Sunshine (51 page)

I didn't know what any humans might be making of us. But I began to see vampires looking back at us. I didn't have any trouble recognizing them. I didn't know if this was because they weren't bothering to try to pass, or if I just knew a vampire when I saw one these days.

I didn't notice when the first one did more than look, when the first one came at us. I didn't notice till Con had … never mind. He did it with his other hand, and with the hand that held mine, jerked us back into chaos-space. He wiped the splatter of blood off his face with his forearm, except there was blood on his arm too. I was afraid I'd see him lick his lips. I didn't. Maybe I didn't watch long enough. Maybe, you know,
used
blood isn't of much interest. My hand trembled in his: in the hand of my lethal vampire companion.

I was alive, human, with a beating heart. I was all alone.

The next time there were several of them. This time Con jerked us out of chaos-space, because he then had to let go of my hand. I was glad I didn't have to find out what would happen if I got left there alone without him. I wasn't glad for very long.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do: note to myself, in my next life, get some martial arts training—get a
lot
of martial arts training—just in case. Again, as with the first vampire who attacked us, something happened—quicker than I could follow—quicker than I wanted to follow, and I yanked my gaze away, afraid of what my dark vision might make out for me. There was blood, again, but there was also at least one vampire left over while Con was otherwise engaged, and he was looking at me. I looked at him, not thinking about anything but my own terror, my eyes wide open, open so wide that they hurt. He met that gaze—hey, he knew a human when he saw one, and he knew he was a vampire—and I
saw him falter
, and then Con had turned from whatever he was doing and … took care of that one too, too fast for me to look away. I think I probably cried out. Jesse wasn't going to rescue me, this time. I wasn't going to come to myself with human arms around me and a human voice shouting in my ear,
It's all over. You're all right
.

There was now quite a lot of blood, and … bits and pieces. I had blood on me too. Con seized my hand again, and said sharply,
Come
. I didn't dare look in his face. There would be no comfort, no reassurance, in the face of any vampire. When I took a running step to keep up with him, my shoes slipped. In the blood. There was so much blood on our hands that as it dried, our fingers stuck together. The
meaty
smell was a miasma, a poison gas.

We didn't duck back into the chaos-space. I had half-forgotten my alignment, but it was now as if it was
tied
to me—or I was tied to it. It was pulling us along, through these dark broken streets where the shadows lay twisted and crumpled like dead bodies, pulling as if we were on a leash. I wanted to untie it, but I couldn't, I mustn't—I wanted to—no, it was too late; even if I had funked it now, at the last minute, after the last minute, all it would do now is get us killed. Sooner.

I could hear them—someone—keeping pace with us—why didn't they close in, cut us off, attack us? Con said quietly, as if there was no urgency whatsoever, “Bo will not be able to say your name. Either of your names.”

What
? Sunshine. Rae. Daylight names. Old vampires can't say daylight words either? The very old vampires that can't go out in the moonlight that is only faint reflected sunlight? The academics would have said Con counted as very old, and he didn't even wait for full dark: twilight was good enough for him. And he called me Sunshine.
There are different ways of being what we are
. Apparently Bo hadn't aged so well. Something to talk to the academics about. Variability of Aging Among Vampires. Usage of Certain Words Pertaining to Daylight by Aged Vampires. Maybe I could get my pass into the Other Museum's library after all. No, wait. I was about to die.

I didn't immediately see what good Bo's not being able to say my name was going to do me. Bo wasn't going to need to say—or know—my name to kill me.

Okay. Names are power. We'd had that back at the lake. Big deal. Fangs are more power. We'd had that at the lake too. Con had chosen to let me go. Bo wasn't going to.

Why
had
I agreed to this anyway?

“You feel the pull strongly?” Con went on in that infuriatingly calm voice. “Bo has connected to our presence here. If we are separated, go on. Follow that connection to its end. Leave me. I will catch up with you when I can.”

Oh good. I was so glad he would make the effort to catch up with me later. Although I wished he'd used the word
goal
or
aim
rather than
end
.

“I recommend—” he added, dispassionate as ever—I was trying to remind myself that he always sounded unbothered, not to say dead. Or maybe that it was a good sign he sounded so unflapped now, as if this was still all part of the normal range of vampire activities. I almost didn't hear the rest of what he was saying: “—you do not attempt to retreat into any Other-space, including the way I have brought us both. You would only draw some of Bo's creatures after you, and their advantage there would be greater than yours.”

Right. Like it wasn't greater than mine
everywhere
.

I realized that while we were no longer in the chaos-space, we weren't exactly in No Town either. Or at least I hoped it wasn't No Town, because if it was, our human world was in even more trouble than most of us knew about … than I knew about … again the thought came to me: What did I know? Pat said a hundred years, tops, before … And the people who came to No Town for thrills weren't likely to notice that the whole scene was sliding over the edge of normal reality into.…

I felt the pull strongly all right, like a hand around my throat that was slowly tightening. If I was a dog on a lead, I was wearing a choke collar, and my master didn't like me much. Maybe it was that sense of pressure that made my vision go funny; but then, my vision had been funny for two months now, and I was kind of used to funniness. But this was a new kind of funniness, where things seemed to dance in and out of existence, rather than merely in and out of light and darkness.

There were streetlights where we were—some of them still worked—and great swathes of darkness. There was the uneven pavement under our feet, the potholed roads, the crumbling curbs. Once I stepped unawares on a manhole cover and the sound this made, even in this night of horrors, made my heart leap into my throat. There were tall buildings that seemed to prowl among the shadows; a few of them had dim lights burning that gave the old peeling posters on their walls an undesirable life: huge painted eyes winked at me, fingers as long as my legs beckoned to me. The way the clubs leaped out of the night with their noise and bewildering lighting, stabbing and erratic, rhythmic and dazzling, rainbow-colored or this week's fashion match, heightened that sense of
Otherwhere:
hey, I wanted to say to some of the humans we passed, you don't need drugs, let me tell you, there are spaces between worlds, there are master vampires that loop invisible ropes around your neck and drag you to your doom.…

We are running through No Town. I hear our footsteps—no, I hear my footsteps, and the kind of unmatched echo that chills your blood, because you know it means you're not alone, and what you're not alone with isn't human. I remember when hearing and seeing were simple, it had to do with sound and light and the manageable equations they taught you in school. I am wondering if anyone notices us; the only kind of running that goes on here is the furtive kind, no joggers out to burn off last night's burger and fries or reach the buzz of an endorphin high. No one, hearing running footsteps—especially running footsteps with an unmatched echo—is going to look up if they can help it. I guess I can stop worrying about seeing someone I know.…

A few people do look up, though: bad consciences, old habits, a momentary—or drug-induced—forgetfulness about who or where they are? I think I meet the eyes of one young woman: I see her take me in, take Con in, disbelieve us both … and then we're past her, running out of the light-surf, back into the ocean of darkness.

Into a fresh seethe of vampires. They didn't want to connect with me. Lucky me. I winced and twitched out of the way of anything I saw, anything I half-saw; I stopped trying to
see
anything, and let my instinct—whatever instinct this was—keep me moving. Where was Con? No, I still knew him from the rest of them. For one thing, he was the center of the seethe. If there's only one guy on your team, he's the one everybody else is jumping on.

It went on in a horrible almost-silence.

There was a hot circlet around my neck and across my breast; there were two small fires burning in my two front jeans pockets. Apparently they'd learned their lesson that first time, when the sun-sword had hit the pillow; they didn't set my clothes on fire this time either. And it wasn't because they weren't really putting it out: they were. The evening we'd blown SOF HQ wasn't even a dress rehearsal for what was going on now.

Even with my talismans going full throttle my luck didn't hold for long. Something—some
one
—crashed into me, tore me away from Con, out of the seethe; it was taking me somewhere. It was, in fact, the same direction I was being dragged by my invisible leash, but I didn't feel I wanted any help getting there sooner; besides, whatever Con had said about going on without him, I'd rather not, thanks.

I saw a
shape
, and ducked away from it. It seemed a little uncertain of its own bearings; it missed its grab, and teeth ground down my arm, strangely fumbling, if teeth can fumble. Hey, my jugular is up this way. I wished for a nice apple-tree stake, well impregnated with mistletoe, except I didn't know how to use it; staking takes training. The table knife had been a one-off.… I put my right hand in my pocket, braced the butt end of my hot little knife against my palm, and pointed it up between my fingers: not with the blade open, just the hard blunt end of it, like a single fat brass knuckle. I saw it momentarily, shining like a tiny moon, like a slightly misaligned gemstone in a ring.

Then I swung it, with my paltry human strength, up in the general direction of where the base of the breastbone that belonged to the teeth in my other arm might be.

I connected. The wide blunt end of my knife …
sank in
. As it did it blazed up, no longer moonlike but sunlike, golden, shining, a tongue of flame, and in its light I saw a golden lattice extending up my arm.

I had just time to remember what had happened in an alley when I had used a table knife.

The noise was different. There were no narrow alley walls for the gobbets to smack against. Instead I heard the thick heavy
splat
, like loathsome rain, as they fell around me. I'd forgotten the smell—the smell of something long dead and rotten. I thought, they're not even a little human any more when they explode: they shatter so easily, like throwing an overripe melon against a fence. No melon ever
smelled
like this.…

Con rematerialized from wherever he had been, from whatever he had been doing. I just managed not to wince out of his way too. The problem was he looked like a vampire, and at the moment he looked a lot more like a vampire than he looked like Con. One of the even-more-comforting-than-usual stories about vampires is that sometimes, during vampire gang wars for example, they go into berserker furies and tear anything they can get their hands on apart, not only their enemies but their comrades, the guys on their own side. Supposedly the berserker fit can last quite a while, and if a particularly effective dismemberer gets to the end of the bodies around it before the fit wears off, it will tear
itself
to shreds too.

Maybe this is a consoling story when you're at home with a book or reading it off your combox screen: the idea that there are that many fewer vampires in the world, that they had done each other in while we humans cowered safely behind closed doors with a
hell
of a lot of wards nailed over them. (If you find yourself so unlucky as to be living somewhere there is a sucker gang war going on, you pin
a lot
of wards around your house, and you do
not
go out after dark or before dawn for
any
reason.) I didn't know what a vampire running amok looked like, but it might have looked like Con. It wasn't just … it wasn't.… Look, if you ever have the opportunity to choose between being eaten by a tiger and bitten by an enraged vampire, take the tiger.

I was probably off in my feeble little human she's-in-shock-wrap-her-in-a-blanket-and-get-out-the-whisky space. Humans don't deal with extreme situations very well. Our pathetic bodies freak out. We freeze, and our blood pressure falls, and we can't think, and all that. I stood there, staring, while Con snarled and showed me his teeth, and didn't offer me the blanket or the whisky or the hot sweet tea. Then—maybe he remembered I was his ally, maybe he'd remembered that but had momentarily forgotten, seeing me as soaked in blood and sprinkled with the remains of a mutilated enemy as he, that I was a mere human. Maybe the snarl was the vampire equivalent of “Hot damn! Well done!”

Whatever. He stopped snarling, and … drew his face together. When he seized my slimy hand and pulled me along after him again I didn't gibber, I didn't collapse, and I didn't throw up. I stuffed my knife back into my pocket, and went.

I wish I could forget how it feels, your hair stuck to your skull with blood, foul blood running gummily down inside your clothes, invading your privacy, your decency, your
humanity
, till it chafes you with every breath, every movement, the tug of it as it dries on your skin feeling like some kind of snare. Blood in your mouth, that you cannot spit the vile taste of away. I think I must have gone into some kind of berserker fury myself. There are things you don't want to know you can do, aren't there? But if you're lucky you never find them out. I found out too many of them, all at once. I, who had to leave the kitchen at Charlie's when they were whacking up meat into joints or putting slabs of drippy pulpy maroony-red stuff through the grinder.