Sunshine (45 page)

“Quite right. But you do grow more accustomed to it.”

“Wardskeepers have this whole rigorous training thing. So you aren't doing anything—stuff doesn't happen till you're ready for it.”

She laughed, and it was a real laugh. “Only in theory. Tell me, what were your first cinnamon rolls like? And didn't the recipe look simple and pure and beautiful on the page? And the instructions your teacher gave you, before he left you to get on with it, were perfectly clear and covered everything?”

I smiled reminiscently, stirring sugar into my tea. “They were little round bricks. I still don't know how I did it. They got
heavier
. They can't have weighed more than the flour I put into them, you know? But I swear they did. There's a family myth that Charlie used them in the wall he was building around Mom's rose garden. I wouldn't be surprised.”

“The first time I cut a ward sign—cutting a sign is your first big step up from drawing all the basic ones, over and over and over, and you
long
for it—I managed to wreck the workshop. Fortunately my master believed my talent was going to be worth it. If we all survived my apprenticeship.”

“I blew out the ovens once, but that wasn't entirely my fault.… Okay. Point taken. But I don't think anyone knows how to travel through nowheresville.”

“Then I hope you are taking good notes, to make teaching your students easier.”

“You are a hard woman,” I said.

She leaned forward and lightly touched the chain around my neck. “That is a potent thing. You have others, I think, but this is new. It has a great sense of darkness around it, and yet it is a clear dark. Like a bit of jewelry in a black velvet case. A gift from your friend, I imagine.”

I nodded, trying not to be unnerved by her perceptiveness.

“My master would be most interested, but he lives on the other side of the country.”

“Your master?” I said, startled out of politeness. “But you're—”

“Old,” she said composedly. “Yes. Older perhaps than you think. Magic handling has that effect. Surely you know that?”

“I thought it was a fairy tale. Like pots of gold and three wishes.”

“It is not a very reliable effect, and ordinary ward- and spellcrafters won't notice much difference. But to those of us who soak ourselves deeply in a magical source, it can have profound consequences. This is not a chosen thing, you know. Or it chooses you, not the other way around.”

“I always thought my grandmother looked very young,” I said slowly. “I haven't seen her since I was ten. When I was in my teens I decided it was just that she had long dark hair and didn't look like other people's grandmothers.”

“I never knew your grandmother, although I knew some of the other Blaises at one time. But my guess is that she was much older than you had any idea of.”

“Was,” I said. “None of it got her through the Voodoo Wars. Or my father either.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I don't
know
they're dead. But I can't believe my gran wouldn't have let me know.…” My voice trailed off. “I … I have been my mother's family's kid all my life—even when we were still living with my dad, I think—till four months ago. Almost five months ago. It's a shock to the system.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “Consider the possibility that you had to be a certain age to bear it, when it finally came to you.”

“There must have been an easier way.”

She laughed again. “There is always a better way, in hindsight.”

I said, trying to smile, “The cousins I know—my mother's sisters' kids—are married by the time they're my age. The younger ones do stuff like play varsity sports or collect stamps or dollhouse furniture. The two in college, Anne wants to be a marine biologist and William wants to teach primary school. It's like the Other side doesn't exist. Even Charlie, who you'd think of anyone would remember, says he'd almost forgotten who my dad was.” I paused. “I don't even know how my parents met. It doesn't seem very likely, does it? That Miss Drastically Normal should fall for Mr. All That Creepy Stuff. All I know is that my mom worked at a florist's before she married my dad.

“What happened to the safety net, you know? If I was going to turn out this way, why didn't I get apprenticed? Why didn't my gran leave a codicil in her will asking someone to keep an eye on me? She taught me to transmute. She knew I'd inherited
something
.”

Yolande didn't say anything for several minutes while I sat there trying not to be embarrassed for my outburst. “I don't believe in fate,” she said at last. “But I do believe in … loopholes. I think a lot of what keeps the world going is the result of accidents—happy or. otherwise—and taking advantage of these. Perhaps your gran guessed you might be one of those loopholes. Perhaps she left a codicil in her will saying to leave you alone at all costs. What if you'd been apprenticed, and learned that there is no way through nowheresville?”

I
COULDN
'
T SETTLE
down to read that evening—anything about the Others made me twitchy, anything else was so irrelevant as to be maddening.
Child of Phantoms
, another favorite comfort-read for over a decade, failed to hold me. Reading was of course a problem with my dark vision getting in the way, but in fact flat black type on a flat white page was easier to deal with than almost anything else. I did pretty well so long as I remembered to keep my head and the page perfectly still; if I didn't, the print jumped sick-makingly into three dimensions. It was like the advertising about some latest thriller or other:
This story is so exciting it will leap off the page at you!
For me it did. This is disconcerting when you're reading
Professional Baking Quarterly
, which I usually tried to do. It made me feel I had some of the right attitude, and the letters page was always good for a laugh. Mom renewed my subscription every year as a supportive-maternal present. Surprise.

I did shut myself into the closet for half an hour with my combox. I had to screw up my courage to hit the “live” button. But nothing happened except what is supposed to happen. Whew. Perhaps the com cosmos isn't so homogenous after all. I knew that the official line is that the comcos is entirely a human creation, but then the official human line would be that, wouldn't it? And if there is a lot of vampire engineering in it, that would help to explain both where a lot of vampire money came from and why every authority on the planet—business, ecosyn, social service, governmental, all of them—is droolingly paranoid about vampires. However, if my combox was still in one piece and the comcos equivalent of the Big Ugly Thing That Ate Schenectady hadn't burst out of the screen and seized me, there must still be enough human input to the workings of the comcos to keep it … heterogeneous.

So I glanced through my cosmail to make sure I wasn't missing anything important. The usual globenet come-ons: a ride on the space bus for only a hundred squillion blinks and the soul of your firstborn child. A plastic surgeon who guaranteed to make you look like Princess Helga or your money back. And your face back too? I wondered. Learn spellcasting at home in your spare time, earn zillions, and live forever. I'd always assumed the living forever was out of the same scam as the earning zillions. I wondered how old Yolande was—how old her master was. I doubted it was four hundred years.

I answered a few cosmails. My presence in various Other zones had faded in the last five months. I could have given definite answers to some of the pet topics (Has a human, once captured, ever escaped from a vampire? Have a human and a vampire ever had a conversation on any kind of equal terms? Have a human and a vampire ever had
any
conversation and parted with the human still alive?—Barring some of the media stuff, although another pet topic was whether any of the vampire interviews were real). I had no desire to do so. But it had only been since my first contact with Other-space that it had occurred to me perhaps it would be a good idea to continue to pretend that Cinnamon—my ether name for seven years—was an ordinary woman who hadn't had anything surprising happen to her lately.

When I came out of the closet it was barely twilight. I thought sunset was never coming. This might be the first day of my life I'd ever wanted darkness to come sooner. I always wanted daylight to last longer. I had a lot more trouble getting up at four
A.M.
in winter when it was still going to be dark for hours than in summer when it would be glimmering toward dawn by the time I got to Charlie's.

I took a cup of chamomile tea out on the balcony and waited, feeling the darkness falling as if it were something landing on my skin.

I heard him coming this time. I don't know why I thought of it as hearing, when it had nothing to do with my ears. I didn't see any shadows moving among the other shadows of the garden either, although I knew he was there. But it was more like hearing than it was like anything else, like seeing in the dark is more like seeing than it is like anything else.

“The way here has grown in complexity,” he said.

“Oh—ah?” I said. “Oh. That will be Yolande's new wards. SOF has set up some tickers and I don't know what all.”

“Tickers,” said Con.

“You know,” I said. “You must know. SOF uses them—they record any Others that come near them. Tick tick, back at HQ where they're watching the monitors.”

“I have not had much contact with SOF.”

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto? “Whatever. The point is SOF thinks they're protecting me. So I asked Yolande to disarm any SOF snoopers that would notice you.”

“Yolande.”

“My landlady.”

“You have told her about me?”

I snorted.
“She
told
me
. Turns out she's known all along. And she's a wardskeeper. She's real useful to have on your side.”

Con was silent. I felt sympathetic. I wouldn't have liked the idea that he'd brought a friend into our business either. I was so keyed up that I didn't think about our disastrous last meeting till I'd already taken his hand, and then it was too late. He came back from wherever he'd been, presumably thinking about having another human foisted on him, and looked at me. His fingers curled around mine. I had a Senssurround Dolby flash of The Ten Seconds That Didn't Go Anywhere, but I hit the mental censor button and it went poof.

“Listen,” I said, although it was even less like listening than the nonsound of him moving toward me had been like listening. It was strangely easier too, doing it with him, showing him my new road map rather than trying to figure it out myself. He knew the language
and
the landscape. I had a great idea: next time Pat called me in to SOF for a little more technical mayhem, I'd bring Con. “Hi, I'd like you to meet my helpful vampire friend. Don't worry, my landlady is a retired—mostly retired—wardskeeper, and she says he's okay.” Sure. Speaking of having more humans foisted. Pat would take some foisting.

But I stared into Con's green eyes, and
aligned
myself, or him, like you might take someone's shoulders and turn them round so they're facing the right direction, like you might point at a map once you've told your companion, see, it's those mountains you see right over there.…

For a very nasty moment I thought I'd somehow managed to remake the live contact. That we weren't looking at a map of those mountains, but had been transported there, and the tigers were closing in. I jerked back, but Con's hand held me, and the jerk was like the click-over of the kaleidoscope, and the colored bits fell into a new arrangement.

It was weirdly something like looking through an aquarium at a lot of fish. The fish were whizzing around like crazy—cannonball fish—but I could see them individually, a little, and they did look like distinct and specific little whizzings-around instead of like chaos. This was interesting, although it didn't really get me any farther; they were still moving too fast for me to track a pattern or make my way among them. But this wasn't as sick-making—or as terrifying—to watch or to think about. Presumably this was a good thing. But I remembered the quality of the terror, and wasn't sure that
not
being terrified was wise or sane.

What we were looking for was behind the whizzing things. And that was still just as sick-making, just as terrifying. I didn't like this animated three-dimensional map.
Here be dragons
. Much worse than any dragon, which are pretty straightforward—and straightforwardly alive—creatures that merely suffer that little character defect about liking to eat human flesh.
Here be horrors indescribable
. I barely sensed the dreadful loom of it—the differentiation of it from its manic pinball machine guard system—before I was repelled, repulsed, hurled away more violently than Con had thrown me the other night … except it was Con, this time, who caught me.

I was flopped against him, his arm round my waist, my ear pressed to his silent chest. I grabbed at his other arm, steadied myself, balanced again on my own feet, which seemed very small and very far away. “Have I given us away? Con, was that
live?”
The world still spun. If there had been anything in my stomach but tea (the muffins were a long time ago) it might have come up. As it was, the tea sloshed vindictively a few times and subsided. The chain burned round my throat.

“No,” said Con. “My Sunshine, you must learn moderation. This is not an enemy you can defeat by rushing his front gate.”

I made a little choking noise that might have been third cousin twice removed to a laugh. “I had
no
intention of anything resembling gate-crashing. I thought I was just looking. Except it wasn't, um, looking.”

“No,” said Con. I could feel him thinking. “If you were a new—one of us—there are things I could teach you. I do not think I can teach a human these things.”