Sunshine (50 page)

But then I had never thought a lot about magic handling. I had always been too busy being fascinated by stories of the Others.

“I can see in the dark—er—now,” I said, not wanting to get into how it happened, “but it makes me kind of nuts. In the dark it's okay. But I see in—through—the shadows in daylight too. But I see through them—strangely. I mostly can't make sense of what I'm seeing.” Or if I can I don't know if I'm imagining it, to
make
it make sense. “And most of them wiggle.”

Yolande looked interested. “Perhaps you will tell me more about that some time. I may be able to help.”

Some time
, I thought. Yeah. “The shadows on you don't wiggle though. They just lie there, like all shadows used to.”

“Ah. That will perhaps be the purification process of wardskeeping. If you become a master, as I eventually did, you go through a series of trials that are to make you what you are as intensely as possible. You would not be able to do what a master does without this. I imagine you will see other masters of their craft as you see me.”

I still hadn't decided if the shadows that fell on Con moved around or not. Dark shadows were different from light shadows. So to speak. If they didn't, did that make him a master vampire? What
is
a master vampire? SOF used the term for someone who ran a gang.

I held both arms out and admired the faint twinkly gold, felt the faint prickly itch. I pulled a handful of my hair forward where I could look at it and it too was laced and daubed with gold. Maybe Yolande could sell the process to a hairdresser: bet you didn't have to touch it up every few weeks.

Pity I wouldn't be around to demonstrate.

The sun was near setting.

I dropped my arms. “Thank you,” I said. “That is so feeble. But—thank you very much.”

“You're very welcome, my dear,” said Yolande.

“I must go now, I think.”

“Yes. But I hope you will come back and tell me about it.”

I met her eyes and saw with a shock that she
did
know. I tried to smile. “I hope I will too.”

I
SAT JUST
inside the open doors of the balcony, cross-legged, hands on knees. I didn't bother to try to align, to ask him anything, to tell him anything. He would be here soon enough. He would be here. This time what was doomed to happen wasn't going to be put off. It would begin tonight. And, probably, end there too.

The sun reddened the autumn colors on the trees. The shadows darkened and lengthened.

PART FOUR

P
ERHAPS THE FLAKES
of light had settled in my eyes too when Yolande's web had fallen around me. Sitting still and waiting, watching the sun set, I hadn't thought much about the way the shadows fell and moved; it was always easier when I was motionless myself. But I saw him clearly, this time. I saw him, and not merely by a process of elimination, one wiggly shadow moving in a specific direction. He was a dark figure, human-shaped. Vampire-shaped. He was Con.

A dark figure: dark with glints of gold, as if lightflakes fell on him, sparked like struck matches, and fell away.

Did I hear him or not? I don't know. I had a feeling like sound of him, as I had a feeling like sight. I saw him disappear around the corner of the house. He would be coming up the stairs now; I felt his presence there. He would be opening my door—hmm, did he open doors to walk through them? No, wait. Vampires couldn't disintegrate themselves—I didn't think. A few sorcerers could, but they were the really crazy ones. If you've invited a vampire across your threshold, maybe the door simply didn't exist for him any more? Or anyway why did the front door always
whoosh
gently when I opened it but not when he did?

And I knew when he was standing behind me. It wasn't that I heard him breathing. But the vampire-in-the-room thing was unmistakable.

I stood up and turned around.

He looked different. It might have been the lightflakes but I don't think so. I probably looked different too. If you're going into what you know is your final battle maybe the preliminary loin-girding always is visible. My experience is limited. I don't know that I would necessarily have identified the way Con looked as a vampire prepared for his last battle, but as a thumbnail description it would do.

I was always surprised at how big he was. That's probably something about the way vampires move—the boneless gliding, that human-spine-unhinging creepy grace. You didn't believe it, so you made the vampire smaller in your memory to make it a little more plausible. (Uh. I don't know about the generic
you
in this case. So far as I knew I was the only human, so far, who'd had the opportunity. Or the need.) It's funny, vampires have been a fact of human existence since before history began, and yet in our heart of hearts I don't think we really
believe
in them. Every time one of us meets up with one of them we don't believe in them all over again. Of course in most cases a human meeting up with a vampire is looking at their immediate death and so not believing it is the last forlorn hope—but I'm here to say that being acquainted with one doesn't lessen the feeling much. I didn't believe in Con.

Tricky.

I believed in my own death more.

I stretched my hand out and put it on his chest, where no heart beat. He was wearing another one of his long black shirts. It might have been the one I had worn a few nights ago, except that that one was hanging in the back of my closet with the cranberry-red dress. My vampire wardrobe.

I let my hand drop.

But he reached out and picked it up. There was a fizz, a shock, as his skin met mine. I felt him twitch—ever so slightly—but he didn't loose my hand. He turned it over instead, and then laid it gently, as if it had no volition of its own, in the palm of his other hand. The invisible spark happened again, but he didn't startle this time. My back was to the fading twilight, but in the shadow of my body the occasional gold glints of the web were just visible.

“What is this?” he said.

“Yolande gave it to me. She said it would help me draw on the source of my strength.”

“Daylight,” he said.

“Yes. Does it hurt you?”

“No.”

I thought about that
no
. It sounded a little like the “no” of the kid playing so-called touch football who has just had the three biggest kids in the neighborhood tag her by knocking her down and sitting on her. They asked me after they let me up if I was hurt. I said no. I was lying. “Let me rephrase that.”

A small shiver in his breath. Really quite a human noise: audible breath with a catch in it, like a muted laugh. “When you are a little too hot, a little too cold, does it hurt?”

Old Mr. Temperature Control, I thought. What do
you
know about too hot and too cold? No, I
still
wasn't thinking about any of that. Delete that thought.

“Or if you pick up something a little too heavy for you, does it hurt? It is only a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself.”

I liked that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood.…

I was raving, if only to myself. I took a deep breath. Okay. My new light-web was to Con no worse than hauling an overfull sheet of cinnamon rolls out of the oven and making a run for the counter-top before I dropped them was to me.

I looked into his face, dully lit by the last of the twilight, and realized, with a shock, that I had no doubt: the shadows there lay quietly too.

“Ready?” he said.

I smiled involuntarily. Are you joking? “Yes,” I said.

“I have taken what you showed me and … measured it, by the ways I know. I believe that between us we shall … attain our goal.”

Our goal
, I thought. I didn't translate this into practical terms.

“We do not travel in your nowheresville, but I fear the way we are going is nonetheless … unpleasant. I will need your assistance. It will not be easy both to travel that way and to guard our presence from too-early detection.”

I closed my eyes—
hurling
myself into this, to stop myself from thinking about it—took a firmer grip on his hand, and began to search for the alignment. This was very different from the fuzzy non-telephone line I had used to talk to Con; for that I could just go to the edge of whatever it was that was out there, and grope. This was more like walking through a snake pit with a forked stick, hoping you could sneak up behind the snake you wanted and nail it with the stick before it nailed you. Meanwhile hoping that none of the other snakes saw you first.

I glanced apologetically at the ever-so-slightly-like-the-back-of-a-snake pattern glinting faint gold against—
in
—my skin. I said one of my gran's words: it was only a little word, a little word of thanks and of settling, settling down, settling in, but I thought the light-web might like it. Then I closed my eyes again.

There
.

This may have been the light-web too, or it may have been that I'd now done my compass needle maneuver several times and was getting the hang of it, or it may have been Con. Some of it was Con; I could feel the faint scritchy buzz of connection through our palms. There seemed to be a variety of paths laid out before us: there was the totally evisceratingly worst, the slightly less worst but worst enough, the still really bad, the only basic deadly dire, and probably a few others. I was looking at the Catherine-wheel glitter of the way that had blown out SOF HQ and at the looming thing that was our destination as Con arranged us on the boundary of one of the other, the quite-awful-enough-thanks ways. The looming thing and its guardians didn't look so much like an aquarium this time—or if it did, those fish were
sick
—more like the special effects in one of those postholocaust movies. Any moment now the ghastly mutants would come lurching on screen and wave their deviant limbs at us.

I wished it was a movie.

“Come,” said Con, and we stepped forward together.

By the time we'd walked off the edge of the balcony we were firmly—if that's quite the word I want—into Other-space. Vampires probably can bound lightly down from third stories, but I didn't want to try it. As it was I was immediately having a precarious time keeping my feet; there didn't seem to be any up or down—although this is a good thing when you've just walked off a balcony—or sideways or backward or forward for that matter, other than the fact that
we
had backs and fronts and our faces were on one side of us rather than another. This path, whatever it was, was a lot worse than Con's short way home the other night. At least I had feet, which was an improvement on nowheresville.

Hey, not only did I have feet, I got to keep my clothes on.

I could still see the looming thing that was what we were aiming for, and since I didn't know anything about the protective detail I assumed that my function was to keep watching it. Con propelled us. Presumably forward. He seemed to know up from down and sideways from sideways. I felt
things
whiz past me occasionally, and while I couldn't've told you what they were, I could guess they weren't friendly. Every time I set my foot down it seemed to resolve the place I was in a little more, as if my invading three-dimensionality was making my surroundings coagulate, and little by little there seemed to be another sort of stepping-stone system after all, although rather than the ordinary world sluicing by between the stones it seemed to boil
up
, and become part of the no-up-no-down-no-anything-else. I felt as if I would like to be sick, but fortunately my stomach couldn't figure out which was up either, so it stayed where it was.

After some kind of time there began to be half-recognizable ordinary things in the careening entropy: a street lamp. A corner of a dilapidated building with a revolving door, one of whose panes was broken. A stop sign.

A road sign: Garrison Street.

We were in No Town.

As we went on (“on” still used advisedly), we flickered more clearly into No Town. Sometimes we took a step or two on broken pavement as if we were actually there. Maybe we were.

There were now other people sporadically present also. I didn't like the look of any of them. We passed several nightclubs with people wandering in and out. There were bouncers at the doors of some of them, but that mostly wasn't the style in No Town. If you could walk, you could walk where you wanted to. Even the seriously flash spartan clubs, the places where people who lived in downtown high-rises went when they wanted to feel like they were slumming but were still willing to pay thirty blinks for a short glass of wine to prove they were slumming only because they wanted to, had more subtle ways of getting rid of you.

Meanwhile, outdoors, if you fell down, you lay there, and people still ambulatory stepped over you: horizontal bodies were part of the ambience. Maybe you got rolled, while you were lying there being ambient. Maybe you got taken home for dinner. To be dinner. It wasn't a good place to linger in for anyone—anyone alive, that is—but there was another myth, that if you were high enough, the suckers would leave you alone, because your blood would screw
them
up. I don't think this is something I'd want to rely on myself. There are ne'er-do-wells among the Others like there are among us humans, and my guess is there are suckers who have developed a taste for screwed-up blood. Also, if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything, right? And a still-breathing body facedown in a gutter is real easy to, you know, catch.

I was having trouble staying upright as we winked back and forth between worlds. If when visible I was staggering a little, I would fit right in.

I was a little afraid I might see someone I knew. Gods and angels, never underestimate the power of social conditioning; even under the circumstances, when I was fully expecting never having to face or explain anything to anyone again after the next few minutes or hours or time-fragments splintered by chaos-space, I was worried about this, that I might see Kenny, or his friends, or some of the younger, dumber regulars at Charlie's; or even what remained of a few of the guys my age I knew who hadn't got back out of drugs again. What was I afraid of? That they might see me too—holding hands with a vampire? That I would look as if I was merely under the dark and going to the usual fate of a human seen in the company of a vampire? I was supposed to
care
?