Chimes at Midnight

My eyes snapped open.

“I can do this,” I breathed, and pulled away, pulling the knife from my belt in the same gesture. Tybalt looked at me in alarm. I shook my head. “No, not that. I mean, I’m not going to stab you. I mean . . . look, if this works, be ready to move.”

“October?” he asked, bemused.

“No time.” I knelt next to Nolan, grabbing his hand and turning it, palm upward, in mine. Then, as carefully as I could under the circumstances, I slashed a line across the meaty part of his thumb and clamped my mouth down over it.

A red veil slammed down over my perceptions as Nolan’s memories overwhelmed my reality. Arden doesn’t want to challenge for the throne, but she’s wrong. This woman isn’t our sister, and she’ll lead the Kingdom into ruin. If Arden won’t listen, I’ll go myself. For Father’s sake, and for my sister’s sake, because this so-called “Queen” will never leave us in peace—

There was nothing there that I didn’t already know, and so I forced my way past it, trying to filter through his disjointed, dreaming memories. I’d never done anything like this before, but I’d moved through memories, and the principle was the same: all I had to know was what I was looking for.

I found it buried in a memory of Nolan and Arden playing hide-and-seek through Muir Woods on a beautiful starry night years before I was born. They were chasing each other from tree to tree, and every time one of them was about to be tagged by the other, they would disappear, Arden leaving the scent of blackberry flowers and redwood bark in her wake, Nolan leaving the scent of fresh blackberries and sap. I grabbed the memory of that moment as hard as I could, clinging to it. This was just like pushing strength into Tybalt, or letting May guide me through changing one of the Queen’s transformations. I could do this. I could do this.

Gathering every ounce of strength I could find in myself or borrow from Nolan, I raised my hand and transcribed a circle in the air. The smell of blackberries and sap followed my fingers, faint but there. I pulled my mouth away from Nolan’s hand, and whispered, “Now.”

Tybalt grabbed me a split second later, somehow managing to lift both me and Nolan off the floor as he leaped. He didn’t have to hold us for long. The world dipped and wove—

—and we were landing hard, in a pool of something viscous and sticky. The smell of it hit me a moment after the floor did: blood. My blood, to be specific. We were in the treasury. Groaning, I pushed myself onto my elbows and opened my eyes to find Nolan sprawled a few feet away and Tybalt climbing to his feet. His eyes were wide. He looked stunned. I was proud of myself for that. It’s hard to really shock Tybalt.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“Magic is in the blood. Nolan’s magic includes teleportation,” I said, holding out my hands. Tybalt tugged me to my feet. “I just borrowed it for a little bit.”

“That is absolutely terrifying.”

“Tell me about it.” I turned to look at the room around us, my head throbbing in time with the motion. “This is a treasury. This is where you put rare and important things. If you had something that could treat iron poisoning, this is where you’d put it.” The gray spots at the edge of my vision were intruding again, threatening to block everything out. I ignored them in favor of pulling my phone out of my pocket.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m calling information.”

The phone was answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“Li Qin, hi,” I said. “Remember when you called the Library to ask if I could come in? I need that number.”

“Toby? You sound terrible!”

I looked around the bloody, trashed treasury and fought the urge to laugh. That would have been taking black humor too far, even for me. “Things have been a little messy here.”