Chimes at Midnight

“You’d better be worth it, Your Highness,” I said, and started to climb.

It said something about the oppressive weight of iron at the bottom of the stairs that I actually started to feel a little better as I climbed. The air was still chokingly laced with the stuff, and it would kill me if I stayed too long, but it was better than what we were walking away from.

“Arden needs to fucking bury this place,” I muttered, forcing myself to take another step, and another step after that. Every time I put my foot down was agony, like I was walking through a field of broken glass. I kept going. I hadn’t come this far, and fought my way through this much, to fall to something as passively dangerous as a room full of iron and a Prince who seemed to be getting heavier by the second.

I didn’t know how long I’d been climbing, or how far I had left to go, but I knew this much: I was getting tired. “Hello?” I called, as loudly as I could. “A little help here?”

“October?” Tybalt’s answering shout sounded distant. Too distant. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m having a damn vacation!” The amount of iron exposure he could get by coming down and helping me carry Nolan the rest of the way would be negligible compared to what I’d already subjected myself to. “Help!”

“I’m coming!”

“Good,” I muttered, and kept plodding on. It was less a matter of thinking I could meet him halfway and more the simple fact that if I stopped, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to start again.

I’d gone ten steps when Tybalt came around the curve above me, the hope chest still tucked underneath his arm. He paused, swore, and moved to take half of Nolan’s weight onto himself with his free arm, relieving my burden enough that I was able to straighten up for the first time since, oh, the ground floor.

“Hey,” I said. “Took you long enough.”

“I was waiting to be invited.” Tybalt adjusted his hold on Nolan, shifting the Prince’s weight a bit more, and matched my stride as we walked together up the remaining stairs. “You do get cranky when I insert myself into your life-threatening situations without consent.”

“It’s a character flaw.” The blood I’d borrowed from my past self was running out, and it was getting hard to breathe again. “How far are we from the top?”

“About fifty steps.”

Judging by how many I’d already climbed, that meant we were still a little more than halfway down. “Swell,” I muttered, gritting my teeth, and climbed.

The next forty steps passed without incident, either good or bad. Tybalt turned pale and started to sweat as the iron wore away at him. I managed to keep walking, but my breath was growing shallower, and every time I exhaled, I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to find the strength to inhale again. It was all I could do to keep putting one foot in front of another.

We rounded the final curve to see the man from the Queen’s guard standing in the open doorway, staring down at us.

“Hey!” I called. “Come down here and help us carry this guy!”

“Some of us remember the meaning of loyalty,” he responded.

The iron was clouding my reactions enough that it took me a few precious seconds to realize what he was saying. “No!” I shouted, and lunged, trusting Tybalt to keep Nolan from falling back down to the bottom of the stairs.

I was too slow, and the distance was too great. I reached the door a split second after the guard—who was still the Queen’s man after all—slammed it shut. As I impacted with the wood, I heard the small, terrible sound of a key turning in a lock.

We were trapped.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“HE LOCKED US IN HERE,” I whispered. “Oh, sweet Oberon, he locked us in.” I was dimly aware that Tybalt was trudging up the stairs behind me, but in that moment, I didn’t have the capacity to care. If he needed help, he would ask for it, and I . . . I needed to think. I needed to find a way out of this. The lock. I could pick the lock, I could—

There was no keyhole on this side of the door. No one sealed inside was ever intended to make their way out under their own power, and anyone who was sent to retrieve a prisoner would of necessity have a team of people waiting to pull them out if they succumbed to iron poisoning. There was no reason to put a keyhole inside the prison.

“Now they get smart about their dungeon design?” I turned to see Tybalt stepping onto the landing. “We’re trapped. He double-crossed us, and we’re trapped.”

“I know,” he said. He sounded calmer than I did, but I could see the panic gnawing at the edges of his composure. If he was keeping it in check, it was only because he knew that letting go would result in completely losing control. Like most cats, he didn’t like being boxed in.

Boxed in . . . “Tybalt, can you access the Shadow Roads from here?”

“No. There’s too much iron.” He walked past me to prop Nolan against the wall. This high up, it was just iron-laced stone, no more dangerous than the air. Then he turned to me, holding out his free arm in a mute plea.