Chimes at Midnight

“Just . . . pop your claws and . . . break my skin. Please. I need you to hurt me.”


He hesitated, his grip slackening as he warred against himself. The hungry part of me saw that as an opportunity. I ripped myself halfway out of his hands before he clamped down, claws coming out as an automatic response. They drew a thin line of pain across my left wrist, and the smell of blood was suddenly hot in the room, overpowering the smell of the goblin fruit. That may have been because Walther was frantically capping the jars, but I didn’t think so.

“Let my left wrist go,” I whispered. “Just that. Hold tight, but give me that.”

Cautious now, like he was afraid I would run again at any moment—and he was right to be cautious, because I was ready to bolt—Tybalt released my left wrist. I raised it to my mouth. He hissed when he saw me bleeding, but I ignored him, clamping my mouth down over the wound so my lips created a virtual seal. Blood filled my mouth, hot and salty and so absolutely real that I wanted to cry. I didn’t cry. Instead, I swallowed, and swallowed again, and kept on swallowing until Walther turned to face us.

“Sorry about that,” he said. He had thrown a sheet over the goblin fruit, apparently trying for “out of sight, out of mind.”

“’S okay,” I mumbled, around a mouthful of my own wrist. The bleeding had almost stopped; the scratches weren’t deep. Reluctantly, I pulled my hand away, swallowing one last time before I said, “We didn’t call first.”

“Still.” Walther removed his glasses, dispelling the hasty illusion that made him look human at the same time. His eyes were even bluer this way. All Tylwyth Teg have eyes like that, making it seem like they’re looking straight through you. “What happened?”

“The Queen sent someone to hit me in the face with a goblin fruit pie,” I said. “Well. We’re assuming it was the Queen. That much goblin fruit is going to be expensive, and she’s the one with the most interest in seeing me discredited, instead of just dead. If any of the jam dealers I’ve been hassling had decided to go after me, they would have hired an assassin instead of wasting perfectly good product.” The thought of the pie I’d been hit with made my head start spinning again. I raised my wrist and started sucking on it again. The taste of blood was faint, but it helped.

“Ah, the good old days, when men tried to kill you with guns and I could simply eviscerate them,” said Tybalt.

Walther snorted. “Any questions I had about who your companion was have just been answered. Can you drop the illusions?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not wearing one.”

He paused. Beside me, the faint smell of musk and pennyroyal ghosted through the air as Tybalt removed his human disguise. Finally, Walther said, “That’s what I was afraid of. Let me guess: you got hit with the goblin fruit, your body went ‘oh, this is nice,’ didn’t recognize it as a poison, and tried to adjust things to get the maximum amount of enjoyment. Only since I’m going to bet you were overdosing at the time, you weren’t awake to consciously control the urge, and so you wound up dialing yourself almost all the way human before you ran out of oomph.”

I blinked, lowering my wrist. Tybalt blinked. Walther grinned, a little wryly.

“Did you think I put ‘Professor’ in front of my name because I wanted to get respect from college girls? I am actually capable of analytical thought.” He paused, cocking his head. “You were ready to beat me down to get at the goblin fruit a minute ago. How are you feeling now?”

“Sore,” I said. “Tired, annoyed, hungry . . .”

“But not like you want to take me on if it gets you a fix?”