Sunshine (42 page)

I gazed back at him as innocently as I could.

He sighed. “Never mind. We'll see you at ten tonight. In fact, I'll come by myself at closing.”

“I'm not going to sneak out the back way and go home if I've told you I'll come,” I said, annoyed.

“You haven't actually said you will come,” said Pat calmly, “and I don't want you walking around by yourself at that hour, in case Bozo gets wise between now and then.”

This was a little too near a little too much of the truth. “Bozo?” I said carefully. “Do you have a name?”

“Have we ever had a name?” said Pat. “You find 'em and you stake 'em and then you burn 'em to be sure. But we're obviously chasing a master vampire here, and it's easier if we call him something. Assuming it's a him, which they usually are. So we're calling him Bozo. So, are you saying you'll be waiting for me at ten tonight then?”

“But if Aimil—”

“I'll tell her you're coming anyway and we've got that cosmail saved and we can do it without her if we have to. She can either come be part of the safety net or sit at home waiting for really bad news
and
be hauled over the carpet and messily fired later on.”

“What sweethearts you SOFs are,” I said.

There was no humor at all in Pat's face when he replied: “Yeah. But we're real devoted to the idea of keeping the live alive. What did you do to your chin—and your arm? Is that from when you fell out of Aimil's chair?”

“Must be,” I said. “I don't remember that well.”

I
T WAS A
fairly ordinary day at the coffeehouse. We had one crazy wander in off the street who wanted to tell all of us that the end of the world was coming. He had an interesting variant of the standard format: in his reading the moon was going to be moved in front of the sun and kept there to create a permanent eclipse while the creatures of dark took over down here. The moon would be held in place by the something-o-meter invented by the creatures of dark and which they were presently perfecting. He said “creatures of dark,” not “vampires.” I suppose I was in a twitchy mood anyway, but I didn't like this. There are lots of creatures of the dark, but I would have said that except for vampires none of them is bright enough to invent a something-o-meter. So why didn't he say vampires? He did say eighteen months, tops, before the eclipse began.

It was a good thing he hadn't washed in a while and raved like a loony or some of us might have believed him. I told myself his story would make a good novel. It would sure make a better novel than it would a reality. Mel got rid of him. Mel goes all Good Old Boy amiable and eases them out the door, and the thing about it is that when Mel does it, they don't come back. The only times we've ever had to call the cops is when Mel hasn't been there. Ranting crazies make Charlie nervous. Because this is Old Town we get a fair number of crazies: hell, we feed most of them, out the side door, but not so many of them rant. Charlie can soothe a customer determined to pick a fight when Mel would just throw him out the first time he swore at one of the waitresses, and I'd back Mel against most brawlers, but taking them on their own terms isn't a good way to avoid calling the cops. Sometimes I think more throwing out would be a good thing—we have enough customers, we don't need to put up with the flaming assholes—but Charlie's is Charlie's because of Charlie, which is probably a good thing too. But Mel is the one who deals with the noisy nutters. If there's ever a Mel's it will be racier. And Charlie's will have to hire a bouncer with a degree in counseling.

This crazy came in during the lull between the late-afternoon muffin-and-scone crowd and the early supper eaters so there weren't too many people around. Mrs. Bialosky was there, and I didn't like the way she listened to him either: it seemed to me she was having some of the same thoughts I was. Maybe she was just thinking about full moons. The crazy hadn't mentioned what was going to happen about the moon's phases. He must not be a Were himself.

“Hey, a little live entertainment for slack time,” Mel said to me. “This one missed the mark, okay, next time I'll get jugglers.” I smiled, because he wanted me to, but I noticed he was rubbing one of his tattoos: the hourglass one, that you can't see which way the sand is running. It's a charm about not running out of time. He'd been listening to the crazy too.

I couldn't see into the shadows on Mel's face. They flickered less than some but the red edges were more dazzling as if to make up for this. I didn't know if I couldn't see past the dazzle because I
couldn't
couldn't, or because I didn't want to. If I didn't want to, what was it I was afraid I was going to be seeing?

By ten o'clock I was tired, and I wanted to go home and go to bed. I had a lot of sleep to catch up on. The last thing I wanted to do was slope off to SOF HQ and plug into another live socket and fry my brains some more, but when Kyoko came into the bakery to tell me Pat was in front waiting for me, I didn't duck out the back door—even though I hadn't promised. I may have given the cinnamon-roll sponge a few more vicious stirs than it needed, but then I threw my apron into the laundry, washed off the worst of the day's spatters and stains, and went to meet my fate.

I paused briefly under the doorway. A few days ago I'd tacked up a string over the lintel, so I could stuff some of Mom's charms up there. They balanced on the narrow lintel edge and were kept from pitching over by the string. She hadn't said anything, but then we'd never discussed the fact that she was coming into the bakery when I wasn't there (she rarely crossed the threshold when I was) and leaving charms round about. Well, so, the glove compartment was full. Or she was wearing me down. And they wouldn't last long trying to protect a doorway that had people coming and going through it all the time, but at least they could keep their eyes (so to speak) on me when I was there. And while they still had what in charms passes for eyes.

The funny thing was that I'd begun to feel them there, and kind of didn't mind. I've said that charms usually rub me up the wrong way, like a rash, or a colicky baby living in the spare bedroom whose mom sleeps deeper than you do. And when I stood under the doorway for a moment I felt their—well, their good will, I'm not sure it was any stronger than that—soaking in. I felt like a baba sucking up rum. Or possibly chopped piccalilli vegetables vinegar. I shook my head to make the opalescent chain swish over my skin and patted my pockets.

Pat and I walked over, to my surprise. “I kinda want to know if there's anyone close enough to make a pass at you,” said Pat. “Hope you got a table knife in your pocket.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“Shouldn't be necessary,” said Pat, unfazed. “I got a few of ours skulking in the shadows, ready to race to our rescue.”

This was not comforting, not so much because a vampire could have struck in from nowhere and killed us both before any human defender had done any more than take a deep breath and wonder if there was a problem, but because of what SOF didn't know about my extracurricular activities. I didn't want SOF watching me that closely. And I didn't like their spending that kind of expensive human time on me. “You sound like you're taking this very seriously.”

“You betcha.”

“Why? You haven't got any proof yet that what Aimil and I are doing is anything but psycho doodling.”

Pat was silent a moment, and then gave a heavy sigh. “You know, Sunshine, you're a pain to work with. You think too much. Have you read anything about the little black boxes that are supposed to register Other activity? Called tickers.”

“Yeah. They don't work.”

“Actually they work pretty well. The problem is that there is a larger number of unregistered partbloods in the general pop than anyone wants to talk about—well gosh isn't
that
surprising—and the tickers keep getting confused. Or, you know, sabotaged. It's been a real bad problem in SOF for some reason. Can't imagine why. There's ways around this problem, however, once you all know you're reading off the same page. So we got some tickers that give us pretty good readings, once we figured out how to set 'em up. And I'll tell you that a couple we got down in No Town about fused their chips when you did your locating trick for us a few days ago, and they did it again that afternoon when, it turns out, you were committing your felony with Aimil.”

“Felony my
ass
,” I said.

“Attempting to consort with an enemy alien is a felony, my pretty darling, and all Others are enemy aliens. It's not one of those rules anyone wants to pursue too close, but it has its uses. And trying to locate 'em is near enough to trying to consort with 'em for me. Anyway, we've never had readings like these readings. What you're up to may be psycho doodlings, all right, but they're great big strong psycho doodlings and we're beginning to hope you may be the best chance we've seen in years and not another one of my over-optimistic bad calls.”

I considered having a nervous breakdown on the spot. I probably could have thrown a good one too, about how I couldn't take the strain, that my life had crashed and burned those two nights I went missing by the lake and all Pat and SOF were doing now was stamping out the ashes and oh by the way if you have an axe handy I'll run mad with it now and get it over with since my genes are being slower off the mark than I've been expecting since I figured it out two months or whatever ago, and by the way, that was SOF's doing too, you guys and your sidelong suggestive little chats. While half my brain was considering the nervous breakdown recourse the other half was considering whether maybe I could locate Bo well enough
and then let SOF handle it
. Con and I wouldn't have to go within miles (vampire miles or human miles) of No Town. We could sit at home drinking champagne and waiting for the headlines: NEW ARCADIA SOF DIVISION ELIMINATES MAJOR VAMPIRE LAIR AND DESTROYS ITS MASTER. Our correspondent, blah blah blah.

My imagination wanted MOST IMPORTANT STRIKE SINCE VOODOO WARS, but it wouldn't be. It felt global to me because it was my life on the line.

But it wasn't going to happen that way. I didn't even know why, not to be able to explain it. But I could feel it, like you feel a stomachache or a cold coming on, or somebody's eyes staring a hole in your back. SOF could go in and mess things up for a little while, stake a few young vampires and maybe wreck Bo's immediate plans. But … maybe this was something else I was learning to see in the shadows. Maybe it was from traveling through nowheresville or walking Con's short ways last night when I
was
somewhere else: watching my reality stream by, finding out there are other places with other rules. I was beginning to understand how the connections in the vampire world
really
aren't like our human connections in our human world.

I was tethered to Con as absolutely as he had been shackled to the wall of the house beside the lake. And he and Bo had a bond that required one of them to be the cause of the destruction of the other one. I guessed now that this was as natural a situation to a vampire as making cinnamon rolls was to me. I wondered what happened if a vampire involved in one of these lethal pacts did the vampire equivalent of falling under a bus: did the other one, foiled of catharsis, spin off into the void instead? The really nasty void, that is. Which could explain why it was so godsbloodyawful a place to visit.

He could have warned me, I thought. Con could have said something, that second morning by the lake. Would it have occurred to him? No. Besides, what was he going to say? “Die now or later”? That had been the choice all along. And as far as my situation now being the mere sad inevitable result of my being in the wrong place at the wrong time: grow up, Sunshine. Bo would be just a tiny bit irritated with me personally. Having not only escaped but taken his prize prisoner with me. What had kept me alive so far—my scorned and ignored magic-handling talent, my reluctant and harrowing alliance with Con—was also what was causing the bond. Ordinary mortals don't get bound up in ceremonial duels to the death with master vampires. But ordinary mortals don't survive introductory vampire encounters either.

I cast back to that second morning at the lake and thought, he
did
warn me—or remind me. I just didn't hear it. Why should I? And why should he think I needed warning? “…
That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you
—
as it does, does it not?—and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner. He will order his folk to follow. We must not make it easy for them.” I
was the one who'd assumed the time limitations around Con's annotations of our predicament.

More recently Con had said,
I knew what happened at the lake would not be the end
. And it wasn't like I'd been surprised.

Okay, what if—just as a matter of keeping our position clear here—
what if
we managed to off Bo now? What new chains of vengeance and retaliation would we have forged instead?

I wanted to laugh, but I didn't want to come up with a likely story to explain to Pat what I was finding to laugh at. Unless I wanted to make the laughter hysterical, as a lead-in to my nervous breakdown.

But I didn't. I wanted to find Bo and get on with it. Whatever happened next.
Whatever
. I would think about whatever if there was a tomorrow to think about it in. Right now today was enough—like getting away from the lake alive had been enough. If Aimil's cosmail was Bo, and I could trace it, and SOF could offer some protection from being traced back, then I'd risk doing it with SOF. I
wanted
to find Bo. And hadn't I just been saying there was a bond between Bo and me as well? Big ugly mega yuck.