Sunshine

I was going to have some more scars and the texture of the final weave was going to change. Was changing. It was going to be lumpier, and there were going to be some pretty weird holes. I never had been able to learn to knit. I don’t do uniformity and consistency. Even my cinnamon rolls tend to have individual personality. I could probably cope with a few more wodgy bits in my own makeup.

Maybe my medulla oblongata was refusing to take any crap from my cerebrum again. Shut up and get on with the reconstruction. If you can’t find the right piece, use the wrong one.

I took a step backward, still facing Con, still within reach of him, but so that the sunlight touched me.

There was something struggling out of the murk here, trying to make me think it: If good is going to triumph over evil, good has to stay sane.

Say what? Oh, please. I’m still thinking about breathing. Now I’m supposed to start in flogging myself to go on fighting for the forces of…well, “good” is some freaking mouthful. It sounds like some Anglo-Saxon geek with a big square jaw and a blazing sword, any vestigial sense of humor surgically removed years before when he was conditionally accepted to Hero School.

But that was kind of where I’d wound up, even if I’d missed out on the jaw and the training. Because I was definitely against evil. Definitely. In my lumpy, erratic way. And I knew what I was talking about, because I’d now met evil. That was precisely the point.

I’d touched it.

And I was going to have to remember for the rest of my life that I’d touched it. That these hands had grasped, pulled…

But us anti-evil guys have to stay sane. Lumpy and holey, maybe, but sane. Listen, Sunshine: Bo was gone. He wasn’t going to get the last word now.

I hoped.

At least not until later this morning.

“I’m going to run a bath. I’ll flip you for who goes first.” I had a jar on my desk, next to the balcony, that held loose change.

“Flip?” Vampires. They don’t know anything.

I won. I was almost sorry. I felt obliged to have only one bath, and a fast one, but I made it count. If I rubbed my palms a little rawer than I needed to for an idea, at least my hands felt like my hands while I was doing it. Perhaps the touch of the rose petals, when I’d had to move all the floating roses out of the bath so I could get me into it instead, had helped.

There was no wound on my breast. I hadn’t believed it at first. I kept rubbing the soap all over my front, from throat to pubic line, as if maybe I’d mislaid it somehow. But it wasn’t there. The scar was. I thought it looked a little…wider, shinier, than it had, the day after Con had closed it the first time. But it was a scar.

But my chain was gone too, and there was a new scar, which dipped over the old one, in the shape of a chain hanging around my neck. Together they looked like some new rune, but I couldn’t read it.

There was no sign of the golden web, no matter how hard I scrubbed.

…What had I been saying about going on fighting for the forces of good? In that mad little moment right after Con had said something comforting? That a vampire had seemed to say something comforting should have told me I was having a crazy moment, not a returning-sanity-and-hope moment.

Going on doing anything like what I’d been doing these last five months—horribly culminating in what I had done last night—was approximately the last thing I wanted.

Especially when it meant bearing the knowledge of what I’d done. And that going on doing it would mean bearing more of doing and more of knowing.

But Pat had said we had less than a hundred years left. Us humans. No, not us humans. Us-on-the-right-side. And there aren’t enough of us.

Okay, here’s the irony: if I went on with this heavy magic-handling shtick I was likely to be around in a hundred years.

I pulled the plug and started toweling myself dry. I rubbed violently at my hair like I was trying to friction-burn undesirable thoughts out of my head. I washed and dried my little knife tenderly, however, and put it back in my fresh, clean, dry pocket. I was dressed in the first thing out of the top cupboard in the bathroom, where all my oldest, rattiest clothes lived. Then I started another bath and called Con.

I found a one-size-fits-all kimono in the back of my closet that Con could get into, or rather that would go round him; at least it was black. I could give him the shirt in the back of my closet but it wouldn’t be long enough on him.

Right. I was clean. Con had something to wear. On to the next thing. Food. I didn’t have to think any more long-view thoughts yet. I still had small immediate things to organize myself around.