“Friends approaching?” he questioned, without moving. There would be time and enough to move later. For now, he would like to be as unnerving as possible at the most useful moment. It would be far better for all the family to be in the house and separated from any form of egress before they knew it had been breached.

  YeoWoo was already on her feet, a hunting gleam in her eye.

  “My dear!” he protested, but she vanished into the dimness of the room—whither bound, he knew not.

  To his relief, she didn’t seem inclined to make a bloodbath—or a scene—at the entrance. She had disappeared entirely, in fact. Athelas, sitting where he was in silence and stillness, heard the electronic bingle of the lock, then saw outside light dawn against the wall as the door opened. A babble of conversation, complaint, and irritation boiled up as shadows flickered across the wall; one, two, three, four people passed from the garden and into the house, carrying with them an exuberant mound of assorted plastic, paper, and silken bags.

  No doubt they had been freely spending the money they had received for the sale of the boy. They milled in the entrance, then moved through toward him. Not one of them shut the door behind them, but it shut, swiftly and silently, despite that; and in the sudden darkness beside the door, Athelas saw a gleam of eyes.

  None of the humans seemed to notice. Tired, pleased with their purchases and perhaps just tired enough to be irritated with each other, they bundled together and then separated into their own shadows, lumpy with bags.

  Athelas found a sour taste in his mouth as they divested themselves of the bags across the living room from him, still unaware of his presence across the room, or of the glinting eyes in the shadows behind them. He hadn’t seen this side of the equation before—the joys of sudden wealth and freedom from responsibility—and for the barest moment the sight brought along with it the unpleasant scent of lilies, until someone turned on the indoor lights.

  It could have been one of the humans, but Athelas was reasonably sure that YeoWoo, tired of waiting, had done it herself. In the light that brought the entire room to sharp focus, Athelas saw the vast, white-as-snow gumiho form that was YeoWoo, her tails rising like a massive wave of doom behind the four humans. Harrow’s father, paunchy and far more comfortable with himself than when Athelas had last seen him, stretched out his shoulders, narrowly avoiding hitting the taller, dark-haired man beside him. Two women, one with red hair and a purple dress, the other brunette and slender, were already sitting joyfully beside their piles of bags, eyes bright.

  There was a brief, entirely felicitous moment where the humans seemed to feel only delighted satisfaction, and Athelas, unwilling that they should have any more such moments, cleared his throat. Harrow’s father, still stretching, caught sight of Athelas across the room at the same time, and froze mid-yawn.

  “Ah,” said Athelas. “I see we are discovered.”

  Abandoning bags, women, and dignity, Harrow’s father turned to run, collided with the armchair behind him, scrambled over it, and tumbled into the currently large and furry YeoWoo while the other three humans were still taking in the situation. He screamed and fell backward, but he wasn’t quick enough to cower away: YeoWoo seized him by the neck as though he had been a puppy, lifted him bodily, and deposited him on the couch beside the taller, dark-haired man, who turned perfectly white and pressed himself as far into the couch as possible while YeoWoo did so.

  “You’d better not do anything silly,” Harrow’s father said, when YeoWoo stepped back and he regained his breath. Since his chest was still rising and falling far too quickly for good health, Athelas wasn’t as impressed by the pushback as he might have been otherwise. “We’re being looked after, you know.”

  The brunette looked as though she was going to scream to see if that would bring out the guards she had no doubt just remembered, but YeoWoo made a slight, snarling movement toward her, and she shut her mouth at once.

  “They were supposed to look after us!” said the redhead bitterly, to no one in particular.

  “I take it that you are referring to your fae guards,” Athelas said pleasantly. “They had another appointment, to which we, er…dispatched them swiftly.”

  “I dispatched them,” said YeoWoo, shrinking back into her human form in a way that further terrified rather than comforting the humans.

  “What other appointment?” the dark-haired man complained. “They said they’d keep us safe.”

  “He means they’re dead, you idiot,” snapped the redhead. To Athelas, she said, “Look, if you’re after the kid, you’re too late. Someone already bought him. If you’re quick enough, you might be able to buy him off them.”

  “I don’t buy children,” Athelas told her, smiling coldly. She shrank back, and grew pale when he added, “I don’t particularly care for people who do so, either. Or for those who sell them. Where is the boy? To whom did you sell him?”

  “We had to do something to protect ourselves,” said the red-haired woman bitterly. She followed Athelas’ faintly wondering gaze to the green bags from which textured, likewise green boxes slightly protruded, and flushed. “We’ve put up with the noises at night, and the monsters that appeared in the garden, but we started losing money. We can’t live here without money!”

  “You could get a job,” YeoWoo pointed out. “It’s harder for foreigners, but it’s not impossible.”

  “We do have jobs!” she snapped. She seemed to have grown more comfortable now that YeoWoo was in her human aspect. “Well, two of us do.”

  Both Harrow’s father and the brunette woman scowled, indicating which particular two did not, at present, lay claim to employment.

  Harrow’s father said angrily, “Everything started going wrong as soon as his mother died. He’s bad luck—and it’s not just regular bad luck! You do one nice thing for the kid, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a broken leg. We protected ourselves as much as possible by keeping him away from us—”

  “Ah,” Athelas broke in smoothly. “And by starving him, hitting him, and telling him exactly how poisonous he was and how much you despised him?”

  “I’d like to see how you would have managed any better!” snapped the redhead. “It wasn’t just accidents! It was monsters and insects and nasty things getting into the house! We would have all ended up dead, one way or the other. He might as well go to someone who knows about things like that, and the money just paid back what we lost due to his problem.”

  “Just?” YeoWoo asked, for once asking the question that Athelas would have asked. She swept her eyes over the same pile of shopping that Athelas had just levelled a look at, and said shrewdly, “It would seem as though you were paid more than you lost. The house would suggest that you were paid a great deal more.”

  “Why shouldn’t we?” Harrow’s father said roughly. “They promised they’d take good care of him, and they said we’d be able to access a bit more of their world…”

  The words faltered away as he caught Athelas’ eyes.

  Again, Athelas asked, “To whom did you sell the boy? Where is he now?”

  “You would have done the same thing,” the dark-haired man said, his foot tapping up and down in a jerky movement. “You’ve never tried to live with a kid who poisons the whole house, I’ll bet.”

  “You seem to misunderstand,” Athelas said silkily. “I asked, not for justification, but for information. I don’t particularly care whether you sold the boy for the money it brought, or the status in the world he gave you an entry to—I wish to know to whom you sold him.”

  The second, taller male licked his lips, hesitated, and said, “They’ll kill us if we tell you.”

  “You mistake me, I think,” said Athelas gently, “for someone who might care about that.”

  “They will,” said the redhead, her voice tight and shaking with tension. “They told us they would. You can’t be worried about what happens to one kid and then let four other humans be slaughtered! They said they’d flay us alive if we told anyone! That’s why they left guards here!”

  “Then there would appear to be a choice before you,” said Athelas, even more pleasantly. The guards, he was quite certain, had been bargained for by the family themselves—and as protection, not security against the humans speaking to anyone. They had carried no insignia and wore no uniform. “Because I will certainly kill you all should you not give me the information I need.”

  “No, you won’t,” YeoWoo said, drawing the suddenly hopeful gaze of all four of the humans. “I’m going to kill at least that one.”

  Harrow’s father didn’t so much move as he did swallow, and that small movement trickled down his entire body in a series of shudders. “He’s better off with them. They know how to deal with cursed children who spew out monsters in their dreams.”

  Athelas sighed, and it was left to YeoWoo, who was significantly blunter and possibly just as irritated, to say, “He wasn’t spewing out monsters in his sleep. He was being terrorised by them, you lingering stench on two legs. He was just as terrified as you were!”

  “There you go, then,” the brunette said defiantly. “We sent him somewhere he can be looked after properly. We aren’t equipped to look after a kid like that—we don’t even know what’s going on half the time!”

  “You knew he loved you,” YeoWoo said, her eyes growing darker and wilder. “And you knew that he’d do anything to keep you safe, because Camellia only found him because he was out all day, every day. And instead of looking for help for him, you sold him to people from the same place his nightmares come from.”

  “You can’t kill us,” Harrow’s father said, shifting in his seat. “You won’t get away with it. Someone is going to be looking for us as soon as the ones you got rid of don’t contact them.”

  “We’re not going to talk,” agreed the dark-haired man. “They’ll be here any minute.”

  The redhead pressed her lips together, but the brunette said corroboratively, “It won’t be just a few of them this time, either. They said they have whole armies.”

  “I see,” said Athelas, thinly amused. “Then let us see how long that determination will hold! You between you have forty fingers and forty toes—I am persuaded that a reduction of that amount will prove very useful in helping you all to grasp the essentials of this moment.”

  Harrow’s father said sickly, into the silence of the room, “What do you mean?”

  “He says he’s going to cut off fingers and toes until you start talking,” YeoWoo said impatiently. “Why can’t you understand him? You all speak the same language!”

  The dark-haired man surged from his seat, leaving behind a gaping companion, and went for Athelas with a heavy, wood-hilted stick of some sort of metal and the savagery born from sheer terror. The redheaded woman, screaming like a banshee, went for YeoWoo without a moment’s hesitation—no doubt under the incorrect assumption that in her human form she would be an easier prospect than Athelas.

  Athelas ignored the women and side-stepped the first, wild swing of the metal knobkerry from the dark-haired man. His blade sprang out and he moved swiftly sideways to meet and parry the second blow, coldly amused. The weapon, he noticed, with thin, sour unsurprise, was iron; it was perhaps for that reason that when he sent it flying, he counter-struck and pierced his knife through the man’s shoulder completely.

  The human screamed, and when Athelas fastidiously pushed him away by the shoulder, withdrawing the knife, he screamed again, tumbling backward and into the couch from which he had sprung.

  “Control yourself, madam,” he said to the screaming woman that a contemptuously smiling YeoWoo had restrained without the slightest sign of difficulty.

  The redheaded woman instead bit YeoWoo’s arm.

  “Do that again, and I’ll bite back,” YeoWoo said in disgust, detaching the woman by the simple process of seizing her by the hair at the top of her skull and yanking her teeth out of her arm. “And don’t start yelling again, either.”

  “Don’t kill him!” the redhead shrieked, nearly frantic. “They said they were looking for kids with the kind of abilities Harrow had! They said they’d just be needed for training at a few jobs—things like photographers, dressmakers, singers—so that they could learn a trade! It didn’t sound like hard work!”

  Athelas saw the way her eyes shifted as she said the last part of the sentence, while her voice seemed to fade away, her wild movements growing stiller. Whatever else this woman had thought, she hadn’t thought that Harrow would have an easier life.

  YeoWoo, her lip curled, gave no appearance of believing it, either.

  “Shut up, Mel!” said Harrow’s father. “We’re all dead if you say anything else.”

  “Look at it this way,” Athelas said kindly, allowing his eyes to rest meditatively on Harrow’s father, and then on the taller man, who went whiter and pressed at the swiftly growing red stain on his shirt. “You’re already dead, one way or another. But you evidently know how to keep fae out of your house now, and if you have a bit longer to live, you might just get away from them altogether. You certainly won’t escape my blade should you refuse to answer any longer. Where did these fae come from?”

  The taller man’s voice was low and sullen, and threaded with pain. “We heard that you could talk to…people like you at the DDP,” he said, blood welling slowly through his fingers. “We went there and a woman found us and took us…somewhere that wasn’t exactly real, and made a bargain with us. She said that it was a good thing we’d come to her in time, or we might have all died because of the kid.”

  “Now,” said Athelas silkily into the silence that formed in the wake of those words, a coldness growing within him, “wasn’t that easy? Continue.”

  When Athelas and YeoWoo emerged, the afternoon was softening into evening, the sky a gentle, lemon sorbet edged with red brick all around and trimmed with white. Schoolchildren, returning in the dusk from their after-school hagwons and toiling unknowingly up the hill toward fae and gumiho, made a straggling line along the bitumen that lurched to the side every time a sleek car prowled smoothly up the hill.

  Athelas felt weary in that almost offensively calm and pastel evening, and his soles sounded insufferably heavy when he stepped down into the street.

  It was almost a relief to feel the annoyance that couldn’t help but be produced when YeoWoo said, “Now what are you going to give as an excuse not to help? The café has Harrow shoved in there somewhere, so you can’t pretend that your case isn’t the same as mine.”

  “I shall not attempt to do so,” he said. Nor would he point out that he had managed to do so quite well and might have continued to do so had she not burdened him with her presence today. He was not sure whether it was maliciousness or misery that caused him to add, “I suppose you’ll want to visit the elder after this.”

  He saw the quick flash of surprise across YeoWoo’s face, but it was gone in a moment, and she replied with a very good assumption of calmness, “Why do you say that? Do you expect me to rail at him for not looking after humans better?”

  “I think there are questions that are more needful,” Athelas said acidly. “The elder seems to have been as scant with his information as ever—if he was not aware that humans are apparently being contracted illegally along with behindkind, I will be very surprised. He has given you just enough information to use you as a hammer to break open the hive, so to speak. The café itself is up to far more than he led you to believe.”

  “You think that the café is after humans for a reason, and that Peregrine is more interested in the human contracts than the behindkind ones?”

  “I should doubt he’s more interested in the human ones,” Athelas said. “One particular human or behindkind contract, perhaps. And I should very much doubt that he knows the extent of the human contract trade at present; he certainly had an ulterior motive for setting you on the job, however. That reason may be a particular contract, or it may or may not have something to do with the movement of a certain body.”

  “So you do remember telling me that,” YeoWoo said, with a grin. “I thought you were too far out of it to remember needling me. Well, if you really want to know, you might as well come along with me to rattle Peregrine’s cage.”

  “Perhaps I shall do so,” Athelas said, and that seemed to surprise her, too. He added, “I have the greatest desire to see the same paperwork as the elder would no doubt like to see. If I am an acknowledged part of this work of yours, I run a significantly better chance of being able to do so.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re interested in the paper bonds? Why?”

  Athelas, who had not failed to catch the words photographers, dressmakers, and singers during the questioning of Harrow’s family, didn’t think it incumbent upon himself to explain something that he would much prefer to keep to himself.

  Unfortunately, YeoWoo was silent only a moment before she said, with understanding dawning on her face, “The type of contracts those humans talked about are all contracts that can be useful when someone is planning a wedding.” She sent him an accusing look. “You’re still trying to interfere with that human’s wedding!”

  “It’s not that I’m trying to interfere with the wedding,” Athelas said patiently, “but that I would very much prefer no one else be allowed to interfere with the wedding. I merely wish to attend it without causing a fuss.”

  “I don’t think Lord Sero cares much about your motivations,” YeoWoo said. “He seems to think he needs to keep you under his eye, if last time at the café was a reasonable indicator. He also seems like a very motivated person, and I’d wager that he’s got a memory like an elephant’s.”

  “Longer,” Athelas said ruefully, taking another step into the street to look up and down the length of it. “Fortunately for my plan, I do not fancy I shall have to rely upon his forgiveness. How likely, my dear,” he added, changing the subject, “do you think it is that the humans were correct or truthful in their protestations that the café security would either return for them or see them dispatched?”