Sunshine

“My guess is she got out of your dad’s world when she did and took you with her because she knew what you were. I think she knew you were going to be someone pretty unusual. I think she was hoping that what she’s given you—both by being your mom and by raising you in a place like Charlie’s—is going to be enough. Enough ballast. When what your father gave you started coming out.”

I’d already figured out that she hadn’t included him in the Bad Cross Watch, so what I was in Charlie’s version of events didn’t include the possibility of a demon taint. On the whole I thought my version was more plausible than Charlie’s. Possibly because it was more depressing.

I drifted in a very Charlie-like manner over to the stool and sat down. I looked at my hands, which had a funny red-outlined light-dark edge. I thought about bad gene crosses. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes.

“What do you think, Sunshine?” said Charlie. “Is it going to be enough?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Charlie, I don’t know.”

August was less death-defying than usual in terms of temperature (which among other things meant that I hadn’t had to beg Paulie not to quit) if not in terms of numbers of Earth Trek coachloads, and possibly, because all the heat August hadn’t used had to go somewhere, we went straight into Indian Summer September, do not pass Go, do not collect two thousand blinks. So I got out all my least decent little-bit-of-nothing tank tops and wore them. The scar was visible but the skin was flat and smooth, no puckering, and the white mark itself seemed weirdly old and sort of half-worn-away-looking the way old scars get sometimes.

I was still having trouble with the idea that what had happened that night counted as healing, but whatever it was, it had worked.

I started going home with Mel a lot. He was glad to have me around—glad to stop arguing about my going to another doctor. He didn’t know about Con, of course, but he knew plenty—too much— about recent events. He would know that I needed reassuring without knowing I needed to feel…human.

This is really stupid, but I also discovered that I somehow believed that he was the one human at Charlie’s who might be able to stop me in time if my bad genes suddenly kicked in and I picked up my electric cherry pitter and went for the nearest warm body. That he’d drown me efficiently in a vat of pasta sauce while everyone else was standing around with their mouths open wringing their hands and saying, who are we going to get to cover the bakery on such short notice?

This was at its worst during Monday movie evenings. The Seddon living room had never seemed so small, or so packed with flimsy, vulnerable human bodies. If Mel didn’t feel like going I didn’t go either.

As a romantic fantasy I don’t think it’s going to make it into the top ten—most women pining for the presence of their lovers aren’t worrying about needing their homicidal tendencies foiled—but it did mean I felt a little safer with Mel around.

I probably didn’t believe it at all. I just didn’t want to give him up. He was warm and breathing and had a heartbeat.

Human. Yeah. I hadn’t been willing to go see a specialist human doctor, as Mel had kept asking me to. No. I asked a vampire for help. And took it instantly when he offered it.

Mel must have wondered what happened to the wound on my breast. But he didn’t say anything. He was very good at not saying things. It had only been since the Night of the Table Knife that I’d begun to wonder if his reticence was for my sake or his.

And if it was for his…No. I needed him to be steady, solid, secure. I needed it too badly to pursue that one. Too badly to wonder about the number of live tattoos he had. Even for a motorcycle thug.

Another of the things I’d never thought about was the way when we went home together it was always his home. He’d been inside my apartment a handful of times. If we had an afternoon together we went hiking or went back to his place. If we had an evening together and we decided to go out, we went where he wanted to go because there wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go. I knew his friends. He didn’t know mine. His house wards were set to know me. Mine weren’t set to know him.

I didn’t have friends. I had the coffeehouse. A few librarians—chiefly Aimil, who had been a Charlie’s regular all her life—was as far afield as I went.

It is halfway true that if you are involved in a family coffeehouse you don’t have a life. But only halfway. Mel had a life.

I’ve said before that Mel had been a bit of a hoodlum in his younger days, although nobody seemed to be quite sure how much, or maybe his War service had wiped earlier misdeeds off the record. He wasn’t old now but he’d had time to go wrong and then change his mind. There must have been signs he wasn’t going wrong right, though, even at the time. Some of his tattoos were for pretty strange things. Some of them I didn’t know the purpose of because when I’d asked he’d said “Um” and gone silent.