Sunshine (40 page)

“Bo isn't his real name, is it?” I said. “It sounds like something you'd call a sheepdog.”

“It is short for Beauregard.”

I laughed. I hadn't known I had a laugh available. A vampire named Beauregard. It was too perfect. And he probably hadn't got it accidentally from his stepdad who ran a coffeehouse.

“How much time do we have?” I said. “Bo, I mean, not today's dawn.”

I was beginning to learn when he was thinking and when he was merely thinking about what to say to me, a bumptious human. This time he was thinking.

“I have been out of context since we last met,” he said. Yes, he said
context
. “I do not know. I will find out.”

“Same time, same place,” I murmured. “Not.”

“I do not understand.”

“We have to meet again, right?” I said. “And I have things to tell you too. I may have a—a kind of line on Bo myself.”

He nodded. I didn't know whether to be flattered or outraged. Maybe he thought he'd chosen his confederate well. Equal partners with a vampire: an exhilarating concept. Supposing you lived long enough to enjoy the buzz. But I guess “Hey, well done, congratulations, wow” weren't in common vampire usage. Maybe I could teach him that too, with “probably” and “not before next week.”

“I will come to you, if I may,” he said.

“You would rather I didn't come here again.” I hadn't meant to say that either, but it popped out.

A clear trace of surprise showed on his face for about a third of a second. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't been looking straight at him, but it was there. “You may come here if you wish. I …” He stopped. I could guess what he was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking. Wasn't thinking. “Come. I will give you a token.”

He slid easily through the gap in the impedimenta (sorry, this household brought out the worst in my vocabulary; it was like every bad novel and hyperbolic myth I'd ever read crowding round to haunt me in three dimensions) and made off into the dark. I had a sidelong peek at the overturned goblet as I passed it. My dark vision steadied if I kept it on Con's back, so I did, mostly, resisting the compelling desire to try to figure out what some of the more tortured blacknesses indicated by looking at them directly: hydras with interminable heads; Laocoön with several dozen sons and twice as many serpents; an infestation of triffids; the entire chariot race from
Ben-Hur:
all frozen in plaster or wood or stone. I hoped. Especially the triffids.

Con stopped at a cupboard. It had curlicues leaping out of its lid like a forest of satyrs' horns, and something—things—like satyrs themselves oiling down the edges. It
was
satyrs. Their hands were its handles. Ugh. Con, his own hand on one of the doors, glanced at me. “Why did the Cup distress you?”

I shrugged. How was I going to explain?

“My question is not an idle one,” he said. “I do not wish to distress you.”

Not till after we'd defeated Mr. Bo Jangles anyway. Oh, Sunshine, give a vampire a break. He probably thinks he's trying. “I'm not sure I can explain,” I said. “I'm not sure I can explain to
me
. And vampires aren't much into family ties, are they?”

“No,” he said.

I already knew vampires aren't great on irony.

“I … have got into this because of my inheritance on my father's side. I'm certainly alive to tell about it—so far—on account of that inheritance, right? But—” I looked into his face as I said this, and decided that the standard impassivity was at the soft, understanding end of the range, like marble is a little softer than adamant. “I'm a little twitchy about this bond thing with you, and the idea of—of—a kind of background to it—that your master had dealings with my dad's family—I don't like it.” I didn't want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad. “And the only training I've ever had, if you want to call it training, was a few hours changing flowers into feathers and back with my gran fifteen years ago, and I feel a little … well, exposed. Unready.” I could maybe have said, assailable.

“I see.” Con stared at the ugly door for a moment as if making up his mind, and then opened it. Inside were rows and rows of tiny drawers. I could feel the—well, it wasn't heat, and it wasn't a smell, and it wasn't tiny voices, but it was a little like all three together. There were dozens of things in those drawers and not an inert one in the lot. They were all yelling/secreting/radiating a kind of ME! ME! ME! like the jock kids in school when the coach is choosing teams. I wondered what the cupboard was made of. I didn't feel like touching it myself and seeing if it might tell me anything. I didn't like the grins on the faces of the satyrs.

Con opened a drawer and lifted out a thin chain. The other voices/ emissions subsided at once, some of them with a distinct grumble (or fart). The chain glimmered in the nonlight—the foxy-colored light of the fire didn't reach this far—it looked like opal, if there was a way to make flexible connecting loops out of opal. It was humming a kind of thin fey almost-tune; my mind, or my ear, kept trying to turn it into a melody, but it wouldn't quite go. Con poured it from one palm to the other—it looked fine as cobweb in his big hands—and then held it up again, spreading his fingers so that it hung in a near-circle. The almost-tune began to change. It would catch, like a tiny flaw tripping a recording, making it hesitate and skip; but each time it picked up again the tune had changed. It did this over and over as I listened, as Con held it up; and as I listened the strange, wavering nontune seemed to grow increasingly familiar, as if it were a noise like the purr of a refrigerator or the high faint whine of a TV with the sound turned off. Familiar: comfortable. Safe. I also felt, eerily, that the sound was becoming more familiar because it was somehow
trying
to become familiar: like the shape of a stranger at the other end of the street becomes your old friend so-and-so as it gets close enough for you to see their face and possibly that ratty old coat they should have thrown out years ago. This sibylline chain was
approaching
me … and dressing itself up as an old friend.

It knew its job. By the time it drifted off into silence I was reaching for it as if it belonged to me. Which maybe it did. Con dropped it over my hands and it seemed to stroke my skin as it slid down my fingers. I watched it gleaming for a moment—the gleam seemed to have a rhythm, like a heartbeat—and then I dropped it over my head. It disappeared under the collar of the black shirt, but I felt it lying against me, crossing the tips of the scar below my collarbones, resting in a curve over my heart.

“Thank you,” I said, falteringly. I knew a powerful piece of magic when I saw it and hung it round my neck, but I had never heard of anything quite like this …
convergence
; usually you had to make a terrific effort to match things up even a quarter so well as this. Of course what I didn't know about magic handling would fill libraries.

Also, “thank you” seemed about as pathetic a response to such a marvel as anyone could make.

“I thought it would be glad to go to you.”

“Er—didn't you—”

“No. My master was vexed when he discovered the necklet would not work for him nor any of our kind. This cupboard contains some of his other disappointments.”

“There was a bit of a clamor, when you opened the doors,” I said.

“Yes. These are human things, and they have seen no human since they were brought here.” Pause. “They do not love being idle. Some of them are very powerful. I can restrain them, even if I cannot use them. I would offer them to you, if …”

“If there was any indication I wouldn't make a total botch,” I interrupted, “which there isn't. To the contrary, if anything.” The question of the existence of my demon taint, never far from the front of my mind these days despite serious competition from vampires and immediate death, resurfaced long enough to register that the “human things” had responded to me as human. Well, if they were comparing me to Con I was a shoo-in. I didn't know how long they'd been here, but a good guess was long enough to make them desperate. I touched the chain with my finger, and half-thought, half-imagined I heard a faint—the faintest of faint—hums. If I was going to say I'd heard it, I'd say it was a happy hum. But I wasn't going to say I'd heard it.

“The Cup was my mistake.”

“Allow me to point out that it had been a rather tiring evening already,” I said testily, “before I met the damn …
cauldron
. And I wasn't exactly prepared. Nor was I exactly
introduced
. Even a master handler—which I am not—can be caught off guard.”

“The necklet will allow you to find your way back here,” said Con. “You may, if you wish, investigate these things further, having prepared yourself.”

I laughed a small dry croaking laugh. “That kind of preparation takes decades of apprenticeship. Ruthless, singleminded, hair-raising apprenticeship. It also requires someone to be apprenticed
to
, which in my case I have not got, besides being at least fifteen years too old to start.” And possibly calamitously partblood.

After a pause, Con said, “I too had to … invent much of my apprenticeship. A master with whom you cannot agree is sometimes worse than no master.”

Then why did you
stay
? I thought.

“There are few, I think, master handlers, who could have traveled the way you traveled this evening to come here, and lived.”

My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.

“If you will accept advice from me I would suggest you not come that way again, except in direst need.”

“Happy to promise that one,” I said. “But don't find yourself in direst need again either, okay? Or even plain old bland low-level semi-sub-dire need.”

“Ah. No,” said Con. “I will promise as well. To the extent it is within my mandate.”

He closed the cupboard. I thought, if I do get back here, for my first trick I'm going to transfer all that stuff out of that deeply repulsive cupboard, which I'm sure isn't making any of it rest any easier. Supposing I can find anything more suitable in this baroque funhouse.

“We must be on our way. Dawn is a bare hour away.”

“An
hour
?” I said. “You mean you're—this—is
that
close to—”

My dismay was hardly flattering, but Con answered with his usual detachment: “Not in human geography. But the fact that you are here at all—by the way you came—and the necklet you now wear—you will be able to walk some of my shorter ways.”

My heart sank. “You just told me not to use nowheresville again.”

Con said, “I cannot travel that road any more than I can walk under the sun. I do not take you that way.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well.”

I
DON
'
T KNOW
how we came out above ground again, out into the ordinary night, with a little ordinary breeze and a few ordinary bats swooshing about. Bats. How quaint. I noticed they did not come from where we had come from, however. Wherever that was. I don't seem to recall coming out, like from a tunnel; the wilder, intenser darkness of Con's earth-place merely thinned and crumbled, and eventually we were walking on rough grass and turf. With bats skating overhead. I was uncomfortably reminded of my perfunctory clothing when the breeze showed a tendency to billow up inside the long black shirt, but I was so grateful to be breathing fresh air—and because I desperately wanted to be
home
—when Con took my hand I didn't instantly jerk it away from him again. At least he didn't offer to carry me. Even though I was barefoot again. It occurred to me that I had a pattern of being inappropriately dressed during my associations with Con.

His shorter way was a little like stepping on stepping stones while the torrent foamed around your feet—in this case the torrent of that conventional reality I was so eager to return to—and threatening at any moment to surge over the edge and sweep you away. I almost certainly would have lost my balance without his hand: you had to look down to see where to put your feet, and reality careering past at Mach hundred and twelve is seriously dizzy-making, plus some of the stepping stones were dangerously slick, disconcertingly like ordinary stones in an ordinary stream, although I didn't want to think what they were slick with, nor what the equivalent of getting soaking wet might be if I fell off. It was less unnerving than the way I'd gone earlier tonight, as that way was less unnerving than where Aimil's cosmail had taken me, but it was still unnerving. Very.

I wondered if traveling through nowheresville was part of the
You will begin, now, I think, to read those lines of … power, governance, sorcery, as I can read them
, that Con had predicted a month ago. But he'd said
read
. If this was reading I didn't want to know about doing.

Then the stones seemed to get bigger and bigger and the torrent slowed and grew calm, and we were at the edge of Yolande's garden.

I didn't notice him leave. I don't remember his dropping my hand. But as I recognized the shape of the house in the near-light of mundane night under the open sky, I realized I was alone.

I remembered as I staggered up the porch steps, trying to avoid the creakiest ones, that I didn't have the key to my apartment. Again. At this rate I should start keeping a spare under a flowerpot for those nights I found myself doing something strange with Con while barefoot and unsuitably clothed. Maybe it was the necklet, but I put my hand over the keyhole and growled something, I don't know what, and
heard
the damn bolt click open. I also heard tiny ward voices chittering at me irritably, but they didn't try to stop me coming in. I rebolted the door tidily behind me.