Sunshine

Yolande let out a long slow breath. I looked at her inquiringly. “I wasn’t sure it was going to work. I told you we had to put this together very quickly.”

“What—is it?”

Yolande paused. “I’m not sure how to explain it to you. It is not a ward, or only indirectly so. It is a form of comehither, but generally only sorcerers ever use anything like it. It—it gathers your strength to you. It taps into the source of your strength, more strongly than you can unaided.

“Most magic handlers have a talent for one thing or another, and it is drawn from one area of this world or another. A foreseer with a principal rapport with trees may see visions in a burl of her favorite wood, for example, rather than in the traditional crystal ball. A sorcerer whose strongest relationship is with water will be much likelier to drown his or her enemy than to meet them in battle, although one with an affinity for metal would forge a sword.”

“Affinity,” I said bitterly. “My affinity is for vampires.”

“No,” said Yolande. “Why do you say that?”

“Pat. SOF. That’s why they want me. Because I’m a m-magic handler”—I could hardly get the phrase out; handling seemed far from the correct term in my case—“with an affinity for vampires.”

Yolande shook her head. “The hierarchies of magic handling are no particular study of mine. But your principal affinity is for sunlight: your element, as it were. It is usually one of the standard four: earth, air, water, fire. Sometimes it is metal, sometimes wood. I have never heard of one for sunlight before, but there are—are tests for these things. Yours is neither fire nor air, but a bit of both, and something else. While I was doing the tests and coming up nowhere, I thought of sunlight because of all the days I have seen you lying in the sun like a cat or a dog—I have only ever seen you truly relaxed like that, lying motionless in sunlight. And you told me once about the year you were ill, when you lived in a basement flat, and how you cured yourself by lying in front or the sunny windows when you moved upstairs. I thought of your nickname—how I myself had relied on your nickname to tell me the real truth about you, after the vampire visited you…

“As for your—let us call it counteraffinity: your counteraffinity may be for vampires. I have never heard of this either, but I do know it is often a magic handler with a principal affinity for water who can cross a desert most easily; a handler with a principal affinity for air who can hold her breath the longest, someone with an affinity for earth who flies most easily. It is the strength of the element in you that makes you more able to resist—and simultaneously embrace— its opposite. You are not consumed by the dark because you are full of light.”

I didn’t feel full of light. I felt full of stomach acid and cold phlegm. I knew about the four elements, of course; I even knew a little about this counteraffinity thing. Magic handlers with a principal fire element never get hired by the fire service; fires tend to be harder to put out with them around. But an Air or a Water is a shoo-in for the Fire Corps because Airs never seem to suffer smoke inhalation and water seems to go farther with a Water. A lot of lives have been saved by the Airs and the Waters in the Fire Corps. I’d never thought of it as having to do with counteraffinities though.

But then I had never thought a lot about magic handling. I had always been too busy being fascinated by stories of the Others.

“I can see in the dark—er—now,” I said, not wanting to get into how it happened, “but it makes me kind of nuts. In the dark it’s okay. But I see in—through—the shadows in daylight too. But I see through them—strangely. I mostly can’t make sense of what I’m seeing.” Or if I can I don’t know if I’m imagining it, to make it make sense. “And most of them wiggle.”

Yolande looked interested. “Perhaps you will tell me more about that some time. I may be able to help.”

Some time, I thought. Yeah. “The shadows on you don’t wiggle though. They just lie there, like all shadows used to.”

“Ah. That will perhaps be the purification process of wardskeeping. If you become a master, as I eventually did, you go through a series of trials that are to make you what you are as intensely as possible. You would not be able to do what a master does without this. I imagine you will see other masters of their craft as you see me.

I still hadn’t decided if the shadows that fell on Con moved around or not. Dark shadows were different from light shadows. So to speak. If they didn’t, did that make him a master vampire? What is a master vampire? SOF used the term for someone who ran a gang.

I held both arms out and admired the faint twinkly gold, felt the faint prickly itch. I pulled a handful of my hair forward where I could look at it and it too was laced and daubed with gold. Maybe Yolande could sell the process to a hairdresser: bet you didn’t have to touch it up every few weeks.