Sunshine

There was a laugh that stuck in my throat. “No,” I said soberly. “It would not have been right for me.” I sagged forward again, but this time I was leaning against his leg, my cheek just above his knee. “How did she die?” I said dreamily, resting against the leg of the vampire who had cured my poisoned wound with the death of a doe.

“How?” he repeated. There was a long pause while I remembered the wild grass against my slender legs, the way my four hoofs dug into the ground as they took my weight as I ran, how much more fleetly and steadily I ran on four two-toed hoofs than I would ever run on two queerly inflexible platterlike feet and thick clumsy legs.

He said: “There are many myths about my kind. It is not true that we cannot feed unless we torment first. She died as any good hunter kills his prey: with one clean stroke.”

“But…” I said, groping for the answer I wanted. Needed. “You told me—long ago. By the lake. You have to ask. You can take no…blood that is not offered. She has to have said ‘yes.’ ”

After a little while he said: “Animals do not draw the distinction between life and death that humans do. If an animal is caught, by age, by illness, by some creature stronger than it, and cannot escape, it accepts death.” A longer pause. “Also…my kind were all once human. There perhaps can be no truly clean death between one of your kind and one of mine.”

I thought: If that is true, then it works both ways. The death of the giggler at my hands is no cleaner than the death he was offering that girl. I shivered. I felt Constantine‘s hand on the back of my neck.

“I told you last time that Bo and I chose different ways of being what we are. You magic handlers know you risk, with every sending, the recoil. Bo is burdened by many years of the recoil of the torment that provides the savor to his meals. The savor is real—yes, I too have tasted it—but it is not worth the price.”

I was looking across the room, at a corner near the ceiling, where one of the occupied cobwebs hung. I could see the tiny dot that was the folded-up spider at the center.

I raised my head and turned round, knelt up, put my hands on his knees, stared into his face, into his eyes. I had looked full into his eyes briefly last night, while I held the knife, before he had taken from me the action I could not perform. I stared at him now, minute after minute, night flowing past us as morning had done by the lake, two months and a lifetime ago, when I told him I would take him with me, through the daylight, out of the trap we shared. “You used the blood of a doe, to spare me the death of a human. You said you would not—were not—turning me. Why are you not telling me not to look in your eyes?”

“I have not turned you,” he replied. “In three hours, when the sun rises, you will find that sunshine is your element, as it always has been. I do not think you can be turned. You can be killed, as any human can be, as the poison Bo set in your flesh would at last have killed you, but I believe you cannot be turned.

“There is nothing I can do to you with my gaze, any more, whether I wish it or not. I was not able…to give you the doe’s clean blood cleanly. I caught and carried her blood for you, for tonight’s necessary rite, but I am not a clean vessel. Sunshine, we are on territory neither of us knows. We are bound now, you to me as I already was to you, for I have saved your life tonight as you saved my existence two months ago.”

“I think the honors were about even, two months ago,” I said, struggling. He picked my hands up off his knees, held them between his hands.

“That-which-binds did not judge so; the scales did not rest in balance. You will begin, now, I think, to read those lines of…power, governance, sorcery, as I can read them. By what has happened between us tonight. Onyx Blaise’s daughter—the daughter who did what you did, that second morning by the lake—always held that capacity. Now you must learn to use it. That-which-binds reckons I have been bound to you by what happened two months ago. I could not come to you if you did not call me, but if you called I had to come. You are now bound to me as well. I did not do this deliberately; to save your life, it was the only choice I had, and I was bound to try.

“When I came to you four nights ago, I had no knowledge of the wound you still carried. I was thinking only of how I could convince you—to go into battle with me. That I should succeed did not seem likely, though you were calling to ask me for help. I came here that night thinking how I might give you—anything I could give you—to help you in that battle, if you agreed. It would have required some greater tie between us, but nothing like…

“I do not know what I have given you tonight.” Another silence. He added, “I do not know what you have given me.”

Another, longer silence.

“Well,” I said, shakily, clinging to his hands holding mine, “I think I can see in the dark.”

PART THREE