Sunshine

I’d explained where we were going when we had started out. The vampire had said nothing, but then he often said nothing, and he hadn’t disagreed. I had the knife-key in my bra; we’d either find him a nice deep patch of shadow while I did my trick again, or he could keep his hands on my shoulders to maintain the Sun Screen Factor: Absolute Plus. I hadn’t thought a lot beyond that. I guess what I was thinking was that a car equaled normal life. Once I got in my car and stuck the key in the little hole and the ignition caught, everything that had happened would be over like it had never happened, and I could just go back to my life again. I wasn’t thinking clearly, of course, but who would be? I was still alive, and that was pretty amazing under the circumstances.

I hadn’t thought about what I would do with the vampire after we got to the car either. As much as had occurred to me was that he could keep one hand on my knee while I drove, or something. Nobody put his hand on my knee except Mel, but just how “somebody” was a vampire? I didn’t think I could shut even a vampire in the trunk, although the shade in there ought to be pretty total, and I wasn’t sure what the parameters were anyway. I knew that a heavy coat and a broad-brimmed hat weren’t fireproof enough and historians had long ago declared that the famous stories of knights in heavy armor turning out to be vampires weren’t true either, so probably one layer of plastic car wasn’t enough. But then what? Where do you drop off a vampire whom you’ve given a lift? The nearest mausoleum? Ha ha. The whole business of vampires hanging out in graveyards is bogus—vampires don’t want anything to do with dead people, and the people they turn don’t get buried in the first place. But old nursery tales die hard. (So much for Bram Stoker et al., Miss Yablonsky’s point exactly.)

So I hadn’t made any contingency plans. When we got to the old cottage I said, “Okay, here we are,” and the vampire set me down, and I was standing on my own feet, and trying not to step on anything that would make me bleed. He was hovering, however, and it wasn’t only because of the sun; I’m sure he would have picked me up again faster than blood could drip if it had come to that. He had one hand tactfully on my elbow. The light was no more than dappled where we stood. Funny how the claustrophobic regrowth of wilderness scrub can suddenly seem treacherously open and sporadic when you’re thinking in terms of your companion’s fatal allergy to sunlight.

I knew where I’d left the car. It was a small cabin and the place you parked was right behind it. “It’s not here,” I said stupidly. For the first time I felt the ripples of power lurch, as if they might knock me over, as if they might…spill over the lip of me somehow, and be lost. I couldn’t risk, no, I wouldn’t risk…I turned round and seized him, wrapped my arms around him, as if he were a seawall and could turn back any vagrant tide, contain any unexpected breaker. His arms, hesitantly, slid behind me, and it occurred to me that our prolonged physical contact was probably no more pleasant for him than it was for me, if perhaps for different reasons.

I took a few deep breaths, and the ripples steadied. I steadied. He was a good wall. Really very wall-like in some ways. Solid. Immobile. I realized I had my face pressed against what I knew from experience was an ambulatory body…that had no heart beating. Funny. And yet there was a buzz of…something going on in there. Life, you might call it, for want of a better term. I had never met a wall that buzzed.

I let go. He let go, except for one hand on my shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. “I thought I was losing it.”

“Yes,” he said.

“If I had lost it, you’d have die—fried, you know,” I said, to see what he would say. “Yes,” he said. I shook my head.

“My kind does not surprise easily,” he said. “You surprised me, this morning. I have thus used up my full quota of shock and consternation for some interval.”

I stared at him. “You made a joke.”

“I have heard this kind of thing may happen, to vampires who linger in the company of humans,” he said, looking and sounding particularly vampirish. “It is not a situation that has provoked much interest. And…I am not myself after a day spent in daylight.”

I’m not feeling a whole lot like myself either, I thought. I was carefully not thinking about the instinct that had thrown me at him just now. Wouldn’t grabbing a tree have steadied me at least as well? So what if maybe he fried? “So you are not surprised by the disappearance of my car. That makes one of us.”

“I had thought it unlikely that Bo would allow so obvious a loose end to remain dangling.”

“I’m sorry. Yes. That is—sense. But I don’t know what to do now.”

“We go on,” said the vampire. “We must be well away from the lake before dark.”