Sunshine

“I had to—touch him,” I said in a low voice. “I tried not to, but he was too strong. He was winning. I put my hands…I touched him. Bo.” As I said it all the other things I was trying not to remember about the night before came racing back, bludgeoning their way into my mind. I felt myself begin to fragment again. When I’d been facing the goddess, I’d known what I was doing for a little while. Now that there was no immediate threat to organize myself around…I shivered, even in the daylight. Thin, cool, autumn sunlight, with winter to come, with its shorter, colder days, before the baking heat of summer returned. Autumn daylight wasn’t going to heal my hands.

Or the reopened wound on my breast. I hadn’t had to look at it yet, accept its reappearance yet, while all of me was covered with crusted blood.

“Sunshine,” said Con gently. “He had no power to hurt you physically. He had had no such power for many years. His strength was in his will, and in the physical strength of those he controlled by his will. If his creatures—his acolytes—had not hurt you, he could not.”

I wanted to say, he did hurt me—his creatures did hurt me—they taught me what I could do. I would never have done what I did to Bo, if I had not already done it to his followers. “He almost killed me!” I said at last, aloud, feebly. This was an unendurably anticlimactic way of describing what had happened. Merely dying seemed like a minor difficulty, like an alarm clock that had failed to go off or a car that wouldn’t start. Maybe I had been hanging out with vampires too much.

“Yes. By sheer force of evil. Only that.”

“Only that,” I said. “Only that.”

“Yes.”

I turned my head to look at him, leaving my hands awkwardly where they were. The Mr. Connor of the goddess’ office had gone; my Con was back. There was a vampire in the room. He looked tired, almost as a human might look tired, as well as ragged and filthy. My vampire looked tired. I took my hands off the railing so I could go back into the shadows to Con. I reached out to touch him, twisted my hands away from him at the last moment. But he took my hands by the wrists, and kissed the back of each fist, turned them over and waited, patiently, till the fingers relaxed, and kissed each palm. It was a strange sensation. It felt less like being kissed than it felt like a doctor applying a salve. Or a priest last rites. “There is nothing wrong with your hands,” he said. “The touch of evil poisons by the idea of it. Reject the idea and you have rejected the evil.”

I was being lectured in morality by a vampire. I wanted to laugh. The problem was that he was wrong. If he’d been right maybe I could have laughed. “My hands feel—they’ve been—changed. I can feel this. They—they don’t belong to me any more. They are only—attached. They feel as if they may be—have become—evil.”

“Bo’s evil was a very powerful idea.”

“I thought I was coming to pieces. I am not sure I’m not. My hands—my hands are two fragments of what is left of me.” Two ruined fragments.

There was a pause. “Yes,” said Con.

“How do you know?” I whispered.

I waited for him to drop my hands, to move away from me. The pleading whine of my voice set my own teeth on edge. He was only still with me because the sun trapped him here till sunset.

He didn’t move away. He said, “I see it in your eyes.”

This was so unexpected I gaped at him. “What—”

“No. I cannot read your secrets. But I can read your fears. My kind are adept at reading fear. And you look into my eyes as no other human ever has.”

I looked away from him. War and Peace, my fears. All fifty-odd volumes of the Blood Lore series. The complete globenet directory. For sheer length and inclusiveness my fears were right up there. I hoped he was a speed reader.

He dropped my hands then, but only to put a finger under my chin. “Look at me.”

I let him raise my chin. Hey, he was a vampire. He could break my neck if he wanted to. This way he didn’t have to.

“You are not afraid of everything,” he said.

“Nearly,” I said. “I am afraid of you. I am afraid of me.”

“Yes,” he said.

There was a curious comfort in that “yes.” I had definitely been hanging out with vampires too long. This vampire.

I remembered standing in the sunlight in my kitchen window, the morning after my return from the lake. That moment when I first began to feel I might recover, from whatever it was that had happened.

The splinters that my peace of mind had been smashed into—if not, perhaps, after all, my sanity—were sending little scouting filaments across the gaps, looking for other pieces, whether I’d sent them out to look or not. Where the scout-filaments met, they’d start winding themselves together again, knitting themselves back into rows…They were probably building on those first granny knots from when I’d agreed to be let out of the SOF bind and be responsible for my behavior.

No: from the first granny knots of the morning after Con had brought me home from the lake.