Sunshine (52 page)

Blood stings when it gets in your eyes. And it's
viscous
, so it's hard to blink out again. It may not only be because the blood stings that you're weeping.

I have always been afraid of more things than I can remember at one time. Mom, when I was younger, and still admitted to some of them, said that it was the price of having a good imagination, and suggested I stop reading the
Blood Lore
series (which was past thirty volumes even then) and maybe retiring
Immortal Death
and
Below Hell Keep
from the top bookshelf for a while. I didn't, but it wouldn't have done any good if I had. Reading scary books is weirdly reassuring, most of the time: it means at least one other person—the author—has imagined things as awful as you have. What's bad is when the author comes up with stuff you hadn't thought of yet.

I'd thought it was bad when I was just
reading
stuff I hadn't thought of.

And even then I'd known that sometimes it's worse when the author leaves it to your imagination.

I stopped using my knife. I found out I didn't have to. I found out I could do it with my hands.

It was still mostly Con, that we got through. Even warded up the wazoo and covered in bright gold cobweb I was still only human. I was still slower and weaker than any vampire. But I had Con. And I
was
warded and webbed, and the vampires didn't like tangling with me. They kept choosing to tangle with Con, even though they could see—graphically—what had happened to the last vampire or twelve or twenty-seven or four thousand and eight vampires that had tangled with Con. If we ever got to the end of all this, ha ha and so on, and wanted to find our way back out of the maze, it wasn't a thread we would have to follow but a path paved with undead body parts.

Maybe they thought they'd wear him out or something.

I still got a few. You'd think offing a few vampires would feel like doing a community service, wouldn't you? It doesn't. Not even when they don't explode. That's why I started doing it with my hands. They didn't explode, I discovered, if I merely jammed my fingers in under their breastbones and pulled.

My vampire affinity.

I lost track. There was gore and gruesomeness and then more of it and I hated all of it, and was ready to be killed, just to get away from it, if someone would promise me,
cross their heart and hope to die
, very very funny, that I wouldn't rise again. In any semblance. I still wasn't sure about the mechanics of turning and it seemed to me that dying in the present circumstances probably wasn't the best recipe for staying quietly in my grave afterward. Supposing someone found enough of me to bury.

I would have liked to give up. I
meant
to give up. But I couldn't. Like I couldn't stay at home and hide under the bed, I guess. Maybe it was promising Con to stick around as long as I could.
Stick
seemed the right verb under the circumstances. Every time I lifted one of my blood-clotted shoes there was a sticky, ripping noise.

And then everything went quiet, at least except for the noise I was making. Mostly it was just breathing. Maybe bleating a little.

One of the things that had happened during the business of savaging our way through Bo's army was that I'd begun to know where Con was, like I knew where my right hand or my left leg was. It was a bit like unwrapping something from swathes of tissue paper, or following an idea through its development to a conclusion. You have an inkling of something, some shape or concept, and it gets clearer and stronger till you know what it is. It happened while the occasional shrieks and dead-flesh noises went on, all those near-misses with my own death. I understood that I was crazy, crazy to be still alive, crazy to be doing what I was doing to stay alive, crazy to be trying to stay alive. This knowingness about Con was a strange island in a strange ocean.

That sense of Con's presence, of his precise location, had undoubtedly saved my life several times in the carnage, if it hadn't done much for my sanity. But it meant that when things suddenly went quiet and I felt someone—some vampire—coming noiselessly up behind me, I knew it was Con.

Well well
, said a silent voice from an invisible speaker.
This meeting has been much more amusing than I anticipated
.

I didn't have to hear Con snort. He didn't, of course. Vampires don't snort, even with derision. But I knew as Con knew that the voice was lying when it said
amusing
.

I also knew who this was. Bo. Mr. Beauregard. The fellow who had got us in all this. The fellow we were here to have the final meeting with. Him or us. I was pretty sure things had only started to get
amusing
, even if they hadn't gone quite as Bo had expected so far. And while I knew vampires didn't get tired, exactly, I knew that they could come to the end of their strength. I'd seen Con coming to the end of his, out at the lake. I didn't know how one evening of tearing up your fellow vampires limb from limb matched against having been chained to the wall of a house with a ward sign eating into your ankle and the sun creeping after you through the windows every day, day after day, but I doubted Con was feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed now. I sure wasn't. I was missing my nice sympathetic human emergency room tech saying, “There's nothing really wrong with you, we're giving you a sedative and you can go home.” I was also so tired that the weirdness of my dark vision was starting to bother me again, like new shoes that aren't quite broken in yet that you've been wearing too long. I couldn't tell how much of what I seemed to be seeing was happening, and how much of it was my overstressed brain playing tricks on my eyes.

I stared around, trying to make sense of what I was … okay,
not
seeing, it was dark in here, wherever it was. When had it become
in here
? We'd started out on the streets of No Town, more or less. Well, we weren't there any more. Given the … mess … I was glad no humans were likely to stumble across us. I tried to settle down, settle back into my skin—except I didn't want to be in my skin any more. I didn't want to be me. I didn't want to
know
me.

But the animal body was overriding the conscious brain, the brain that ground out concepts like
worthwhile
and
not worthwhile
. My medulla oblongata was determined to stay alive, whatever my cerebrum said. For a moment I seemed to be floating up above myself, looking down at the bloody wreckage, at the two figures still standing, Con and me, standing next to each other, facing in the same direction.

When Bo spoke again, I
snapped
back together, body and mind. I could almost hear the clunk, as the bolts slotted into place, trapping me with myself again. I may have hated and feared myself now, but I hated and feared Beauregard worse.

Welcome, welcome. Do come in. Welcome between us, Connie, has been a curious affair for some years now, eh? I imagine you haven't been too surprised. Perhaps you explained it to your companion. I hope so, Connie. It would have been rude of you to omit explanation, I feel, and you have always been the
soul
of courtesy, haven't you? Your little human, Connie, is very enterprising. She has been nosing around me for some little while. I'm surprised, Connie, that you would allow a human to do your, shall I say, dirty work? You must have found your experience a few months ago more debilitating than I realized. Or perhaps more corrupting
.

And I had thought Con's laugh was horrible. I blanked out when Bo laughed, like you blank out when you're conked on the head. It's not a voluntary response.

Maybe I should have been insulted that I was being ignored. I wasn't. I didn't want him to say anything to me. The mere experience—I won't call it sound—of his voice was like having the skin peeled off me—the skin I hadn't wanted to fit myself back inside a few moments ago. Very, very distantly it occurred to me that if I was feeling a little brighter I might find it funny that Bo seemed to be accusing me of being a bad influence. On a vampire. But I wasn't feeling brighter.

Oh yes, I am here, waiting for you. Do keep coming on. After all, you have worked quite hard to progress so far, have you not? It would be a pity to waste all that effort. And I really don't feel I could let you go now without paying your respects to me personally. It would be so rude. And wasn't I just saying, Connie, that you are the soul of courtesy
?

The voice itself was flaying me alive. What was left of my mind and will were addled with the effort to remain—myself. Slowly, painfully, I moved my right hand, slid it stickily into my pocket, and closed my gummy and aching fingers around my little knife. It wasn't hot any more, but the painful pressure of the voice eased a little. I dropped my eyes and through the smeary muck on my forearms I could see the occasional gleam of golden webbing.

Do walk on. Please
.

That
please
seemed to last a century.

Walking on being precisely what he was trying to prevent us from doing, by the nonsound of his voice. I squeezed my knife till I could feel it grinding into my palm, and took a step forward. So did Con. He didn't take my hand again, but as we moved, his shoulder brushed mine. I realized it was important not to appear to be struggling. Con could probably have moved faster without me, but he didn't; he waited. So I raised my other foot and took another step. And another. Con matched me, and with every step we touched, briefly, shoulder or arm or back of hand. There was a sort of quiver against my breast, as if the chain that hung there was rearranging itself.

You must be tired
, said the voice.
You are walking so slowly
.

But I heard it too. He was losing this round, as he had lost the first one, because we weren't paralyzed and helpless. Because I wasn't dying under the scourge of his voice.

I wondered how much worse it would be if he said my name.

It became easier as we went on; he'd withdrawn, I guess, plotting his next move. We didn't get rushed by any minions trying to kill us either. I kept my hand wrapped around my knife, and I felt the little hard lump that was the seal against my other leg. The chain felt stretched across my breast like a rock-climber spread-eagled across a particularly tricky slope. I pretended I was going forward
bravely
, ready for the next challenge. But I'd been wounded by that voice: the bitter burning of acid. My body throbbed with it, despite the talismans, despite the light-web. Every step blew a little gust of pain through me. I tried not to shiver, which would only make it worse; and besides, pathetically, I didn't want Con to despise me. As our shoulders brushed, I felt him helping me, offering me his strength. I forgot again that he was a vampire, that I was afraid of him too, that I hated what he could do and had done, tonight, hated him for making me find out what I could do. He was also all I had. He was my ally and if I was going to let him down, which I probably was, at least let me not do it because I just
lost
it.

The silvery luminescence that began eerily to come up around us was genuine light of some sort, light that a human eye could respond to. But there was nothing here I wanted to see, that I wouldn't rather be able to trick myself into half-believing I wasn't seeing, that my human neurons were confused by the vampire thing I was infected with.

We were in a huge room. There were enormous pipes, and the remains of scaffolding, and machinery, all round the walls, and more overhead. Some kind of derelict factory; No Town was full of them. This one had been renovated, in a way; the sickly wash of marsh-light gleamed off knobs and rivets, dials and gadgetry that no human had ever invented, let alone put together. I wondered, dimly, if there was any purpose to them, or if they were merely backdrop, window dressing, the latest vampire version of Bram Stoker's febrile fantasy of ruined castles and earth-filled coffins. Big or important vampire gangs always had a headquarters, and headquarters usually contained some accommodations for those nights they wanted a change from eating out, and they felt like throwing a dinner party at home. Such a space would be suitably decorated to inspire further adrenaline panic in their visitors, and the word was that techno degeneracy had been the staging of choice since the Wars, although how anyone found this out to report it on the globenet was a mystery. Stoker and his coffins had always been nonsense, but the vampires had borrowed the idea for a century or two as a mise-en-scène because it worked. The lack of scarlet-lined black capes and funny accents tonight wasn't making me happy.

I knew immediately that I didn't like techno degeneracy either, but I wouldn't have liked earth-filled coffins any better. If there was any surprise, it was that I had any energy left to dislike anything.

I was much better off disliking the décor, and trying to convince myself I wasn't seeing it anyway. At the far end of the big room there was a dais, and on that dais sat Bo.

I felt his eyes on me.
Look at me
, they said. It wasn't a voice this time, or even a compulsion, like the drag like a rope round my neck I had felt earlier.
Not
looking into his eyes felt like trying to prevent my heart from beating. But I didn't look, and my heart continued to beat.

The dais was a tall one, and on the steps up to it lounged several more vampires. They were all watching us with interest. I could see the glitter of eyes. I wondered if vampire eyes really do glitter, or if it was something to do with the marsh-light, or with my dark vision, or with the fact that I'd gone crazy and hadn't figured this out yet. So, okay, chances were I wasn't going to stay alive long enough to do any figuring, but I was still alive at the moment, and I was … it seemed ridiculous even as it occurred to me, but I was
angry
. I'd had my life ruined by this disgusting, undead monster. I had nothing to lose. All the best stuff in the books—and sometimes in history too—gets done by people who have nothing left to lose and so aren't always looking over their shoulders for the way out after it was over. I thought, wistfully, that I'd rather be looking over my shoulder for the way out. But I wasn't. I was about to die. But if I could take him—the Bo-thing—with me, it would have been worth it.