Chimes at Midnight od-7

by Seanan McGuire

  Chimes at Midnight

  ( October Daye - 7 )

  Seanan Mcguire

  Things are starting to look up for October "Toby" Daye. She's training her squire, doing her job, and has finally allowed herself to grow closer to the local King of Cats. It seems like her life may finally be settling down...at least until dead changelings start appearing in the alleys of San Francisco, killed by an overdose of goblin fruit.

  Toby's efforts to take the problem to the Queen of the Mists are met with harsh reprisals, leaving her under sentence of exile from her home and everyone she loves. Now Toby must find a way to reverse the Queens decree, get the goblin fruit off the streets—and, oh, yes, save her own life, since more than a few of her problems have once again followed her home. And then there's the question of the Queen herself, who seems increasingly unlikely to have a valid claim to the throne....

  To find the answers, October and her friends will have to travel from the legendary Library of Stars into the hidden depths of the Kingdom of the Mists—and they'll have to do it fast, because time is running out. In faerie, some fates are worse than death.

  October Daye is about to find out what they are.

  Chimes at Midnight

  (The seventh book in the October Daye series)

  A novel by Seanan McGuire

  For Jude and Alan,

  and all the staff at Borderlands Books.

  But especially for Ripley. We miss you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  Chimes at Midnight marks the start of what I view as the second stage in Toby’s journey, and I am grateful and a little awed that you’re all here with me, watching it happen. Writing these books is forever a labor of love, and a big part of that is all of you. Seriously. Thank you all. Thanks also to the Machete Squad, as always, since without them, I would probably still be hiding under the bed rather than facing the tangles of draft two; to the Disney Magic Bitches, for putting up with endless trips to Disneyland; and to Vixy, Amy, Brooke, and Shawn, for being extremely forgiving of the fact that no matter where we go, Toby goes there too.

  I remain utterly delighted with my agent and personal superhero, Diana Fox, with my editor and savior, Sheila Gilbert, and with my eternally fantastic cover artist, Chris McGrath. Thanks to Christopher Mangum and Tara O’Shea for website design and maintenance, and to Kate Secor for keeping my email from eating me alive. I know it’s hungry . . .

  We have come so far, and we have so far yet to go, and I am honored to have you all here with me to see where we wind up. I hope you’ll continue to stick around.

  My soundtrack while writing Chimes at Midnight consisted mostly of Prepare the Preparations, by Ludo, Carry the Fire, by Delta Rae, Fairytale, by Heather Dale, endless live concert recordings of the Counting Crows, and Journey’s Greatest Hits, by Journey. Any errors in this book are entirely my own. The errors that aren’t here are the ones that all these people helped me fix.

  Now remember: You must not look at goblin men. You must not buy their fruits . . .

  OCTOBER DAYE PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

  THROUGH CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

  All pronunciations are given strictly phonetically. This only covers races explicitly named in the first seven books, omitting Undersea races not appearing in, or mentioned in, book seven.

  Afanc: ah-fank. Plural is Afanc.

  Annwn: ah-noon. No plural exists.

  Bannick: ban-nick. Plural is Bannicks.

  Barghest: bar-guy-st. Plural is Barghests.

  Blodynbryd: blow-din-brid. Plural is Blodynbryds.

  Cait Sidhe: kay-th shee. Plural is Cait Sidhe.

  Candela: can-dee-la. Plural is Candela.

  Coblynau: cob-lee-now. Plural is Coblynau.

  Cu Sidhe: coo shee. Plural is Cu Sidhe.

  Daoine Sidhe: doon-ya shee. Plural is Daoine Sidhe, diminutive is Daoine.

  Djinn: jin. Plural is Djinn.

  Dóchas Sidhe: doe-sh-as shee. Plural is Dóchas Sidhe.

  Ellyllon: el-lee-lawn. Plural is Ellyllons.

  Gean-Cannah: gee-ann can-na. Plural is Gean-Cannah.

  Glastig: glass-tig. Plural is Glastigs.

  Gwragen: guh-war-a-gen. Plural is Gwragen.

  Hamadryad: ha-ma-dry-add. Plural is Hamadryads.

  Hippocampus: hip-po-cam-pus. Plural is Hippocampi.

  Kelpie: kel-pee. Plural is Kelpies.

  Kitsune: kit-soo-nay. Plural is Kitsune.

  Lamia: lay-me-a. Plural is Lamia.

  The Luidaeg: the lou-sha-k. No plural exists.

  Manticore: man-tee-core. Plural is Manticores.

  Naiad: nigh-add. Plural is Naiads.

  Nixie: nix-ee. Plural is Nixen.

  Peri: pear-ee. Plural is Peri.

  Piskie: piss-key. Plural is Piskies.

  Pixie: pix-ee. Plural is Pixies.

  Puca: puh-ca. Plural is Pucas.

  Roane: row-n. Plural is Roane.

  Satyr: say-tur. Plural is Satyrs.

  Selkie: sell-key. Plural is Selkies.

  Shyi Shuai: shh-yee shh-why. Plural is Shyi Shuai.

  Silene: sigh-lean. Plural is Silene.

  Tuatha de Dannan. tootha day danan. Plural is Tuatha de Dannan, diminutive is Tuatha.

  Tylwyth Teg: till-with teeg. Plural is Tylwyth Teg, diminutive is Tylwyth.

  Urisk: you-risk. Plural is Urisk.

  We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

  —William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part II.

  ONE

  August 22nd, 2012

  LIKE MANY PORT TOWNS, San Francisco is a city built on top of its own bones, one where broad modern streets can exist side by side with narrow alleys and abandoned thoroughfares. It’s a lot like Faerie in that regard. Both of them are studies in contradiction, constant wars between the old and the new. I prowled down one of those half-hidden alleys, the sky midnight dark above me and my shoulders hunched against the growing chill. I’m inhuman and borderline indestructible. That doesn’t make me immune to cold—more’s the pity.

  I’d been walking down the alleys of the city since a little after ten o’clock, when most of the mortal population was safely inside and the streets informally switched their allegiance to Faerie. The air around me smelled faintly of cut grass and copper, as well as the more normal scents of garbage and decay. The don’t-look-here I had cast over myself was holding, for the moment.

  Somewhere in the alleys around me, a tabby tomcat was prowling, and a woman who looked enough like me to be my sister walked shrouded in her own don’t-look-here. Quentin and Raj—my squire and Tybalt’s heir, respectively—were back at the house watching horror movies and pretending not to resent the fact that we wouldn’t let them come along. I’ve dragged Quentin into plenty of dangerous situations, but even I have my limits.

  We were hunting for goblin fruit.

  It’s a naturally-occurring narcotic in Faerie: sweet purple berries that smell like everything good in the world and give purebloods beautiful dreams. The effect can be concentrated by making the fruit into jam, dark as tar and more dangerous than any mortal drug. What’s just pleasant for purebloods is an unbreakable addiction for humans and changelings—the crossbred children of the fae and human worlds. They waste away on a diet of nothing but sweet fruit and fantasies.

  Goblin fruit isn’t illegal. Why should it be? It doesn’t hurt the purebloods who love it, and it’s usually too expensive for changelings to get their hands on—which didn’t explain why the stuff had been appearing on the streets of San Francisco with increasing regularity. My old mentor, Devin, used to control the city’s drug trade. He kept the goblin fruit out . . . at least until he died. It took me too long to realize what a hole his passing would make. In my defense, I was busy t
rying to keep myself alive.

  That excuse wasn’t going to hold much water with the people who were already addicted—or with the ones who were already dead.

  Word on the street was that half a dozen local changelings had vanished recently, there one day and gone the next. They hadn’t taken any of their possessions, if they had anything to take; not all changelings did. They hadn’t told their friends where they were going. A few were known criminals—thieves and petty thugs. Others were just kids who’d been bunking in the independent fiefdoms of Golden Gate Park while they tried to figure out what to do with their lives. And then, suddenly, they were just gone.

  Changelings are the perfect victims in Faerie. We’re a born underclass, and very few of us have anyone to miss us if we disappear. I might never have heard about the problem at all, if I hadn’t been one of Devin’s kids, once upon a time. A few of my fellow survivors came to me to see if there was anything I could do. I agreed to try. I’d been out on the streets every night for a week doing just that. So far, I’d busted three goblin fruit dealers, stopped a mugging, and stopped for coffee at half the all-night diners in the city. But I hadn’t seen any of the missing changelings. I honestly wasn’t sure whether that was a blessing or a curse.

  A raven cawed harshly from somewhere overhead. It would have been a perfectly normal sound in the daylight, but here and now, this late at night . . . I looked up, scanning the rooftops until I spotted the outline of a large raven perched on a broken streetlight. It cawed again and then took off, flying west. I swore under my breath and chased after it, trying not to let it out of my sight as I ran along the alley.

  The uncharacteristically night-flying raven was the animal form of Jasmine Patel, my Fetch’s girlfriend. She’d been keeping lookout over the whole area. If she was calling for backup, she’d seen something—and whatever it was, it was pretty much guaranteed to be nothing good.

  Jazz’s caws guided me through the maze of narrow streets, until I skidded around a corner and into a dead-end alley. There was a dumpster at the far end, so overstuffed with garbage that it had practically become a tiny, localized landfill. A figure I knew was standing at the edge of the mess, her head bowed in evident sorrow. She was my height, with colorless brown hair worn short and streaked with neon pink. Her clothes were almost shockingly bright in the dim alley—orange corduroy pants and an electric blue sweater—but somehow, that didn’t do anything to lessen the impact of the scene. May knew what death meant, maybe better than any of us. She was a Fetch, after all.

  I stepped up next to her, releasing my don’t-look-here as I joined her in looking at the heaped-up trash. She put a hand on my shoulder, sniffling.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “I know.”

  There was a girl lying sprawled in the garbage. Her skin and hair were the ivory color of old bleached bones, with a faint waxy sheen: she was half Barrow Wight. Only half; her height, and the square lines of her jaw, came from her human parent. She was thin enough to look consumptive, and she wasn’t breathing.

  I walked forward, kneeling to touch the girl’s wrist. Her skin was still warm. She’d been alive when we started prowling the streets. There was a faint, sickly-sweet smell to the garbage around her, too dilute to be tempting, but strong enough to make her cause of death plain. Goblin fruit. We’d finally found a changeling who had been killed by goblin fruit. Luck was with us.

  Luck was nowhere in the picture.

  “Toby?” May’s voice was very soft. “What do you want to do now?”

  There was only one thing that we could do. I stayed crouched beside the girl, my fingers still resting lightly on her wrist. “We wait for the night-haunts.”

  The soft scent of musk and pennyroyal tickled my nose. “Are you sure that is the wisest course of action?” asked a male voice, sounding faintly concerned.

  “I promised not to summon them again. I didn’t promise not to hang around and say hello.” I straightened, turning to face him. I couldn’t quite conceal my relief at the sight of Tybalt, standing there in a wine-colored shirt and tight black pants. Unlike May and I, he hadn’t bothered trying to make himself look human: the black tabby stripes in his dark brown hair were clearly visible, and his eyes were banded malachite green, with vertical pupils. His expression, however, was as sorrowful as May’s.

  If I hadn’t already loved him, I think I would have started to in that moment.

  “The night-haunts aren’t friendly people, Toby,” said May. “I know. I used to be one.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” I shook my head. “It’s not like we can break into the county morgue later and examine her body. Even if we had forensic training, it wouldn’t matter. This is the only way.” If the girl had died a violent death, I could have sampled her blood for clues. This was different. If I tried to do blood magic and ride her memories, I could wind up getting addicted to goblin fruit in the process. I cared about justice. I cared about cleaning up my streets. There were some risks I still wasn’t willing to take.

  The night-haunts were a risk of a different variety, and one that I had taken before. They were one of the deep, dark secrets of Faerie, the shadows that came for the dead and carried them away, leaving perfect human replicas in their place. The work of the night-haunts allowed Faerie to exist without worrying that the bodies of our dead would betray us. The trouble was, they also made it impossible for me to know how many of the missing changelings had died and been replaced by human manikins. This changeling could be our first casualty. She could also be our twentieth. If the bodies couldn’t tell me, I was going to have to go for the next best thing, and ask the dead.

  Wings rustled overhead as Jazz came in for a landing, shifting back into her semi-human form in the same motion. She was a tall, black-haired woman of clearly Indian descent, with raven-amber eyes. “I think Toby’s right,” she said, moving to take May’s arm. “That doesn’t mean we have to stay if you’re not comfortable.”

  “No,” said May, shaking her head. “If Toby’s staying, so am I.” She hesitated before smiling, very slightly. “It’ll be nice to see my siblings again.”

  Fetches are created when night-haunts consume the blood of the living. Sort of like caterpillars turning into butterflies, only gorier and a lot less likely to wind up on binders designed by Lisa Frank. I grimaced a little. “All right. Tybalt?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Do you even need to ask whether I intend to remain here while you engage in casual conversation with a group of merciless carrion-eaters who have little reason to be fond of you? I’m staying.”

  “Not going to argue,” I said, and walked over to stand beside him.

  “What do we do now?” asked Jazz.

  In unison, May and I replied, “We wait.”

  Tybalt snorted before casually looping his arm around my waist. I let him pull me a little closer, although I didn’t allow myself to relax. The night-haunts are nothing to relax around. The comforting smell of pennyroyal and musk rolled off him like my favorite cologne. All fae have their own distinctive magical odor. I’m more sensitive to them than most. It’s all part and parcel of being the first in a new race of blood-workers: the Dóchas Sidhe.

  My mother, Amandine, is the daughter of Oberon himself, making her Firstborn and more powerful than anyone as . . . reality-challenged . . . as she is has any real need to be. I’m her daughter by a mortal man, making me a changeling with a rather unusual skill set, combined with the bleached-out coloring of a bad watercolor painting. The fact that I managed to get myself knighted for services to the Crown was practically a miracle. The fact that I had been dating the local King of Cats for three months without discovering that it was all an especially cruel dream sequence was definitely a miracle.

  The four of us made a strange tableau as we stood there, looking at the body of a dead girl and waiting for her strange eternity to begin. It felt almost disrespectful. The dead should be alone when the night-haunts come. But I’d promised not to summon them, and there was no bette
r way to find our answers than this. No; that wasn’t right.

  Given the circumstances, there was no other way at all.

  Ten minutes, maybe less, passed before we heard the distant sound of ragged wings beating against the night. That was our only warning: immediately after that, the flock descended. They were a ribbon of smoke and dead leaves against the night, an impossible swirl of half-realized bodies and charcoal-sketched faces. Individually, they were about the size of Barbie dolls, but they didn’t travel that way; they moved as an all-consuming cloud, too organized to be natural.

  They landed between us and the body, the more solid members of the flock standing closest to us, folding their wings behind their bodies and watching us with wary hunger. Several of them had faces I knew. Devin, my old mentor; Oleander, the woman who’d been partially responsible for my spending fourteen years as an enchanted fish . . .

  . . . and Connor, the Selkie man I’d loved, once upon a lifetime ago. My mouth went dry. Connor had been alive the last time I’d seen the night-haunts. Somehow, I hadn’t allowed myself to consider what his death would mean.

  He met my eyes, and then looked away without saying a word. There was nothing left for us to say.

  Devin’s haunt felt no such restraint. He launched himself into the air with a maddened buzzing of his wings, flying forward to hover in front of my nose. Face contorted with anger, he gestured at the girl in the trash and demanded, “Well, Toby? Well? Is this good enough for you?”

  “What?” My eyes widened, temporary shock over seeing the night-haunt wearing Connor’s face forgotten. “Devin, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “For over a hundred years, I kept that shit out of this city, and you—” He laughed, a bitter sound with no amusement behind it. “You may as well have invited it in. Rolled out the red carpet, told the dealers that San Francisco was ripe for the taking. Are you happy now? All these dead kids are on your head.”