Sunshine

He wasn’t as good at waiting as I was. “Go on,” he said immediately.

I’d stopped shrugging in the last two months too: you can’t shrug without pulling at the skin below your collarbones. “I don’t know. It doesn’t heal. It seems to close over and then splits again. The doctor put stitches in it a couple of times, gave me stuff to put on it. Nothing works. It just splits open again. It’s a nuisance but I have been kind of learning to live with it. Like I had a choice. This is—er—worse than usual. Sorry. It’s only a shallow gash. You may—er—remember.”

“I remember,” he said. “Show me.”

I managed not to say, What? It took me a minute to gather my dignity as well as my courage, and my hands were shaking a little when I raised them to unbutton the top two buttons of my nightgown, and peel the edges back so he could see the bony space below my collarbones and above the swell of my bosom, where the blood now ran down in a thin ragged curtain from the wicked curved mouth of the long ugly slash. I barely flinched when he reached out a hand and touched the blood with his finger and…tasted it. Then I closed my eyes.

“I offer you no harm,” he said again, gently. “Sunshine. Open your eyes.”

I opened them.

“The wound is poisoned,” he said. “It weakens you. It is very dangerous.”

“It was for you,” I said, dreamily. I felt like one of those oracle priestesses out of some old myth: seized by some spirit not her own, a spirit that then speaks from her mouth. “They wanted to poison you.”

“Yes,” he said.

I thought, I have been so tired, these last two months. I have got used to that too. I have told myself it is just part of—having had what happened, happen. You do not get over something like that quickly. I had told myself that was all it was. I had almost believed it. I had believed it. The cut didn’t heal because it didn’t heal.

Poisoned. Weakening me. Killing me is what he meant. Note that vampires can also be tactful.

All those hours in the sunlight, baking the thing, the hostile presence on my body. I’d known it was hostile, although I hadn’t admitted it. I hadn’t taken the next step of thinking “poisoned.” Sunlight was my element; and so I turned to sunlight. And sunlight was the only thing that did any good, and it didn’t do enough. Because the wound was poisoned. That was out of some story where there would be an oracle priestess somewhere: the poisoned wound that did not heal. I’d already been wondering how I was going to get through the winter, when I couldn’t lie outdoors and bake some hours every week. Been learning not to think about wondering how I was going to get through the winter.

He was silent, waiting for me to finish thinking. I looked at him: glint of green eyes in the moonlight. Don’t look in their eyes, I thought. Tiredly.

This would have been a nasty shock to him too, of course. Finding out his ally is a goner.

I was too tired to look at him. I was too tired for almost anything. Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.

“Sunshine. I know a little about poisons. This is not something your human doctors can distill an antidote for.”

This was even better than his repeating that neither of us had any chance against Bo. By dying I was going to ruin his chances too. It’s funny: I was actually sorry about this. Maybe I was a little delirious. Maybe too much had been happening lately. Maybe I was just very, very short of sleep.

“There is something that can be done. Can be tried.” Pause. “It is not easy.”

Oh, big surprise. Something wasn’t going to be easy. I tried to rouse myself, to react. I failed.

“But can you trust me?”

More happy news. Not just something to be done, but a vampire something. Which doubtless meant it would have more blood in it. I don’t like blood. I mean, I like it fine, inside, circulating, carrying oxygen and calories to all your stay-at-home cells, but slimy seeping pink hamburger gives me the whim-whams.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you. Good question. I thought about it. It will not be easy. Yes, okay, that was a given. I didn’t have to think about that. Can I trust him?

What have I got to lose?

What if his something is something I can’t bear? There are all sorts of things I can’t bear. I’m not brave to begin with, I’m very, very tired, I’m spongy with post-traumatic what have you, and I very nearly can’t bear what I did last night with a table knife. And I may be a homicidal maniac.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I think so.”

He didn’t exhale a long breath, as a human might have done, but he went motionless instead. It was a different kind of motionlessness than not moving. Having said yes I felt better. Less tired. Evidently still delirious, however, because I bent toward him, touched the back of his hand. “Okay?” I said.

A little silence.

“Okay,” he said. I had the sudden irreverent notion that he’d never said “okay” before. Spend time with humans and have all kinds of unusual experiences. Laughter. Slang.