Sunshine (12 page)

“Oh,
gods
,” I said.

“As you say. But as you said earlier, I did not see myself receiving any better offers either. It seemed to me worth even that price against the almost certain likelihood of annihilation at Bo's hands.”

I said, fascinated against my better judgment, “You thought I could navigate you through the trees somehow?”

“Yes. I would not have been totally helpless. I can—detect the presence of solid objects. But it would not have been easy.”

I laughed. It was the first time I had laughed since I had driven out to the lake alone. “No. I'm sure it wouldn't have been.”

We went on some time then in silence. We had to stop once for me to have another pee. Gods. Vampires didn't seem to
have
bodily functions. I squatted behind him, holding one of his legs. While I was on the spot, so to speak, I had a look at his sore ankle. It still looked disgusting but I didn't think it looked any worse.

It occurred to me several times that we were making much better speed than we would have with me walking barefoot. And while the iron-railing effect was pretty painful I have ridden in cars with worse suspension than being carried by a striding vampire. That liquid motion thing they do is no joke, and one-hundred-twenty (give or take) pound burdens don't dent it either. If the ankle was troubling him it didn't show.

The cut on my breast hurt quite a lot but I had more important things to worry about. He carried me so smoothly that it didn't crack open anyway. Thankful for small favors. I felt that even our present momentous alliance might have been put under strain if I started bleeding on him again.

I was keeping a vague watch on the sun through the trees over the lake, and also, with the power alive and working, I seemed able to sense it in some way other than seeing or feeling the touch of its light, and I knew when noon had come and gone. I had had a drink out of the water bottle a couple of times, and had offered it to my chauffeur, but he said, “No, thank you, it is not necessary.” He sure was polite after he'd decided not to have you for dinner.

It was much farther back to my car than I'd guessed. Thirty miles, probably more. Maybe I still could have made it by myself before sunset, even barefoot. Maybe.

But I wouldn't have made it much farther, and the car wasn't there.

I'
D EXPLAINED WHERE
we were going when we had started out. The vampire had said nothing, but then he often said nothing, and he hadn't disagreed. I had the knife-key in my bra; we'd either find him a nice deep patch of shadow while I did my trick again, or he could keep his hands on my shoulders to maintain the Sun Screen Factor: Absolute Plus. I hadn't thought a lot beyond that. I guess what I was thinking was that a car equaled normal life. Once I got in my car and stuck the key in the little hole and the ignition caught, everything that had happened would be over like it had never happened, and I could just go back to my life again. I wasn't thinking clearly, of course, but who would be? I was still alive, and that was pretty amazing under the circumstances.

I hadn't thought about what I would do with the vampire after we got to the car either. As much as had occurred to me was that he could keep one hand on my knee while I drove, or something. Nobody put his hand on my knee except Mel, but just how “somebody” was a vampire? I didn't think I could shut even a vampire in the trunk, although the shade in there ought to be pretty total, and I wasn't sure what the parameters were anyway. I knew that a heavy coat and a broad-brimmed hat weren't fireproof enough and historians had long ago declared that the famous stories of knights in heavy armor turning out to be vampires weren't true either, so probably one layer of plastic car wasn't enough. But then what? Where do you drop off a vampire whom you've given a lift? The nearest mausoleum? Ha ha. The whole business of vampires hanging out in graveyards is bogus—vampires don't want anything to do with
dead
people, and the people they turn don't get buried in the first place. But old nursery tales die hard. (So much for Bram Stoker et al., Miss Yablonsky's point exactly.)

So I hadn't made any contingency plans. When we got to the old cottage I said, “Okay, here we are,” and the vampire set me down, and I was standing on my own feet, and trying not to step on anything that would make me bleed. He was hovering, however, and it wasn't only because of the sun; I'm sure he would have picked me up again faster than blood could drip if it had come to that. He had one hand tactfully on my elbow. The light was no more than dappled where we stood. Funny how the claustrophobic regrowth of wilderness scrub can suddenly seem treacherously open and sporadic when you're thinking in terms of your companion's fatal allergy to sunlight.

I knew where I'd left the car. It was a small cabin and the place you parked was right behind it. “It's not here,” I said stupidly. For the first time I felt the ripples of power
lurch
, as if they might knock me over, as if they might … spill over the lip of me somehow, and be lost. I couldn't risk, no, I
wouldn't
risk … I turned round and
seized
him, wrapped my arms around him, as if he were a seawall and could turn back any vagrant tide, contain any unexpected breaker. His arms, hesitantly, slid behind me, and it occurred to me that our prolonged physical contact was probably no more pleasant for him than it was for me, if perhaps for different reasons.

I took a few deep breaths, and the ripples steadied. I steadied. He was a good wall. Really very wall-like in some ways. Solid. Immobile. I realized I had my face pressed against what I knew from experience was an ambulatory body … that had no heart beating. Funny. And yet there was a buzz of … something going on in there. Life, you might call it, for want of a better term. I had never met a wall that buzzed.

I let go. He let go, except for one hand on my shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. “I thought I was losing it.”

“Yes,” he said.

“If I had lost it, you'd have die—fried, you know,” I said, to see what he would say.

“Yes,” he said.

I shook my head.

“My kind does not surprise easily,” he said. “You surprised me, this morning. I have thus used up my full quota of shock and consternation for some interval.”

I stared at him. “You made a
joke
.”

“I have heard this kind of thing may happen, to vampires who linger in the company of humans,” he said, looking and sounding particularly vampirish. “It is not a situation that has provoked much interest. And … I am not myself after a day spent in daylight.”

I'm not feeling a whole lot like myself either, I thought. I was carefully not thinking about the
instinct
that had thrown me at him just now. Wouldn't grabbing a tree have steadied me at least as well? So what if maybe he fried? “So you are not surprised by the disappearance of my car. That makes one of us.”

“I had thought it unlikely that Bo would allow so obvious a loose end to remain dangling.”

“I'm sorry. Yes. That is—sense. But I don't know what to do now.”

“We go on,” said the vampire. “We must be well away from the lake before dark.”

I was trying to bring my brain back into balance. Settling the ripples down seemed to have cost me a lot, and my brain didn't want to produce coherent thoughts. I was also, of course, so far beyond tired that I didn't dare look in that direction at all. “The lake?” I said.

He paused again, so I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like what followed. “Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways. The one that is relevant in this case is that landscape which is all one sort of thing is … more penetrable to our awareness to the extent of its homogeneity. It is not the distance that is crucial, but the uniformity. Bo will be able to find us too easily within any of the woods of the lake because they are all the woods of the lake, even without blood spoor to follow. Once we are out of those woods … in some ways Bo will have more difficulty in tracing us than a human might.”

A tiny piece of good news, if we lived long enough. Okay. The nearest way out of the woods was still the way we had been going—which must have been why the vampire agreed to it in the first place. The woods around the lake spilled into more woods and smaller lakes and some mostly deserted farmland before it came to any more towns. New Arcadia was the only city for some distance, and then there were a lot of smaller towns and villages spreading out from us, eventually themselves getting larger and closer together again till they became another city. But that was a hundred miles away.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“I am going where you are going till sunset,” said the vampire. “Then you are going where you are going, and I am going where I am going.”

I sighed. “Yes. No. I didn't mean to pry. Look, it is all very well that we have to get away from the woods, but that means going into at least the outskirts of the town. And while I can keep the sun off you, I can't make you look human. And let me tell you your skin color is strictly incredible, and you're not even wearing a shirt. And we don't have a car.”

The vampire took this without a tremor. “What do you suggest?”

“The only thing I can think of is to plaster ourselves with mud—especially you—stagger a little, and hit town at the tip of the north end, where the druggies hang out. You do look a little like a junkie, or you look a little more like a junkie than you look like anything else. Human. With any luck any junkies that have eyes left to see you with will be so creeped out by how much worse it can get than they realized that nobody will say anything to us.” I paused. “Then there's the poor but fairly respectable area, and they won't like us, but if we keep moving they
probably
won't call the suck—the cops. What worries me most is that some bright spark might guess you're a demon. You manifestly can't be a vampire because you're out in daylight. But you aren't, as I say, at all persuasive as human. You
could
be a rather dim demon who doesn't realize how bad your passing for human is—and since we have to keep hold of each other someone might think you were kidnapping me—hell. And there's at least one highway we have to cross too. Double Carthaginian hell. I don't suppose you know that part of town at all?”

“No.”

“No. I don't either, much. Well, if they don't call SOF, we should be able to find the nature preserve my landlady's house is on the other side of.… I have no idea how far all of this is though. A ways. We could have gone directly through town in my car.” I looked apprehensively at the sun, which was nearing midafternoon, and there were still a lot of trees between us and pavement.

“Indeed you would not have been best advised to go directly through town in your car, not with me in it with you. Your family will have given the—the identification number to the police.”

“What? License plate. Oh. Oh. I'm sorry. I hadn't thought of that either.”

“I had not supposed you had brought me all this way to betray me at the last,” he said.

No. “But … it's likely to be well past sunset before we get to my apartment,” I said, trying not to sound desolate. I am
not
too tired to go on, I was telling myself. Not finding the car is only a
setback
. It's not the end of the story.

“I will see you home,” said the vampire courteously, like a nice, well-brought-up boy seeing his date back to her house after dinner at the local pizza place.

There was no reason that this should make my eyes fill with tears. I was just tired. “I didn't mean—oh—thanks,” I said. I should have wanted him gone as soon as possible. I should have been longing for the sight of the sun touching the horizon—at least once we got out of the trees. But I wasn't. I was grateful that he was going to see me to my front door. Standing by the cabin and looking at the place my car should have been and wasn't, I didn't think I could do it without him.

I was glad he hadn't fried.

We went down to the lake in our little connected duo. I had grown sort of used to being carried, and because it was such an odd thing to be doing at all, the crucial, fundamental oddness of our necessary proximity was less noticeable. Walking side by side with my hand tucked under his arm was much odder and more uncomfortable. I also found that it made me feel more lopsided. It was probably only a function of being so tired, but having the power exchange, or whatever it was, only going on through one hand made me feel dizzy. I leaned on him not very voluntarily.

The ground here was mostly dirt and moss with a little struggling grass or grasslike weeds, so my bare feet were not in much danger. When we got to the shore I chose the marshiest place I could find—I knew where to look, there was a little inlet just east of the cabin—and made him sit down in it, and then rubbed bog slime and mud all over him, including his hair. He was so skinny my hands went
thump thump thump
down his ribs. He put up with all of this with perfect stoicism. He put one hand round my ankle—so I would have both hands free—but I told him to use both ankles for balance. My balance.

I was a little more artistic about my own ornamentation. I only had to look like someone who might be jiving with this freak in a nonmandatory way. So I rubbed mud into my hair and let it drip down one side of my face and over that shoulder. I primly kept the mud away from the cut on my breast. My mother's rules of hygiene were very clear about preventing dirt from entering an open wound, and I didn't have a Band-Aid to hand. It would have had to be several very large Band-Aids anyway. (I hoped mud on the vampire's injured ankle wasn't going to cause him any problems: that the clean-of-live-things trick was a general defense.) Besides, the slash was probably good added verisimilitude and we could use all the help we could get. Verisimilitude of what? My lip was still swollen but it had stopped bleeding hours ago, and the metal tang of blood was no longer in my mouth. Hooray. I wanted to feel as little like a vampire as possible. I didn't like the sensation that the boundaries were getting a little blurry.