Sunshine

“Okay,” I said. “So we walk.” I opened the car door and clambered stiffly out. This was harder than it would have been if I hadn’t been squashed by SOF technology four times, especially the last time when it didn’t work. I patted my stomach as if checking to make sure I was still there. I seemed to be. The cut on my breast was itching like crazy: the sort of variable itch that reinforces its performance by regular nerve-fraying jabs of pain.

My jackknife seemed to be trying to burn a hole through its cotton pocket to my leg. I wrapped my hand around it. The heat was presumably illusory, which perhaps explained why the sense of being fried felt so comforting. I set off through the trees without looking behind me. They’d follow, and I had to get myself moving before I thought much about it or I wouldn’t do it at all.

I didn’t bother trying to figure out where the bad spot ended. I went down to the shore of the lake and turned right. Walking on the shore, while awkward, all shingle and teetery stones and water-tossed rubbish, wasn’t so bad as walking through the trees. I was in sunlight out here, and the memories were under the trees. I hadn’t walked on the shore before.

It was the right bad spot. I came to the house much too soon. I could half-convince myself I was enjoying walking by the lake. I like walking by water in the sunshine. I’d often enjoyed walking by this lake. Before. I stopped, feeling suddenly sick, and waited for the other two to catch up with me. “I’m not sure I can do this,” I said, and my voice had started to go funny again, as it had last night, when I told them you don’t hear vampires coming.

“It’s daylight, and we’re with you,” said Jesse, not unsympathetically.

I said abruptly, “What if we get back to the car and it won’t start? We’d never get out of these woods before dark.”

“It’ll start,” said Pat. “You’re okay. Hold on. We’re going to walk up the hill toward the house real slow. You just keep breathing. I’m walking up on your left and Jesse is walking up on your right. We’ll go as slow as you want. Hey, Jesse, how’s your nephew doing with that puppy he talked your folks into buying him?”

It was well done. Puppy stories got me to the stairs. By that time Pat had me by the elbow because I was gasping like a puffer demon, except they always breathe like that, but having a hand on my elbow was too much like having been frog-marched up those stairs the last time I’d been here. “No,” I said. “Thanks, but let me go. Last time, you know, I had help.”

The porch steps creaked under my weight. Like last time. Unlike last time, the steps also creaked under the weight of my companions.

Almost dreamily I went through the still-ajar front door and left across the huge hall toward the ballroom. It was daylight, now, so I could look up, and see where the curl of grand staircase became an upstairs corridor lined by what had once been an equally grand balustrade, but some of the posts were cracked or missing. There were still glints of gold paint in the hollows of the carving. In the dark I hadn’t known the railings were anything but smooth. I wouldn’t have cared.

The ballroom was smaller than I remembered. It was still a big room, much bigger than anything but a ballroom, but in my memory it had become about the size of a small country, and in fact it was only a room. As ballrooms go it probably wasn’t even a big one. The chandelier, very shabby in daylight, still had candle stubs in it, and there was a lot of dripped wax on the floor underneath. There was my corner, and the windows on either wall that had bounded my world for two long nights and a day in between…

I shuddered.

“Steady, Sunshine,” said Pat.

I had been worrying about the shackles in the walls. I was going to have to revert to not remembering, when Pat and Jesse asked me about the second shackle, the one with the ward signs on it.

There were no shackles. Just holes in the walls. I almost laughed. Thanks, Bo, I said silently. You’ve done me a favor.

Pat and Jesse were examining the holes, Pat still half keeping an eye on me. The holes looked like they’d been torn—as if the shackles had been ripped out of the walls by someone in a rage. By some vampire: no human could’ve done it. But I guessed the rage part was accurate. A frustrated—possibly frightened—rage, or on orders? On orders, I thought. I doubted Bo’s gang did anything that Bo hadn’t told them to do first. But however it had happened, I didn’t have to explain a shackle with ward signs on it.

They did, of course, want to know about the second set of holes.

“This is where I was,” I said, pointing to the holes nearer the corner.

“And this?” said Jesse, kneeling in front of the other holes.

“I don’t remember,” I said automatically.

There was a silence. “Can we have an agreement, maybe,” said Pat. “That you stop saying ‘I don’t remember’ and do us the kindness of telling the truth, which is that you’re not going to say what you remember.”