Sunshine (36 page)

Wardskeeper
. She must then … her own house … but Con … I realized I'd said the first word aloud—I hoped only the first word—because she was answering me.

“No, I'm not your idea of a wardskeeper, am I?” she said. “I was never anyone's idea. But once I was established, new business came to me by word of mouth, and my prior clients usually had the good sense to warn future clients that they were going to meet a drab little old lady—I have been old and drab since my teens, by the way—who gave the impression of being hardly able to cross the road by herself.” She looked at me, smiling. “I admit that crossing the road alone has never been one of my greater gifts. Cars move much too quickly to suit me, and frequently from unexpected directions. I was always a much better maker of wards.”

I couldn't think how to ask my next question. I couldn't even summon up the spare attention to hoot at the idea of Yolande being
drab
.

“But then,” she went on, almost as if she was reading my mind, “people often are not what one might expect them to be. I would not expect a young, likable, sensible—and sun-worshipping—human woman who works in her family's restaurant to have a friend who is a vampire.”

Then I could say nothing at all.

“My dear,” Yolande said, “I have now told you almost as much as I know about your private affairs. Yes, there are more wards about this house and garden than you are aware of, and the fact that you haven't been aware of them is perhaps an indication to me that I have not yet lost my skill. I knew, of course, that a vampire had been visiting, but I also knew that you had not merely invited him in, but that you were under no coercion to do so. A good ward, my dear, will also prevent a forced invitation from achieving its object. And my wards are good ones.

“It took no great effort of intellect to puzzle out some of what happened to you during the two days you were missing last spring, especially not with the reek of vampire on you. Sherlock Holmes—do young people still read him, I wonder?—made the famous statement that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This is a very useful precept for a maker of wards, and I am not, perhaps, wholly retired. Vampires, as vampires will, caused you harm; but in this case, very unusually, not terminal harm. This one particular vampire therefore can be assumed to have done you some service, and that service created some kind of bond between you. This wild theory, suggestive of someone farther into her dotage than she wishes to believe, has been lately fortified when he returned, not once, but twice.

“I know that your unlikely friend is a vampire, a male vampire, and that there is only the one of him whom you invite across your threshold. This I have found very reassuring, by the way. Had there been more than one, I think my determination to assume the best rather than the worst might have failed. Although I admit I have doubled the wards around my own part of the house.… I have nothing to indicate that he is
my
friend too, you understand, and the human revulsion toward vampires generally is well justified.”

Yolande leaned forward to look into my face. “In the roundabout way of an old lady who perhaps spends too much of her time alone, I am offering you my support, in this impossibly difficult task you have taken on. The natural antipathy between vampires and humans means, I feel, that it
is
some task; I doubt either you or your friend is enjoying the situation. I don't suppose your new SOF colleagues know about either the task or the friend, do they?”

I managed to shake my head.

“I am not surprised. I doubt SOF is very … adaptable. Lack of adaptability is the root cause of much trouble in large organizations.”

I thought of Pat turning blue and smiled a little. But only a little. She was right about their attitude toward vampires. She was right about the universal human attitude toward vampires.

“I had not planned to say anything to you. I had at first assumed that whatever happened four months ago was over. But the vampire taint on you remained: that wound in your breast was some vampire's handiwork, wasn't it?”

So much for the camouflage provided by high-necked shirts. I nodded.

“And then your friend came, and now there is no wound. The two events are related, are they not?”

I nodded again.

“That is as good a definition of friendship as I need. But … I will no longer call it a taint … the fleck, the fingerprint of the vampire is still upon you. I am afraid the metaphor that occurs to me is of the eater of arsenic. If you eat a very, very little of it, over time you can develop a limited immunity to it. I do not know why you should choose to … immunize yourself like this. Or why he should.… My dear, forgive me if I have been a hopeless busybody. But your inevitable and wholly justified dismay, confusion, and preoccupation of four months ago has changed, certainly, but it has not decreased. It has increased—alarmingly so.”

She paused, as if she hoped for an answer, but I could say nothing.

“My dear, there is something else my wards have told me: that your nickname is more than an affectionate joke. I can believe no evil of someone who draws her strength from the light of day. If I can help you, I will.”

The sense of a burden unexpectedly lifted was so profound it made me dizzy, not least that by its lifting I realized how heavy it was. I had assumed—I had
known
—that there was no one I would be able to tell about my
unlikely friend
—there was certainly no one I would have risked telling. And now Yolande had told me. There were two of us who knew.

Maybe that meant the task was not impossible after all.

Whatever the task was.

Well, wiping Bo out would be a service to all humankind, certainly, whether Con and I survived or not. But offhand I couldn't see how even having a wardskeeper on our side was going to be useful. Besides, I had a selfish desire to stay alive myself. Bag the future of humanity.

And Con was failing to show up to help me make plans.
He
was the one who had told me that time was short. The new dry guys in Old Town bore something of the same message.

But there was now another human who knew about Con and me—and hadn't freaked out. I felt better even if I shouldn't've.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don't thank me yet,” said Yolande. “I haven't done anything yet, except pry into your private affairs. I would not have done so if I had felt I could risk not enquiring into them.”

Well, thank the gods and the angels for nosy landladies. This nosy landlady.

“Is there such a thing as a—an—antiward? Something that attracts?” I said.

Yolande raised her eyebrows.

“My—unlikely friend. He should have come back, and he hasn't. And I don't know how to find him.”

“And the binding between you?”

I shook my head. “It isn't strong enough, or—or it's like it crosses worlds. And I can't enter the vampire world.” Or I can, I thought, but I don't know what to do when I get there. Like how to find anything. Like how to get out again.

“Then perhaps he has not called you.”

Interesting that she should know he had to. “I think he is in trouble. I think he may be in enough trouble that he can't call me. Or he doesn't know how. Vampires don't call humans, do they?”

One eyebrow stayed up as she thought about this. “I see the difficulty.” She sat silent for several minutes and I sat in that silence, half-remembering a thing called
peace
. I'd forgotten peace in the last four months. It said something about my state of mind that merely sharing the fact of Con's existence with someone else with a heartbeat made me remember it … in spite of the hard, dreadful knowledge of the existence of Bo.

She stood up and went inside. I gave myself another cup of tea and looked at the roses. Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said:
You do not have to choose
.

My tree said
yessssss
.

My doe stood at the edge of the forest shadows, looking into the sunlight, her back sun-dappled.

You do not have to choose.

I didn't believe it. Hey, how many hamburger eaters on the planet are haunted by
cows
?

When Yolande reappeared, her hands were full. “I can make something more connected for you, more like a—a loop in a rope; but here is something you can try straightaway.” Two candles, and a little twist of strong-smelling herbs. “Put the candles on either side of you, and the herbs before and behind you. Light them as well—do you have smudge bowls? Wait a few minutes till the smoke from all mingles. Then seek your friend.”

I
WAITED TILL
full night dark, and then I settled on the floor inside the open balcony door. I lit the candles and the herbs, and stubbed the herbs out again. I waited for the smoke to mingle. It wasn't exactly a pleasant smell, but it was interesting, and intense. A …
drawing
sort of smell. It drew me into it.

I closed my eyes.
Con, damn you, where are you? I'm sure you're in trouble.
Call me to come to you, you stubborn bastard.

I was back in the vampire space, but the smoke had come with me, wrapped round and round me like an enormously long scarf, streaming behind me into the human world, streaming before me into the vampire beyond-dark. I lay, suspended, in between, but this time I felt neither lost nor sick.

Sunshine, pay attention. I felt neither lost nor sick. It
wasn't
the same space. It was some
other
weird Other void where no human had any business. The big difference was that this one wasn't trying to kill me. At least not at once. Was this the back way, the little country lane way, after the speed and roar of the superhighway had been too much for me earlier? I still couldn't read the map.

Pity you couldn't just take a bus.

I wriggled a little where I lay—there was still the uncanny
pressure
of alien-space, the difficulty breathing, the blindness, the awkwardness, as if a human body was the wrong vehicle if you wanted to travel here; but it lacked the malevolence of the nowhere I'd been in that afternoon in Aimil's living room, and the smoke-scarf gave me a little protection, as if against a bitter wind. If I were a car, then I'd rolled my windows up. Okay. Here I was. I practiced breathing. A little time went by, if time went by here. Till the strangeness, this nonmalevolent strangeness, began to feel like … merely the medium I had to work with.

I was a painter who had been handed a dripping glob of clay, a singer who had been handed a clarinet … a baker of bread and cookies who had been handed a vampire.

I bent and turned, seeking the alignment I wanted. There … no. Almost.

There.

And then I heard his voice.

Sunshine
.

Once. Only once. My name.
There
.

The shock of when I hit the exact bearing felt like putting my whole body in an electric socket.
Wow
. But then I was blazing along that line like an arrow from a burning bow. The smoke was stripped away by the speed of my going, my hair seemed to be peeling off my scalp, and the pressure was increasing … and increasing … I was being stretched—rolled like a ball of dough between palms to make bread-sticks, a fluff of sheep's wool twisted and squeezed to wind round a spindle—thinner and thinner and thinner, a bit of blunt thread crushed between huge fingers, poked painfully through the eye of a needle.…

Wham
.

I dropped out of the darkness, the void, the Other-space, back into something like somewhere. Back into my body, if I had been out of it.

I fell a little distance,
smack
, onto something. Something rather chilly, and slightly yielding, but not very, and also curiously … lumpy. I would have slid right off it again.

Except that it wrapped its arms around me, rolled me over so that it was on top of me, pinning me securely with its weight, and buried its fangs in my neck.

I froze. Well, what are you going to do? And all this was happening
flick flick flick
like the frames of a movie, too fast to react to.

It was dark, black dark, as dark as the void I had so recently traveled, and while I could see in the dark, I didn't have much practice in this kind of darkness, and also … well there was this other stuff going on, you know? My chief awareness was centered on the feeling of teeth against my neck.

The teeth hadn't broken the skin. His teeth hadn't. His hair was in my face. I'd had his hair in my face once before, but he'd been bleeding on me that time. Maybe it was my chance to return the favor? He had said he wouldn't turn me—that he couldn't turn me. He'd also said that I could be killed, like any other human. Standard deaths of humans included being dry-guyed.

Maybe vampires didn't like drop-in visitors. Well, I'd tried to call ahead. Ha ha.

His teeth were still against my neck. Other than that he was motionless. I mean that.
Motionless
. Like being lain on by a stone. A stone with fangs, of course.

His hair smelled musty, damp. It wasn't an unpleasant smell—if it reminded me of anything it reminded me of spring water, wet earth and moss on the rocks around it—but it wasn't his usual vampire smell. Don't ask me how I knew it was him but I did. Besides the fact that I guess if it had been any other vampire he wouldn't have hesitated midway through the fang-burying action.

He was
cold
. Motionless and cold. Cold all the way down the length of him.…

There seemed to be a lot of skin contact going on here. I blinked against the dark. I shivered against his body. I felt, then, briefly, his lips against my neck, as they closed over the teeth. His face rested against the curve of my neck, a moment, two moments. Two of my heartbeats. He was growing less cold. I was used—sort of—to the lack of a heartbeat, but I was pretty sure he wasn't breathing either. What vampires call breathing. The fizziness I'd put my arms around when I'd discovered my car was gone, that day at the lake, that wasn't there either.