Chimes at Midnight

TWELVE

KAREN WAS SITTING ON THE foot of the bed, and the bed was the one I’d had when I lived with Cliff, a yard sale special bought for five dollars and the manual labor it took to carry it up the stairs to our shitty second-floor apartment. I’d hated that apartment, but I’d loved that bed. Gillian was conceived there, my beautiful baby girl. I smiled at Karen and stretched to my full length, luxuriating in the simple pleasure of having my bed back again.

“Hi, sweetie,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Karen frowned. She was thirteen now, no longer the gangly eleven-year-old I’d once rescued from Blind Michael’s lands. Her hair had continued to pale as she aged and was now an interesting shade of birch-bark white, although the tips were black, matching the tufts of fur tipping her dully pointed ears. She was wearing purple cotton pajamas, and looked profoundly displeased.

“I’m here because Quentin called me,” she said. “He said you needed me because you were dreaming, and you wouldn’t stop.”

I looked at her blankly. Karen was an oneiromancer, capable of interpreting and traveling through dreams. But that left one important question: “Who’s Quentin?”

“You don’t mean that, Auntie Birdie.” She slid off the bed, grabbing for my hands. “Come on. Get up. You need to get up.”

“I don’t want to.” I snarled one hand in the blankets, refusing to be moved, and scowled. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to yank your elders out of a nice, comfortable bed?”

“Why don’t you come with me, and you can tell her what I did?” Karen asked the question like it was entirely reasonable, punctuating it with another tug on my hand. “Come on. Get me in trouble. I want you to get me in trouble.”

“Wait a second . . .” I squinted, trying to puzzle through my increasing confusion. Finally, I said, “You’re not Karen.”

That seemed to startle her. She stopped pulling. “What?”

“Karen’s a teenage girl. Teenage girls don’t want to get in trouble. You want to get in trouble. That means you’re not Karen.” I pulled my hand effortlessly from hers. Her grip had lost all strength once I realized she was just a figment of my imagination. “You have no power over me. Now shoo.”

Karen blinked at me again before looking up at the ceiling and saying, “I tried. I’ll try again, but she’s too far gone right now.” Then she disappeared, leaving me alone.

Well. That was rude of her. I yawned and rolled over in the bed, trying to find a good position for a nap. Everything was comfortable. Everything was wonderful, and weirdly, that was the problem. I wasn’t used to being so content. I didn’t know how to sleep through it. I closed my eyes, hoping that would do the trick.

Instead, I felt the mattress shift as someone sat down next to me, and Connor said, “You know, you’re never going to be totally happy here. This isn’t where you’re supposed to be. Also, this is a really ugly duvet.”

“Connor!” I opened my eyes, rolling onto my back again so that I could see him better. My Selkie lover looked just like he always had, silvery hair, drowning-dark eyes, handsome without being intimidating about it. So much of Faerie tried to turn beauty into a weapon. It was nice to look at a man who was just easy on the eyes, no supernatural strings attached.

Maybe that also explained my attraction to . . . my smile faded, replaced by a puzzled frown. My attraction to who? I was lying in my bed—my big four-poster bed, the one Mother had put in my room at her tower, with the pillows piled so high they were almost a pre-made fort, and the sheets spun from wind and thistledown—and I was looking at Connor, so why was I trying to think about another man? It didn’t make any sense.

Connor rested one webbed hand against my cheek, frowning. “You need to wake up.”

Now it was my turn to frown. “You, too? Come on, Connor, I’m not asleep. I’m here, with you.” It felt like I hadn’t seen him in forever. I sat up in the bed, looping my arms around his shoulders, and leaned close enough to smell the sweet saltwater scent of his skin. “Kiss me.”

“No.” He pulled away. “Toby, fight it. You have to fight it.”

“Fight what?” My frown turned puzzled. “Come on, Connor. Kiss me. Don’t you love me anymore?”

He laughed, a sharp, barking sound that gave away his Selkie nature almost as much as his appearance. “With all my heart, but, Toby, I lost the right to kiss you on the night that I died. Remember? I died in the shallowing in Muir Woods, when we went to bring Gillian home. You saw me among the night-haunts.” He gently removed my hand from the back of his neck and moved it to press against his chest. “Remember?”

Dampness beneath my fingers, dampness flowing up through the fabric of his shirt. I pulled my hand away, and it was red with something I wanted to pretend was wine, but it wasn’t wine, no, it had never been wine. The smell of blood was suddenly heavy in the room, so similar to seawater, so unmistakably not. I raised my head to stare at Connor.

He shrugged, looking sheepish and sad. The blood was spreading rapidly through his shirt, dyeing it a deep, almost purple shade of crimson. I wanted to look away. I hate the sight of blood. “I’m sorry, Toby,” he said. “I died. You were there. You loved me, and I died, and I can’t kiss you anymore, because I’m not the one you’re meant to be kissing. I would have stayed with you forever, if I’d had the chance. I would have given you a million kisses. But that didn’t happen. I died, and all those kisses died with me.”

“What . . .” The room suddenly seemed wrong. I hadn’t lived in my mother’s tower for years. Connor had never been there at all, not the first time we were dating, and not the second time, either. I looked down at myself. I was wearing a long black T-shirt with the logo for the Bourbon Room on the front. I hadn’t owned that shirt in twenty years. I didn’t even remember what had happened to it. “What’s going on?”

“You need to wake up now, Auntie Birdie.” Karen again. I raised my head, unsurprised to find her standing there. Equally unsurprising was the fact that the room had changed. Now it was my room at the house, comfortable in a way that neither the apartment nor the tower had been, because it was mine. It was the home I had made, not a home that had been made for me.

“What do you mean? I didn’t go to sleep.” My fingers were sticky. Unthinkingly, I wiped them on the blanket.

Karen’s eyes followed the gesture. “Even in dreams, blood has power for you,” she said.

It was clearly a suggestion. That didn’t make it an appealing one.

Still: if I was hallucinating and Karen was telling me to wake up, maybe whether or not something was appealing didn’t get to matter just now. I licked my palm, filling my mouth with the coppery taste of Connor’s blood—although, because this was a dream, it brought no memories with it. The blood was just blood, empty of anything but power. I shuddered, swallowed, and licked my hand again before looking around me, trying to force the situation to start making sense.

The room didn’t change. Maybe that meant the blood was helping: things were actually letting me look at them now, instead of shifting as soon as I tried. I slid out of the bed, standing unsteadily. “What’s going on? Karen, why do you keep saying I need to wake up?”

“Because you’re dreaming, even though you didn’t go to sleep.” Her expression was grave. “You have to wake up. This is what she wants. I’ve walked in her dreams. I know this is what she wants. You can’t give it to her.”

“What who wants?” I rubbed my face, trying to clear it. The taste of the blood in my mouth was changing, saltiness turning sweet, until it filled everything. Until it filled every little crack and crevice and . . . oh. Oh. I lowered my hand, looking at it. The blood was gone, replaced by the dark purple stickiness of jam. There were seeds under my fingernails, like proof that a crime had been committed.

When I raised my head again, the room was dark. Everything was gone, except for Karen, standing in the nothingness. I took a step toward her. She remained just as far away.

“The pie . . .”

“Yeah.” She grimaced sympathetically. “You need to wake up now.”

“Quentin. Is he all right?” I looked around, trying to tease details out of the dark. “Oh, root and branch, where is he? And where’s Tybalt?” I remembered him leaving me to go to the Court of Cats, but had that really happened, or was I trying to imagine him safe and far away?

“Wake up,” commanded Karen. She took a step toward me, her eyes seeming to glow white through the gloom. When she moved, we actually wound up closer together. “You want answers, you can’t find them here. Wake up, now, before it’s too late. Wake up.”

She was close enough to touch me, and she did, reaching out with both hands and shoving me. I wasn’t braced. I fell, arms pinwheeling as I struck the spot where the floor should have been and then kept falling, down, down, down into the darkness that seemed like it would never end. I screamed. It didn’t change anything. I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath—

—and I wasn’t falling anymore. I was flat on my back on what felt like a feather mattress, and I wasn’t moving at all. My mouth still tasted like berry juice and blood, a mixture of salty and sweet that was disturbingly reminiscent of Chex Mix. I cracked open one eye, wondering what room I was dreaming myself into now.

It was one of the guest rooms at Shadowed Hills. The walls were painted white, and the single window looked out on the eternal twilight of the Summerlands sky. This wasn’t the first time I’d woken up here; as I opened my other eye and sat up, I looked down at myself. I was wearing a cotton nightgown with the Ducal arms stitched on the right breast. Then I raised my head, and collapsed back into the bed as the room began to spin.

“Oh, Maeve’s ass,” I groaned. My voice came out weaker than I liked. I groaned again, and rolled back into a sitting position, waiting with my head bowed until the room was still.

So far, so good. I swung my feet around to the floor and stood. The room remained still. Emboldened by my success, I took a step toward the door and promptly collapsed, like my skeleton had been replaced with pipe cleaners. There wasn’t time to roll with the fall; I hit the floor hard, absorbing most of the impact on my knees and palms, although I also cracked my forehead. The hot smell of blood filled the room again, now emanating from my skinned hands.

The spinning of the room was joined now by the throbbing in my head, but I had just enough remaining coherence to bring a hand to my mouth and start sucking on it, trying to get as much blood as I could before the wound healed. My thoughts cleared as soon as the blood hit my tongue. Not enough for me to stand, but enough for me to realize that the last thing I wanted to do was stop drinking my own blood. I was prepared to reopen the wound on the floor if I needed to . . . but I didn’t seem to need to. I was still bleeding.

Huh. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, still sucking. I was definitely awake this time—asleep didn’t hurt this much—and the pie that I’d been hit with in the parking lot was definitely baked with goblin fruit. Nothing else explained my dreams, or my disorientation.

Which meant I was now addicted.

“Shit,” I mumbled, against the flesh of my own hand.

Footsteps came running down the hall outside my door before it banged open. I tilted my head back and saw a woman I didn’t recognize standing there, hands braced against the doorframe. She had the body of a 1940s pinup girl and the hair of a Disney princess, platinum blonde, shoulder-length, and just wavy enough to make it interesting to animate. She also had a pair of frantically beating mayfly’s wings growing from her shoulders.

“Toby!” she shouted. She hurried forward, helping me off the floor. Her wings provided just enough lift to make the process possible. I doubt she could have moved me on her own.

“Hi, Jin,” I said, leaning on her and allowing myself to be moved. My knees still hurt, and my palms were still bleeding. That didn’t strike me as a good sign. “Recent molt, huh?” Jin was an Ellyllon, a type of hedonistic fae who often worked as healers, since they were better acquainted with the body than almost anyone else. That meant, among other things, that she periodically changed her entire physical appearance. She didn’t have any control over the process, but the results were always interesting.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been blonde,” she said, taking her arms away once she was sure I was steady. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been hit in the face with an evil pie.” I opened my eyes, panic lancing through me. “Where’s Quentin? He was with me.”

“He’s here,” said Jin. “I made him wait in the ballroom when he wouldn’t stop pacing. Sylvester came back from Goldengreen once we realized what was happening to you. He’s been with your squire in the ballroom since.” As the Duke’s personal physician, Jin was one of the few people who could order Sylvester Torquill around his own knowe.

I nodded shakily, looking down at my bleeding palms. “This is bad, huh?”

“You could say that.” Jin placed the back of her hand against my forehead. “You’re not running a fever. That’s a good sign.”

“What are you talking about? It’s a drug, not a disease.”

“Yes, except that your body seemed to treat it as a combination of the two. Goblin fruit is tricky, Toby, and you have the power to make it . . . better . . . for yourself.”

From the way she said “better,” I didn’t think she was referring to the process of kicking my unwanted habit. “What do you mean?”

“Humans enjoy goblin fruit more than fae do. It’s part of why it kills them. It’s why it kills changelings, too, although it takes longer. You may be the only changeling who’s ever tasted the stuff and had the power to make things . . . more enjoyable.”

I stared at her.

Slowly, Jin nodded.

“Oh, no. No, no, no.” I grabbed a hank of my hair and pulled it in front of my face. It was a colorless brown, the noncolor of tree bark and faded dye jobs. “No.” Dropping the hair, I felt for my ear, and breathed a sigh of relief. It was still pointed. Less than it should have been, but enough that I knew I hadn’t turned myself completely human.

“It’ll be okay,” said Jin awkwardly. She patted me on the shoulder. “We’ll figure something out. We always do.”

“So what, I’m addicted to something that’s killed every changeling who’s ever tasted it, and my body is trying to turn itself human so it can enjoy dying more, and we’re going to ‘figure something out’?” I glowered at her, glad to have something to focus my ire on. “How’s that going to work?”

“I didn’t say it would be easy, now, did I?” Jin stood. “I’m going to go let everyone know that you’re awake. When you decide to get dressed—against my recommendation, but that’s never stopped you before—there are clean clothes in the top drawer of the bureau. But I really wish you’d stay in bed.” With that, she was gone, shutting the door behind herself.

Jin was probably right: I needed to stay in bed. I needed to keep moving even more. The Queen had sent the man who hit me with that pie. I knew that was true, even if the Karen I’d seen in my dreams turned out to have been a goblin fruit-induced hallucination. The Queen was scared of me. It was the only explanation. And as to why she hadn’t killed me . . .

Killing me would have been like killing Nolan. Elf-shot took an opponent out of the picture for a century. Getting me addicted to goblin fruit proved that I was incapable of resisting temptation, turning me into someone to be pitied, not rallied behind. She didn’t want a martyr, and so she was trying to discredit me in a way my critics would believe.

“To hell with that,” I muttered. I licked my palm again, worrying the last flecks of drying blood loose with my tongue, and reached as deep into myself as I could, looking for the place where my fae and mortal heritages met. It was hard, slow work, like trying to swim through quicksand, but I found it, an intangible line drawn across the substance of my self.

I had done this before. Never intentionally to myself, but on Gillian, when I turned her mortal, and on Chelsea, when I turned her fae. I knew how the process worked. Reminding myself of that as firmly as I could, I gathered the tatters of my magic and wrapped my mental hands around the line, yanking hard.

The pain was immediate and intense. The line didn’t budge, but I did, falling off the bed as I screamed, clawing at my own head in an effort to make the hurting stop. It didn’t help. I kept screaming, and was still screaming when the door slammed open and Sylvester was there, gathering me into his arms.

“October!” He cradled me, looking back toward what I could only assume was Jin. “What’s wrong with her? Fix her!”

“I can’t.” Jin stepped into view behind him. I barely noticed. I was too busy screaming. “The air smells like her magic. Just a little, but enough that I think I know what happened. Toby! Did you try to shift your blood?” My screams must have been answer enough. “She only stopped sliding toward human when she got too weak to change herself that way. If she tried to do it on purpose . . . no wonder she’s screaming. She doesn’t have the strength to do that, especially not with the goblin fruit still in her system.”

“So get it out of her system!”

“Your Grace, if I knew how to do that, I would be rich beyond even your wildest dreams, and have a Duchy of my very own.”

Then she was stepping past Sylvester, and her fingers were grazing my temple, as gentle as spiderwebs. The pain dropped away, and I dropped with it, falling back into the dark.