“It would seem,” he said, returning the phone to his pocket and taking up his teacup again, “that I have an address.”

  “YeoWoo’s contact was useful, then?”

  “Extremely,” said Athelas, even more dryly.

  If he had known the merman was in Seoul, he would certainly have troubled himself to approach Marazul personally, instead of being obliged to YeoWoo for the use of the merman’s services. It might have taken some time to convince Marazul to help, but Athelas had done so before, and he supposed he would have been able to do it again.

  “You don’t think there’s any chance Harrow is with his family?”

  There was a very slight rising note on the last word; was Camellia making sure that he hadn’t been lying to her the other day, or was she offering him a chance to admit it if he had been lying to her? He was not lying to her, but as he was certainly not telling her the entire truth, it was perhaps best not to wrangle about the matter.

  “I didn’t see him on the footage,” Athelas said. “So I should rather doubt it. I’m certain the family know where he is, however—or at least that they have some idea who took him. If you were offering to accompany me, of course—”

  “I wasn’t,” she said, setting her feet on the floor and rising with almost the motion and lightness of the steam from the teapot.

  That was very satisfactory. If Camellia were to come with him, he would perhaps have to investigate more thoroughly an angle to the business that he would very much prefer not to.

  “You might bring your teapot,” he said; and when she looked at him enquiringly, he added, “Should I need to be defended from behindkind in the streets.”

  “Funnily enough,” Camellia said, “it did occur to me that a teapot was the best way to protect you. That wasn’t the sort of protection I was thinking of, though.”

  Athelas asked as he rose, mockingly, “You were, perhaps, thinking of protecting my soul?”

  “Personally, I would have thought your sanity would be the first thing to protect,” said Camellia, matter-of-factly. “After that, it might be possible to try and protect your soul.”

  A tickle of genuine amusement curled through Athelas.

  “Are you offering, my dear?” he asked; and in that brief moment where he saw the distaste on her face and realised his mistake, Athelas knew he had lost that tenuous connection they had had. The words my dear had slipped out before he was aware of them.

  “I don’t leave the house,” she said, her voice as cool as it had been earlier. “Dinner will wait for you, so take as long as you need.”

  And Athelas, smothering his annoyance with himself, merely said, “How very agreeable,” and left the room while there was yet a sip or two of tea remaining.

  YeoWoo was waiting for him outside the house at the top of the stairs when he shut the door behind him, to his faint consternation.

  “There you are!” she said. She didn’t sound impatient so much as curious. “What were you talking to Camellia so long about?”

  “I thought she might like to join me, and she indicated otherwise,” he said briefly. If it was a choice, he would prefer Camellia’s company to YeoWoo’s, but he still further preferred to go about this day’s business alone.

  YeoWoo made a small scoffing noise. “Why would she want to go with you?”

  “A fair question,” allowed Athelas. “However, I would have said the same about you: I did not expect to see you here upon leaving the house.”

  What was the gumiho playing at?

  She sniffed a small laugh. “I didn’t think you did.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  “So I perceive. Am I permitted to know why?”

  “I’m not like you,” said YeoWoo, her upper lip curling faintly. “Sometimes I just do things to help, because I can.”

  “Very well,” Athelas said, starting down the stairs toward the street. “But I really do advise you to think again. I will be softened neither by artificial means nor genuine ones.”

  “I told you,” she retorted. “Sometimes I like to help. Do as you please.”

  Athelas didn’t reply to that: he had his own ideas about YeoWoo’s efforts to help, and he had some experience in helping with various reasons in mind that were too intertwined to discover exactly which one was uppermost. He suspected that neither of them fully knew their own motives from one moment to the next.

  “Anyway,” YeoWoo added, “I’m afraid of annoying Camellia.”

  “An understandable fear,” Athelas said, his lips curving involuntarily. He still remembered the heaviness of poison weighing him down as the colourful, sunlit flutter that was Camellia moved around the room. “One does, after all, prefer one’s food and drink to be unadulterated.”

  “Does one?” asked YeoWoo, her eyes flicking across his face with a surprising keenness of perception. “Because I know that expression, and I would have called it a hunting expression, not a hunted one.”

  “My hunting days are long past,” said Athelas calmly. Still, it would do no harm for Camellia to get some input from a source other than himself, and he was quite certain the two women talked more often with each other than with himself. So he added, “Call it appreciation. It’s not often that I’m taken by surprise, and I have a healthy respect for any person who can so swiftly cut my feet from beneath me.”

  YeoWoo’s gaze didn’t grow any less perceptive, but it did show a hint of scepticism. “Camellia’s got pretty good armour where it comes to men,” she said. “Just so you know.”

  Athelas wasn’t sure if it was irritation or subtlety that made him say, “Armour is only so good as its weakest point, after all; and I have always enjoyed finding the right way into hard-to-reach places.”

  Perhaps it was a share of both, because the small scoffing noise that YeoWoo made irritated him further. “It would be worth it just to see you fall on your face,” she said.

  Athelas travelled to his destination through Between, more for the sake of convenience than for the sake of seeing if he could leave YeoWoo behind by that means—as much as he found a perverse enjoyment in tweaking at her guilt.

  It was a yellow kind of day, the misaemonji hanging low over the city and filtering the air uncomfortably in the human world, and when they sank into Between from one step to the next, YeoWoo gave out an annoyed, “Ugh!”

  The misaemonji Between, catlike, curled around her at the sound, weaving around her arms and through her hair.

  “Get off!” she said, batting it away. To Athelas, she said, “We ought to keep moving. It’s bad out there, but in here it’s worse.”

  “So I see,” said Athelas. He might have been amused if he hadn’t been able to fairly feel the yellow dust crawling down his throat; he didn’t like to think of it investigating his insides. “We’re for Apgujeong, I believe. This way.”

  They travelled through Between from the top of their street and toward the Dongjak Bridge across the Hankang, followed and surrounded by a yellow miasma of humming dust that seemed determined to buzz through every part of them. Nearer to the river, there was a slight lessening of the weight of dust, as if the massive, slow movement of the water pushed back at the yellow dust to ease the air.

  YeoWoo, grimly lifting each leg as though it was weighted, climbed the blue-flanked stairs beside him. Athelas had vaguely expected the bridge to be less iron and more…earthy…but its ironness seemed to be as immoveable as the shade of blue with which its sides and centre had been painted, and the only real difference between the bridge in Between and in the human world was that the section between the opposing lanes of traffic was missing Between. In the human world, that part would have been the double track upon which the subway ran its trains, confined between blue scallops of metalwork before they descended into the earth and ran below ground; in the shifting space of Between, Athelas saw with some incredulity that a water dragon had made itself at home between the two opposing flows of traffic.

  All iridescent scales and water droplets flinging from its fishy whiskers as it swept past in a bridge-shaking rattle of iron, it leapt from the water at one side of the Hankang, zipped along the length of the bridge as though it had wings, and plunged back into the water at the other end, only to emerge and do the same thing five minutes later.

  Athelas saw the exuberant joy of its exercise in one gleaming eye the size of a car door as it swept past them once again when they had nearly crossed the bridge, its beard flying like seaweed after it. He was reminded irresistibly of a dog sprinting up and down the length of its yard with its head back and tongue out, mad with wild joy at running.

  “The timing’s a bit off,” was all YeoWoo said, but she didn’t seem to dislike the rush of air each time the dragon passed.

  Athelas narrowed his gaze at the world around him to take in a little more of the human world as they walked, and found that although the dragon timed its joyful run with the passing of the trains in most cases—or perhaps simply chased after them for enjoyment—it sometimes leapt up from the water and ran the whole bridge around when there was no train to cover the rattle of its passing. He was surprised that the humans hadn’t complained about the safety of a structure that rattled so often without any obvious reason.

  Once they were beyond the river, it was quicker going through Between. The passing of the water dragon seemed to have sucked the life out of the misaemonji, and now the polluted atmosphere, heavy with dust, simply sulked in looser coils of vaguely yellow air without doing more than settling in their hair and clothing. It also ceased to slow their movement, and the Behind denizens that usually crawled the Between streets began to appear in ones and twos as well, scurrying out of the nearby streets and alleys that were more akin to low, stone walls with a cross-hatching of sticks that concealed gardens full of vegetables and herbs.

  Athelas, content to walk closer to the Hankang while it was inclined to keep off the far too attentive misaemonji, edged away from those ancient walls that very nearly protruded right into the human world and found himself strolling along the riverside with YeoWoo. She appeared to be in a thoughtful mood, so he didn’t attempt to speak with her—no doubt she was running her own investigation through her mind, finding weak points, discovering ways forward, and working on plans and counter plans for when something inevitably went wrong.

  He couldn’t help wondering, however, when he caught a brief, thoughtful, sidelong look from her, if there was something else to it. YeoWoo had come along with him today for a purpose, despite anything she said about her heart being so much softer than his. There was no doubt a good-heartedness to YeoWoo, but Athelas, who recognised those of his own kind, knew that there was a ruthlessness to her as well. He found himself curious to know in which direction she would go when her morals clashed with her desires. He suspected that she had faced such a choice before, and that the contempt with which she viewed him was in some measure the contempt with which she viewed her younger self, who had not chosen then as she might now.

  “Here, I rather think,” he said a few moments later, and stepped into the human world between one alley mouth and the next. His neat shoes stepped down onto equally neat bitumen that was edged politely and cleanly, unlike most of the streets they had just passed through.

  Around them, red brick buildings with their own red-brick fences walling in private gardens and carparks formed the walls of the street, and single buildings rose to two stories, grand and solitary each from the other. Fruit trees protruded from most of the gardens around, and when Athelas stopped in front of the blue number plate that bore the same number he had received that morning from Marazul, the trees that surmounted the fence were unquestionably the most well-grown in the street.

  “This is the place?” YeoWoo looked around critically and added with certainty, “If they sold the boy, they got a lot of money for it. Apgujeong is one of the more expensive neighbourhoods this side of the river—or the other.”

  “Indeed,” said Athelas. “It makes one wonder exactly who might need organs so badly that they’d be willing to pay such a price.”

  The organ trade was worth a lot of money, he told himself. There was no reason to decide immediately that the family must have sold the boy to behindkind. And yet, he doubted the organ trade paid quite as much as this, while someone with Harrow’s obviously budding abilities with Between would certainly be an object of interest to the right behindkind.

  “It makes me wonder what Harrow can do,” YeoWoo said frankly, irritating him by giving voice to what was very nearly his own thought. “Or what the purchaser thinks he can do. This is more money than the organ trade would get them—I think they’ve sold him to someone from Behind.”

  “If you think so, I’m surprised you’re helping me break in,” Athelas said, with a soupcon of irritation. “I should imagine than we’re about to step on some toes.”

  “They’ll have guards,” she said, dismissing that in her consideration of the business at hand. There was a maliciousness to her eyes that suggested she was well aware that he was considering the distinct possibility that they were now dealing with the contract trade once again. “Around here, there might even be human security we’ll need to account for.”

  “I’m aware,” Athelas said. “Let us bypass the human side of things, in that case.”

  The place had no walls, Between. There was no house between the worlds, either, but Athelas kept enough of an eye on the human world to know exactly where the walls of the house were according to human laws of being, and he was disturbed when, attempting to push through those via Between, he was repulsed.

  It was a familiar, gritty sensation full of acid, and Athelas drew in a deep, shuddering breath as he stopped to reassess.

  YeoWoo appeared again in a few moments, Between glittering like moonlight in her white hair. “What is it?”

  “I rather fancy that the household is prepared against my coming,” he said placidly. He remembered the iron knife from the other house, and felt the light, sparkling feeling of danger that helped to pierce through his general dislike for the work in which he was engaged. “They have laced the brickwork with iron filings.”

  YeoWoo stared at the bricks and then laughed shortly. “I wonder who told them that would help? It answers one question, though; they must have sold the kid to someone Behind.”

  “No doubt they took advice before selling the boy,” said Athelas, since he couldn’t argue with that.

  “Whoever it was that gave them the advice doesn’t seem to have told them what to do in case of gumiho,” YeoWoo pointed out. “I’ll go in and bring them out—or better still, I’ll open the front door.”

  “I should prefer not to be trapped within an iron framework shaped as a human house,” Athelas said.

  “Perhaps you would, but you won’t be able to do much good out here,” YeoWoo said. “Especially if the humans aren’t at home. Do you think you’re likely to be safer in there, or going back home to tell Camellia that you wouldn’t go into the house after finding it?”

  “I am not,” said Athelas, with thin patience, “afraid of Camellia.”

  In pursuit of her good opinion, however—and therefore, presumably, the renewed good opinion of a certain human girl—Athelas was prepared to risk significantly more. He had also lately become curious to know how a grateful Camellia might react.

  “You should be,” YeoWoo told him. “I’m going back in. Wait by the front door.”

  “I should think you will find guards within,” he warned, resigned to the danger. Exactly what he had feared had come to pass, with YeoWoo to both know and see it. There was no turning back now—no pretending not to see the film of Between and fae over everything.

  “I could use the exercise,” said YeoWoo, and disappeared back into the wall of the house with a flutter of drapery and white hair.

  Athelas strolled toward the front door, avoiding the windows, and the few moments of silence abruptly broke. Muffled yells and the blunt clash of metal permeated the garden; someone screamed. Something hit the window he was nearest to, a wet splatter of sound, and ahead of him, the front door swung inward. Athelas might have stopped—or at least slowly approached to make sure that nothing untoward was waiting for him—but he already knew what he would see before he was near enough to see properly into the house.

  Blood red skirts brushed lightly against the grey door, and white hair caught in the breeze, tinted blue in patches. “They’re not home,” YeoWoo said, beckoning him in with the downward dabbing motion that was by now becoming familiar to Athelas. The interior behind her was more generously splashed with blue blood than even she was. “We’ll have time to clean up the mess before they get back.”

  Athelas stepped cautiously into the house and said rather painedly, “You might have made a trifle less mess, in that case, my dear.”

  YeoWoo shrugged one shoulder, over which he could see glistening intestines dangling over the blade of a fan and dripping blue onto the carpet. She had been as untidy with the other—two, or three? he wondered—fae guards who had evidently been waiting for her. “They tried to throw a net over me and stab me through it. A net.”

  “Ill-judged,” he allowed. “One presumes that you advocate cleaning in order to wait successfully for the humans to return home.”

  “We aren’t going to be able to come back once they know we know they’re here, so we might as well.”

  “Very true,” said Athelas, removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeves. “Then let us get to work.”

  The day had well passed noon when Athelas saw YeoWoo stiffen over in the chair she had thrown herself into.