Sunshine

Nobody said anything right away. If this was supposed to make me start talking to fill up the silence it didn’t work. There wasn’t anything I could say that wouldn’t get me into more trouble than I was in now. Okay, here’s another thing: magic handlers have to be certified and licensed. I had lied about what had happened by the lake for a lot of reasons, and needing to register myself as a magic handler was the least of them and barely worth mentioning from my point of view, but by not doing it I’d still committed the sort of crime that even the ordinary police don’t like and SOF really hates. Tonight I’d totally, inexorably, undeniably, blown it. Even a magic handler shouldn’t have been able to skeg a sucker with a table knife.

I wasn’t going to be able to fudge that one either. The table knife in question was lying on the one clear space on Jesse’s desk. I assumed it was the same knife. It was the coffeehouse pattern and while it had been wiped roughly off, the smear of remaining bloodstains was convincing.

I had no idea when I’d dropped it. But the fact that it was here meant that they knew what had happened. No escape.

And then Pat came in carrying a pot of tea and a paper bag with the Prime Time logo. I wanted to laugh. They were sure trying. The Cinnamon Roll Queen wasn’t going to be bought off by a fast-food hamburger—supposing I ate hamburgers, which I didn’t, and after tonight, even if I had, I’d‘ve given them up—but Prime Time was a twenty-four-hour gourmet deli. Downtown, of course. Far too upscale to open a branch in Old Town. Not that they’d survive on Charlie’s turf anyway.

I stopped wanting to laugh when I noticed that Pat looked like a man who had been got out of bed for an emergency.

It was even good tea.

Jesse said, “Can you tell us what you’re afraid of? Why you won’t talk to us.”

I said cautiously, “Well, I’m not licensed…”

There was a general sigh, and the tension level went down about forty degrees. Pat said, “Yeah, we thought that was probably it.”

There was a little silence and then the three of them exchanged long meaningful looks. I had tentatively started to relax and this stopped me, like sitting down in an armchair and discovering there’s a bed of nails instead of a cushion under the flowered chintz. Uh-oh.

Pat sighed again, this one a very long sigh, like a man about to step off a cliff. Then he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and held it. And held it. And held it. After about a minute he began to turn, well, blue, but I don’t mean human-holding-his-breath blue, I mean blue. Still holding his breath, he opened his eyes and looked at me: his eyes were blue too, although several degrees darker than his skin, and I mean all of his eyes: the whites as well. Although speaking of all of his eyes, as I watched, a third eye slowly blinked itself open from between his eyebrows. He was still holding his breath. His ears were becoming pointed. He held up one hand and spread the fingers. There were six of them. The knuckles were all very knobbly, and the hand itself was very large. Pat was normally no more than medium-sized.

Theo gently lowered the front legs of his chair to the floor, drifted over to the office door, and locked it. He returned to his chair, put his feet against the edge of the desk, and rocked back on two legs again.

Pat started breathing. “If I let it go any farther I’ll start popping my buttons. Pardon me.” He unfastened his belt buckle and the button on his waistband.

“You’re a demon,” I said.

“Only a quarter,” said Pat, “but it runs pretty strong in me.” His voice sounded funny, deeper and more hoarse. “My full brother couldn’t turn if he held his breath till he had a heart attack. Nice for him. Sorry about the locked door, but it takes a good half hour for the effects to wear off again.”

It’s only really illegal to be a vampire, but people who too regularly call in sick the day after the moon is full somehow never get promoted beyond entry-level positions, and a demon that can’t pass is an automatic outcast. And miscegenation is definitely a crime. Since the laws about this are impractical to enforce, what happens is that if you have a baby you know can’t pass, you arrange to look as careworn and despondent as possible (which will be easy in the circumstances) and go wail at the Registry Office that no one had told you that great-granddad—or great-grandmother—had been or done or had, whatever, great-grand-something being safely dead, of course, and unavailable for prosecution. So the kid gets registered, and grows up to find out it can’t get a job in any industry considered “sensitive,” and if any of its immediate family had been on the fast track, they’re probably now off it. For life. Even if nobody else shows any signs of being anything but pure human.