“Sorry,” murmured Harrow. He seemed to have shrunk in on himself a little; a small, black-haired turtle, he was all shoulders and legs. “I forgot the time.”

  He had probably spent the last half hour trying to decide whether to mention the time or not, YeoWoo thought. Or trying to figure out how to say he had to leave. It wasn’t like Camellia not to notice that—YeoWoo might think of this sort of thing afterward, when it was too late, but she didn’t usually notice at the time. It was Camellia’s job to do that, and YeoWoo wondered why she had failed this time.

  The curiosity made her linger a little longer in front of the gate, prompting a faintly questioning look from Athelas and a decidedly belligerent look from the human who had grabbed Harrow.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “We’re friends,” Athelas said mildly. “We were coming in this direction, so we walked him home.”

  “He doesn’t need to bother people into walking him home,” said the man. The grip he had around Harrow’s arm was white-fingered and fierce. “He knows better than that. Get inside, you.”

  YeoWoo felt the sigh of irritation that slipped out of her too late. “Listen,” she said. “If the kid comes out tomorrow with bruises on him, I’ll be back to ask questions.”

  “I don’t hit kids,” said the man flatly, without releasing Harrow. “And you can’t prove that I do. If you try to harass me, I’ll call the police.”

  He wasn’t frightened, and that irritated YeoWoo. She allowed herself to change very slightly—teeth elongating, air prickling around her skin, her eyes silvering. The man wouldn’t be able to quantify the threat, but he should certainly feel it.

  “Make sure you remember that,” she said, through her teeth. “Because if I see a single bruise on him, you and I are going to have a conversation about how bruising works.”

  The man, as if electrified, stared up at her. Then he repeated huskily, “I don’t hit kids,” and jerked himself and Harrow back through the gate, slamming it.

  Whatever had been the truth of the statement earlier, YeoWoo was inclined to think that the man would now think twice before he laid a hand on Harrow—or before he allowed anyone else to do so. She was rather surprised that Camellia hadn’t done anything of this sort—or asked her to do anything of this sort—earlier. Unlike YeoWoo and Athelas, she wasn’t the sort to think that anyone was broken beyond repair, even if they were.

  YeoWoo gave a small, derisive sniff of contempt and walked on. She fancied that Athelas smiled a little as he walked at her side, and that was very nearly as irritating as the human’s lack of fear had been earlier.

  “What?” she snapped at him, as they turned into the next street.

  “Your dedication to the protection of humans is really very impressive.”

  “I do what I can, where I can,” she said shortly. “I don’t have time to run after humans, but if something happens in front of me there’s usually something I can do.”

  She saw the slow, meditative look back that Athelas turned over his shoulder as they climbed a hill that gave them a new vantage of the street they’d just left, but it was still a disagreeable surprise when he said, “I rather think you might have done more harm than good, my dear.”

  “I did what I could,” she said dismissively. She had had to speak up, but of course it had been a good thing to do.

  “Did you?” There was an unpleasantly thoughtful sound to his voice. “I rather thought you did what made you feel better.”

  “There’s an intersection,” snapped YeoWoo, and led the way toward the station.

  By the time they arrived in Seongsu, YeoWoo was feeling irritated and squashed by the sheer number of people in the subway. None of them had touched her—YeoWoo still managed to glare away any prospective lingerers or overly familiar subway companions—but her gumiho self felt compressed and oppressed despite that.

  “We might,” pointed out Athelas, annoyingly close to her ear, “have arrived rather more quickly via Between.”

  “Don’t murmur in my ear,” snapped YeoWoo, and swept toward Exit 5 instead of 2, as she would normally have done. She didn’t look behind her, because she was sure that he was wearing that irritatingly amused, tiny smile that often hid in the corners of his eyes as much as the corners of his mouth, and she didn’t want to see it.

  Athelas was serious by the time they were down at street level, however; he looked around curiously at the underside of the subway above them as they crossed the road, the burling chaos of noise that was traffic flow bouncing off the pillars and the tarmac and flowing around him without seeming to touch him. And before YeoWoo stepped up onto the footpath at the side of the small shoe shop that was usually a front for Peregrine’s door, he was already gazing at the store.

  “Dear me,” he said thoughtfully. “What an interesting puzzle!”

  “We need to get into the shop first,” YeoWoo said. “And it won’t be easy, even if he wasn’t expecting me to bring reinforcements. Don’t move too far away from the shop front or he’ll be able to see you. It’s why I came out this exit instead of number 2.”

  “Ah,” said Athelas. “I believe I see why you required two for this job.”

  “Yes, I thought you would,” YeoWoo said. She wasn’t displeased: Athelas might be annoyingly quick on the uptake, but he was also usefully quick when she didn’t feel like explaining what needed to be done.

  In this case, what needed to be done was for one person to hold the door of the shoe shop still while the other person searched for the actual entrance—the real way in that wasn’t necessarily the door. The reason she hadn’t been able to enter the shoe shop earlier was that someone had detached the door from the entrance, and while that door moved about the front of the shop between one blink and the next, the entrance was impossible to use. Even had she managed to catch the door and open it, unless she managed to open it at exactly the right time, it wouldn’t have been aligned with the entrance of the shop.

  Between was, at times like these, very irritating.

  “If you get the door, I’ll get the entrance,” she told Athelas, who merely nodded and caught with surprising swiftness at the shifting door.

  It took him a few attempts to lay hands on the door, and another one after that to keep his hold on it, and YeoWoo was aware of it wriggling in her peripheral as she felt between the layers of the shop front for the empty space that was the entrance. She would never have been able to do both things at once, but it was a comfort to know, seeing Athelas struggle to keep hold of a door that was determined to wriggle away from him, that the old fae wouldn’t have been able to do it alone, either.

  “Rather more swiftly, perhaps, my dear?” suggested that old fae. He wasn’t quite panting, but he wasn’t breathing easily, either.

  It would have been fun to make him struggle, but YeoWoo had someone else to irritate today. She seized on the entrance as it yawned before her suddenly and twitched it back toward Athelas in one movement.

  For a brief moment, both door and entrance aligned, and YeoWoo snatched the door open before they could separate again. She whisked herself into the small shop, closely followed by Athelas, and as the door closed behind them, it separated once again from the entrance. The shop front became cloudy and then completely opaque, while the reflected street openings with their small, dark pubs disappeared from sight in a moment.

  YeoWoo found that a tiny corner of her skirts, pinching around Athelas’ legs, had been caught in the door. She made a sound of annoyance, tugging at it, and Athelas moved away from the press against his legs.

  “I doubt that will come out,” he said, and strolled further into the shop.

  YeoWoo was aware. She grew a sharp-edged claw on her forefinger and sliced off the corner of fabric in a single, irritated slash, then followed Athelas. There was no inner door in sight this time, though there were still shoes—indoor slippers—up against the back wall.

  “The slippers seem to have something of Between to them,” Athelas suggested, gazing at the slippers that were nearest to the door.

  YeoWoo had already seen as much: it looked as though several people had used the shoe shop as a shoe-well to the main dwelling that housed Peregrine. Those slippers, used to walk Between and right through the cement pillars beyond the store, had probably left tracks through Between—and Between had certainly left its mark on them.

  “I knew I’d find something if I could get into the shop!” YeoWoo said in triumph. She kicked off her own shoes and stepped lightly into the smallest of the three pairs of slippers, feeling the cool refreshment of Between curl around her toes and up her ankles.

  “How very perspicacious of you,” murmured Athelas ironically. “I’m so glad you noticed.”

  “I saw them at once,” YeoWoo told him coldly. “I suppose we had the same idea, too.”

  Athelas, annoyingly, said, “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

  “You mean you’re not going to say until I tell you my idea,” YeoWoo said, with a short, dismissive hiss of air. “If we use the slippers, there will be a remembered track for us to follow through Between. The slippers and Between have probably imprinted on each other enough to guide us all the way to Peregrine’s house, even if he has closed the door from his side.”

  Athelas, who had already removed his own shoes, now stepped into another of the pairs of slippers. “Indeed,” he said mildly.

  YeoWoo gave another short sniff. He wasn’t going to admit that she had been correct, then. Instead, Athelas was running his hands over the door that wasn’t quite a door, his eyes flicking up and down along the length of one side of it as well; as YeoWoo watched, he reached out the toe of his slipper and tapped it lightly once against the door.

  Not quite against the door—his foot went beyond it.

  “Delightful,” said Athelas, and stepped quite through, his brown tweed back disappearing. A moment later, his head returned seamlessly through the white laminated wall, his brown curls limned with Between, for long enough for him to say, “I fancy it will be somewhat disorienting, my dear. Should you prefer to hold my hand?”

  YeoWoo sent him as withering a look as she was capable of and stepped through. There was the taste of a wilder than usual Between on her lips, and the mingled scents of cold cement, mossy water, and living greenery in her nostrils. Here, the world was more shadow than it was reality.

  In the usual kind of Between that seamlessly linked one part of Behind to another, or the human world to Behind, she should have been able to see what there was here that could be from the human or could be Behind.

  Instead, with Peregrine’s front door uncoupled from the storefront, Between simply stretched and made shadows in the dark underside of the human road surmounted by subway pillars. Those shadows stretched so massively from where the pylons met the ground that YeoWoo could have taken them as a path and walked right up the side of the pylon, following the smooth length of it right to the tapering point it made either above or beyond her. She had the impression that if she could continue to see the shadows as solid long enough to follow them to their end, she could walk the entire path safely.

  YeoWoo had a moment to realise coldly that she had not before been in this kind of Between, and to wonder if she really would need to humiliate herself so far as to reach for Athelas’ hand, before she saw the dusty, moonlight tracks of previously used slippers glimmering faintly in what could pass for the ground ahead of her.

  She tried not to look at that pseudo-ground too closely, because it so nearly resembled shadow that she thought she might fall through it to certain injury on the tarmac in the human world below. Instead, she followed the trail of footsteps itself, and saw with a slight sinking of her heart that they proceeded directly at the wildly distorted pillar ahead and then right up it as if the shadow really was the path it pretended to be.

  YeoWoo muttered to herself in annoyance and looked around for Athelas. There was another set of footsteps beside her, with a vague sort of shimmer to the air that could have been brown tweed or hessian flapping beneath the overpass, depending on how one looked at it. Fortunately, YeoWoo knew to look at it as if it was brown tweed, and as soon as she had seen him, Athelas seemed to shift sharply into focus, one brow raised with a questioning look at her.

  “It’s that way,” YeoWoo said flatly, tilting her chin toward the cement pillar that was becoming more of a road and less of a pillar the longer she focused on its centre instead of its edges.

  “How charmingly askew,” said Athelas, and strolled forward toward the sweeping concrete.

  YeoWoo kept pace at his side, looking directly at the centre of the pillar as she stepped onto it, and felt her feet meeting solid ground easily and solidly on it as she did so. Her tread followed exactly in the faintly glimmering footsteps, but more by habit of the slippers themselves than by her own efforts.

  She did the same all the way to the top—or perhaps the end—of the pillar that had become a road; by then it felt so familiar, and the slippers had assumed so much of their regular habit, that when they reached that top, YeoWoo stepped unhesitatingly onto the underside of the subway floor.

  “How decidedly unpleasant,” deplored Athelas, stepping easily onto the curving underside beside her as if born to be a bat. “I shall not look down.”

  “I don’t know what’s up and down anymore,” YeoWoo said beneath her breath. “What a ridiculous place to live!”

  “In his defence, it must be said that the idea is to keep out visitors like ourselves.”

  “If he wants to keep out visitors like us, he’s doing a bad job,” opined YeoWoo. “Is this the door, do you think?”

  Athelas reached out a hand to the angled shadow thrown by fluorescent lighting mounted on the concrete ahead of them, and seemed to find something solid to grasp. “Indeed,” he said; and, curling his fingers around something in that shadow, he swiftly twisted his wrist.

  The ceiling of the overpass opened up at their feet, and YeoWoo took a step before she could think too much about what she was doing. That step was rushing, breathless, and far too fast; when it was over, she had her feet beneath her on solid marble tiling that formed a familiar shoe-well. YeoWoo moved aside slightly to allow for Athelas to step into the shoe-well beside her.

  “How delightful to have the floor return to being a floor,” Athelas said, looking around at the small area and then at the white expanse ahead of them in the main house.

  YeoWoo, stepping lightly and coolly up onto marble, heard the distant sound of running water, and smiled maliciously. Serve Peregrine right if he was in the shower. It would teach him to leave her outside when he had promised to help her.

  Athelas followed her, turning his wrists a little in his sleeves with the pretence of straightening his cuffs—loosening his knives, thought YeoWoo. She didn’t need to do anything of the kind, but she still trod lightly by force of habit learned over the course of decades of staying alive in both her human and gumiho forms.

  To her malicious glee, they met Peregrine as he was exiting his bathroom, drying his hair with one hand, his robe only loosely closed. He yelled and flung the towel at them, droplets of water from his wet hair hitting the marble as he scrambled to wrap his robe more closely around himself.

  “You didn’t answer when I rang the bell,” YeoWoo said.

  “You can’t break into an elder’s home!” Peregrine said, hastily tying the belt of his bathrobe. He did so with a little too much haste and fervour and winced as the final tug cinched his stomach tighter than he had probably intended.

  “You,” said YeoWoo, stalking across the floor toward him and precipitating a hasty couple of backward steps by the elder, “can’t tell me that you’ve got information for me once I’ve cleared myself of suspicion of murder, and then refuse to see me.”

  “I can do what I want in my own house!” Peregrine said, flushing and very nearly stumbling over his words as well as his feet. “How did you get in here!”

  “You shouldn’t leave slippers in the shoe-shop when it’s closed if you don’t want people to use them,” YeoWoo told him.

  “My dear…” sighed Athelas.

  “He would have discovered as much for himself, anyway,” YeoWoo said irritably.

  “Yes, I would,” Peregrine said, nearly as irritably. He edged around YeoWoo as if afraid that she would touch him, and retreated behind the kitchen bar, snatching up his towel as he went. “You haven’t left any shoes in the entry, and I can see the Between tracked across my floor from the slippers you’re wearing.”

  “Now you’ll know better,” YeoWoo said. “And we’d like it if you stopped changing the subject. You said you had some information on where to find the elder I’ve been looking for.”

  “I didn’t say I’d give it to you without payment,” Peregrine said, his ears very faintly pinker. “You can’t just expect people to give you information without doing something or giving something in return. There’s a local problem I need help with, and—”

  “Just so,” agreed Athelas; and while Peregrine stared at him in surprise, YeoWoo glared at him. He added placatingly, “My dear, there is nothing but trouble to be had from giving things out freely. A decent bargain is by far the best way to go about things, I do assure you.”

  “You only say that because you get the best of any bargains you make,” muttered YeoWoo. She didn’t say it loud enough for Peregrine to hear because in this case, a bargain in Athelas’ favour was far more likely to be one in her favour as well. The main point, however, was that she shouldn’t have to make a bargain when she had already fulfilled what Peregrine had previously asked of her. More loudly, she said, “I should just turn your house upside down and find it myself.”

  “I really wouldn’t do that unless you want to be bitten,” Peregrine said at once.

  YeoWoo flicked an assessing look at him that had Peregrine clearing his throat and tugging his bathrobe more tightly closed at the chest, and said, “Yes, but can you change faster than me?”

  Peregrine’s ears went red once again, and there was a sudden explosion of fluffy, blue-tinged fur. As shaggy as if his gumiho form had also had a shower and then dried itself, Peregrine said, “If you attack me, I’ll bite your ears off.”