Sunshine

So the suckers are right, humans do hate them in a single-mindedly committed way that is unlike our attitude to any of the other major categories of Others. But it’s hardly surprising. Vampires hold maybe one-fifth of the world’s capital and they’re a race incontestably apart. Humans don’t like ghouls and lamias either, but the rest of the undead don’t last long, they’re not very bright, and if one bites you, every city hospital emergency room has the antidote (supposing there’s enough of you left for you to run away with). The global council periodically tries to set up “talks” with vampire leaders in which they offer an end to persecution and legal restriction and an inexhaustible supply of pigs’ blood in exchange for a promise that the vampires will stop preying on people. In the first place this doesn’t work because while vampires tend to hunt in packs, the vampire population as a whole is a series of little fiefdoms, and alliances are brief and rare and usually only exist for the purpose of destroying some mutually intolerable other sucker fiefdom. In the second place the bigger the gang and the more powerful the master vampire, the less he or she moves around, and leaving headquarters to sit on bogus human global council “talks” is just not sheer. And third, pigs’ blood isn’t too popular with vampires. It’s probably like being offered Cava when you’ve been drinking Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin all your life. (The coffeehouse has a beer and wine license, but Charlie has a soft spot for champagne. Charlie’s was once on a globenet survey of restaurants, listed as the only coffeehouse anybody had ever heard of that serves champagne by the glass. You might be surprised how many people like bubbly with their meatloaf or even their cream cheese on pumpernickel.)

Okay, so I’m a little obsessed. Some people adore soap operas. Some people are neurotic about sports. I follow stories about the Others. Also, we know more about the Others at the coffeehouse—if we want to—because several of our regulars work for SOF—Special Other Forces. Also known as sucker cops, since, as I say, it’s chiefly the suckers they worry about. Mom shuts them up when she catches them talking shop on our premises, but they know they always have an audience in me. I wouldn’t trust any cop any farther than I could throw our Prometheus, the shining black monster that dominates the kitchen at Charlie’s and is the apple of Mel’s eye (you understand the connection between motorcycles and cooking when you’ve seen an industrial-strength stove at full blast), but I liked Pat and Jesse.

Our SOFs say that nobody and nothing will ever enable suckers to go out in daylight, and a good thing too, because daylight is the only thing that is preventing them from taking over the other four-fifths of the world economy and starting human ranching as the next hot growth area for venture capitalists. But then SOFs are professionally paranoid, and they don’t have a lot of faith in the guys in lab coats, whether they’re wearing black hats or white ones.

There are stories about “good” vampires like there are stories about the loathly lady who after a hearty meal of raw horse and hunting hound and maybe the odd huntsman or archer, followed by an exciting night in the arms of her chosen knight, turns into the kindest and most beautiful lady the world has ever seen; but according to our SOFs no human has ever met a good vampire, or at least has never returned to say so, which kind of tells its own tale, doesn’t it? And the way I see it, the horse and the hounds and the huntsman are still dead, and you have to wonder about the psychology of the chosen knight who goes along with all the carnage and the fun and frolic in bed on some dubious grounds of “honor.”

Vampires kill people and suck their blood. Or rather the other way around. They like their meat alive and frightened, and they like to play with it a while before they finish it off. Another story about vampires is that the one domestic pet a vampire may keep is a cat, because vampires understand the way cats’ minds work. During the worst of the Voodoo Wars anyone who lived alone with a cat was under suspicion of being a vampire. There were stories that in a few places where the Wars were the worst, solitary people with cats who didn’t burst into flames in daylight were torched. I hoped it wasn’t true, but it might have been. There are always cats around Charlie’s, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly. There are always more of them at the full moon too, which goes to show that not every Were chooses—or, more likely in Old Town, can afford—to go the drug route.