Sunshine

“Yes,” he said. I didn’t see him shed the kimono or walk out of the room, but suddenly he wasn’t there, and the kimono was a black puddle on the dark floor. When he reappeared he was wearing his own clothes. The black shirt looked much better on him than it had on me. The trousers looked pretty bad, but they were better than nothing. They had to be damp still, but I told myself he could raise his body temperature to steam them dry if he wanted to. Another of those little perks to being undead.

He hadn’t buttoned the shirt.

There was no wound on his chest.

I’d been here before.

But there was a scar.

I climbed off the bed—standing up, a little dizzy—went to him, touched it. “That’s new,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I wanted to know why: what would scar a vampire? Another vampire’s try for your heart? Or the touch of live human lips on such a wound? But I didn’t ask.

“You slept,” he said.

I nodded.

“It is over. Last night is over,” he said. “And Bo is gone forever.”

I looked up at him. There was no expression on that alien, gray-skinned face. If it wasn’t for the eyes, he could be a statue. One carved by a particularly lugubrious sculptor.

Ludicrous, I thought. Insane, grotesque, impossible.

I looked away, so he couldn’t read my eyes. But he’d said he could only read my fears, not my secrets.

I would be sorry never to see Con again.

“It is beginning to be over,” I said. “Last night is beginning to be over. I dreamed—I dreamed of my grandmother.”

“She who taught you to transmute.”

Yes.

He nodded—as an articulated statue might nod—as if this made perfect sense. And as if this were the last, perfect stroke, and the story—or the statue—was complete.

I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t.

“We are still bound, you and I,” he said. “If you call me, I will come.”

I shook my head, but he didn’t say any more. “You could call me,” I said. Spectres of the sort of black Bakelite phone fantasy that Con’s master might have tucked away in a corner gyrated briefly across my mind’s eye.

“Yes,” he said.

I touched the new scar on my neck, the one that crossed the old scar, the one in the shape of a necklace. “I have lost the chain you gave me. I’m sorry. I couldn’t find the way, even if you did call me.”

“You have not lost it,” he said. There was a pause. “The necklet is still there.”

“Oh,” I said blankly. I suppose if a pocketknife can be transmuted into a key a chain can be transmuted into a scar. Maybe on the same grounds as that it’s hard to leave your head behind because it’s screwed on. Although it had been as well for Con a little earlier that my pocketknife was still detachable. Carefully I said, “I would not want to call you if you did not want to come.”

Another pause. I bit my lip.

“I would want to come,” he said.

“Oh,” I said again.

Pause.

“Would I…do I need to be in danger of dying?” I said.

“No,” he said. But he turned his head, and looked through the window, as if he was longing to be gone.

I stepped back. I took a deep breath. I thought of cinnamon rolls. And Mel. I thought of trying to help save the world in less than a hundred years, doing it Pat’s way. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to turn this into some kind of human good-bye thing, you know? You’re free to go.”

“I am not human,” he said. “I am not free.”

“I am not some kind of trap—or jail cell!” I said angrily. “I am not a rope around your neck or—or a shackle around your ankle! So—so go away!”

Perhaps it was the wind of my anger. I heard a rustle of leaves.

He looked again at the window. I wrapped my arms around my body and leaned back against the end of the bed, and stared at the floor, waiting for him to vanish.

“When do you again make—cinnamon rolls?”

Gaping at him was getting to be a bad habit. So was saying, What? I gaped at him. I said, “What?”

Patiently he repeated, “When do you go again to your work of feeding humans?”

“Er—tomorrow morning, I guess. What time is it?”

“It will be midnight in two hours.”

“Six hours then. I leave here a little after four.”

Slowly, as if he were an archaeologist deciphering a fragment of a long-dead language, he said, “You could come with me. Tonight. I would return you here in time for your leaving to go to the preparation of cinnamon rolls. If you are sufficiently rested. If you…wished to come.”

What does a vampire actually do at night? Go for long invigorating walks? Research the habits of badgers and owls and—er—I wasn’t very up on my nocturnal wildlife. “Aren’t you—er—hungry?”

Another pause. Time enough for me to decide I’d imagined what he’d just said.

“I am hungry,” he said. “I am not so hungry that I cannot wait six hours.”