Sunshine (11 page)

“A Blaise,” he said. “Bo's lot brought me a
Blaise
. And not just a third cousin who can do card tricks and maybe write a ward sign that almost works, but Onyx Blaise's daughter.” He stopped laughing. Then I decided maybe silence was worse after all, at least when it followed that laughter.

“Your father didn't educate you very well. If I had killed you and had your blood, the blood of Onyx Blaise's daughter, the blood of someone who can do what you just did, I could have snapped that shackle as if the steel were paper and the marks on it no more than a—a recipe for cinnamon rolls, and taken the odds against me with Bo's gang, even after the weeks I've been here, even against all the others you haven't seen, silent in the woods, watching.
And I would have won
. That's what the blood of someone from one of the families can do, and a Blaise.… The effect doesn't last—a week at the most—but a lot can be done in a few nights.” He sounded almost dreamy. “On Onyx Blaise's daughter's blood I could get rid of Bo for good. I still could. All I would have to do is keep you here one more day, and wait till sunset. I'm weak and sick and I see double in this damned daylight, but I'm still stronger than a human. All I would have to do is keep you here.…” His voice trailed off.

I didn't move. There was a small wispy thought in the back of my mind. It seemed to be something like: oh, well. A little closer to consciousness there was a slightly more definite thought, and it said, well, we've been here before, several times, in the last couple of days. We're either going to lose for good now, or we aren't.

I sat very still, as if I were trying to discourage a cobra from striking.

More minutes of sunlight streamed past us toward nightfall.

At last he said: “But I am not going to. I suppose I am not going to for some reason similar to whatever insane reason has made you decide to free me and take me with you. What happens when your power comes to its end, in five minutes or five hours? Well, I know that the fire is swift.”

I moved. Slowly. Distracted, in spite of everything, by that
I know
. Not
I believe
or
I guess
but
I know
. Something else not to think about. I continued to move very slowly. Took my hands off the empty shackle. Slid the key into my bra again. It could stay a shackle key for now.

I was not, perhaps, fully convinced that the cobra had lowered its hood. I felt his eyes on me again.

“I did warn you that names have power,” he said. “Even human names, although this was not what I was thinking of when I said it.”

“I'll remember not to tell any vampires my father's name in the future,” I said. I glanced out the window. We'd lost about half an hour since I'd made the key. I shivered. My glance fell on my corner; the sack looked plumper than it had when I last looked—before Bo's gang had come the second time. More supplies, presumably. I would need feeding to get me through this day, although I didn't at all feel like eating now, and neither of us had pockets to carry anything in. I went over to the sack and picked it up. Another loaf of bread, another bottle of water, and something heavy in a plastic bag. I pulled the heavy thing out … heavy and
squishy
. A big lump of red, bleeding meat.

I gave a squeak and dropped it on the floor, where it obligingly went
splat
.

The vampire said, “It is beast. Cow. Beef. I believe they have forgotten to cook it for you.”

“I don't like cooked meat either,” I said, backing away from it. “I—I—no thanks. Er—would it do you any good?”

Another of his pauses. “Yes,” he said.

“It's all yours,” I said. “I'll stick to bread.”

I saw him, this time. Did he mean for me to be able to see him, was it hard for him to move in daylight even early in the morning and in shade, or was he merely luxuriating in being free from the chain? Or had he moved so little in the last … however many days and nights that even he felt a little stiff? He walked as slowly as a weary human might walk around the big rectangle of light on the floor, around it to my corner, although he still walked with a sinuousness no human had. He bent and picked up the drippy parcel. I thought, is he going to suck it dry or what?

I didn't see. It was like when he drank water. One moment there was water, the next moment there was not. One moment there was a big piece of bloody meat in a white plastic bag, and the next moment the white plastic bag, ripped open, was drifting toward the floor, and the meat had disappeared. Vampires sometimes like their blood with a few solids, I guess. Maybe it was like having rice with your curry or pasta with your sauce.

I decided against trying to tie the sack round me somehow, and ate most of the new loaf instead, although it tasted like dust and ashes, not wholly because it was more store bread. (I spared a brief thought about how vampires might go shopping for human groceries. Groceries
for
humans, that is.) Then I picked up the water bottle. It would come with us.

We had to get going.

We were leaving. We were on our way. We were going
now
. And I was scared out of my
mind
. What had I let myself in for? The mere thought of remaining in constant physical contact with a vampire was abhorrent, and he was right, what about when whatever-it-was ran out? But I couldn't force him to come with me. He had decided it was worth the risk. So how fast was the fire, anyway? Supposing it came to that. I didn't need an answer to that: not fast enough. Nothing like as fast as a nice clean beheading.

And if you're touching a vampire when he catches fire …

Okay, okay, wait, said a little voice in my head. How did you get here? You got here by making the best of a whole carthaginian hell of a series of bad choices. And remember he doesn't feel horrible when you're doing your sun-parasol trick. He feels more like … helping Charlie do the books when Mom's sick. Or dealing with Mr. Cagney.

Mr. Cagney was one of our regulars at the coffeehouse, and he was convinced that the rest of the world existed to give him a bad time. He was the only one of our regulars who couldn't manage to say anything nice about my cinnamon rolls. That didn't stop him from eating them, however, and listening to him complain on a day he had arrived too late and they were sold out had resulted in our always having one set aside for him. Dealing with Mr. Cagney was an effort. A big, tiring, thankless effort. On the whole I thought I preferred the vampire.

He was watching me. “You can change your mind.” Then he said something that sounded almost human for the first time: “I half wish you would.”

I shook my head mournfully. “No. I can't.”

“Then there is one more thing,” he said.

I was beginning to learn that I probably wouldn't like anything he said after one of his pauses. I waited.

“You will have to let me carry you till we are well away from here.”

“
What
?”

“Blood spoor. Your feet will be bleeding again before we are halfway across the open area.” Was there the faintest tremor in his oddly echo-y voice when he said that? “Mine will not. And Bo's folk will not be at all happy about our escape, tonight, when they discover it. They will find the trail at once if they have blood spoor to follow.”

I laid on a pause of my own. “Are you telling me that if I had decided to leave you behind, I wouldn't have made it anyway?”

“I do not know. There might conceivably have been some reason you were able to escape—a faulty lock on the shackle, for example. Bo would have someone's … someone would pay severely for this, but it might end there. That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you—as it does, does it not?—and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner. He will order his folk to follow. We must not make it easy for them.”

This was the longest speech I had heard from him. It edged out his description of the supersucker he would have become on the blood of Onyx Blaise's daughter. “For a ma—a creature who is driven mad by daylight, you are making very good sense.”

“Having an accomplice is … reviving. Any hope after no hope. Even in these somewhat daunting circumstances.”

Daunting. I liked that too. That was as good as “clean of live things.”

He moved toward me and held out his arms, slowly, as if trying not to scare me. There was a sudden, ghastly rush of adrenaline—my body was having some trouble keeping up with my mind's mercurial decisions—and I twitched myself sideways like I was moving a puppet. I put one arm round his neck—carefully, so I didn't stretch the dubiously clotted scab on my breast—and held the water bottle in my other hand. He bent and picked me up more easily than I pick up a tray of cinnamon rolls.

It was not going to be a comfortable ride. It was rather like sitting on the stripped frame of a chair that has had all the chair bits taken away—there are just a few nasty pieces of iron railing left, and they start digging railing-shaped holes into you at once. Also, if this was a chair, it was made for some other species to sit in. Vampires do breathe, by the way, but their chests don't move like humans'. Have you ever lain in the arms of your sweetheart and tried to match your breathing to his, or hers? You do it automatically. Your brain only gets involved if your body is having trouble. Fortunately there was nothing about this situation that was like being in the arms of a sweetheart except that I was leaning against someone's naked chest. I could no more have breathed with him than I could have ignited gasoline and shot exhaust out my butt because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car.

I also had the weird sensation that he'd been several degrees
cooler
when he picked me up, and he'd matched his body temperature to mine. Speaking of matching.

We left by the door Bo's gang had brought me through, across the ghostly hall, and out through the front door, which had been conveniently left ajar. What did I know about vampire deliberateness? I could barely recognize my vampire's breathing as breathing. But I had a notion that he walked not merely without hesitation but
very
deliberately into the blast of sunshine at the foot of the porch, and turned left, toward the trees on that side. I felt my harness take the strain. If there had been real straps involved, they would have creaked. It was a long way to the edge of the wood. It was perhaps just as well he was carrying me; the heat of the sun seemed to be making me woozy.

Heat doesn't usually trouble me. One of the reasons Charlie had first let me help him with the baking when I was still small was because I was the only one of any of us who could stand the heat of it in the summer, including the rest of the staff. That was when Charlie's was still fairly small itself, and Charlie was doing most of the cooking, before he opened up the front so we could have tables as well as the counter and the booths along the wall, and before he built my bakery. The bakery now is its own room next to the main kitchen, and there are windows and an outside door and industrial-strength fans, but in July and August pretty much everyone but me has to get out of there and splash water on themselves and have a sit-down.

But this was something else. The big curly ripples of power I'd felt when we stood in front of the window seemed bigger and curlier than ever, and were slowing the rest of me down, taking up too much space themselves, squeezing the usual bits of me into corners, till I felt squashed, like someone in a commuter train at six
P.M.
Even my brain felt compressed. That sense of wearing some kind of harness that had also managed to nail itself into my major organ systems was still there, but I began to feel that it wasn't so much carrying the burden as holding me together, so that the power ripples knew where the edges—the edges of
me
—were, and didn't break anything. I didn't feel frightened, although I wondered if I should.

We reached the edge of the trees at last, and it was better at once in their shadow. I felt more alert, and
lighter
somehow, although I wouldn't have described the effect of the ripples as heavy. But that feeling of having all my gaps filled a little too full eased somewhat. I remembered what he'd said about daylight:
I feel as if the rays of your sun are prizing me apart
. The tree-shadow wasn't thick or reliable enough to protect us from the sun so the power was still moving through me, but I didn't feel I was about to overflow, or crack. I thought: okay. I can guard one vampire from the effects of bright direct daylight. I wouldn't be able to guard two. Not that this was a piece of information I was planning on needing often in the future.

“We've crossed their line,” said the vampire. “The guard ring is behind us.”

“They'll know we have, won't they?”

“They'll know tonight. We—do not pay attention to the daylit world.”

“Will they know where?”

“Perhaps. But I am following the traces from when they brought me here—and, so far, it is the same way they brought you—and without fresh blood they will have trouble deciding what is old and what is new.”

“Uh …” This wasn't a topic I was looking forward to bringing up. “You know you and I are both, uh, wearing quite a lot of my, uh, blood already. Uh. Crusted. From last night.”

“That matters very little,” said the vampire. “It is only blood hot from a live body when it touches the earth that leaves a clear sign.”

I reminded myself this was good news.

He was silent for a while, and then he said, dispassionately as ever, “I had feared that even if you could, as you claimed, protect my body from the fire as we crossed the open space, that the sun would blind me. This did not happen. I am relieved.”