Sunshine (21 page)

I wondered what I was. Was I
almost
human?

“Yeah,” he said. “What you're thinking.”

I tried to look like I might be thinking what he thought I was thinking. Whatever that was.

“SOF is full of Others and partbloods because it's vampires that are
our
problem. Sure there are lousy stinking demons—”

And bad-magic crosses.

“—but there are lousy stinking humans too. We take care of the Others and the straight cops take care of the humans. If we got the suckers sorted the humans would calm down—sooner or later—let the rest of us live, you know? And then we'd be able to organize and
really
get rid of the 'ubis and the goblins and the ghouls and so on and we'd end up with a relatively safe world.”

There was a story—I hoped it was no more than a myth—that the reason there still wasn't a reliable prenatal test for a bad-magic cross was the prejudice against partbloods.

Jesse said patiently, “You transmuted worked metal.”

I nodded.

“Do you still have the knife?”

I dragged my mind back to the present. I'd decided earlier that the light in the office was good enough, so I nodded again.

“Can we see it?”

Pat let go of my hands, and I pulled the knife out of my fuzzy pocket and leaned forward to lay it on a pile of paper on Jesse's desk. It lay there, looking perfectly ordinary. Jesse picked it up and looked at it. He passed it to Theo, who looked at it too, and offered it to Pat. Pat shook his head. “Not when I'm coming down. It might crank me right back up again, and we can't keep the door locked all night.”

“What would happen if someone knocked?” I said. “You're still a little blue around the edges.”

“Closet,” said Pat. “Nice big one. Why we chose Jesse's office.”

“And we would be so surprised that the door was locked,” said Jesse. “Must be something wrong with the bolt. We'll get it checked tomorrow. Miss Seddon is all right, isn't she?”

“Miss Seddon is fine,” I lied. What was wrong with her was not their fault.

“Rae—” said Jesse, and hesitated.

I was holding myself here in the present, in this office, so I was pretty sure I knew what he wanted to ask.

“I don't know,” I said. “I haven't been back to the lake since. There's a really big bad spot behind the house, maybe that's part of why they chose it, and when—when I got out of there I just—followed the edge of the lake south.”

“If we take you out there—let's say tomorrow—will you try to find it?”

It had little to do with what I hadn't told them that made the silence last a long time before I answered. What I had told them was plenty for why I didn't want to go there again. “Yes,” I said at last, heavily. “I'll try. There won't … be anything.”

“I know,” said Jesse. “But we still have to look. I'm sorry.”

I nodded. I picked up my jackknife and put it back in my pocket. I looked at Jesse. Then I looked at the blood-smeared table knife lying on his desk, and he watched me looking. “That's the next thing, isn't it?” he said. “Okay—you have some kind of line on worked metal. Some pretty astonishing line, it must be. But that doesn't explain.…”

The phone rang. He picked it up. “Ah. Well, better send him up then.” We all looked hard at Pat. He wasn't blue at all. Theo unlocked the door.

Mel came through it about ten seconds later, looking fit to murder battalions of SOFs with nothing more than a table knife. “What the dharmic
hell
do you red-eyed boys think you are up to, keeping a law-abiding member of the human public incommunicado for over an hour?”

I managed to keep a straight face. “Red-eyed boy” (or girl) is an accusation of Other blood: just the sort of thing a pissed-off civilian would say to a SOF. They all looked perfectly blank. “Sorry,” said Jesse. “We didn't mean to keep her incommunicado. We were getting her out of a bad situation as fast as possible—brought her in the back way, of course. The media jokers can't get to her here. But we forgot to send word to the front desk that we weren't—er—holding her.”

Sure you forgot, I thought. Mel, still quivering with fury, and equally aware Jesse was lying, turned to me. “I'm okay,” I said. “I was a bit—hysterical. They let me have a shower,” I added inconsequentially. I'd had a rough night, and it was getting harder and harder to remember what I'd told whom and why.

“A
shower
?” said Mel, taking in my fuzzy-bunny clothing—probably the first time he'd ever seen me in anything that didn't involve red or pink or orange or yellow or at least peacock blue or fluorescent purple—and I realized he didn't know what had happened. He wouldn't, would he? You don't destroy vampires by rushing up to them and sticking them with table knives. The only sure thing about the night's events was that there'd been some kind of fracas—some messy kind of fracas—and I'd disappeared with some SOFs. There were probably half a dozen incompatible versions of what had happened out there by now.

No wonder Mel was feeling a little wild.

“It's sort of a long story,” I said. “May I leave now, please?” Before you start asking me about tonight, I thought.

“That's what I'm here for,” said Mel, throwing another good glare around.

“See you tomorrow,” said Jesse.

“What?” said Mel.

“I'll tell you on the way out,” I said.

“Sleep well,” said Pat.

“You too,” I said.

T
HEY GAVE ME
my soggy clothes in a plastic Mega Food bag and I managed to jam my feet into the clammy, curled-up sneakers so I could walk. Jesse offered to call a taxi, but I wanted some outdoor air. Even midtown civic center outdoor air.

We had to go back to the coffeehouse: the Wreck was there. Mel had walked over. Well, I don't know about
walked
. He had come over without vehicular assistance anyway. He was still putting out major anger vibes, even after a successful rescue of the damsel from the dragon-encircled tower. The dragon had been blue, and essentially friendly. The real problem was about the damsel.… I had never wanted someone to talk to so badly, never been so unable to say what I wanted to talk about.

And if I managed to tell him, what was he going to say? “I'll start ringing up residential homes for the lethally loony tomorrow, see where the nearest openings are”?

“Don't even try to tell me what happened till you've had some sleep,” said Mel. “The goddam
nerve
of those guys.… I thought Pat and Jesse were okay.”

“I think they are okay,” I said, regretfully. In some ways it would have been easier if they weren't. “Jesse and Theo did get me out of there—um—and they couldn't help being, you know, professionally interested.”

Mel snorted. “If you say so. Listen, the whole neighborhood is talking about it. Whatever it is. The official SOF report—what they've already fed to the media goons—is that you were an innocent bystander. None of us is going to say anything, but there were a lot of people in that alley by the time Jesse and Theo got you away, and it's unanimous that you were …”

There was a pause. I didn't say anything.

He added, “Charlie seemed to think Jesse
was
doing you a favor. That SOF could protect you better than we could.”

Yeah. Further destruction of personal world view optional.

Mel sighed. “So we hung around the phone at the coffeehouse, waiting—Charlie and me. We sent everybody else home—including Kenny, sworn on pain of having his liver on tomorrow's menu not to tell your mother anything. The phone didn't ring. So then we rang SOF and got yanked around by some little sheepwit on the switchboard, and that's when I came over.…”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

The coffeehouse was dark and the square silent and empty, although there was some kind of distantly audible fuss going on somewhere it was easy enough to guess was a block or two over and down a recently defiled alley. We went round the side of the coffeehouse and I could see a light on in the office. Charlie, drinking coffee and pacing. He had his arms wrapped around me so tight I couldn't breathe almost before I was inside. Charlie is such a
mild
little guy, most of the time.

“I'm okay,” I said. Charlie gave a deep, shuddering sigh, and I remembered him backing me up with Mr. Responsible Media. I also remembered all the time he'd spent in years past, encouraging my mundane interest in learning to make a mayonnaise that didn't crack, how much garlic went into Charlie's famous hash, my early experiments with what turned out to be the ancestors of Bitter Chocolate Death et al. There was no magic about Charlie. Nor about most restaurants, come to that. Human customers tend to be a little twitchy about anything more magical than a waitress who could keep coffee hot. I wondered about my mother's motive in applying for a job as a waitress all those years ago: I was already making peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies while we were still living with my dad (if there was a grown-up to turn the oven on for me), and if she was looking for nice safe outlets.… “Tonight. It's—it's connected with what happened—when I was gone those two days.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Charlie.

“Jesse wants me to try to find the place it all happened. Out at the lake. They're taking me out there tomorrow.”

“Oh bloody
hell
,” said Mel. “It's been two months. They don't have to go tomorrow.”

I shrugged. “Might as well. I have the afternoon off.”

“The lake,” said Charlie thoughtfully.

I'd told everyone I'd driven out to the lake. I hadn't said that what happened afterward also happened at the lake. Till tonight my official memory had ended sitting on the porch of the old cabin.

“Yes. I was—er—held—at a house on the lake. They want me to try to find it.”

Either Mel or Charlie could have said, when did you remember this? What else do you remember? Why did you tell SOF when you haven't told us? Neither of them did. Mel put his arm around me. “Oh, gods and frigging angels,” he said.

“Be careful,” said Charlie.

O
NE OF THE
(few) advantages to getting to work at four-thirty
A.M.
is that you can be pretty sure of finding a parking space. When I come in later I'm not always so lucky. I'd had to park the Wreck in a garage lot that evening, and it was locked at eleven. Mel took me home. When we got there and he turned the bike off the silence pressed against me. The sudden quiet is almost always loud when you've been on a motorcycle and got somewhere and stopped and turned it off, but this was different. Mel didn't say any more about the night's events. He didn't say any more about SOF taking me out to the lake the next day. I could see him
wanting
to … but as I've said before, one of the reasons Mel and I were still seeing each other after four years was because we could
not
talk about things sometimes. This included that we both knew when to shut up.

It was
blissful
, spending time with someone who would leave you alone. I loved him for it. And I was happy to repay in kind.

It had never occurred to me that leaving someone alone could harden into a habit that could become a barrier. It had never occurred to me before now.

I had to repress the desire that he not shut up this time. I had to repress the desire to ask him if I could talk to him.

But what could I have said?

We stood there in the darkness for a minute or two. He was rubbing another of his tattoos, the sand wheel, on the back of his left hand. Then he came with me to check that I still had Kenny's bicycle and the tires weren't flat. Then he kissed me and left. “See you tomorrow,” is all he said.

I reached over my head to touch the wards strung along the edge of the porch roof on my way indoors. These were all Yolande's. Her wards were especially good and I'd often thought of asking her where she got them, but you didn't really ask Yolande questions. I had noticed that her niece, when she was visiting, didn't seem to ask questions either, beyond, “I'm taking the girls downtown, can I bring you anything?” And the answer would probably be “No, thank you, dear.”

I wiggled my fingers down the edges of my pots of pansies on the porch steps, to check that the wards I'd buried there were still there, and that a
ping
against my fingers meant they were still working. I straightened the medallion over my downstairs door and lifted the “go away” mat in front of the one at the top of the stairs to check that the warding built into the lay of the planks of the floor hadn't been hacked out by creature or creatures unknown. I fluttered the charm paper that was wound round the railing of my balcony to make sure it was still live, blew on the frames of my windows for the faint ripple of response. I didn't like charms, but I wasn't naive enough not to have good basic wards, and I'd been a little more meticulous about upkeep in the last two months.

Then I made myself a cup of chamomile tea to damp down the scotch and the cheese. I took off the bunny pajamas and put on one of my own nightgowns. The toilet paper had held; there wasn't any blood on the SOF thing. I put my still-wet clothes in a sinkful of more soap and water. Tomorrow I would put them through a washing machine. I might throw them out anyway, or burn them. (I still hadn't burned the cranberry-red dress. It lived at the back of my closet. I think I knew I wasn't going to burn it after the night I dreamed that it was made of blood, not cloth, and I'd pulled it out of the closet that night, in the dark, and stroked and stroked the dry, silky, shining fabric, which was nothing like blood. Nothing like blood.) My sneakers would live. I had dozens of T-shirts and jeans if I decided I wanted to burn something but I wasn't going to sacrifice a good pair of sneakers if I could help it.