Chimes at Midnight

“Ah, but then, would you have smiled?”


I laughed, and held his hand as we walked out from under the bridge, heading for the dirt trail cut into the hillside by generations of students coming and going. The campus was mostly deserted this late at night. A few students walked the pathways, but they were few and far between, as were the homeless people sleeping in the shelter of the school’s patches of carefully preserved natural vegetation. I realized with a shiver that I couldn’t tell whether the people remaining were human or fae, and walked a little closer to Tybalt. My current condition could come with a lot of nasty surprises if I wasn’t careful.

“Are you cold?” he asked, looking down at me.

“Just facing a few unpleasant realities,” I said. “Walther’s office is this way.”

As a junior faculty member, Walther rated a proper lab less because he was valuable, and more because he had a tendency to cause unexpected and odd-smelling explosions. I was pretty sure he’d used some persuasion spells, and maybe a glamour or two, to convince the administration to give him as much leeway as he had. He was in a better spot than some people with much more seniority, and nobody seemed to mind.

Then again, this was Walther. They probably just assumed he’d blow himself to kingdom come and they’d get his space without having to waste precious political favors.

The back door to the chemistry building was never locked, to accommodate the hours kept by the graduate students and some of the faculty—again, Walther. Tybalt and I walked through the empty, echoing building to the one door with a light shining through the glass. I knocked.

Something clattered. Footsteps followed, and then the door opened, revealing a tall blond man with disturbingly blue eyes only half-hidden by a pair of wireframe glasses. He was wearing a welders’ apron over his carefully professorial slacks-and-button-down-shirt combination, and he looked confused.

“Hello?” he said. Then he paused, squinting at me. Tybalt didn’t normally visit, or deign to wear a human disguise; my usual human disguise actually looked a little less human than I did at the moment. Still, some things carried over, because Walther said, incredulously, “Toby?”

“We sort of have a problem,” I said. “Can we come in?”

“Sure. Jack’s not here.” Jack Redpath was his very friendly, very human grad student. Without him, the lab was clear.

I walked inside, Tybalt close behind me, and promptly froze, swaying on my feet. Tybalt was right there to grab my shoulders, preventing me from lunging for Walther’s workbench.

“What in the world—?”

“If you would be so kind as to put the goblin fruit away, we can discuss the current situation,” said Tybalt, in a tight, clipped voice.

It took everything I had not to fight against his hands. The smell from the open jars of goblin fruit filled the room the way blood normally would, obscuring and overpowering everything with need, need, need. I needed to fill myself with sweet fruit and sweeter dreams, forgetting all this nonsense about a lost Princess, a banishment, all of it. The goblin fruit would take it all away. Everything would be wonderful if Tybalt would just let me go—

I was held captive by a mad Firstborn once. Blind Michael, whose magic was a lot like goblin fruit in the way that it could remake your perception of the world. I fought him, even if I couldn’t beat him. I did it with my own pain and with the smell of blood in the mist. “Tybalt,” I managed, gritting the word out through my teeth. “I need you . . . to scratch me.”

“What?”