Sunshine (33 page)

I hoped I was still human.

Pat drove and put me in the front seat with him. “Can you still feel—whatever?”

I thought about it. Reluctantly. I poked around for that feeling of
Here
. I found it. It was like finding a dead rat in your living room. A large dead rat. “Yes,” I said.

“West?”

“Yes.”

We drove. Old county buildings quickly became Old Town, which turned almost as quickly into downtown and then rather more slowly into nothing-in-particular town, blocks of slightly shabby houses giving way to blocks of somewhat seedy shops and offices and back again. It wasn't a big city; we went over the line into what most of us called No Town far too soon. In the first place I didn't want to go there at all, in the second place I didn't like being reminded that it was so close. New Arcadia's only big bad spots are in No Town, which did compel a certain amount of evasive driving. Even a SOF car can only go where there are still roads, and urban bad spots get blocked off fast. But we weren't going nearly indirectly enough for me.

Here
moved out of the back of my mind into the front, like Large Zombie Rat getting up off your living room floor and following you into the kitchen where you realize that it's bigger and uglier than you thought, and its teeth are longer, and while zombies are really, really stupid, they're also really, really vicious. They're also nearly as fast as vampires, and since they don't just happen, they're made for a purpose, if one is coming after you, that's probably its purpose, and you're in big trouble.

Here
was getting worse. It was going to burst out of my skull and dance on the dashboard, and it wouldn't be anything anyone wanted to watch. “Stop,” I said. Pat stopped. I tried to breathe. Zombie Rat seemed to be sitting on my chest, so I couldn't. I couldn't see it any more though—there didn't seem to be anything left but its little red eyes—no, its huge, drowning, no-color eyes—

“I—can't—any—more—turn—around,” I think is what I said. I don't remember. I remember after Pat turned around and started driving back toward Old Town. After what felt like a long time I began breathing again. I was clammy with sweat and my head ached as if pieces of my skull had been broken and the edges were grinding together. But Zombie Rat was gone.

That had been far too much like the bad spot the SOF car hadn't protected us from, the day Jesse and Pat took me back out to the house on the lake. (Those no-color eyes … both mirror-flat and chasm-deep … if they were eyes.…) But we hadn't tried to drive through a bad spot. And this time it was just me. Pat and Jesse hadn't noticed anything. Except my little crisis.

I didn't know if I was angrier at their making me try to do—whatever—or at the fact that I'd failed. I'd been to No Town when I was a teenager. It wasn't like I had no idea. Any teenager with the slightest pretensions toward being stark, spartan, whatever, which I'm afraid I had had, will probably give it a try if it's offered, and it will be offered. And No Town is a rite of passage; quite sensible kids go at least once. I'd been there more than once. Some of the clubs were pretty spartan by anyone's standards. Kenny said (out of Mom's hearing) this was still true. And it was also still true (Kenny said) that you dared each other to climb farther in, over the rubble around the bad spots, although nobody got very far. But I hadn't got any less far than anyone else, when I was his age.

So had whatever-it-was moved there since my time, or was I just more sensitive now than I had been? No Town was actually a lot cleaner now than it had been when I was sixteen and seventeen, which was right after the Wars. Having been once captured by vampires, did I now overreact to their presence? If “overreact to vampires” wasn't a contradiction in terms.

Or was this another horrible, specific one-off, like my having heard the giggler when no one else could?

I didn't know if I wanted the answer to be yes or no. If it was no, then it might mean my sucker connection was general, which didn't bear thinking about. But if it was yes, then it meant I was picking up something to do with Bo. Which didn't bear thinking about.

Unless it was Con. Unless this had been his daylight wards, protecting him, protecting
us
, in the company of a couple of sucker-hating SOFs.

No
. It wasn't Con. Whatever it was, it wasn't Con.

Pat drove around into the SOF back lot again. Neither of them had said any word of blame or failure or frustration to me, although I felt I could hear them both thinking. Words like “triangulation.” I didn't know if they'd marked where I made them turn around. Probably. But neither of them mentioned it. Yet. “I'd take you straight to Charlie's but I don't think you want the neighborhood seeing you show up in a SOF car,” Pat said, as offhand as if we'd been buying groceries.

I started to shake my head—unmarked SOF cars were like SOFs out of uniform; you still knew—but changed my mind. “Thanks.” I fumbled for the door handle.

“Do you want to come back in? You look a little … worn. There are a few bedrooms in the back. They're pretty basic but they have beds and they're quiet. Or I could run you home.”

This time I did manage to shake my head. Carefully. “No. Thanks. I'm going for a walk. Clear my head.” The last thing I wanted to do was lie down in a small dark room and try to go to sleep. I didn't want to go home either. There might be a dead rat in the living room.

I got out of the car, lifted my face to the sunlight. It felt like a good fairy's kiss. Except good fairies don't exist.

As I walked toward the exit Pat called after me, “Hey. Didn't you want to tell us something? When you came in.”

I looked at him, at the way the shadows fell across his face. He was leaning on the roof of the car, which was unmarked-cop-car blue. That was probably why the shadows in the hollows of his eyes, his upper lip, his throat, looked blue. “I forget now,” I said. “It'll come back to me.”

Pat smiled a little: a twitch of the lips. “Sorry, Sunshine.”

I raised a hand and turned away again. He said softly, “See you.” He could have meant only that he'd see me at Charlie's, where we'd seen each other for years. But I knew that wasn't what he meant.

I
WENT FOR
a long walk. I spiraled slowly through Old Town, from the outside edge, where SOF headquarters and City Hall lie on the boundary between Old Town and downtown, to the next circle where the area library and the Other Museum and the older city buildings are, through several small parks and down the long green aisle of General Aster's Way (purple in autumn with michaelmas daisies, some municipal gardener's idea of a joke), and then into the back streets of Charlie's neighborhood, where everyone gets lost occasionally, even people who have lived there all their lives, like Charlie and Mary and Kyoko. I was used to getting lost. I didn't mind. I'd come to something I recognized eventually.

I wandered and thought about the latest thing I didn't want to think about. There seemed to be so many things I didn't want to think about lately.

I didn't want to think about my increasing sense that something had happened to Con.

And that it mattered.

There
is no fellowship
between humans and vampires. We are fire and water, heads and tails, north and south … day and night.

Maybe I was imagining the bond. Maybe it was a way of dealing with what had happened. Like post-traumatic thingummy.

Con himself said the bond existed, but he could be wrong too. Vampires are deadly, but no one says they're infallible.

I blinked my treacherous eyes, watching the things in the shadows slither and sparkle. I had plenty to worry about already. I didn't have to worry about vampires too. One vampire. The last thing I wanted to be doing was worrying about him.

No, the next to last thing. The last thing I wanted was to be bound to him.

I hadn't thought I had any—did I mean innocence?—to lose, after those two nights on the lake. I didn't know you could go on finding out you'd had stuff by losing it. This didn't seem like a very good method to me.

Over two months of being slowly poisoned probably hadn't been really good for me either. And the nightmares had been bad. But in a way they'd still been pure. I'd made a mistake—a mistake I'd paid dearly for—but it had been a
mistake
.

A month ago, I'd
called
on Con. Okay, I was at the end of my tether. But I'd still asked a vampire for help—not Mel, not a human doctor of human medicine. And he'd helped me. The nightmares I'd had since weren't pure at all.

My thought paused there, teetering on the edge of a precipice, and then fell over.

What if it
hadn't
been a mistake, driving out to the lake? What if I'd had to do it—if not that exact thing, then something similar. What if that restlessness I hadn't been able to name had caused exactly what it was meant to cause?

That question I hadn't asked Con, out by the lake,
is my dad another of your old enemies? Or your old friends
?

Between the dark thoughts inside my head and the leaping, glittery shadows my eyes saw, I had to stop. I was at the edge of Oldroy's Park. I groped my way to a bench and sat down.

I sat there, and stared at the tree opposite me, and the way the rough ridges of its bark seemed to
wiggle
where they lay in shade. My thoughts were stuck on that night at the lake. I never liked coincidence much, but I hated the sense I was making now.

I watched the wiggling bark. It occurred to me that this was new. I'd been seeing into shadows, but merely what was there, as if there was a rather erratic light on it. This was something else. Which gave me something I could bear to think about, so I thought about it. A few more minutes passed and it seemed to me it was as if I was watching the tree breathing. I found a leaf in shadow, and looked at it for a while; it twinkled, as if with tiny starbursts, but rather than thinking ugh—weird, I kept watching, till there seemed to be a pattern. I thought, it's as if I'm watching its pores opening and closing. I looked down at my hands. The shadows between the fingers gleamed like a banked fire. The tiny shadows laid by the veins on the backs of them were a tiny, flickering dark green edged with a tinier, even more flickering red. The daylight part of the veins looked as it always did. In the shadow places I could see the blood moving.

I was sitting in sunlight, not shade. I automatically chose sun if there was any sun to be had. I remembered the sun on my back the first morning at the lake, like the arm of a friend. I closed my eyes.

I heard the footsteps but I didn't expect them to pause.

“Pardon me,” said a voice. “Are you all right?”

I opened my eyes. An old woman stood there, a little bent over, leaning on the handle of her two-wheeled shopping cart. “You look—tired,” she said. “Can I fetch you anything? There is a shop on the corner. And it has a pay phone. Can I call someone for you?”

She had a nice face. She would be someone you would be glad to have as a neighbor, or as a regular at the coffeehouse you and your family ran. I looked at the shadows that fell half across her face and saw … I don't know how … that she was a partblood. And that something about my expression was maybe making her guess I might be going through finding that out about myself. And remembering how hard this was she was going to ask me, a total stranger, if I was all right.

I hauled myself back into the ordinary world, and the vision faded. The shadows that fell across her face reverted to being the usual, disorienting, see-through, funny-edged shadows I'd been seeing for a month. She smiled. “I'm sorry to disturb you. I—er—I thought you might perhaps—er—”

“Want to be disturbed?” I said. “Yes. Isn't it … silly … how … upsetting … just thinking can be?”

“It's not silly at all. The insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are.”

Scarier than vampires? I thought. Scarier than an
affinity
for vampires? Well. That was what she'd said, wasn't it? What my mind contained was an affinity for vampires.

She was fishing around in her cart and pulled out a package of Fig Carousels and another of Chocolate Pinwheels. I laughed. She smiled at me again. “Which?” she said, holding them out toward me.

I hadn't had a Pinwheel in fifteen years, although the secret recipe for Sunshine's Killer Zebras was the later result of a three-pack-a-week pre-Charlie's childhood. I pointed to the Pinwheels. She tore open the packet, sat down, and offered it to me. “Thank you,” I said. She took one too.

We sat in silence for a while, and did away with several more Pinwheels. “Thank you,” I said again.

“Maud,” she said. “I'm Maud. I live—there,” and she pointed to one of the old townhouses that surrounded the little park. “I sit here often, in warm weather. I've found it's a good place for thinking; I like to believe Colonel Oldroy was a pleasant fellow, which is why the disagreeable thoughts seem to fall away if you sit here.”

Colonel Oldroy had been one of those military scientist bozos who spent decades locked up in some huge secret underground maze because whatever they were doing was so superclassified that the existence of a lab to do it in was confidential information. It still wasn't public knowledge where his lab had been, but Oldroy got the credit, or the blame, for the blood test SOF still used on job applicants. Before Oldroy there was no reliable test for demon partbloods. (Remember that
demon
is a hodge-podge word. A Were can't be a partblood; you either are one or you aren't. Anything else, anything alive that is, may be called a demon, although things like peris and angels will probably protest.) Pretty much the first thing that Oldroy discovered was that
he
was a partblood. He'd retired before they had a chance to throw him out, and spent the last twenty years of his life breeding roses, and naming them things like Lucifer, Mammon, Beelzebub, and Belphegor. Belphegor, under the less controversial name Pure of Heart, was a big commercial success. Mom had a Pure of Heart in her back yard. Oldroy may not have had a very happy life, but it sounded like he'd had a sense of humor. I wondered if he'd had anything to do with synthesizing the drug that made partbloods piss green or blue-violet but pass his blood test, or with setting up the bootleg mentor system.