Sunshine

“It will not be tomorrow night,” he said. “Perhaps the night after.”

“Okay,” I said. “See you.”

“Sleep well,” he said.

“Oh, sure, absolutely,” I said, trying for irony, but he was already gone.

I left the window full open. I wanted as much of the fresh night air in the room with me as possible. There was a tiny chiming from one of the window charms. It was a curiously serene and hopeful noise.

I must have looked pretty rough that morning too. It occurred to me that everybody at the coffeehouse was treating me like an invalid while trying to pretend they weren’t treating me like an invalid. I wanted to tell them that they were right, I was an invalid, that mark on my breast that only Mel knew was still there was poisoned, and I was dying. I didn’t say any of this. I said I was still short of sleep.

Paulie turned up an hour before time that morning saying he didn’t have anything better to do, but I was pretty sure Mom had called him and asked if he could come in early. I think Mom had figured out that the charms she was giving me were going somewhere like into the Wreck’s glove compartment, so she had begun stashing them around the bakery where maybe I wouldn’t find them but they could still do me some good. Since my unwelcome speculations about dark family secrets the other night in Jesse’s office I had begun to wonder what all Mom’s charms were for, exactly. She’s always been something of a charm freak; I’d put it down to eight years in my dad’s world. I found two new ones that morning: a little curled-up animal of some sort with its paws over its eyes and a red bead where its navel should have been, and a shiny white disc that rainbows ran across if you held it up against the light. I left them where I found them. Maybe I should let them try to defend against whatever they could. I had some fellow-feeling for the small curled-up creature with its hands over its face, even if the red alien parasite was lower down on it than it was on me. Charms are often noisy, which is another reason I don’t like them much, but you aren’t going to hear extraneous buzzing and burbling above the general din at Charlie’s. Especially on shifts when I had to spend some time in the company of a genially humming apprentice.

Mel was working that afternoon but Aimil had the day off from the library. She wandered back into the bakery with a cup of coffee toward the end of my stint, said she’d just found out about an old-books-and-junk sale in Redtree, which was one of the little towns between us and the next big city to the south, she was going to go, and did I want to come along? I should probably have gone home and taken a nap, but I didn’t want to. So I said yes. A nice little outing for the doomed. Furthermore Aimil talked about library politics the whole way there and didn’t once mention nocturnal neighborhood excitements. So by the time we arrived at the village square in Redtree I was in the mood.

Ordinarily I love this kind of thing without any effort. Someone who does coffeehouse baking for a living doesn’t have huge amounts of disposable income, but the point about books-and-junk sales is that you never know what you may find for hilariously cheap. There are fewer people since the Wars than there had been before, and less money (don’t ask me how this works: you’d think if there were fewer people there would be more money to go around), so there is a lot less motive for dealers to discover specialist markets for old, beat-up, weird, or obscure-looking and possibly Other-related stuff. Plus a lot of people don’t want to think about old, beat-up, weird, obscure-looking, and possibly Other-related stuff because it reminds them of the Wars, or what life had been like before the Wars, i.e., better. The result is that a lot of very interesting nonjunk gets heaved into the nearest box for the next garage sale.

Furthermore, almost nobody wants to read the gormless old fiction about the Others which is my fave. I picked up a copy of Sordid-Enchantments on the title alone, and the fourth, and most icky and rare, volume of the Dark Blood series, which I was no longer sure I wanted to read—the heroine has a choice to die horribly or become a vampire horribly, and she chooses to die. If I’d realized how gross it was going to get after the first volume I wouldn’t have bothered— but I’m a completist, I had the first three, and hey.

I was feeling pretty good. In spite of last night. Or in an even funnier way, because of it. It was like I had two days out of time. Everything was on hold until…either the vampire-something worked, or it didn’t. Jesse and Theo had been at a table under the awning when Aimil and I left Charlie’s, and I’d nodded and kept going. I hoped nothing had come up they wanted to talk to me about. Nothing was allowed to come up for the next two days. I was on vacation in my own mind, cinnamon rolls at four a.m. or not.