Sunshine (44 page)

I tried to look as if I would like to be cooperative. “I'm sorry,” I said. “It was like I was falling into chaos, and then I went over backward in the chair and the combox exploded.”

The goddess' radar was telling her I was holding something back. With a great effort I raised my eyes again and met hers. There was no way I was going to try to read any shadows on her face: it was as much as I could do to look at her at all. What the
hell
was this? Some kind of wild personal warding system? I'd never met anything like it.

We stared at each other. She wasn't my boss—and she wasn't a vampire—and life with my mother had taught me not to intimidate easily, although this last took some effort, and my head was spinning even worse than … Uh.
What
? She was
trolling
me.…

This was strictly illegal: a violation of my personal rights, and anything an illegal fishing expedition found was automatically forfeit too, in theory, but once you know something you know it, don't you? There is a license you can get to do a mind search under certain circumstances but there is a list of prior requirements as long as the global council's charter—besides that, you need to be a magic handler particularly talented in etherfo interchange—and in practice there are only a few specialist cops and specialist lawyers who get one. And likely some SOFs: but if the goddess had the license, she was misusing it now.

“Hey
,” I said, and put up my arm, as if to ward off a physical blow. Trolling isn't an exact science for even the best searcher, and the searchee has to hold still. Big police stations have a mind-search chair as standard equipment, and a medic standing by with a shot of stuff that on the street is called
delete
, which makes you hold still all right and you may not move real well again for a long time afterward.

I was pretty sure she hadn't had the chance to pull anything out of me but I sure didn't like her trying. I also thought I understood why those I disconcertingly found myself thinking of as my gang—Pat and Jesse and Aimil and Theo—looked so jumpy.

“I am so sorry,” she said, not sorry at all. “I am accustomed to assisting recall in our agents. I did it automatically.”

The hell you did, lady, I didn't say. You were hoping I wouldn't notice. I did say, “Good night. If I remember anything, I'll let you know.”

She would have liked to stop me, but perhaps she didn't quite dare. I had noticed what she'd tried to do, and an accusation of illegal mind search would be embarrassing to SOF even if they denied it convincingly. It occurred to me that she must really, really want anything I could tell her, to have taken the chance. Was she that flash on vampires or was there something else going on? Silly me. Of course there was something else going on. If she was just megahot on vampires, she and Pat would be buddies, and they weren't.

It also occurred to me that she couldn't have pulled anything out of me, because if she had, she'd've found a way to hold me, and she was letting me go.

I turned very carefully to the door, wanting to get through it before she changed her mind. I also didn't want to shake my fix loose till I'd had a chance to explore it. I felt it swimming, the way a compass needle swims as you turn the casing.

Aimil clung solicitously to my elbow. “My car's in back,” she said.

We were halfway down the final corridor when we heard someone running up behind us: Pat. “I've left Jesse trying to deal with the goddess,” he said. “Sorry, Sunshine, can you move any faster? I want us all out of here before she thinks of a reason to yank us back in.”

They hustled me along between them. Pat was holding his wounded arm pressed against his body, but his grasp on me was strong enough. Once I was outdoors I felt the fix run through me again. “I have to stop,” I said. Pat didn't argue, but he glanced over his shoulder.

We stood at the top of the little flight of stairs into the parking lot. I took a deep breath and tried to settle myself, wait for the compass needle to stop waving back and forth. It didn't want to stop waving back and forth. A void needle will presumably be confused by moving around in ordinary reality, the way an ordinary compass needle will be confused by steel beams and magnetic fields. I hoped there weren't any steel-beam and magnetic-field equivalents nearby. Settle, I told it. I haven't lost it, I thought, please don't tell me I've lost it.…

“Um,” said Aimil. “I don't know if this might be of any help to you,” and she pulled a bit of exploded combox from her pocket and offered it to me.

“You darling,” I said. Sympathetic magic is never the best and is usually the crudest, but when you wanted grounding there is nothing better, and any damn fool with a drop of magic-handler blood six generations back can tap it. I held the scrap of plastic in both hands.

This time I didn't have to turn around. I felt it slamming in over my right shoulder—no,
through
it—toward my heart. Like a stake into a vampire.

I dropped the bit of combox and threw myself away from its line of flight. The chain round my neck and the knife and seal in my pockets blazed up again—and I seemed to have a friction burn across the front of my right shoulder where the whatever-it-was had grazed me in passing—it felt like someone had taken an electric sander to me.

Pat caught me, or I might have fallen down the steps onto the pavement. “
Wow
,” he said, and almost dropped me, as if he'd caught hold of something burning; but he was a true SOF, or he had his damsel-rescuing hat on that evening, or he was more worried about me than about the skin of his hands or the stitches in his shoulder. He flinched but his grip tightened.

“Sorry,” I said. “That was a little of what blew the combox.”

Aimil shook her head, slowly went to where the bit of broken combox was still rocking on its curved edge where it had landed, bent down even more slowly, and picked it up. Brave woman. But it wasn't the sort of clue we could afford to leave lying around: everybody knows about sympathetic magic, which would include all the goddess' spies.

Pat rubbed his hands down the sides of his legs. “Shiva wept,” he said. “Sunshine, you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “More or less.” I looked in the direction that the invisible stake had come from. No Town again. I looked back. “Your stitches are bleeding.”

“Did you get anything?”

“No Town. We knew that.”

Pat expelled his breath in an angry sigh. “So we blew out the com system, destroyed a lot of equipment,
and
got the goddess of pain on our butts, and all we know is that it's No Town. Bloody hell.”

I glanced at Aimil, who was valiantly not saying “I told you so.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Not your fault, Sunshine. I'm sure we're on to something with you, we just have to figure out how to use it. Some day we're going to cruise you around and see if it is No Town at all, and if we can get some kind of angle on it.”

I thought this sounded like trying to find the epicenter while you're falling into the cracks in the earth, but I didn't say anything.

“But that's the long way and I'm impatient. Damn. John's a com whiz. I should have asked him before. He could take on the goddess' little walters; I just thought Sanchez—well. It plays as it plays, and the goddess is going to be watching our every move now.”

“Who is she?” I said.

“The goddess of pain? Sunshine, you're slipping. She's second in command here at div HQ, but we keep hoping she'll get promoted out of regional and out of our hair. Jack Demetrios—he's the boss—he's okay.”

I did know that. But I didn't know how to ask about the goddess' weird vibes. “Does she have any—er—unconventional personal wards or anything?”

Pat looked at me in that too-alert way I didn't like. “You mean other than the fact that her walking into a room makes any sane person want to run out of it? You mean she's got that effect as a switch on her control board? Hey, Sunshine, what are you picking up?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. Too much happened tonight is all.”

“She tried to troll you, didn't she?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But you blocked her,” said Pat. “Thank the listening gods. I'm glad you blocked her anyway, but I always like seeing the goddess screw up.”

I
HAD SOME
trouble convincing them to let me drive myself home. I had a
lot
of trouble convincing them. Aimil knows me well enough to know to stop arguing eventually, but I left Pat scowling and furious. But he wasn't scowling and furious as hard as he should have been. That meant that they already had something planted out at Yolande's to check up on me. Hell.

The Wreck was in a good mood. We got home at a steady thirty-five mph and it didn't diesel for more than fifteen seconds after I turned the key off. I fumbled in the side pocket for something to write on and something to write with: all the usual glove compartment things had got crowded out of the glove compartment by charms. I scribbled,
Yolande, help. SOF is monitoring here for Other activity. S
, and stuck it under her door. I tried to listen for any tickers in the neighborhood but that wasn't in my job description and I didn't know what to listen for.

I dragged myself upstairs. I hadn't cleaned up all that well from last night, so it was easy to fish out a few wax chips from the candles Yolande had given me and dump them into a smudge bowl and light a candle under them. I waited till the chips began to grow soft, and I could smell, faintly, their aroma. Then I closed my eyes and aligned myself.…

I didn't want to go anywhere. I just wanted to leave a message. The chain around my neck began to feel warm. Only a little warm.

…
Sunshine
? …

…
Found
…

…
Tomorrow
…

…
Beware
…
SOF here
…

I
T WAS A
good thing my hands knew what to do because the rest of me was barely responsive to automatic pilot the next day, or anyway the gear assembly needed its chain tightened up several links. I got through the morning, the Wreck took me home, I fell asleep several steps from the top of the stairs but my feet carried me the rest of the way into my bedroom and I woke up at three, lying slantways across my unmade bed, my feet hanging over one end, my cheek painfully creased and my bruised jaw made sorer by a wad of bedspread. The sin of untidiness chastised.

“Oh, ow,” I said, rolling over. Bath time. When in doubt, take a bath. My family (especially those of them who remembered clearly what it had been like to share a one-bathroom house with me) every year at Winter Solstice give me enough bubble bath to last me till next Winter Solstice. I wasn't going to make it this year though. I always got through a lot of bubble bath, but this year was in a category of its own.

When I was dressed I went out onto my balcony to brush my wet hair in the sunlight. Yolande was in the garden, cutting off deadheads. She looked up at the sound of my doors opening. “Good afternoon,” she said. “May I make you a cup of tea?”

“Love it,” I said. “Give me five minutes.”

When I came downstairs her door was open. I closed it behind me and made my way to her kitchen. My apartment was one of the attics; hers was the whole of the ground floor, and it was a big house. I didn't linger to stare, but I found myself looking around at everything I had seen before with the new idea that any of it might be possible secret wards; and it did seem to me that the shadows lay differently on certain things than on others, and some of those certain things were pretty unexpected. Could that faded, curling postcard that said
A Souvenir of Portland
leaning drunkenly against a candlestick be anything but a worthy candidate for a housecleaning purge?

Yolande was fitting the tea cozy over the pot when I came in. There were cups on the table. I knew where her cookie plates lived, so I got one down and put my offerings on it: chocolate chip hazelnut, Jamdandies, Cashew Turtles, plus butterscotch brownies and half a dozen muffins. (Fortunately I hadn't landed on the bakery bag when I fell asleep.) Technically we aren't supposed to take anything home from the coffeehouse till the end of the day, but I'd like to see anyone try and stop me.

“It is ironic,” she said, “that SOF, our white knights against the darkness, are causing you such bother. But I think I can guarantee they will not notice your friend if he comes again. You will forgive me if I made my obstructions specific again to him only. Were you successful the other night?”

I didn't mean to laugh, but a sort of yelp escaped me. “Yes. If anything too successful.”

Yolande said, “I'm afraid that is sometimes the inevitable result of the possession of real power. That it is stronger than you are, and not very biddable.”

“I don't think it's my so-called power that's the problem,” I said bleakly. “It's the trouble it gets me into.”

Yolande pulled my cup toward her, settled the tiny silver sieve over it, and poured. Before I met her I had thought you made tea by throwing a tea bag in a mug and adding hot water. Four years ago I'd convinced Charlie to inaugurate loose tea in individual teapots at Charlie's. I told him that a coffeehouse that sold champagne by the glass could stretch to loose tea. Our postlunch afternoon crowd had instantly ballooned. Must be more Albion exiles in New Arcadia than we thought. Albion had been hit very badly by the Wars.

“I doubt your interpretation,” said Yolande. “If I may be blunt, I don't think you'd still be alive if you were a mere pawn.”

“I know this is pathetic of me, but sometimes I think I'd rather be a pawn. Okay, a live pawn.”

Yolande was smiling. She had that inward remembering look. “Responsibility is always a burden,” she said.

“Next you're going to tell me it doesn't get any easier.”