Her stride turned into a run, but Athelas, who had caught a brief glimpse of a human girl in a ripped t-shirt, ripped jeans, and hair dyed purple just before she stepped through the façade of the café that was all a human should be able to see, knew at once what was happening.

  Somehow, and for some reason, the human girl YeoWoo had incited to arrive at the café as a catalyst to the raid, had arrived two and a half hours earlier than she ought to have arrived.

  Athelas broke into a swift, silent sprint and caught up with YeoWoo before she darted down the stairs toward the café, bringing her up short with one hand on her elbow.

  “My dear,” he said, “Peregrine and his enforcers will no doubt need to be informed before you rush into the place. I very much doubt they’ll appreciate you giving away the game so soon; if someone recognises the girl for who she is and ushers her out, we’ll take that into account going forward. Better to keep our edge of surprise.”

  YeoWoo threw off his hand. “The enforcers are already here. They came before us to stake out the place—they’ll have seen her going in, and they—there they go!”

  There was a swarm of gold at the outer façade of the café; Athelas briefly saw it as it must seem to the humans, as someone with a very great deal of power put that significant power toward a glamour that would cover any cracks in the camouflage already provided by the Between location of the café.

  “Good heavens!” he said. He hadn’t seen the enforcers—he hadn’t sensed them either. “I really must be getting old. Either that, or I need to choose my company a great deal more carefully; distraction is such an enervating state of affairs!”

  YeoWoo cast him a look of impatience and strode away down the stairs toward the café. Athelas followed, and they entered the café to a scene of absolute pandemonium: lines of enforcers pushed up against lines of café behindkind like a wave, breaking through here and there to stream in and upward. Other behindkind—staff and customers alike—tried to escape through the front in ones and twos and were collared in short order by enforcers manning the outer boundary.

  “It would seem,” said Athelas, “that the enforcers are gaining the upper hand! Where is Peregrine, do you think?”

  YeoWoo snarled at the nearest enforcer, who was straining to contain two behindkind desperate to escape the café, “Where is Peregrine?”

  “He’s going for the server room,” tossed the enforcer over his shoulder, panting as he pushed back against the frantic energy of the behindkind. “Central spoke, third floor. He was asking for you. He says if we don’t get up there in the next five minutes, we’re going to lose everything.”

  YeoWoo turned and effortlessly broke through the line of behindkind trying to keep any more enforcers out, trailing a few enforcers in her wake, and Athelas broke into a run again to keep up with her. He nearly lost her when they finally managed to push through the confusion spells on the hallway and found the centre of the café but caught up again just as she found the stairwell.

  “A moment, my dear,” he said.

  “There’s no time for moments,” YeoWoo said, casting a swift glance around. “We need to keep going upward if we’re going to break through the guards around the server room in time. You heard them.”

  “Peregrine is no doubt capable of tearing through a few dozen behindkind with the enforcers at his disposal,” Athelas reminded her. “Others in the café are less likely to have the wherewithal to take advantage of the situation.”

  She stared at him almost uncomprehending, then said sharply, “Harrow. You’re going to get the boy now.”

  “Even so,” agreed Athelas.

  He threw a look down the corridor behind them; he could see nothing, but he heard the distant shouts and doors slamming that heralded the approach of café staff—scrambling through what halls they might, he rather thought, to gather up and sneak out as many top tier contracts as they could. YeoWoo’s gaze followed his: they saw a panoply of behindkind pass by the mouth of the corridor, pushing ahead of them a group of iron-chained contracts and carrying others with them, a rear-guard of sword-wielding fae behind them.

  The first of those, however, had been the den sister, her face hard and almost blank, dragging a resisting contract along behind her. Where the den mother was, Athelas could only guess.

  “The merman seems likely to have company very soon,” he said to YeoWoo. “Wherever it is he has hidden himself. If you wish to find him, I fancy the elder is likely to get into the server room with or without you.”

  YeoWoo’s feet shifted; then she took a step back from him, and toward the direction of the stairwell and the server room. “I’m not going to risk everything on that,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “I will not,” Athelas reminded her, “have time to find the merman as well as the boy.”

  “He’ll still be here when we finish!” YeoWoo said, almost pleadingly. It was as though she was asking him, not telling him. “The rest of the enforcers will break through any moment! You can’t tell me that you don’t want to see their paperwork for the other humans!”

  “I do indeed,” said Athelas, smiling faintly.

  He could almost taste the lilies; the scent of them tangibly mixed with the bitter taste of resignation—or perhaps self-loathing—that clung to the inside of his mouth. There had been no Camellia for him when he found himself enclosed in white walls, but there would be one for Harrow, should he succeed today. The contract papers could wait just a little longer—or, if YeoWoo did her work well enough, would still be waiting for him when he did what he had to do.

  He added, “In fact, I fancy the information will be of great importance to me, so do please ensure that you succeed in preserving all of the information, if go you must. I have a human boy to rescue from the consequences of our folly.”

  He turned and strode down the hallway in the opposite direction before he could allow himself to be persuaded otherwise, and heard behind him the small, explosive sound of frustration that burst from YeoWoo at his departure.

  She wasted no more time, just as he had expected; he had known that she was no Pet. He heard her sweep around and run for the stairwell, her footsteps echoing. And with a mixture of regret and awful familiarity in his heart, Athelas continued on his way.

  Athelas was neither superstitious nor easily influenced—he was, however, by experience imbued with a very great appreciation for the sort of things human children could do when they were well enough connected with Between to start using it without realising what they were doing.

  Accordingly, in order to find his way to the human section of the contract dormitories once again, he followed exactly the route he had seen the dark, nightmare shadow take the first time he had wandered the hallways. He might perhaps have seen the shadow itself if he had been willing to look more closely at the dark shadows and memories that bubbled in his periphery and left him too tight in the chest, unwilling to look in any one direction for too long.

  There was the faintest flicker of darkness disappearing into the door when he stopped in front of it, and this time Athelas put his open palm against the cool surface, turning his ear toward it and pressing forward to hear any sound from within.

  “Harrow!” he said, swift and authoritative.

  There was no sound from within, but at the end of the hallway there was a sudden scuffle and rush of feet, as if someone had heard him call and knew exactly where he was. Athelas turned his head the other way, and saw the expressionless, dark-eyed face of the den sister, who was also a figure in black against the white walls, very nearly a nightmare herself.

  So he had been correct: Harrow was indeed very valuable to the right person, if the den sister herself had come back to fetch him.

  “Get away from there!” she said sharply.

  “I think not,” said Athelas. “You have a key, I take it?”

  A crescendoing roar built from the hallways around them, a vast scrum of enforcers and behindkind fighting and milling past the end of the corridor, and in the surging noise, the den sister drew a sharp, oil-tipped blade.

  Poison, thought Athelas, darkly amused.

  He shifted his feet as she darted forward to stab him in the ribs, turning lightly and grasping her wrist. He twisted that wrist, ruthlessly and effectively, and killed the sister more swiftly and gently than she deserved with a knife up and through the ribs to her heart.

  He wasn’t sure whether that was a right or a wrong decision, either; it seemed fitting, since he had made a bargain with Harrow to do him good for his own reasons, that Athelas should give up one or two points to make sure that the job was done. Had he taken the kind of time that it would have pleased him to take over someone who carried the stink of lilies so clearly in their very skin, he would have lost his chance to get to Harrow and carry him off.

  Athelas searched the den sister’s pockets and found the key he had been sure he would find: it was a single key, and coated with both magic and Between. It would open any door in the café, he was sure.

  It opened the door beside him, at any rate. Athelas, aware of the growing pandemonium along the halls and that it would overflow into this hallway before long, stepped swiftly inside the room and looked around sharply.

  A familiar, crumpled little body lay on the fold-out bed that was the only piece of furniture in the room, just a few steps away from the door. Athelas crossed the room in those few steps and bent over the body, his gaze resting on the boy’s chest, which rose and fell very slightly.

  “Harrow,” he said softly.

  Harrow’s eyes opened, but the blackness of them was an empty blackness, shiny and lacking any kind of understanding. Athelas saw himself reflected back in their glossiness, and shook the boy roughly by the shoulders, disturbing the image.

  “On your feet!” he said, with the scent of lilies suddenly heavy in his nostrils once again. “No one will rescue you—on your feet and shift for yourself!”

  The boy stared up at him, blank and unresponsive. Athelas would have wagered significantly that Harrow didn’t really see him—or that the boy thought he still dreamed. He allowed a trickle of magic to seep down his fingers and once more grasped Harrow by the shoulders, and this time, the effect was electric. Harrow seized up and began to shake uncontrollably, his eyes still wildly unreachable, until he was thrashing without direction or consciousness. Athelas’ breath hissed through his teeth, and he gripped the boy tighter, this time using his inborn talent for healing instead of simply magic. The thrashing ceased, but the boy continued to shake uncontrollably, and Athelas’ tie, weighed down with the tie pin, fell forward and hit Harrow lightly on the nose.

  Perhaps the cold touch of enamel did the trick—perhaps Harrow, as YeoWoo had known he would, recognised the pin—but whatever the reason, those black eyes finally focused, and Harrow looked directly into his eyes.

  “There you are,” said Athelas, and the scent of flowers seemed to fade away for a brief moment, though there was still sweat on his brow. Perhaps it was that brief respite that brought him back to a calmer frame of mind; he said with all of his usual cool politeness, “I am very much afraid that you will have to walk: there will be need for me to use my hands before very much longer.”

  “I can walk,” said Harrow slowly and obediently, but as soon as he got his feet beneath him and was away from the frame of the bed, his legs folded beneath him.

  Athelas caught him beneath the arms and then with one arm beneath the knees, lifting the boy bodily. The child weighed very little, though his legs dangled significantly; the danger would be in how much space he took up, not the extra weight he put on Athelas.

  “Thank you,” said Harrow, his voice small and panting from Athelas’ chest.

  “I refuse to be thanked,” Athelas said, sharp and cold with the sudden, unpleasant familiarity of it all. Trust and death were far too often allied for his taste, and he was, at this moment, almost desperate for Harrow to live. “I do this for my own reasons entirely, and I shall reap the rewards without concern for you.”

  “Oh yes,” Harrow said, slurring a little bit. He tucked his head into Athelas’ lapel, his black hair catching in the tie pin. He moved his head restlessly and managed to say, “I forgot about that,” before he ceased to move.

  “How extremely inconvenient,” said Athelas to himself, feeling the weakness of his own legs as perfumed air seemed to seep into every pore.

  He knew exactly how little use it would be to hope for YeoWoo’s appearance—no doubt she was tearing her way through whatever behindkind stood between herself and the server room, where she hoped to find the information she had searched for over the last decades—but he couldn’t help wishing for it, regardless.

  He had seen the determination in her face and the almost savage disregard for anything else but her own ends in her eyes; he doubted that any promise she had made to the merman would be of help to him in this desperate grasping for what was so close to her. YeoWoo would come back for the merman, but only after she had done what she came to do. The same was true for Athelas himself; he didn’t expect to see YeoWoo until well after the dust settled.

  It was a shame, but he wouldn’t be able to help the merman, either—it would stand to be seen if he could get himself and Harrow both out whole. He could either carry the boy or fight for their lives; he didn’t like his chances of doing both at the same time. He could certainly not take the risk of venturing deeper into the DDP, where there would be more behindkind to account for.

  Athelas approached the door softly; as softly, he stole from the room when it was apparent that no one was around to see him. He was barely out of the room, however, when three behindkind in various states of their true appearance scrambled around the corner, all human limbs and squirrel ears and tufts of fur in odd places.

  One of them swore, one chittered nervously, and the third charged forward, the whites of his eyes surmounting his irises in two pale half-moons. Athelas allowed Harrow’s legs to drop and dangled the boy close to him, a long, limp weight, his left-hand blade sweeping down and out of his sleeve to fall into his grasp with solid familiarity.

  He met the careless, terrified rush of the first behindkind with that blade, turning his shoulder toward the charge and Harrow away from it. The behindkind took the knife deep in his torso; it slipped through his ribs and exited his back in the same fashion as he sagged against Athelas’ left shoulder. The other two behindkind chittered together and then ran back the way they had come as Athelas disengaged his knife, shoving the corpse away from him with his shoulder. He caught the tangerine movement of danger slightly behind and to his left, and swept around, blade foremost, making a pivot point of the weight of Harrow on his right leg.

  His sword met the throat of the new attacker, and there was Camellia, her elegant, dusky neck slashed with blue, standing perfectly still before him, her arms out and her palms slightly forward, wordlessly protesting her harmlessness.

  Her mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out; blood dripped down onto the blousy top of her orange summer dress and sank deeply into it.

  It took Athelas one buzzing, eternal moment to remember that the blood on that dusky skin was blue, and that Camellia was human. He had not slashed her throat—the blood had caught her across the throat in a spray as his knife came around to bear.

  “You should,” he said to her mechanically, the knifepoint dropping a few inches, “have brought your teapot.”

  “So I see,” she said at last, and Athelas allowed his knife to drop altogether just as she also relaxed her arms to her sides. Then there was another scramble of movement at the end of the hallway—this one more concentrated and sustained, as if many behindkind were gathering—and she said sharply, “Give him to me!”

  Athelas slid the boy into her arms, scenting bergamot and orange in his proximity, and that scent chased away the still-faintly-lingering taste of lilies for another, too-brief moment. With the momentary respite came a warm pressure around his forearm; Camellia briefly touched his arm and then withdrew the warmth.

  Perhaps it was a thank-you—perhaps she had seen that his stance was not quite steady. Certainly she couldn’t see what he saw along the white stretch of hallway that seemed to grow longer and longer. She couldn’t know that the space was clouded with spectres that seemed to have become as real as flesh to Athelas, whose ears rang with screams, pleas, and the soft, sodden sound of the hilt of a knife hitting flesh just parted by its blade.

  “The walls…will stop most attackers from getting around me,” he said over his shoulder, the words heavy and difficult. “Don’t keep too close. Don’t fall behind.”

  “Understood,” she said crisply. “I’m behind you.”

  Athelas moved up the hallway, his feet remembering the way out without any conscious help, acutely aware of the delicate, fluttering movement of life behind him, and the swarming of bloody shadow all around him. Neither the behindkind nearing the turning into their corridor nor the shadows around could be allowed to touch the warmth behind him; but as his world tilted at the edges and closed in on him, Athelas felt the same old piercing despair and futility. No matter what he did, he couldn’t protect Camellia and Harrow. And when the behindkind caught up with them, their deaths would be slow and painful. There would be blood and death and never-ending captivity.

  Athelas shook his head to clear his vision and focused on his feet, then on the milling behindkind who boiled around the corner of the corridor ahead just as he and his charges reached the t-piece where they could turn right.

  “Go ahead,” he said to Camellia, ushering her past himself and taking up the rear just as a couple of bidulgui led the scattered group toward the turning, squawking in triumph.

  His first lunge took off the head of the foremost bidulgui, and terrified the other into a hoarse, squawking shriek that ended in a bubbling of sound as Athelas’ right hand plunged his second knife into its left lung. He took two swift steps backward, clearing the bodies to leave them as stumbling block to the next comers rather than to himself, and the rest of the rabble surged as one.