Chimes at Midnight

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.”