Chimes at Midnight

“Sorry, no,” I said, automatically looking over my shoulder to assess the voice’s owner for signs that he might be a danger.

He was a skinny mortal man in a long black trench coat—or at least, that’s all I saw before he pulled his hand from behind his back and was suddenly next to me, crossing the intervening distance at a speed that was anything but human. I reached for my knife, but I was too slow, too slow to do anything but open my mouth in preparation for a shouted warning. Then the pie he was holding was slamming into my face, filling my mouth and nose with sticky sweetness.

Wait. Pie?

Quentin shouted something as I clawed the pastry from my face, wiping fruit and chunks of crust away from my eyes. My attacker was gone, leaving the parking lot empty except for me, Quentin, and the pretty floating lights that were dancing a slow quadrille around us.

Oh.

I looked down at my pie-covered fingers. I should have recognized the smell, if not the taste—and why would I have recognized the taste? I had always been so careful. I had never tasted goblin fruit before in my life.

“Quentin,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure why it was important that I tell him what was going on—the lights seemed a lot more pressing—but he was my . . . he was my brother? My son? My squire. He was my squire, and that meant telling him I was going to be unavailable. “I think you should get Sylvester.”

“Toby?”

He sounded scared. Why should he sound scared? This was wonderful. I raised my head and beamed. He was beautiful. Everything was beautiful.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, and passed out in the parking lot.





TWELVE


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.”