Sunshine

“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 un-appreciative 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.