Sunshine (16 page)

There was a series of articles about how many different kinds of Weres there are, another favorite topic. Wolves are the famous one, of course, but they're actually comparatively rare. There are probably more were-chickens than there are were-wolves, which if you're asking me explains why comparatively few Weres go rogue as against, say, how many demons. And possibly why the black market in anti-Change drugs is so slick, although the idea of black marketeers with either a sense of humor or of compassion is maybe stretching it a little. More likely the were-chickens will pay
anything
for the drugs, and do.

But there are were-pumas, for example, and were-bears. Werecoyotes are enough of a scourge that the SOFs go after them and do a horrible sort of mop-up about once a year. Were-raccoons are nasty little beggars and were-skunks are, well, beyond a nightmare. Get a were-skunk mad at you and your life isn't worth living. There's a special flying SOF unit for were-skunks. Every city over about a hundred thousand has a SOF were-rat unit, speaking of horrible mop-ups. New Arcadia has one. But according to Pat and Jesse you can stay one jump ahead (so to speak) of all the Weres, even the rats, as long as you don't get careless. Nobody ever stays a jump ahead of vampires.

Maybe because there was all this other stuff about the Others, and because, of course, I wanted not to be noticing, I ignored for a while that there were more local stories about vampires. Sucker sightings, sucker activity, which is to say fresh desiccated corpses, aka dry guys. As I say, New Arcadia is pretty clean, but nowhere is really clean of vampires. And so I didn't notice right away—who wants to notice bad stuff happening next door? And even if it was happening, it didn't mean it had anything to do with my little adventure. I could ignore it if I wanted to.

…
That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you
—
as it does, does it not
?—
and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner …

T
HE COFFEEHOUSE IS
in the old downtown area, called Old Town now. It had been a pretty grotty place when Charlie's first opened, and he catered to grotty people, figuring that everybody has to eat. Since he apparently didn't do anything—including, I swear, sleep—in the beginning but run the coffeehouse, he could do everything himself, including cook from scratch. He didn't even have a regular waitress the first couple of years; the kitchen, such as it was, was lined out along the fourth wall. This kept his overheads low, and I've already said he's a good cook. The cleaner and more lucid of his grotty clientele began to bring their less grotty friends there because of the food. When Mom and I moved in two blocks away the gentrification had only just begun—begun enough that Mom wasn't totally stupid to move in—but there were still drunks and hype heads on more corners than not, and Ingleby Street was still all old-books shops, the kind where walking in the door puts you at immediate risk of being crushed to death by a toppling pile of crumbly yellow magazines no one has looked at in fifty years. (This nearly happened to me when I was twelve, and the owner was so relieved I wasn't going to tell my mom on him—my mom even then had a local rep as someone you didn't mess with—that he gave me a great deal on them instead. This motley assortment included an almost unbroken run of
Vampire Tales and Other Eerie Matters
from the sixties, which among other Other things included the first serial publication of the early, less controversial volumes of
Blood Lore
. I was already Other-fascinated, but this may have confirmed the disease.)

When I was still in high school the city authorities got really excited because New Arcadia was going to be on the post-Wars map. This was partly because we'd had—comparatively—quiet Wars, so most of the city was still standing and most of its occupants were still sane, and partly because our Other Museum by the mere fact that it was still there had become nationally and perhaps globally important. I had never liked it myself; the exhibits for the public were real lowest-common-denominator stuff, and you had to have six PhDs, no dress sense, and a face like a prune to get into the stacks or any of their serious holdings, which included stuff you couldn't get on the globenet. You could say my nose was out of joint. I was going to like it even less if it was going to swamp us with the kind of loony-tune academic that specialized in Others, but the city council thought it was going to be totally thor.

One of their bright ideas about raising Old Town's attractiveness level, since we were inconveniently close to the museum, was to dig up all the paving and put down the cobblestones that the city authorities had dug up seventy years ago to put down paving, and replace the old (and, by the way, brighter) street lamps with phony gas lamps with electric bulbs in them. Then they stuck a raised flower bed in the middle of what had been the road, and made it a pedestrian precinct. The old-books stores left and the antique shops and craft boutiques moved in, and for a while there Charlie and Mom were thinking desolately about trying to relocate the coffeehouse because we didn't want to learn to make Jackson Pollack squiggles out of raspberry coulis, thank you very much. And if the taxes went up as predicted they would have to sell the house even if they kept the coffeehouse, which they probably wouldn't do either because they wouldn't be able to bear putting up the prices enough for the sort of hash and chili and chicken pot pie and succotash pudding and big fat sandwiches on slabs of our own bread menu that we do so well—this was before my bakery was built and so before we were also known for toxic sugar-shock specials—to keep us in the black. Our regulars wouldn't be able to afford it, even if the new upscale crowd wanted to eat retro diner food, or we wanted to serve it to them. Meanwhile the pedestrian precinct seemed to be pretty well shutting down our trucker traffic, and Charlie's has had truckers from its first day. There used to be a joke that a New Arcadia route trucker wasn't the real thing till he could get his rig within two blocks of Charlie's.

But it turned out there were more of the old grotty people still clinging on than anyone realized—well, we realized it, because most of them ate at the coffeehouse (including the better class of derelicts who knew to come to the side door and ask for leftovers), but we thought the Rolex shiny-briefcase thugs would drive them out. Only it was the Rolex shiny-briefcase thugs that eventually left. So the old grotty people are still here, and the coffeehouse is still here, and Mom and Charlie still live around the corner, and most of the antique shops have subsided or are subsiding more or less gently into junk shops again, and some of them are beginning to have piles of old books in the corners, and most of our truckers still come in the back way, although they can't get within two blocks any more. And when the city in disgust told us to mind our own flower bed because they weren't going to do it any more, Mrs. Bialosky, who is one of our most stalwart and ubiquitous locals, organized working parties, and nearly every year since then our flower bed wins something in the New Arcadia neighborhood gardening festival, and I like to think I can hear the sound of city authority teeth grinding. Mrs. Bialosky owns a narrow little house on the corner of Ingleby and North where she can keep an eye on almost everything that happens, and the two-seater corner booth just to the right of the front door of Charlie's also belongs to her in all but real estate contract, and woe betide anyone who sits there without her permission. Mrs. B, by the way, is suspected of being a Were, but there is no consensus on a were-
what
. Guesses range from parakeet to Gila monster. (Yes, there are were-Gilas, but not usually this far north.)

For the most part our neighborhood is a good thing. Who wants to be dazzled by Rolexes and aluminum briefcases every time you want to have a quiet cup of tea sitting on the wall around the award-winning flower bed? I'll take the odd wandering vagrant any day. But it means that if you've got vampires moving in from the outside they're going to move into our neighborhood before they move into a neighborhood like the one the city authorities had planned for us. Suckers don't like their food in a bad state of preservation any more than humans do, but our population is predominantly sound and healthy, just not very well-off or important. Furthermore, when the city went into its snit about our bad attitude, they had finished tearing out all the old streetlights but hadn't finished putting in new ones, and since then they keep claiming they can't afford to finish the job. Some of our shadowy corners are really
very
shadowy.

And then one of the dry guys turned up on Lincoln Street, less than three blocks from Charlie's.

You might think the neighborhood would shut down, everyone staying indoors with the doors locked, iron dead-bolts stamped with ward signs and shutters hung with charms, but far from it. Charlie's was hopping the next evening, and since Charlie himself would almost rather die than turn away a customer—not because he always has his eye on his profit margin (Mom would say he
never
has his eye on his profit margin), but because a hungry and thirsty person must always be treated kindly—we had people leaning against the walls and outside against the front window. Maybe they were crowded a little closer than usual under the awning, where the coffeehouse lights were bright. Our dopey fake gas lamps dotted around the square looked even more pathetic than usual, but you're pretty safe if there's enough of you. Even a serious vampire gang won't tackle a big group of humans without an extremely good reason. But it was just as well no fire inspector came out for a stroll that night and checked the numbers against our license. Although the local fire inspector was an old friend of Charlie's, and would have stopped for a glass of champagne and a chat.

Things got really exciting when the TV van showed up. I was in the bakery, feverishly turning out whatever-took-the-least-time to feed the extra people, but I heard the commotion and Mary put her head in long enough to tell me what was going on. “I'm not here,” I said. “If it comes up.” She nodded and disappeared.

But too many other people knew I was there. I'd been interviewed—or rather they'd tried to interview me—right after it happened. SOF is supposed to “cooperate” with the media, but I know Pat and Jesse are in a more or less continual state of pissed-offness because someone is forever leaking more stuff from their office than they feel anyone but them needs to know, but their boss, or rather their sub-boss, widely known as the goddess of pain, refuses to try to shut it down, so they are stuck. In this case it meant that it had got leaked that SOF was very interested in whatever had happened to me, even if I hadn't given them any reason to be interested, and even though apparently nothing else had happened since (if I'd developed a rider, like an incubus, or a hitch, from a demon having me on a tether, there are signs, if you're looking). So now Mr. TV Roving In Your Face Reporter, exploring neighborhood response to a sucker in our midst, wanted to interview me, and at least eight people had told him I was on the premises. Mom, for good or bad, had gone home; she hates packed-out nights and in theory we didn't need her. She would have given Mr. TV Pain in the Butt Interviewer something to think about. It mightn't have been such great publicity for Charlie's but we don't really need to care what local TV thinks of us.

Charlie is great at blandishing. Few people can resist him when he's in Full Blandish. But he's nowhere near as good at getting rid of assholes as Mel is, and it was Mel's night off. Charlie came back after a while and asked if I could bear to come out and be stared at. “You can say no a few times and come back here; I'll keep 'em out after that. But if you'd be uncooperative in person first it would be easier.”

Charlie knew I hated the whole business, which I did, but that wasn't the real problem. The ever-ready-for-fresh-disasters media guys had walloped my bruised and messed-up face onto TV seven weeks ago, though I'd refused to talk to them. I don't suppose I could have stopped them even if it had occurred to me to try. I'd thought about it later. I hadn't wanted to, but I did. Did vampires watch local news on TV? Seven weeks ago they might still have been prying up floorboards for where I might be hiding.

Most of what goes on TV, even on local TV, gets archived on the globenet within a few weeks. And vampires use the globenet all right. Some people believe vampire tech is better than human.

I went out front like Charlie asked. Mr. TV was there with his camera slave, half Quasimodo and half Borg. Mr. TV had amazing teeth, even for a TV presenter. “I don't have anything to say,” I said.

“Just come outside a minute, where we can get a clearer shot,” said Mr. Teeth. I wondered if vampires ever got their teeth capped. I went off on a teeny fantasy about specialist fang caps. Probably not.

“You don't have anything to get a clearer shot of,” I said.

“Oh now you want to leave that up to us,” said Mr. Teeth, grinning even wider. He put his hand on my arm.

“Take your
hand
off my
arm
,” I said. I had meant to sound huffy but it came out sounding like a person about to fly into the ozone and loop the loop. Damn.

Mr. Teeth dropped my arm but his eyes (and his incisors) glinted with increased interest.
Damn
. He made a gesture to the slave, who raised his camera and pointed it at Mr. Teeth. I heard him start in with the TV introduction voice but there was a ringing in my ears. The scab on my breast started itching fiercely. I kept my hands clenched at my sides; if I scratched it it would start to bleed, and if it started to bleed it would leak through, and I didn't want the Contusion That Wouldn't Go Away to be on the eleven o'clock news too. Seven weeks ago I'd been home from the doctor for the first time and bristling with stitches (for the first time), which had been part of the shock effect of my appearance, since they showed. Back then while I hadn't exactly been aiming for the Frankenstein look it hadn't occurred to me I had anything to hide, and I didn't want the little stubbly ends catching on my clothing.