Sunshine

I was beginning to learn that I probably wouldn’t like anything he said after one of his pauses. I waited.

“You will have to let me carry you till we are well away from here.”

“What?”

“Blood spoor. Your feet will be bleeding again before we are halfway across the open area.” Was there the faintest tremor in his oddly echo-y voice when he said that? “Mine will not. And Bo’s folk will not be at all happy about our escape, tonight, when they discover it. They will find the trail at once if they have blood spoor to follow.”

I laid on a pause of my own. “Are you telling me that if I had decided to leave you behind, I wouldn’t have made it anyway?”

“I do not know. There might conceivably have been some reason you were able to escape—a faulty lock on the shackle, for example. Bo would have someone’s…someone would pay severely for this, but it might end there. That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you—as it does, does it not?—and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner. He will order his folk to follow. We must not make it easy for them.”

This was the longest speech I had heard from him. It edged out his description of the supersucker he would have become on the blood of Onyx Blaise’s daughter. “For a ma—a creature who is driven mad by daylight, you are making very good sense.”

“Having an accomplice is…reviving. Any hope after no hope. Even in these somewhat daunting circumstances.”

Daunting. I liked that too. That was as good as “clean of live things.”

He moved toward me and held out his arms, slowly, as if trying not to scare me. There was a sudden, ghastly rush of adrenaline— my body was having some trouble keeping up with my mind’s mercurial decisions—and I twitched myself sideways like I was moving a puppet. I put one arm round his neck—carefully, so I didn’t stretch the dubiously clotted scab on my breast—and held the water bottle in my other hand. He bent and picked me up more easily than I pick up a tray of cinnamon rolls.

It was not going to be a comfortable ride. It was rather like sitting on the stripped frame of a chair that has had all the chair bits taken away—there are just a few nasty pieces of iron railing left, and they start digging railing-shaped holes into you at once. Also, if this was a chair, it was made for some other species to sit in. Vampires do breathe, by the way, but their chests don’t move like humans‘. Have you ever lain in the arms of your sweetheart and tried to match your breathing to his, or hers? You do it automatically. Your brain only gets involved if your body is having trouble. Fortunately there was nothing about this situation that was like being in the arms of a sweetheart except that I was leaning against someone’s naked chest. I could no more have breathed with him than I could have ignited gasoline and shot exhaust out my butt because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car.

I also had the weird sensation that he’d been several degrees cooler when he picked me up, and he’d matched his body temperature to mine. Speaking of matching.

We left by the door Bo’s gang had brought me through, across the ghostly hall, and out through the front door, which had been conveniently left ajar. What did I know about vampire deliberateness? I could barely recognize my vampire’s breathing as breathing. But I had a notion that he walked not merely without hesitation but very deliberately into the blast of sunshine at the foot of the porch, and turned left, toward the trees on that side. I felt my harness take the strain. If there had been real straps involved, they would have creaked. It was a long way to the edge of the wood. It was perhaps just as well he was carrying me; the heat of the sun seemed to be making me woozy.

Heat doesn’t usually trouble me. One of the reasons Charlie had first let me help him with the baking when I was still small was because I was the only one of any of us who could stand the heat of it in the summer, including the rest of the staff. That was when Charlie’s was still fairly small itself, and Charlie was doing most of the cooking, before he opened up the front so we could have tables as well as the counter and the booths along the wall, and before he built my bakery. The bakery now is its own room next to the main kitchen, and there are windows and an outside door and industrial-strength fans, but in July and August pretty much everyone but me has to get out of there and splash water on themselves and have a sit-down.