Chimes at Midnight

I eyed him warily. “Not as such, no.”


“Good. Good. Your instincts are usually right, when you let yourself trust them. For you, blood will almost always be the answer.” He grabbed a suspiciously convenient roll of gauze from the desk, lobbing it at me underhand. I caught it, only fumbling slightly in the process. My fingers were too thick and clumsy, and they didn’t want to do as they were told.

Well, they were going to learn. Until I could get hold of a hope chest, they were what I had to work with. “Do I even want to know why you had this sitting there?”

“I work with sharp things, and some of us don’t heal like superheroes,” said Walther. He paused, blanching. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“It’s okay.” I shook my head. “Although if you have a scalpel or something that I can borrow, that would be good. I don’t want to depend on getting Tybalt to claw me when the craving gets too bad.”

“I would prefer to avoid that myself,” said Tybalt.

Walther frowned. “How much do you know about anatomy? Physiology? Where the major arteries in the humanoid body tend to appear?”

“Wow, you know, most people would just go ‘where the major arteries are,’” I said, trying to make him smile. It didn’t work. I sighed. “Very little. But that isn’t my main concern right now.”

“When you’re bleeding out because you sliced yourself wrong, it will be,” said Walther.

“And when I’m so high I can’t think, much less act, I might as well be bleeding out,” I snapped back. “At least then, I’d die knowing that I was trying. Look, I’ll avoid any visible veins, I’ll cut across instead of cutting down, but I need easy access to blood. Unless you’ve managed to cook up a cure while we weren’t looking?”

“Not yet,” said Walther. “I’m still trying. But there are better options than scalpels.”

“Like what?”

He turned his back on us, opening one of the long drawers in his desk to produce a leather-wrapped bundle. When he unrolled it, he revealed a variety of old-fashioned-looking surgeon’s tools, including a syringe that could probably have been used to extract blood from a Bridge Troll. I blanched.

“That is not a better option than a scalpel,” I said.

“I’ve been a chemist for a long time,” he said, picking up the syringe. “That used to include a lot of the duties humans have transferred to doctors.”

“You practiced bloodletting?” asked Tybalt.

“For about eighty years. Syringes and leeches, that’s the way to keep food on the table. Toby, pick up that bottle of rubbing alcohol and come over here. Let’s see if we can’t find a way to keep you from damaging yourself to get the blood out.” He paused before adding, “It’s the bottle labeled ‘rubbing alcohol,’ next to the bottle labeled ‘H2SO4.’ Don’t grab the wrong one.”

“Why not?”

“Because the other bottle is sulfuric acid, and you’ll die.”

“Oh, because that’s safe,” I grumbled. Grabbing the bottle that wasn’t going to kill me, I walked over and offered it to Walther.

“Good,” he said. “Tybalt, get me one of the ice cube trays from the freezer?” He picked up a cotton ball, dousing it in rubbing alcohol. “Toby, arm, please.”

Hanging my leather jacket on the nearest chair, I held out my right arm. Walther swabbed a square of flesh about an inch wide clean and drove the needle home before I could tense up. Eighty years of practice had left him pretty good at gauging the location of a vein: the syringe in his hand began to fill with blood as soon as he pulled back the plunger.