Sunshine

He’s the one that made this mark on me, I thought. This slice in my flesh that won’t close. You could say I had a score to settle. That doesn’t explain why I managed to settle it though. “He was—he was the other one that had hold of me, coming here. I don’t know how many of them there were altogether—a dozen maybe.” I thought of the second evening, the twelve of them fanning out around me and the prisoner of the other shackle, coming closer. Slowly coming closer. How I’d been pressing myself against the wall so hard my spine hurt. “Most of them didn’t say anything. The one I think was the Breather—he seemed to be giving the orders. I thought of him as—as the lieutenant of the raiding party. He talked. And he held one of my arms, bringing me here. This—the one from last night, he held my other arm. He talked. He was the one with the…sense of humor.” Her feet are already bleeding. If you like feet.

“The lieutenant of the raiding party,” said Jesse thoughtfully. “That sounds like there was a colonel back at headquarters.”

“You’d expect that, a setup as elaborate as this one,” said Pat. “This is a gang run by a master vampire.”

They both looked at me. “Do you know anything about the master?” said Jesse.

I could have said, I’m not going to tell you. I said, “No.”

There was another silence. I tried not to squirm. This should be when the SOFs revert to type and start yelling at me for withholding important information and so on.

“We have a problem, you see, Sunshine,” said Pat at last. “Okay, we know you’re not telling us everything. But…well, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but that happens oftener than you might think, people not telling SOF everything. Hell, SOF not telling SOF everything. I mean aside from the nomad blood of guys like Jesse and me. We could probably live with that if that was all it was. We wouldn’t like it, maybe, but we’ve had a lot of practice not being told everything, and if you get too pissed off at people then they really won’t talk to you.

“But you’ve done something pretty well unprecedented. Twice. You got away from a bunch of vampires—alone, and out in the middle of nowhere. It happens occasionally that a sucker gang gets a little carried away, teasing some kid from a human gang that has been jiving in the wrong place, hoping to see vampires. The kid gets a little cut up, but we take him to the hospital and they stitch him up and give him his shots, and he goes home good as new if a little more prone to nightmares than he used to be. It doesn’t happen that a young woman alone in a wilderness gets away from a sucker gang so determined to keep her they have her chained to the wall. So far as I know it hasn’t ever happened before.”

I wished he would stop saying “alone.” He hadn’t forgotten the second set of holes in the wall any more than I had. Thank the gods at least the telltale shackle itself was gone.

“And that’s only the first thing. The second thing is that you sauntered up to a sucker last night that in the first place you had no way of knowing was there, in the second place he stood there while you staked him without any warning or any backup, and in the third place staked him with a stainless steel table knife. People have staked suckers without backup, but they’ve never done it by running up to one in full sight and they sure as suckers hate daylight don’t do it with a goddam table knife. I pulled the research on it that proves it can’t be done, last night. Stainless steel is a no-hoper even if you’ve had the best wardcrafters and charm cutters in the business do their number on it first.

“I told you I don’t need much sleep. I spent the rest of last night going through the files for anything about sucker escapees and unusual stakings. There isn’t much. And nothing at all like you, Sunshine.

“We ought to put all this in our report, and pass it on up the line, and then you’d get a horde of SOF experts down on you like nothing you’ve ever imagined, and, speaking of shackles, you’d probably spend the rest of your life chained to the goddess of pain’s desk. She’d love you.