“All right, but I’m taking the rest of the cheesecakes,” Luca said, emptying both cheesecake plates into a paper bag he had produced from who knew where. “And I’m going to ask for your help soon. I still need you to get something with your tiny little hands.”

  “Speaking of help—” began Viv. She had been sitting with him for hours and she still hadn’t asked him about Jonno, Gilbert, or who had paid for Luca to do the kill in the first place.

  “Can’t,” said Luca, his eyes glittering, still backing away. “Contractual terms say no talking about the kill.”

  She didn’t see him slip further Between, or back into the human world, but Viv didn’t quite manage to see him leave, either. She had tried to: she had wanted to see as much of him as she could because then there would be nothing of him to be had for probably quite some time.

  There was a regretful feeling in her that time had gone very quickly, although a glance at her phone told her that it was now somehow approaching eight in the morning, and that she and SooAh had in fact been gone some six hours at least, most of which must have been spent in the café discussing Dad, and merpeople, and Seffy, and leeches. That was quite ridiculous, but must be true.

  A yell of panic from across the café reminded Viv that she had yet to rescue the behindkind boy from SooAh’s not-so-tender-mercies. She did so by physically removing SooAh from the behindkind boy’s back and bearing her aloft through the café in a puff of tulle and pompoms, and SooAh must have been happy enough to leave, because she didn’t try to do anything to Viv that Viv could see.

  Moreover, she was happily skipping across the surface of the Yarra when they left the café, apparently delighted to drag Viv across the bright, morning twinkle of the river through increasingly difficult to see—and hear—areas of Between that the human world was impressing upon now that the bright light of morning was apparent.

  The cafes around them were somehow fading, suddenly just a phantom of Viv’s sun-dazzled eyes. The amber-brown waters beneath them were beginning to feel dangerously boggy by the time they stepped back into the little wooden shed and into the path of oncoming morning joggers in the human world.

  Viv rescued SooAh from being run over by one of the joggers—or perhaps rescued the jogger from SooAh’s vengeful feet—and turned her steps resolutely toward the Tea House. That was what fantasy did, after all: it faded. And she had to return to the real world, because that was where she belonged.

  Chapter 9

  Leave No Stone Unturned

  “Boss man’s looking for you,” said Bazza, when Viv re-entered the Tea House with SooAh just before nine. He jerked his thumb upward then made six with his fingers, indicating the sixth floor.

  “Thanks,” Viv said.

  “You all right, little sis?” Bazza asked, solemnly observing her. “You look a bit rough.”

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night,” Viv said. “And there was—no, never mind, it’s just been a long day. Or night.”

  “You come down and have a cuppa with me later, all right?” said Bazza. He lowered his voice to what amounted to a gentle shout and added, “I got wagon wheels. Don’t tell anyone else.”

  “Everybody else already knows,” SooAh said, wrinkling her nose at him. “You are too loud.”

  “Did you expect Jasper?” Viv asked Bazza, ignoring the little girl. As usual, the troll’s perception and solid kindness had comforted her, much like Tony had done earlier. “I didn’t think he was meant to be back this week.”

  “Reckon something bit him in the backside,” Bazza said, grinning. “He came back in a big flap early this morning. He’s been up and down about ten times since then, wanting to know where you are.”

  BoRa’s scheme had worked extremely well, then, Viv thought, amused. Barely nine in the morning and Jasper was already back at the Tea House; the handbag that BoRa had coldly unpacked and modelled in front of the mirror yesterday for Viv’s amused eyes must have been even more expensive that she’d thought.

  Still, she wasn’t prepared for the crackling tenseness to Jasper when she stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor, or the way he rounded on her in a second when the elevator dinged, just a bit too late.

  Viv thought for a moment that he might stalk across the room toward her, but he stayed where he was by her desk, one long finger tapping against the top of it in a way that made her move rather more quickly toward him than she might otherwise have done.

  The finger stopped tapping abruptly, and Jasper’s eyes flicked over her once before coming to rest on her neck. “Where have you been!” he said sharply. “And what have you done to your neck?”

  Viv touched the fingers of one hand to her neck in some bewilderment. “What? Oh! I was carrying SooAh for the last bit of the walk; her slippers were getting dirty. She clings like a limpet. It’s just a bit of redness from that, I think.”

  “Show me your stomach.”

  “What?”

  “Your stomach,” he said, lips grim. “Show me that there’s nothing there.”

  Viv understood in a slow, bewildering wave of recollection. So much had happened over the last day and night; she had very nearly forgotten the nightmare that preceded the call from Dad.

  “Was that your Dad?” she asked. “In the dream? He can’t hurt me, really; it was just a nightmare.”

  “Then show me your stomach and prove it,” Jasper said, removing his glasses and throwing them on the desk in one impatient movement.

  Viv might have protested if it hadn’t been for the glasses. Jasper, insofar as it was possible for Jasper to do so, had completely lost his cool. She already knew his father was a terrifying and touchy subject; the thoughts that were beginning to propagate in her mind like so many unpleasant mushrooms gave her some idea of why that was.

  “How did you get into my dream?” she asked him, unbuttoning her cardigan and pulling her shirt out of her waistband.

  “We seem to be connected in some way,” Jasper said, pinching his nose between his eyes. “It’s very inconvenient. Next time you’re in a dream and you come across my bedroom, kindly refrain from entering.”

  He bent over to examine her stomach; Viv felt his cool fingers trace a line and was shocked when she looked down to see that there was a short, pink, slightly puckered line there as though she had been stabbed years ago and healed over in that time.

  “What on earth?” she demanded, shaken.

  “It’s not completely real,” he said, gently touching the skin around the almost-scar. “If you’d been in there for much longer, it might have been more dangerous.”

  “How could it be almost real when it happened in a dream?” Viv asked, very carefully. She felt as though it would be very easy to panic right now.

  Jasper glanced up at her. “My father is…something not quite human,” he said. “He’s not exactly alive, but he isn’t dead, either. You might call him a memory, but memories of this sort can do a lot of damage if you let them.”

  Viv resisted the urge to clear her throat, and wondered if she should ask if she could cover her stomach again now that he had seen the almost-scar there. Jasper didn’t seem to have finished examining it, and his fingers still pressed the skin around it as if he could exorcise it from her flesh by doing so.

  He seemed to realise that he was still touching her bare skin at the same time. He stepped back, straightening, and fetched his glasses from the desk again, then drew in a long, silent breath.

  “Where were you?” he asked once again, putting the glasses back on. They mirrored immediately, hiding his eyes. “You can’t disappear from the Tea House at any hour you please.”

  “Dad had a break-in,” Viv said, tucking her shirt back in and re-buttoning her cardigan. “I had to go and make sure he was all right.”

  Jasper appeared to have frozen when she looked up again. “A break-in?” he repeated. “What sort of break-in?”

  “One that scared him and left his safe-box scattered across the floor,” Viv said, very frankly. “My dad isn’t supposed to be connected to this world by more than the woman he married. Why is this sort of thing happening to him?”

  “Your father would no doubt be the better person to ask that question,” pointed out Jasper. “Is he injured?”

  “No,” said Viv. “But I don’t think they were trying to hurt him—or not hurt him, if it comes to that. I think they were mostly ignoring him.”

  “I’m glad to know he’s safe. Did they just…leave?”

  “No; Luca helped them leave,” Viv said, looking directly at him despite the fact that she couldn’t see his eyes. “Some of them rolled up in a rug. Is there a reason why he would do that?”

  “That’s another question I’m not qualified to answer,” Jasper told her. “Please leave word with Bazza next time you have to leave unexpectedly, Viv. Do you know where BoRa is?”

  Viv nearly, and very piously, told him that this was a question she wasn’t qualified to answer. Instead, choosing peace, she said, “I haven’t seen BoRa since yesterday. Since you’re here, though—what did the toxicology report mean?”

  Jasper’s eyes met hers, making her aware that they were now visible again. “Didn’t you look at it?”

  “Of course I looked at it,” she retorted, and saw him very briefly press his lips together to avoid showing amusement. “I didn’t understand it, though. I don’t know how to read that kind of graphic and I didn’t have time to look up all the scientific labels they used. Which type of arsenic was it?”

  “Pure arsenic,” he said. “Not derived from iron ore.”

  “Which means⁠—”

  “Which means,” said Jasper, sitting on the edge of Viv’s desk, “that the most logical thought process would be that Gilbert really was the target all along. Arsenic trioxide is much easier to source and it’s a quicker death for a human. It would also harm a part-fae man badly. Pure arsenic, on the other hand, is unlikely to hurt anyone part-fae. Or so I hear. I’m following up leads as to where it could have come from.”

  He was far from convinced, Viv knew. So was she. He was also asking her, delicately, where she had gotten her information that made her ask the question.

  “It’s ridiculous,” she said crossly. “If someone was trying to kill Gilbert, why kill Jonno instead, later? They were obviously taking a lot of trouble to make sure they didn’t hurt him with the arsenic, or they would have just used the one that was easier to get!”

  “Perhaps Gorman was trying to help the succession along,” Jasper said. “Or perhaps the desired result was just Jonno in jail.”

  “Yes, but if someone was just going to hire Luca to kill Jonno, why play around with poison and prison first?” she pointed out, irritated. It was one thing to ask the question and do the investigation when it was simply obvious that one of them had been the target. The entire episode of who was meant to drink the poisoned beer seemed ridiculous now in the light of Jonno’s gruesome death and dismemberment. Viv didn’t think Jasper was entirely convinced of Gilbert being the target himself—though he didn’t seem to know what to make of his own perplexity.

  “Jonno had been going through Gilbert’s finances,” he said, after a pause. “I asked Tech Support to look into it for me; Gorman mentioned that the cash supplies in the house had disappeared, and only Gilbert and Jonno knew where those were. I would have sworn that there were some only Gilbert knew about, but those were taken, too.”

  “So Jonno was trying to take over his father’s finances completely?”

  “He’d been trying his best to do so, from the paperwork I’ve seen—not always successfully, however,” said Jasper, smiling faintly. “It does make it seem as though Gilbert had a good reason to want to kill his son—except that if he was enough himself to try and kill his son, he would certainly have been enough himself to prevent Jonno from stealing from him by myriad other means.”

  “What does Forex think?”

  “I would like very much to know that,” said Jasper. “They certainly seem to think that Gilbert isn’t as lost as he appears to be, or I don’t think they’d still be in the manor. Either that, or they still haven’t found what they were looking for. But I don’t think they would be putting in covert surveillance measures if it were just that they haven’t found what they want.”

  “They don’t seem very interested in the murder investigation, at any rate,” Viv said. “It just seems like a useful excuse to bring them into the manor. It’s all really confusing and annoying; nothing about the murder or the aftermath makes any sense. Not even the victim really makes sense.”

  Jasper nodded very slightly. “It should have been Gilbert.”

  Viv had to pinch her lips together to press back the untimely laugh that tickled her chest. “That’s a nice thing to say about a friend,” she remarked. “I suppose I should be glad that I’m your employee and not your friend.”

  Jasper looked at her blankly; his eyes travelled from her eyes to her primly pressed lips and it seemed to click for him that she was joking.

  “Gilbert and I weren’t exactly what humans think of as friends,” he said, smiling faintly and looking away again. “By behindkind standards, that word would be acceptable—but we were closer to allies. We had aligned goals from the start, and he was one of two who were willing to give me a hand up when no one else would.”

  “Maybe he thought you and Jonno would get along,” Viv suggested. The Gilbert she had met yesterday seemed genuinely concerned for his son, despite his obviously altered mental state.

  Jasper laughed, once again surprising her. “I’ve got no doubt that he had a great many ideas in mind and a great many reasons for helping me, but I doubt that arranging a friend for his son was one of them. I don’t wish Gilbert any ill; I meant to say that unless Jonno has been up to some very surprising things since last I saw him, it seems odd to me that anyone at the manor should be murdered except Gilbert.”

  “Or that Luca would kill someone who was partially human for no reason,” Viv said slowly. “Do you think someone wanted to hurt Gilbert through killing Jonno?”

  “Gilbert is far more likely to care about the contents of his safe than he is to care about the loss of his son,” Jasper said, chilling Viv’s skin with the carelessness of the way he said it. “He sent him off to boarding school when it became obvious that Jonno wasn’t going to use the modest gifts he got from his mother to do anything that his father wanted him to do by way of business.”

  Viv found that she couldn’t picture the man she had met two days ago while he was tossing pistachio shells down at her, sending his son away to boarding school. “How did you end up at boarding school, anyway?” she asked Jasper. “Let alone with Jonno.”

  “I had a couple of benefactors,” said Jasper. “And yes—one of them was Gilbert. He said that I could go along with Jonno because I’d make better use of the connections I could make there than his son would. I did so, and they’ve served me very well.”

  There was a faint buzzing that made him pause, and then take out his phone, which he studied for some moments before he put it away with a slight breath that could have been relief.

  “Well,” he said, catching her eye again. “It would seem that the Coroner has arrived. Suffice it to say, Viv, that I’m still shocked we have Jonno’s dismembered body to autopsy instead of Gilbert’s.”

  “Maybe they were trying to kill each other,” Viv said, more to herself than Jasper.

  She saw the faint smile that came and went on his face; Jasper had already thought of that. He said only, “Perhaps the autopsy itself will reveal more.”

  “Oh good,” Viv said. “You’re here now; you’ll probably want to observe the autopsy and get the report directly yourself.”

  She was not at all eager to oversee it herself; she would pass that job off to Jasper with the greatest of pleasure.

  “Since I have something to take up with BoRa, I’m afraid that the observation of the autopsy will be entirely left up to you,” Jasper said, as smooth as butter. “Don’t throw up, will you? The Coroner doesn’t like that.”

  It wasn’t until Viv was taken to a seemingly steel-lined office on the first floor of the Tea House that she truly began to appreciate exactly what she had been asked to do. She was the first person in the room, and the pieces of Jonno’s body were already laid out on a stainless steel table that Viv had never seen before.

  Of course, she had never before seen this room, either. She wasn’t entirely sure it had existed before today, even though it must have; rooms didn’t just appear and disappear.

  Well, she thought doubtfully, they had never just appeared to her before she came to live at the Tea House. Things had their own rules here. Things had their own rules regardless; she was simply aware of them more now.

  Viv tried not to look too closely at the pieces of Jonno, but they were so clinically precise, neat, and white, like cuts of meat, that before long she found she could look at them without feeling ill. There was something very different about body parts clinically laid out and body parts still in situ with blood and other detritus still puddled about them.

  By the time the Coroner arrived, in fact, Viv was feeling only mildly ill.

  The Coroner was a tall, brisk lady with a short, brisk cut to her golden hair that left it shaggy, volumized, and yet somehow one unit. It didn’t look as though it dared to flop out of place or lose its volume. She was wearing a well-fitted grey suit with a mid-length skirt, and she walked into the room with a decided click click click of her heels, her chin sailing ahead of her.

  “Lovely,” she said, stopping a few steps into the room and gazing around. “Lovely setup. This will do very well.”

  Her accent was English, Viv thought. She half-expected the Coroner to tell her to put on some gloves and hold something. She was very relieved when the woman instead neatly stripped off her suit jacket, laying it precisely across the back of a chair so that it didn’t wrinkle, then pulled on a pair of gloves with a snap and began to pick up body parts one by one to examine them.