Sunshine (49 page)

Other things I didn't do included waste any time trying to find out who'd planted that fetch on me. Yolande did a sweep on the Wreck for me and didn't find anything but two new wards tucked under the front bumper and a ticker behind the rear license plate. She was quite taken with the wards, saying she was falling behind on research faster than she knew, that they were a whole new design of traveling ward and by far the most effective she'd seen. They had to be SOF too. An example of a large corrupt organization getting it right. She left all of them alone.

I had been hoping to see Pat. I could promise anything he liked for tomorrow or the day after that. But he didn't show up, as he mostly hadn't been showing up since the night we blew out HQ. He must be getting his cinnamon roll fix by white bakery bag. In a world where I was less and less sure of anything, I was sure that that jones was real. I was sorry not to have a chance to say good-bye, except of course I wouldn't have said good-bye. When Mary came into the bakery to ask if there was anything hot out of the oven she didn't know about to tell Jesse and Theo I said, carelessly, “Oh, I'll bring it: I'll try my new whatever-these-are on them.” I liked the idea of inventing a new recipe on my last day on earth, and I've always liked to see my guinea pigs' faces when they first bite down. I said, “So, say hi to Pat for me,” and they both looked at me as if there was a hidden message, which there was, although I doubted they were going to guess it. They were distracted quickly enough by the whatever-these-were: I'd have to do the unthinkable and write out the recipe, so Paulie could have it. And maybe Aimil would come up with a good name. Sunshine's Eschatology. Hey, my eschatology
would
have butter, heavy cream, pecans, and three kinds of chocolate in it.

I'd miss feeding my SOFs: they were good eaters.

I'd miss being alive.

I had been due to work through the early-supper split shift but I decided I wanted to see the sun set from my balcony once more so I wheedled Emmy into it. Didn't want her to lose all her bakery skills just because she'd been made assistant cook next door—Paulie was going to need her. I'd already bent Paulie's arm into a pretzel till he'd agreed to take the dawn shift tomorrow. The Thursday morning system had broken down so completely I no longer remembered if I owed him some four
A.M.S
or he owed me some. The confusion was probably good for him. He was about to have to learn to be chief baker real fast.

There were some people it was too difficult to say good-bye to, so I didn't try. Mom, of course. If I'd made a point of going into the office to say good-bye to her that day, however casually, she'd've been calling the cops and the hospital before I got the words out of my mouth. Once a mother, always a mother, and I'd have to have some spectacular reason for breaking the awkward but practical truce that we never spoke to each other unless on specific coffeehouse business. Kenny was bussing tables; we exchanged “Hey”s. I'd never said good-bye to Kenny and this wasn't the time to start. I had seen Billy for about two-thirds of a second earlier in the afternoon, when he blasted into Charlie's long enough to fling over his shoulder at the nearest parent the information that he was spending the rest of the day with the equally hyperactive friend accompanying him. He did not acknowledge me; I was part of the family backdrop. What was to acknowledge? My importance lay in the availability of the eight muffins and two-each-from-every-bin-and-four-if-they-were-chocolate-cookies they took with them as they blasted out again.

Mary and Kyoko I said “See you” to. I waved to Emmy, who was in the main kitchen looking harassed, but I was beginning to suspect that her harassed look was covering up the fact that she was having a really good time and didn't quite believe her luck. I always checked out with Charlie, to make sure there weren't any last-minute gaps I might be able to fill, to make sure our schedules for tomorrow matched. I'd told him about the swap with Paulie; I only said I was tired, and I know I looked it. We didn't say good-bye either. Our ritual went, “See you tomorrow, Sunshine,” and “Yeah.” I said “Yeah,” as usual. Even on days off he said “See you tomorrow” because even on days off he usually did.

I hadn't realized that I never said good-bye to anyone about anything.

Mel. He was on break when I left, and he wasn't jiving with some guy or guys in greasy denim about overhead cam shifts through hot pastrami or meatloaf sandwiches—or for that matter discussing world news with one of our more coherent derelicts. Mel was leaning against the corner of the building drinking coffee and muttering to himself. I knew what he was muttering about: he'd given up smoking ten years ago but he still wanted a cigarette every time he drank coffee, and he drank a lot of coffee. Sometimes his fingers twitched, not from the caffeine jag but from the memory of doing his own roll-ups. This made him drink more coffee. One day he was going to wake up and discover he'd turned into a coffee plantation, and then Charlie's would have its own fresh home-grown beans even if we had to replace our chief cook. There are worse things to wake up and discover you've turned into. A vampire, for example. Although the books say you'll know it's coming.

Mel looked up and saw me, and his face eased into his good-old-boy smile. Mel used his charm as deliberately as laying an ace on the table, so you could see exactly what it was. It was one of the good things about him. Whatever he might not be telling you, what he did tell you was the truth.
I'm your friend, Sunshine
. He still looked like someone who should be wearing greasy denims rather than an apron, although the tattoos confused the issue: greasy denims and a long hooded cloak? Hmm. I wondered if sorcerers ever used food splotches instead of cosmetics.

“Hey Sunshine.”

“Hey.”

“We still on for Friday afternoon?”

I nodded, probably too vigorously, because his smile faded. “Something wrong?”

Nothing that wasn't wrong the last time you asked me that question, I thought, only it's got wronger faster than maybe I was expecting. I shook my head, trying to be less vigorous. “No. Thanks.”

He swallowed the last of his coffee, put the mug down on the ground, and came over to me. “Sure?”

“Sure. Yeah.” I put my arms around him, leaned my face against his shoulder (my forehead against the oak tree that was visible beneath the torn-off sleeve of his T-shirt), and sighed. He smelled of food and daylight. I could feel his heart beating. He put his arms around me. “Probably just lingering indigestion from eleven-twelfths of a Bitter Chocolate Death yesterday,” I said. I felt the small kick of his diaphragm as he laughed—he had a sort of furry-chuckle laugh—but he knew me too well. “Try again, Sunshine,” he said. “Do blue whales OD guzzling all that sea water? Your veins
run
chocolate—finest dark semisweet—not blood.”

Pity it looked red, then. It gave vampires ideas. I didn't say anything.

“You can tell me about it on Friday, okay?” he said.

I nodded. “Okay.” If I said any more I would probably burst into tears.

I
DROVE HOME
slowly. I thought of going by the library, but decided Aimil came into the “too difficult” category, and she might conceivably make some kind of guess what I was feeling so gloomy about and I didn't want to take the risk. What a really awful reason not to see someone for the last time. But I was so
tired
.

I sat in the car again at home and watched the leaves turning. It seemed to me a lot of autumn had happened in the last two days. I thought of the two days out of time I'd had after Con had diagnosed me and before he was supposed to come back and cure me. I'd known I was dying, but it kind of hadn't mattered. It wasn't only that I believed Con would find a way to heal me. It was that there wasn't anything I could do. I didn't have that luxury this time. I was going to have to go through with it, whatever it was. I'd always scorned the stories where the princesses hung around waiting to be rescued: Sleeping Beauty, spare me. Tell the stupid little wuss to wake up and sort out the wicked fairy herself. I found myself thinking that sleeping through it sounded pretty good after all.

Yolande was looking out for me, and her door was open before I'd climbed out of the Wreck. I walked draggingly up to her. I didn't even know that it was going to be tonight. I remembered those extra nights I'd waited for Con, with death lying on my breast like a lover. What a long time ago that seemed. I tried to make this a hopeful thought, but it refused to work. It was like trying to blow up a popped balloon. Hello, Death,
you
again. Just can't keep away, can you?

Saints and damnation. Mostly damnation.

Yolande drew me into her workroom. There was a little heap of … sunlight on her desk. What? I blinked. It looked like … as if there was a chink in the blind, letting a single ray in to make a pool there: except it wasn't a pool, it was a
heap
, and there was no ray of sun. I could feel my eyes fizzing back and forth like a camera's automatic lens, trying to find the right setting and failing. The heap cast no shadows. It was a small domed hummock of pure golden light.

I had stopped to stare, and Yolande went to her desk and picked it up. It seemed to flow over her hands, slowly, like rivulets of warm honey, or small friendly sleepy snakes. It was, I thought, as it separated itself over her fingers, a latticework of some variety. The filaments met and parted in some kind of pattern, and the filaments themselves seemed to carry a pattern, like scales on a snake's back. It moved slowly, but it moved; it curled round Yolande's wrists. My strange sense of it—them—being friendly but half asleep remained. “It will wake up when it touches you,” she said, as if reading my mind. “We had to put it together in great haste, and it's not yet used to being—manifest.”

She came toward me, stretching the light-net gently between her hands like a cat's cradle, and—threw it over me.

For a moment I was surrounded by twinkling lights; and then I felt it—them—settling gently against my skin, delicate as snowflakes, but warm. Bemusedly I held one arm out to watch the process. You know how if you watch, if you concentrate, you can feel when snowflakes land on you, feel the chill of them, almost individually at first, till your face or hand or arm begins to numb with the cold, and then they melt against your skin and disappear. So it was with these tiny lightflakes: I saw them as they floated down, shimmering down, felt them when they touched me, lighter than feathers or gossamer, and over all of me, for clothes were insubstantial to them. But they were not merely warm, a few of them were uncomfortably hot, and left tiny pinprick red marks; and while they dissolved on contact like snowflakes, they appeared to sink through the surface of my skin, leaving nothing behind, no dampness, no stickiness, no shed scales.… After they'd all vanished, if I turned my arm sharply back and forth I could just see the webwork of light, like veins, only golden, not blue. I itched faintly, especially where belt and bra straps rubbed.

Yolande let out a long slow breath. I looked at her inquiringly. “I wasn't sure it was going to work. I told you we had to put this together very quickly.”

“What—is it?”

Yolande paused. “I'm not sure how to explain it to you. It is not a ward, or only indirectly so. It is a form of comehither, but generally only sorcerers ever use anything like it. It—it gathers your strength to you. It taps into the source of your strength, more strongly than you can unaided.

“Most magic handlers have a talent for one thing or another, and it is drawn from one area of this world or another. A foreseer with a principal rapport with trees may see visions in a burl of her favorite wood, for example, rather than in the traditional crystal ball. A sorcerer whose strongest relationship is with water will be much likelier to drown his or her enemy than to meet them in battle, although one with an affinity for metal would forge a sword.”

“Affinity,” I said bitterly. “My
affinity
is for vampires.”

“No,” said Yolande. “Why do you say that?”

“Pat. SOF. That's why they want me. Because I'm a m-magic handler”—I could hardly get the phrase out;
handling
seemed far from the correct term in my case—”with an affinity for vampires.”

Yolande shook her head. “The hierarchies of magic handling are no particular study of mine. But your principal affinity is for sunlight: your element, as it were. It is usually one of the standard four: earth, air, water, fire. Sometimes it is metal, sometimes wood. I have never heard of one for sunlight before, but there are—are tests for these things. Yours is neither fire nor air, but a bit of both, and something else. While I was doing the tests and coming up nowhere, I thought of sunlight because of all the days I have seen you lying in the sun like a cat or a dog—I have only ever seen you truly relaxed like that, lying motionless in sunlight. And you told me once about the year you were ill, when you lived in a basement flat, and how you cured yourself by lying in front of the sunny windows when you moved upstairs. I thought of your nickname—how I myself had relied on your nickname to tell me the real truth about you, after the vampire visited you.…

“As for your—let us call it counteraffinity: your counteraffinity may be for vampires. I have never heard of this either, but I do know it is often a magic handler with a principal affinity for water who can cross a desert most easily; a handler with a principal affinity for air who can hold her breath the longest, someone with an affinity for earth who flies most easily. It is the strength of the element in you that makes you more able to resist—and simultaneously embrace—its opposite. You are not consumed by the dark because you are full of light.”

I didn't feel full of light. I felt full of stomach acid and cold phlegm. I knew about the four elements, of course; I even knew a little about this counteraffinity thing. Magic handlers with a principal fire element never get hired by the fire service; fires tend to be harder to put out with them around. But an Air or a Water is a shoo-in for the Fire Corps because Airs never seem to suffer smoke inhalation and water seems to go farther with a Water. A lot of lives have been saved by the Airs and the Waters in the Fire Corps. I'd never thought of it as having to do with counteraffinities though.