Sunshine (15 page)

During borrowed-car gaps Mel gave me a lift on his motorcycle of the week (favors don't get much more serious than giving someone a ride at four
A.M.),
and then I started using Kenny's bicycle. Kenny was at an age when bicycles are deeply uncool and he didn't miss it. Downtown where the coffeehouse is is a drag on a bike, cars and buses first run you off the road and then leave you asphyxiating in their wake, but it's nice out near Yolande's and bicycling helped make me tired enough to sleep through the nights. Although it meant getting up at three-thirty to get in in time to make cinnamon rolls. Which is ridiculous. Also, Mom was having kittens about my riding a bike after dark (or before sunup), and she was perhaps not entirely wrong about this, even if she didn't know why, and even though there was no record of anyone ever being snatched off a bike in New Arcadia. There was no record of suckers at the lake either. So I did buy another car. The Wreck. It ran. I bought it from a friend of Mel's who liked tinkering with cars the way Mel liked tinkering with motorcycles, and the friend guaranteed it would
run
, just so long as I didn't want anything fancy like a third gear that was there all the time, or a top speed of over forty. It suited me fine. I didn't feel like getting attached to another car, and the sporadic absence of third gear was an interesting diversion.

The doctor took the stitches out of my breast. My feet healed. Life started to look superficially normal again. I took a deep breath and asked Paulie how he'd like to get up at four in the morning once a week to make cinnamon rolls. He was delighted. Another head case joins the inner cadre at Charlie's. He chose Thursday. I now had two mornings a week I didn't have to get up before sunrise. Theoretically. I didn't tell him what if he was paying attention he already knew, that the coffeehouse schedule was a thing that happened on paper and never quite worked out that way. But letting him think he got to choose should be good for morale. His morale. And even an unpredictable series of fours in the morning I didn't have to get up at was going to be good for
my
morale.

Aimil and I started going to junk and old-books fairs again. And when I went hiking with Mel we didn't go out to the lake. Not being able to decide what to tell anyone about anything had become the habit of not telling anybody anything. The funny thing was that the nearest I came to telling anyone was Yolande. There was something about the way she put me in a chair and made pots of tea and sat with me and talked about the weather or the latest civic scandal or some book we had both read, and not only didn't ask me anything but didn't appear to be suppressing the desire to ask me anything either.

The second nearest I came was one night with Mel, when I woke up out of one of the nightmares, and was out of bed and across the room before I had registered that the body I had been in bed with—had had my head on the chest of—had a heartbeat. Mel didn't say anything stupid. He sat up slowly, and turned the light on slowly, and made me a cup of tea slowly. By that time I was no longer twitching away from every shadow but I was too pumped with sick adrenaline to sleep. Mel took me downstairs and put a paintbrush in my hand. Every now and then he got talked into doing a custom job on one of the bikes he'd rescued. I had laid down primer and first coats for him a few times, and buffed finishes, but that's all. That night he had me filling in the outline of tiny green oak leaves. When I had to stop and get ready to report for cinnamon roll duty I felt almost normal again. No, not normal. Something else. I felt as if I'd accidentally re-entered my grandmother's world, where I didn't want to go. But if that was where I had been, it had done me good. I wondered who the bike was for, why they wanted an oak tree. Mel would never do the standard screaming-demon thunderbolt-superhero sort of thing, all jaw and biceps and skeggy-looking flames, and one of the few little dumb things that would ruffle that calm of his was the sight of a bike decorated with a flying sorcerer, but a tree was a … well, a funny symbol for something with wheels that was built to go lickety-split. Or look at it another way. The main symbolism around trees is about their incorruptibility, right? Their immunity to all dark magic. This is not something you expect your average biker to be deeply interested in.

I felt a little breeze—Mel had opened a window—heard leaves rustle. It hadn't occurred to me that my secret tree might be, say, an oak, or an ash, a beech, some particular kind of tree that related to a tree I might find in an ordinary landscape. I didn't want my grandmother's world to have anything to do with this one. I didn't want what had happened to me at the lake to have anything to do with this world, this ordinary landscape. I laid my paintbrush down and went and stood with Mel by the open window.

A
FTER THE FIRST
week or two of armed and sizzling silence after the argument, and all messages passed through pacifist intermediaries, Mom had started giving me charms. She'd turn up at the coffeehouse at about eight in the morning with another charm done up in the standard charm-seller's twist of brown paper. I didn't want them, but I took them, and I didn't argue with her. I didn't say anything at all except (sometimes) thank you. Mom and I hadn't gone in for light conversation in years, since it never stayed light, between us. I did things with the charms like wrap them around the telephone at home, to soften any bad news it might be bringing me, or drape them round my combox screen, ditto. This kind of abuse wears charms out fast. I'm not a big fan of charms—barring the basic wards, which I admit only a fool would dispense with, fetishes, refuges, whammies, talismans, amulets, festoons, or any of the rest, I can do without 'em. They take up too much psychic space, and the sooner these new ones crashed and burned the sooner they'd stop bugging me. But Mom was trying to behave herself, and the charms seemed to relieve her feelings. Once I had a car again I started stuffing them in the glove compartment. They didn't like it, but charms aren't built to quarrel with you.

The mark on my breast, which appeared to have closed over, cracked open again, and oozed. It was nearing high summer by then and I, who generally wore as little as decency allowed because it got so hot in the bakery, was suddenly wearing stranglingly high-necked T-shirts. You can't ooze in a public bakery. I went back to the doctor and he said “hmm” and had I remembered yet how I'd gotten the cut in the first place. I said I hadn't. He gave me a different cream for it and sent me home again. It seemed to heal for a while and then cracked open again. I grew clever about taping gauze over it and ripping the armholes out of my high-necked shirts and wearing lurid multicolored bras—fortunately there was a vogue on for lurid multicolored bras—so it looked like I was merely making a somewhat unfortunate fashion statement. Mel knew better, of course, and if it hadn't been for him I would have stopped going to the doctor, but Mel was a stubborn bastard when he wanted to be and he wanted to be about this, drat him. So I had to go back again. The doctor was starting to worry by now, and wanted to send me to a specialist. A specialist in
what
, I wanted to say, but I didn't dare. I was afraid I'd give something away, that my guilty conscience would start oozing through the cracks somehow, like blood and lymph kept oozing through the crack in my skin. I refused to see a specialist.

Some cop or other came by the coffeehouse at least once a week “to see how I was doing.” Any of our marginally half-alert regulars knew the Cinnamon Roll Queen and chief baker had been absent a few days under mysterious circumstances and that whatever had happened to her was still casting a pall over the entire staff at Charlie's. That was everybody. And our SOF regulars are better than half alert or they wouldn't be working for SOF. So I had cops coming in and our SOFs watching the cops and the cops watching our SOFs. It should have been funny. It wasn't. I think Pat and Jesse actually suspected the truth, although I don't see how they could have. Maybe they thought it was ghouls or something, although ghouls don't generally have the foresight to, like,
store
a future meal. But something had happened and the law enforcement guys wanted to get out there and enforce something. They weren't fussy. If it was people, the cops were happy to do it. If it wasn't people, SOF was happy to do it. But I was supposed to choose my dancing partner and I wouldn't, and this was making the troops restless.

I did notice the difference between the people who were really bothered for me, or for the sake of the society they were paid a salary to keep safe, and the people who wanted to know more because it was like live TV or those cheesy mags with headlines like I ATE MY ALIEN BABY. Fried, with a side salad and a beer.

The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained. This meant that soon everybody “knew” that whatever had happened did indeed involve the Others, because that made a better story. I think they would have liked to assume that it involved the Darkest Others, because that made the best story of all, except that, of course, I was still
here
, and nobody escaped from vampires.

Nobody escaped from vampires.

I didn't know if the everybody who knew this included SOF or not, but I could hardly ask.

M
EANWHILE THERE WERE
the nightmares. There continued, relentlessly, to be the nightmares. They weren't getting any better or easier or rarer. There's not that much to tell about them because nightmares are nightmares on account of the way they feel, not necessarily by the mayhem and the body count. These felt bad. Of course they always had vampires in them. Sometimes I was being stared at by dozens of eyes, eyes that I mustn't look into, except that wherever I looked there were more eyes, and I couldn't shut my own. Sometimes there was just the knowledge that I was in a horrible place, that I was being contaminated by the horrible place, that even if I seemed to get out of it I would take it with me. The nightmares also always had blood in them, one way or another. Once I thought I had woken up, and my bed was floating in blood. Once I was wearing the cranberry-red dress and it was
made
of blood. But the worst ones were when I was a vampire myself. I had blood in my mouth and my heart didn't beat and I had strange awful thoughts about stuff I'd never thought about, that in the dream I would think I
couldn't
think about because I was human, and then I'd remember I wasn't human, I was a vampire. As a vampire I knew the world differently.

I told myself that those two days at the lake were just something that had happened. That's all. The dreams were like the wound on my breast: my mind was wounded too. The bruises and scratches were the superficial stuff: of course they healed quickly. And everybody dreams about vampires; we grow up dreaming about them. They're the first and worst monster that lives under everybody's bed. You do get mad Weres or a demon that's tired of passing for human and not being able to do the less attractive demon things, but mostly it's vampires.

I never dreamed about … The funny not ha-ha thing was how hard I was trying to forget about him too. He'd saved my life, sure, but he'd destroyed my world view in the process. The only good vampire was a staked and burned vampire, right? So what if he'd shown a little enlightened self-interest about me—as well as having a sense of honor straight out of some nineteenth-century melodrama with dueling pistols and guys who said things like “begone varlet,” which was how I'd lived long enough to present him with an opportunity to display enlightened self-interest. He was still a vampire. And everybody he'd … my brain wouldn't go there … was still dead. To put it another way: the loathly lady was still a loathly lady, she hadn't been cured by whatever, and there was no reason to suppose she wasn't going to go on eating huntsmen and their horses and hounds, and probably the occasional knight who didn't give her the right answers as well.

I didn't think there was a word for a human so sicko as to rescue a vampire, so he could go on being a vampire, because no one had ever done it. Before.

When I woke up out of one of these nightmares I didn't dare go back to sleep again. And they kept coming. So after a few weeks I segued from being flipped out and exhausted by what had happened to being flipped out and exhausted from being flipped out and exhausted.

During this first time in my life I didn't want to read lots of news reports about Other activity, there seemed to be more of them around.

Some of it was okay. There was another long heated debate—as a result of some statistical review stating that the numbers of those afflicted were rising—about whether incubi or succubi were living or undead, which is an old argument but no one has ever settled it. The obstacle to scientific study is that the moment the psychic connection is cut your object of investigation disintegrates, and by seizing one of the things for scientific study you are ipso facto severing the link. At least until the global council decides it's okay to keep a human being as a thing-thrall, which is at present even for purposes of pure research
highly
illegal, although the official language talks about corporeal and noncorporeal subjugation. The reason it's such a hot topic is that while incubi and succubi are a relatively small problem, some people think that finding out how they work would give us a handle on vampires, which is absolutely number one on everyone's list about Others, and the medical guys can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, which isn't an option with vampire dinners. Well,
usually
they can cure someone who has been a thing-thrall, if they haven't been one for too long.

There was a project drawn up not too long ago with a list of volunteers to be thing-thralls but that never got off the ground, maybe partly because the 'ubis like choosing their own prey and bait on a string doesn't interest them, but mainly because there was this huge public outcry against it. Mind you, you have to wonder about the volunteers. 'Ubis may be a bigger problem than anybody knows because thing-thralls are usually having a
very good time
and it's their loving friends and families (sometimes their pissed-off colleagues) that start to wonder why they're sleeping twelve or fourteen hours a day and spending the rest of the time looking like they just had amazingly terrific sex. Nobody knows whether thing-thralls really are having sex with their things either, or whether they only think they are. But even the best sex your nerve endings can be made to imagine they're having has to be balanced against the fact that your IQ tends to drop about one point for every month you're a thing-thrall. The cleverer 'ubis cut and run before the brain drain gets obvious, and a lot of people aren't using their brains to begin with and don't miss them. But sometimes it's too late for the thrall to have any future more intellectually demanding than night shift shelf restocker. There is a bagger I know at our local Mega Food who had been New Arcadia's top criminal defense lawyer before an 'ubi got him. I used to read the reports of his courtroom antics and thought being a thing-thrall had improved his personality beyond recognition, but it had knocked hell out of his career prospects.