“Yes, but won’t you think about the frogs? I’m sure they receive enough unwanted vomit from the student body.”
I blinked. And then, to my surprise, I laughed. Tybalt smiled toothily.
“Good,” he said. “You’re still you.”
“You’re stuck with me,” I said.
His smile faded, replaced by a quiet uncertainty that I’d come to recognize an inch at a time, picking it out of his more common expressions like a secret that was just for me. Kings of Cats aren’t supposed to be weak; they’re not supposed to be uncertain or worried. Those are emotions for people who don’t have Kingdoms to run.
Or for people standing alone with their suddenly mostly-human girlfriends, wondering if they put off saying, “I love you” for too long. I put my hand against the side of his face. This was the first time we’d been alone since I woke up. If I couldn’t afford a few seconds for this, it was already too late. I was already lost.
“Hey,” I said. “I mean it. You’re stuck with me. I’m not going anywhere. If there’s an answer, we’ll find it. And if there’s not an answer, we’ll create it. We’re going to talk to Walther, and then we’re going to ask the Luidaeg if she knows where to find a hope chest, and we’re going to fix this. I’ll be back to normal before you know it.”
“Your life is in danger. You’re stubborn, pigheaded, and refusing to admit the gravity of your situation. I’d say you’re normal right now.” His tone was light, but it couldn’t disguise his relief.
“Don’t make fun of me while I’m in the middle of a crisis.”
Tybalt peeled my hand away from his face, holding it as he stepped closer. There was no space left between us. “My sweet little fish. If I refused to make fun of you simply because you were in the grips of a crisis, I would never have the opportunity to make fun of you again.”
“I’d be okay with that,” I said.
He laughed and started to lean forward, clearly intending to kiss me. I raised a hand, stopping him. He blinked at me.
“I just threw up,” I said.
“October, given the circumstances—”
“All I can possibly have had in my stomach was goblin fruit. I don’t need to deal with you going on a magical mystery tour while I’m trying to cross campus. Let me rinse my mouth, and then you can have all the reassuring kisses you want, okay?”
Tybalt sighed. “Loath as I am to acquiesce to your request, it does have merit.”
“You could have just said ‘okay,’ you know.”
“Ah, but then, would you have smiled?”
I laughed, and held his hand as we walked out from under the bridge, heading for the dirt trail cut into the hillside by generations of students coming and going. The campus was mostly deserted this late at night. A few students walked the pathways, but they were few and far between, as were the homeless people sleeping in the shelter of the school’s patches of carefully preserved natural vegetation. I realized with a shiver that I couldn’t tell whether the people remaining were human or fae, and walked a little closer to Tybalt. My current condition could come with a lot of nasty surprises if I wasn’t careful.
“Are you cold?” he asked, looking down at me.
“Just facing a few unpleasant realities,” I said. “Walther’s office is this way.”
As a junior faculty member, Walther rated a proper lab less because he was valuable, and more because he had a tendency to cause unexpected and odd-smelling explosions. I was pretty sure he’d used some persuasion spells, and maybe a glamour or two, to convince the administration to give him as much leeway as he had. He was in a better spot than some people with much more seniority, and nobody seemed to mind.
Then again, this was Walther. They probably just assumed he’d blow himself to kingdom come and they’d get his space without having to waste precious political favors.
The back door to the chemistry building was never locked, to accommodate the hours kept by the graduate students and some of the faculty—again, Walther. Tybalt and I walked through the empty, echoing building to the one door with a light shining through the glass. I knocked.
Something clattered. Footsteps followed, and then the door opened, revealing a tall blond man with disturbingly blue eyes only half-hidden by a pair of wireframe glasses. He was wearing a welders’ apron over his carefully professorial slacks-and-button-down-shirt combination, and he looked confused.
“Hello?” he said. Then he paused, squinting at me. Tybalt didn’t normally visit, or deign to wear a human disguise; my usual human disguise actually looked a little less human than I did at the moment. Still, some things carried over, because Walther said, incredulously, “Toby?”
“We sort of have a problem,” I said. “Can we come in?”
“Sure. Jack’s not here.” Jack Redpath was his very friendly, very human grad student. Without him, the lab was clear.
I walked inside, Tybalt close behind me, and promptly froze, swaying on my feet. Tybalt was right there to grab my shoulders, preventing me from lunging for Walther’s workbench.
“What in the world—?”
“If you would be so kind as to put the goblin fruit away, we can discuss the current situation,” said Tybalt, in a tight, clipped voice.
It took everything I had not to fight against his hands. The smell from the open jars of goblin fruit filled the room the way blood normally would, obscuring and overpowering everything with need, need, need. I needed to fill myself with sweet fruit and sweeter dreams, forgetting all this nonsense about a lost Princess, a banishment, all of it. The goblin fruit would take it all away. Everything would be wonderful if Tybalt would just let me go—
I was held captive by a mad Firstborn once. Blind Michael, whose magic was a lot like goblin fruit in the way that it could remake your perception of the world. I fought him, even if I couldn’t beat him. I did it with my own pain and with the smell of blood in the mist. “Tybalt,” I managed, gritting the word out through my teeth. “I need you . . . to scratch me.”
“What?”
“Just . . . pop your claws and . . . break my skin. Please. I need you to hurt me.”
He hesitated, his grip slackening as he warred against himself. The hungry part of me saw that as an opportunity. I ripped myself halfway out of his hands before he clamped down, claws coming out as an automatic response. They drew a thin line of pain across my left wrist, and the smell of blood was suddenly hot in the room, overpowering the smell of the goblin fruit. That may have been because Walther was frantically capping the jars, but I didn’t think so.
“Let my left wrist go,” I whispered. “Just that. Hold tight, but give me that.”
Cautious now, like he was afraid I would run again at any moment—and he was right to be cautious, because I was ready to bolt—Tybalt released my left wrist. I raised it to my mouth. He hissed when he saw me bleeding, but I ignored him, clamping my mouth down over the wound so my lips created a virtual seal. Blood filled my mouth, hot and salty and so absolutely real that I wanted to cry. I didn’t cry. Instead, I swallowed, and swallowed again, and kept on swallowing until Walther turned to face us.
“Sorry about that,” he said. He had thrown a sheet over the goblin fruit, apparently trying for “out of sight, out of mind.”
“’S okay,” I mumbled, around a mouthful of my own wrist. The bleeding had almost stopped; the scratches weren’t deep. Reluctantly, I pulled my hand away, swallowing one last time before I said, “We didn’t call first.”
“Still.” Walther removed his glasses, dispelling the hasty illusion that made him look human at the same time. His eyes were even bluer this way. All Tylwyth Teg have eyes like that, making it seem like they’re looking straight through you. “What happened?”