Sunshine (5 page)

Then they were gone.

I
THINK
I must have fainted again. When I came to myself I was stiff all over, as if I had been lying on the floor for a long time. I both remembered and tried not to let myself quite remember what had happened. This lasted for maybe ten seconds. I was still alive, so I wasn't dead yet. If it wanted me awake and struggling, to continue to appear to be unconscious was a good idea. I lay facing the door the gang had left by; which meant that the cross-legged vampire was behind me.…
Don't think about it
.

I was up on my knees, halfway to my feet, and scrambling for the door before I finished thinking this, even though I knew you couldn't run away from a vampire. I had forgotten that I was chained to the wall. I hit the end of my chain and fell again. I cried out, as much from fear as pain. I lay sprawled where I struck, waiting for it to be over.

Nothing happened.

Again I thought,
Please, gods and angels, let it be over
.

Nothing happened.

Despairingly I sat up, hitched myself around to face what was behind me.

It was looking at me. He was looking at me.

The chandelier was set with candles, not electric bulbs, so the light it shed was softer and less definite. Even so he looked bad. His eyes
(no: don't look in their eyes)
were a kind of gray-green, like stagnant bog water, and his skin was the color of old mushrooms—the sort of mushrooms you find screwed up in a paper bag in the back of the fridge and try to decide if they're worth saving or if you should throw them out now and get it over with. His hair was black, but lank and dull. He would have been tall if he stood up. His shoulders were broad, and his hands and wrists, drooping over his knees, looked huge. He wore no shirt, and his feet, like mine, were bare. This seemed curiously indecent, that he should be half naked. I didn't like it.…Oh, right, I thought, good one. The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the track with the wrong kind of rope. There was a long angry weal across one of the vampire's forearms. Overall he looked … spidery. Predatory.
Alien
. Nothing human except that he was more or less the right shape.

He was
thin
, thin to emaciated, the cheekbones and ribs looking like they were about to split the old-mushroom skin. It didn't matter. The still-burning vitality in that body was visible even to my eyes. He would be fine again once he'd had dinner.

My teeth chattered. I pulled my knees up under my chin and wrapped my arms around them. We sat like this for several minutes, the vampire motionless, while I chattered and trembled and tried not to moan. Tried not to beg uselessly for my life. Watched him watching me. I didn't look into his eyes again. At first I looked at his left ear, but that was too close to those eyes—how could something the color of swamp water be that
compelling
?—so I looked at his bony left shoulder instead. I could still see him staring at me. Or feel him staring.

“Speak,” he said at last. “Remind me that you are a rational creature.” The words had long pauses between them, as if he found it difficult to speak, or as if he had to recall the words one at a time; and his voice was rough, as if some time recently he had damaged it by prolonged shouting. Perhaps he found it awkward to speak to his dinner. If he wasn't careful he'd go off me, like Alice after she'd been introduced to the pudding. I should be so lucky.

I flinched at the first sound of his voice, both because he had spoken at all, and also because his voice sounded as alien as the rest of him looked, as if the chest that produced it was made out of some strange material that did not reflect sound the same way that ordinary—that is to say, live—flesh did. His voice sounded much odder—eerier, direr—than the voices of the vampires who had brought me here. You could half-imagine that Bo's gang had once been human. You couldn't imagine that this one ever had.

As I flinched I squeaked—a kind of
unh
? First I thought rather deliriously about Alice and her pudding, and then the meaning of his words began to penetrate. Remind him I was a rational creature! I wasn't at all sure I still was one. I tried to pull my scattered wits together, come up with a topic other than Lewis Carroll.… “I—oh—they called you Connie,” I said at random, after I had been silent too long. “Is that your name?”

He made a noise like a cough or a growl, or something else I didn't have a name for, some vampire thing. “You know enough not to look in my eyes,” he said. “But you do not know not to ask me my name?” The words came closer together this time, and there was definitely a question mark at the end. He was
asking
me.

“Oh—no—oh—I don't know—I don't know that much about vam—er,” I gabbled, remembering halfway through the word he had not himself used the word
vampire
. He'd said “me” and “my.” Perhaps you didn't say
vampire
like you didn't ask one's name. I tried to think of everything Pat and Jesse and the others had told me over the years, and considered the likelihood that the SOF view of vampires was probably rather different from the vampires' own view and of limited use to me now. And that having
Immortal Death
very nearly memorized was no use at all. “Pardon me,” I said, with as much dignity as I could pretend to, which wasn't much. “I—er—what would you like me to talk about?”

There was another of his pauses, and then he said, “Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power—even human names. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.”

My mouth dropped open. “Tell you—” Who am I, Scheherazade? I felt a sudden hysterical rush of outrage. It was bad enough that I was going to be eaten (or rather, drunk—my mind would revert to Alice), but I had to
talk
first? “I—I am the baker at Charlie's Coffeehouse, in town. Charlie married my mom when I was ten, just before the—er.” I managed not to say “before the Voodoo Wars,” which I thought might be a sensitive subject. “They have two sons, Kenny and Billy. They're nice kids.” Well, Billy was still a nice kid. Kenny was a teenager. Oh, hell. I wasn't supposed to be using names. Oh, too bad. There are more than one Charlie and Kenny and Billy in the world. “We all work at the coffeehouse although my brothers are still in school. My boyfriend works there too. He rules the kitchen now that Charlie has kind of become the maitre d' and the wine steward, if you want to talk about a coffeehouse having a maitre d' and a wine steward.” Okay, I thought, I remembered not to say Mel's name.

But it was hard to remember what my life was. It seemed a very long time ago, all of it, now, tonight, chained to a wall in a deserted ballroom on the far side of the lake, talking to a vampire. “I live in an apartment across town from the coffeehouse, upstairs from Y—from the old lady who owns the house. I love it there, there are all these trees, but my windows get a lot of—er.” This time what I wasn't saying was “sunlight,” which I thought might also be a touchy topic. “I've always liked fooling around in the kitchen. One of my first memories is holding a wooden spoon and crying till my mom let me stir something. Before she married Charlie, my mom used to tease me, say I was going to grow up to be a cook, other kids played softball and joined the drama club, all I ever did was hang around the coffeehouse kitchen, so, she said, she might as well marry one, a cook, since he kept asking—Charlie kept asking—she said she was finally saying yes, because she wanted to make it easy for me. That was our joke. She met him by working for him. She was a waitress. She likes feeding people—like Charlie and me and M—like Charlie and me and the cook. She thinks the answer to just about everything is a good nourishing meal, but she doesn't much like cooking, and now she mostly manages the rest of us, works out the schedule so everyone gets enough hours and nobody gets too many very often, which is sort of the Olympic triathalon version of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time, only she has to do it every week, and she also does the books and the ordering. Um. It's just as well she's back there because a lot of people don't come to us for nourishing meals, they come for a slab of something chocolate and a glass of champagne, or M—er, or our all-day breakfast which is eggs and bacon and sausages and baked beans and pancakes and hash browns and toast, and a cinnamon roll till they run out, which they usually do by about nine, but there are muffins all day, and then a free wheelbarrow ride to the bus stop after. Er. That's a joke. A wheelbarrow ride over our cobblestones would be no favor anyway.

“I have to get up at four
A.M.
to start the cinnamon rolls—cinnamon rolls as big as your head, it's a Charlie's specialty—but I don't mind. I love working with yeast and flour and sugar and I love the smell of bread baking. M—I mean, my boyfriend, says he wanted to ask me out because he saw me the first time when I was up to my elbows in bread dough and covered with flour. He says that for most guys it's supposed to be great legs or a girl being a great dancer—I can't dance at all—or at least a good personality or something high-minded like that, but for him it was definitely watching me thump into that bread dough.…”

I hadn't realized I'd started crying. My long-ago, lost life. The tears were running—pouring—down my cheeks.

And suddenly the vampire moved toward me. I froze, thinking,
Oh no
, and
at last
, and
okay, at least my last thoughts are about everybody at the coffeehouse
, but all he did was hold one of his big hands under my chin, so the tears would fall into his palm. I cried now from fear and anticipation as well as loss and sorrow, and my tears had made quite a little pool before I stopped. I stopped because I was too tired to go on, and my whole head felt
squashy
. I suppose I should have been flipping out. He was
right next to me
. He hadn't moved again. When I stopped crying he lowered his hand and said calmly, “May I have your tears?” I nodded, bemused, and, very precisely and carefully, he touched my face with the forefinger of his other hand, wiping up the last drips. I was so braced for worse I barely noticed that this time a vampire really had touched me.

He moved back against the wall before he licked the wet finger and then drank the little palmful of salt water. I didn't mean to stare but I couldn't help it.

He wouldn't have had to say anything. Maybe he'd liked the story of my life. “Tears,” he said. “Not as good as …” a really
ugly
ominous pause here“…but better than nothing.”

“Oh, gods,” I said, and buried my face in my knees once more. I had begun to shiver again too. I was exhausted past exhaustion, and I was also, it occurred to me, hungry and thirsty. And, of course, still waiting to die. Gruesomely.

I couldn't bear not to keep an eye on him for long, however, and I raised my now sticky face from my knees soon enough. I wiped my face on a corner of my ridiculous dress. I hadn't really noticed what I was wearing—there had been other things on my mind since I had been obliged to put it on—in other circumstances I would have found it very beautiful, but an absurd thing for a coffeehouse baker to be wearing, even a coffeehouse baker in a ballroom with a ball going on in it. If I were attending a ball I would be there as one of the caterers, I certainly wouldn't be there for the dancing.… I'm raving, I thought. The dress was a dark cranberry red. Heart's-blood red, I thought. It was put together slyly, in panels cut on the bias, so it clung to me round the top and swung out into what felt like yards of skirt at the hem. It draped over my awkward knees in drifts like something out of a Renaissance painting. I supposed it was silk; I hadn't had a lot of close-up experience with silk. It was soft like a clean baby's skin. I knew quite a lot about babies, clean and otherwise.

I glanced at him—at his left shoulder. He was still watching me. I let my gaze drift down, over his ragged black trousers, to his bare feet. He too had a shackle around one ankle.…

What
?

He was shackled and pinned to the wall just as I was.

He must have seen me working it out. “Yes,” he said.

“Wh-why?”

“No honor among thieves, you are thinking? Indeed. Bo and I are old enemies.”

“But—” The reason for the wasteland around the house was suddenly apparent. No shelter from daylight except inside the house. Whoever it was—Bo—thought the shackle itself might not be enough. The chain that held him was many times heavier than mine, and both the shackle and—I could see it, now that I was looking—the plate in the wall that held the ring were stamped with … well, to start with, with the old, most basic ward symbol: a cross and a six-pointed star inside a circle. The standard warding against inhuman harm that ten percent of parents still had tattooed over their babies' hearts at birth, or so the current statistics said. It was illegal to tattoo a minor, because of the possible side effects, and you nearly had to have a dispensation from a god to be granted a license for a home birth since the Wars because the government assumed that the opportunity for an illegal tattoo was the only reason anyone would want a home birth. Warding tattoos didn't happen in hospitals. Theoretically. Jesse and Pat said that no fiddling tattoo would stop a vampire, but the real reason for its being illegal is that the stiff fines levied against parents who had it done anyway was a nice little annual nest egg for the government.

There was some evidence that a tempered metal ward spelled by an accredited wardsmith and worn next to the skin would discourage a vampire that unexpectedly came in contact with it, long enough for you to make a run for it—maybe. The problem with that scenario is as I said, most suckers run in packs. One of the friends of the one that let go of you would grab you, and the second one would know where not to grab.