Sunshine

I didn’t know if I was angrier at their making me try to do— whatever—or at the fact that I’d failed. I’d been to No Town when I was a teenager. It wasn’t like I had no idea. Any teenager with the slightest pretensions toward being stark, spartan, whatever, which I’m afraid I had had, will probably give it a try if it’s offered, and it will be offered. And No Town is a rite of passage; quite sensible kids go at least once. I’d been there more than once. Some of the clubs were pretty spartan by anyone’s standards. Kenny said (out of Mom’s hearing) this was still true. And it was also still true (Kenny said) that you dared each other to climb farther in, over the rubble around the bad spots, although nobody got very far. But I hadn’t got any less far than anyone else, when I was his age.

So had whatever-it-was moved there since my time, or was I just more sensitive now than I had been? No Town was actually a lot cleaner now than it had been when I was sixteen and seventeen, which was right after the Wars. Having been once captured by vampires, did I now overreact to their presence? If “overreact to vampires” wasn’t a contradiction in terms.

Or was this another horrible, specific one-off, like my having heard the giggler when no one else could?

I didn’t know if I wanted the answer to be yes or no. If it was no, then it might mean my sucker connection was general, which didn’t bear thinking about. But if it was yes, then it meant I was picking up something to do with Bo. Which didn’t bear thinking about.

Unless it was Con. Unless this had been his daylight wards, protecting him, protecting us, in the company of a couple of sucker-hating SOFs.

No. It wasn’t Con. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Con.

Pat drove around into the SOF back lot again. Neither of them had said any word of blame or failure or frustration to me, although I felt I could hear them both thinking. Words like “triangulation.” I didn’t know if they’d marked where I made them turn around. Probably. But neither of them mentioned it. Yet. “I’d take you straight to Charlie’s but I don’t think you want the neighborhood seeing you show up in a SOF car,” Pat said, as offhand as if we’d been buying groceries.

I started to shake my head—unmarked SOF cars were like SOFs out of uniform; you still knew—but changed my mind. “Thanks.” I fumbled for the door handle.

“Do you want to come back in? You look a little…worn. There are a few bedrooms in the back. They’re pretty basic but they have beds and they’re quiet. Or I could run you home.”

This time I did manage to shake my head. Carefully. “No. Thanks. I’m going for a walk. Clear my head.” The last thing I wanted to do was lie down in a small dark room and try to go to sleep. I didn’t want to go home either. There might be a dead rat in the living room.

I got out of the car, lifted my face to the sunlight. It felt like a good fairy’s kiss. Except good fairies don’t exist.

As I walked toward the exit Pat called after me, “Hey. Didn’t you want to tell us something? When you came in.”

I looked at him, at the way the shadows fell across his face. He was leaning on the roof of the car, which was unmarked-cop-car blue. That was probably why the shadows in the hollows of his eyes, his upper lip, his throat, looked blue. “I forget now,” I said. “It’ll come back to me.”

Pat smiled a little: a twitch of the lips. “Sorry, Sunshine.”

* * *

I raised a hand and turned away again. He said softly, “See you.” He could have meant only that he’d see me at Charlie’s, where we’d seen each other for years. But I knew that wasn’t what he meant. I went for a long walk. I spiraled slowly through Old Town, from the outside edge, where SOF headquarters and City Hall lie on the boundary between Old Town and downtown, to the next circle where the area library and the Other Museum and the older city buildings are, through several small parks and down the long green aisle of General Aster’s Way (purple in autumn with michaelmas daisies, some municipal gardener’s idea of a joke), and then into the back streets of Charlie’s neighborhood, where everyone gets lost occasionally, even people who have lived there all their lives, like Charlie and Mary and Kyoko. I was used to getting lost. I didn’t mind. I’d come to something I recognized eventually.

I wandered and thought about the latest thing I didn’t want to think about. There seemed to be so many things I didn’t want to think about lately.

I didn’t want to think about my increasing sense that something had happened to Con.

And that it mattered.

There is no fellowship between humans and vampires. We are fire and water, heads and tails, north and south…day and night.

Maybe I was imagining the bond. Maybe it was a way of dealing with what had happened. Like post-traumatic thingummy.

Con himself said the bond existed, but he could be wrong too. Vampires are deadly, but no one says they’re infallible.