Sunshine (56 page)

It did matter. I would be giving Con away too.

I'm very sorry, Con was saying to the goddess. I know how thin my story sounds. But there is nothing else to tell you. It was all very baffling to me—to Miss Seddon and me—too.

There was a little silence. I set my tea mug down on the floor, and groped in my pocket for my little knife, the knife that glowed with daylight even in the dark, the knife that burned Con if he touched it. I held it a moment before I pulled it out, wondering if I was dead—not undead, Con promised me I couldn't be turned, just dead, a new form of zombie perhaps, which would explain why my brain was refusing to work properly, why nothing seemed quite real, not even my fear. A zombie's brain always goes first, while sometimes their hearts go on beating. If I was dead, perhaps I couldn't save Con from the daylight any more either. The knife was warm in my hand. Body heat. But zombies are usually cool. Like all the undead. My knife was warm like the touch of a friend, against my gangrenous hand. Suddenly there were tears in my eyes. Do zombies weep?

I pulled the knife out. I made all the effort I was capable of, to be here, to be
present
, in this room, with Con and Pat and the goddess of pain.

“Pardon me,” I said. “I want to return your knife before I—er—forget.” I should have said something about why I was remembering now rather than at some other moment, why I had Mr. Connor's knife in the first place, but I couldn't think of anything. I was at the end of my thinking. It was taking all my energy to be here.

And I didn't know that it would work. It was merely the only thing I could imagine to try.

Con turned toward me. He almost forgot to be human. When I tossed him the knife his hand moved toward where it was going to be.… I
felt
him check himself. He plucked the knife out of the air a little too neatly, but not impossibly so. Not inhumanly. He caught it, and closed his fingers around it, rested his hand on his knee. The knife had disappeared. If there was anything to see as it burned him, if it burned him, if it was still full of daylight—of my sunshine—no one in the room would see. He set his tea mug down, so he still had one hand free. “Thank you,” he said, and turned back to the goddess as if for her next question.

We had our one bit of luck then. There was a wire-squeak so momentous, apparently, that one of the goddess' minions risked whispering it to her, and she was distracted, perhaps, from this curious business of Mr. Connor's knife. She wasn't very happy about whatever news the minion gave her, whatever it was.

Then she sighed, elaborately, as if releasing tension. As if asking everyone in the room to relax. I didn't relax. Con didn't, but then he was never relaxed, any more than he was ever tense. He was just there. Pat didn't relax. I couldn't see any of the rest of us. The minions didn't relax. I'm sure there is a regulation in their contract that forbids them to relax. The goddess looked around at us and smiled. It wasn't a very good smile. If I had to choose, I would say Con did it better.

“Well,” she said. “It has been a long night and everyone will be better for a rest. And you two warriors”—she tried to make this sound unironical, but she failed—“according to the latest report, have been a part of the destruction of a major vampire sanctum—perhaps an instrumental part of that destruction. You must forgive what may appear to be my excessive zeal here tonight; but occurrences like this are rare, and SOF
must
know as much as possible about any event concerning the Others, especially the darkest of the Others, to be as effective as we can be. And we have found, over and over again, that the sooner we speak to any and all witnesses, the better.

“I would appreciate it if you would return, later, when you are rested, and fill out formal statements, which we can keep on file. I would also appreciate it if you would make yourselves available for further discussion, at some future time. Occasionally it has happened that witnesses do remember later what they were too shaken to comprehend at the time; perhaps as we learn more about what happened, some detail we can describe to you will loosen something in your memories, something we can use.

“You must see that to the extent it is possible you had a crucial role in tonight's events we
must
discover what that role was.

“And in the meanwhile, perhaps”—she was moving as she spoke—“after the night that has passed, the light of morning will make us all feel better.”

With
better
she pulled the blind. Daylight, filtered by proofglass but unmistakably, undeniably daylight, fell full on Con.

How long after sunlight touches him before a vampire burns? The stories say immediately, but what is immediately? One second? Ten? I sat still, rigidly still, my nerves shrieking. Con, of course, looked as he always looked: neither tense nor calm. Twenty seconds. Thirty. Surely thirty seconds was longer than
immediately
?

What is the algebra of how long one live person with an affinity can protect one vampire from the effects of sunlight as compared to one small inanimate daylight-charged pocketknife? Supposing that the person is still alive and the affinity is still functioning, the pocket-knife still charged, and the fact that the vampire was presently passing for human didn't morph the process so that Con was about to collapse in a little heap of cold ashes with no gruesome intermediate stages.

Forty seconds. Fifty.

Sixty.

That's good enough.

I burst into tears, and Con was up off his chair at once—as immediately as the fire that hadn't come—and kneeling beside mine, one hand on my shoulder. My blanket had fallen off. I felt my affinity yank itself from wherever it lived—somewhere around my heart apparently—and
throw
itself toward the shoulder he was touching. It was still there. Still live. I heard a rustle, like a sigh of leaves.

Trees are impervious to dark magic.

The hand that held my knife still hung by his side.

It seemed to me that as a performance it wasn't too unlikely that he'd put his hand on my shoulder, after whatever it was that we'd been through together. Maybe we were calling each other Mr. Connor and Miss Seddon, but we'd come out of whatever it was holding hands. I turned my head and stared at him, into his leaf-green eyes, into the face of the monster I had saved, and been saved by, probably too many times to count, now, any more, even by what he had called
that which binds
. Perhaps that was why I could feel my affinity working its way through his body, through the vessels that carried his blood, a special little squad of it racing down to his burned hand. I put both my hands—my contaminated hands—on his shoulders, and leaned my head against him, and wept and wept, and the warmth, the human-seeming warmth of his body through the tattered, filthy shirt against the palms of my hands felt the way my knife had felt: like the touch of a friend. The healing touch of a friend.

I had meant to burst into tears, to break the scene, to give Con a chance to move, and to put up his sun parasol sitting in the next chair, but it had been easy—too easy, and it was hard to stop crying, once I'd begun. It took me several minutes to get to the gulping and hiccupping stage, by which time all of Pat's people were rushing around holding boxes of tissues and bringing damp towels to wipe my face with and brandishing fresh cups of tea. The goddess and her people hadn't moved at all. She looked like a naturalist observing faulty ritual behavior: not at all what she had been led to believe was the norm for this species, but was therefore interesting precisely for that reason, and how could she turn it to her advantage? I didn't like it, but I'd worry about it later.

Her people stood and sat around looking stuffed. Working for the goddess didn't encourage the acquisition of damp-towel-fetching skills.

I would worry about it all later. I was getting used to the idea that I might have a later to worry about it in. Maybe. I was so
tired
.

I had dropped my hands from Con's shoulders to juggle tea and towels and tissues. I looked at them, my hands, going about their usual business of grasping and manipulating. I couldn't see the green and the black any more. But I couldn't see the gold either. I knew the seal was gone forever, and the chain—I couldn't feel the chain against my breast any more, although the reopened wound had stopped aching. Had I heard the rustle of leaves when Con touched my shoulder?
Sun-self, tree-self, deer-self. Don't they outweigh the dark self? Not any more
. I would worry about me later too. About my hands. I would ask Con.… I hoped I would have a chance to ask Con. Because after I got him out of this daylight, our alliance was over.

Con. He still knelt beside me. An ordinary man might have looked silly, doing nothing, but even as a relatively successful human-facsimile he looked so … unconventional? Unsomething. Silly didn't come into it. Or maybe that was just how I saw him. It was day again, and Con was my responsibility, and we were surrounded by people who must continue to believe he was human. I looked at him. He'd dropped the yellow blanket when he left his chair. He looked better without it, even blood-mottled and with his clothes hanging off him in sodden-and-dried-stiff rags.

“Pardon me, Miss Seddon, but I think I must beg you to keep my knife for me a little longer. I don't believe any of my pockets have survived the night's encounters.” He held it out to me, turning and opening his hand: the palm was unmarked. I felt that my affinity emergency-squad was dancing around in some little-used synapse somewhere, giving each other teeny microscopic high-fives.

I put down a towel and accepted the knife, slipping it awkwardly back into the pocket it had come out of. I was careful not to look at the goddess as I did this: as if it was just a little jackknife. I wondered if vampire clothing had pockets. What would vampires keep in pockets? Handkerchiefs? House keys? Charms against being grilled (so to speak) by angry, high-ranking SOF officers?

I'd managed to move my chair a little during the commotion after I burst into tears. Con was safe for the moment, in shadow. I stood up and looked at the goddess. She was taller than I was, of course. There are spells to make you appear taller than whoever you are talking to, but they are expensive, and all but the best have a nasty habit of revealing you as your real height the minute you turn your attention to someone else. I guessed the goddess was just tall. “I apologize for making a fuss,” I said, as respectfully as I could. Maybe she was so accustomed to reeking hostility from most of her colleagues and interviewees that she didn't register it any more. Maybe she would assume I didn't like her because she'd intimidated me successfully. Well, she had.

“May we leave now, please?” I continued, holding my poisonous hands out placatingly, palms up. “I will come back whenever you like, but I'm so tired I can't think. And I want a bath.” Several baths. And what I was wearing—the remains of what I was wearing—would go into the trash. No, the bonfire. I would start running out of clothing soon if I wasn't careful. If I had a future it would have to include some shopping.

She made gracious-cooperation noises that were about as sincere as my respectfulness, and we were allowed to leave—Con and I, and Pat and John and Theo and Kate and Mike. In the windowless hallway Con and I drifted nonchalantly apart. I was trying to remember if there were any unexpected windows around blind corners. I hadn't been at my best when we'd come through the first time. I wasn't at my best now, but against all odds, I was improving.

Pat expelled a long noisy breath. “Well held, you guys,” he said. He glanced at Con. I could guess he was torn between wanting to celebrate a partial victory against the goddess and wanting to know who and what the hell my apparent ally really was. He caught my eyes and I watched him decide to trust me. I watched him watching me watching him decide to trust me. It was true: I owed him. That was something else I'd have to figure out later.

“Can I give you a ride home, Sunshine?” he said casually.

“That would be great,” I said feelingly. Even supposing I had bus fare in my pocket, which I didn't, I didn't yearn for the experience of getting Con and me anywhere in public. Any sane bus driver would refuse to let us on board, the way we looked, not to mention the nearest stop was a mile and a half from Yolande's and I didn't think I could walk that far.

I doubted that any nowheresville way was available in—from—daylight. And if I was too tired to walk from the bus stop I was way beyond too tired to deal with any nowheresvilles.

And turning up at Charlie's, looking like this
and
with Con in tow, wasn't an option.

“John, you want to take Mr. Connor—”

“He can come with me,” I said firmly. “We have to—talk.”

“I bet you do,” said Pat. “Okay, Sunshine, I won't ask, but take notes, okay? I'm not going to do my heavy SOF guy trick and make you do your talking here because you've already had that from the goddess, and besides, if she found out I'd taken you to my office and got more out of you than she did she'd bust my ass back to Tinker Bell patrol.”

There is a legion of little old ladies (of assorted ages and sexes) who manage to believe that the Others are mostly small and cute and harmless, and live under toadstools, and wear harebells as hats. A lot of them ring up their local SOF div to report sightings, because that is the citizenly thing to do, and since there are a few ill-tempered Others who sometimes pretend to be small and cute and harmless—I'd never heard of any of them wearing harebells, however—these have to be checked out. But it is not a popular job.

“I've been getting reports from No Town right along, you know,” continued Pat, “and I want to know what you guys
did
. And I want it in triplicate, you got that? But I'm a patient man and I'll wait. I won't even tell the goddess I took you home together.”