Sunshine

“—but there are lousy stinking humans too. We take care of the Others and the straight cops take care of the humans. If we got the suckers sorted the humans would calm down—sooner or later—let the rest of us live, you know? And then we’d be able to organize and really get rid of the ‘ubis and the goblins and the ghouls and so on and we’d end up with a relatively safe world.”

There was a story—I hoped it was no more than a myth—that the reason there still wasn’t a reliable prenatal test for a bad-magic cross was the prejudice against partbloods.

Jesse said patiently, “You transmuted worked metal.”

I nodded.

“Do you still have the knife?”

I dragged my mind back to the present. I’d decided earlier that the light in the office was good enough, so I nodded again.

“Can we see it?”

Pat let go of my hands, and I pulled the knife out of my fuzzy pocket and leaned forward to lay it on a pile of paper on Jesse’s desk. It lay there, looking perfectly ordinary. Jesse picked it up and looked at it. He passed it to Theo, who looked at it too, and offered it to Pat. Pat shook his head. “Not when I’m coming down. It might crank me right back up again, and we can’t keep the door locked all night.”

“What would happen if someone knocked?” I said. “You’re still a little blue around the edges.”

“Closet,” said Pat. “Nice big one. Why we chose Jesse’s office.”

“And we would be so surprised that the door was locked,” said Jesse. “Must be something wrong with the bolt. We’ll get it checked tomorrow. Miss Seddon is all right, isn’t she?”

“Miss Seddon is fine,” I lied. What was wrong with her was not their fault.

“Rae—” said Jesse, and hesitated.

I was holding myself here in the present, in this office, so I was pretty sure I knew what he wanted to ask.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been back to the lake since. There’s a really big bad spot behind the house, maybe that’s part of why they chose it, and when—when I got out of there I just—followed the edge of the lake south.”

“If we take you out there—let’s say tomorrow—will you try to find it?”

It had little to do with what I hadn’t told them that made the silence last a long time before I answered. What I had told them was plenty for why I didn’t want to go there again. “Yes,” I said at last, heavily. “I’ll try. There won’t… be anything.”

“I know,” said Jesse. “But we still have to look. I’m sorry.”

I nodded. I picked up my jackknife and put it back in my pocket. I looked at Jesse. Then I looked at the blood-smeared table knife lying on his desk, and he watched me looking. “That’s the next thing, isn’t it?” he said. “Okay—you have some kind of line on worked metal. Some pretty astonishing line, it must be. But that doesn’t explain…”

The phone rang. He picked it up. “Ah. Well, better send him up then.” We all looked hard at Pat. He wasn’t blue at all. Theo unlocked the door.

Mel came through it about ten seconds later, looking fit to murder battalions of SOFs with nothing more than a table knife. “What the dharmic hell do you red-eyed boys think you are up to, keeping a law-abiding member of the human public incommunicado for over an hour?”

I managed to keep a straight face. “Red-eyed boy” (or girl) is an accusation of Other blood: just the sort of thing a pissed-off civilian would say to a SOF. They all looked perfectly blank. “Sorry,” said Jesse. “We didn’t mean to keep her incommunicado. We were getting her out of a bad situation as fast as possible—brought her in the back way, of course. The media jokers can’t get to her here. But we forgot to send word to the front desk that we weren’t—er—holding her.” Sure you forgot, I thought. Mel, still quivering with fury, and equally aware Jesse was lying, turned to me. “I’m okay,” I said. “I was a bit—hysterical. They let me have a shower,” I added inconsequentially. I’d had a rough night, and it was getting harder and harder to remember what I’d told whom and why.

“A shower?” said Mel, taking in my fuzzy-bunny clothing— probably the first time he’d ever seen me in anything that didn’t involve red or pink or orange or yellow or at least peacock blue or fluorescent purple—and I realized he didn’t know what had happened. He wouldn’t, would he? You don’t destroy vampires by rushing up to them and sticking them with table knives. The only sure thing about the night’s events was that there’d been some kind of fracas— some messy kind of fracas—and I’d disappeared with some SOFs. There were probably half a dozen incompatible versions of what had happened out there by now.

No wonder Mel was feeling a little wild.

“It’s sort of a long story,” I said. “May I leave now, please?” Before you start asking me about tonight, I thought.

“That’s what I’m here for,” said Mel, throwing another good glare around.

“See you tomorrow,” said Jesse.

“What?” said Mel.

“I’ll tell you on the way out,” I said.

“Sleep well,” said Pat.

“You too,” I said.