Chimes at Midnight

It wasn’t a long wait. The door opened just a crack, revealing the scowling, suspicious face of the Luidaeg. She blinked when she saw me, suspicion fading first into puzzlement, and finally into raw shock. Allowing the door to swing the rest of the way open, she said, “Toby?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

“Bullshit.”

I blinked. “Okay, that’s not the reaction I was expecting. Look. I have my knife, I have my jacket, I have my sarcastic tag-along . . . what else is required for the position? Because I’m way too tired to stand out here and argue about my identity any longer than I need to. I need your help.”

“What you don’t have is a hell of a lot of fae blood,” the Luidaeg said. Her hand shot forward, grabbed my upper arm, and hauled me into the apartment. Tybalt followed, not protesting her rough treatment of me. Even Kings of Cats have to come with some sense of self-preservation.

“Ow!” I protested, trying—and failing—to pull myself out of her grasp.

She raised her head, eyes narrowed, and turned toward Tybalt. “Close the door,” she said. Then she started walking, hauling me toward her bedroom.

I had time to note that the illusions normally filling her apartment were gone, leaving the place visibly impeccable. She knocked three times when she reached her bedroom door—she almost always did that, and I never knew why—before opening it to reveal the dark, candle-filled cavern of her bedroom. The walls were lined with saltwater tanks. I couldn’t make my eyes focus on half of them, although I knew their contents: that one held hippocampi, brightly-colored as reef fish and the size of my hand; that one housed a pearl-eyed sea dragon the length of my arm. His name was Ketea, and the Luidaeg once used one of his scales to turn me into a Merrow.

“Sit,” she commanded, shoving me toward the large bed. I stumbled backward, barely managing to avoid hitting my hip on one of the carved wooden posts that held up the canopy. She planted her hands on her hips, eyeing me. I squirmed, but didn’t say anything. It seemed better not to. Finally, she said a single word: “How?”

“Someone hit me in the face with a pie,” I said.

The Luidaeg blinked, expression going slack. The candlelight threw strange shadows over her cheeks, and made my stomach clench. I don’t like candles. “That’s . . . wait . . . what? You’re almost human because someone’s been watching too many damn Bugs Bunny cartoons?”

“I don’t know whether I should be horrified or impressed that you know who Bugs Bunny is.” I leaned back to rest most of my weight on my hands and said, “It was a goblin fruit pie. Jin at Shadowed Hills thinks my body liked the fruit so much that it wanted to experience the stuff more strongly, and so it shifted itself around without consulting me. I was sort of overdosing at the time.”

“And you can’t turn yourself all the way human,” said the Luidaeg grimly. “Thank Dad for that.”

I blinked at her. “I didn’t know that.”

“Faerie protects itself, and good thing, too. If you didn’t have that particular failsafe built into your powers, you’d be mortal, and we’d be screwed.”

“But couldn’t we find a hope chest and . . .”

“You’ve said it yourself, October: you can’t make something stronger when it’s not there. If your body had been capable of chasing the goblin fruit all the way into mortality, you’d be off the playing field permanently. Have a nice life, all sixty or seventy years of it, and try not to remind your old enemies who you are. It can be done to you, but it’s not a thing you can do to yourself.” She reached out and grasped my chin, turning my face roughly one way, and then the next. “Right now, you’re basically a merlin. Ten, maybe fifteen percent fae. Even when Amy was fucking with you as a child, she never jobbed you as good as you’ve just jobbed yourself. Gold star, moron.”

“Is there nothing that can be done?” asked Tybalt. I pulled my head from the Luidaeg’s grasp and turned to see him standing near the open bedroom door.

“There’s plenty, assuming you can keep her alive long enough to do it.” The Luidaeg snapped her fingers, pulling my attention back to her. “Hey. Look at me, human girl. How bad is the craving? How many of us would you stab for a jar of jam?”

“It’s not bad right now,” I said. “We went to Walther before we came here. He figured out a stopgap that I should be able to use long enough for us to figure out something more permanent.”

The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “Methadone won’t work.”

“I’m not even going to ask why you know what methadone is, but no.” I pulled the baggie of blood gems out of my inside jacket pocket. “He made these from my blood. They dull the wanting for a little while.” But not for long. I could feel it starting to twist in my gut again, telling me that nothing in this world mattered half as much as seeing the beautiful things the goblin fruit had to show me.