Sunshine (23 page)

And eyes. Eyes. Staring. Their gaze like flung acid. No color. What color is evil
? …

When I came to, I was screaming. I stopped. Even the guys looked shaken. I could see the scuff marks in the road ahead of us, where Jesse had slammed us into reverse. Good thing the driver hadn't gone under. I put my hands over my mouth. “Sorry,” I said.

“Nah,” said Pat. “If you hadn't been screaming, I'd've had to do it.”

“What now?” said Jesse. They both looked at me.

“Maybe this is the really big bad spot behind the house,” I said. “I told you there was one. We're pretty well north of the lake now, aren't we? Seems like we've come far enough, but I keep losing the lake behind the trees.”

“Yeah,” said Jesse. “The road's well back here, because this is where the big estates are. Were.”

“Okay,” I said. “So we walk.” I opened the car door and clambered stiffly out. This was harder than it would have been if I hadn't been squashed by SOF technology four times, especially the last time when it didn't work. I patted my stomach as if checking to make sure I was still there. I seemed to be. The cut on my breast was itching like crazy: the sort of variable itch that reinforces its performance by regular nerve-fraying jabs of pain.

My jackknife seemed to be trying to burn a hole through its cotton pocket to my leg. I wrapped my hand around it. The heat was presumably illusory, which perhaps explained why the sense of being
fried
felt so comforting. I set off through the trees without looking behind me. They'd follow, and I had to get myself moving before I thought much about it or I wouldn't do it at all.

I didn't bother trying to figure out where the bad spot ended. I went down to the shore of the lake and turned right. Walking on the shore, while awkward, all shingle and teetery stones and water-tossed rubbish, wasn't so bad as walking through the trees. I was in sunlight out here, and the memories were under the trees. I hadn't walked on the shore before.

It was the right bad spot. I came to the house much too soon. I could half-convince myself I was enjoying walking by the lake. I like walking by water in the sunshine. I'd often enjoyed walking by this lake. Before. I stopped, feeling suddenly sick, and waited for the other two to catch up with me. “I'm not sure I can do this,” I said, and my voice had started to go funny again, as it had last night, when I told them you don't hear vampires coming.

“It's daylight, and we're with you,” said Jesse, not unsympathetically.

I said abruptly, “What if we get back to the car and it won't start? We'd never get out of these woods before dark.”

“It'll start,” said Pat. “You're okay. Hold on. We're going to walk up the hill toward the house real slow. You just keep breathing. I'm walking up on your left and Jesse is walking up on your right. We'll go as slow as you want. Hey, Jesse, how's your nephew doing with that puppy he talked your folks into buying him?”

It was well done. Puppy stories got me to the stairs. By that time Pat had me by the elbow because I was gasping like a puffer demon, except they always breathe like that, but having a hand on my elbow was too much like having been frog-marched up those stairs the last time I'd been here. “No,” I said. “Thanks, but let me go. Last time, you know, I had help.”

The porch steps creaked under my weight. Like last time. Unlike last time, the steps also creaked under the weight of my companions.

Almost dreamily I went through the still-ajar front door and left across the huge hall toward the ballroom. It was daylight, now, so I could look up, and see where the curl of grand staircase became an upstairs corridor lined by what had once been an equally grand balustrade, but some of the posts were cracked or missing. There were still glints of gold paint in the hollows of the carving. In the dark I hadn't known the railings were anything but smooth. I wouldn't have cared.

The ballroom was smaller than I remembered. It was still a big room, much bigger than anything but a ballroom, but in my memory it had become about the size of a small country, and in fact it was only a room. As ballrooms go it probably wasn't even a big one. The chandelier, very shabby in daylight, still had candle stubs in it, and there was a lot of dripped wax on the floor underneath. There was my corner, and the windows on either wall that had bounded my world for two long nights and a day in between …

I shuddered.

“Steady, Sunshine,” said Pat.

I had been worrying about the shackles in the walls. I was going to have to revert to not remembering, when Pat and Jesse asked me about the second shackle, the one with the ward signs on it.

There were no shackles. Just holes in the walls. I almost laughed. Thanks, Bo, I said silently. You've done me a favor.

Pat and Jesse were examining the holes, Pat still half keeping an eye on me. The holes looked like they'd been torn—as if the shackles had been ripped out of the walls by someone in a rage. By some vampire: no human could've done it. But I guessed the rage part was accurate. A frustrated—possibly frightened—rage, or on orders? On orders, I thought. I doubted Bo's gang did anything that Bo hadn't told them to do first. But however it had happened, I didn't have to explain a shackle with ward signs on it.

They did, of course, want to know about the second set of holes.

“This is where I was,” I said, pointing to the holes nearer the corner.

“And this?” said Jesse, kneeling in front of the other holes.

“I don't remember,” I said automatically.

There was a silence. “Can we have an agreement, maybe,” said Pat. “That you stop saying ‘I don't remember' and do us the kindness of telling the truth, which is that you're not going to say what you remember.”

There was a longer silence. Pat was looking at me. I met his eyes. He had held his breath till he turned blue last night. He'd already made up his mind to trust me, even knowing that I was lying about what had happened. That made me feel pretty bad until it occurred to me that there was another angle on last night's demonstration: not only that Pat and Jesse and Theo were willing to trust me, but that they understood sometimes you had to lie.

“Okay,” I said.

“So,” said Jesse. “This second set of holes.”

I took a deep breath. “I'm not going to tell you.”

“Okay,” said Jesse. “I think these holes are from another shackle. If it had been empty while you were here, Rae, you wouldn't mind telling us that. So, there must have been another prisoner, and it's this other prisoner you aren't going to tell us about.”

I didn't say anything.

“Interesting,” said Jesse.

Pat stared out one of the windows, frowning. “Shackles in a ballroom aren't standard equipment, so the suckers will have put them in special. The thing is, the space cleared around this house has been done recently too. You have to assume they did that as well. Why?”

I could keep silent on this one a little more easily. It seemed pretty weird if you didn't know. And this one they couldn't guess. I hoped.

They went off to look at the rest of the house. I stayed in the ballroom. I sat on the windowsill nearest my shackle, the one on the long wall—the window I'd peed out of. The window I'd knelt in front of when I'd changed my knife to a key. The lake looked a lot like it had the day I'd been here: another blue, clear day. It was hotter today though, summer rather than spring. I leaned back against the side of the window and thought about cinnamon rolls and muffins and brownies and the cherry tarts I'd started experimenting with since Charlie had ordered an electric cherry pitter out of a catalog and gave it to me hopefully. Charlie's idea of post-traumatic shock therapy: a new kitchen gadget. I thought about the pleasure of sitting in bright sunlight. With two humans in easy call. I might have opened my collar and let the sun shine there, but I had the gash taped up and I wasn't going to risk Pat or Jesse seeing it.

I thought about the fact that Mel, easygoing, laid-back, mind-your-own-business Mel, kept nagging me to look for a doctor who
could
do something about it, and found my refusal inexplicable and dumb.

Jesse and Pat came back into the ballroom and hunkered down on the floor in front of me in my window. There was a silence. I didn't like this. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get away from the lake, from what had happened here, from being reminded of what had happened here. I'd done what they'd asked, I'd found them the house. I didn't want to talk about this stuff any more. I wanted to go back to the car and make sure it was going to start, and get us out of here before sundown. I wanted to sit in the sun somewhere other than beside the lake.

“So, last night,” said Jesse. “What happened?”

“I don't—” I said. Pat looked at me and I smiled faintly. “I wasn't going to say I don't remember. I was going to say I don't know. It was—it was like instinctive, except who has that kind of instinct? If it was an instinct, it was a really
stupid
instinct.”

“Except that it worked,” Pat said dryly. “So, you didn't think, ah ha, there's a sucker a couple of streets over, I think I'll go stake the bastard? Never mind that I don't know how I know it's there or that I'm going to stake it with a goddam
table knife
?”

“No,” I said. “I didn't think at all. I didn't think from the time I—I stood up from where I was sitting at the counter to when—when Jesse had hold of me and was yelling that it was all over.”

“So why did you stand up—and pick up a table knife—and take off at a speed that wouldn't have shamed an Olympic sprinter?”

“Um,” I said. “Well, I heard him. Um. And I didn't like having him … on
my
ground. I was, um, angry. I guess.”

“Heard him. Heard him what? Nobody else heard anything.”

“Heard him, um, giggle.”

Silence.

“Was this by any chance a sucker from two months ago?” Pat said gently. “From what happened here?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us any more?”

He's the one that made this mark on me, I thought. This slice in my flesh that won't close. You could say I had a score to settle. That doesn't explain why I managed to settle it though. “He was—he was the other one that had hold of me, coming here. I don't know how many of them there were altogether—a dozen maybe.” I thought of the second evening, the twelve of them fanning out around me and the prisoner of the other shackle, coming closer. Slowly coming closer. How I'd been pressing myself against the wall so hard my spine hurt. “Most of them didn't say anything. The one I think was the Breather—he seemed to be giving the orders. I thought of him as—as the lieutenant of the raiding party. He talked. And he held one of my arms, bringing me here. This—the one from last night, he held my other arm. He talked. He was the one with the … sense of humor.”
Her feet are already bleeding. If you like feet
.

“The lieutenant of the raiding party,” said Jesse thoughtfully. “That sounds like there was a colonel back at headquarters.”

“You'd expect that, a setup as elaborate as this one,” said Pat. “This is a gang run by a master vampire.”

They both looked at me. “Do you know anything about the master?” said Jesse.

I could have said, I'm not going to tell you. I said, “No.”

There was another silence. I tried not to squirm. This should be when the SOFs revert to type and start yelling at me for withholding important information and so on.

“We have a problem, you see, Sunshine,” said Pat at last. “Okay, we know you're not telling us everything. But … well, I probably shouldn't be telling
you
this, but that happens oftener than you might think, people not telling SOF everything. Hell, SOF not telling SOF everything. I mean aside from the nomad blood of guys like Jesse and me. We could probably live with that if that was all it was. We wouldn't like it, maybe, but we've had a lot of practice not being told everything, and if you get too pissed off at people then they
really
won't talk to you.

“But you've done something pretty well unprecedented. Twice. You got away from a bunch of vampires—alone, and out in the middle of nowhere. It happens occasionally that a sucker gang gets a little carried away, teasing some kid from a human gang that has been jiving in the wrong place, hoping to see vampires. The kid gets a little cut up, but we take him to the hospital and they stitch him up and give him his shots, and he goes home good as new if a little more prone to nightmares than he used to be. It doesn't happen that a young woman alone in a wilderness gets away from a sucker gang so determined to keep her they have her chained to the wall. So far as I know it hasn't ever happened before.”

I wished he would stop saying “alone.” He hadn't forgotten the second set of holes in the wall any more than I had. Thank the gods at least the telltale shackle itself was gone.

“And that's only the first thing. The second thing is that you sauntered up to a sucker last night that in the first place you had no way of knowing was there, in the second place he stood there while you staked him without any warning or any backup, and in the third place staked him with a stainless steel table knife. People have staked suckers without backup, but they've never done it by running up to one in full sight and they sure as suckers hate daylight don't do it with a goddam table knife. I pulled the research on it that proves it can't be done, last night. Stainless steel is a no-hoper even if you've had the best wardcrafters and charm cutters in the business do their number on it first.

“I told you I don't need much sleep. I spent the rest of last night going through the files for
anything
about sucker escapees and unusual stakings. There isn't much. And nothing at all like you, Sunshine.