Sunshine

“Why do you think?” I said, looking at him steadily. The shadows on his face lay plain and clean. I slid a little further into my strange seeing. These shadows had a slightly rough or textured quality I was beginning to guess meant partblood—I’d seen it in Maud’s face first, but Aimil had it too—and in Pat’s case this not-quite-human aspect was distinctly blue. But the shadows said there was no deceit beyond the basic subterfuge of passing for pureblood human. Pat was who he said he was, and believed what he said he believed. “I want to find these guys too,” I said. “And SOF, begging your pardon, makes me nervous.”

Pat sighed and rubbed his head with his hand, making his short SOF-norm hair stand on end. “Look, kiddo, I know all the usual complaints about SOF and I agree with most of them.” He saw me looking at his hair and smiled a little. “So I don’t happen to mind the hair and the uniform, that’s not a crime, is it? But we can protect you better at SOF HQ than you can protect yourself anywhere else. What if what you were tracking had noticed you were searching for it the other day? You think you could have got back out fast enough for it not to follow you home? The fact that Aimil is still alive proves that it didn’t notice. But I think that was dumb luck. Nobody has ever lived a long happy life depending on dumb luck, and depending on any kind of luck is as good as tearing your own throat out when you’re messing with suckers. I don’t care what extra powers you got, Sunshine.‘’

I swallowed. “Did you say all that to Aimil?”

“You bet I did, babe, and more besides. She is, after all, on our payroll and subject to our rules. You aren’t. Yet, although I’ve thought about it. But SOF doesn’t pay so good and generally we have to blackmail people like you and Aimil, to put it bluntly, not to mention figuring out what the official description of what we wanted you for would be. I could probably tie you up in a big knot of top-secret intelligence bureaucracy—we’ve got powers to compel ordinary citizens in certain circumstances, did you know that? And we could make these the right kind of circumstances, never fear—but it would take too long and I suspect it would make you ornery. We need you too badly to risk pissing you off, if we can get you any other way. By the way, you were planning on coming to us with anything you found on the other end of Aimil’s cosmails, weren’t you? You don’t have any noble, suicidal plans to take these suckers on by yourself, do you? Tell me you are not that stupid.”

I said with perfect honesty, “I have no intention of trying to take these suckers on by myself, no.”

Pat looked at me with a slight frown. “Why doesn’t that sound as reassuring as it should?”

I gazed back at him as innocently as I could.

He sighed. “Never mind. We’ll see you at ten tonight. In fact, I’ll come by myself at closing.”

“I’m not going to sneak out the back way and go home if I’ve told you I’ll come,” I said, annoyed.

“You haven’t actually said you will come,” said Pat calmly, “and I don’t want you walking around by yourself at that hour, in case Bozo gets wise between now and then.”

This was a little too near a little too much of the truth. “Bozo?” I said carefully. “Do you have a name?”

“Have we ever had a name?” said Pat. “You find ‘em and you stake ’em and then you burn ‘em to be sure. But we’re obviously chasing a master vampire here, and it’s easier if we call him something. Assuming it’s a him, which they usually are. So we’re calling him Bozo. So, are you saying you’ll be waiting for me at ten tonight then?”

“But if Aimil—”

“I’ll tell her you’re coming anyway and we’ve got that cosmail saved and we can do it without her if we have to. She can either come be part of the safety net or sit at home waiting for really bad news and be hauled over the carpet and messily fired later on.”

“What sweethearts you SOFs are,” I said.

There was no humor at all in Pat’s face when he replied: “Yeah. But we’re real devoted to the idea of keeping the live alive. What did you do to your chin—and your arm? Is that from when you fell out of Aimil’s chair?”

“Must be,” I said. “I don’t remember that well.”

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