Sunshine

“Hey,” I said, and put up my arm, as if to ward off a physical blow. Trolling isn’t an exact science for even the best searcher, and the searchee has to hold still. Big police stations have a mind-search chair as standard equipment, and a medic standing by with a shot of stuff that on the street is called delete, which makes you hold still all right and you may not move real well again for a long time afterward.

I was pretty sure she hadn’t had the chance to pull anything out of me but I sure didn’t like her trying. I also thought I understood why those I disconcertingly found myself thinking of as my gang— Pat and Jesse and Aimil and Theo—looked so jumpy.

“I am so sorry,” she said, not sorry at all. “I am accustomed to assisting recall in our agents. I did it automatically.”

The hell you did, lady, I didn’t say. You were hoping I wouldn’t notice. I did say, “Good night. If I remember anything, I’ll let you know.”

She would have liked to stop me, but perhaps she didn’t quite dare. I had noticed what she’d tried to do, and an accusation of illegal mind search would be embarrassing to SOF even if they denied it convincingly. It occurred to me that she must really, really want anything I could tell her, to have taken the chance. Was she that flash on vampires or was there something else going on? Silly me. Of course there was something else going on. If she was just megahot on vampires, she and Pat would be buddies, and they weren’t.

It also occurred to me that she couldn’t have pulled anything out of me, because if she had, she’d‘ve found a way to hold me, and she was letting me go.

I turned very carefully to the door, wanting to get through it before she changed her mind. I also didn’t want to shake my fix loose till I’d had a chance to explore it. I felt it swimming, the way a compass needle swims as you turn the casing.

Aimil clung solicitously to my elbow. “My car’s in back,” she said.

We were halfway down the final corridor when we heard someone running up behind us: Pat. “I’ve left Jesse trying to deal with the goddess,” he said. “Sorry, Sunshine, can you move any faster? I want us all out of here before she thinks of a reason to yank us back in.”

They hustled me along between them. Pat was holding his wounded arm pressed against his body, but his grasp on me was strong enough. Once I was outdoors I felt the fix run through me again. “I have to stop,” I said. Pat didn’t argue, but he glanced over his shoulder.

We stood at the top of the little flight of stairs into the parking lot. I took a deep breath and tried to settle myself, wait for the compass needle to stop waving back and forth. It didn’t want to stop waving back and forth. A void needle will presumably be confused by moving around in ordinary reality, the way an ordinary compass needle will be confused by steel beams and magnetic fields. I hoped there weren’t any steel-beam and magnetic-field equivalents nearby. Settle, I told it. I haven’t lost it, I thought, please don’t tell me I’ve lost it…

“Um,” said Aimil. “I don’t know if this might be of any help to you,” and she pulled a bit of exploded combox from her pocket and offered it to me.

“You darling,” I said. Sympathetic magic is never the best and is usually the crudest, but when you wanted grounding there is nothing better, and any damn fool with a drop of magic-handler blood six generations back can tap it. I held the scrap of plastic in both hands.

This time I didn’t have to turn around. I felt it slamming in over my right shoulder—no, through it—toward my heart. Like a stake into a vampire.

I dropped the bit of combox and threw myself away from its line of flight. The chain round my neck and the knife and seal in my pockets blazed up again—and I seemed to have a friction burn across the front of my right shoulder where the whatever-it-was had grazed me in passing—it felt like someone had taken an electric sander to me.

Pat caught me, or I might have fallen down the steps onto the pavement. “Wow,” he said, and almost dropped me, as if he’d caught hold of something burning; but he was a true SOF, or he had his damsel-rescuing hat on that evening, or he was more worried about me than about the skin of his hands or the stitches in his shoulder. He flinched but his grip tightened.

“Sorry,” I said. “That was a little of what blew the combox.” Aimil shook her head, slowly went to where the bit of broken combox was still rocking on its curved edge where it had landed, bent down even more slowly, and picked it up. Brave woman. But it wasn’t the sort of clue we could afford to leave lying around: everybody knows about sympathetic magic, which would include all the goddess’ spies.

Pat rubbed his hands down the sides of his legs. “Shiva wept,” he said. “Sunshine, you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “More or less.” I looked in the direction that the invisible stake had come from. No Town again. I looked back. “Your stitches are bleeding.”

“Did you get anything?”

“No Town. We knew that.”