Chimes at Midnight

by Seanan McGuire

  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 better 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.”

  “What? Devin—”

  “You could have stopped this!” He flew even closer, close enough that I could feel the breeze generated by his wings. “You could have done something!”

  “Egil, you forget yourself,” snapped May, her words suddenly overlaid with an accent that I had never heard before. Devin’s haunt and I both turned toward her. Her eyes were fixed on him, and so cold. You could freeze to death in those eyes. “Chastising the living? Really?”

  “As if you have any right to judge me, Mai,” he snapped. The difference between the name he used and the one I knew her by was subtle, but I could hear it. “You’ve joined them.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said, the accent slipping from her voice to be replaced by her normal Californian lilt. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Now stop shouting and help.”

  “You said ‘all these dead kids,’” I said, slowly. “Devin . . . how many have there been?” I knew that “Devin” was the name of the face the night-haunt wore, and not the name of the night-haunt himself, but I was pretty sure that I didn’t have the right to call him “Egil.” “This girl is the first one we’ve found.”

  He turned in the air to look at me impassively. Then he snapped his fingers. Figures began to separate themselves from the flock, flying forward—not as close as he had come, but close enough for me to make out faces, hair colors, the points of their ears. Some were more human-looking than others, but all of them were changelings. They just kept coming. By the time they stopped, there were more than a dozen night-haunts hanging in the air, wings a blur as they stared at me.

  The blood ran out of my cheeks, leaving me pale and lightheaded. “So many?” I whispered.

  “Goblin fruit is a killer,” snapped Devin. “You may as well have put a bullet in their heads. It would have been more merciful.”

  “Your memories are of the man who killed me,” said May mildly. “Maybe you should watch the murder metaphors, huh?” The last person whose face and memories May had consumed when she was still a night-haunt was a girl named Dare, who’d seen me as her hero. Devin had killed her. That had to be making this pretty awkward for both of them, now that May saw the world as herself, and not through the death-hungry veil of the night-haunts.

  I couldn’t really appreciate her quipping. I was too busy looking at the night-haunts. Some of them were wearing faces I recognized, changelings I’d seen in Golden Gate Park or at Home before Devin died. Others were strangers to me, and always would be, now. They were dead. These were just their echoes, and all too soon, they’d fade away.

  This had to stop.

  “Devin . . .”

  “Don’t you apologize to me,” he said, fluttering back, until he was flying just in front of those silent, doomed children. “If you want to make this right, make it stop. The dead are dead. Worry about the living.”

  “I thought the night-haunts appreciated death,” said Tybalt. I glanced at him, startled. I’d almost forgotten that he was there.

  “We do,” said Devin’s haunt mildly. “It doesn’t make us monsters. Now leave, all of you. This is not for you to see.”

  “Not even me?” asked May. That strange accent was in her voice again, turning it plaintive—almost lonely. Just as I’d never considered that Connor would be among the night-haunts now, I’d never thought about how much she had to miss them. One adopted sister wasn’t exactly a fair trade for a whole flock of blood siblings.

  “Not even you, Mai,” said Devin’s haunt, his voice softening slightly. “You made your choice.”

  She nodded, eyes oddly bright, before she took Jazz’s hand and turned to walk away. She didn’t say good-bye. Maybe that wasn’t a thing the night-haunts did.

  I stayed where I was for a few seconds more, forcing myself to look at the entire flock—even Connor’s haunt, who still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I knew the goblin fruit problem was bad. I didn’t know it had reached this point. And I’m going to make it right.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, girl,” said Oleander’s haunt, still standing safely on the ground.

  “I never do,” I said.

  Ther
e was nothing left to say after that, and too much left to do. Blinking hard to keep myself from starting to cry, I turned and followed after May and Jazz. Tybalt paced beside me, a silent shadow.

  Even when I heard the sounds of the flock beginning to eat, I didn’t look back. The night-haunt with Devin’s face was right: there are things in Faerie that are not for me to see. Not if I ever want to sleep again.

  I had work to do.

  TWO

  THE CAR WAS PARKED behind a convenience store, draped in an illusion to keep it from being borrowed by some enterprising joyrider. May snapped her fingers to release the spell as the four of us approached. None of us spoke, and we held our silence as I unlocked the doors, checked the backseat for unwanted visitors, and slid behind the wheel. My hands were shaking and I was afraid that I was going to run us off the road, but that didn’t matter. May doesn’t drive, largely because no one is willing to get into a car with her anymore. Jazz can fly. Tybalt mostly uses the Shadow Roads to get around. Unless I wanted to call a taxi, I was driving.

  Tybalt grimaced as he got into the passenger seat. I didn’t say anything, but I knew how uncomfortable he was, and I appreciated that he was willing to put himself through this for my sake. Faerie: where it’s only a little weird to realize that my boyfriend is older than the internal combustion engine.

  We were halfway home before anyone spoke. “What are we going to do?” asked Jazz. “All those kids . . .”

  “There was no way we could have known.” The words sounded sincere. It took me a moment to realize they’d come out of my mouth. “The night-haunts were doing their job, and that meant we never had a chance of finding out about those other kids. Not unless someone told us, and nobody knew for sure.” Their names. Sweet Titania, I hadn’t even learned all their names. How was I going to tell their parents if I didn’t know their names?

  Thinking like that was just going to drag me down into a never-ending spiral of blame and self-loathing. I couldn’t afford that. Not right now.

  May must have known what I was thinking, because she said softly, “I can try to talk to the flock. Maybe I can get their names.”

  “That would be good.” I glanced at Tybalt as I turned onto Market Street. “Were any of them yours?”

  “Thankfully, no,” he said. “The goblin fruit has not reached my Court as yet. Given time, it will. My control over my subjects is strong, but it is not absolute.”

  “Right.” Three months ago, right before we started officially dating, one of Tybalt’s subjects introduced me to my own intestines. That probably wouldn’t have happened if Tybalt had been in control of Samson’s actions at the time. “Okay.”

  “They weren’t from the flock, either,” said Jazz. “We’re not missing anyone.”

  “Okay,” I repeated. I was learning more and more about whose they weren’t—and it wasn’t helping. The Cait Sidhe and the Raven-maids and Raven-men kept a close eye on their changelings, protecting them the way the larger fae community didn’t. But selling goblin fruit to changelings wasn’t a crime. The Queen of the Mists had to know that it was happening, and she’d never done a thing to stop it.

  Everyone quieted after that. None of us really had anything to say. I pulled into the covered two-car parking area next to the large Victorian house that we had on long-term loan from my liege, Duke Sylvester Torquill. May and Jazz got out as soon as the engine stopped, leaving me alone with Tybalt. He waited until their doors were closed before putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, softly, “He was wrong. This is not your fault.”

  I kept my hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Are you sure about that? Because it feels like my fault.”

  “October.”

  I didn’t turn.

  Tybalt sighed before saying, more firmly, “October.” Reluctantly, I turned to face him. He reached out and touched my cheek. “This is not your fault. That does not mean it is not your responsibility. I know that. So my question now becomes . . . what are we going to do about it?”

  “We’re going to stop it.” Once again, the words were out almost before I realized they were coming, and once again, they helped. I nodded, slowly at first, then with growing conviction. “People are dying. The Queen of the Mists will have to do something now.”

  “I do not share your conviction on that matter, but I am willing to follow your lead.” He leaned in, fingers still pressed to my cheek, and kissed me.

  There was a time when I would have pulled away, feigning displeasure I didn’t really feel. That time ended after I nearly lost him in Annwn, and after he nearly lost me at the hands of Raj’s father, Samson. The phrase “tumultuous courtship” was practically invented for us.

  But that’s over now. He kissed me with calm assurance and I responded in kind, taking a brief, sweet comfort in the hint of pennyroyal on his lips. Finally, I pulled away. “Let’s go inside,” I said. “We need to decide what happens next.”

  “As milady wishes,” he said, smiling faintly, and opened the car door.

  A narrow brick path led from the parking area—it’s not really a garage, since it doesn’t have walls, but it’s private parking in the city of San Francisco, which makes it worth its weight in gold—to the back door of the house, which opened on the kitchen. May and Jazz had left it unlocked when they went inside. I pushed it open, calling, “It’s just us, don’t shoot.”

  “Toby!” My name was followed by the sound of a teenage boy vaulting over the back of the living room couch. Quentin appeared in the kitchen doorway a few seconds later, practically vibrating with the need to know what he might have missed. “You’re home.”

  “I am,” I said, heading for the coffeemaker on the counter. May, Oberon bless her, had started a fresh pot while I was still out in the car with Tybalt. “Where are May and Jazz?”

  “They went straight up to their room. May said you’d tell me what was going on.”

  “Of course she did.” My hands were shaking again as I poured myself a cup of coffee. I still forced myself to complete the process before I turned to him and said, “We finally found proof that the goblin fruit problem has gotten bad enough that it’s killing people.”

  Quentin’s eyes widened behind the bronze fringe of his hair. I remember a time when that hair was the color of cornsilk, but like many Daoine Sidhe, it had darkened as he aged. “Somebody died?”

  “A lot of somebodies died, Quentin.” I could see their faces if I closed my eyes. “We found a dead changeling in an alley, and we waited with her until the night-haunts came. We saw the victims, all of them. There have been at least a dozen. Maybe more.”

  “Oh, oak and ash.” He stood a little straighter, unconsciously falling into a formal posture. He was a courtier at Shadowed Hills when we first met, and some habits die hard. “What are we going to do?”

  There was something extremely comforting about that “we.” I spent so long without any allies that sometimes I wasn’t sure I knew what to do with the ones I had. “We’re going to take it to the Queen,” I said. “This is her land. She should be doing something to keep her people alive.”

  “Um,” said Quentin. “But . . . she hates you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said dryly. “I appreciate the reminder, though.”

  “He has a valid point,” said Tybalt. “Her dislike for you is rather legendary.”

  “And she’s still the Queen.” I sighed before taking a gulp of my coffee. “We work with what we have.”

  They weren’t exaggerating, sadly. The Queen of the Mists had hated me for years, starting when I refused to pretend I hadn’t been the one to discover what was currently her knowe. Her hatred had just grown stronger, and more irrational, with time. She’d done some complicated political maneuvering to get me convicted of murder not all that long ago. She nearly succeeded in having me executed over that one.

  But this was her Kingdom, and Faerie is a feudal society. If I wanted this to happen, we would have to go through the Queen.
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  “Quentin, go get changed,” I said, topping off my coffee. “I’m going to go find May and Jazz, see if they want to come with us—where’s Raj?”

  “He went to Helen’s,” said Quentin, grimacing. “They’re fighting again.”

  Helen was Raj’s longtime half-Hob girlfriend. It was sort of a miracle that they were still together, given the circumstances of their meeting, but I wished them luck. Love does best when it has lots of luck to bolster it up. “All right, fine. That means we don’t need to worry about him. I want to leave within the hour, got me?”

  “Got you,” said Quentin, and vanished into the hall, sounding more like an elephant than a teenage boy as he galloped toward the stairs.

  I followed more sedately, sipping my coffee as I walked. I was almost to the second-floor landing when I heard Tybalt following. I knew he was letting me hear him, and that dissolved what little irritation I might have otherwise felt; by walking loudly enough for me to hear, he was offering me the opportunity to tell him to go away.

  Adjusting to the nonverbal oddities of dating a Cait Sidhe has been strange, but rewarding, and in a way, I think I’ve been getting ready for this for years. I looked back over my shoulder as I stopped in front of the door to May and Jazz’s shared room, flashing him a quick smile. “You okay back there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do believe I am.”

  “Good.” I turned back to the door, knocking as I called, “Is everybody decent? I need to talk to you.”

  “We’re clothed,” said May, opening the door. I could see Jazz behind her on the bed, pulling her blouse down in a way that implied “clothed” might have been an exaggeration. I didn’t say anything about it. Their sex life is none of my business. “What’s up?”

  “I’m about to do something I really, really don’t want to,” I said. “You want to come?”

  May pulled a face. “The Queen’s Court? Really? Tonight?”