Sunshine

So, I would have said that not much could be worse—short of being dead or undead—than those first weeks after the night I went out to the lake and met some vampires up close and personal. I would have said that being paralyzed from the neck down or having an inoperable brain tumor would be worse. Not a lot else. Just shows how limited the human imagination can be.

The first weeks after Con healed the wound on my breast were worse.

It’s funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the nights at the lake, that the great crisis was about What I Was or Who I’d Become or What Terrible Thing Was Wrong With Me (and About to Go Wronger) and Why All Was Changed As a Result. But I was still struggling against the idea that all was changed.

Sticking the giggler with the table knife should have shaken me out of this fantasy even if the sucker-sunshade trick hadn’t, but I was too busy being grossed out by the sheer grisliness of the latter experience to have thought much about the philosophical implications. What the little chat with Jesse and Pat had revealed to me had done my head in worse, and the news that the suckers were on to conquer the world within the next century had been worse yet. I felt like a pancake in the hands of a maniac flipper. But when you’re being caromed around your life like a squash ball you haven’t got leeway to think about what happens next. When you’re feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren’t thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week. Maybe you should be, but you aren’t. Now is more than enough.

Before the detox night with Con I still thought I could say no somehow, could still stick my head back in the sand. Hey, I wasn’t going to be around in a hundred years—unless maybe I started handling a lot of magic, which I didn’t want to, right? That was exactly what I didn’t want to be doing; magic handling extending your lifespan was a myth anyway—so what did I care?

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you’re scared enough. I was scared enough.

Of course I had had this apparently permanent leaking wound on my breast, I had had these nightmares, and I had been doing a pretty bad job after all of suppressing thinking about what it all meant, what had happened at the lake. But I was still obstinately trying to pretend I’d only had a piece of very, very bad luck, and the fact of my having survived it wasn’t…irredeemable. My gran had shown me all that transmuting stuff fifteen years ago, and I’d never used it before. Maybe it would be another fifteen years before I used it again. Maybe thirty this time. And one vampire more or less? Who cares?

And the table knife venture was just that the giggler’d been the one who cut me, poisoned me. It was a one-off. There was an answer in there somewhere: it wasn’t me, it wasn’t my warped, screwed-up genetic heritage.

And if I’d delivered the world of one sucker, sort of accidentally having preserved it another one, then my final effect on the vampire population was nil, invisible, void. Which was exactly the profile I’d choose.

I told myself I had always been my father’s daughter. I was facing what had been there all the time.

But I was also facing stuff that hadn’t been there.

Being able to see in the dark sounds great. Never trip over the bathroom threshold on your way for a pee at midnight again, right? But it’s not that simple. Human eyes don’t see in the dark. They don’t have the rods and cones for it or whatever. Therefore you are doing something that isn’t human. It’s not like you’ve awakened a latent talent, like someone who finds out they have a gift for playing jazz piano after a life previously devoted to Bach. That may be odd, but it’s within human scope. Seeing in the dark isn’t. And you know it. That doesn’t mean I know how to explain it; but trust me, you can tell the difference between seeing because there’s enough light and “seeing” because something weird and vampiry is going on in your brain that chooses to pretend to be happening in your eyes because that’s the nearest equivalent. Like if some human had had a poisoned wound healed by some weird reciprocal swap with the phoenix, maybe they’d be able to fly afterward, apparently by flapping their arms.

(Mind you no one has seen the phoenix in over a thousand years, and it has never been inclined to do humans any good turns. Rather the opposite. Very like vampires, I suppose. Except a lot of people think the phoenix is a myth, and not many are stupid enough to think vampires are. I think the phoenix has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being true, because it’s nasty. What this world doesn’t have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who invented this system?)

I saw in the dark pretty well. I thought, do I want to see Bo coming?