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Detective Tuatu missed the days when a phone call would drag him from his sleep to attend a murder. The days when the only irritating sight he had to put up with at a crime scene was the stubbly, pre-coffee scowl of the forensics assistant.
These days, it seemed, the norm was for the personification of the North Wind to sweep in under his door, take her human form and crouch beside his bed to blow gently in his ear until he woke up.
It wasn’t as though Detective Tuatu wasn’t already busy enough. He had enough work to be going on with in his own department—not to mention the work he kept getting from a certain small human teenager who was living in one of the most dangerous situations that Tuatu had ever seen—and he wasn’t really interesting in forging any more relationships of the Odd and Dangerous variety. He had a feeling already that he hadn’t quite seen the last of the one he was still entangled with.
He groaned and sat up, causing the bed to creak. “What do you want?”
“I need a policeman.”
“Call triple-zero.”
“It’s not an emergency,” she said. “I just need a policeman.”
“Then can you please stop breaking into my house?”
“There was no breaking in,” North told him promptly, seating herself on his bed. “I swept in through the floorboards, just like the spiders. Now if you’d told me your name—”
“I’m not telling you my name,” Detective Tuatu told her grumpily. His grandmother had known better than to give first names to peoples Odd and Dangerous, and she had seen that he knew better, too. That knowledge had never before seemed necessary or relevant until this latest epoch of his life. Now it had a chill to it. “Can’t you just use the phone like everyone else?”
“No,” said North simply. “It’s far quicker to do it this way. Besides, you’ve been ignoring your calls.”
“How do you know that?” demanded the detective, waking up a bit more quickly. He hadn’t been answering all of his calls, but that was because he knew how much of a headache they were going to be, and that didn’t even include answering the phone to North.
“I tapped your phone,” she explained. “So I knew you wouldn’t answer if I did try to call you.”
“That’s the point of not answering calls!” Tuatu said in exasperation. “So that I have the choice of whether or not I talk to you! And what do you mean, you tapped my phone?”
“At any rate,” said North, “if you’d told me your name, it would be much easier. I could just whisper you here on a breeze.”
“That sounds like exactly the type of thing my grandmother was trying to prevent when she told me not to tell odd and dangerous people my name.”
North leaned forward and much too far into Tuatu’s personal space, causing a slight blip of his heart that annoyed him greatly. “I am very interested in your grandmother,” she said. “Can I meet her?”
“Why are you tapping my phone, North!”
“Because I want to know who’s calling you, of course! You have such an interesting spectrum of acquaintance!”
“It’s getting more and more interesting by the day,” he said, rather sourly. He got up so that he wouldn’t have to find himself sitting quite so close to her, and added, “I need to get changed.”
“All right.”
“That means I want you to leave the room.”
“Oh.” North sounded disappointed, but she did as she was told, and he found her dancing with sunbeams in the kitchen when he was dressed.
“You humans take so long to get dressed!” she marvelled.
“I suppose you get dressed in three seconds flat—”
“Less,” she said. “But that’s because the rules of the physical world don’t apply to me all the time. Just when I’m being very human. I used to take a long time to get dressed, too. But that was some time ago.”
She had stopped dancing, and Tuatu found that he regretted the sorrow clinging to every line of her; in her face, in the gentle droop of her shoulders; in her distant eyes. He knew something of North’s momentary life as a real human, and he hadn’t meant to bring up old wounds.
“What is it you need a policeman for?” he asked.
The bright smile was back on her face in a moment, and he saw her tiny feet move once, twice, lightly across the floor. She was dancing again: Tuatu had noticed that she seemed to be very fond of the first and last sunlights of the day.
“Some friends of mine asked me to help them out,” she said.
“Are you sure it’s something I’ll be able to help with?” he asked doubtfully. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be asking those three about it?”
“The Troika? No, I wouldn’t like to bother them for something so small as this,” she said. “I could do it myself, but I tend to break humans if I’m not very careful, and—”
“You have a problem with humans?” he said, filing away for later that rather disturbingly casual piece of information.
“Yes. Well, as I said before, it’s not exactly my problem: it’s a problem for a friend of mine. She needs a wheelchair to get around, you see, but for the last few months there has been someone parking in the only wheelchair accessible park by the doctor’s office. The rest of the carpark is on a steep incline, so she can’t wheel herself up as far as the front door, and her mother can’t push her all the way there, either.”
“I can’t stop people parking in a wheelchair park if they need the park and they have a permit,” Tuatu warned her. “The parks are for everyone, not just friends and family of law enforcement.”
“These ones don’t need it, and they don’t have a permit,” North said, her usually pleasant black eyes narrowing. “They don’t display a permit and when I looked them up in the system—”
“North, it’s illegal to—”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently. “But this is important. When my friend asked the doctor’s office about them, they pretended not to know what she was talking about. The drivers of the van don’t go into the office, but my friend said you can’t miss seeing their van from the office, even though they go into the aquatic centre that’s under construction next door instead of the doctor’s office. I could fix it myself, but—”
“I’d rather you didn’t break any humans,” Tuatu said hastily. “All right, all right, I’ll come. I’ll give them a bit of a warning and if they keep doing it, I’ll issue a few fines as well. Is she certain they don’t need the spot, permit or otherwise?”
“She tells me that they sometimes don’t bother to use the wheelchair if they’re only going to be in there a few minutes.”
“All right,” he said again. No permit was one thing; no permit and a demonstrated lack of need for the park was another. “I’m not going to arrest anyone, though.”
“This is enough,” said North, and she seemed pleased.
They took Detective Tuatu’s car to the doctor because he steadfastly refused to be carried anywhere by the North Wind. North pouted a little but got in the car anyway, and she didn’t complain on the way, either. When they pulled up outside the doctor’s office just outside Glenorchy, she only pointed to one of the parks—the exact one Tuatu would have used if he had been left to himself. It gave them a good view not only of the doctor’s office and the carpark, but of the perennially closed aquatic centre next door. It made him wonder exactly how often North had been on stakeout, and for what purposes.
“There’s nothing there,” Tuatu said, indicating the empty parking spot.
“The surgery isn’t open yet,” North replied. “Just wait. There’s five minutes to go; they should arrive any minute.”
As she was still speaking, Tuatu saw a white van in the rear-view mirror, slowing and with its indicator blinking.
“Right on time,” he said. “It looks like one of the doctors has arrived, too.”
The doctor was a messy, plump, pleasant-looking woman who shot a very narrow-eyed, school-marmish look at the car they were in. That made Tuatu feel slightly better, because if she had noticed that it was odd for a car to be simply sitting in the carpark in this area, then it was likely that she knew all about the van, and that it was something the surgery had allowed.
That was what he thought, right up until the driver of the van got out, walked calmly to the back of the van, took out his wheelchair, and sat down in it. Tuatu would have gotten out then, but the wheelchair ramp came down after the man, and a teenaged boy in a bright red wheelchair rolled out onto the bitumen.
The doctor’s gaze didn’t even falter as she walked across the lot; it swept past the van, past the man who was now wheeling himself down the hill toward the aquatic centre, past the young boy who was now coasting down the hill after the older man.
“The heck!” Tuatu said in astonishment. “Did she not see them? What did I just see? Is it just the kid who needs a chair?”
If so, why was the adult male using one?
“Oh,” said North. Her voice was thoughtful. “Well, this changes things a little.”
“What does?” he asked, still watching the two males as they took the wheelchair ramp at the aquatic centre at a very fast clip.
“Follow me,” she said, and got out of the car.
“Wait!” Tuatu protested, fumbling at the door handle; too slow to do anything but dash after her. “There’s no need for you to get involved! I’ll have a word with them myself!”
North said decisively, “I don’t think so. They may not be dangerous on their own, but there’s sure to be more of them.”
“More of who? Park stealers?”
“And they’re always more dangerous when there’s more of them,” she called over her shoulder.
Her feet moved too quickly for him to be able to distinguish them: Tuatu was quite sure she wasn’t exactly human right now.
“If they’re more dangerous, we should make a plan before we go in!” he called ahead to her, but she didn’t slow down.
“I don’t plan things,” she said. “We sweep in, and we sweep out, and we sweep everything before us.”
“All right, but there’s no point in speaking in the royal we when it’s just you and me,” he retorted, catching up with her finally at the door. “Do you have to run so fast?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “You wouldn’t let me bring you here, so I needed to feel a little bit of speed.”
“You could have wound down the window,” said Tuatu, before he could stop himself. He had been half expecting her to do as much.
North grinned at him, but became serious almost the next minute, as changeable as her name. “You should stay behind me,” she said. “Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” he demanded, looking around the aquatic centre’s carpark that had been filled with construction supplies, and into the empty centre itself. “It was two men!”
“Where there’s two, there’s always more,” North said solemnly, and darted in through the door.
The centre smelled…odd when Detective Tuatu followed her, trying to stop himself protesting that she should be staying behind him when he knew how ridiculous that was. It wasn’t a musty smell or a chlorine smell; nor was it the smell of dust. It was something distinctly fishier than that. Fishy, and perhaps a little bit slimy—the detective felt that he could find himself stepping on something unpleasantly squishy any moment.
“Where do you think they went?” he asked North quietly, as they moved through the chilly entrance area. “I wouldn’t have thought they were likely to be doing anything related to drugs, but this place looks like it’s been closed for the last year, and if the door was already open for them—”
“It’s not drugs,” said North. “And they’ll be at the pool.”
Tuatu would have liked to have asked her how she knew as much, but as soon as they entered the main pool area, he could see that she was quite right: of the older male there was no sign, but the teenaged male still sat in his chair with his back to them, facing the deep end of the pool.
“Aha!” said North triumphantly. “Come here, you slimy little crustacean!”
She seized the teenager by the back of the collar and hefted him out of the chair without so much as a grunt of effort, then threw him directly into the pool.
“North!” Tuatu expostulated, appalled. “You can’t throw people into pools! Especially not when they can’t walk!”
He started forward as he spoke, ready to dive in and save the struggling teen, but North’s tiny hand closed on his elbow with stunning power.
“They’re not people,” she said. “Watch.”
Under Detective Tuatu’s disbelieving eyes, the pair of legs thrashing beneath the water rippled, joined, and became…a tail. The newly outed merman surfaced, cursing, and called North a few choice names that nearly sparked a new desire in Tuatu to jump into the water, though for very different reasons this time.
“They’re merpeople,” North added. “They don’t usually need the wheelchairs—they just don’t like having to walk when they’re in the world above.”
“You can’t out me to humans!” the teenager yelled at her.
“You can’t take over swimming pools and carparks!” North retorted. “Where’s your school leader?”
“None of your business, ground crawler!”
Tuatu opened his mouth to warn the teenager that he was already facing charges of trespass and breaking and entering, but as he did so, there was a crowding of shadows at the doors behind them. Five men, he noticed, with the clear, cool realisation that if North wasn’t as powerful as he suspected she was, they were in a great deal of trouble.
“I’m right here,” said the barrel-chested man at the front of the group. It was very easy to see that chest, not only because of its size but because it was bare and very, very white. “Who’s asking?”
“Police,” Tuatu said shortly, showing his identification. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“This is our place now, ground crawler,” said the leader, and pulled a gun from the back of his waistband. “If the owner has sent you to make trouble for us, well, you’re going to run into a bit of trouble yourself.”
Tuatu was fairly certain it was only a tranquiliser gun, but he reached back and grabbed North’s hand to tug her behind him anyway, his identification still presented rather more mulishly in front of him with the ridiculous thought that it could somehow help.
North, unfortunately, did not budge an inch. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said to the barrel-chested leader. “I assume you know very well who I am.”
“I do,” said the leader, and pulled the trigger.
North gave a very small, surprised gasp, and staggered back a pace, dropping Tuatu’s hand. A dart, protruding from her shoulder, wobbled as she dropped to one knee, and the detective wasn’t sure whether he or North appeared more surprised in the reflective glass walls around the pool.
“North?” he said sharply. He hadn’t expected something so small as a tranquiliser dart to put down the North Wind. “Do you need a hand?”
“No,” she said, too quickly. “It would be better if you don’t touch me, I think.”
“That’s the problem with you incarnations,” said the leader, to Tuatu’s further bemusement. “You’re always getting too close to the human world.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“Nothing to worry about,” North said, her voice cheerful but faint. “Just don’t touch me and I’ll be fine. Probably don’t talk to me for a few minutes, either; I’d rather you didn’t concern yourself with me at the moment.”
That cut at Detective Tuatu’s heart, because he didn’t see why North should be allowed to sweep into his house, blow in his ear, dance with sunbeams in his kitchen, and then tell him not to be concerned with her.
He drew his gun.
“Don’t point that stupid human thing at us,” the merman leader said. “It won’t stop us; it’ll only annoy us.”
“I enjoy being annoying,” said Tuatu, sparing a quick glance behind him at North. She had pulled out the dart and was again standing, but she didn’t look quite steady. If his only weapon was a mere annoyance to these people, he would need to find a different weapon: he couldn’t count on North to look after them both when she was still swaying on her feet.
He looked around them as far as he could without being obvious about it, but all he could see was the button that unfurled the plastic pool covers, and that was no use unless—unless he could unfurl it very quickly in a particular direction…
“You won’t enjoy it by the time we’re finished with you,” said the merman. “We’ll see how you like a bit of fun with the boys. You can’t threaten us.”
Detective Tuatu met North’s eyes in the glassy reflection of the wall, and flicked his eyes back to the switch. He saw her look at the furled pool cover and grin.
“I haven’t threatened you,” he said to the men. “Not yet, anyway. I’m about to begin.”
“Do what you want,” jeered one of the mermen behind the leader. “You can’t take our pool from us.”
All he needed, thought Tuatu, was for them to move forward a little bit more. In line with that pool cover roll across the water, for example, so that it could easily envelop them were there to be a strong enough breeze.
“It’s time for you to get in the water,” said the merman leader. “If you do us a favour and jump in without us having to put you in, we’ll even let you up to breathe now and then.”
“Come and get us,” said Tuatu, banking on the merman’s overweening machismo. He added, for good measure, “Fish breath.”
It was a safe bet: the merman surged forward with a snarl of annoyance, forgetting his dart gun, and the other four followed him. Tuatu let them get uncomfortably close before he pressed the button, and for a very horrible moment, he thought he’d left it too long.
Then there was a roar of wind, and the scream of plastic whipping through the air at high speed. A brief tornado of wind and plastic tore around the group of five mermen while the teenager yelled threats and insults from the pool and struggled to climb out again, then there was only a very vocal bundle of plastic struggling on the cold pool tiles and one rapidly calming teenager who had just realised the precarity of his situation.
“Nice work,” said Tuatu, to North.
She smiled brightly at him. “See how well we work together! Aren’t you glad you came with me? It was much more interesting than I thought it would be: such fun!”
“Oi,” said a familiar voice from across the pool, while Tuatu was trying to find a way to express how very much he disagreed with her point of view. “Couldn’t you lot wait five seconds for us? We were coming.”
The teenaged merman disappeared in the flip of a tail, and Tuatu saw him beneath the water, trying to cower behind the pool cleaner. That wasn’t surprising: across the pool was a trio of Behindkind and one scrawny human. The scrawny human was Pet, Detective Tuatu’s friend and current thorn-in-the-side: she wasn’t exactly deadly, though he had the feeling that if she stayed with the people she was staying with for much longer, she might very well be.
What had frightened the merman, however, was the massive, pale fae lord at the front of the group: Lord Sero, apparently, though Detective Tuatu knew him as Zero. If Zero’s imposing presence and hard, cold blue eyes weren’t enough to frighten anyone, the fae lord was flanked by Athelas on his left; a brown-eyed, gently smiling, quietly terrifying fae steward who knew far too much about everything in general and death in particular to leave Detective Tuatu comfortable. On Zero’s right was a gorgeously suited, perfectly pressed, almost glowingly handsome Korean man—vampire, as Tuatu was quite well aware. The vampire’s pout and liquid dark eyes seemed to suggest that he had come for blood and had not as yet been satisfied. Tuatu, who had seen exactly what it took to satisfy the vampire, understood perfectly why the teenaged merman didn’t break the surface.
All four of them skirted the pool and approached: Pet grinning, Zero slightly frowning.
Of North, who was bubbling over with laughter, Tuatu asked resignedly, “Was this all a joke? A Between surprise party or something?”
“No,” said North, still giggling. “But my friend did say that there were a lot of suspicious looking people around yesterday and now I understand why!”
“Rude!” said Pet, but she was still grinning. “Suspicious, me? I’ve got a very trustworthy face!”
“They were probably talking about the fae lord with a knife belt and the vampire with blood all down his face,” Tuatu said.
“I should like to point out that he does not at present have blood on his face,” Athelas gently mentioned. Despite the gentleness of his voice, the mere sound of it caused the bundle of mermen to become deathly silent and cease their struggles. “Moreover, what sinister appearance do I present?”
“I don’t know,” Tuatu said. “But I know you’re not harmless.”
“I should think not!” said Athelas, even more gently, and turned to assist Zero, who had silently begun to unpackage the sardined mermen.
“I am trying to be very good,” said the vampire, leaning an elbow on Pet’s shoulder. “But I would like to bite someone.”
The cold smile that accompanied the information, along with the fact that the JinYeong had said something understandable at all, instead of in Korean, suggested to Tuatu that he was the person JinYeong would like to bite.
Tuatu cleared his throat and looked away. He asked Pet, “Did he just speak English?”
“Nah,” said Pet. “He must’ve decided to let you understand him for once.”
“To let—Is he getting in my head to do that?”
“Nah, he’s just using a—um, translator.”
Tuatu narrowed his eyes at her. “I don’t believe you. Why does he still want to bite someone, by the way? He’s usually been pretty busy biting people by the time he gets to me.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the problem: he hasn’t been. This lot only go troppo on Behindkind when they’re causing harm to humans. Merfolk having a bar mitzvah every few days and stealing disabled carparks isn’t causing harm to humans, just being a pain in the neck.”
“I would like,” said JinYeong, more quietly this time but no less stubbornly, “to be a pain in the neck.”
“I think I preferred it when I couldn’t understand the vampire,” Tuatu said. “Is that—is that what was happening? They were taking over the centre to host parties? They pulled a gun on North!”
“It was only a tranquiliser gun,” North said dismissively. “They probably thought it wasn’t going to work on me: they were just playing.”
“Yes,” said the vampire, tilting his head to look at North, and then at Tuatu. “It is verrrry interesting. But if they had played with you, it would have been unpleasant.”
“Yeah, we saved a bloke from one of ’em the other night,” Pet explained. “They nearly drowned him, but he got out onto the road. Figured he’d come from in here and thought we’d come and see what was going on next time someone arrived.”
“What’s Zero saying to them?” asked Detective Tuatu, looking curiously across at the five cowering mermen and the one teenager who had been as unceremoniously dragged from the water by Zero as he had been thrown in by North. Zero towered over them, even the barrel-chested one, and he wasn’t surprised at their change of attitude. “Why can’t I understand it?”
“He’s telling ’em that if they don’t watch their p’s and q’s, he’s gunna let you arrest the lot of ’em and they can see how dry their precious scales get when they’re rotting in jail,” said Pet, grinning. “And you can’t understand ’em because he’s doing the reverse of what JinYeong’s doing.”
Tuatu very nearly grinned. No wonder the merfolk had been gazing over at him with expressions of horrified disbelief for the last few minutes.
“Is he going to stop them coming here?”
“Nope,” said Pet. “They’re allowed to use the pool; they’re citizens as well. But they have to hire it out the same as everyone else, and they’ve got to clear away all the stuff that makes it look like the centre’s under renovation. And they have to pay the fee to have the pool cleaned every time they use it for one of their parties, to get rid of the gunk.”
“Tell them they have to stop using the disabled park next door, as well,” the detective said, stepping forward to address Zero. “If they do that again, I’ll lock ’em up and throw away the key.”
Zero’s pale brows rose: Tuatu couldn’t tell if the fae was irritated or impressed, but since it didn’t seem likely that he would be impressed by Tuatu, the detective came to the conclusion that Zero was irritated.
Still, Zero asked the mermen, “Did you hear that?”
The mermen nodded quickly and silently, without looking up, and Zero raised his brows once again in Detective Tuatu’s direction.
“Are you satisfied, Detective?”
“Yes,” said Detective Tuatu, retreating to the relative safety of North, Pet, and the vampire. North gave him an approving pat on the shoulder, which made Tuatu feel far more exhilarated than he would have expected, and Pet grinned at him once again.
“If we’re done here, we might as well go back home for a barbie,” she said.
Detective Tuatu hadn’t quite been holding his breath, but he must have been tensing, because he discovered that his jaw was tight only when he relaxed. He knew something of the methods of these three non-humans, and their methods usually involved a more…permanent solution to misbehaviour.
“Told ya,” said Pet, who had been watching him narrowly. “A telling off is all they’re getting.”
“No one need die today,” Zero said, but he said it toward the mermen, and Tuatu was left with the feeling that it was a warning, not a comfort. “You can go.”
The mermen shuffled out, dragging the soggy teenager with them and murmuring various iterations of, “Thank you m’lord”, “Yes, m’lord”, and “As you say, m’lord”.
Zero watched them until they were gone, his broad back turned to the rest of the group, relentless in his watchfulness.
“You came close to minor disaster today, my lady,” murmured Athelas to North. “It can be such a…humanising sensation, interacting with the denizens of this world.”
“Nonsense,” North said, putting her nose up a little. “As if a few mermen would be a problem!”
“That,” said Zero, turning to pierce her with a cool blue look, “was not what Athelas was referring to. I’ve already warned you about this sort of thing: if you want to be safe, you shouldn’t get attached to humans.”
“That’s only good if you want to stay alive,” said North, with barely-concealed exuberance. “I want to live.”
Detective Tuatu opened his mouth to ask exactly what they were talking about, but Pet got in first.
“C’mon, you lot,” she said. “I’ve got steak out on the bench and if it goes bad, I’m not going to the supermarket to get more.”
“I love steak,” said North, grabbing Detective Tuatu’s hand. “And I love not cooking even more! If you ask me very nicely, I’ll carry you there so quickly—”
“I’m not telling you my name,” the detective said.
“But—”
“No.”
“Later, then,” she said irrepressibly. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow morning to see if you’ve changed your mind.”
“I don’t—” began Tuatu, but it was too late; he was talking to the wind. North now sat demurely in his car, as if she’d been there all along.
“Catch ya at the house,” said Pet, winking; then she, and the vampire, and the two fae were gone.
Tuatu found himself content to take the human way around. After all, even if the incarnation of the North Wind was waiting in his car, for a little while she had been human enough to take a dart to the shoulder.
And that was something Tuatu felt should be encouraged.
