Sunshine

They started walking up the slope toward the house. The others had melted out of the trees (wherever they’d been meanwhile) and were straggling behind the three of us, my two jailers and me. My sense that none of them was happy became stronger. I wondered if their willingness to walk through the woods at fumbling human speed had anything to do with this. I looked up at the sky, wondering, almost calmly, if this was the last time I would see it. I glanced down and to either side. The footing was nearly as bad here as it had been among the trees. There was something odd…I thought about my parents’ old cabin and the cabins and cottages (or rather the remains of them) around it. In the ten years since the Wars had been officially ended saplings and scrub had grown up pretty thoroughly around all of them. They should have done the same around this house. I thought: it’s been cleared. Recently. That’s why the ground is so uneven. I looked again to either side: now that I was looking it was obvious that the forest had been hacked back too. The big house was sitting, all by itself, in the middle of a wide expanse of land that had been roughly but thoroughly stripped of anything that might cause a shadow.

This shouldn’t have made my situation any worse, but I was suddenly shuddering, and I hadn’t been before.

The house was plainly our destination. I stumbled, and stumbled again. I was not doing it deliberately as some kind of hopeless delaying tactic; I was merely losing my ability to hold myself together. Something about that cleared space, about what this meant about…whatever was waiting for me. Something about the reluctance of my escort. About the fact that therefore whatever it was that waited was more terrible than they were.

My jailers merely tightened their hold and frog-marched me when I wobbled. Suckers are very strong; they may not have noticed that they were now bearing nearly all my weight as my knees gave and my feet lost their purchase on the ragged ground.

They dragged me up the last few stairs to the wide, once-elegant porch; the treads creaked under my weight as I missed my footing, while the vampires flowed up on either side of us with no more sound than they had made ranging through the woods. One of them opened the front door and stood aside for the prisoner and her guards to go in first. We entered a big, dark, empty hall; some moonlight spilled in through open doors on either side of us, enough that my eyes could vaguely make out the extent of it. It was probably bigger than the whole ground floor of Mom and Charlie’s house. At the far end a staircase swirled up in a semicircle, disappearing into the murk overhead.

We turned left and went through a half-open door.

This had to be a ballroom; it was even bigger than the front hall had been. There was no furniture that I could see, but there was a muddle overhead—its shadow had wrenched my panicky attention toward it—that looked rather like a vast chandelier, although I would have expected anything like that to have been looted years ago. It seemed like acres of floor as we crossed it. There was another muddle leaning up against the wall in front of us—a possibly human-body-shaped muddle, I thought, confused. Another prisoner? Another live dinner? Was waiting to be eaten in company going to be any less horrible than waiting alone? Where was the “old-fashioned guest” who liked dresses rather than jeans and sneakers? Oh, dear gods and angels, let this be over quickly, I cannot bear much more…

The muddle was someone sitting cross-legged, head bowed, forearms on knees. I didn’t realize till it raised its head with a liquid, inhuman motion that it was another vampire.

I jerked backward. I didn’t mean to; I knew I wasn’t going to get away: I couldn’t help it. The vampire on my left—the one who had asked me why I didn’t beg for my life—laughed again. “There’s some life in you after all, girlie. I was wondering. Bo wouldn’t like it if it turned out we caught a blanker. He wants his guest in a good mood.”

Bo’s lieutenant said again, “Shut up.”

One of the other vampires drifted up to us and handed its lieutenant something. They passed it between them as if it had been no more than a handkerchief, but it…clanked.

Bo’s lieutenant said, “Hold her.” He dropped my arm and picked up my foot, as casually as a carpenter picking up a hammer. I would have fallen, but the other vampire held me fast. Something cold closed around my ankle, and when he dropped my foot again it fell to the floor hard enough to bruise the sole, because of the new weight. I was wearing a metal shackle, and trailing a chain. The vampire who had brought the thing to Bo’s lieutenant stretched out the end of the chain and clipped it into a ring in the wall.

“How many days has it been, Connie?” said Bo’s lieutenant softly. “Ten? Twelve? Twenty? She’s young and smooth and warm. Totally flash. Bo told us to bring you a nice one. She’s all for you. We haven’t touched her.”

I thought of the gloves.