Chimes at Midnight

WE DIDN’T STEP OUT OF THE SHADOWS: we fell, all of us dragged into an ungainly heap by my collapse. Tybalt wasn’t letting go of me, and Quentin wasn’t letting go of him, and the end result was a total train wreck. I, of course, wound up on the bottom of the pile, but I would have been in bad shape either way. The run had been too much for me. My eyes were frozen practically shut, and I was struggling to breathe.

“October!” Tybalt rolled off me, shoving Quentin out of the way—I heard his faint grunt of protest—before gathering me into his arms. “Breathe, dammit,” he commanded, cradling me close as he tried to warm me with his own body heat. “Toby! Breathe!”

I coughed, breaking the frozen seal on my mouth, and began to take great, choking gasps of air. I didn’t even pretend to be sitting up on my own. I just let Tybalt hold me, and kept focusing on trying to thaw my lungs.

“Is she okay?” Quentin, somewhere off behind me.

“I forgot how badly the Shadow Roads used to treat her.” Tybalt sounded guilty, like this was somehow his fault, and not the Queen’s for sending someone to hit me in the face with a pie full of goblin fruit.

A pie. Sweet Oberon, could we get any more slapstick if we tried?

Giggling made breathing harder, but it made me relax, which helped. I sat up straighter, scraping the ice from my eyelashes. “I’m okay,” I said, the wheeze in my voice revealing my words as lies. I coughed again before offering my hands to Tybalt, letting him pull me off the floor. “Really. I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. I realized with a start that I couldn’t make out his expression through the gloom. Humans aren’t equipped to see in the dark the way fae are. I really was running blind.

“I’m sure,” I said, looking around the defunct bookstore. It was, if anything, even more decrepit-looking in the dark; the shelves were just blurs. Even the pixie dust was gone. Its faint glow would have been a real blessing, but humans can’t see pixies, either. Not without fae ointment. Maybe Marcia would give me some. “Quentin, can you get the door? I’m never going to find it on my own.”

“On it,” he said, and moved past us, a pale smudge against the dark bookshelves.

Tybalt took my arm. I didn’t pull away. In my current condition, I needed the help.

“Are you truly sure that you’re all right?” he murmured, pitching his voice too low for Quentin to hear.

“No,” I whispered back. “But for right now, I have to be. So let me be all right. Please.”

“Ah.” He sighed, hand tightening on my arm. “As you say.”

I flashed him a smile—he’d be able to see it, even if I couldn’t see him—and let him guide me to where Quentin was waiting for us. I could see the bookshelves behind him, but no matter how much I squinted, there wasn’t even the glimmer of an illusion.

“Here,” he said.

“Yeah.” I stopped walking, pulling Tybalt to a halt. “Tybalt, you’d better pick me up.”

“Why?” I could hear his frown.

“Because I can’t even tell there is an illusion here, which means it’s probably going to be really hard for me to walk through the spell that covers the doorway. Faerie doesn’t like it when humans wander in willy-nilly. It’ll be easier if you carry me.”

There was a moment of silence as we all considered the ramifications of my current condition. I was just this side of out of Faerie. Then Tybalt shifted his hold so that his arm crossed my back, and hoisted me up into something uncomfortably close to a parody of a bridal carry. I closed my eyes. He stepped forward, and the world did a sickening dip and weave around me while what felt like thousands of gnats gnawed at my skin, creating an itching, stinging sensation that made me want nothing more than to rip myself free and run like hell.