Sunshine

So I glanced through my cosmail to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important. The usual globenet come-ons: a ride on the space bus for only a hundred squillion blinks and the soul of your firstborn child. A plastic surgeon who guaranteed to make you look like Princess Helga or your money back. And your face back too? I wondered. Learn spellcasting at home in your spare time, earn zillions, and live forever. I’d always assumed the living forever was out of the same scam as the earning zillions. I wondered how old Yolande was—how old her master was. I doubted it was four hundred years.

I answered a few cosmails. My presence in various Other zones had faded in the last five months. I could have given definite answers to some of the pet topics (Has a human, once captured, ever escaped from a vampire? Have a human and a vampire ever had a conversation on any kind of equal terms? Have a human and a vampire ever had any conversation and parted with the human still alive?—Barring some of the media stuff, although another pet topic was whether any of the vampire interviews were real). I had no desire to do so. But it had only been since my first contact with Other-space that it had occurred to me perhaps it would be a good idea to continue to pretend that Cinnamon—my ether name for seven years—was an ordinary woman who hadn’t had anything surprising happen to her lately.

When I came out of the closet it was barely twilight. I thought sunset was never coming. This might be the first day of my life I’d ever wanted darkness to come sooner. I always wanted daylight to last longer. I had a lot more trouble getting up at four a.m. in winter when it was still going to be dark for hours than in summer when it would be glimmering toward dawn by the time I got to Charlie’s.

I took a cup of chamomile tea out on the balcony and waited, feeling the darkness falling as if it were something landing on my skin.

I heard him coming this time. I don’t know why I thought of it as hearing, when it had nothing to do with my ears. I didn’t see any shadows moving among the other shadows of the garden either, although I knew he was there. But it was more like hearing than it was like anything else, like seeing in the dark is more like seeing than it is like anything else.

“The way here has grown in complexity,” he said.

“Oh—ah?” I said. “Oh. That will be Yolande’s new wards. SOF has set up some tickers and I don’t know what all.”

“Tickers,” said Con.

“You know,” I said. “You must know. SOF uses them—they record any Others that come near them. Tick tick, back at HQ where they’re watching the monitors.”

“I have not had much contact with SOF.”

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto? “Whatever. The point is SOF thinks they’re protecting me. So I asked Yolande to disarm any SOF snoopers that would notice you.”

“Yolande.”

“My landlady.”

“You have told her about me?”

I snorted. “She told me. Turns out she’s known all along. And she’s a wardskeeper. She’s real useful to have on your side.”

Con was silent. I felt sympathetic. I wouldn’t have liked the idea that he’d brought a friend into our business either. I was so keyed up that I didn’t think about our disastrous last meeting till I’d already taken his hand, and then it was too late. He came back from wherever he’d been, presumably thinking about having another human foisted on him, and looked at me. His fingers curled around mine. I had a Senssurround Dolby flash of The Ten Seconds That Didn’t Go Anywhere, but I hit the mental censor button and it went poof.

“Listen,” I said, although it was even less like listening than the nonsound of him moving toward me had been like listening. It was strangely easier too, doing it with him, showing him my new road map rather than trying to figure it out myself. He knew the language and the landscape. I had a great idea: next time Pat called me in to SOF for a little more technical mayhem, I’d bring Con. “Hi, I’d like you to meet my helpful vampire friend. Don’t worry, my landlady is a retired—mostly retired—wardskeeper, and she says he’s okay.” Sure. Speaking of having more humans foisted. Pat would take some foisting.

But I stared into Con’s green eyes, and aligned myself, or him, like you might take someone’s shoulders and turn them round so they’re facing the right direction, like you might point at a map once you’ve told your companion, see, it’s those mountains you see right over there…

For a very nasty moment I thought I’d somehow managed to remake the live contact. That we weren’t looking at a map of those mountains, but had been transported there, and the tigers were closing in. I jerked back, but Con’s hand held me, and the jerk was like the click-over of the kaleidoscope, and the colored bits fell into a new arrangement.