Sunshine (38 page)

But my stomach was still roaring (I often eat in my dreams, I know you're not supposed to) and the apples were sitting beside me with a loaf of bread, and a fantastic goblet hilariously in keeping with the general flamboyance of my immediate surroundings, so I sat up and reached for the nearest apple. And saw the silky black sleeve falling back from my arm.

I didn't hiss as well as he had, the night he discovered the wound in my breast, but I gave it a good shot. I was so used to my eyesight behaving strangely that the flitteriness of the lighting hadn't at first registered, but it did now: both that there was light, and that it wiggled. There was some heat source behind me; I turned around.

The fireplace, of course, was huge. It was shaped like some monster's roaring mouth; you could see the monster's eyes (well, two of them; I chose not to look for more) gleaming above the mantelpiece of its writhing lips (you might not think writhing lips would have any flat spots, but there were candelabra balanced up there, shaped like snakes' bodies and dismembered human arms); each eye was bigger than my head, and gleamed red, although that may have been the firelight. No, it wasn't the firelight.

Con, cross-legged on the floor, straight-backed, shirtless, barefoot, his head a little bowed, looked rather as he had the first time I saw him. Only not so bony. He was also less gray, washed in the ruddy firelight. And my heart beat faster when I looked at him for different reasons than it had that first time. He looked up as I turned; our eyes met. I looked away first. I picked up the apple and bit into it. So, maybe he lived near an orchard (how long had I been asleep)? That didn't explain the bread. I wasn't going to ask. I wasn't going to ask about the bottle of wine on the floor next to the little table either (the table was a depressed-looking maiden in a very tight swathe of material with no visible means of support, holding the carrying surface at an implausible angle between her neck and one shoulder. Even more implausible was the angle of her breasts, which I don't think even cosmetic surgery could achieve), which was a straightforward local chardonnay. I'd have preferred a cup of tea. A glass or two of this on top of everything else that had been happening and I'd be off my chump. But hey, I was already. Off my chump, I mean. I poured some wine gingerly into the goblet. Pity to waste it: he'd already drawn the cork. Ever the polite host. The wine seemed to go a long way down before it hit bottom, like dropping pebbles in a well.

I ate a second apple and had a dubious sip of the wine. (It still tasted like straightforward local chardonnay, even from that histrionic beaker.) The damn goblet tingled in my hand. I
really
didn't want to get into some kind of communion with an overdressed tumbler. It was knobbly with what looked like gemstones. Oh please. I ate a third apple and started on the bread. Texture suggested cheating: additional gluten flour, probably, but the taste was not too bad; the baker must have the patience or the sense to let the sponge sit a while and ripen. Maybe I was just very hungry.

“Thank you,” I said.

Con's shoulders rippled briefly: vampire shrug facsimile, maybe. “It is little enough,” he said.

“How long did I sleep?”

“Four hours. It is four hours till dawn,” he replied.

And Paulie had taken the early shift this morning. (He'd
offered
.) Okay.

My little excursion through nowheresville must have taken no time at all. One of the standard features of nowheresville, maybe, that made a kind of sense, but you didn't really expect your very own alarming out-of-this-world experiences to align with the science fiction you'd read as a kid. The science fiction you'd outgrown in favor of
Christabel
and
The Chalice of Death
. My eyes wandered involuntarily to the gem-festooned goblet. I had to admit my reading
had
sort of prepared me for an overheated fantasy like this room. About nowheresville I was on my own.

Con didn't look as if he'd suffered any ill effects from his coma, or whatever it had been. I wondered what passed for a near-death experience in a vampire? A slightly misplaced stake? He'd been able to go out foraging, anyway: the bread and the apples were both fresh.

“I wouldn't have expected you to … choose to sit next to a fire,” I said, at random. Sitting next to a fire seemed like the sort of thing only silly, show-offy vampires would do. Like human kids playing chicken in No Town.

He didn't say anything. Oh, good, we're playing
that
game again. I ate another apple.

He raised his head and shook his hair back in an almost human gesture. Almost. “We do not need heat as you do,” he said, and I expertly translated the “we” and “you” into “vampires” and “humans.” “But we may enjoy it.”

Enjoy. I didn't enjoy thinking about vampires enjoying things. The things they tended to enjoy.

“I enjoy it,” he said, and, surprising me enormously, added, “it is the warmth of life and the heat of death.”

Life as defined by warmth to a chilly vampire? Death by burning, death by the sun? Or the original death of being turned? Maybe he had been harmed by his coma: it was making him introspective. As being bounced off walls appeared to be doing to me.

I took a deep breath. “I—I have had a—a feeling that all was not well with you—for some time,” I said. “I think it began the night you—healed me. But it took me a while to—to figure out that that was what I was picking up. If I was. If you follow me.”

“Yes,” he said.

He didn't say anything more for the length of time it took me to eat a fourth apple. Hey, they were small. Was it rude to eat, er, food, in front of a vampire? I'd done it before, of course. But if there was a future in congenial vampire-human relations there were grave (so to speak) etiquette questions to be addressed.

“Will you tell me what happened to you?” I said, half irritated at the need (apparently) to drag it out of him, half astonished at my own desire to know. What was this, friendship? Big irony alert. Here we're both agonizing over this Carthaginian
bond
business and maybe it's only that we're learning to be friends. I could get into fireside sitting as the warmth of life too, probably. Hey, he was still a vampire and I was still a human and there was some other weird stuff, like transmuting and poisoned wounds and nowheresville. Not to mention going out in daylight.

But if we were supposed to be friends, I was going to have to get used to the fact that he wasn't the chatty type.

He said, musingly, as if he was listening to his own words as he spoke them, “I was more wearied by the effort to heal your wound than I realized at once. I had not, you see, ever attempted anything similar before. As I told you, I had to … invent certain aspects. Guess others. I am not accustomed to not knowing what I am doing.”

One of the advantages of very long life. Lots of time for practice.

“I was careless after I left you. I permitted myself to be preoccupied. I was … sensed. By one of Bo's gang. I needed to escape, and not to let her trace you through me. Another maneuver I am unaccustomed to is protecting the whereabouts of a human.”

I had the feeling he was saying something more than, “And they weren't going to get anything out of me other than my name, rank, and serial number.” I wondered what a vampire address book would look like: would it have
alignments
rather than street numbers? What would an alignment index look like?

Could one vampire steal another vampire's address book?

“The first one called for assistance, of course; and they were very … persistent, when they caught the trace of you on me as well. I eluded them eventually. It was not easy. I came here. As you found me.”

Naked in a dark empty stone room. Vampire convalescence gone wrong. “You mean you had been like that over a
month
? You schmuck, why didn't you call me
before
?”

He looked up at me, and there was undeniably a faint smile on his face. It looked a little grotesque, but not too bad, considering. Nothing like as awful as his laugh, for example. “It never occurred to me.”

I had said to Yolande:
Vampires don't call humans, do they
?

He looked back at the fire. “Even if it had, I do not think I would have done so. It would not have occurred to me that you could assist in anyway.”

“You called me. You called my name. Once. I wouldn't have found you if you hadn't.”

“I heard you calling me. You asked me to answer you.”

“I called you to call me.”

“Yes. Sunshine, do you wish me to apologize again? I will if you desire it. I could not have rescued myself. I was … too far away. But I heard you, and I could still answer. You came and … brought the rest of me back with you. I am grateful. I thank you. That is not the way I would have chosen to … leave this existence. The balance between us has tipped again.”

“Oh, the
hell
with the damn balance,” I said. “What I'm thinking is, if you hadn't needed to protect me, it would have been a lot easier, right? I
weaken
you, don't I? Aside from your having got tired already bailing me out that night.” With the blood of a doe.

There were times, like now, when the feel of light and warmth was … different too. Different like seeing in the dark was different—but differently different. Different in a way I knew didn't come from a vampire. Is this simple
nowness
of awareness some gift from her?

For a moment there were three of me: there was the human me. There was my tree-self. And my deer-self.

Surely we outnumbered the vampire-self?

“Weakened,” he said thoughtfully. “I think your interpretation of weakness may be distorted. I am physically stronger than any human. I can go without sustenance for longer than any human. But you can derive sustenance from bread and apples, which I cannot. And you can walk under the sun, which I cannot. How do you define weakness?”

I was thinking about my experience of bringing the rest of him back. It was a little difficult
not
to think about comparative weakness when only one of you could fling the other one across a room and into a wall and you were the one that got flung. Okay, I was not going to pursue that line. I sighed. He had already told me he couldn't stand against Bo alone. Choosing me as an ally might have made more sense to me if getting calories out of bread and apples and going around in daylight had any discernable relevance to the issue. “Where am I?”

I thought he looked puzzled. Another of those vampire-senses-are-different moments, I suppose. “This is my … home,” he said at last.

“You don't call it home,” I said, interested.

“No. I might call it my … earth-place, perhaps. I spend my days here. I have done so for many years.”

“Earth-place? Then we are underground?”

“Yes.”

“What about the fireplace?”

He looked at me.

“Doesn't the smoke say ‘Someone's here'?”

“The smoke is not detectable in the human world.”

Oh. Vampires would hold a lot more than one-fifth of the global wealth if they patented a really good air filter. The cynical view of the Voodoo Wars is that the Others had done us humans a favor, by killing enough of us off and thus lowering the level of industrial commerce to a point that we hadn't managed to commit species suicide by pollution yet, which we otherwise might well have. Even if they looked at it this way, which I doubted, this would not have been pure philanthropy. Demons and Weres, whichever side of the alliance they'd been on, need most of the same things we do, and vampires … well. Maybe it depends on your definition of “philanthropy.”

I looked around a little more. The only light was from the fire, and my dark vision was sort of half-confounded by something about this place, maybe just the thundering excess. Still, I could see a lot, and it was all pretty bizarre. The fur I was wrapped up in appeared to be real fur, long and silky, in jagged black and white stripes. I couldn't think what animal it might be. Something that didn't exist, perhaps, till a vampire killed it. With the slinky black shirt—and the bruises—I felt like something off the cover of this month's
Bondage and Discipline Exclusive
. All I needed was ankle bracelets and a better haircut. The buttons on the back of the sofa I was lying on were tiny gargoyle faces, sticking their tongues out or poking their fingers up their noses. Every now and then they weren't faces at all, but pairs of buttocks. The sofa itself was some kind of purple plush velvet … except that the shadows it laid were
lavender
. Well, if I could travel through nowheresville I suppose I shouldn't protest about shadows that were lighter than their source, or about furs from animals that didn't exist. My knowledge of natural history in black and white didn't extend much beyond skunks and zebras anyway. Maybe it did exist, whatever it was. The fur could have been dyed, but somehow this didn't suit my idea of vampire chic. Actually
Con
didn't suit my idea of vampire chic. This hectic Gothic sensibility was a surprise. “Interesting decorating principles,” I said.

He glanced around briefly, as if reminding himself what was there. “My master had a sense of the dramatic.”

I was riveted both by
my master
and
had
. As in used to have, as in dead, rather than undead? “Your master?” I said experimentally.

“This is his room.”

Silence fell. Con returned to staring motionlessly at the fire. So much for leading questions. I sighed again.

Con, to my surprise, stirred. “Do you wish to hear about my master?” he said.

“Well, yes,” I said.

There was a pause, while he, what? Organized his thoughts? Decided what to leave out? “He turned me,” he said at last. “I was not … appreciative. But I was apt to his purpose. As there was no going back I agreed to do as he wished.” Another pause, and he added, with one of those more-expressionless-than-expressionless expressions, like his more-than-stillness immobility: “A newly turned vampire is perhaps more vulnerable than you would guess. I was dependent on my master at first, whether I wished it or not, and I … chose to let him teach me what I needed to know to survive. That was many years ago, when this was still the New World.”