Sunshine

The western end of New Arcadia isn’t entirely deserted; it has some rather murky small businesses scattered around and some clubs the police keep closing down that open again a day or a week later. Sometimes they reopen briefly somewhere else, sometimes they don’t bother to pretend to move. It is the western end of town where gangs of mostly human, mostly teenage boys go to play chicken and look for vampires. It is also a popular area for squatters, although the attrition by death rate is pretty severe. A lot of the murky small businesses that manage to hold on there cater to squatters who can’t afford to pay for housing, but if they want to stay alive have to pay for some warding. There are two kinds of cheap wards: the ones that don’t work, and the ones that mess with what for want of a better phrase I’m going to call black magic. Which gives you the idea. The homeless are better off sleeping in the gutters in Old Town, but I admit that for Old Town‘s sake it’s a good thing most of them don’t.

It didn’t take a combox or a kick in the head to tell anyone in New Arcadia that if they were looking for suckers to look west.

“I was pointing west,” I said grudgingly. “Big deal.”

“We don’t know if it’s a big deal yet or not,” said Pat reasonably. “We won’t know till we drive you out there.”

“No,” I said.

“It might be, for example,” Pat continued unfazed, “that it isn’t the west of New Arcadia at all; it could be somewhere a lot farther away—Springfield, Lucknow, Manchester.” Manchester had a rep as a vampire city. “The globenet is the globenet; you never know where a specific piece of cosmail has come from.”

“Unless you’re SOF, and you track it down,” I said.

There was a little silence. Jesse sighed. “It’s not that easy. I mean, tracing something off the net is never easy—”

“There are all those boring laws about privacy,” I said.

“—which even SOF has to make an effort to break,” said Pat.

“—but a lot of the usual rules of, um, physics, don’t work quite the same with Others as with humans,” Jesse continued.

Yeah, I thought. How does a hundred-and-eighty-pound man turn into a ninety-pound wolf? Where does the leftover ninety go? Does he park it in the umbrella stand overnight?

“Geography and vampires is one of the worst. Where they are and where we are often doesn’t seem to, uh, relate.”

Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways…It is not the distance that is crucial, but the uniformity…. Evidently this worked in both, um, directions. Einstein was wrong. I wondered if it was too late to give my skeggy old physics teacher a bad day.

“So even if we got a good read off a cosmail that we were sure was lobbed by a sucker we still might not know any more than we did before we wasted some of SOF’s tax blinks cracking it. We can use all the help we can get.”

“Which I think I said to you already not long ago,” added Pat. “You might also keep in mind that the guys who don’t want to be found usually have the edge on us guys who want to find them. Even the human ones, and they’re usually easier. Sunshine, give us a break. We’re not trying to ruin your life for fun, you know.”

I stared into the bottom of my mug. Not Jesse or Pat’s fault that I was bound to a vampire. I didn’t think they’d be real open to the idea of making an exception for him. I wasn’t happy about it myself. But I could hardly tell Pat that the reason SOF was so full of covert partbloods now made me feel worse, not better.

I was getting to a pretty bad place if I was beginning to wonder if maybe going bonkers and having to be bagged for my own good might be my best choice.

What if what I had pointed toward was Con?

No. The answer came almost at once. No. What I had pointed toward was something…something in itself sick-making, antithetical to humans. To anything warm and breathing. Betrayal would be a different sort of sick. I was sure.

I was pretty sure.

A human shouldn’t be able to think in terms of betraying a vampire. It didn’t work. Like those nonsense sentences they used to wake you up when you are supposed to be learning a foreign language. I eat the hat of my uncle. I sit upon the cat of my aunt. Depends on the cat of course.

It didn’t work, like being able to see in the dark didn’t work. The bottom of my mug was in shadow. I hadn’t drunk the last swallow because it had a fine dust of tea leaves in it. Even they threw shadows, tiny shadows within the shadow, floating in the shadowy dark liquid. “Okay,” I said.

It might have been Bo I’d found. That I’d felt through the globe-net. That was about as sick-making a thought as I could have. Bo, that Con was supposed to be finding so we could go spoke his wheel before he spoked ours. Again. Permanently.

“Then you’ll come with us?”

I thought about it. There wasn’t much to think. “I have to be back at six,” I said.

“You got it,” said Pat.