said it. It was too late by then, of course; when Athelas looked back at her even the smudge of worry above and between her brows was gone.

  “The neighbours didn’t see the boy being taken, but they did see the family pack as much as they could into a car early this morning and drive away as if they were trying to get out before someone else came,” he said.

  He carefully said no more. There was no reason for behindkind to buy a human boy from his family: Athelas would not mention such a possibility at all. He would not involve himself in scuffles involving the contract trade—and who was to say that the contract trade was involved, after all? There was still a very lucrative organ market in South Korea, into which it was far more likely that Harrow had been sold.

  “You or me,” YeoWoo said, understanding immediately and willing now to accept blame where it might be considered meritorious instead of deleterious. “After our visit the other day, they would have known better than to stay there if they let anything happen to the kid. Especially if they made something happen to him.”

  “Indeed,” agreed Athelas. “It is a great inconvenience to my investigation, I might add.”

  YeoWoo shrugged one shoulder impatiently—an uncomfortable pulling away more than an actual shrug. “We’ll find them anyway.”

  “We…?” Athelas drew out the word curiously.

  “You,” YeoWoo corrected herself coldly. She added, even more coldly, “You might as well tell us all that you know, instead of trying to spin it out and make everyone uncomfortable.”

  “Happily enough, one of the neighbours had a car with a camera in it, parked in exactly the right place to catch most of the scene,” said Athelas, without betraying the thread of smugness that nestled warmly in his chest. “It had a very good view of the front of the car as well as the occupants as they drove away.”

  Camellia’s eyes rested on him. “You got a license plate number?”

  “I did. Finding someone who can turn that into useful information will be another matter, but it’s a good place to start. I don’t have the sort of connections in Seoul that I have—had—in Australia, but no doubt I can uncover some useful person with the right sort of leverage.”

  There was a very faint sniff from YeoWoo’s direction—and a malicious sort of satisfaction in the curve of her red-tinted lips when Athelas glanced over at her. It was YeoWoo’s time; she knew it, and he knew it.

  “I know someone who can do it,” she said, explaining that dark shade of satisfaction. “But you’ll have to pay for it.”

  Athelas gazed at her for a few moments.

  “You can’t ask the enforcers, because they’ll want to know what you’re doing and then want you to do what they want you to do,” she pointed out. “And you can’t ask Peregrine, because he’ll want something in exchange as well.”

  “Perhaps I would consider an exchange with the esteemed elder preferable to one with you, my dear.”

  “You might, but I doubt it,” she said. “He’ll ask you to do exactly the same thing as I’ll ask you to do, and he’ll give you considerably less in return.”

  She seemed to catch Camellia’s eye, and added defensively, “I’ll help find the boy, too. I wouldn’t leave him in this old twister’s hands, anyway.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to do your bargaining in peace,” said Camellia.

  She didn’t say it with any kind of edge to her voice, but YeoWoo’s cheeks and ears had reddened by the time Camellia freshened the blue teapot and left the room. When Camellia had gone, she shifted forward as if no longer comfortable where she had been, and said over folded arms, “I went to the contract market in Dongdaemun Design Plaza today to look for the first of my leads. I talked with the den mother and had her bring out a selection of behindkind contracts for me, but she’s got the one I need hiding away to be trained properly.”

  Athelas’ brows rose. “A bold move,” he said. He had some experience with den mothers; they were a suspicious and highly intuitive lot. “A good den mother tends to know when a buyer is serious and when they’re wasting time—they also tend to know when someone of an investigative nature is visiting. It’s something in the contemptuous and disdainful gaze of a real buyer, I believe. It would seem you had a suitably despising look at your disposal.”

  “Of course,” YeoWoo said. “I just pretended everyone was you. You’re the person I despise the most,” she added.

  “Thank you,” Athelas said mildly. “As surprising as it may seem, I caught your implication without the need for explanation. Perhaps we could cut to the chase and state terms; you said that you are in contact with someone who could investigate this license plate for me? What would you ask in return? I trust that you’re not counting on me to liberate this contract in training?”

  “Of course not!” said YeoWoo impatiently. “If that was all it took, I would have gone in and fetched the contract myself; I can take care of security and one den mother without much trouble. The problem is that I need to be more subtle than that.”

  “So I understand,” Athelas said. “A problem indeed.”

  YeoWoo didn’t quite roll her eyes, but she came very close. “I’m in talks—or I will be—with a contract the house doesn’t want to sell outright.”

  “You’re not, I take it, interested in the contract itself.”

  “Exactly,” said YeoWoo. “I suggested it because it meant I’d be able to go often to the café again to see him and discuss terms.”

  “You wish me to discuss terms for you?”

  YeoWoo shrugged one shoulder. “You know how to negotiate. I do too, but not to the level that you do—and I need to draw the discussions out for long enough for me to become enough of a fixture there that they don’t mind me wandering around.”

  “They’ll always mind you wandering around,” Athelas warned.

  “Yes, but they’ll only stop me if it looks suspicious,” YeoWoo countered. “They know who I am, and they’re not going to risk alienating me over nothing; an entitled purchaser sweeping around the place and being annoying isn’t suspicious. It’ll only get suspicious if they think I care too much about anything I chance to see.”

  “I trust that you’re prepared to fight your way out when something inevitably goes wrong, my dear.”

  “You don’t have to concern yourself with that part of it,” YeoWoo told him coldly. “You’ll be closest to the door, anyway; if you need to run, you’ll be in the best position. Do the negotiations for me, and I’ll take your license plate number to someone who can find out everything you need to know. You’ll be after your organ harvesters or child peddlers before you know it. Do we have an agreement?”