Chimes at Midnight

FIFTEEN

TYBALT DIDN’T LET ME RUN with him this time. He hoisted me into his arms as soon as we were on the Shadow Roads, carrying me through the darkness. I didn’t protest. I knew as well as he did what we were up against, and if we were going from San Francisco to the UC Berkeley campus, I needed all the help I could get. Instead of fighting, I just curled there, trying to borrow what warmth I could from his body, and held my breath, waiting for it to be over.

I hate being helpless even more than I hate being hurt. I spent too much of my life thinking I couldn’t take care of myself, and having that condition thrust upon me was not making me a happy girl. The steady rumbling in my stomach wasn’t helping. If this went on much longer, I was going to be just like every other goblin fruit addict in the world: out of my mind with wanting, ready to do anything for a fix.

My lungs were burning by the time Tybalt stepped out of the shadows and into the cool night of the mortal world. I coughed, wiping the ice from my face, and tried to scramble down. He bent to make it easier for me. I cast him a grateful look before catching myself on the nearest surface—a brick wall—and vomiting. I didn’t have anything in my stomach, but that didn’t seem to matter to my body. It was unhappy, and it was going to make sure I knew it.

Tybalt put a hand on my back, resting it in the space between my shoulder blades. “Are you all right?”

“Not on this or any other planet.” I straightened up, looking around. We were under the old bridge spanning the creek that cut through the middle of campus. I sighed. “See, if I’d just realized where we’d come out, I could have thrown up in the water. Less mess.”

“Yes, but won’t you think about the frogs? I’m sure they receive enough unwanted vomit from the student body.”

I blinked. And then, to my surprise, I laughed. Tybalt smiled toothily.

“Good,” he said. “You’re still you.”

“You’re stuck with me,” I said.

His smile faded, replaced by a quiet uncertainty that I’d come to recognize an inch at a time, picking it out of his more common expressions like a secret that was just for me. Kings of Cats aren’t supposed to be weak; they’re not supposed to be uncertain or worried. Those are emotions for people who don’t have Kingdoms to run.

Or for people standing alone with their suddenly mostly-human girlfriends, wondering if they put off saying, “I love you” for too long. I put my hand against the side of his face. This was the first time we’d been alone since I woke up. If I couldn’t afford a few seconds for this, it was already too late. I was already lost.

“Hey,” I said. “I mean it. You’re stuck with me. I’m not going anywhere. If there’s an answer, we’ll find it. And if there’s not an answer, we’ll create it. We’re going to talk to Walther, and then we’re going to ask the Luidaeg if she knows where to find a hope chest, and we’re going to fix this. I’ll be back to normal before you know it.”

“Your life is in danger. You’re stubborn, pigheaded, and refusing to admit the gravity of your situation. I’d say you’re normal right now.” His tone was light, but it couldn’t disguise his relief.

“Don’t make fun of me while I’m in the middle of a crisis.”

Tybalt peeled my hand away from his face, holding it as he stepped closer. There was no space left between us. “My sweet little fish. If I refused to make fun of you simply because you were in the grips of a crisis, I would never have the opportunity to make fun of you again.”

“I’d be okay with that,” I said.

He laughed and started to lean forward, clearly intending to kiss me. I raised a hand, stopping him. He blinked at me.

“I just threw up,” I said.

“October, given the circumstances—”

“All I can possibly have had in my stomach was goblin fruit. I don’t need to deal with you going on a magical mystery tour while I’m trying to cross campus. Let me rinse my mouth, and then you can have all the reassuring kisses you want, okay?”

Tybalt sighed. “Loath as I am to acquiesce to your request, it does have merit.”

“You could have just said ‘okay,’ you know.”

“Ah, but then, would you have smiled?”

I laughed, and held his hand as we walked out from under the bridge, heading for the dirt trail cut into the hillside by generations of students coming and going. The campus was mostly deserted this late at night. A few students walked the pathways, but they were few and far between, as were the homeless people sleeping in the shelter of the school’s patches of carefully preserved natural vegetation. I realized with a shiver that I couldn’t tell whether the people remaining were human or fae, and walked a little closer to Tybalt. My current condition could come with a lot of nasty surprises if I wasn’t careful.

“Are you cold?” he asked, looking down at me.

“Just facing a few unpleasant realities,” I said. “Walther’s office is this way.”

As a junior faculty member, Walther rated a proper lab less because he was valuable, and more because he had a tendency to cause unexpected and odd-smelling explosions. I was pretty sure he’d used some persuasion spells, and maybe a glamour or two, to convince the administration to give him as much leeway as he had. He was in a better spot than some people with much more seniority, and nobody seemed to mind.

Then again, this was Walther. They probably just assumed he’d blow himself to kingdom come and they’d get his space without having to waste precious political favors.

The back door to the chemistry building was never locked, to accommodate the hours kept by the graduate students and some of the faculty—again, Walther. Tybalt and I walked through the empty, echoing building to the one door with a light shining through the glass. I knocked.

Something clattered. Footsteps followed, and then the door opened, revealing a tall blond man with disturbingly blue eyes only half-hidden by a pair of wireframe glasses. He was wearing a welders’ apron over his carefully professorial slacks-and-button-down-shirt combination, and he looked confused.

“Hello?” he said. Then he paused, squinting at me. Tybalt didn’t normally visit, or deign to wear a human disguise; my usual human disguise actually looked a little less human than I did at the moment. Still, some things carried over, because Walther said, incredulously, “Toby?”

“We sort of have a problem,” I said. “Can we come in?”

“Sure. Jack’s not here.” Jack Redpath was his very friendly, very human grad student. Without him, the lab was clear.

I walked inside, Tybalt close behind me, and promptly froze, swaying on my feet. Tybalt was right there to grab my shoulders, preventing me from lunging for Walther’s workbench.

“What in the world—?”

“If you would be so kind as to put the goblin fruit away, we can discuss the current situation,” said Tybalt, in a tight, clipped voice.

It took everything I had not to fight against his hands. The smell from the open jars of goblin fruit filled the room the way blood normally would, obscuring and overpowering everything with need, need, need. I needed to fill myself with sweet fruit and sweeter dreams, forgetting all this nonsense about a lost Princess, a banishment, all of it. The goblin fruit would take it all away. Everything would be wonderful if Tybalt would just let me go—

I was held captive by a mad Firstborn once. Blind Michael, whose magic was a lot like goblin fruit in the way that it could remake your perception of the world. I fought him, even if I couldn’t beat him. I did it with my own pain and with the smell of blood in the mist. “Tybalt,” I managed, gritting the word out through my teeth. “I need you . . . to scratch me.”

“What?”

“Just . . . pop your claws and . . . break my skin. Please. I need you to hurt me.”

He hesitated, his grip slackening as he warred against himself. The hungry part of me saw that as an opportunity. I ripped myself halfway out of his hands before he clamped down, claws coming out as an automatic response. They drew a thin line of pain across my left wrist, and the smell of blood was suddenly hot in the room, overpowering the smell of the goblin fruit. That may have been because Walther was frantically capping the jars, but I didn’t think so.

“Let my left wrist go,” I whispered. “Just that. Hold tight, but give me that.”

Cautious now, like he was afraid I would run again at any moment—and he was right to be cautious, because I was ready to bolt—Tybalt released my left wrist. I raised it to my mouth. He hissed when he saw me bleeding, but I ignored him, clamping my mouth down over the wound so my lips created a virtual seal. Blood filled my mouth, hot and salty and so absolutely real that I wanted to cry. I didn’t cry. Instead, I swallowed, and swallowed again, and kept on swallowing until Walther turned to face us.

“Sorry about that,” he said. He had thrown a sheet over the goblin fruit, apparently trying for “out of sight, out of mind.”

“’S okay,” I mumbled, around a mouthful of my own wrist. The bleeding had almost stopped; the scratches weren’t deep. Reluctantly, I pulled my hand away, swallowing one last time before I said, “We didn’t call first.”

“Still.” Walther removed his glasses, dispelling the hasty illusion that made him look human at the same time. His eyes were even bluer this way. All Tylwyth Teg have eyes like that, making it seem like they’re looking straight through you. “What happened?”

“The Queen sent someone to hit me in the face with a goblin fruit pie,” I said. “Well. We’re assuming it was the Queen. That much goblin fruit is going to be expensive, and she’s the one with the most interest in seeing me discredited, instead of just dead. If any of the jam dealers I’ve been hassling had decided to go after me, they would have hired an assassin instead of wasting perfectly good product.” The thought of the pie I’d been hit with made my head start spinning again. I raised my wrist and started sucking on it again. The taste of blood was faint, but it helped.

“Ah, the good old days, when men tried to kill you with guns and I could simply eviscerate them,” said Tybalt.

Walther snorted. “Any questions I had about who your companion was have just been answered. Can you drop the illusions?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not wearing one.”

He paused. Beside me, the faint smell of musk and pennyroyal ghosted through the air as Tybalt removed his human disguise. Finally, Walther said, “That’s what I was afraid of. Let me guess: you got hit with the goblin fruit, your body went ‘oh, this is nice,’ didn’t recognize it as a poison, and tried to adjust things to get the maximum amount of enjoyment. Only since I’m going to bet you were overdosing at the time, you weren’t awake to consciously control the urge, and so you wound up dialing yourself almost all the way human before you ran out of oomph.”

I blinked, lowering my wrist. Tybalt blinked. Walther grinned, a little wryly.

“Did you think I put ‘Professor’ in front of my name because I wanted to get respect from college girls? I am actually capable of analytical thought.” He paused, cocking his head. “You were ready to beat me down to get at the goblin fruit a minute ago. How are you feeling now?”

“Sore,” I said. “Tired, annoyed, hungry . . .”

“But not like you want to take me on if it gets you a fix?”

I eyed him warily. “Not as such, no.”

“Good. Good. Your instincts are usually right, when you let yourself trust them. For you, blood will almost always be the answer.” He grabbed a suspiciously convenient roll of gauze from the desk, lobbing it at me underhand. I caught it, only fumbling slightly in the process. My fingers were too thick and clumsy, and they didn’t want to do as they were told.

Well, they were going to learn. Until I could get hold of a hope chest, they were what I had to work with. “Do I even want to know why you had this sitting there?”

“I work with sharp things, and some of us don’t heal like superheroes,” said Walther. He paused, blanching. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“It’s okay.” I shook my head. “Although if you have a scalpel or something that I can borrow, that would be good. I don’t want to depend on getting Tybalt to claw me when the craving gets too bad.”

“I would prefer to avoid that myself,” said Tybalt.

Walther frowned. “How much do you know about anatomy? Physiology? Where the major arteries in the humanoid body tend to appear?”

“Wow, you know, most people would just go ‘where the major arteries are,’” I said, trying to make him smile. It didn’t work. I sighed. “Very little. But that isn’t my main concern right now.”

“When you’re bleeding out because you sliced yourself wrong, it will be,” said Walther.

“And when I’m so high I can’t think, much less act, I might as well be bleeding out,” I snapped back. “At least then, I’d die knowing that I was trying. Look, I’ll avoid any visible veins, I’ll cut across instead of cutting down, but I need easy access to blood. Unless you’ve managed to cook up a cure while we weren’t looking?”

“Not yet,” said Walther. “I’m still trying. But there are better options than scalpels.”

“Like what?”

He turned his back on us, opening one of the long drawers in his desk to produce a leather-wrapped bundle. When he unrolled it, he revealed a variety of old-fashioned-looking surgeon’s tools, including a syringe that could probably have been used to extract blood from a Bridge Troll. I blanched.

“That is not a better option than a scalpel,” I said.

“I’ve been a chemist for a long time,” he said, picking up the syringe. “That used to include a lot of the duties humans have transferred to doctors.”

“You practiced bloodletting?” asked Tybalt.

“For about eighty years. Syringes and leeches, that’s the way to keep food on the table. Toby, pick up that bottle of rubbing alcohol and come over here. Let’s see if we can’t find a way to keep you from damaging yourself to get the blood out.” He paused before adding, “It’s the bottle labeled ‘rubbing alcohol,’ next to the bottle labeled ‘H2SO4.’ Don’t grab the wrong one.”

“Why not?”

“Because the other bottle is sulfuric acid, and you’ll die.”

“Oh, because that’s safe,” I grumbled. Grabbing the bottle that wasn’t going to kill me, I walked over and offered it to Walther.

“Good,” he said. “Tybalt, get me one of the ice cube trays from the freezer?” He picked up a cotton ball, dousing it in rubbing alcohol. “Toby, arm, please.”

Hanging my leather jacket on the nearest chair, I held out my right arm. Walther swabbed a square of flesh about an inch wide clean and drove the needle home before I could tense up. Eighty years of practice had left him pretty good at gauging the location of a vein: the syringe in his hand began to fill with blood as soon as he pulled back the plunger.

No matter how advanced my blood magic has become, the sight of blood has always made me nauseous. Not this time. I couldn’t take my eyes off the glass as it filled. My stomach grumbled again. If I couldn’t have goblin fruit, apparently blood would do perfectly well. “Great,” I said, sounding dazed even to my own ears. “Now I’m a vampire.”

“There’s precedent,” said Walther. “There are some old records that claim Daoine Sidhe changelings last longer once they’ve become addicted than most others, because they can take sustenance from the blood of beasts. You’re just cutting out the middle man.”

“I could hunt for her?” asked Tybalt.

“You could, but I think this is more hygienic, and probably more effective. Pass the ice tray?”

“Here.” Tybalt stepped up beside me, holding a bright green plastic ice tray.

For some reason, that struck me as unutterably funny. I put a hand over my mouth, but not quickly enough to smother my smile. Walther just smiled, taking the ice tray from Tybalt’s hand.

“If you’re smiling, there’s hope,” he said, and put the tray down on the counter before picking up another cotton ball. “Hold this to the wound while I determine whether we need more blood.”

“Yay,” I deadpanned. “Holding my blood inside my body is always my favorite part of crazy alchemy adventures.”

He pulled the needle out. A bead of blood welled up before I slid the cotton into the place. The smell of copper still filled the air, relaxing my nerves further and causing my stomach to rumble again. It felt like I was trading one form of addiction for another. At least this one came naturally, and might eventually make me better, instead of making me worse.

Walther turned to the ice cube tray, squirting blood from the syringe into each of the tiny squares. He ran out of blood with only half the spaces filled. Turning back to me, he said, almost apologetically, “Other arm, please.”

“You could at least buy me dinner first,” I said, bending my right arm to keep the cotton in place as I extended my left.

“Tybalt would gut me if I tried,” said Walther. Again, he slid the needle into my vein; again, the glass chamber began to fill with blood.

“See, that kind of attitude is never going to get you anywhere with the ladies.” I sighed, watching the blood flow. Then I paused, and asked, “Shouldn’t I be dizzy? Blood loss is supposed to make you dizzy.”

“Right now, I think your body is too distracted for dizziness.” Walther pulled the needle out again, putting another puff of cotton in place. “Bend your arm.”

I did as I was told. “That doesn’t sound very scientific to me.”

“Says the girl with the goblin fruit addiction and the tomcat boyfriend, to the alchemist who’s about to do something really impressive,” said Walther. He emptied the freshly-drawn blood into the last of the little squares, put the syringe aside, and reached for a saltshaker filled with what looked like paprika. “You may want to step back.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because there’s a fifty-fifty chance this is going to explode.”

I stepped back. So did Tybalt, who positioned himself slightly to my left, where he could push me clear if something actually blew up, without seeming like he was hovering. I appreciated his concern, even as I resented the need for it.

Walther sprinkled the paprika-looking herbs over the squares of congealing blood before waving his hands and beginning to chant in Welsh. The air in the lab chilled by about eight degrees in as many seconds, the faint ice and yarrow scent of his magic surrounding us. He kept chanting, lowering his hands toward the blood. The air got even colder. Then the magic burst like a popped balloon, and Walther turned to face us, grinning broadly.

“I am a genius,” he announced. “You may lavish praise upon me at your leisure. But don’t take too long, I haven’t got all night.”

“I’ll start lavishing praise when you tell me what you did,” I said. The air wasn’t warming as quickly as it had cooled. I shivered and hugged my arms to my body. “Can I put my coat back on now?”

“If the bleeding has stopped, yes.” Walther produced a cookie tray and a roll of parchment paper from the mess on the counter. He spread the paper across the metal, then reached behind himself for the ice cube tray. “Voilà.”

“Walther, seriously, you need to tell me what I’m supposed to be getting excited about, because I honestly don’t have a clue.”

Walther tipped the ice cube tray over the parchment paper. The “ice cubes” fell out . . . but they weren’t ice cubes, not even bloody ones. Instead, a shower of what looked like polished garnets landed on the parchment paper. They ranged in size from Tic Tacs to throat lozenges almost an inch long.

I blinked. “That’s my blood.”

“Yes.”

“You turned my blood into . . . what, exactly?”

“These are like M&M’S; they melt in your mouth, not in your hands.” Walther picked up one of the mid-sized “stones,” offering it to me. “Try.”

“If you say so.” I took the chunk of solidified blood and popped it into my mouth, where it immediately dissolved on my tongue. The growling in my stomach stopped, replaced by a sudden feeling of fullness. It didn’t even leave the taste of blood behind; instead, my mouth tasted like mint and lavender. I stared at him. “What . . . ?”

“It’s a simple preservation spell, with a little herbal mixture to make the taste more palatable.” Walther turned to the counter one more time, this time producing a plastic baggie. “If you take one of these whenever the craving gets too bad, you should be able to keep it under control, for a little while. I’ll keep working on a more general treatment. This is just a short-term solution.”

“What do I do if I run out?”

“Try not to run out.” Walther swept the artificial jewels into the baggie before pressing the zip-seal closed. “This is . . . I’ll be honest, Toby, I have no idea how your body is sustaining itself. You’re the source of this blood. It shouldn’t give you any nutrition you didn’t lose in creating it. At best, this is like dancers eating ice chips to convince themselves that they’ve had an actual meal. At worst, it’s not even that much. You’re going to starve if this goes on too long, and I’m concerned that bleeding you more than once would wreak havoc on your system when it’s already overtaxed. Do you understand me?”

“Do I understand that this is a stay of execution, not a cure? Yeah. But it’s more than we had when we got here.” It might be enough to get me to a hope chest—or to Mom, although that seemed less likely. I picked up my leather jacket, shrugging it back on. “You do good work, Walther.”

“Yeah, well, I came to the Mists for the tenure, I’m staying for the excitement.” Walther smiled a little as he turned to hand me the bag of gleaming red stones. It didn’t reach his eyes. “Please try to be careful. And Tybalt, if she seems to be running out of stamina, don’t let her argue. Get her out of whatever she’s doing and back to someone who can take care of her.”

“I will have her at Shadowed Hills before she can utter a word of protest,” said Tybalt.

“Hey, right here, remember?” I protested. I took the bag from Walther, tucking it into the inside pocket of my jacket. The urge to eat another stone—just one—was strong. I forced it away.

“Yes, and we’d like to keep it that way.” Walther shook his head. “I know too much about goblin fruit, and not enough about Dóchas Sidhe. Be careful.”

“I’ll try.” That was all I could promise him. That was all I could promise anyone, myself included. This wasn’t the sort of situation that allowed for much in the way of “careful.” But there was “less stupid,” and maybe that would be enough.

It was going to have to be.