“Not very,” YeoWoo said flatly. “Those guards weren’t café security—they were paid mercenaries. The den mother would have threatened the family, but unless she thought they were stupid enough to talk, or heard talk of them, I doubt she would bother to come back and deal with a few humans that everyone else would think were crazy if something slipped out.”

  “I agree,” said Athelas. “In which case, it seems likely that the humans may not run just yet.”

  YeoWoo asked curiously, “Are you going to leave them there? Living happily in a house they bought by selling their child?”

  “Oh no,” said Athelas coolly. “I rather think not.”

  FOX IN THE HENHOUSE

  “Who are you really after?”

  Peregrine looked faintly flustered, and perhaps slightly furry about the ears. “What do you mean?”

  “There are humans out there in slave contracts through the DDP contract café,” YeoWoo said irritably. She and Athelas hadn’t had to force their way into Peregrine’s house that evening, which cut down on potential aggravation, but she didn’t particularly care for the feeling of being used as Peregrine’s pawn. Besides that, she had had to remain within a few metres of Athelas through the entirety of their walk due to the glamour he had put on them both to prevent badly-timed recognition. “And whatever they want the humans for, it involves them being able to do things humans aren’t supposed to be able to do. If you’re trying to find out exactly what someone’s doing with humans these days, you’d better tell me, because if I find you’ve also been lying about the information you promised me—!”

  “I didn’t lie!” Peregrine protested, though he grew furrier. He was obviously prepared for her to attack, because he took off the perfectly cut cream-coloured suitcoat he had been wearing and laid it over one of the low-backed bar stools. “The information is all in the café, and we can’t access it without going in and doing the job so thoroughly that we get the owners along with the stock.”

  “Then perhaps we should say,” suggested Athelas gently, “that you merely forgot to mention a few key facts about who suggested this particular investigation?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” Peregrine said peevishly. “They don’t want dangerous people knowing about it.”

  “Knowing about what, exact—Oh.” YeoWoo stopped. “It is a human you’re after. Particularly a human. Someone powerful had a human child out there who showed a bit of promise with things that humans don’t usually show promise with, and the child was taken by someone who thought they were worth having.”

  Peregrine drew in a breath and let it out again. “One of the behindkind I…liaise with…asked me to look into the disappearance of his child. He thought it was better for her to be with his ex-wife to keep her out of the sight of the sort of behindkind who like soft human children, but he thinks his ex-wife sold her.”

  “Then he should have a conversation with his ex-wife, since it’s illegal for humans to sell their children to fae.”

  “Illegal, yet not unknown,” murmured Athelas, as YeoWoo caught his eyes.

  “We haven’t been able to find the ex-wife,” Peregrine said.

  “I see,” said YeoWoo thoughtfully. “So you can’t prove it one way or another—and the human child isn’t at the café, or you would have found them already.”

  “We’re almost one hundred percent sure she’s not there,” Peregrine said, grimacing slightly. “But we can’t risk losing the entire operation, or the information we could get. He wants the café taken down completely, with no chance to spring up again. So do I.”

  “You can tell whoever your VIB is that there’s some good news, then,” YeoWoo said. “I’ve already found one human, and she told me about a couple of others I was able to talk to. Are you still going to take down the café if I find the human you’re after?”

  “Of course!” Peregrine’s head jerked back; he was offended. “It’s not just about the one girl. These type of contract houses are a disgusting blot on behindkind society and need to be stamped out. Once we start taking a hard line with one, the rest will start to fall into line.”

  “They might,” YeoWoo said. “Or you might start a street war. What if we find the human at the café while I’m investigating? Will that be enough for you to go in straight away?”

  “There’s still the matter of the records we need—”

  “The records are in a human computerised system,” YeoWoo told him. “They’ve got someone who knows how to work it all as well as add a few more familiar touches to the system with Between. So long as you’ve got someone who knows about human computers with you and you know where to go, you’ll have access to the records as well.”

  He stared at her. “Are you sure?”

  “Extremely,” said YeoWoo, who was at least eighty percent sure. “Will that be enough?”

  “If she’s in the café, yes,” said Peregrine. “You tell me that you have eyes on her, and I’ll have a group there within half an hour to sweep through and secure all records and staff before any of them can be done away with. They won’t be able to wriggle their way out of the consequences.”

  YeoWoo gazed at him for a very long time, with an almost fixed grin on her face. “Isn’t it just like behindkind?” she said at last. “You’re never too worried about taking advantage when and where you can, until you take advantage of someone who has someone bigger behind them. The café thinks they’re a pretty big fish—I doubt they thought a human was enough to worry about.”

  “I’m doing my best,” Peregrine said, bristling. “I can only do so much as a liaison between worlds, you know! And I can’t just go arresting people for no reason, either!”

  YeoWoo levelled a long, narrow-eyed look at him and kept her eyes on him for long enough that he began to fidget. “I don’t like you,” she said.

  Peregrine bristled again. “You don’t have to like me,” he said. “I’m your elder. And if it comes to that, you should be treating me with more respect.”

  “That’s your system,” YeoWoo said. “I’m not part of it. I didn’t agree to the terms, and I don’t think the cost is worth it. And if you’re going to play the respect your elder game, I’d like you to explain why it only works one way. You expect respect and politeness because you’re the great protecting elder, but from all that I can see, you’re not doing as much protecting as you are exploiting.”

  “How dare you!” Peregrine said, his head jerking back and lifting his chin. “I protect everyone under my authority, and all I ask in return is acknowledgement!”

  “Really?” Perhaps he could feel the scorn in her voice that she couldn’t hide. Willing to draw blood, YeoWoo said, “Let’s put it this way, then: you moved that body the other week. Why?”

  Peregrine stared at her, flustered; he managed to say, “What body?”

  She threw him a withering look that made his cheeks darken with blood. “You moved the first body that got me into that mess with SuYeol and HimChan.”

  “One suspects, in fact,” said Athelas, having drifted away toward the windows, “that it was done deliberately in order to implicate a certain gumiho of both of our acquaintance.”

  YeoWoo found herself grinning again—a sour, amused grin. Athelas might say that he had no idea of helping her—he said something of the kind so often, in fact, that she wondered if he was telling her, or himself—but he certainly managed to shift things along with the very slightest effort when he so chose. He was patently uninterested in listening to anything that Peregrine and YeoWoo might have to say to each other, and had moved away to indicate as much, but he hadn’t been able to help himself needling Peregrine into saying something useful to her, regardless.

  How many times, wondered YeoWoo, who knew a little something of how the Behind world worked, had he had cause to regret that impulse before he had become the twisted mass of regret, bitterness, amorality, and blood that he was?

  Somewhere inside him, far beneath the part of him that YeoWoo despised, Athelas still had a faint desire to help. Apparently it had never been quite thrashed out of him despite what he might say.

  Peregrine, his eyes flicking back and forth between Athelas and YeoWoo, seemed not to know which one of them to address with his answer. Or, thought YeoWoo, more cynically, he was simply trying to take as much time to think about it before he had to enunciate his answer.

  “You wanted to implicate me in the murder,” she said, before he could think of a better answer. “We know that. You wanted to make sure that the enforcers came to see me, and you probably thought they’d even arrest me. You thought I’d come to you, didn’t you?”

  “I gave you the benefit of the doubt,” he said bitterly. “If you’d come straight to me to ask for help, I would have known that you were ready to be redeemed. You would have proved that you were ready to join the community and make amends for all the blood you’ve shed. You could have helped so many people since the time you turned, but all you wanted was revenge; I wanted to know that you were a different person before I helped you with anything.”

  “You mean you were trying to force me to be that person,” YeoWoo muttered. “Why would I come to you?”

  Peregrine’s dark eyes glittered with anger. “There are advantages to working with me, you know.”

  YeoWoo gave a short, humourless laugh. “Ones like being implicated in a murder I didn’t commit?”

  “Why him?” Peregrine asked, as if he couldn’t help himself. He tilted his chin toward Athelas, who was still by the window as if in his own world and entirely uninterested in anything but the view. “Why go to someone like the Steward? You’re already stained with your past—why pollute yourself any further? I gave you the chance to redeem yourself in the eyes of the community here; I gave you the protection of my own name—”

  “Only if I managed to get myself out of the mess you put me in,” YeoWoo interrupted. “I don’t think “stained by your past” is something you can talk too loudly about, either; your community was the one that killed my family and friends one by one until I did something about it.”

  “Regardless of what you think about the powers that be, they are the powers that be, and you don’t have the right to take the law into your own hands.”

  “Agree to disagree,” said YeoWoo firmly.

  “You can’t agree to disagree with the law!” said Peregrine, appalled.

  “I’m not going to be taken in and reformed,” YeoWoo said, with the taste of blood between her teeth. “And once this job is over and we both have everything we want, there won’t be any reason for us to see each other again. I’m not going to join your self-righteous little gang of foxes so that I can make my killing sanctioned work.”

  She turned on her heel and marched back toward the door—where, unaccountably, Athelas was already lingering as if he had predicted the direction of the conversation—while Peregrine was still saying hastily behind her, “You can’t walk away from family!”

  YeoWoo stepped out of the house and then the shoe shop outside with something of a snap to her walk. It irked her immensely that there could be someone who perceived her in very nearly the same way that she perceived Athelas: twisted, corrupted, and lacking any kind of moral compass that mattered. All that she had ever done, she had done for love—she had, moreover, brought punishment to a set of people who had never before had to answer for their crimes; she had brought justice to a set of people who had never before had anyone to advocate for them.

  She had never killed scores of people and used scores more for her own ends while she wrought her own designs on the world, and even if her vendetta against the gumiho of the day could have been considered a search for revenge, she had only ever burned down those who had harmed herself and her family. She hadn’t attacked innocents and used them as pieces in her game.

  YeoWoo had the sudden, gut-wrenching memory of blood and fine fabric beneath her hands, and a pair of brown eyes gazing up at her, hazy with pain, while a hand grasped her sleeve. A voice saying, “Kill me, nuna. I don’t want to live anyway. Take my blood and hers from them.”

  She pushed it away immediately, her stride lengthening, and was forced in a few moments to slow her usual step to avoid outstripping the strolling Athelas, who hadn’t yet spoken a word since they left Peregrine’s airy house and was once more joined to her by the irritating link of a glamour.

  YeoWoo didn’t like much about her current situation, but she liked walking beside a silent and close-faced Athelas even less than she liked the rest of it. In the shifting lights of evening, Athelas was looking remarkably, worryingly, thoughtful; and even if that was something she would rather think about than old memories, YeoWoo was aware of a twitch of discomfort.

  “You’d better not be thinking what it looks like you’re thinking,” she said forthrightly, to help quell that discomfort—and perhaps to chase away lingering ghosts.

  “Do enlighten me!”

  “You’re thinking that the easiest thing would be to break in and fetch Harrow out tonight without considering anything else.”

  “I object to that characterisation,” Athelas said smoothly. “And if I were thinking so, I would be thinking of a great many things besides. How to get in and out without being noticed, to begin with. We are, of course, going to the café tomorrow, so one of those issues is moot. One assumes that the exit will not be so simple, but I have heard that the purpose of working with a partner is to assist in situations like this.”

  YeoWoo sniffed out a dismissive breath. “Oh, so we’re partners now, are we? That’s very convenient.”

  “Indeed! As you so astutely pointed out, we did say that we would make use of each other.”

  “You don’t even know where in the building they’re keeping him,” YeoWoo said flatly. “And you don’t know what sort of security they have, either.”

  “I shouldn’t think they would worry about security for humans.”

  “Neither would I,” YeoWoo said. “But we already know that someone out there is looking for humans for a particular purpose. They’re also looking for humans who can do things humans shouldn’t be able to do, and I don’t think they’d be doing it if it wasn’t profitable for them. They’ll be looking after them very well.”

  “Yes,” said Athelas. “It’s all very interesting. I would have said that the most useful thing about humans is their rather reprehensible pack instinct, but I must also acknowledge that some of them have as-yet untapped depths when it comes to Between and Behind. They also have the merit of being very close to unnoticeable; no behindkind thinks that a human will be able to hurt them.”

  “Yes, I heard that had given you some trouble,” YeoWoo said, very slightly malicious.

  The faint curl of Athelas’ lips acknowledged a hit, but when he spoke, it was on the subject of her first remark. “Never fear, my dear: I do not, in fact, intend to raze the café to the ground and heroically make off with one small human boy. There is a great deal of work to be done before such a step is taken; I am, alas, very well aware of how quickly more valuable contracts are squirrelled away once the wrong authorities begin to take notice of certain fronts of the contract trade.”

  YeoWoo nodded, and said more to herself than to him, “The biggest problem for both of us is trying to make sure we hit the place at exactly the right time and in the right place to make sure that we stop that from happening.”

  “Perhaps that will be a problem later,” Athelas said ruminatively, “but I imagine that our biggest conundrum tonight is likely to be whether or not we should tell Camellia all that we have learned. It occurs to me that time will solve most of our other issues, providing we are not caught at work. I am not, for instance, preparing to bear down on the café at the present moment.”

  YeoWoo frowned. She hadn’t thought of that, but now that she did, she was quite certain that Camellia would be even more likely than Athelas to immediately set off to the café—or to demand that the two of them do so.

  “Indeed,” Athelas said, and she fancied his tone was very slightly malicious. “A problem, is it not?”

  “We can’t go in tomorrow,” YeoWoo said seriously. “Not for blood, at any rate. If we go in tomorrow and sack the place, neither of us will get what we want—and Camellia probably won’t, either.”

  “I agree,” he said. “Therefore, we will tell Camellia very little. We have our next lead, but it is by no means solid—and we have decided to work together. No doubt a judicious and useful circumstance for the both of us.”

  YeoWoo slid a narrowed look at him. She was quite sure that he would announce as much to Camellia himself—most likely suggesting that he had, out of the goodness of his own heart, decided to aid YeoWoo. She had no intention of deceiving Camellia (or of helping Athelas to deceive her for his own undoubtedly untoward motives) but it would be nice for Camellia to know that YeoWoo was, in fact, helping to find Harrow.

  She decided to say nothing. She could always make sure she said something later, if Athelas was too free with the truth when he talked to Camellia.

  Athelas, as if mulling over his thoughts as he spoke, said slowly, “I think the elder will not be very concerned about the boy when it comes to a raid.”

  “You don’t have to go with Peregrine,” YeoWoo pointed out. “So long as you know where to go when it happens, you can still keep him safe yourself.”

  “Then shall we agree that my focus will remain on the boy, although we are ostensibly working together?”

  “Of course,” YeoWoo said, irritated. “I’ve been working it by myself until now. I don’t need your help.”

  Athelas smiled faintly. “So it would appear. Now that you have two focuses, what will you do?”

  “Outside, I’ll keep looking for the human girl,” YeoWoo said. “Go back to the couple of humans that I know came from the DDP and see if any of them can talk a bit more now that they’re under new contracts. Inside, I’ll go after the sea-nymph now that I know where she is; I’d like to keep her as a backup if anything goes wrong later. What about you? How will you find out where the boy is? Seduce the den mother?”