Sunshine (19 page)

I wasn't going to be able to fudge that one either. The table knife in question was lying on the one clear space on Jesse's desk. I assumed it was the same knife. It was the coffeehouse pattern and while it had been wiped roughly off, the smear of remaining bloodstains was convincing.

I had no idea when I'd dropped it. But the fact that it was here meant that they knew what had happened. No escape.

And then Pat came in carrying a pot of tea and a paper bag with the Prime Time logo. I wanted to laugh. They were sure
trying
. The Cinnamon Roll Queen wasn't going to be bought off by a fast-food hamburger—supposing I ate hamburgers, which I didn't, and after tonight, even if I had, I'd've given them up—but Prime Time was a twenty-four-hour gourmet deli. Downtown, of course. Far too upscale to open a branch in Old Town. Not that they'd survive on Charlie's turf anyway.

I stopped wanting to laugh when I noticed that Pat looked like a man who had been got out of bed for an emergency.

It was even good tea.

Jesse said, “Can you tell us what you're afraid of? Why you won't talk to us.”

I said cautiously, “Well, I'm not licensed.…”

There was a general sigh, and the tension level went down about forty degrees. Pat said, “Yeah, we thought that was probably it.”

There was a little silence and then the three of them exchanged long meaningful looks. I had tentatively started to relax and this stopped me, like sitting down in an armchair and discovering there's a bed of nails instead of a cushion under the flowered chintz. Uh-oh.

Pat sighed again, this one a very long sigh, like a man about to step off a cliff. Then he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and held it. And held it. And held it. After about a minute he began to turn, well, blue, but I don't mean human-holding-his-breath blue, I mean
blue
. Still holding his breath, he opened his eyes and looked at me: his eyes were blue too, although several degrees darker than his skin, and I mean
all
of his eyes: the whites as well. Although speaking of all of his eyes, as I watched, a third eye slowly blinked itself open from between his eyebrows. He was still holding his breath. His ears were becoming pointed. He held up one hand and spread the fingers. There were six of them. The knuckles were all very knobbly, and the hand itself was very large. Pat was normally no more than medium-sized.

Theo gently lowered the front legs of his chair to the floor, drifted over to the office door, and locked it. He returned to his chair, put his feet against the edge of the desk, and rocked back on two legs again.

Pat started breathing. “If I let it go any farther I'll start popping my buttons. Pardon me.” He unfastened his belt buckle and the button on his waistband.

“You're a
demon
,” I said.

“Only a quarter,” said Pat, “but it runs pretty strong in me.” His voice sounded funny, deeper and more hoarse. “My full brother couldn't turn if he held his breath till he had a heart attack. Nice for him. Sorry about the locked door, but it takes a good half hour for the effects to wear off again.”

It's only really
illegal
to be a vampire, but people who too regularly call in sick the day after the moon is full somehow never get promoted beyond entry-level positions, and a demon that can't pass is an automatic outcast. And miscegenation is definitely a crime. Since the laws about this are impractical to enforce, what happens is that if you have a baby you know can't pass, you arrange to look as careworn and despondent as possible (which will be easy in the circumstances) and go wail at the Registry Office that no one had told you that great-granddad—or great-grandmother—had been or done or had, whatever, great-grand-something being safely dead, of course, and unavailable for prosecution. So the kid gets registered, and grows up to find out it can't get a job in any industry considered “sensitive,” and if any of its immediate family had been on the fast track, they're probably now off it. For life. Even if nobody else shows any signs of being anything but pure human.

It's probably worse, the partbloods that are fine till they hit adolescence, and suddenly find out that the Other blood, which they may not have known about, is alive and kicking and going to ruin their lives. Every now and then it happens to a grown-up. There was a famous case a few years ago about a thirty-eight-year-old bank manager who suddenly grew horns. They fired him. He'd had an exemplary career till that moment. He appealed. The case got a huge amount of publicity.

They still fired him.

As “sensitive” industries go, SOF was at the top. No way any demon partblood was going to get hired by the SOFs.

Even someone like Mary might be turned down if she applied for basic SOF training, if anyone was so poor-spirited as to report to her recruitment team that the coffee she poured was always hot. Mary wasn't registered. If the government insisted on registering everyone who could sew a seam that never unraveled or pour coffee that stayed hot or patch a bicycle tire that didn't pop somewhere else a hundred feet down the road, they'd have to register sixty percent or something of the population, and fond as the government was of paper trails and tax levies, apparently this boggled even their tiny minds. But SOF cared down to this level. The deep widow's peaks you sometimes get with a little peri blood and which are so fashionable that models and actors are forever having cosmetic surgery to implant them, if one of these people had a sudden desire for a midlife career change to SOF they'd have to go in with their surgeon's certificate taped to their forehead, or they'd be turned away at the door. SOF didn't fool around.

Pat blinked his blue eyes at me and smiled. He had a nice smile as a demon. His teeth were blue too.

“SOF is rotten with partbloods,” said Jesse. “I'm one. Theo's another. So is John. So are Kate and Millicent and Mike. We somehow seem to find each other to partner with. Safer, of course. ‘Hey, doesn't that blue guy look a lot like Pat? Where
is
Pat, anyway?' ‘Look like
Pat
? You must be joking. He's at home with a head cold anyway.' But Pat's the most spectacular of us, which is why we called him in tonight.”

I had maybe about managed to keep my jaw from dropping round my ankles while Pat turned blue—it had taken several minutes, I could go with the flow—but this was absolutely one too many. This was on a par with, say, finding out the president of the global council was a sucker, the moon was made of green cheese, and the sun only rose in the morning because of this complicated system of levers and dials overseen by an encampment of the master race from Antares settled on Mars.… “What the hell d'you mean SOF is rotten with partbloods? What about the goddam blood test when they take you?”

All three of them smiled. Slowly. For a moment I was
the only human in the room
, and they were all bigger and tougher than I was. I went very still. Not, I'm sorry to say, the stillness of serenity and compassion. Much more like a rabbit in headlights.

The moment passed.

“It must have been a bastard in the beginning,” said Jesse.

“When the only drug that worked made you piss green for a week,” said Pat.

“Or indigo or violet,” said Theo.

“Yeah,” said Pat. “Depending on what kind of partblood you were.”

“But the lab is pretty well infiltrated by now,” said Jesse. “Once you get that far you're usually home already.”

There was another pause. Maybe I was supposed to ask what “you're home already” meant, but I didn't want to know any more. I hadn't been so mind-blasted since I woke up next to a bonfire surrounded by vampires. As the silence lengthened I realized that the tension level was rising again, and there were more meaningful looks flashing back and forth. I tried to rouse myself. But I was so tired.

At last Pat spoke. “Okay,” he said. “Where we were. Um. We've been thinking for a while that something like … turning blue must have happened to you out at the lake. Or—wherever. But we haven't had a good excuse to, well, ask you about it closely. Somewhere we could lock the door when I held my breath.”

“Till tonight we haven't been totally sure that's what we were looking at anyway,” said Jesse. “Arguably we still aren't.”

They looked at me hopefully.

I thought about what I could say. They'd just handed me all their careers on a platter. All I had to do was walk out of here and tell someone—say, Mr. Responsible Media—that Pat turned blue, three-eyed, and twelve-fingered if he held his breath, and that several of his closest colleagues including his partner knew about it, and they'd tie Pat to a chair, put a plastic bag over his head, and await developments. They'd have to. Even if the twenty-four-star bigwig supreme commander honcho of SOF was a fullblood demon him- or herself and knew the name of every partblood in the service, the public furor would make them do it. Being an unlicensed magic handler was a mouse turd in comparison.

My brain slowly ground out the next necessary connection to be made. Oh …

“You know about my dad?” I said.

They all snorted. Pat sounded like the horn on something like a semi or a furniture van.
Ooooongk
. “Does the sun rise in the morning?” said Jesse.

With or without the help of the guys from Antares? “Then probably you know that my mom raised me to be, er, not my father's daughter.”

“Yeah,” said Pat. “Made us real interested, if you want to know.”

I stared at him. “You had better not be telling me you have been hanging around the coffeehouse
for fifteen years
on the off chance that you could catch me—turning blue.”

It wouldn't be turning blue, of course. Unlike demon blood, magic handling was welcomed by both government and corporate bureaucracy in its employees—sort of. What they wanted was nice cooperative
biddable
magic handling. Somewhere
between
a third cousin who could do card tricks and a sorcerer. The problem is that as the magic handling rises on the prepotency scale, the magic handler sinks off the other end of the biddableness scale. But there probably had been biddable Blaises. And no one had ever proved my dad was a sorcerer. I didn't think.

“We hang out at the coffeehouse because we're all addicted to your cinnamon rolls, Sunshine, and your lethal dessert specials, especially the ones with no redeeming social value,” said Pat. “You didn't see us half so often before Charlie built the bakery. But your dad didn't hurt as an excuse on our expense accounts.”

Another pause. I didn't say anything.

“And your mom seemed kind of … well,
extreme
about it, you know?”

And another pause. I seemed to be missing something they wanted me to catch on to. But I was so
tired
.

“And the coffeehouse is a good place to keep an eye on a lot of people. Gat Donnor.” Poor old Gat. He was one of our hype heads. Sometimes when he got the mixture wrong—or right—he turned into a skinny orange eight-foot lizard (including tail) that would tell you your fortune, if you asked. The locals were used to him but tourists had been known to go off in the screaming ab-dabs if they came across him. SOF was interested because a slightly-above-the-odds number of the fortunes he told were accurate.

I brought myself back to the present. Sitting in a SOF office with a blue demon SOF and a few friends.

“I suppose you know your Mrs. Bialosky is a Were?”

I did laugh then. “Everyone believes she is, but no one knows
were-what
. No—don't tell me. It would spoil it. Besides—Mrs. Bialosky is one of the good guys. I don't care what her blood has in it.” It is a violation of your personal rights to have blood taken by your doctor examined for anything but the disease or condition you signed a release form about before the lab tech got near you with the needle, but accidents happen. One of the other ways you could guess a Were or a demon is by their paranoia about doctors. Fortunately the lab coats perfected artificial human blood fifty years ago—or nearly perfected it: you need about one in ten of the real thing—so donating blood isn't so big a deal any more, and the nasty-minded don't necessarily get any ideas looking at blood donor lists about who isn't on them. Human magic handling doesn't pass through transfusions; demon blood won't make you a demon, and weak part-demon might not show at all, but strong part- or full-demon makes a fullblood human very sick, even if the blood type is right. And being a Were transfuses beautifully, every time.

“I couldn't have said it better myself,” said Jesse. “So, you grew up being your mom's daughter, with no higher ambitions than the best cinnamon rolls in the country. Did you know about your dad?”

I hesitated, but not very long. “More or less. I knew he was a magic handler, and I knew he was a member of one of the important magic-handling families. Or I found that out once I was in school and some of the magic-handler kids mentioned the Blaises. I was using my mom's maiden name by the time I went to school, before she married Charlie. I knew that my dad being a magic handler was something to do with why my mom left him, and … at the time that was enough for me.” I thought about the “business associates” my mom hadn't liked. That was what she'd always called them. “Business associates.” It sounded a lot like “pond slime.” Or “sorcerer.” As I got a little older I realized that people like my mother mean “pond slime” when they say “sorcerer.” Lunatic toxic kali pond slime.

“I
felt
like my mother's daughter, you know? And after we cleared off I never saw my dad again.” I'd never said this to anyone before: “My mom was so determined to have nothing whatever to do with my dad's family that I wanted to be as much like her as possible, didn't I? She was all I had left.”

They all nodded.

“So you didn't know anything about what your own heritage might be?”