Sunshine (41 page)

I didn't take his shirt off. I fell onto my bed and was asleep instantly.

I
HALF EXPECTED
to wake up and find myself lying in a little pile of ashes, when the black vampire shirt disintegrated under the touch of the sun's rays; I more than half expected to wake up having had a long, labyrinthine dream about Con with a background to match—labyrinthine, I mean. No again. (Although I remembered when I'd last woken up in my bed and hoped that what I remembered about something-strange-with-Con had only been an embarrassing dream. It hadn't been a dream that time either—and the things-that-weren't-dreams were by this showing getting
more
embarrassing. Speaking of patterns I wanted to break
soon
.) I did wake stiff as a plank from all my new scrapes and bruises, and with a crick in my neck so severe I wasn't sure I was ever going to get my face facing frontward again. I looked over my shoulder at the little heap of abandoned clothing in front of the still-open balcony door as I stumbled into the bathroom and started running hot water for a bath. I'd been here before too, only last time it was the other vampires that had knocked me around.

Be fair, I thought. I'm in a lot better shape than I was when I got home four and a half months ago.

I didn't feel like being fair.

For just a
moment
—for fewer than the ten seconds it had lasted when it happened—I remembered his mouth on mine, his naked body hot and sweating against mine—

No. I put my head under the tap and let the water blast all such thoughts away. My hair needed shampooing anyway.

The shirt, although it needed a wash, still looked pretty glamorous in daylight. Good quality material. Nice drape. Even if black wasn't my color. Although at the moment a lot of me was dark blue and purple, and it coordinated very well with that. I scowled at the mirror. My own fault for looking. The chain round my neck gleamed in daylight too. It looked more like gold this morning, but if I stirred it with a finger it had a queer iridescent quality not at all like real gold, not that I had much acquaintance with the stuff. I had always favored plastic and rhinestones.

I took the shirt off carefully and put it with the other laundry. Was it natural fibers, I wondered, did it need to be dry-cleaned? I had somehow neglected to ask Con about these crucial details. Borrowing shirts from ordinary guys wasn't this complicated. For one thing, ordinary-guy shirts usually had washing instruction tags in them. This one didn't have any tags.

I took my bath and wondered if I was going to make it in to the coffeehouse for the lunch shift.

I wasn't anything like as bad off as I had been last spring. I was just sulky. I only took one bath. By the time the water had cooled from scalding to merely hot I could almost turn my head again.

I left the rainbow chain round my neck during my bath. I didn't want to take it off somehow, and I doubted that bubble bath was going to tarnish it. What I did do was introduce it to my other talismans. I hadn't a clue how to clean up after last night's magic—none of the words my gran had taught me seemed at all suitable, I felt kind of put off candles and herbs, and I wasn't in a very
thank you
mood. But I knew I should be doing something. This was a compromise.

As a solemn rite it wasn't much: I was cross-legged on the very rucked-up sheets of my bed, and still dripping from the bath, wrapped in an assortment of towels. I had pulled my little knife from the pants pocket of the trousers on the floor, and took the mysterious seal out of the bed-table drawer. I smoothed a bit of pillow and laid them there. Then, gently, I lifted the chain off over my head, and dropped it down around them.

I don't know what I was expecting. It just seemed like the thing to do. Knife, meet necklace. Seal, meet necklace. Necklace, meet knife and seal. I suspect we are going into some kind of fracas together, and that you are my co-conspirators—you and that underground guy—and I want to make sure you're all on speaking terms with one another before I ask you to guard my back.

Or something.

It was too late in the year for direct sunlight to touch my pillow at that time of day. So I don't know what happened. But there was a flash like—well, like a ray of sunshine, but it was some ray: like a golden sword, like a Christian saint's vision of glory. It landed on my talismans with an almost audible
whump
, like the king's grip had slipped and he'd clobbered the knight on the shoulder instead of merely tapping gently and dubbing him Sir Thing.

And the pillow caught fire.

I sat there with steam suddenly boiling off my wet towels, my mouth open, staring. And my brain had gone on vacation without advance warning, because I
reached into the fire, closed my hands around my three talismans, gathered them together, and pulled them out of the fire
.

The fire went out. The pillow lay there, charred and smoking.

My hands felt a little hot. No big deal. When I opened my hands, there were three overlapping red marks on the palms: one long thin almost rectangular oval, for the knife, one smaller shorter fatter oval for the seal, and a scarlet curl over the ball of one thumb, a slightly ragged thread-width stripe, for the chain. None of the objects themselves now felt any more than human-body-temperature warm. None of them looked a trace different than they had a minute before. Before they had been set on fire by persons or forces unknown.

“Oh,” I said. My voice quavered. “Oh my.”

I
MADE IT
in for the lunch shift all right. I didn't want to stay home alone with myself. I hung the chain round my neck again, and put the knife and the seal in two separate pockets. I didn't feel like leaving anything in the bed-table drawer any more. We'd bonded or something—speaking of weird bonds. Our affiliation had been confirmed by setting one pillow on fire. I put the pillow in the trash and the sheets in the washing machine. My sheets had never been so clean as they'd been in the last few months. I hardly got them on again before something else happened and I was feverishly ripping them off and stuffing them in the wash with double amounts of soap and all the “extra” buttons pushed: extra wash, extra rinse, extra water, extra spin, extra protection against things that go bump in the night. Unfortunately I never could find that last button. Some day soon I'd buy another pillow and a new set of pillowcases.

Turned out once I was dressed in long sleeves and a high neck and jeans you didn't see the bruises much. There was one on my jawline that was going to be visible as soon as I tied my hair back and a gouge down my forearm that I decided I had to put a bandage on even if this made it look worse than it was. Couldn't be helped. You can't ooze in a public bakery any more than you can cook anything without rolling your sleeves up first. I'd worry what to tell Mel later.

Paulie was glad to see me. It had been a busy morning, but then it was always a busy morning. “We're full up with SOFs,” he said. I grunted. I'd seen them on the way in, glancing through the door to the front, having thoughtfully come in the side way for staff only (and hungry derelicts), just in case of things like SOFs. I put a clean apron on and tied my hair up at lightning speed (lightning bolt, golden sword, Mach hundred and twelve), threw a little flour in my face to camouflage the bruise on my jaw, and was up to my elbows in pastry by the time Pat had drifted apparently aimlessly into the bakery. I hadn't seen him on my way in; he'd been moving pretty fast himself if they'd called him over from HQ. “A word with you on your next break?” he said.

“I've only just got here,” I said, smudging flour and butter and confectioner's sugar together briskly.

“Whenever,” he said, loitering.

“It'll be a couple of hours,” I said quellingly. I could feel Paulie raising his eyebrows behind my back: Pat was usually a friend with privileges. That had been before I'd found out my loyalties were not merely divided, they had hacked me in two and were disappearing over the horizon in opposite directions.

“Whatever you say, ma'am,” he said, saluting, although not very convincingly. “I don't suppose there are any cinnamon rolls left?”

“No,” I said.

“Walnut sticky bun?” said Paulie. “Blueberry muffin, pumpkin muffin, orange, carrot and oat muffin, pear gingerbread, honeycake?”

“One of each,” said Pat, and disappeared.

Paulie hadn't been with us long enough yet to pretend to be impervious to the sincere flattery of people gorging themselves on the stuff you had made. He rubbed his face with a sugary hand to disguise the grin and went off to load up a plate and shout for Mary to take it out front.

I
WAS TEMPTED
not to admit when I went on break but I was having to do enough lying just plugging through my days—and nights—and didn't want to get too used to it. It was like I didn't want to forget the difference between daylight and nighttime: and both my funny eyes and my funny new life-and-undead style seemed to be prodding me relentlessly in that direction. Not funny.

My sunshine-self. My tree-self. My deer-self. Didn't we outnumber the dark self? My hands patted the two pockets that contained the knife and the seal, leaving two more smudges on my apron.

I took the apron off and washed my hands and made myself a cup of tea and went out front. Pat had either come back or was still there. Paulie's piled-up plate two and a half hours ago hadn't been enough; he was now eating Lemon Lust pastry bars and Killer Zebras. Any normal human ought to have a gut he'd have to carry around on a wheelbarrow, the way he ate. This had crossed my mind once or twice before, being many years acquainted with Pat's eating habits, but he was SOF, you know? So he got a lot of exercise and had a high metabolism rate. I wondered again what kind of demon he was. If he was a rubberfoot, which came in blue sometimes, he could walk up walls, for example, which must burn a
lot
of calories. I nodded to him and went out to sit on the wall of Mrs. Bialosky's flower bed. The sun was shining.

He followed me. “Listen to the news last night?” he said.

I was
making
it, I thought. I suppressed a shudder. “No.”

“One killed and three missing in No Town,” he said. “The one killed is confirmed sucker.”

“You can't be sure this soon that the other three are anything but missing,” I said. “Maybe they ran away.”

Pat looked at me.

“They may have run away from something else,” I said, “that had nothing to do with vampires.”

“The moon may be one of Sunshine's Killer Zebras, but I doubt it,” said Pat. “A lot of people saw these four hanging around together earlier in the evening.”

I didn't say anything.

“Four is a lot for one night, even in No Town.”

I still didn't say anything.

“We'd like you to come round this afternoon and have another stroll through a few cosmails,” said Pat.

“I don't get off till ten tonight.”

“We'll wait,” Pat said grimly. “There's one little snag—Aimil doesn't want to do it. She says you tried it on your own a few days ago and it took you away somewhere. She said she thought you'd died. Now, why would you want to try it on your own, I wonder?”

“Why do you think?” I said, looking at him steadily. The shadows on his face lay plain and clean. I slid a little further into my strange seeing. These shadows had a slightly rough or textured quality I was beginning to guess meant partblood—I'd seen it in Maud's face first, but Aimil had it too—and in Pat's case this not-quite-human aspect was distinctly blue. But the shadows said there was no deceit beyond the basic subterfuge of passing for pureblood human. Pat was who he said he was, and believed what he said he believed. “I want to find these guys too,” I said. “And SOF, begging your pardon, makes me nervous.”

Pat sighed and rubbed his head with his hand, making his short SOF-norm hair stand on end. “Look, kiddo, I know all the usual complaints about SOF and I agree with most of them.” He saw me looking at his hair and smiled a little. “So I don't happen to mind the hair and the uniform, that's not a crime, is it? But we can protect you better at SOF HQ than you can protect yourself anywhere else. What if what you were tracking had noticed you were searching for it the other day? You think you could have got back out fast enough for it not to follow you home? The fact that Aimil is still alive proves that it didn't notice. But I think that was dumb luck. Nobody has ever lived a long happy life depending on dumb luck, and depending on
any
kind of luck is as good as tearing your own throat out when you're messing with suckers. I don't care what extra powers you got, Sunshine.”

I swallowed. “Did you say all that to Aimil?”

“You bet I did, babe, and more besides. She is, after all, on our payroll and subject to our rules. You aren't. Yet, although I've thought about it. But SOF doesn't pay so good and generally we have to blackmail people like you and Aimil, to put it bluntly, not to mention figuring out what the
official
description of what we wanted you for would be. I could probably tie you up in a big knot of top-secret intelligence bureaucracy—we've got powers to compel ordinary citizens in certain circumstances, did you know that? And we could make these the right kind of circumstances, never fear—but it would take too long and I suspect it would make you ornery. We need you too badly to risk pissing you off, if we can get you any other way. By the way, you
were
planning on coming to us with anything you found on the other end of Aimil's cosmails, weren't you? You don't have any noble, suicidal plans to take these suckers on by yourself, do you? Tell me you are not that stupid.”

I said with perfect honesty, “I have no intention of trying to take these suckers on by myself, no.”

Pat looked at me with a slight frown. “Why doesn't that sound as reassuring as it should?”