Sunshine (34 page)

“Sometimes you have help,” I said. “Sometimes people come along and offer you Chocolate Pinwheels.”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“I'm Rae,” I said. “Do you know Charlie's Coffeehouse? It's about a quarter mile that way,” I said, pointing.

“I don't get that far very often,” she said.

“Well, some time, if you want to, you might like to try our Killer Zebras. There's a strong family resemblance.… Tell whoever serves you that Sunshine says you can have as many as you can carry away, to bring back to this park and eat. In the sunshine.”

“Are you Sunshine then too?”

I sighed. “Yes. I guess. I'm Sunshine too.”

“Good for you,” she said, and patted my knee.

I
GOT HOME
that night at about nine-thirty and had a cup of cinnamon and rosehip tea and stared out at the dark and thought. There was at least one good result of my negative epiphany that afternoon in Oldroy Park: there seemed to me suddenly so many worse things that worrying about Con seemed clean and straightforward. He had saved my life, after all. Twice. Never mind the extenuating circumstances. I stood on my little balcony and remembered:
I could not come to you if you did not call me, but if you called I had to come
.

“Constantine,” I said quietly, into the darkness. “Do you need me? You have to call me if you do. You told me the rules yourself.”

He'd said Bo was after us. And that Bo would make a move soon. I rather thought that “soon” in this instance meant a definition of soon that humans and vampires could agree on. Con should have been back before now to tell me what was going on, what we were going to do. How far
he'd
got in tracing Bo. He hadn't.

There was something wrong.

I S
LEPT BADLY
that night, but this was getting to be so usual that it was an effort to try to decide if the nightmares I'd had were the kind I should pay attention to or not. I decided that they probably were, but I didn't know what kind of attention to pay, so I wasn't going to. I went in to work, turned my brain off, and started making cinnamon rolls, and garlic-rosemary buns for lunch. Then I made brown sugar brownies, Rocky Road Avalanche, Killer Zebras, and a lot of muffins, and then it was ten-thirty and I had the lunch shift free.

I had pulled my apron off and was about to untie my scarf when Mel's hand stopped me long enough for him to kiss the back of my neck. I shook my hair out and said “Yes” and we went back to his house together and spent some time on the roof. There's nothing nicer than making love outdoors on a warm sunny day, and this late in the year it felt like getting away with something too.

Mel used to laugh, sometimes, right after he came, in this gentle, surprised way, as if he'd never expected to be this happy, and then he'd kiss me, thoughtfully, and I'd hang on to him and hope that I was reading the signs right. That afternoon was one of those times. He'd wound up on top, which, I admit, I had slightly engineered, since there was a bit of an autumnal breeze snaking around and it was nice and warm under Mel's body. His breath smelled of coffee and cinnamon. We lay there some time afterward—I loved that butterfly-wings feeling of a hard-on getting unhard inside me—and while we lay there I was all right and the world was all right and everything that might not be all right was on hold. And it was
daylight
and with my treacherous eyes shut I could just lie there and feel the sunshine on my face.

After a comfortable, rather dreamy lunch he went downstairs to take apart or put together some motorcycle and I went off to the library. I wanted to talk to Aimil.

She looked up from her desk, smiled faintly and said, “I have a break in, uh, forty minutes,” and went back to whatever she was doing.

I had a pass through the NEW shelves where there was a book hysterically titled
The Scourge of the Other
. It was a good two inches thick. I considered stealing it and putting it through the meat grinder at Charlie's, but the library would only buy another one and the detritus of ink and binding glue probably wouldn't do the quality of Charlie's meatloaf any good. I knew without picking it up that the chapters would have rabble-rousing headings like “The Demon Menace” and “The Curse of the Were.” I wasn't going to guess what noun was desperate enough for vampires. Four months ago I would have just scowled. Today it gave me a hard-knot-in-pit-of-stomach feeling. It was turning out I had a lot of Other friends. And Con, of course, whatever he was.
Con, are you all right
?

My tea was already steeping when I went back to the tiny staff kitchen to find Aimil. “So, how did it happen?” I said.

She didn't bother to ask how did what happen. “I knew about your SOFs at Charlie's because you told me about them.”

“I told you so you wouldn't stop speaking to me because I seemed to like some guys who wore khaki and navy blue.”

“That they were SOF was supposed to help?”

“They told the best Other stories.”

“I guess. I could have done without the one … never mind. Anyway, so I recognized them when they came here. One day Pat and Jesse asked if I'd come by the SOF office some day for a chat—I hadn't realized you could feel
surrounded
by two people, you know?—and what was I going to say, no? So I said yes. And then they asked me if I'd be interested in doing a little work for SOF and of course I said no, and then they started working around to telling me they weren't so interested that I was a reference librarian as they were interested in what I was doing with Otherwatch and Beware. They seemed to know what I was doing at home too, and before I totally freaked Pat held his breath and turned blue. I said, what's to prevent me reporting you? And he said, because you're another one … I have
no
idea how they found out.” Aimil stopped, but she didn't stop like end-of-the-story stop.

“And?” I said.

She sighed. “Rae, I'm sorry. They also said, because you're a friend of Sunshine's.”

There was no window in the little library staff kitchen. I wanted sunlight. What had my friendship to do with anything? She'd been working for SOF for almost two years. “And you didn't tell me.”

Aimil walked over to the door and closed it gently. I didn't want anyone to hear us either, but my spine started prickling with claustrophobia, or dark-o-phobia anyway. “I'm sorry,” said Aimil. “It's only been since I've been working for them that I've started … have been able to
start
thinking of myself as Other. As a partblood. The best way to pass is to believe in the role, you know? My parents know, of course, but they haven't made any attempt to find out where it comes from. None of my brothers had anything weird happen to them, and so far as I know they don't know about me. I haven't told my family I'm SOF, and I haven't—hadn't—told
anyone
I'm part-blood. Who was I going to tell? Why? The only person who would have a right to know is the father of my children, and I'm not going to have children and pass this on. I hope none of my brothers' kids … well. Because I'd have to tell them then.”

I didn't say anything right away. “When did you find out?”

“Yeah,” said Aimil. “Right about the time I met you. You looked as lost as I felt. And then it turned out we got along, and …”

“Did everyone but my mother and me assume that who my dad was was public knowledge?”

“It wasn't quite that bad.”

I looked at her.

She said reluctantly, “It was maybe worse during the Voodoo Wars but by then everyone knew you, and your mom had married Charlie, and Charlie's family has lived in Old Town forever, and you were normal by context, you know? And then you had two dead-normal little pests for brothers. Nobody ever, ever caught you doing anything weird at school—you seemed just as fascinated as the rest of us when some of the Ngus and Bloodaxes and so on talked about magic handling. I don't deny that a few people looked at you a little sideways.”

I'd let my tea sit too long, but the bitterness in my mouth seemed appropriate.

“You were into
cooking
, Rae. And a generation or two ago the Blaises were top dog, sure—”

Were they, I thought. So many things my mother never told me. Although I couldn't really blame her for my avoiding reading globe-net articles that mentioned the Blaises. Could I? I'd
wanted
to be Rae Seddon.

“You still heard a little about them at the beginning of the Wars … but then it's like what was left of them disappeared. So maybe you were genuinely normal, you know? Most people say that magic handling runs out in families sooner or later.”

“The SOFs didn't think so,” I muttered. Disappeared.
Bo's lot brought me a
Blaise.
And not just a third cousin who can do card tricks and maybe write a ward sign that almost works, but Onyx Blaise's daughter
.

Onyx Blaise.

Whose mother taught his daughter to transmute. How did the people who were looking at me sideways count those one or two generations? What else could my gran do? Had she done?

Disappeared
how
?

“And nobody gets more normal than your mom.”

True. I would think about how to thank her for my very well embedded normalcy later. It might be difficult to choose between cyanide and garrotting.

“Can we go outside?” I said.

The sun was behind a cloud but daylight is still better than indoors. “Aimil. I want to ask you a favor.”

“Done.”

“Okay. Thanks. It's what SOF wants me to do—try and get some location fix on one of your creepy cosmails. But I want to do it somewhere that isn't behind proofglass.”

“In daylight,” said Aimil. “Okay. We'll do it at my house. My next afternoon off is Thursday.”

“I'll find someone to swap with.”

“It's not only the proofglass, is it? It's also SOF. You don't want to do it just because SOF tells you to.”

I nodded. “I know they're the good guys and everything, but …”

“I know. Once I found out they were watching me I changed the way I do some stuff. They are good guys and I do work for them and I don't mind—much. But it's all a little nomad for me. And I still have this silly idea that my life belongs to
me
.”

There were good reasons Aimil and I were friends.

I
WENT HOME
that night and stood on the balcony again and said to the darkness, “Con, Constantine, are you all right? If you need me,
call me to you
.”

For a moment I felt … something. Like a twitch against your line when you're half asleep or thinking about something else. It may be a fish and it may be the current … but it
may
be a fish. (I'd learned to fish because Mel taught me, not because I longed to impale small invertebrates on barbed hooks and rip hell out of piscine oral cavities and smother fellow oxygen breathers in an alien medium.) The flicker itself made me think I was half asleep or thinking about something else, because I was straining after any sign whatsoever. And it was gone again at once.

T
HURSDAY AFTERNOON WASN
'
T
flash ideal but I managed. Paulie was a little too not-sorry to change his single weekly four-thirty-in-the-morning shift for another afternoon that Thursday, and he hadn't made up the one he'd missed our last thirteen-day week yet either. I'd worry about just how not-sorry he was later. Meanwhile I got up at three
A.M.
to do a little extra baking like I had a point to make. As I drank the necessary pint-mug of blacker-than-the-pit-of-doom tea to get me going I stood on the balcony again, testing for quivers in the current. All I got was a stronger sense that there was something wrong; but I was good at feeling there was something wrong even when there wasn't—something I'd inherited from my mother—and there was nothing in this case but my own glangy unease to look at.

There are advantages to driving an old wreck instead of a modern car; wrecks bounce around and jerk at your hands on the wheel and help keep you awake. The charms in the glove compartment were more restless than usual too: I think they were objecting to the driving. By the time I got off work at noon I felt it had been several years since I'd had any sleep, and I had a nap instead of lunch. I brought sandwiches in a bag, and Aimil had a pot of tea waiting for me.

It was another gray day, but Aimil had pulled the combox table around so that the chair backed up against the window, which she had opened. What daylight there was fell on me as I sat there, and there was a little wind that stroked my hair.

“Where do you want to start?” said Aimil. “With the
bingo!
one from the other day, or do you want to start fresh?”

I hadn't thought about it. Good beginning. It was so hard to screw myself to do anything, the details got a bit lost.…

Who—or what—was I looking for? Con? Or Bo? Since I was doing it alone with Aimil I wasn't trying to make Pat and Jesse happy. So what was going to make me happy? Define
happy
.

But if I found something on the other side of the real globe that Pat and Jesse would get all tangled up in negotiations with their local SOF equivalents over, it might get them out of my hair.

Finding Bo wasn't going to make me
happy
, but I didn't want to look for Con with anyone else around, even Aimil. Which left Bo or the Unknown. The Unknown, at the moment, was unknown. Bo, on the other hand, was after me. Bo, then.

“Let's start with bingo.”

Aimil brought up the file, highlighted the cosmail I wanted, and stepped back. I squinted at the screen. I could see the winking bar of highlighting, and the button was under my finger. I pressed.

It was like hands around my throat, a crushing, splintering weight on my breast; there was also a horrible, horrible pressure against my
eyes
, my poor dark-dazzled eyes … I was lost in the dark, I no longer knew which way was up and which down, I was vertiginous, I was going to be sick.…