Sunshine (28 page)

I sat up. I was too sleepy and too relieved not tell the truth. “I've been worrying about you.”

I'd figured out last time that vampires don't move when they're startled, they go stiller. He did that different-kind-of-stillness thing.

“You know,” I said. “Concern. Unease. Anxiety. You said you'd come back two nights ago. You didn't. There's this little threat of annihilation going on too, you know? I thought maybe you'd got into trouble.”

“The preparations took longer than I anticipated,” he said. “That is all. Nothing to … worry you.”

“Nothing to worry me,” I said, warming to my theme. “Sure. The annihilation threat includes me and I'm wearing a poisoned wound that is slowly killing me. I wouldn't dream of worrying about anything.”

“Good,” he said. “Worry is useless.”

“
Oh
—” I began. “I—” I stopped. “Okay. You win. Worry is useless.”

He stood up. I tried not to clutch the bedclothes into a knot. He pulled his shirt off and dropped it on the floor.

Eeeeek
.

He sat on the edge of my bed again. He had one leg folded under him and the other foot still on the floor, sitting to face me cringing into the headboard. I thought, okay, okay, he still has one foot on the floor. And he only took his
shirt
off.

“Do you still have the knife you transmuted?” he said. “That would be the best.”

The best
what
. I knew this was going to have blood in it. I knew I wasn't going to like it. And that particular knife, of course … “Uh. Well, yes, I still have it.” I didn't move.

“Show me,” he said. A human might have said, what's your problem? So where is it? He just said, show me.

I opened the bedside table drawer. When my jeans went in the wash, the contents of my pockets went in there. The knife was there. It was lying next to the glyph as if they were getting to know each other.

The light was visible at once in the darkness. I picked the knife up and cradled it in my hand: a tiny, clement sun that happened to look like a pocketknife. In ordinary daylight or good strong electric light it still looked like a pocketknife. I held it out toward him.

“This has been—since that night?”

“Yes. It happened—do you remember, right at the end, I transmuted it again, into the key to my door?”

“Yes.”

“I'm pretty sure that's when it happened. It had been something-in-the-dark-colored when I pulled it out. I don't … it was something to do with making the change at night, I think. I think I'm not supposed to be able to do stuff after dark. But I did do it. I felt something … crack. Snap. In me. And since then it's been like this. I shifted it back to a knife the next day—didn't notice till evening what had happened. I thought it would fade after a while, but it hasn't.”

I think I'm not supposed to be able to do stuff after dark
. I had done this somehow though. And I happened to have been being held in the lap of a vampire at the time. That had been another of the things I hadn't been thinking about, the last two months. Because if it was something to do with the vampire—this vampire—why had my knife become impregnated with
light
?

I hadn't told anyone, shown anyone. It was very odd, finally having someone to tell. I hadn't wanted to tell anyone at the coffeehouse, any of the SOFs. When I spent the night with Mel, I was careful to keep my knife in its pocket. I was still trying to be Rae Seddon, coffeehouse baker, in that life. Even after I'd exposed my little secret that it had been vampires at the lake—that I was a magic handler and a transmuter—I still hadn't wanted to tell anyone about my knife. The only person, you should forgive the term, left to tell was him. The vampire. The vampire I had now agreed to ally myself with in the hopes of winning against a common enemy.

It was a relief, telling someone.

I wondered what else an unknown
something
breaking open inside me might have let loose, besides a little radiant dye leak. I wondered if the jackknife of a bad-magic cross would glow in the dark. Sure. And when I went nuts it would transmute into a chainsaw.

He looked at it, but made no attempt to touch it. “That helps to explain. One of the reasons it has taken this extra time for me to come to you is that it has puzzled me you are not weaker, having borne what you bear two months already. I have been seeking an explanation. It could be crucial to our effort tonight.” He paused. When he went on, his voice had dropped half an octave or so, and it wasn't easy to hear to begin with because of the weird rough half-echo and the tonelessness. “What you show me is a judgment on my arrogance; it did not occur to me to ask you for information. I have much to learn about working with anyone, for all that I believed I had thought through what I said to you last time. I ask pardon.”

I gaped at him. “Oh
please
. Like I'm not sitting here half expecting you to change your mind and eat me. Oh, sorry, I forgot, I'm poisonous, I suppose I'm safe after all, I get to bite the big one without your help. I'm your little friend the deadly nightshade. But that's just it: humans and vampires
don't
ally. We're implacable enemies. Like cobras and mongooses. Mongeese. Why should you have thought of asking me anything? If there is going to be pardoning between us, it should be for lunacy, and mutual.”

At least he didn't laugh.

“Very well. We shall learn together.”

“Speaking of learning,” I said. “I take it you have learned what to do about this,” and I gestured toward my breast. “Since you're here.”

“I have learned what will work, if anything will.”

“And what if it doesn't work?”

“Then both of us end our existence tonight,” he said in that impassive we're-chained-to-the-wall-and-the-bad-guys-are-coming voice I remembered too well.

Oh gee. Don't pull your punches like that. I can take the truth, really I can. I said something like, “Unnngh.”

“I believe it will work.”

“I'm delighted to hear it.”

“Your wound is worse.”

“Oh well. No biggie.” I was a trifle preoccupied with his little revelation about our joint even-more-immediate-than-Bo impending doom. He'd
said
he wasn't sure what he was doing. “It comes and goes.”

“Will you remove the bandage?”

Or you will? I thought nervously. I unbuttoned the top two buttons of my nightgown again and peeled the gauze away.
Ouch
. Of course the cut began to bleed at once.

“Er—I don't suppose you want to tell me what you're going to do?”

Badly phrased question.

“No,” he said.

“Will
you please tell me what you are going to do.”

“If you would take your knife, and open the blade.”

My heart, having tried to accustom itself to
vampire in the room
, began to thump uncomfortably. The knife lay between us on the bed, where I had set it down. I looked at him a little oddly as I picked it up, and he, I suppose, well accustomed to blood-letting and thinking nothing of a little more or less of the same, misinterpreted my look.

“I would prefer not to touch your knife, it will burn me. And it is better if you cut me yourself.”

EEEEK.

“Cut you?”

“Yes. As you are cut. Here.” And he touched the place below his collarbones. A lot less bony on him, it occurred to me. I hadn't registered it before, but he was a lot more filled-out-looking generally than he had been when we first made acquaintance.

When he was half-starved and all. I hadn't seen him with his shirt off four nights ago. Well.

I could have sat there quite a while thinking ridiculous thoughts—anything was better than thinking about the prospective hacking and hewing: a two-and-a-half-inch blade is plenty big enough to do more damage than I wanted to be around for—but he said patiently, “Open the blade.”

The knife seemed much heavier in my hand than usual, and the blade more reluctant to unfold. I snapped it open and the blade flared silver fire.

“You said it would
burn
you.”

“And so it will. I would appreciate it if you made the cut quickly.”

“I can't,” I said, panicky. “I can't—cut you—at
all
.”

“Very well,” he said. “Please set the tip of it, here,” and he touched a spot below his right collarbone.

I sat there, frozen and staring. I even raised my eyes and looked into his: green as grass, as my grandmother's ring, as my plaid socks from last night. He looked steadily back. I could feel my own blood—my poisoned blood—seeping slowly down my breast, staining my nightgown, dripping on the sheet.

He reached out, and gently closed his own hand around mine holding the knife. He drew hand and knife toward him, set the point where he had indicated. I
felt
the slight give of his flesh under the blade. His hold tightened, and he gave a tiny, quick twist and jerk, and the knifepoint parted the skin; I
felt
the moment up the blade into my hand when the skin first divided under the glowing stainless-steel blade, when it sank into him. There was a
sound
, as if I could hear that sundering of flesh, or perhaps of the undead electricity that guarded that flesh, a minute fizz or hiss; then he drew the sharp—the burning sharp—edge swiftly across his chest in a shallow arc—just like the wound on me. And pulled the knife away again. It was over in a moment.

The slash he had made was deeper, and the blood raged out.

I was—whimpering, or moaning: “Oh no, oh
no
,”—I dropped the knife and reached toward him as if I could close the awful gash with my hands. The blood was black in the moonlight, there was so much of it, too much of it—it was hot,
hot
, running over my hands.…

“Good,” he said. He took my bloody hands and turned them back toward me, wiped them down the front of my poor once-white nightgown, firmly, against the contours of my body; pulled my hands toward him again, smeared them across his chest, and back to press them against me: repeated this till my nightgown
stuck
to me, sopping, saturated, as if I had been swimming, except the wetness was his blood.

I was weeping.

“Hush,” he said. “Hush.”

“I don't understand,” I said, weeping. “I don't understand. This cannot be—healing.”

“It can,” he said. “It is. All is well. Lie back. Lie down,” he said. “You will sleep soon now.”

I lay down, bumping my head against the headboard. My tears ran down my temples and into my hair. The smell of blood was thick and heavy and nauseating. I saw him leaning, looming over me, felt him lie down upon me, gently, so gently, till our bleeding skins met with one thin sodden layer of cotton partially between: till the new wound in him pressed down against the old wound in me. His hair brushed my face as he bowed his head; his breath stirred my hair.

“Constantine,” I cried, “are you
turning
me?”

“No,” he said. “I would not. And this is not that.”

“Then what—”

“Do not talk. Not now. Later. We can talk later.”

“But—but—I am so frightened,” I pleaded.

In the moonlight I could see his silhouette clearly. He raised his head away from me, arching his neck backward so our bodies remained touching. I saw him rip, quickly, neatly, his upper lip with his lower teeth, his lower lip and tongue with his upper. He bent his head to me again, and when he stopped my mouth with his, his blood ran across my tongue and down my throat.

I
T WAS STILL
dark when I woke. I had turned on my side—I always sleep curled up on one side or the other—but this time I was facing the room. My first thought was that I had had a terrible dream.

I was alone in the bed. I looked down, along my body. Gingerly I touched my white nightgown. It had been a dream. I had imagined it. I had imagined all of it. Although my nightgown felt curiously—
tacky
, as if I had worn it too long, although it had come fresh out of the dryer this morning. But it was white. The sheets were white too.

No bloodstains.

I had imagined it.

I knew he was sitting in the chair. After four nights he had returned after all. I couldn't bear to look at him—not yet—not while the dream was so heavy on me—so shamefully heavy. What a horrible thing to dream. Even about a vampire. At least he wouldn't know that I'd dreamed—at least he wouldn't know. I didn't have to tell him. I sat up, and as I sat up, I felt a small heavy something fall to a different position on top of the bedclothes.

My small shining knife. The blade still open.

No.

I looked at him. Although the chair was in shadow I saw him with strange clarity: the mushroomy-gray skin, the impassive face, the green eyes, black hair. I
knew
it was nighttime—I felt it on my own skin—why could I see as if it were daylight?

It occurred to me that he wasn't wearing his shirt.

No
.

I had climbed out of bed and taken the two steps to the chair and laid my hands on his unmarked chest before I had a chance to think—before I had a chance to tell myself not to—laid my hands as I had laid them—an hour ago? A week? A century?—with the blood welling out, sluicing out, from the cut I had made with my knife. I touched his mouth, his untorn lips.

“Poor Sunshine,” he said, under my fingers. “I told you it would not be easy. I did not think how difficult the manner of it would be for you.”

“It—it happened, then?” I said. My knees suddenly wouldn't hold me, and I sank down beside his chair. I leaned my forehead against the arm of it. “What I remember … I thought it must be a bad dream. A … shameful dream.”

“Shameful?” he said. He bent over me, took my shoulders so I had to sit up, away from the support of the chair. The top two buttons of my nightgown were still undone, and the edges fell open as I moved. He put one hand on my breast just below the collarbones, so that it covered the width of my old wound. He left his hand there for two of my breaths, took it away again, held it, palm up, as if he might be catching my tears; but I was dry-eyed.