Chimes at Midnight: An October Daye Novel (31 page)

The fifth key opened the lock.

My shoulders slumped in relief as I pushed the door open, letting the keys fall into the growing puddle of blood at my feet. Dianda was saying something, but I couldn’t stop to listen. She would get up on her own. Or she wouldn’t, and we’d deal with that when I knew whether or not this was the end of the line. My feet left bloody prints as I walked into the room.

Treasure—both recognizable and strange—was piled up on all sides. Bars of gold and platinum shared space with sacks of beans and jars of feathers. I shuffled forward, trying to spot the hope chest somewhere in the mess. The smell of blood was overwhelming everything.

Blood. I fumbled the baggie full of the Luidaeg’s blood out of my pocket and managed to break the seal, spilling blood lozenges in all directions. I let them fall, focusing on the two that I had left in my hand. She knew the hope chests. They knew her.

Please, let this work without killing me,
I thought, and put the lozenges into my mouth.

The kick of her blood slamming into me was even harder this time, maybe because I’d taken twice as much. It wanted to own me, and I couldn’t let it, or I would be lost. I forced the forming memories aside, trying to focus the energy the blood was pumping through me. “Hope chest,” I whispered. “Hope chest, hope chest . . .”

And there it was, a simple wooden box on a plain pedestal that I could suddenly recognize. I stumbled toward it, flashes of the Luidaeg’s memories washing over me with every step. The Luidaeg and a blonde woman, kissing on a beach at sunset. The Luidaeg in a bog, watching smoke curl up against the stars, holding a little boy who had Blind Michael’s eyes. The Luidaeg in the arms of a man with hair the color of twilight, blackness shot through with glints of gold and red and rose.

Then my hands touched the wood, my blood staining the delicate carvings, and I fell to the floor with the hope chest cradled in my arms, and nothing really mattered anymore. I didn’t feel myself hit the floor.

I didn’t feel anything.

I
OPENED MY EYES and found myself staring at the ceiling of my old apartment. “Okay,” I muttered, sitting up and looking down at myself. I was in my long black Bourbon Room T-shirt, and I was lying on my four-poster bed from Mother’s tower. The room was familiar and wrong at the same time, mixing aspects of my mortal and fae lives with maddened abandon. The shelves groaned with battered paperbacks and random knickknacks alongside magic swords and jars full of fireflies. One of the windows looked out on the Summerlands, while the other showed a midday parking lot.

“I hate symbolism,” I said, sliding out of the bed. At least nothing hurt. My wounds were gone, washed away by whatever process I’d started by touching the hope chest.

I
had
touched it, hadn’t I? I couldn’t quite remember whether I’d reached it in time. I walked toward the door, fighting the urge to touch my ears and see where my blood was balanced. This place seemed designed to tell me soon enough, and there was no point in rushing the inevitable.

Then I opened the door, and found myself looking at . . . myself. Mostly. The woman in the doorway was clearly a changeling, a little less fae than I had been at the start of the week, a lot less human than I’d been when I broke into the treasury. She was wearing my leather jacket, and had a knife in either hand. Her fingers were wrapped around the blades, hiding them, and their hilts were identical.

“Hi,” she said, without preamble. “I’m you.”

“I got that,” I said, frowning. “What’s going on? Am I going to have some kind of messed-up vision every time I need to change my blood?”

“Maybe,” she said. “It’s not like this is ground that’s been walked before. Most blood magic comes with visions of a sort, so you could call this more of the same. How do you feel?”

“Weak.”

“That’s because you’re bleeding to death.” She held the knives out toward me, hilt first. “Pick one.”

I blinked. “That’s it? That’s the wisdom of this particular stupid vision? ‘Pick one’?”

“The hope chest responds to intent, and right now, you don’t have any; you’re too far gone,” she said, still holding the knives out. “You could actually say that this moment, right here, is both you fighting your own blood, and you fighting the hope chest. Part of you wants to be human. Let the goblin fruit carry you away on a tide of sweet, sweet dreams that leave you dead. Part of you wants to be fae. Stop making this choice, stop taking this risk. So pick a knife. If you get the silver, you’re fae. If you get the iron, you’re human. Either way, you’ll have made a decision—you’ll have given the hope chest the intent it needs to work.”

“Are you messing with me?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m offering you a fifty-fifty chance at survival. And that’s better than you’ll have if you don’t pick a knife soon. There’s only so much blood in your body, and you’re not regenerating. Come on. Choose while there’s still time for it to matter.”

The knives were identical, and she was holding them the same distance from her body. Nothing about her position hinted at which one I should take.

“What do I do after I have it?” I asked.

“Stab yourself.”

“. . . of course I have to stab myself,” I muttered. “This day just gets better and better.”

“Don’t stall,” she snapped abruptly. I blinked. She scowled. “If you bleed to death, I die with you. So stop messing around and fix this. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. I have too much left to do.”

“But if I pick the wrong knife—”

“If you pick the wrong knife, Faerie had better find a new hero.”

I stared at her for a few precious seconds before turning my attention to the knives in her hands. They gave no external clues, nothing that might help me know which one I wanted.

But then, I’ve never been very good at choosing just one. I reached out and grabbed both knives before she had a chance to react, pulling them from her hands. The motion left her fingers cut and bleeding, freeing the smell of blood to invade the room. I took a deep breath, letting the blood strengthen me, turned the knives around in my hands, and drove them into my stomach in a single gesture. I never did see which was which. It didn’t seem to matter.

The pain was sudden and immense, expanding to fill the entire world. The last thing I saw before I fell was my own face smiling at me from the doorway. She looked approving. I wanted to yell at her. If there was a right choice, why couldn’t she just tell me that and skip the stupid riddles? But falling seemed much more important than arguing. I hit the floor on knees I could barely feel through the pain washing through my body.

The knives. The knives. I needed to . . . I needed . . . I yanked the knives out of my stomach before the blackness could take me. And then I closed my eyes, letting myself go limp. Dying hurt. I did not approve. I did not—

A hand closed on my shoulder, fingers surprisingly solid despite the remaining haze. “Toby? October? Are you all right?” Dianda sounded worried. I couldn’t blame her. From the smell of things, there wasn’t much blood left
in
me, but there was a lot of it
around
me. “Hey. Don’t be dead. I’m pretty sure it’ll count as a declaration of war if you’re dead.”

“No such luck,” I rasped. Until I spoke, I hadn’t been quite sure I still had a mouth. It tasted like blood, just like everything else. I swallowed, trying to clear the taste away, and opened my eyes to find Dianda—still finned and scaled—on the floor next to where I’d fallen. I blinked. “Did you crawl here?”

“I need water before I can shift back,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” I sat up, waiting for a flare of pain. Nothing happened. I reached for my side, slipping my hand through the cut in my clothing to feel smooth, undamaged skin. Sitting up a bit straighter, I pulled my hand free, wiped it on my jeans, and reached up to brush my hair back.

My fingers hit the sharp edge of my ear. Not pureblood-sharp, but the angle I was used to. I took a deep breath, swallowing the urge to shout with joy. “I think I’m—” I began, and stopped as pain shot through my left side. I doubled over, clapping my hands over the wound I knew had to be there.

They found the hilt of my iron knife. Fighting to focus, I wrenched the blade from its scabbard and flung it across the room. It clattered against a pile of golden coins before vanishing behind them. I pulled up my shirt and pulled down the waistband of my jeans. There was a welt where the knife had been close to my skin, and unlike the rest of my injuries, it wasn’t healing.

“I’m
definitely
back to normal,” I said, and stood, tucking the hope chest under my arm. Maybe more than normal. I felt less human than ever before, although I’d managed to hang on to some of my humanity. I knew the balance of my own blood well enough to be sure of that.

Worrying about what I’d done to myself could come later. For the moment, I had allies to worry about. “I’m going to get you some water,” I said.

To my surprise, Dianda shook her head. “No. There’s bound to be something in here,” she waved a hand to indicate the treasury, “that makes water out of nothing, or never dries up, or whatever. I’ll find it. Go save your cat.”

Tybalt. Fear washed over me, and I nodded. “All right,” I said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I didn’t wait for her response. I was off and running, my feet squelching through the blood trail I’d left earlier. Even in her current form, Dianda could fight off any guards that came for her. She was a Duchess in the Undersea; they based titles off the ability to hold them. She’d be fine. Tybalt needed me.

How long had it been? How long had it taken me to change my blood back to normal, how long for Dianda to pull herself across the treasury floor to where I was huddled around the hope chest? How
long
? I ran, heading as fast as I could for the dungeon door. My feet slid on the blood-slick stone floor. I slammed my hip against a corner and kept on running, feeling the pain first spread through me and then recede, pulled back by the power in my blood.

I couldn’t properly enjoy my body being my own again. I was too busy running, my mind already playing through the worst possible scenarios. Most of them were terrifyingly simple: I’d get there and the night-haunts would be gone, and the next time I saw the flock, there would be a diminutive figure with Tybalt’s eyes among their number.

The door to the dungeon was unguarded; the guards Dianda and I had taken down were gone. Whether gone meant “away” or “down,” I didn’t know, and didn’t care. I yanked the door open and ran into the dark without care for how badly I might hurt myself. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting there in time to save him.

The door to Dianda’s cell was open. That was a good sign: if the guards had been down here, they would have closed it. I kept running until I turned the final corner and stopped dead. The bottom seemed to drop out of the world, leaving me alone in the darkness. Tybalt was there, unmoving, lying in exactly the position he’d been in when I left him.

But the night-haunts were gone.

Moving slowly now, like the air had been replaced by thick goo, I walked toward him. He still looked fae. Night-haunts usually replaced the dead with human-seeming shells. Would they have bothered with that here, in a knowe, where his body would never be seen by the mortal world? It didn’t make sense, from a logical standpoint—but since when was Faerie logical? Maybe they’d left one just to mess with me.

“It isn’t fair,” I whispered.

“It never is,” replied Devin’s voice. I whipped around to find the two night-haunts hovering behind me. Connor’s haunt wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I managed to fight the urge to slap them out of the air. “Is he alive?”

“For now,” said the Devin-haunt, looking me up and down. “I see you’ve found yourself again. Our part in things is done. Whether he lives or not, you owe us.”

“I know,” I said, and turned my back on them. I walked the last few steps to Tybalt, kneeling beside him on the cold stone floor, and reached out to stroke his cheek. My fingers left bloody trails behind them. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, you need to wake up. It’s time to save the Prince, defeat the evil Queen, and go on a vacation. I hear Hawaii is nice this time of year. I’ll go there with you. I’ll go anywhere with you. Come on, kitty-cat. Wake up.”

He didn’t respond. I glanced over my shoulder to the night-haunts. They were hovering there, watching me. Connor’s haunt made a small gesture with his hand, like he was pulling power out of the air. That was all.

My power has never been in the air. I turned to Tybalt, taking a deep breath, and raised my hand to my mouth, licking the blood off of my palm. There was enough there that I didn’t need to cut myself. My magic responded instantly, thundering down on me in a cascading wave of cut grass and bloody copper. I gathered it all, holding it like a snake that wanted to escape, and bent to press my lips to Tybalt’s.

Directing a spell means telling the magic where you want it to go. This time, as I kissed him, I told the magic I wanted it to go into his body. I gave it freely and without restraint, trying to push it away from me as hard as I could.
Come on, Tybalt,
I thought, half-begging, half-praying.
Take it. Please, take it, and open your eyes. Come on . . .

Even with the blood, my magic wasn’t limitless. I kept forcing it away from me, but there was only so much I could do, and the end was nearing. I gathered what strength I could and pushed it into him.
Please.

With a choking gasp, Tybalt started breathing.

His arms rose, closing around me, and my one-sided kiss became something more as he kissed me back. I sighed with relief as I let the last of my magic go, fading into the dungeon air. Finally, I leaned in and let my forehead rest against his. His eyes were open. I had never seen anything so beautiful.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” he said. Then he blinked, and frowned. “You are
covered
in blood. And your eyes . . .” His eyes widened. “Your eyes are your own. October, did you find it?”

“I did.” I pulled away, holding up the hope chest. “I couldn’t find the user’s manual that goes with it, but I think I did okay. Are
you
okay?”

“Tired. Sore. What happened?”

I climbed to my feet, offering my free hand. “The Queen tightened her wards after our last jailbreak. The strain of carrying me through them nearly killed you.”

“Ah.” He took my hand and stood. “Then it’s a good thing you found the hope chest on your own.”

“Not entirely on my own. Dianda’s in the treasury.”

He blinked. “Why did she not return here with you?”

“She’s sort of a fish from the waist down at the moment. And she’s got a moderate case of iron poisoning, so she needs water before she can shift back.”

“I miss so much when I’m unconscious,” he said.

I laughed, turning to lead him out of the dungeon. I was unsurprised to see that the night-haunts were gone. Together we walked back to the stairs and up into the hall. One of the Queen’s guards was waiting there. I didn’t see Tybalt move. One moment, he was standing beside me, the next, he was holding the guard off the floor by the throat.

“You really like that move, don’t you?” I asked, continuing to walk. The guard thrashed as Tybalt cut off his oxygen supply. “Just don’t kill him. We’re not breaking Oberon’s Law today.”