Sunshine

Pity I wouldn’t be around to demonstrate.

The sun was near setting.

I dropped my arms. “Thank you,” I said. “That is so feeble. But— thank you very much.”

“You’re very welcome, my dear,” said Yolande.

“I must go now, I think.”

“Yes. But I hope you will come back and tell me about it.”

I met her eyes and saw with a shock that she did know. I tried to smile. “I hope I will too.”

I sat just inside the open doors of the balcony, cross-legged, hands on knees. I didn’t bother to try to align, to ask him anything, to tell him anything. He would be here soon enough. He would be here. This time what was doomed to happen wasn’t going to be put off. It would begin tonight. And, probably, end there too.

The sun reddened the autumn colors on the trees. The shadows darkened and lengthened.

PART FOUR

Perhaps the flakes of light had settled in my eyes too when Yolande’s web had fallen around me. Sitting still and waiting, watching the sun set, I hadn’t thought much about the way the shadows fell and moved; it was always easier when I was motionless myself. But I saw him clearly, this time. I saw him, and not merely by a process of elimination, one wiggly shadow moving in a specific direction. He was a dark figure, human-shaped. Vampire-shaped. He was Con.

A dark figure: dark with glints of gold, as if lightflakes fell on him, sparked like struck matches, and fell away.

Did I hear him or not? I don’t know. I had a feeling like sound of him, as I had a feeling like sight. I saw him disappear around the corner of the house. He would be coming up the stairs now; I felt his presence there. He would be opening my door—hmm, did he open doors to walk through them? No, wait. Vampires couldn’t disintegrate themselves—I didn’t think. A few sorcerers could, but they were the really crazy ones. If you’ve invited a vampire across your threshold, maybe the door simply didn’t exist for him any more? Or anyway why did the front door always whoosh gently when I opened it but not when he did?

And I knew when he was standing behind me. It wasn’t that I heard him breathing. But the vampire-in-the-room thing was unmistakable.

I stood up and turned around.

He looked different. It might have been the lightflakes but I don’t think so. I probably looked different too. If you’re going into what you know is your final battle maybe the preliminary loin-girding always is visible. My experience is limited. I don’t know that I would necessarily have identified the way Con looked as a vampire prepared for his last battle, but as a thumbnail description it would do.

I was always surprised at how big he was. That’s probably something about the way vampires move—the boneless gliding, that human-spine-unhinging creepy grace. You didn’t believe it, so you made the vampire smaller in your memory to make it a little more plausible. (Uh. I don’t know about the generic you in this case. So far as I knew I was the only human, so far, who’d had the opportunity. Or the need.) It’s funny, vampires have been a fact of human existence since before history began, and yet in our heart of hearts I don’t think we really believe in them. Every time one of us meets up with one of them we don’t believe in them all over again. Of course in most cases a human meeting up with a vampire is looking at their immediate death and so not believing it is the last forlorn hope—but I’m here to say that being acquainted with one doesn’t lessen the feeling much. I didn’t believe in Con.

Tricky.

I believed in my own death more.

I stretched my hand out and put it on his chest, where no heart beat. He was wearing another one of his long black shirts. It might have been the one I had worn a few nights ago, except that that one was hanging in the back of my closet with the cranberry-red dress. My vampire wardrobe.

I let my hand drop.

But he reached out and picked it up. There was a fizz, a shock, as his skin met mine. I felt him twitch—ever so slightly—but he didn’t loose my hand. He turned it over instead, and then laid it gently, as if it had no volition of its own, in the palm of his other hand. The invisible spark happened again, but he didn’t startle this time. My back was to the fading twilight, but in the shadow of my body the occasional gold glints of the web were just visible.

“What is this?” he said.

“Yolande gave it to me. She said it would help me draw on the source of my strength.”

“Daylight,” he said.

“Yes. Does it hurt you?”

“No.”

I thought about that no. It sounded a little like the “no” of the kid playing so-called touch football who has just had the three biggest kids in the neighborhood tag her by knocking her down and sitting on her. They asked me after they let me up if I was hurt. I said no. I was lying. “Let me rephrase that.”

A small shiver in his breath. Really quite a human noise: audible breath with a catch in it, like a muted laugh. “When you are a little too hot, a little too cold, does it hurt?”