“That could cause a few problems.”

  “I know,” said YeoWoo roughly. “I’ll get it back from him. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “It was a good idea.”

  “At least that was something good I did,” YeoWoo said, more to herself than Camellia, and went back to her rice puffs.

  “You know I try not to stick my nose into the business of the people who live in the house,” Camellia said, after a slight pause.

  This startled YeoWoo enough to say, “No, you don’t. You do it all the time.”

  The ready laugh sprang to Camellia’s dark eyes, and her plum-coloured lips curved. “It’s no use having this nose if I don’t use it,” she said, tracing an exaggerated version of it in the air along her profile. “All right, but I usually try not to interfere.”

  YeoWoo thought about that for a little while before she said, “You usually egg us on to interfere with each other instead.”

  “Exactly,” said Camellia, briskly taking up the boiling jug and pouring water over the tea leaves in a strainer with curling handles. “And I always want to know what’s going on. That’s what happens when you’re very nearly housebound.”

  “You went out the other night.”

  “Yes,” Camellia agreed, setting down the jug. The steam rose in a multi-coloured stream of weightless particles, scenting the air, but even that familiar scent made YeoWoo feel ill. “But that was only dire necessity. Things seemed to go off a lot more quickly than you told me they would.”

  “Everything went off differently than I thought it would,” said YeoWoo quietly. “We barely got what we needed, and some of the contracts were already gone when we were able to check the rosters.”

  “But that’s not what’s bothering you,” Camellia prompted. “Then I suppose it’s the merman you told me about.”

  “I told him I’d take responsibility for him,” YeoWoo said, accepting a cup of tea from Camellia and finding that it was a robust vanilla rooibos that seemed to have no other business than to hearten her. She took one sip and set it down. She didn’t deserve to be heartened. “But I had to help Peregrine get to the computers before the café staff could get rid of them. By the time I got to his room, the merman was gone. There wasn’t much blood, but there was some.”

  “I see,” Camellia said. “You think he’s dead, then?”

  YeoWoo gripped her lower lip between her teeth, at a loss to explain the awful, enormous confusion of what she felt. “No,” she said. “Maybe. That’s not the important thing.”

  “Your interests and his didn’t align,” said Camellia, leaning into the kitchen counter and resting her arms on the cool marble. “And you had to choose between getting what you wanted and doing what you thought was right.”

  “That’s closer to it, I suppose,” YeoWoo said, looking down into the shifting surface of the tea at her changing reflection. Bitterly, she added, “The girl was supposed to arrive about two hours later; if everyone had been on time, we would have been able to do everything all at once.”

  There was a brief silence before YeoWoo broke it to add, almost angrily, “No, it’s not her fault. I told the merman I’d look after him, and I left him to…whatever happened. It was necessary, but…”

  “Perhaps it’s the new insight to your own character that’s so unsettling,” Camellia said, unpleasantly accurate. “And if it shocks you, perhaps you should think about why it shocks you. We all have our own ideas of who and what we are, but I’ve found that it’s hard to know who you truly are until you’re faced with a very black-and-white decision that strips away every pretence or shade of grey.”

  “I couldn’t do both,” YeoWoo said, at last sipping her tea again. It did the same robustly cheering thing it had done earlier, and she put it down at once. “I couldn’t look after him and get the information I needed. If I’d had longer to think about it, maybe I would have done differently.”

  “Is it the fact that you did him wrong that bothers you, or the fact that you did him wrong while knowing it was wrong? Or is it that it feels familiar again?”

  YeoWoo stared up at her rather blindly, and couldn’t answer.

  “I didn’t come in to scold you,” Camellia said, her gaze dropping to the bracelets on her wrists, which cast golden-and-green enamel spangles across the benchtop. “By the way. I doubt my own decisions over the years would stand up to too much scrutiny.”

  “Oh,” said YeoWoo, straightening a little. So it hadn’t just been the house stirring; there was something happening. “What did you come in for?”

  “A furry gentleman is here to see you. I put him in the sitting room.”

  “Furry? Here in the house?”

  “He’s human at the moment,” Camellia said. “But I got the impression of fur and far too many tails. He also seems to be quite brushed and combed and has a very nice set of shoulders.”

  “Peregrine,” YeoWoo said angrily, standing up at once. “He’d better have a very good explanation for why he wouldn’t see me the last couple of days, or the fur is really going to fly.”

  “That might explain the way he keeps tugging at his collar,” said Camellia. “I doubt it will have done him any harm to wait, but he might be even more fidgety by the time you get in to see him. I’ll take the teacup, if you don’t mind.”

  YeoWoo, who had all but dashed for the door, stopped jerkily and returned the teacup to Camellia’s waiting hands. Then she swept through the door, bright and hot with anger, energised to have some other, easier emotion to deal with than the potent and all-too-familiar mix of shame, regret, and self-loathing.

  As she had guessed, it was Peregrine in the sitting room. He couldn’t have made himself more picturesque if he’d tried; he stood by the corner windows with his hands in the pockets of his navy-blue trousers, shoulders set in a tense line and head turned to gaze out one of the windows, presenting a sharp, clean jawline, and a straight nose.

  “You’ve got a lot of cheek!” YeoWoo snarled at him as she walked through the door.

  Peregrine twitched around, his torso moving backward awkwardly as though his first instinct was to step back, but he had been able to convince his feet not to do so. “Why are you angry at me?” he asked blankly.

  “It’s been three days since I got you everything you wanted,” YeoWoo spat. “Where have you been?”

  “You didn’t come to see me!”

  She threw him a look. “Were you at home?”

  Peregrine looked down. “No, but I would have come home if you’d asked me to!”

  “If you weren’t home, you could have come here on your way out,” she said. “You owe me information, and if that isn’t why you’ve come here…”

  “I came because I want to talk to you about the merman,” Peregrine said, his shoulders straightening. He looked as though he had decided that he was going to take charge of the conversation.

  “I don’t really care what you want to talk about,” YeoWoo said. “You promised me information, and I want it. And if you decide to start shutting me out of your house again, I’ll keep breaking in.”

  “You’re not allowed to break into my house,” said Peregrine, darkening slightly.

  YeoWoo said shortly, “Housebreaking isn’t something you ask permission for. Where is my information?”

  “I know what I promised, but the merman has disappeared and just now I need more information before I—”

  “You said you would have the information for me,” YeoWoo said thinly. “That was our agreement. I didn’t agree to keep one merman alive and well into the bargain: if you wanted that done, you should have told me.”

  The words felt raw and bloody in her throat. She hadn’t made any such agreement with Peregrine, that much was true—and as far as Peregrine was concerned, what she had not-quite-promised and failed to deliver to Marazul himself was not important.

  “He was our contact,” Peregrine said, beginning to run a frustrated hand through his hair and catching himself at the last moment. He shoved the hand back in his pocket. “Do you understand? He was the one who was feeding us information through his network so that the café couldn’t see what he was doing. He’d managed to work his way around the prohibitions in his contract by making a program that talked to us for him, so he didn’t trigger his bond; it was some sort of artificial intelligence. He’s the one who knows the name of the gumiho you’ve been looking for. If he’s dead, that’s the end of it.”

  YeoWoo stared at him dumbly, understanding in one sickening, breathtaking blow exactly how badly she had miscalculated, and exactly how far Marazul had stuck his neck out in order to help her. When she managed to gather her wits and her voice, she said through her teeth, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We didn’t know it was him until we reached his room, either. Amongst the agreements he was working on with you was the password to get into the locked parts of the computer system, and we found a small silver medal with a chain running through it. It was a pre-arranged signal so that we could find him amongst the contracts—he should have been wearing it.”

  YeoWoo’s heart sank a little further. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the pool of blood by the table,” Peregrine said, looking away. The lines that deepened on his forehead made YeoWoo wonder if he felt the same kind of shame and failure that she did. He added, “I would have kept him safe if I could; he wouldn’t tell me who he was, and I couldn’t get to him quickly enough.”

  YeoWoo’s faintly kindly feeling toward him vanished at once. Of course Peregrine wasn’t going to blame himself.

  “What about you?” she asked, and it was difficult to keep the accusing tone out of her voice. “Did you get all you needed out of the raid?”

  “Everything,” said Peregrine. “And very nearly everyone. Now that we’ve got Lee BoRa back and looking more like herself, we’ve got unassailable cause and a nearly perfect witness; her bond paperwork was whole and available for us on the computer in reception, along with everyone else’—”

  “The one that never worked properly,” YeoWoo said, still sick with all the things she should have seen, and sicker with how she should have acted—could have acted—to get everything she had wanted. If she had gone to save Marazul, she would have had him and all of the records for Peregrine; it wouldn’t have mattered if they had lost the computers in the server room.

  “Marazul must have been keeping it that way for us on purpose: as soon as our human used the password we found in his rooms, the entire computer unlocked. Even if we hadn’t got the computers in the server room, he had everything backed up onto that one and we would have had everything whole.”

  “He was always pretending to fix it,” YeoWoo said. She almost smiled: even knowing Marazul for as short a time as she had known him, it was exactly the kind of open sneakiness she would have expected from him. “What about the people? Did you get everyone in management?”

  There was a small sliver of hope; if all of the management had been found, it meant that Marazul hadn’t been taken. It would mean that he had disappeared of his own free will.

  Peregrine seemed to understand her. He said, “The den mother was the only one we didn’t get to—if she knows that Marazul was our man, he’s probably dead by now.”

  “How would she know?” YeoWoo said coldly; but that cold went right to her blood and bones. It was very possible that the den mother would by now have put two and two together to arrive at the conclusion that YeoWoo and Marazul had been collaborating. “All we know is that there was blood in his room—and that there wasn’t enough of it to mean death.”

  “We had a sighting of him in Daegu,” Peregrine said, offering a sharp-edged hope. “That’s why it took so long for me to come see you; I hoped to be able to bring him with me.”

  YeoWoo was surprised at how much the relief hurt as it stabbed through her. “He’s not dead,” she said. “All right. We just have to find him, then.”

  “I don’t have the resources for a sustained search,” pointed out Peregrine. “I only had the resources I had and the help of the enforcers because of who we were looking for. When it comes to cleaning up after the raid, there’s only so much I can do—I went as far as I went because of my promise to you.”

  YeoWoo stared at him in disbelief. “You used him to get what you wanted, and now you’re going to throw him away? Are you going to wait until you find him in a pile of garbage out on the streets? He was your informant!”

  “Then you should have looked after him yourself!” Peregrine snapped.

  YeoWoo shut her mouth, but her eyes must have spoken volumes, because Peregrine cleared his throat before he added, “The point is that he’s the one who knows about the gumiho you’re looking for. I thought you’d want to know, so I came to tell you.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” YeoWoo said, through her teeth. “And later, we’ll talk about the difference between information being kept in a computer within a contract establishment, and information that’s kept inside an informant’s head. How did Marazul find out? He’s not even from this part of the world—what would he know about the gumiho council or things that happened nearly a century ago?”

  “He’s apparently been a useful tool of several organisations here over the last two years,” Peregrine said. “We can’t even guess at how much he must know and what he might have discovered during his career.”

  “And you wanted him to keep being a useful tool for you afterward,” YeoWoo said, realising as she said it that it was the truth. “How did you expect to free him from his obligations to the café?”

  “If we got him back, he would be free by default of the café’s bad acting, and could take part in our case—along with any other cases he might like to assist us with.”

  YeoWoo stared at him without bothering to conceal her contempt. “What are you doing to find him?”

  “The usual,” Peregrine said stiffly. “And you can’t really say that I’ve thrown him away when I still have scent-trackers out after him. I’m sure we’ll find him at some stage.”

  “You’ll likely find him dead, if he really knows as much as you say he does,” YeoWoo said shortly. Double-crossing the contract café was one thing—double-crossing behindkind organisations was another. “He’ll never be a part of your case.”

  Peregrine’s chin grew mulish. “We’ll see about that. If he turns up, I think you’ll find that he’ll be happy enough for our protection.”

  “I’m not going to be a part of your ridiculous little group, either,” she told him. There was enough of her that felt raw and cut to want to hurt in turn. “I’ll find the merman myself, and as soon as I do, I’ll be on my own way again.”

  “We’ll see about that, too,” said Peregrine, and left the room.

  YeoWoo waited until the front door shut behind him before she wandered wearily back into the hallway, insensibly searching for warmth and sunlight. She passed through a patch of sunlight on her way toward the sunroom and heard the sound of voices from within. Harrow, above stairs, was probably sleeping again; YeoWoo could smell his faintly sweaty scent as he fought demons—or perhaps ran from them—in his sleep. Camellia and Athelas must be the ones in the sunroom.

  She caught the scent of tea—a sharp, slightly bitter brew of yuja cha—as she entered. That was more to her current mindset than the earlier vanilla rooibois had been.

  “Harrow’s family has disappeared again,” said Camellia as YeoWoo entered, pouring out. Her eyes were on the stream of tea that flowed into Athelas’ teacup, but the words were undoubtedly directed at him.

  “So I understand,” said Athelas, accepting the cup by its saucer and smiling faintly at the small, mugwort-coloured rice cake that wedged warmly between the side of the teacup and its saucer. He knew, thought YeoWoo, with a dull kind of amusement as she crossed the room and sat down opposite him, exactly what had happened to Harrow’s family. “I should imagine that they won’t be seen for some years yet. At least seven, I would be prepared to guess.”

  “I see,” Camellia said. She passed a cup of tea to YeoWoo, who clasped it between her hands, then she perched lightly on the far arm of the couch upon which Athelas sat. “Nothing illegal, surely? With the crack-downs lately…”

  “Perhaps not legal in spirit, but I assure you that it was legal to the very letter,” said Athelas.

  YeoWoo had been aware that the twisty old fae had been out and about over the last few days; she had thought that he was up to no good chasing leads on his precious wedding or chasing down the leads to be had from Peregrine. Apparently, she had misjudged him.

  “You terrified them into signing themselves over to a contract group,” she said. “And now they’ll get a taste of what they had planned for Harrow.”

  “Hardly that,” he protested smoothly. “They will, after all, be contracted with a reputable contract service: polite, law-abiding, and dealing only with humans who are aware of Between and Behind. They will receive nothing but seven years of hard labour, and perhaps a few life lessons.”

  “And the proceeds of the sale?” asked Camellia, reaching out a slender hand with sunny yellow nails that contrasted pleasingly with her dusky skin to pluck two more rice cakes from the plate there. She put them on Athelas’ saucer beside the other one, green, pink, and white side-by-side.

  Athelas regarded the rice cakes for a moment before he said, “Our youngest resident human will have something of a nest egg when he comes of age, I believe.”

  “I thought you would have killed them,” said YeoWoo, fetching her own rice cakes with a bubbling sense of discontent. She took the rest of the mugwort rice cakes so that Athelas wouldn’t be able to have them.

  “Indeed,” said Athelas calmly. “So did I. How pleasant to reflect upon one’s moral betterment.”

  He smiled blandly at YeoWoo, who looked away and ate her rice cakes in silence.

  “I should, however, mention that we may have taken on more than we were aware of by rescuing the boy,” he added. “And by removing him from his family.”

  YeoWoo found that her first thought was, by rote, one of contempt, and with difficulty swallowed that response. She had no right to be contemptuous of Athelas.