Sunshine (18 page)

It was warm, and the front doors were open. There were still a few people sitting at one of the outside tables; another couple had drifted off with their cups of coffee to sit on the flower bed wall and smooch. One of the last closing-up rituals was to have a sweep through the square for coffee cups, champagne glasses, and dessert plates. If you paid your bill beforehand, we didn't stop you taking your sweetheart and your sweet thing on a plate to a quieter spot. (Your bad luck if you chose a spot already occupied by a wino or a hype head, but hey.) This was probably illegal too, by civil regulation 6703.4, subheading Behavior of Clientele at Eating Establishments and Potential Broadcasting of Crumbs to Deleterious Effect, viz., the Vermin Population, but no one had stopped us yet.

It was so quiet. Peaceful. Even the SOFs looked pretty relaxed, for SOFs.

And I heard a familiar goblin giggle.

Did I hear it? I don't know. I'll never know. But I
knew
it, one way or another, however it got to me. And I had picked up a table knife and bolted out the door long before any poor following-on function like rational thought had a chance to kick into gear.

No human has ever destroyed a vampire by thundering down on it brandishing a table knife. In the first place, vampires are fantastically faster than humans. You can't
race
up to a vampire to do anything, because it's done it several times already, waiting for you. And you can bet it's not going to stand there waiting to be staked.

In the second place, a table knife is a real bad choice. You can do it with wrought iron, although no one in their right mind is going to haul a wrought iron stake around with them when wood works better and weighs a lot less. But stainless steel, forget it: it slithers off, like a swizzle stick on an ice cube. You have as much chance of punching a hole in a vampire with stainless steel as you have racing up to it and getting it to hold still while you try.

Wood will break through that little layer of whatever-it-is, the electricity of the undead, and let your stake penetrate. You still have to ram it in hard, and you have to know where it's going, and it has to reach and enter the heart, or you've just died as the vampire rips your head off. A sucker repelling a staking doesn't bother to be cool about it. (Note that while a vampire may have to ask permission to suck your blood, it can kill you any time it likes. It just won't get a square meal out of the experience.) Macho SOFs will go straight in through the breastbone, but the more sophisticated approach—as well as the more likely to be successful—is up underneath it. The notch at the bottom of the breastbone is a useful road marker—so I'm told. It's still not at all easy to do. There are lots of dead people who have tried. There have been a lot of studies done about the best wood for stakes too. Turns out it's apple wood—and not any old apple, but a tree that is home to mistletoe. Retired or invalided-out SOFs (this latter category a small number: SOFs tend to live or die with nothing in between) often end up tending SOF orchards, and making sure the mistletoe is happy. Mistletoe is cranky stuff, and nobody knows why it sometimes grows and sometimes doesn't. Makes you wonder what the druids knew—or Johnny Appleseed. Of course the druids are a fairy tale and Johnny Appleseed never existed. They say. But then, they also say that no human has ever destroyed a vampire by charging at one flashing a table knife.

Maybe no human ever
had
.

I did have one advantage. He wasn't expecting
me
.

I had time to see the look on his face. I probably didn't figure out what I'd seen till later, but this was what it was: he was looking for me—for
me
—but he wasn't expecting to find me. He was working under his master's orders, all right, but privately he thought his master had a wild hair up his ass, and he wasn't going to find me, because I was dead. He didn't know how I was dead, or where I had disappeared to, but I
had
to be dead. Therefore I was. I understood this point of view completely.

Maybe it was just the surprise of seeing someone thinking they could do anything with a table knife.

He paused. The girl he'd been pulling under stood swaying and stupid while he turned to me. We stared into each other's eyes for the last time fragment, my last few running steps, before I thudded into him …

… and slammed the table knife up under his breastbone, and into his heart. I remember the hot evil smell of his last breath on my face.…

I'd never heard or read anywhere that vampires explode when staked. Maybe it's only when you use a table knife. Vampires aren't made of flesh and blood quite the way we are … but near kali goddam enough. It was … horrible. The contact, when I drove against him, not just arm's length with the knife—The sense of the knife going in—maybe I didn't think I was going to be able to do it either; maybe that was the plan—The
texture
of the knife sliding into—The way it seemed to
know
where to go, with my hand on it—

The smell—

The surprise on his face, just before my knife reached his heart and it stopped—being a face—

The
sound
—

The pressure of the—blast—which made me stagger, which smeared and stained me with—

From the taste in my mouth a few minutes later, I assume I threw up. Maybe I passed out as well, although I was still on my feet when I began to hear someone shouting, “Rae! Rae! It's over! You're okay!” and also began to realize there were arms around me and they were trying to stop me thrashing around. There was a lot of other noise; someone screaming; other people shouting; and, coming closer, a siren. The siren should have been reassuring: the sound of approaching authority. Authority would take over and I could relax. Relax, Sunshine.

It wasn't reassuring. But it did have the effect of sobering me up. I stopped flailing. The arms loosened—not very much—and let me stand on my own feet. It was Jesse, holding on to me.

There was already a crowd. I suppose the screaming brought them. We're the kind of neighborhood that responds to screams. Jesse and I were in a little alleyway—one alley over from where the corpse husk, the dry guy, had been found a week ago—and from somewhere someone had found a couple of halogen floodlights. This meant you could see.…

I started retching, and Jesse turned me round and started hauling me toward—what turned out to be a car, driven by Theo. It's a good trick, getting anything with four wheels, including a kid's little red wagon, this far into Old Town. Maybe that's part of SOF training too. The crowd was still gathering. Maybe they didn't understand what they were seeing—the dark, dribbling blotches on the ground, stickily trailing down the enclosing walls—the charnel house smell might have been a dead rat or a backed-up drain; Old Town can be like that—but the scene the floodlights illuminated.… I managed to look away before I heaved again, not, I think, that there was anything left to come up.

Jesse bundled me into the back seat and was now … wiping me down with a towel. I had … horrible stuff all over me. Did SOF vehicles automatically carry large absorbent towels for … cleanup? This one had hung outdoors on a line. I tried to think about the smell of the towel—laundry soap, fresh air,
sunlight
. I was crying. Less messy than throwing up anyway. Easier to clean up after. I cried harder. I'd cried more in the last two months than I had done in my entire previous life.

I croaked something. I didn't understand what I said either, and Jesse said, “Don't talk now. We're going to get you some clean clothes and a cup of cof—tea.” He knew me well enough to know I didn't drink coffee. That should have been reassuring too, that I was with friends—but I wasn't with friends. I was with SOF. Who had seen me explode a sucker with a table knife. I wondered if they were getting me away so fast, before anyone from the coffeehouse had a chance to intervene. Mel. Charlie. Where were they taking me anyway? And why? I could make a guess and it didn't make me feel any better.

Jesse's dark face was invisible in the darkness of the back seat. I was almost desperate enough to ask to turn the dome light on, just so I could see his face. That he had a face. A human face.

I croaked again. “Will she be all right?”

“Who?” said Jesse.

“The girl. The … girl who was screaming. The girl who was … under the dark.”

Jesse said, “She'll be okay.”

I was silent a minute. We were out of Old Town. I couldn't figure what we were doing at first; I was used to the front door of the SOF county building—not that I made a habit of going there—of course there would be a back way. Where they parked their cars. Also perhaps where they brought people in they didn't want to be seen. How soon before the TV van showed up in the alleyway and started panning over those blotchy walls, those gruesomely amorphous lumps on the pavement?

“You don't know, do you? You don't know if she'll be all right.”

Jesse sighed and sat back, leaving the towel in my lap. It didn't smell like sunlight any more: it smelled like disintegrated vampire. The car smelled like disintegrated vampire. Jesse, because he'd been holding on to me, had disintegrated vampire all over him too. In the flickering light as we went from one streetlight's aura to the next he looked rather too much like a pied demon. Pied demons are not among the nice ones. “No. I don't know. We don't snatch people out from under the dark at the last minute like that very often. But I'm pretty sure she'll be all right. I can tell you why, but you could tell us something too. Something for something.”

I grunted. I had been rolling my window down for some fresh air, and had discovered that it would only roll down halfway, and that the doorlock button was engaged, but not by me. No escapees from the back seat of a SOF car.

He almost laughed. “It's not what you think. Hell, Sunshine, what do we have to do to—”

The car stopped. We were in a parking lot tucked in among a lot of big civic-looking buildings. It was nothing like empty, as you might expect it should be at this time of night, although all the cars were parked at one end of the lot, near one particular building. I didn't recognize SOF HQ from the back, but I could guess that was what it was. Most municipal departments don't run a big night shift, and the ordinary cop station was across town.

The doorlocks popped open. We got out of the car, first Theo and then Jesse again holding my arm, as if I either needed support or might run away. They took me up some stairs and down a long ugly windowless hallway with doors opening off on either side. Eventually Jesse tapped on a cracked-open door with a light behind it. “Annie,” said Jesse, “can you give us a hand?”

Annie wasn't reassuring either, but she was nice about trying to pretend that she didn't think there was something extremely fishy about why I was there and in what condition and at this time of night. After all, she was right: there was something extremely fishy about it. She took me to the women's shower room and gave me fresh towels, soap, and this shapeless khaki jersey fuzzy-on-the-inside one-piece thing to put on that was like little kids' pajamas only without the feet.

I walked into the shower with all my clothes on. It was harder getting them off wet, but I didn't want to wait even long enough to get undressed before I made contact with hot water. Then I knelt on the shower floor and scrubbed them—and my sneakers—and left them in a heap I had to keep stepping over while I washed myself. But I wanted
all
the blood and … muck …
drummed
out of them. I wasn't as long about it as I had been the morning after coming back from the lake, but I scrubbed myself till I hurt all over and came out feeling boiled because I'd had the hot water turned up as high as it would go. I was sweating as I tried to dry off: partly because of the hot water. The cut on my breast had opened again, of course. I put some toilet paper on it, like I'd cut myself shaving, hoping it would scab over enough not to leave bloodstains that might need explaining on the pajamas.

I belatedly rescued the contents of my pockets when I hung my sodden clothes over the midsummer-cold radiator. My knife didn't mind a wetting so long as I dried it off again right away but my leather key ring would probably never forgive me, and the charm loop on it was definitely a goner. It was one of Mom's charms and it was one of the sort that keep going
bzzzt
at you so you know they're paying attention and I hadn't meant to drown it but I wouldn't be sorry to have it stop pestering me.

I paused a moment when I was dry and dressed to gather together what faculties I had left. I was so tired.

Annie was lurking outside to take me to wherever. She offered me some shuffly fuzzy-on-the-inside slippers too, also khaki, but enough is enough with the regression to childhood, and I stayed barefoot. Besides, I hate khaki.

I figured it was Jesse's office, since he was the one sitting behind the desk, while Theo was tipped back in a straight chair to one side, his feet against the edge, the toes of his shoes curling up the messy pile of papers on that corner and leaving black marks on the bottoms of the pages. Tsk tsk. Jesse's jacket had disappeared and he was wearing a clean shirt that didn't fit. There was a coffee machine in the corner going
glub glub
.

Nobody said anything right away. If this was supposed to make me start talking to fill up the silence it didn't work. There wasn't anything I could say that wouldn't get me into more trouble than I was in now. Okay, here's another thing: magic handlers have to be certified and licensed. I had lied about what had happened by the lake for a lot of reasons, and needing to register myself as a magic handler was the least of them and barely worth mentioning from my point of view, but by not doing it I'd still committed the sort of crime that even the ordinary police don't like and SOF really hates. Tonight I'd totally, inexorably, undeniably, blown it. Even a magic handler shouldn't have been able to skeg a sucker with a table knife.