Sunshine (47 page)

“You look like a man who needs caffeine,” I said. “I'll grab us something from the counter and meet you outside. Do you want privacy or comfort?” Comfort meant the nice little tables out front, overlooking the square and Mrs. Bialosky's flower bed, still doing its stuff with chrysanthemums and asters this late in the year.

“Privacy,” he said.

He was sitting at one of the unsteady tables in the grim little courtyard behind the coffeehouse that by never doing anything with we could continue to avoid opening to customers. You got used to the roar of the kitchen fans and Mom had a couple of tough little evergreen shrubs in pots that could survive the cooking fumes. Pat and I didn't talk about anything much after all. He drank the coffee and engulfed the various buns and other edible objects I'd brought, but absentmindedly, like a refueling procedure. The fact that he didn't argue with me about trying again, about trying to find out the extent of the burnout—about whether or not there really was a burnout—made me feel more guilty.

Silence fell. Pat stared into nothing. “I'm sorry,” I said.

He looked at me. “I believe you,” he said. He stood up. “I'm not sure I believe the rest of it, but I believe you're sorry about it.” He paused. “Makes my life easier in some ways.” Another gleam of the normal Pat as he said: “Maybe by the time you've decided you're not burned out any more the goddess will have found someone else to crucify.”

I didn't say anything. He rubbed both hands through his hair this time, and added, “I didn't say this. But watch your back, Sunshine.” Then he left.

M
EL WANDERED OUT
a few minutes after Pat had left. I was staring into my teacup. I'd forgotten to bring a sieve out, so there were tea leaves in the bottom of it, but I couldn't read them. “You look like a woman who needs a good laugh,” he said. “Have you heard the one about the were-pigeon and the streetcleaner?”

“Yes,” I said. “Mel, d'you suppose
anyone
is exactly who they say they are?”

“Charlie, maybe,” he answered, after a little pause, of surprise or consideration. “Can't think of anyone else. Hmm.” I watched his hand lift off the table and rub one of his tattoos.

Maybe I should have been thinking about tattoos myself, but there's a real big drawback to them. Any charm can be turned against you, if you run into the thing it's supposed to be protecting you from, and the thing is enough stronger than the protection. A powerful enough demon adept or magic handler can overwhelm one too, although that's serious feud stuff and not common. A tattoo feeds itself on
you
, so tattoos do tend to be a lot more stable and longer-lived than the ordinary charms you set around and hang up, including the ones you wear next to your skin; but a charm that isn't living off you can be destroyed a lot more easily if it does go—or is sent—rogue. A rogue tattoo can eat you up. It happens occasionally. Before five months ago I didn't figure I needed any heavy warding. Now that I did, tattoos were the last thing I was going to try.

“Charlie,” I said. “I can't think of anyone else either.” Not Mel. Not me.

“Not Mrs. B,” said Mel, smiling. “Sunshine, I don't like metaphysics unless I'm drunk, it's only three-thirty in the afternoon, and I'm working tonight. What's up?”

If Mel had really been trying to pass as a motorcycle hoodlum, his tattoos wouldn't be as beautiful or as elaborate. Lots of sorcerers go in for a superabundance of tattoos, but they mostly keep them hidden—they're harder to rogue that way. Hence the long enveloping robe and deep hood technique with inked-up sorcerers when they're actually handling magic. (For day-to-day, walking-the-dog, doing-the-shopping use, a lot of sorcerers disguise the real shape of their tattoos with cosmetics. Long sleeves and high collars are
hot
in the summer—and there are favorite sorcerer tattoos that go on your lips and cheeks and forehead too. But—I love this—magic can apparently be a bit perfunctory about certain things in the heat of a transaction. Any tattoo a sorcerer wants
working
while he or she handles magic can't be distorted with face paint or pancake foundation because it may turn out to be the
apparent
figure that performs. Or doesn't.)

My dad didn't have any tattoos. That I remembered. But I didn't remember my dad very well, and not all sorcerers have tattoos.

But sorcerers are sorcerers. Tattooists mostly make their livings punching charms in leather, not live skin, and they'll try to talk an ordinary member of the public out of it if you already have, say, three magic-bearing tattoos, even little boring ones, and they'll tell you why. In vivid detail. It isn't just the rogue possibility: a lot of magic-bearing tattoos can sort of
unbalance
you. You start not being quite sure where the real-world lines are with a lot of tattoos whispering in your dreams. Of course having lots of magic-bearing tattoos is one way of saying you're a tough guy—first because the implication is that you need all that charm and ward power, and second because you're hardy enough to bear the drain and the disorientation.

But there are better ways of showing you are a tough guy than having lots of tattoos, partly because no tattooist who wants to keep his or her license is likely to cooperate, and the ones who don't have licenses are too likely to make a mess of it. There is only one small secondary quarter-circle's difference between a ward against drunkenness and another one against eyestrain, for example, and the latter won't get you home safely with a load on. And that's one of the common, simple wards, and most of Mel's tattoos weren't common or simple. But they were magic bearers, not ornamental. You could smell it, like ozone when a storm is coming. And besides, nobody who had
any
pretensions to hanging out with a biker gang would dare have ornamental tattoos. Ornies are for wusses.

Mel couldn't be a sorcerer—sorcery isn't something you can successfully hide for long—but he did have a lot of tattoos. It was typical of him too that when he had come to talk to Charlie about a job the first time he had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows and his shirt open at the neck, in spite of the fact that it was January and
freezing
. Although maybe he just had a good take on Charlie, who in his affable, openhearted way, enjoys Charlie's reputation as a place slightly on the edge.

I said, “Mel, who are you?”

Mel picked up both my hands and kissed them. His lips were warm. When he laid them back on the table he didn't let go. I watched the sunlight twinkle among the fine hairs on the backs of his hands, and the red and gold and black of the tattoos there. Both the hairs and the tattoos had an unusually bright red edge, as if there was firelight on them. Or in them. His hands were warm too. Human temperature. The temperature of the fire of human life. Speaking of metaphysics. “I'm your friend, Sunshine,” he said. “Everything else is just static on the line.”

I wondered if he'd heard what Pat had said. I wondered who had done his tattoos. Maybe what I thought I knew about magic-bearing tattoos was from the same script as the disquisition about how masturbating will make you blind and a cretin. (Even 'ubis don't damage your sight.) Maybe I should ask him. But then I'd have to tell him why I wanted to know.

Even if you could successfully hide being a sorcerer, Mel still couldn't be one. Sorcerers are loners—they don't do things like get jobs as cooks in coffeehouses, or jive with their old motorcycle gang—occasionally they hang with other sorcerers, but usually for some specific and time-limited purpose. Sorcerers are too paranoid to have ordinary human friends and too competitive to have sorcerer friends. The street version about sorcerers is that they are basically not to be trusted: humans aren't meant to be that mixed up with magic. Not even magic-handling humans.

Where did
sorcerers
get their tattoos?

Maybe I didn't know anything any more.

I
DROVE HOME
thinking about that
Watch your back
. I was already watching my back, and Pat knew it. Was he warning me to watch my back against
SOF
? Was a loyal—if partblood—member of SOF warning me that SOF itself was not to be trusted? Okay, lately I'd heard about partbloods needing to stick together for mutual defense, and I'd heard a long time ago about the goddess of pain, and I knew none of our SOFs liked her; but I thought—I assumed—this was only because she was a hardass bitch who was more concerned with her own career path than with making humanity safe from the Others. Was Pat suggesting something more ominous? And if he was, was he suggesting it about one overambitious gorgon with skewed priorities, or about a treacherous vein, you should forgive the term, running through all of SOF?

Gods and angels, wasn't Bo
enough
?

At a stoplight I flipped open the glove compartment and looked at the clutter. A few of the charms twitched. Poor Mom. At least she was trying. I realized that I was grateful for the useless tangle, even if it was useless. Because she was doing
something
. She hadn't averted her eyes from the fact that I needed help. She merely had no clue how much help, or what kind. Only Con really knew, only he didn't know, because he wasn't human, so he didn't know what he knew. Or something.

When I got home I sat staring at the shadows the leaves from the trees threw on the driveway. They glinted and did strange things with perspective like all shadows did now, but they were beautiful and they didn't mean anything. They were what happened when light fell on leaves. It wasn't late summer any more; it was autumn, and the leaves were beginning to turn. A pale yellow one like a big flat blanched almond skittered across the hood of the Wreck.

I opened my knapsack and swept the thatch of charms into it, including one spark plug, quite a lot of string, and a few rubber bands, from back in the days when the glove compartment performed the usual function. I was pretty sure I felt a tiny penetrating buzz when my skin connected with one of the charms, but I had no idea which one. Then I went and knocked on Yolande's front door.

She opened it almost at once. “Come in,” she said. “I have spoken to my old master.”

I sighed. I followed her in. She took me to a room I had not been in before, next to the kitchen, also overlooking the garden. I knew at once that not many people came here—first because if she wished no one to know that she had been a wardskeeper, or at least to believe she was a retired wardskeeper, this room would give the show away; second because the
privateness
of it radiated from everything in it, like heat or light. I brushed one hand across my face, as if it was a veil I had difficulty breathing through.

She noticed this and said, “Oh! Pardon,” and lifted something down from over the door we'd come in. The sense of private space invaded lessened—sank—like water. I looked down, bemused. The shadows on the floor were very active.

She laid the thing she had moved down on the desk. I sat in the chair in front of it, I leaned forward, held a hand over it:
something
beat at my palm. It wasn't heat any more than my dark vision had to do with my eyes, but it was perhaps related to heat, and it manifested itself a bit like heat against the skin. I moved my hand and looked at the thing. It was a tiny round piece of what looked like stained glass. I could see the leading of it, but I could not see if the fragments made up a picture, or if any of the bits were painted. The shadows swam in it very strangely.

Wardskeeper. It sounded so … solid. Even if you blew up the occasional workshop, at least you knew you were in training, and for what. Your master told you what to do, what to do next.

Yolande, watching my face, said, “I'm sorry, my dear. I know this is one of the last things you want to hear, but I think you are in over your head in exactly what you are best suited to be in over your head in—my grammar grows confused—and you are doing very well.”

She was getting almost as bad as Con. What happened to random chat? I wanted to say, “All I wanted was to bake cinnamon rolls for the rest of my life,” but I knew it wasn't true, and besides, I was tired of whining. So I didn't say it. I picked up my knapsack, out of the seething not-wetness still roaming about the floor, and set it on her desk. As I lifted it I had felt the charm-thatch inside it
scrambling
to stay away from the not-wetness; as I set it down, it seemed to be trying to escape contact with the top of the desk. Well, I thought, I guess at least one of them is live.

Her eyes widened, and then she frowned. “Lift it up again, if you would,” she said. I did, and she took something out of a drawer, and spread it out, and then gestured for me to put the knapsack on it. I did. Whatever was going on subsided.

“What have you brought me to look at?” she said.

I opened the knapsack, but had a sudden reluctance to touch the charms. “Wait,” she said, and brought something else out of another drawer: a pair of wooden tongs. They had symbols scrawled up their flat sides. I groped around, grasped an end of the tangle, and hauled it out. It seemed to have half-unraveled itself: it came out looking like crochet gone very, very wrong. As it came free of the knapsack one end snaked around as if seeking something, and then began climbing up one arm of the tongs. Toward my hand.

“Drop it
,” said Yolande sharply. I dropped. It landed on the desk; there was a hiss and a bad smell—a
really
bad smell—and then there was a forlorn little heap of bad crochet work (plus one spark plug) with a torn-out hole in it, edged by a purply brown stain. The stain writhed.

“Ugh,” I said.

“Ugh indeed,” Yolande said mildly. “That was no ward; that was a fetch. Where was it?”

“In the W—in my car,” I said.

“Do you keep your car locked?”

“Not here,” I said, cold needling up my spine.