Sunshine

So when I swam back to consciousness, the fact that I was still alive and in one piece wasn’t reassuring. I was propped against something at the edge of a ring of firelight. Vampires can see in the dark and they don’t cook their food, but they seem to like playing with fire, maybe the way some humans get off on joyriding stolen cars or playing last-across on a busy railtrack.

I came out of it feeling wretchedly sick and shaky, and of course scared out of my mind. They’d put some kind of Breath over me. I knew that vampires don’t have to stoop to blunt instruments or something on a handkerchief clapped over your face. They can just breathe on you and you are out cold. It isn’t something they can all do, but nearly all vampires hunt in packs since the Wars, and being the Breather to a gang had become an important sign of status (according to globenet reports). They can all move utterly silently, however, and, over short distances, faster than anything—well, faster than anything alive—as well. So even if the Breath went wrong somehow they’d catch you anyway, if they wanted to catch you.

“She’s coming out of it,” said a voice.

I’d never met a vampire before, nor heard one speak, except on TV, where they run the voice through some kind of antiglamor technology so no one listening will march out of their house and start looking for the speaker. I can’t imagine that a vampire would want everyone listening to its voice to leap out of their chairs and start seeking it, but I don’t know how vampires (or cats, or loathly ladies) think, and maybe it would want to do this. And there is, of course, a story, because there is always a story, that a master vampire can tune its voice so that maybe only one specific person of all the possibly millions of people who hear a broadcast (and a sucker interview is always a big draw) will jump out of their chair, etc. I don’t think I believe this, but I’m just as glad of the antiglamor tech. But whatever else it does, it makes their voices sound funny. Not human, but not human in a clattery, mechanical, microchip way.

So in theory I suppose I shouldn’t have known these guys were vampires. But I did. If you’ve been kidnapped by the Darkest Others, you know it.

In the first place, there’s the smell. It’s not at all a butcher-shop smell, as you might expect, although it does have that metallic blood tang to it. But meat in a butcher’s shop is dead. I know this is a contradiction in terms, but vampires smell of live blood. And something else. I don’t know what the something else is; it’s not any animal, vegetable, or mineral in my experience. It’s not attractive or disgusting, although it does make your heart race. That’s in the genes, I suppose. Your body knows it’s prey even if your brain is fuddled by the Breath or trying not to pay attention. It’s the smell of vampire, and your fight-or-flight instincts take over.

There aren’t many stories of those instincts actually getting you away though. At that moment I couldn’t think of any.

And vampires don’t move like humans. I’m told that young ones can “pass” (after dark) if they want to, and a popular way of playing chicken among humans is to go somewhere there’s a rumor of vampires and see if you can spot one. I knew Kenny and his buddies had done this a few times. I did it when I was their age. It’s not enormously dangerous if you stay in a group and don’t go into the no-man’s-land around the big cities. We’re a medium-sized city and, as I say, we’re pretty clean. It’s still a dumb and dangerous thing to do—dumber than my driving out to the lake should have been.

The vampires around the bonfire weren’t bothering not to move like vampires.

Also, I said that the antiglam tech makes sucker voices sound funny on TV and radio and the globenet. They sound even funnier in person. Funny peculiar. Funny awful.

Maybe there’s something about the Breath. I woke up, as I say, sick and wretched and scared, but I should have been freaked completely past thought and I wasn’t. I knew this was the end of the road. Suckers don’t snatch people and then decide they’re not very hungry after all and let them go. I was dinner, and when I was finished being dinner, I was dead. But it was like: okay, that’s the way it goes, bad luck, damn. Like the way you might feel if your vacation got canceled at the last minute, or you’d spent all day making a fabulous birthday cake for your boyfriend and tripped over the threshold bringing it in and it landed upside down on the dog. Damn. But that’s all.

I lay there, breathing, listening to my heart race, but feeling this weird numb composure. We were still by the lake. From where I half-lay I could see it through the trees. It was still a beautiful serene moonlit evening.

“Do we take her over immediately?” This was the one who had noticed I was awake. It was a little apart from the others, and was sitting up straight on a tree stump or a rock—I couldn’t see which—as if keeping watch.