Sunshine

“I did know something. My gran—my dad’s mother—showed up again a year after we geared off. I used to visit her—at our old cabin at the lake. She’d meet me there. My mom wasn’t happy about it, but she let me go. My gran told me some—taught me some.”

“Taught you,” Jesse said sharply.

“Yeah. Stuff changing mostly. Little stuff. Enough to know that I had something, but not so much that I—had to use it, you know?”

They nodded again. Magic handling, like Other blood, often makes its presence known, whether you want to know or not. But if it wasn’t too strong, it would also leave you alone, if you left it alone. Probably.

“Then my gran disappeared. When I was about ten. Just before the Wars. And just when Charlie married my mom. Charlie didn’t seem to mind having me around. He adopted me, let me get underfoot at the coffeehouse. And yeah. I was drawn to cooking. I’ve been cooking, or trying to cook, since I was like four. Pretty sad, huh? A Blaise with frosting on the end of her nose. And once I got to Charlie’s I thought that was the end of the story.”

“And then two months ago,” said Jesse. Why did I feel there was something else going on with these guys? Like we were having two conversations, one of them silent. It seemed to me that this out-loud one was enough.

I sighed. “All I did was drive out to the lake on my night off. I had a headache, I wanted some peace and quiet, you don’t get that anywhere around my family, including away from the coffeehouse. I’d just had my car tuned, it was a nice night. There hasn’t been any trouble at the lake that I know of since the Wars were over, so long as you stay away from the bad spots. I drove out to our old cabin, sat on the porch, looked at the water…”

That was as much of the story as I had told before. I still wasn’t expecting my heart rate to speed up, my stomach to hop back and forth like water on a hot griddle, and tears to start pricking the backs of my eyes at the prospect of telling even a little bit more. I looked down at my shapeless jersey kids’ pajama lap, and then glanced at the table knife on Jesse’s desk. The world started to turn faster and at a funny angle.

Jesse reached into a bottom drawer and brought out a bottle of…oh, hey, single-malt scotch. Some SOFs did know how to live. Theo had turned the Prime Time bag upside down. There was an assortment of greasy-paper-wrapped bundles and they smelled…like food. Real human food. “Have a sandwich,” said Theo. “Have some chips. Have—hey, Pat, you’re living dangerously. Have a Prime Time brownie.”

“No thanks,” I said automatically. “Too much flour, too much raising agent, and the chocolate they use is only so-so.”

“Your color’s improving,” said Jesse. “Tell us more about Prime Time’s sins. I’m sure their bread isn’t as good as yours either.” It isn’t. “Have some scotch.” I held out my (empty) tea mug.

I had half a Swiss cheese and watercress sandwich (on mediocre anadama) to give my stomach something else to think about. The dark stains on the walls in the alley. The goblets among the cobble-stones…Stop that. Okay, I should maybe think about what Pat and Jesse and Theo were trying to give me space to say. To be afraid of? Something that had to do with, however good their cover, how they must be afraid of being found out as partbloods?

…No.

It hadn’t occurred to me before. I didn’t think there was a word for a human so sicko as to rescue a vampire, because no human had ever done it. Before.

Dear gods and angels, no.

It’s not only paranoia and bureaucratic oppression that demands partbloods be registered. Human magic-handling genes and certain demon genes mix really, really badly. There are lots of minor charm-twisters who have a touch of both the human capacity for magic and the demonic, and there’s a story that some of them can do stuff no one else can, although it tends to be more goofy than useful. But this is strictly trivial magic handling.

Not all demons can do magic; some of them just are, although the areness of demons can seem magical when it isn’t. A swallow demon—to take a rare but spectacular example—can fly less because of its hollow bones, although it has those too, than because something funny goes on with some of its atoms, which behave in certain ways as if they exist in some other universe. One of these ways is that they have no gravity in this one. So a swallow demon, despite being the size of anything from a large wardrobe up to and including a small barn, flies. It isn’t magic. Swallow demons don’t do magic. It only looks like magic. But a lot of demons also handle magic, some of them as powerfully as powerful humans do. And a drop of their blood into a strong human magic-handling gene pool is a disaster.