Chimes at Midnight

FOUR

WE DIDN’T LINGER ON THE BEACH. We were too close to the Queen’s knowe for comfort, and the night was slipping through our fingers, already skating down the long slow slope toward dawn. I put my leather jacket back on, drawing it tight. Then Tybalt, Quentin, and I piled into the car while May produced her cell phone from somewhere inside the candy confection of her dress, raising it to her ear. I didn’t worry about them. Danny would get them safely home.

Quentin sat quietly in the backseat for the first part of the ride, mirroring Tybalt, who sat stiff and silent next to me. I was just starting to consider turning on the radio when Quentin said, in a careful tone, “Toby? Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did, but you can ask another one.” Anger and dread were warring for control of my emotions, and it felt like they were negotiating a team up. I had to find a way to fight this. If the Luidaeg couldn’t help me, I still had to come up with something. But what? She was the Queen. I was a changeling with some weird skills and a bunch of allies that I cared way too much about. What if she decided to go after them? Tybalt couldn’t abandon his Court. Sylvester wouldn’t abandon his Duchy. They were going to be sitting ducks if I was forced to leave.

I didn’t want to be in this situation. She hadn’t given me a choice.

“Why do you hate goblin fruit so much? I mean . . .” Quentin paused, choosing his words more carefully before he said, “I mean you hated it even before you knew for sure that people were dying. Lots of things can kill people. You don’t hate them all.”

“Most deadly things come with a choice. A changeling who tastes goblin fruit once—just once—doesn’t get any choice after that.” I frowned at him in the rearview mirror. “You’ve been watching me chase the stuff all over the Bay Area for months. I thought you’d know this by now.”

“Yeah, but you started when you were still . . .” His voice faltered as he realized he’d almost mentioned Connor. He glanced guiltily at Tybalt. Tybalt, bless him, didn’t say anything.

Purebloods don’t like to think about death much. It upsets them to remember that people aren’t eternal. Connor’s death nearly broke me. But he died to save my little girl, and I couldn’t shame him by refusing to go on with my own life. “The goblin fruit started showing up on the streets after Connor died,” I said. “I was looking . . . I don’t even know what I was looking for. I was looking for trouble. I found it.”

“I thought you were going to die, too,” Quentin admitted in a small voice. I stared at his reflection, shocked. That was something he’d never said out loud, no matter how much his behavior told me he was feeling it. He looked down at his hands, twisting them together in his lap, and said, “It’s why I kept telling Tybalt where you were going, and how much danger you were putting yourself in. I hoped maybe you’d listen to him, even if you wouldn’t listen to me.”

Tybalt nodded, confirming Quentin’s story. I winced.

“Oak and ash, Quentin, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” He raised one shoulder and let it drop again in a classic teenage half-shrug. “When I had to break up with Katie, I sort of felt like dying for a little while. I guess having someone you love die has to be a whole lot worse.”

“It is,” I said honestly. “It’s the worst thing you can imagine.” I glanced at Tybalt, who was still looking straight ahead, letting us talk without him. I took my right hand off the wheel and placed it on his knee, earning myself a quick, almost grateful look. “But it gets better.”

“That’s good. It’s just . . . you never told me why you started hunting goblin fruit the way you have been. I’m your squire, Toby. I’m supposed to support you while you train me, and I can’t do that if you never tell me what’s going on. It’s my job to be here for you.” He sounded profoundly frustrated. “People are dying. I get that. I could have helped, if you’d let me.”

I took a deep breath, pulling my hand from Tybalt’s knee and raking the hair out of my face. Finally, I said, “Let me ask you something. Have you ever tried goblin fruit?”

There was a long pause before Quentin answered, “No. I mean. Some of the older courtiers back home had tried it, but I wasn’t old enough when I came here, and Duke Torquill doesn’t allow the stuff in his Court.”

Quentin was originally from Canada—somewhere near Toronto, if I placed his faint and fading accent correctly. Where near Toronto was something I didn’t know. He was a blind foster to the Duchy of Shadowed Hills, which made his parentage and title, if any, a secret until such time as his fosterage ended or his parents chose to reveal themselves. “So you’ve never had any, but you’ve talked to people who have. What do they say about it?”

“That it’s like going to the deeper lands of Faerie, even if it’s only for a little while.” Quentin’s tone turned disdainful. “I’ve been to the deeper lands. I didn’t like it much.”

I had to fight the urge to laugh. It would just have offended his dignity, and it wouldn’t have been fair: I didn’t like the deeper lands much either. Tybalt wasn’t so restrained. He snorted. All three of us had wound up in Annwn, a realm that’s supposed to be long-sealed. Our stay had involved a lot of bleeding, mostly on my part, and a lot of pain, for everyone. I was just as glad to be home. “Yeah, but I bet it sounded pretty appealing before you knew what the deeper lands were like.”

“I guess so,” admitted Quentin.

“Now imagine how amazing that sounds to changeling kids. They’re on the outside looking in. They’re never going to have as much magic as everybody else. They’re not going to live as long as everybody else. Hell, half the courtiers I knew when I was a kid said even setting foot in the deeper lands would strike a changeling dead.” It was pure pixie-crap, of course. The first changelings came about because the fae insisted on abducting mortals and carrying them away to their enchanted castles under the hills. If changelings couldn’t survive the deeper lands, we’d have known that millennia ago. “Can you see how goblin fruit would sound appealing?”

“Well, sure, but goblin fruit is deadly to changelings. Everybody knows that.”

I sighed. Sometimes my squire was such a pureblood that it hurt. “Quentin, believe me, changeling kids get used to being lied to by people who want to keep the best things for themselves. There’s always someone who thinks the whole ‘it’s deadly’ thing is one more lie to keep them from being happy. There’s always someone willing to try one little taste. And one is all it takes.” No one evangelized for goblin fruit like a changeling on their first high, before the first pains of withdrawal hit them. They were true believers, each and every one, and they’d convince all their friends that the warnings were false.

Quentin frowned, disdain fading into puzzlement. “You hate goblin fruit because it messes with changelings? Not because it kills them?”

“It’s not just about that, although it’s part of it. Goblin fruit is too dangerous. It kills changelings. It endangers the secrecy of Faerie. The more it infects the streets, the more likely it becomes that someone will slip and hand a jar to a human. What happens then? And yeah, I also don’t like that it’s one more ‘we can have this because we’re so pure and awesome, and you can’t, because your blood is all tainted and gross’ reminder that we can’t ever be on equal footing.”

Quentin paused before he said, “You sound like my dad. He hates goblin fruit. He says it’s a divisive element and that it drains resources that should be going toward preserving unity.”

“Sounds like a smart guy.” I tried to keep my tone light. Quentin didn’t mention his parents often. No matter how curious I was, some rules aren’t meant to be broken, and that includes the rules that protect the blind fosters. I wouldn’t push. Which didn’t mean I didn’t want to.

“Yeah,” said Quentin. “I guess I understand why you hate goblin fruit. I mean, it makes sense, especially with . . . you know, everything.”

“You mean me being the only changeling knight in the Kingdom, and constantly dealing with a Queen who hates me?” I asked dryly. “Oh, and now? Banished. Because exile was so what I needed this week.”

“Yeah.” Quentin sighed. “I wish this didn’t have to be your problem.”

“Any chance of that just died.”

“I know. But I . . .” He met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said. Then it was my turn to grimace. “Wow. That sounded about as sincere as a used car salesman, huh?”

“I was thinking you sounded as sincere as someone in a horror movie saying, ‘I’ll be right back.’ You won’t be right back, unless it’s as a head in a bag.”

“I’ve got to talk to May about the stuff you’re watching on television.”

“Who do you think keeps showing it to me?”

Tybalt chuckled. “He has a point.”

“Don’t help. I don’t think I could handle it if the two of you ganged up on me right now.” I pulled up in front of an all-night taqueria, glancing down at my distinctly nonstandard attire before digging my wallet out of the front pocket of my jacket and handling a twenty dollar bill to Quentin. “Go inside. Get as many burritos as this will buy, and get me a large coffee.”

“Yes, sir!” He snatched the bill from my hand and was out of the car like a shot, all anxiety forgotten at the sound of the dinner bell. I smiled a little, turning toward Tybalt.

“The Luidaeg likes it when we bring—” I began. His kiss cut off the rest of my sentence. While I was turned away, he had unfastened his seatbelt and closed the distance between us, and now he was pressed to me like a teenage boy after the prom. I fumbled with my own seatbelt until I found the latch and was able to squirm free, wrapping myself around him in turn. His fingers found the back of my neck, tangling in the small wisps of hair not contained by the net of ribbons. I splayed my fingers against his chest, bracing myself without pushing him away, and kissed him like I thought the world was going to end.

We were still like that when the rear door opened and Quentin said, sounding both amazed and a little disgusted, “Don’t you need to breathe?”

“Ah, you see.” Tybalt pulled his mouth away from my throat, turning a lazy, smug-eyed smile on Quentin. “I am a King of Cats, and she was a fish for quite some time. We are both very, very good at holding our breath.”

“Off.” I pushed him away, shaking my head. “You just had to go to the fish place, didn’t you? Quentin, did you get my coffee?”

“I like being alive,” he said, and passed me the cup.

“Good.” I took it, refastened my belt, and started the car, trying to pretend that Tybalt wasn’t grinning wickedly at me from the passenger seat. It wasn’t easy. “Buckle up.”

I let Tybalt hold my coffee as we drove the last mile or so to the Luidaeg’s neighborhood. The area where she lived wasn’t exactly what you’d call “upscale.” Or “nice.” Hell, even “livable” was pushing it, although the definition is different when you’re a functionally immortal sea witch who likes to be left alone. San Francisco grew up around the Luidaeg. She could live wherever she damn well wanted to.

The streets changed around us as we drove, careful maintenance giving way to benign neglect, then wanton vandalism, and finally the sort of disrepair that implied the residents had abandoned all hope. It was just another facade. The people living in the Luidaeg’s shadow enjoyed some of the lowest crime rates in the city. When we had earthquakes, their foundations didn’t crack; when it rained for a week, their roofs didn’t leak. The residents of the blocks surrounding the Luidaeg’s dockside home were her last passive line of defense against strangers, and she took care of them.

No one lived on the Luidaeg’s block. There was maintaining a neighborhood, and then there was putting up with neighbors. One was good sense. The other was likely to get someone killed.

I parked on the street, reclaiming my coffee from Tybalt and letting Quentin carry the burritos as we walked down the alleyway to the Luidaeg’s door. It was old, faintly bloated wood, set into a frame that looked so water-damaged it might fall apart at any moment. Appearances can be deceiving, especially where the Luidaeg is concerned. I knocked lightly. Then I stepped back, sipped my coffee, and waited.

“Think she’s up?” asked Quentin, rummaging through the bag of burritos.

“If she’s not, we’re probably all about to be torn limb from limb. Get ready to run.” I peered into my cup. “Maeve’s tits, I think they pumped this stuff up from the center of the Earth. It’s not coffee. It’s fermented dinosaur blood.”

“Cool.” Quentin pulled a foil-wrapped burrito out of the bag and began unpeeling it.

I raised an eyebrow. “‘Cool’? That’s all you have to say?”

“Be glad he’s not grilling you about the comet that killed them all,” said a dry voice. We turned, almost in unison, to see the Luidaeg standing in the alley behind us, two paper grocery bags in her arms. She looked faintly puzzled, but not annoyed. I’d take it. “What the fuck are you three doing here?”

The Luidaeg is fond of human profanity, I think because it tends to shock the purebloods. I shrugged. “We were in the neighborhood.” I didn’t want to tell her I’d been exiled until after she’d agreed to let us in.

“Uh-huh. Is there a burrito in that sack for me?”

“Lobster, shrimp, and every pepper in the store,” said Quentin happily.

“Ew,” I said, and took the bag. If I left it alone with the two of them, Tybalt and I weren’t going to get any.

“You don’t have to eat it.” She turned her deceptively normal-eyed gaze on me, considering my dress. Finally, she said, “You reek of the bitch-Queen’s magic, and you don’t normally bring the kitty-cat here. What’s wrong?”

“Can we talk about it inside?” I asked. “Please?”

The Luidaeg smiled, showing too many teeth. “I love it when you beg. Come on in.” She pushed past us to the door. It swung open at her touch, revealing a dark hallway. She stepped inside, calling, “Hurry up, I don’t have all night,” without turning back.

“You know, the first time I came here, she used a key to get in,” I commented to Quentin, as we followed her.

“I guess she doesn’t feel like she has to pretend as much,” he replied, pausing long enough to close the door behind him.

The idea that the Luidaeg wasn’t pretending for us anymore was reflected by the hall itself, which was pristine, in that slightly shabby, lived-in way older apartments get when they’ve been well-cared for and well-loved for long enough. The air smelled like clean saltwater, a scent that implied there was a beach somewhere in the house, if we were brave enough to look. Knowing her, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a stretch of shoreline inside the pantry, waiting for beachcombers and human sacrifices.

It was almost a relief when I saw a cockroach scuttle across the floor. No matter how much she cleaned the place up—or how much of the mess had been an illusion—she was still the sea witch we knew and liked more than was probably good for our health.

We followed the Luidaeg down the hall to the kitchen, where she began unpacking her groceries. Tybalt and I stayed in the doorway, watching, while Quentin moved to help her put away the cans. There was no illusion-sheen in the air around her because she wasn’t wearing one: she was the oldest among us, and her nature was protean enough that she didn’t need anything as crude as an illusion when she wanted to pass for human. She just changed herself.

She looked like she was somewhere in her early twenties, with the fading ghosts of acne scars under the freckles on her cheeks and strips of electrical tape holding her thick brown pigtails in place. I’d seen her fae nature slip through a few times, but never for long, and never all the way. I was pretty sure that the day I saw the Luidaeg’s true form would either be the day she killed me, or the day when I had much bigger things to worry about.

She placed a twelve-pack of Diet Coke in the fridge before turning to face me, folding her arms, and saying, “Well?”

“Well?” I echoed. “What ‘well’? Did I miss something that would trigger a ‘well’?”

“Well, can I have my burrito?” She held out her hand. “And, well, you want to tell me what’s going on? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost, and you wouldn’t have come here like this, fresh from Court and with an entourage, because you thought I wanted a burrito. You’re not stupid enough to think I wouldn’t realize something was up.”

“Gee, you sure know how to make a girl feel good.” I straightened, dug her burrito out of the sack, and passed it to her. There was another burrito labeled “chicken w/o beans.” I handed it to Tybalt before taking a deep breath, putting the bag down on the kitchen table, and saying, “We finally found proof that the goblin fruit is killing changelings. At least a dozen so far.”

“You found a body and waited until the night-haunts came, didn’t you?” She took a bite of her burrito, foil and all. Her teeth had turned sharp at some point, more like a shark’s than a human’s.

“Yeah,” I confirmed quietly.

The Luidaeg took another foil-covered bite of burrito and swallowed without chewing before she said, “They must really like you, or they’d have killed you by now. So the stuff is killing changelings. We knew it would, eventually.”

“I went to the Queen of the Mists. I had to tell her.”

“You what?” The Luidaeg lowered her burrito, the color draining out of her eyes until they were the color of green driftglass, weathered and worn down by the sea. “Mom’s tits, Toby, are you stupid?”

“I had to know if she knew.”

“Let me guess: she did.”

“She’s the one who’s been distributing it.” The depth of loathing in my voice didn’t surprise me, although maybe it should have. At some point in the drive, my dislike of her had solidified into hatred. She was a murderer, even if Oberon’s Law didn’t see her that way.

“And? Kings and Queens need money, too, and people like their drugs too much to care about whether or not they’re going to be fatal. Hell, sometimes ‘it will kill you’ is the main appeal.”

“It’s too fast,” said Quentin. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged. “Almost nothing is addictive just because you taste it once. Goblin fruit doesn’t give people a choice. You could make someone a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, if you wanted to be a jerk. And there’s no way to quit. It doesn’t seem . . . I dunno, fair.”

“Faerie isn’t fair, kid, and if you don’t know that, it’s high time you learned it.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “Fair was never on the table.”

“It’s not right,” I said, suddenly annoyed by her casual dismissal of Quentin’s concerns. “It’s endangering Faerie. Even if ‘fair’ was never a consideration, survival was. Is. As long as we’re stuck in the human world, we can’t afford the risks goblin fruit encourages people to take.”

“Better,” said the Luidaeg, and took another bite of burrito.

I was warming to my subject. “How are they even growing the stuff? You can’t cultivate goblin fruit in the mortal world. You can barely grow it in the Summerlands without a dedicated team of horticulturists who don’t have hobbies. Walther tried to cultivate a bush, just so he could chart the life cycle, and he gave up when even doing the whole thing inside Goldengreen didn’t make the berries germinate.”

“Where does goblin fruit grow naturally?” asked the Luidaeg.

“Tirn Aill, Tir Tairngire, and the Blessed Isles.” The answer was automatic. Back when I lived with my mother, I spent hours being trained on the names of all the lands of Faerie, even the ones that I would never live long enough to see.

“Uh-huh. And they’ve been sealed for centuries, right?”

“Yes, but during the exodus, people brought soil and stuff. I just don’t understand why it hasn’t all been used up by now. I mean, how long does a pot of dirt from the Blessed Isles stay a pot of dirt from the Blessed Isles, and not a pot of dirt from Marin?”

The Luidaeg smiled. “Now you’re asking better questions. Here’s the deal with goblin fruit: it keeps showing up on the street because purebloods with the space and magic to grow the bushes like the berries. And where there’s a market, people will find a way to get to the product. I hate the shit. It wreaked hell with the Selkie community about two hundred years back, and I don’t like anything that screws with the Selkies. But I wasn’t able to stop people from selling it, just drive them off my territory. With the Queen backing them and with me in semi-retirement, there’s nothing standing in their way.”

“Yeah.” The Luidaeg didn’t like anything that screwed with the Selkies, except for the Luidaeg. They were her property, in a messed-up way, because they existed due to the horrible murder of most of her descendants. I tried not to think about that too hard. “Are you going to come out of retirement?”

“Can’t. Wish I could, but I can’t.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “I withdrew for a reason. Don’t ask me about it. It’s one of the things I’m not allowed to tell you.”

“Swell.” I was aware that the Luidaeg used to be more active than she was these days—the stories about her confirmed that, even if she’d rarely left her apartment for anything but groceries in the years I’d known her. Why that changed was something I didn’t know, and that apparently wasn’t going to change any time soon.

“All of this is well and good, but it does not touch on what really brought us here,” said Tybalt gravely. “October. You need to tell her.”

The Luidaeg frowned, gaze sharpening. “Tell me what?”

“The Queen . . .” I took a deep breath. “I asked her about the goblin fruit. I asked her if she would please stop allowing it on the streets.”

“And . . . ?” prompted the Luidaeg.

“And I’ve been exiled. I have three days to get out of the Mists. After that, she’s not going to show any leniency with me.”

To my surprise, the Luidaeg laughed. “Oh, is that all?” She put the remainder of her burrito down on the counter before turning to me. Her teeth were back to normal. “See, the trouble here is that once someone has a throne, it’s damn hard to tell them they’re doing it wrong. Three days is a lot of time, if you know how to use it.”

I stared at her. “What?”

“I’m just saying, you have more resources at your disposal than you think you do, and she’s letting her own prejudices blind her. You’re just a changeling, after all. What could you possibly do to hurt her?” She grinned broadly. “You can do a lot. For starters, you can try talking to some of the people who knew King Gilad and find out what they can tell you.”

Quentin and Tybalt looked at her blankly.

For once, I wasn’t the last one in the room to get what the Luidaeg was hinting at, and I didn’t like the feeling very much. I stared at her. She raised an eyebrow, clearly content to wait me out if that was what it took. Finally, slowly, I asked, “Luidaeg, if there’s something you want me to know, why don’t you just tell me?”

“Because I can’t.” Her smile slipped, replaced by an expression of deep frustration. “This is one of those areas where I’m bound and counter-bound until I can’t see straight. Unless you know the right questions, I can’t give you the answers you need.”

I slammed back the rest of my taqueria coffee in a long, profoundly unsatisfying gulp. Wiping my mouth, I said, “Just one question, then. Can the people who knew King Gilad help me take down the Queen?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. So it’s time to play scavenger hunt.” I looked at Tybalt and Quentin, who were watching me hopefully, and sighed. “Okay. Just one more question.”

The Luidaeg gave me a flat, frankly disbelieving look. “Really.”

“Yes, really.”

“What is it?”

“Can I have one of your Diet Cokes? Because I’m not up for saltwater coffee right now.” And if I was going to go talk to the only people who I knew for sure had known King Gilad before he died, I was going to need more caffeine. Hell, I was going to need a caffeine IV.

The Luidaeg blinked at me. Then she laughed, indicating the fridge with one hand. “Help yourselves.”

“That’s what you’re always telling me to do,” I said, and went to get myself a soda.