Sunshine (58 page)

Especially when it meant bearing the knowledge of what I'd done. And that going on doing it would mean bearing more of doing and more of knowing.

But Pat had said we had less than a hundred years left. Us humans. No, not us
humans
. Us-on-the-right-side. And there aren't enough of us.

Okay, here's the irony: if I went on with this heavy magic-handling shtick I was likely to be around in a hundred years.

I pulled the plug and started toweling myself dry. I rubbed violently at my hair like I was trying to friction-burn undesirable thoughts out of my head. I washed and dried my little knife tenderly, however, and put it back in my fresh, clean, dry pocket. I was dressed in the first thing out of the top cupboard in the bathroom, where all my oldest, rattiest clothes lived. Then I started another bath and called Con.

I found a one-size-fits-all kimono in the back of my closet that Con could get into, or rather that would go round him; at least it was black. I could give him the shirt in the back of my closet but it wouldn't be long enough on him.

Right. I was clean. Con had something to wear. On to the next thing. Food. I didn't have to think any more long-view thoughts yet. I still had small immediate things to organize myself around.

I was frying eggs when he came out, looking very exotic in the kimono. I stood there holding a skillet with three beautifully fried eggs in it and said miserably, “I can't even feed you.” How I'd organized my entire life: feeding other people. I heard what I was saying—or what I was saying it to—a moment after the words came out, but his gaze did not waver.

“I do not eat often. I do not need food.”

I shook my head. I'd narrowly avoided mental breakdown as a result of facing ancient all-consuming evil, and now I was about to lose it over giving a vampire breakfast. I felt tears pricking at my eyes. This was ridiculous. “I can't eat in front of you. It's so … I feed people for a
living
. If I don't do it I'm a failure. I
identify
as a feeder of …”

“People,” said Con. “I am not a person.”

I'd just been having this conversation with myself in the bathroom. “Yes you are,” I said. “You're just not, you know, human.”

“Your food grows cold,” said Con. “It is better hot, yes?”

I shook my head mutinously. He was right, though, it was a pity to ruin such ravishing eggs.

“I will drink with you,” said Con.

“Orange juice?” I said hopefully. It had to have calories in it. Water didn't count.

“Very well. Orange juice.”

I moved three white roses out of one of my nice glasses, gave it a quick wash, and poured orange juice in it. It was one of the tall ones with gold flecks. Silly thing to drink juice out of. I didn't see him drink—it occurred to me I hadn't seen him drink his tea in the goddess' office either—but nearly half a gallon of orange juice disappeared while I ate my eggs and two toasted muffins and a scone. (What a good thing that it hadn't occurred to me to empty my refrigerator before I died.) Did that mean he liked it, or was this his demanding standard of courtesy again?

“What does it taste like?” I asked.

“It tastes like orange juice,” he said, at his most enigmatic.

How was I planning on defining us-on-the-right-side, anyway? Con had been on the right side as compared to Bo. Con was still a vampire. He still …

I did the dishes in silence while Con sat in his chair. The kimono made him look very zen, sitting still doing nothing. I'd seen it first at the lake, that capacity for sitting still doing nothing with perfect grace: although that wasn't how I'd thought of it when we were chained to the wall together. And it was interesting that he retained it when he wasn't under the prospect of immediate elimination with no way out, which might be expected to focus the mind. If it didn't blow it to smithereens.

I did the dishes slowly. We'd done washing and eating. There wasn't anything to come except to figure out sleeping arrangements. Con had acknowledged that vampires did something like sleep during the day. And my body had to have sleep soon or I was going to fall down where I stood. But my mind couldn't deal with it. I'd tried to convince myself to haul some laundry downstairs but I couldn't face the effort:
stairs:
the assault on Everest, and where were my Sherpas? I rescued Con's trousers from where he had rinsed and wrung them out and draped them over the towel rack (you don't think of vampires in domestic-chore terms, but I suppose even vampires have to come to some arrangement about getting their clothes washed), and hung them on the balcony for the sun and wind to dry them; at least they were still trousers, if a trifle ravaged by events, which was more than could be said for the remains of his shirt. I scuffled around in my closet again—at some peril to life and limb, since my com gear tended increasingly to get left in there—and pulled the spare shirt out, and left it on the closet doorknob.

Every utensil was scoured within an inch of its life and dried and put away too soon.

Sleep. No way.

At least, being this tired, and still half-watching my hands for renegade moves, I wasn't interested in—or maybe I should say I wasn't capable of brooding about—what else might happen in a bed-type situation. Or could happen. Or wasn't going to happen.

I was capable of brooding about being afraid to be alone. Afraid to sleep.

“You'll have to have the bed,” I said. “There are no curtains for the balcony, and the sun gets pretty much all round the living room over the course of the day. I'll sleep on the sofa.”

He was silent for a moment, and I thought he might argue. I'm not sure I wasn't waiting hopefully for an argument. But all he said finally was, “Very well.”

O
F COURSE
I couldn't sleep. I would have liked to pretend—even to try to pretend—that it was because I wasn't used to sleeping during the day, but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago “something or other or die” had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.

Sleep was no friend today. Every time my heavy, aching eyes closed, some scene from the night before shot onto my private inner-eye movie screen, and I prized them open again and lay, dismally, in the soft golden sunlight of early autumn, surrounded by the smell of roses.

I don't know how long I lay there. I turned on my side so I could watch the sunlight lengthen across the tawny floor as the sun rose higher, as the light reached out to pat my piles of books, embrace the desk, stroke the sofa, draw its fingers tenderly across my face. I was comfortable, and safe: safer than I'd been since before the night I drove out to the lake, and met Con. Bo was gone, Bo and Bo's gang. But I couldn't take it in. Or I couldn't take it in without … taking in everything it had involved. We'd done it, Con and I. We'd done what we set out to do, and, furthermore, what we'd known, going in, we wouldn't be able to do. Or I had known we wouldn't be able to do it. What I hadn't known was that I'd been
counting
on not being able to do it. And I'd been wrong. We'd
done
it.
Done
is a very thumping sort of word. I felt like I was hitting myself with a club.

I didn't feel safe. I felt as if I was still waiting for something awful to happen. No. I felt as if the thing I most dreaded had arrived, and it wasn't death after all. It was me.
I'm afraid of you. I'm afraid of me
.

As little as three months ago I'd thought that finding out I might be a partblood, and might as a result go permanently round the twist once the demon gene met up properly with the magic-handling gene, was the worst thing that could happen. It was the worst thing I could imagine. I'd pulled the little paper protector of disuse off the baking-soda packet of my father's heritage and dropped it into the vinegar of my mother's. The resultant fizz and seethe, I'd believed, was going to blow the top of my head off. Now those fears seemed about as powerful as the kitchen bomb every kid has to make once or twice to fire popcorn at her friends. I felt as if mere ordinary madness would have been a reprieve. I'd known about the bad odds against partbloods with human magic-handling in their background. I hadn't known anything about Bo. About what a thing like Bo could be.

Black humor alert. And I still didn't know if my genes
were
getting ready to blow the top of my head off. Although it seemed to me they'd had the best opportunity any bad-gene act could possibly have wanted, and had let it pass them by.

I wrapped the blanket closer around me and stood up and went into the bedroom. I'd drawn the curtains tightly together and the bed was in heavy shadow and I wasn't paying attention, so it took me a moment to realize he wasn't in it.

He couldn't have
left
. It was
daylight
out there. Panic rose up in me. I would have guaranteed I didn't have the energy for panic. One more thing to be wrong about. And what was I panicking about anyway? Being left alone with myself? I'd rather have a vampire around?

Well. Yes.

I didn't have time to finish panicking. He stood up—or more like unfolded, like a particularly well-jointed extending ladder or something:
stood up
doesn't really describe it—from the far side of the bed. “What are you doing on the
floor?”

He just looked at me, and I remembered the room I had once found him in. The room that wasn't his master's. At least he was still wearing the kimono.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I can't sleep.”

“Nor I,” he said.

“So you do sleep,” I said. “I mean, vampires sleep.”

“We rest. We become … differently conscious than when we are … awake. I am not sure it is what you would call sleep.”

No, and orange juice probably doesn't taste like orange juice to you either, I thought.

I couldn't sleep, but I was too tired to stand up. I sat down on the bed. “I—we did it, you know?” I said. “But I don't feel like we did it. I feel like we failed. I feel like everything is worse now than it was before. Or that I am.”

He was still standing. “Yes,” he said.

“Does it feel like that to you too?”

He turned his head as if he was looking out the window. Maybe he was. If I could see in the dark, maybe a vampire could see through curtains. Maybe it was something you learned to do after the first hundred years or so. One of those mysterious powers old vampires develop. “I do not think in terms of better and worse.”

He paused so long I thought he wasn't going to say any more. It's probably an occupational hazard, becoming a fatalist, if you're a vampire.

But he went on finally. “What happened last night has changed us. Yes. Inevitably. You have lived—what? One quarter of one century? I have existed many times that. Experience is less to me than it is to you, for I have endured much more of it. And yet last night troubles me too. I can—a little—guess how much more it must trouble you.”

I looked down, partly so he couldn't read anything in my eyes, although he probably already had. Maybe that was why he had been looking through the curtains. Vampire courtesy. Previously observed.

Troubled, I thought. Okay.

“Sunshine,” he said. “You are not
worse
.”

I looked up at him, remembered what I saw him do. Remembered what I had seen myself do. Remembered Bo.

Tried to remember that we were the victors.

Failed. If this was victory.…

I was so tired.

“I will do anything it is in my power to do for you,” he said. “Command me.”

A vampire, standing on the far side of my bed, wearing my kimono, telling me he'd do anything I asked. Steady, Sunshine.

I sighed. I wasn't up to it. “I don't want to feel alone,” I said. “Lie down on the bed and let me lie down beside you, and put your arms around me. I know you can't do anything about the heartbeat, but I know you can breathe like a human if you want to, so will you please?”

I looked at his face in the shadows—the shadows that lay motionless and fathomless across it—but it was expressionless, of course. He lay down, and I lay down, and he put his arms around me. (Note: do vampire limbs get pins and needles?) And breathed like a human. More or less. It was a little hard to ignore the lack of heartbeat that close—no, you may not
think
you're aware of a pulse in the body lying next to you, barring your actual head on an actual chest, but, trust me, you are—but he was the right temperature and that helped. And somehow the solidity of him, the fact that my open eyes could see nothing but his throat above the folds of the kimono and his jaw above that, felt strangely as if he was protecting me, as if he could protect me from what I had brought back with me, had roused to consciousness within me, the previous night. I curled my deceitful hands under my chin. And I found myself falling asleep after all.

I dreamed, of course. Again Con and I were in Bo's lair, and there were vampires coming at us from all directions, flame-eyed, deadly, horrible. Again I saw Con do the things I would rather not have seen anyone do; again I did things myself I would rather not have done nor know that I had done. It does not matter if it is them or us, after a certain point. It does not matter. There are some things you cannot live with: with having done. Even to survive.

Again my hands touched Bo's chest. Plunged within it. Grasped his heart, and tore it free. Watched it burn. Watched it deliquesce.

And again.

And again.

I felt the poison of that contact sinking through my skin. It did not matter if it was
only
the poison of evil, the poison of an idea: it was corruption, and it corrupted me. I felt the fire of the golden web rise up in me: through me: and lift away.