Sunshine (35 page)

No
.

I steadied myself. I found an … alignment. Somewhere. Somewhere, reaching in the dark … I was … no, I wasn't standing. There didn't seem to be anything to stand on, and I wasn't sure there was any of me to stand
with
. If my feet had disappeared, then perhaps it wasn't surprising that my eyes—no, my sight—had disappeared too. This wasn't just darkness: this was what came after. This was the beyond-dark. And I could only see in the dark. My eyes were still there—or perhaps they were now my non-eyes—I couldn't see with them and blinking no longer seemed relevant, but the pressure was there. And why was it so difficult to breathe? Especially since at the same time breathing seemed as irrelevant as blinking. Why did I
want
to breathe?

Where was I? I was—
stretched
—along some intangible line; a compass needle. Compass needles don't mind the dark. Although I doubted I was pointing toward anything like a north that I'd recognize back in the real world. Maybe I'd found where Aimil's cosmail had come from. But where was here? And was there some clue I could take back with me to the world I knew?

If I could get back there.

I experimented with moving. Moving didn't seem to be an option. I was too much like nothing, here, in this nonplace, in the beyond-dark. Right, okay, next time I come I'll organize my question better going in.…

Next time, presupposing I get out of this time alive.

I was grateful for the pressure against my eyes, the difficulty breathing; it made me feel I still existed … somehow. Somewhere.

I was a magic handler, a stuff changer, a Blaise by blood, and lately, by practice. Not much practice but growing all the time.

I remembered another sense of alignment, when I had changed my little knife to a key. I reached for that sense. No, I reached for my knife. It shouldn't have been there, and I had no fingers to feel for it, but I was suddenly aware of it. I couldn't see it, but I knew that it was a light even in this darkness. And by its invisible light I could … see. See. Feel. Hear. Smell. Live.…

I heard a rustle, like leaves in a breeze. And for a moment I stood on four slender furred legs and I could feel and hear and smell as no human could.

And then I was back again, sitting in Aimil's living room, and her hand was reaching through my powerless fingers and pressing the button. The screen went dark. “That was
not
good,” she said.

“What—happened?” I was amazed at the sense of my body sitting in the chair, of gravity, of sight (light; twinkly shadows), of fingers on a keyboard, feet against a floor.
Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways
. Had I—? What had I—?

The leaves laid sun-dapples on my brown back as I stood at the edge of the woods with the golden field before me. I raised my black nose to the wind, cupped my big ears forward and back to listen.

Yeek
. My human fingers closed on my knife. I was still in Aimil's living room.

“You were gone,” said Aimil. “Not long—ten seconds or so—just long enough for me to take two steps and reach for the button. But your body didn't have
you
in it.” She sat down, suddenly, on the floor. “Do you know where you went?” She bowed her head between her knees, and then tipped her face back and looked up at me. “Do you know?”

I shook my head. Experimenting with motion. I remembered the void, the alignment, the other senses—my little knife. My tree. My … doe. I wondered, when she had accepted the death she knew she could not escape, if she knew what her death was
for
, if that could have made any difference, if that was why she … I touched the knife-bulge in my pocket. It felt no different than it ever had. We sat in daylight; if I took it out it would look like any other pocket-knife. The second blade, which I rarely used, would be covered with pocket lint; the first blade, which I used all the time, would need sharpening. Folded up it was about the length of my middle finger, and a little wider and deeper; it was scraped and gouged by years in a series of pockets, sharing cramped quarters with things like loose change and car keys. And it glowed in the dark, even in the beyond-dark of the void. Glowed like a beacon that said, “Hold on. I've got you. Here.”

I felt—carefully—after my experience of nowhere, of beyond-dark. Had I brought anything back after all, anything I could use?

Yes. But I didn't know what it was. It wasn't anything so straightforward as a direction.

“Not caffeine after that,” said Aimil, still on the floor. “Scotch.” She got up on all fours and reached to the little cabinet next to her sofa. “And don't even ask me if you want to try again, because the answer is no.”

I looked at her when she gave me a small heavy glass with a finger's width of dark amber liquid in it, about the color of the thin wooden plates set into the sides of my little knife. “We won't try it again today,” I said. “But we have to try again.”

“No,
we
don't,” she said. “Let SOF figure it out. It's what they're for.”

“If they could figure it out they wouldn't be asking us.”

“The Wars are over,” she said.

“Not exactly,” I said, after a pause. “Didn't Pat tell you—”

“Yes, he told me we'll all be under the dark in a hundred years!” she said angrily. “I know!”

I slid down to join her on the floor. I felt like a collection of old creaking hinges. I leaned over and put an arm around her. “I don't want to know either.”

After a moment she said, “There have been two more dry guys in Old Town this last week. Have you heard about them?”

“Yes.” It had been on the news a few days ago—great stuff to hear when you're driving alone in the dark—and Charlie and Liz had been talking about it when I brought the first tray of cinnamon rolls out front. They had fallen silent. I pretended I hadn't heard anything and toppled the first burning-hot roll onto a plate for Mrs. Bialosky. She patted my hand and said, “Don't you worry, sweetie, it's not your fault.” Because she was Mrs. Bialosky I almost believed her, but I made the mistake of looking up, into her face, when I smiled at her, and saw the expression in her eyes. Oh. I almost patted her hand back and told her it wasn't her fault either, but it wouldn't have done any good. I guess I wasn't surprised to find out that Mrs. Bialosky wasn't only about litter and rats and flower beds.

“I wouldn't have joined SOF just because Pat can turn blue,” Aimil said. “Working in a proofglassed room gives
me
asthma. Even part-time. Or maybe it's just all the guys in khaki.”

I
WENT BACK
to Charlie's for the dinner shift, but Charlie took one look at me and said, “I'll find someone to cover for you. Go home.”

“I'll go when you find someone,” I said, and lasted two hours, by which time poor Paulie had agreed to give up the rest of his night off after being there all afternoon. Teach him to be glad to escape the four-thirty-in-the-morning shift. I was home by eight-thirty; it was just full dark. Charlie had sent me home with a bottle of champagne that had a glass and a half left in it: perfect. I stood on my balcony and drank it and looked into the darkness. The darkness danced.

I had had an idea. I didn't like it much, but I had to try it. I went back indoors and unplugged my combox. It's never quite dark under the sky, and I didn't have curtains for the balcony windows. I tucked the box under my arm, ducked into my closet, and closed the door. This was real darkness. There wasn't a lot of room in there, but I swept a few shoes aside and sat down. Turned the box on, listened to the resentful hum of the battery; it was an old box, and preferred to run off a wire. The screen came up and asked me if I wanted to enter the globenet. I sat there, staring at the glowing lettering. In the darkness, it didn't flicker at all, it didn't run away into millions of tiny skittish dwindling dimensions, like looking into a mirror with another one over your shoulder. I read it easily.

I liked it even less that my idea had worked. At least I didn't have to use a combox at Charlie's. It would have been difficult to explain why I needed a closet.

I brought the box back out of the closet and plugged it in on my desk. Not that I invited people home very often but I was touchy about looking normal even to myself now that I was behaving more like Onyx Blaise's daughter. Your combox on a desk is much more normal than your combox in a closet. Could my dad see in the dark? Could any of my dad's family? I couldn't remember any of them except my gran: the rest were tall blurry shapes from my earliest childhood. Aimil was right: the Blaises had disappeared during the Wars. But I hadn't noticed. I had been busy being my mother's daughter. Even if I wanted to contact them I had no idea how.

I could ask Pat or Jesse. Right after I told them I had a brand-new hotline to Vampire World the new horror theme park. It would blow the Ghoul Attack simulation at the Other Museum clean out of the water. It would make the Dragon Roller Coaster Ride at Monster-world look like a merry-go-round. Just as soon as we get a few little details worked out, like how you get there. And how you get away again. Meanwhile I still hadn't told them that I could see in the dark. Would I have told them a few days ago, if Aimil hadn't been there? It was what I'd gone in to tell them.

I went back to the balcony. I felt for an alignment. I stood at the edge of the void, but I stood in my world, on my ordinary feet, looking at ordinary darkness with my … not quite ordinary eyes.

Constantine. Con, are you there
?

This time I was sure I felt that tug on the line streaming in the dark ether—a coherent pinprick of something in the incoherent nothing. But I lost it again.

I was so tired I was having to prop myself against the railing to stay standing up.

So I went indoors and went to bed.

M
EANWHILE ON OTHER
fronts I was adapting. I usually hit it right the first time when I reached for the spoon or the flour sack or the oven control. I hadn't walked into a door in several days.

After the vision had risen like a tide and floated me off my grounding in Oldroy Park, after I'd seen what I'd seen in Maud's face—whether it was there or not, since I could hardly ask her—when the vision subsided and left me standing on solid earth again, some of the dizziness had subsided too. It was as if the dark was a kind of road map I'd been folding up wrong, and this time I'd got it right, and it would lie flat at last. Although road maps didn't generally keep unfolding themselves and flapping at you saying Here! Here! Pay attention, you blanker! I thought: it is a road map of sorts. But it was about a country I didn't know, labeled in a language I didn't understand. And it didn't
unfold
so much as
erupt
.

I didn't know if I'd seen what I'd seen in Mrs. Bialosky's face either, the morning she'd told me not to worry.

So, which did I like better: that my affinity was growing stronger, that it could pull me out of the human world into some dark alien space, or that I was merely going mad and/or had an inoperable brain tumor after all? Did I have a third choice?

I worked pretty well straight through that day and got home in time to have a cup of tea in the garden. Yolande's niece and her daughters had left after a two-week visit and it was none of my business but I was secretly delighted to have
our
garden to ourselves again. Yolande came out and joined me. I watched a few late roses do a kind of waltz with their shadows as a mild evening breeze played with them. Then I watched Yolande. I'd always liked watching her: I wished she could bottle that self-possession so I could have some. It was a little like Mel's, I thought, only without the tattoos. I was feeling tired and mellow and was enjoying this so much it took me a while to realize something strange.

The shadows lay quietly across Yolande's face.

I snapped out of being mellow and stared at her. She saw me looking and smiled. I jerked my eyes away hastily. What? How? Why? What could I ask her?

Nothing.

I looked at her again. The shadows on her face were quiet, but they went … down a long way. Like looking into the sky.

What did I know about her? She had inherited this house from some distant relative who had also been childless and felt the spinsters of the world needed to stick together. She'd moved here from Cold Harbor when she retired. I didn't recall she'd ever told me what she retired from. She had that calm strong centeredness I thought of as ex-teacher, ex-clergy, ex-healersister or midwife; I couldn't imagine her as someone in a power suit navigating a desk with a combox screen the size of a tennis court and a swarm of hot young assistants in an outer office whose haircuts were specially designed to look chic wearing globenet headsets ten hours a day.

I couldn't ask. If she'd wanted to tell me it would have come up long ago. It probably had nothing to do with what she'd done for a living anyway. It was probably like having freckles or curly hair or transmuting ability: you're born with it. But things like transmuting ability tend to lead to other choices.… “I don't think you've ever told me what you retired from,” I blurted out.

“I was a wardskeeper,” she said easily, as if she was commenting on the pleasantness of the evening, as if my question wasn't entirely rude.

Wardskeeper.

I wanted to laugh. No wonder her house wards were so good. You didn't earn that title easily. There were hundreds of licensed wardcrafters, first, second, and third class, for every wardskeeper. The rank of wardskeeper granted an unrestricted authority to design and create any protection against any Others that any client wished to hire you for. Even wardskeepers had specialties: large business, small business, home, personal bodyguard, and the whole murky business of watchering, which ranged from honest protective surveillance to downright spying. But you didn't get your wardskeeper insignia unless you could make a more than competent stab at all of it.