Sunshine (29 page)

“You are healed,” he said. “There is no shame in healing.”

I looked down, touched the place he had touched. The skin was clear and smooth: I could see it plainly. I could see plainly too, a thin pale scar, where the wound had been, but this was a real scar. The wound was gone, and would not reopen.

“The blood,” I said. “All the blood.”

“It was clean blood,” he said. “It was for you.”

I was remembering the real dream I had had after I slept—the blood dream. Daylight, sunshine, grass, trees, flowers, the warmth of life, gladness to be alive.…

Gladness to be alive. Gladness was the wrong word. It was much simpler than that, more direct. There was no translation of sensation into a
word
like gladness. It was the sensation itself. Smells, sounds, tastes, all perceptions so different from anything I knew in waking life, so unequivocal, uncluttered … uncontaminated. The wide world around me seemed vast and open and immediate in a way I did not recognize. But my sense of self was—there was no thought to it. There was a place where all those strange vivid sensations met, and there
I
was. A feeling, instinctive, responsive me—but no
me
.

On four legs. This life I dreamed—this life I borrowed—this life I knew so strangely from the inside—this life, I abruptly knew, that had been taken for me—it was no human life. I was remembering life as some creature—she, I knew her as she; I knew her as a grass-eater, a scenter of the breeze, and a listener with wide ears; I felt her long lithe muscles, rough brown fur, smelled the sweet gamy smell of her; I knew her as a runner and a leaper and a hider in dappled shadow. A deer.

I searched for the horror of her death, for the fear and the pain, the helpless awareness of coming final darkness. I remembered waking up, sick and dazed but with a kind of drugged tranquillity, after Bo's lieutenant had used the Breath on me. I looked for some equivalent in my doe's last minutes. I could not find it.

“The doe,” I said.

“Yes. It would not have been right for you to remember the last day of a human woman.”

There was a laugh that stuck in my throat. “No,” I said soberly. “It would not have been right for me.” I sagged forward again, but this time I was leaning against his leg, my cheek just above his knee. “How did she die?” I said dreamily, resting against the leg of the vampire who had cured my poisoned wound with the death of a doe.

“How?” he repeated. There was a long pause while I remembered the wild grass against my slender legs, the way my four hoofs dug into the ground as they took my weight as I ran, how much more fleetly and steadily I ran on four two-toed hoofs than I would ever run on two queerly inflexible platterlike feet and thick clumsy legs.

He said: “There are many myths about my kind. It is not true that we cannot feed unless we torment first. She died as any good hunter kills his prey: with one clean stroke.”

“But …” I said, groping for the answer I wanted. Needed. “You told me—long ago. By the lake. You have to ask. You can take no … blood that is not offered. She has to have said ‘yes.'”

After a little while he said: “Animals do not draw the distinction between life and death that humans do. If an animal is caught, by age, by illness, by some creature stronger than it, and cannot escape, it accepts death.” A longer pause. “Also … my kind were all once human. There perhaps can be no truly clean death between one of your kind and one of mine.”

I thought: If that is true, then it works both ways. The death of the giggler at my hands is no cleaner than the death he was offering that girl. I shivered. I felt Constantine's hand on the back of my neck.

“I told you last time that Bo and I chose different ways of being what we are. You magic handlers know you risk, with every sending, the recoil. Bo is burdened by many years of the recoil of the torment that provides the savor to his meals. The savor is real—yes, I too have tasted it—but it is not worth the price.”

I was looking across the room, at a corner near the ceiling, where one of the occupied cobwebs hung. I could see the tiny dot that was the folded-up spider at the center.

I raised my head and turned round, knelt up, put my hands on his knees, stared into his face, into his eyes. I had looked full into his eyes briefly last night, while I held the knife, before he had taken from me the action I could not perform. I stared at him now, minute after minute, night flowing past us as morning had done by the lake, two months and a lifetime ago, when I told him I would take him with me, through the daylight, out of the trap we shared. “You used the blood of a doe, to spare me the death of a human. You said you would not—were not—turning me. Why are you not telling me not to look in your eyes?”

“I have not turned you,” he replied. “In three hours, when the sun rises, you will find that sunshine is your element, as it always has been. I do not think you can be turned. You can be killed, as any human can be, as the poison Bo set in your flesh would at last have killed you, but I believe you cannot be turned.

“There is nothing I can do to you with my gaze, any more, whether I wish it or not. I was not able … to give you the doe's clean blood cleanly. I caught and carried her blood for you, for tonight's necessary rite, but I am not a clean vessel. Sunshine, we are on territory neither of us knows. We are bound now, you to me as I already was to you, for I have saved your life tonight as you saved my existence two months ago.”

“I think the honors were about even, two months ago,” I said, struggling. He picked my hands up off his knees, held them between his hands.

“That-which-binds did not judge so; the scales did not rest in balance. You will begin, now, I think, to read those lines of … power, governance, sorcery, as I can read them. By what has happened between us tonight. Onyx Blaise's daughter—the daughter who did what you did, that second morning by the lake—always held that capacity. Now you must learn to use it. That-which-binds reckons I have been bound to you by what happened two months ago. I could not come to you if you did not call me, but if you called I had to come. You are now bound to me as well. I did not do this deliberately; to save your life, it was the only choice I had, and I was
bound
to try.

“When I came to you four nights ago, I had no knowledge of the wound you still carried. I was thinking only of how I could convince you—to go into battle with me. That I should succeed did not seem likely, though you were calling to ask me for help. I came here that night thinking how I might give you—anything I could give you—to help you in that battle, if you agreed. It would have required some greater tie between us, but nothing like …

“I do not know what I have given you tonight.” Another silence. He added, “I do not know what you have given me.”

Another, longer silence.

“Well,” I said, shakily, clinging to his hands holding mine, “I think I can see in the dark.”

PART THREE

S
O, I WOULD
have said that not much could be worse—short of being dead or undead—than those first weeks after the night I went out to the lake and met some vampires up close and personal. I would have said that being paralyzed from the neck down or having an inoperable brain tumor would be worse. Not a lot else. Just shows how limited the human imagination can be.

The first weeks after Con healed the wound on my breast were worse.

It's funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the nights at the lake, that the great crisis
was
about What I Was or Who I'd Become or What Terrible Thing Was Wrong With Me (and About to Go Wronger) and Why All Was Changed As a Result. But I was still struggling against the idea that all
was
changed.

Sticking the giggler with the table knife should have shaken me out of this fantasy even if the sucker-sunshade trick hadn't, but I was too busy being grossed out by the sheer grisliness of the latter experience to have thought much about the philosophical implications. What the little chat with Jesse and Pat had revealed to me had done my head in worse, and the news that the suckers were on to conquer the world within the next century had been worse yet. I felt like a pancake in the hands of a maniac flipper. But when you're being caromed around your life like a squash ball you haven't got leeway to think about what happens
next
. When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week. Maybe you should be, but you aren't.
Now
is more than enough.

Before the detox night with Con I still thought I could say
no
somehow, could still stick my head back in the sand. Hey, I wasn't going to be around in a hundred years—unless maybe I started handling a lot of magic, which I didn't
want
to, right? That was exactly what I
didn't
want to be doing; magic handling extending your life span was a myth anyway—so what did I care?

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you're scared enough. I was scared enough.

Of course I had had this apparently permanent leaking wound on my breast, I had had these nightmares, and I had been doing a pretty bad job after all of suppressing thinking about what it all
meant
, what had happened at the lake. But I was still obstinately trying to pretend I'd only had a piece of very, very bad luck, and the fact of my having survived it wasn't … irredeemable. My gran had shown me all that transmuting stuff fifteen years ago, and I'd never used it before. Maybe it would be another fifteen years before I used it again. Maybe thirty this time. And one vampire more or less? Who cares?

And the table knife venture was just that the giggler'd been the one who cut me, poisoned me. It was a one-off. There was an answer in there somewhere: it wasn't me, it wasn't my warped, screwed-up genetic heritage.

And if I'd delivered the world of one sucker, sort of accidentally having preserved it another one, then my final effect on the vampire population was nil, invisible, void. Which was exactly the profile I'd choose.

I told myself I had always been my father's daughter. I was facing what had been there all the time.

But I was also facing stuff that hadn't been there.

Being able to see in the dark sounds great. Never trip over the bathroom threshold on your way for a pee at midnight again, right? But it's not that simple. Human eyes
don't
see in the dark. They don't have the rods and cones for it or whatever. Therefore you are doing something that
isn't human
. It's not like you've awakened a latent talent, like someone who finds out they have a gift for playing jazz piano after a life previously devoted to Bach. That may be odd, but it's within human scope. Seeing in the dark isn't. And you know it. That doesn't mean I know how to explain it; but trust me, you can tell the difference between seeing because there's enough light and “seeing” because something weird and vampiry is going on in your brain that chooses to pretend to be happening in your eyes because that's the nearest equivalent. Like if some human had had a poisoned wound healed by some weird reciprocal swap with the phoenix, maybe they'd be able to fly afterward,
apparently
by flapping their arms.

(Mind you no one has seen the phoenix in over a thousand years, and it has never been inclined to do humans any good turns. Rather the opposite. Very like vampires, I suppose. Except a lot of people think the phoenix is a myth, and not many are stupid enough to think vampires are. I think the phoenix has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being true, because it's nasty. What this world doesn't have is the three- wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who
invented
this system?)

I saw in the dark pretty well. I thought, do I want to see Bo coming?

Oh yeah, and seeing in the dark doesn't mean when the sun goes down. It also means all the shadows that fall in daylight. This would not be a big issue for a vampire, of course, but it troubled the hell out of me. Even an ordinary table knife throws a shadow—although I didn't really need any more reminders that table knives would never be ordinary to me again.

It throws your balance off, seeing through shadows. Your depth perception goes wrong, like trying to look through someone else's glasses. Everything has funny dark-light edges to it, and sometimes those edges have themselves threadlike red edges. You get your new looking-through-bad-spectacles distortion on everything, including your own hands, your own body, the faces and bodies of the people you love and trust. Oh, the one time this goes away is when you look in a mirror. Or it did with me. Just in case I needed reminding that I got it from a vampire. Thanks.

I hated it that I now “saw” more easily in the dark than I did in the light. In the dark it all made sense. I
hated
this.

I was so clumsy for the first ten days or so that Charlie did another of his drifting-into-the-bakery-and-closing-the-door numbers. Golly, twice in two weeks: I must be a worse pain in the butt than I realized. Damn. He wandered around the bakery for a minute like he was thinking about what to say. I knew better; he figures this stuff out beforehand. When I still lived with him and Mom I used to see him ambling around the house in that fake idle way, figuring out what he was going to say to someone, what they might say back. He thinks of it on the move and he says it on the move. He wandered a lot during the time the city council was trying to upgrade us. The media, who love a good story and truth is noncompulsory, presented Charlie's as the focus of the neighborhood campaign to stay the way we were: downmarket and crappy. This was not entirely false. That's when Charlie's kind of got on the New Arcadia map rather than merely the Old Town map, and one of the results was that Charlie could afford to build my bakery. (I have to say he used to wander a lot when Mom and I were at each other's throats the worst too. There was some overlap between these two eras. Kenny and Billy are probably scarred for life.)