Chimes at Midnight

Changelings are the perfect victims in Faerie. We’re a born underclass, and very few of us have anyone to miss us if we disappear. I might never have heard about the problem at all, if I hadn’t been one of Devin’s kids, once upon a time. A few of my fellow survivors came to me to see if there was anything I could do. I agreed to try. I’d been out on the streets every night for a week doing just that. So far, I’d busted three goblin fruit dealers, stopped a mugging, and stopped for coffee at half the all-night diners in the city. But I hadn’t seen any of the missing changelings. I honestly wasn’t sure whether that was a blessing or a curse.

A raven cawed harshly from somewhere overhead. It would have been a perfectly normal sound in the daylight, but here and now, this late at night . . . I looked up, scanning the rooftops until I spotted the outline of a large raven perched on a broken streetlight. It cawed again and then took off, flying west. I swore under my breath and chased after it, trying not to let it out of my sight as I ran along the alley.

The uncharacteristically night-flying raven was the animal form of Jasmine Patel, my Fetch’s girlfriend. She’d been keeping lookout over the whole area. If she was calling for backup, she’d seen something—and whatever it was, it was pretty much guaranteed to be nothing good.

Jazz’s caws guided me through the maze of narrow streets, until I skidded around a corner and into a dead-end alley. There was a dumpster at the far end, so overstuffed with garbage that it had practically become a tiny, localized landfill. A figure I knew was standing at the edge of the mess, her head bowed in evident sorrow. She was my height, with colorless brown hair worn short and streaked with neon pink. Her clothes were almost shockingly bright in the dim alley—orange corduroy pants and an electric blue sweater—but somehow, that didn’t do anything to lessen the impact of the scene. May knew what death meant, maybe better than any of us. She was a Fetch, after all.

I stepped up next to her, releasing my don’t-look-here as I joined her in looking at the heaped-up trash. She put a hand on my shoulder, sniffling.

“Yeah,” I said softly. “I know.”

There was a girl lying sprawled in the garbage. Her skin and hair were the ivory color of old bleached bones, with a faint waxy sheen: she was half Barrow Wight. Only half; her height, and the square lines of her jaw, came from her human parent. She was thin enough to look consumptive, and she wasn’t breathing.

I walked forward, kneeling to touch the girl’s wrist. Her skin was still warm. She’d been alive when we started prowling the streets. There was a faint, sickly-sweet smell to the garbage around her, too dilute to be tempting, but strong enough to make her cause of death plain. Goblin fruit. We’d finally found a changeling who had been killed by goblin fruit. Luck was with us.

Luck was nowhere in the picture.

“Toby?” May’s voice was very soft. “What do you want to do now?”

There was only one thing that we could do. I stayed crouched beside the girl, my fingers still resting lightly on her wrist. “We wait for the night-haunts.”

The soft scent of musk and pennyroyal tickled my nose. “Are you sure that is the wisest course of action?” asked a male voice, sounding faintly concerned.

“I promised not to summon them again. I didn’t promise not to hang around and say hello.” I straightened, turning to face him. I couldn’t quite conceal my relief at the sight of Tybalt, standing there in a wine-colored shirt and tight black pants. Unlike May and I, he hadn’t bothered trying to make himself look human: the black tabby stripes in his dark brown hair were clearly visible, and his eyes were banded malachite green, with vertical pupils. His expression, however, was as sorrowful as May’s.

If I hadn’t already loved him, I think I would have started to in that moment.

“The night-haunts aren’t friendly people, Toby,” said May. “I know. I used to be one.”