Sunshine (39 page)

Eek, I thought. Three or four hundred years ago, give or take a few decades, and depending on which Old World explorers you are counting from. That can't be right: if he was that old, he shouldn't be able to go out in moonlight.

“He wished to rule here, when the Liberty Wars came, at least … unofficially.”

The standard human slang was below ground and above ground. Unofficially would be below ground: being the biggest, nastiest junkyard dog of the dark side. Officially would still be pretty unofficial: control another two-fifths of the world economy, presumably, and make our global council into a bit of window-dressing.

“He might have succeeded, but he had bad luck, and a powerful and bitter enemy with better luck. There were not many of my master's soldiers left after the Liberty Wars. I was one. Much of my master's vitality left him with the ruin of his ambition. He turned collector instead. Those of his soldiers that had survived the Wars left or were destroyed, one by one, till only I remained. When my master also was destroyed, I was left alone.”

I was glad of the warmth of the fire. Con's voice was low and, as ever, dispassionate, and I had no clue whether he'd been, you know,
fond
of his master in any way, maybe after he'd got over being unappreciative of having been turned. What purpose had Con been apt for? I was sure I didn't want to know. Good. One question that probably wouldn't get answered that I didn't have to ask. Why had Con stayed when everyone else left? I remembered him saying a month ago:
There are different ways of being what we are
. His master before the Liberty Wars sounded like your common or garden-variety world-takeover odin vampire thug, and a powerful one at that. So why had Con stayed? Con who didn't even run a gang now. More questions not to ask for fear he
would
answer.

But I didn't have much clue about the working range of vampire emotion. Blood lust. What else? (Other kinds of lust? Maybe it had been … life lust, earlier. No, I wasn't thinking about that.) Did Con get over being unappreciative by getting over being
able
to feel appreciative? No—Con had just told me he was grateful for being rescued. But gratitude might be a human concept, applicable merely to a situation that demanded some kind of courtesy, as pragmatically meaningless as
thank you
. Well, at least he'd, hmm,
felt
that courtesy was demanded.

And then there was Bo. The inconvenient bond between Con and me that we were trying to, um, strengthen, without, um, intensity, was because of Bo's threat to both of us. I did not like where this thought was going.

“Your master's bitter enemy … was it Bo?”

“No. Bo's master.”

Oh well
that
made it all better immediately. I stuffed a handful of fur in my mouth to stop myself from whimpering.

Con looked up at me. Perhaps he thought the bread and apples hadn't been enough and I was still hungry. “I destroyed his master. It's only Bo now.”

I bit down on the fur. Pardon me, I thought, if I don't find this information overwhelmingly reassuring.
Only
Bo. And his gang, which had chained Con up in a house by a lake not too long ago from which he escaped only by a very curious chance. Con might not fall for that one again but no doubt there were other possibilities. Bo could be assumed to be the resourceful kind of evil fiend. Another of those possibilities had almost got Con a month ago, for example. Why didn't Con want to post an ad in the sucker personals—there had to be hidden vampire zones on the globenet—asking for his old comrades in arms to return for a bit and give him a hand? He could pass out the contents of his master's old room as reward, since he didn't seem too interested in them. If those were real gemstones in my absurd goblet, it was probably worth the national debt of a medium-sized country.

Why didn't he just run a gang, like a
normal
vampire of his age? Who should have to because he couldn't go out in moonlight any more.

There were so many questions I didn't want to know the answers to.

I pulled the fold of fur back out of my mouth again, and tried to smooth it down. Teethmarks, not to mention spit, probably lowered its value. I felt horribly tired, and alone, despite my companion. Especially because of my companion. I picked up the goblet again—it nearly took two hands; two hands would certainly have been easier, I was just resisting the idea of needing two hands—and teetered it toward my mouth. As it had seemed a long time before the wine hit the bottom pouring it in, it seemed rather a while before it touched my lips, tipping it back out. Drinking straight from the bottle, however, didn't seem like an option. Not in this room. In Con's room maybe—the empty one with no furniture. And no fire.

I wanted mountains of dough to turn into cinnamon rolls and bread, I wanted an unexpected tour group on a day we're short of kitchen staff, I wanted a big dinner party to ask for cherry tarts, I wanted to curl up on my balcony with a stack of books and a pot of tea, I wanted Mel's warm, tattooed arm around me and daylight on my face. I wanted to go home. I wanted my life back.

I had been here before. I had once had all that, and I drove out to the lake one night to get away from it.

“What
is
this thing, anyway?” I said, heaving the goblet up. I conceded, and used two hands. It could be a loving cup. First prize in vampire league sports. You didn't fill it with champagne, of course; you cut off the heads of the losing team and poured their blood in. Champagne later maybe when they ran out of the hard stuff.

“It is a Cup of Souls from the ceremony of gathering at Oranhallo.”

“What?”
I put it down hastily. Just
stop
asking questions, Sunshine. No wonder it goddam tingled against my goddam hand. Nobody knows where Oranhallo is. Well, nobody who knows is telling the rest of us. It's not a big issue on the Darkline but it is one of the things that keeps coming up. Among the people who think it exists somewhere you could describe by latitude and longitude, none of the plausible guesses are anywhere near New Arcadia. But there isn't any consensus on whether it is a geographic place or merely a part of the rite. It is a big magic handlers' rite, done by clan. The Blaises probably knew how (and where) to do it, but I didn't. I didn't know anything about cups of souls or ceremonies of gathering, but I didn't want to.

“It is one of the few articles in this room that my master was given,” said Con. “Usually there was some constraint involved.”

I bet there was. “Why would a magic-handler clan want to give something like this to a master vampire? Especially a master vampire.”

“It was not freely given,” Con said after another of his pauses. “But it was offered and accepted as payment for a task he had undertaken that was to their mutual benefit. There was some choice about the conclusion to this task. This reward was proposed as persuasion to make one choice instead of another. The Cup carries no taint that might distress you.”

And your gracious dining accessories don't run to wineglasses from Boutique Central. “Then why does it buzz against my skin?” I said crossly.

“Perhaps because it was the Blaise clan that possessed it,” said Con.

I jumped off the sofa, staggered, bumped into the little table, and heard the goblet crash to the floor as I ran off into the darkness. I didn't get far; Con's master had been a very enterprising collector, and I wasn't up to the weaving and zigzagging to make my way through the spoils. I collided with something that might have been an ottoman almost at once, and hit the floor even harder than the goblet had, although I didn't spill. Further note on vampire emotions, if any: don't expect a vampire to understand the turbulence of human family ties—including broken ones—or maybe it's that vampires don't get it about cowardice, and how a good sound human reaction to unwelcome news is to try and run away from it.

I picked myself up. More bruises. Oh good. It wasn't going to be a mere matter of high-necked T-shirts this time; I was going to need an all-over bodysuit plus a bag over my head. I turned around slowly, balancing myself against some great furled spasm of plaster that might have counted, in these surroundings, as an Ionic pillar. Con was standing up, facing me, his back to the fire, haloed by its light. Maybe it was my state of mind, but he suddenly looked far larger and more ominous than he had since before I knew his name. I couldn't see his face—maybe my dark vision had been further unsettled by my fall—but there was something
wrong
about his silhouette against the firelight; something wrong about him being surrounded by light at all. I remembered what I had thought that first time, by the lake: predatory.
Alien
. He wasn't Con, he was a vampire: inscrutable and deadly.

I made my way back toward the fire. I don't know if I wanted to reclaim Con as my ally, if not my friend, or if it was that there was no point in running away. I had to pass very close to him to reach the fire; there was only one gap among all the arcane bric-a-brac that would let me through. I knelt on the hearthrug—at least there was a hearthrug, even if the hairy fanged head at one end of it didn't bear close examination—and held my hands out toward the fire. It felt like a real fire. More important, it smelled like a real fire, and when I leaned too close the smoke made my eyes sting. It spat like a real fire too, and since there was no fireguard a spark fell onto the hearthrug. I glanced down; the hearthrug was unexpectedly unprepossessing, the fur short and brownish and patchy, having had sparks fly into it before. A few new burns wouldn't ruin its looks because it didn't have any. I felt hearthrugish. I'd never worried about my looks much; I had always had other things to worry about, like making cinnamon rolls and getting enough sleep. But I was beginning to feel rather too burn-marked. Like I'd been lying too near a fire with no fireguard.

Did I hear him sit down near me? You don't hear a vampire coming: I knew this by experience. But this wasn't any vampire; this was Con. I'd already promised to help him, if I could, because I needed his help. No. I hadn't promised. But it didn't matter. The bond was there. I hadn't ratified any contract, I'd woken up one morning to discover fine print and subclauses stamped all over my body. If I wanted a signature, it was the crescent scar on my breast. It meant I heard him coming even when I didn't hear him coming.

I waited a moment longer before I turned to look at him. Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one's name was Constantine. We'd met before.

Well.

“What do we do now?” I said.

“I take you home,” said Con.

“Okay, that's today. What about tonight? Tomorrow?” I said.

“We must find Bo.”

My stomach cramped. Maybe it was just the apples. I also had to learn that shilly-shallying was not a vampire gift. I wondered if I could teach him to say “perhaps” and “not before next week.”

I knew this wasn't going to be a matter of loading up on apple-tree stakes (or table knives) and knocking on Bo's front door. “You don't know where he, uh, lives.”

“No. I had only begun to search, since our meeting by the lake. He is well defended and well garrisoned.”

I glanced up at the invisible ceiling. Given the furnishings the ceiling was probably phenomenal. Or antiphenomenal: like Medusa's head or the eye of a basilisk. “I hope you are better defended,” I said.

“I hope so too.”

I didn't like hearing a vampire talk about
hope
.

“My master specially collected things that defend, or could be turned to defense. He felt that his attempt to win what he desired by aggression had failed, and he wished his subsequent seclusion to be uninterrupted.”

Gargoyles and tchotchkes: the vampire arsenal.

“I have always preferred solitude, and have improved on his arrangements. I have some reason to believe that if I never left this place no one would be able to come to me.”

“You are forgetting the road through nowheresville,” I said. Feelingly.

“I am not forgetting,” he said. “I am assailable by you in a way I am assailable to no one and nothing else.”

Assailable. An interesting choice of adjective. I looked up at him, and he looked down at me. I couldn't see into the shadows on his face. They remained shadows. They didn't wiggle or sparkle and they didn't have red edges. They didn't go down a long way. They were just shadows. Cute. The only person who still looked normal out of my eyes wasn't a person and wasn't normal.

The look between us lengthened. He might not be able to lure me to the same doom he almost had the second night at the lake, but it seemed to me it was still doom I saw in his eyes. I looked away. “Improvements,” I said. “You mean some of this—this—” The phrases that occurred to me were not tactful: this tragic reproduction of William Beckford's front parlor, or perhaps Ludwig II's. “You mean some of this, er, stuff is, er, yours?”

“Nothing you may see, no. I do not like tying up my strength in objects. It was an old argument with my master. Physical shape has a certain durability that the less tangible lacks, but I feel it is a brittle durability. He believed otherwise.”

And he's the one who got skegged, I thought. “Do you know what Bo's philosophy of, er, defense is?”

Pause. Finally he said: “He puts most of his energies into his gang. This will not help us locate him.”

I sighed. “This is another of those vampire-senses-are-different things, isn't it?” I supposed I had to tell him what I'd found through the globenet—how I'd first found the bad nowheresville, the beyond-dark human-squishing space, and what else seemed to be in there. If “in” was the right preposition. Out? On? Up? With? After? Over? English has too many prepositions. Did I have to mention SOF?

I didn't have to tell him anything yet. He didn't seem to be in a big hurry to get me home. How close, in ordinary human-measured geography, was this
earth-place
to Yolande's house? Ally or no ally, I didn't like the idea of our being neighbors.