Chimes at Midnight

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.