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I woke just before dawn. As if I didn't have enough weird abilities unsurfacing lately, I'd started to have a sense of the relative light of the sky, even when I was indoors or underground. Kind of like those widgets you can get for a combox that show little cartoon dawns and phases of the moon, only instead of sitting in the corner of my screen it was in the top right corner of my brain. I wasn't sure whether this was a vampirey thing or my own magic's cracked subconscious idea of being helpful: both vampires and trees seemed a lot more likely to find a light-sense useful than I did. I rubbed the grit out of my eyes and sat up, pushing aside the ridiculous striped-fur blanket thing that had been laid over me.
Con was sitting, cross-legged, spidery, and impossibly still, by the embers of a dying fire. His face was mostly hidden by his hair and his quiet shadows, and he didn't turn his head as I sat up. Thinking, maybe, or some kind of vampire meditation. It was peaceful. It didn't feel like it should be peaceful.
I scowled at the obscene gargoyle faces of the buttons on the back of the sofa I was lying on. The unspeakably ludicrous Gothic decor of this room, this earth-place of Con's, was getting way too familiar. We'd been in a clearing, earlier that night, full of clean cold air and darkness - much more like him, I'd thought, than this place was. I'd sat down, put my head in my hands as he looked down on me. I'd only intended to close my eyes for a second.
"I'm always falling asleep on you," I said. It was such a silly thing to do with a vampire in the room. "I must be great company. More so than usual, even."
He was silent for a moment, and I was just pointing out to myself that the petulance of that comment hadn't really deserved a response when he stirred. "You have had little rest."
That was for sure.
The latest thing interfering with my sleep was Pat's fault, this ridiculous dance around me helping the SOFs. It wasn't that I disagreed with him that we needed to be really goddam careful with any help I gave him, Theo, and Jesse. I mean, for that matter, I didn't disagree with the position of the SOFs outside of our little cabal: imploding buildings and mysterious half-rotten body parts flying out of nowhere is the kind of thing that warrants an investigation, even in No Town. From their point of view, I'd been somehow involved, if only as a dubiously-amnesiac witness, to a fair-sized Other event of some kind, and even if they were used to having very few of the pieces in regards to sucker politics and warfare (if there was a difference), of course they were going to be interested. I was just lucky it hadn't progressed to a locking-me-away kind of interested.
It was playing skegging hell with my nerves, though. It wasn't like I'd had much free time to begin with, without having to play cloak-and-dagger and arrange meetings under constant threat of observation. It seemed like I had to keep a secret mental list for every person I knew of Things That Must Never Be Brought To Light, constantly being updated as it turned out that Whoops, They Knew That After All, Now What? The waitresses were starting to wonder out loud about the amount of time Jesse and Pat spent parked at their tables, and Charlie kept drifting into the bakery to ask if I needed any extra help.
(Let's not get into the ridiculousness of the idea that people I didn't even know might care how I spent my days. My life was not designed to be exciting: eighty percent of what it was supposed to be was on the schedule tacked to the coffeehouse office wall. I wondered if high-ranking SOF officials enjoyed finding out that Billy had picked another western for the Monday night movie, or that our fruit supplier had been less reliable lately.)
"Your body requires sleep to function," Con told me now, the words coming slowly.
"Obviously you've never worked in the small restaurant business."
He looked inscrutable, in a way I was starting to recognize as his idea of humor. "No."
Deadpan banter: another feature of my continuing bad influence on the undead. "Ha," I said. He didn't answer.
We sat like that for a while, and I tried to get a grip on myself. It occurred to me to wonder what kind of work he might have done in...however long he'd been unalive, and alive before that. How did that work, anyway? Everything I'd learned about how vampires' minds worked: aside from being scary, it was too different. It was scary because it was too different. (Was that part of what I'd become?)
Could he even remember his life as a human, as one of those weak prey animals, those enemies of his kind that still couldn't be cleanly killed? How did memory work for him? Was it all forgotten with the old patterns of thought, or bright and sharp as sunlight, or half-remembered like some book you read partway through and then put down a long time ago? Who had he been? I didn't even know if his name was his first or his last, or neither. I didn't quite know how to ask.
His eyes were green in the darkness, and I thought about him carrying me back here from the forest. He'd carried me before, and it had been about as comfortable as lying on bare bits of iron railing, but I'd obviously slept through it this time.
"Con," I said. "I don't know what to do."
"You have learned in the last weeks how to pass from here to your own places." Practicality: how obnoxious. It was true, though I didn't really like thinking about it. The chain he'd given me to allow me to 'approach' his home was now scarred into my flesh.Too goddam symbolic for words. "There are some hours before you must return, yes?"
"Yes," I answered reluctantly.
It was Monday, early Monday morning, my one true day of sleeping in and drinking tea and lying in the sunlight reading trashy old pre-War novels about forbidden powers and hysterical heroines and dark figures of sexy menace hovering above them. Or that was what Mondays had been in the past, anyway. I was going to meet with Pat and the rest of the SOFs today, and then later I was supposed to go out with Mel. And then Monday movie night, popcorn and champagne and a western. Rugged men trying to hold together a young and troubled frontier community, gag. My whole family and my friends would all be there, and just the thought of keeping all the lies and half-truths straight made my head hurt.
I'd had to argue with myself the night before, in fact, as I wrapped up Tuesday morning's dough for the refrigerator and went around switching off the bakery's lights. I was aching, that bone-deep ache you get from working on your feet for six days straight, and all I'd really wanted just then was to go home, maybe take a hot bath if I could manage it without passing out, and then collapse in bed for twelve hours.
But I'd known it'd be Monday, and that if I missed that night's chance to see Con I'd have to wait another week or else give up a precious few hours of a workday night and risk falling face first into a muffin tin the next morning. And I had to see Con. It wasn't that...it wasn't only that I wanted to see, had this curious feeling like something was missing if I couldn't see him -
You had safe and normal, didn't you? And it wasn't enough for you, Sunshine. You felt like there should be more.
- there were actual things we actually needed to discuss, if I could figure out a good way to say, hey, so I seem to be working a lot with people whose entire purpose is wiping out your kind. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but the world appears to need saving. Is that something you could maybe help with?
Maybe not. Another thing to be not talking about. I felt like a Death of Marat, these days, on the outside all white and fluffy pudding in a porcelain shell. Stick a knife in me, and dark purpley-red filling would ooze out. All a little too dramatic.
I'd decided, hadn't I? I'd passed the point of turning back, of being my mom's daughter, a normal crazed coffeehouse baker. My sun-self, my tree-self, my deer-self. Don't they outweigh the dark-self? Not anymore.
I remembered looking through a box of old photos when I was twelve or thirteen. Around the time I'd started wearing stupid makeup and staying out at night. It was in my mom's closet, a shoebox covered in old silver Midwinter wrapping paper. I'd had a fight with her that morning and went looking for a picture of my dad. I didn't have any of my own.
There were pictures of me as a kid, in there. Places with heavy dark furniture I didn't quite recognize, me scowling from Mom's lap or reading a picture book or sitting on a kitchen counter stirring batter in a mixing bowl - I knew that mixing bowl. A lot of those pictures had been torn in half. In one I could only see part of someone's hand, holding mine.
Mom came in and found me looking at the photos after about twenty minutes. That had been one of our more impressive fights.
My eyes were stinging. I turned my face back towards the ridiculous purple velvet of the sofa and closed them again, still and always aware of his gaze on me. It made my stomach flip, even now, that weird hindbrain flutter of hey, help, do something, that's a vampire and you're prey. It really wasn't anything like attraction.
I tried to go back to sleep.
"Here's what I don't understand," said Jesse. He was hunched over in his chair, elbows on knees and one foot bouncing impatiently. (Too many Killer Zebras from the bakery bag I'd brought.) "Why are things so quiet? It doesn't make sense."
Aimil stared at the combox screen, as if the statistics she was looking at were suddenly going to rearrange themselves and do a little dance. Maybe they would, maybe it was a librarian thing. I was looking down at a croissant I'd been shredding into little defenseless strips. I made myself stop, and looked around at the carts, the piled books and the hulking half-gutted old card catalog I was leaning against. One of the loose cards in front of me had the title "Legends of Blood: the Others of Antiquity." It had been x-ed out with a red marker.
(Irony alert: with all the trouble we'd gone to in the last weeks to be stealthy, we'd finally ended up having our dangerous clandestine meetings in the back room of a public library. Pat had suggested the office at Charlie's: I asked him if he wanted to be the one to explain to Mom, if something went wrong again, why her combox had suddenly exploded into hot plastic shrapnel.
Not that Aimil wouldn't have kind of a lot of explaining to do, too, if that happened to one of her work 'boxes, but Mom on a tear makes even the scariest, most mouth-pursing glasses-peering senior librarians look like fluffy lop-eared rabbits. There was also the fact that it might look a little suspicious for a coffeehouse combox used mainly for pay spreadsheets and invoices to suddenly have a subscription to the Darkline. The library administrative codes gave you access to all kinds of premium worldnet services.)
"Is it still the calm before the storm?" Aimil asked, sounding doubtful even as she said it. "I mean, I know we've been saying that for weeks..."
"Months," said Pat. "It's been two months."
"Whatever happened that night in No Town," Jesse pointed out, not looking at me but in a slightly more comfortable way than he'd been careful not to look at me weeks ago, "when that happens, when a major sucker gang gets taken out, every study we've got shows a dramatic increase in Other activity immediately following. New gangs move in, drawn to the blood, and the remaining vamp population goes batshit nomad fighting over the open turf, figuring out who's the biggest and meanest of the junkyard dogs."
"We've been over this," said Theo wearily from the door, where he was keeping watch. "It hasn't happened."
"Why hasn't it happened? Shiva wept, I don't want any more poor bastards getting dry-guyed, but it's starting to worry me," said Pat.
"There's been a drop in the number of Other-related deaths in the past two months," said Aimil quietly. We all knew it. That was the problem.
I'd heard stories about towns where vampires were fighting over territory. The sunset-to-dawn curfews, the heavy locked and warded doors and windows. And still you never knew who'd be next, if it would be someone you knew. As though the Wars had never ended - bad news in the paper every morning. "You think your lives are easier than they should be."
Pat huffed a laugh. "I don't like having to object to that any more than you do, Sunshine."
"Maybe it's something good. Or. Um. Less actively bad than we're expecting." I said. And cursed myself a second later, as all the SOFs turned to look at me as though I'd suggested a vigilante squad of unicorns was working in the shadows to clean up our streets. I made a what do you want from me? face at them, and they grudgingly turned back towards the screen.
"The only thing I can think," Jesse said slowly, "is that we're missing something."
Theo snorted. "Well, yeah."
Jesse went on, ignoring the interruption, "Less visible activity says to me that some scary odin bastard of a sucker is already here, and keeping them all in line. Or driving them away. And I'm sorry, but that's not a comforting thought, even if things are quiet now."
I remembered Con in full berserker-fighter mode, the way he'd snarled at me. I couldn't help but agree with Jesse, even as I knew that snarl had, if anything, been an acknowledgement that I'd just taken down one of our mutual enemies. Vampire for hot damn, well done! - I'd still rather be eaten by an enraged tiger than face that down.
Behold: Rae Seddon, coffeehouse baker and best friend to the new secret lord of the town's underground. Maybe some day there'd be a statue of the two of us in the middle of the Old Town pedestrian district: Con thin and grim, me brandishing a lethal table knife. The question was, who was the 'they' who'd put up it up? Maybe we'd just get lucky and die early. I rubbed my face to keep from giggling like my mind had finally, belatedly, snapped.
The kitchen at the Griffin Bar & Grill was pretty standard motorcycle roadhouse fare - burgers and chicken fingers and fries and other junk I didn't eat. I had kind of a weakness for their onion rings, though, which were served on a little wooden rack with sides of ranch and spicy barbeque sauce. I was giving them and my beer my full attention.
"Sunshine," said Mel beside me in the booth. "We don't have to be here if you don't want."
Another swig of beer, and then I forced myself to lean back against him, shutting my eyes. He was solid and warm and familiar. "It's just...loud here," I said, because it was. There were too many voices, and a song playing on the juke about how somebody's man was putting his hand in the back pocket of some tramp's low-cut jeans. It was kind of comforting in its irrelevancy. "I'm just tired."
"I know. Sunshine," he said, sliding his arm around the back of my waist. He hesitated, and my heart twisted. Because it was Mel, my scruffy, slightly shady boyfriend who was possessed of such vast patience and peace. Mel, who I'd laid with naked on a rooftop, sweat drying on our bodies as I traced out his tattoos with my fingertips. "I know how rough this has all been for you."
I sat forward and stared at the crumbs from the onion rings, a drop of sauce on the waxy wood tabletop. "Are you ever going to tell me who you are?" I asked. It didn't sound like my voice. Or actually, it did - it was that choked-up, pained tone I'd been getting to know and hate so well over the last months.
He was quiet for a moment. "This probably isn't the best..." he said, then broke off, and tried again. "I'm your friend. I told you..."
"'Everything else is just static on the line,'" I quoted him, bitterly. "How can it not be important?"
He sighed. One steady hand touched my back lightly. "You didn't want to know."
I stiffened, tried not to pull away.
He went on. "For a long time, you didn't want to know. It's up to you to decide what's important, Sunshine. But I am your friend."
"Everything's choices, these days," I said into my teacup the next day. The steam was rising in the air; I watched it drift. Yolande, her head framed by the window behind her, picked up a broken cookie piece from the plate on the coffee table.
She looked thoughtfully at the cookie. It was golden and lumpy - Buttermost Limit. "That's not exactly unusual for someone of your age, you know. Your circumstances are more unusual than most, of course. But one always has to make choices about what world to live in."
I stared out the window at the lilac bushes. Roots deep in the darkness of soil, afternoon sun on their leaves. You do not have to choose. I didn't see how that could be anything but a lie.
"Sometimes," she went on, lightly, "one has to invent a new world for oneself out of many different pieces. That can be frightening, more frightening than simply accepting someone else's world. But you may find that the number of choices to be made is not really so overwhelming as it seems. Others make them with you - not for you, but with you. Things begin to fall into place."
"I don't even know if half the things I want are possible," I said unsteadily.
Yolande laughed. It was an oddly youthful sound, and I looked at her, startled. "Haven't you been paying attention, my dear?" she chided me. "More things are possible than you could ever imagine."
I managed to snatch an hour or so of napping that afternoon before heading back to get ready for the dinner rush. Maybe it was just having that extra, unaccustomed sleep that made things worse. People wanted individual cherry tarts and they wanted Death of Marat and around eight Gat Donnor came around to the back entrance, eight feet tall, bright orange, and offering to tell me my fortune. Obviously the mix had gone right. I gave him a bag full of that morning's leftover muffins and told him not to bother, please. I may have sounded just a little off my rails.
I made it through, though, without actually screaming, bursting into tears, or wailing about how I wanted to find some covers to hide under right now, please, and you could take that dessert order and stick it. Finally it was ten o'clock, and I was leaning against the countertop, waiting to take one last pudding out of the oven. Charlie drifted in, hands in the pockets of his long apron.
"Long night," he said. I agreed, and he addressed the big red kitchen mixer. "You've been having a hard time," he told it.
I had to resist the urge to tell him the mixer was industrial strength, it could handle my batters. Only so many times you can make the same joke.
"Sadie's worried, you know. Well, of course you do." He lifted his shoulders a little. "Sunshine. You've heard it before, but if there's ever anything you need to say..."
I went and put my arms around him. "Anything I can do," he said. His flannel-covered shoulder smelled of coffee and lemons and Mom's laundry soap, and just a little bit of red wine.
Big magic-handling families like the Blaises try to hide their kids from the rest of the world, to keep them safe. If their names were known, they'd be at risk. I'd gone on the globenet once, looking for a picture of my dad: there was one from five years before the Wars, with him coming out of some stark, official-looking building. Mom was beside him, head bowed, face hidden by dark glasses.
There was no record in any of the searches I made to a Raven Blaise.
Charlie was so straightforward he'd given his restaurant his own name. He'd given me one, too, and a world to live in. My arms tightened around him for a second: I thought of my dad coming home one day to find the torn-away other halves of all those photographs. No images left to use to search for us.
It was hard for me to face, really. Everybody I knew, they'd all been saying something simple to me, over and over: look, stupid, we care.
I pulled away and gave him a wobbly smile. "One last Death of Marat." He smiled back.
Using my heavy-duty potholders to lift the pudding out of the oven, the water around the porcelain dish sloshing just a little, I heard Mel's voice from a couple feet away, sounding oddly neutral. "Sunshine. Someone to see you."
I turned, and saw Con standing next to Mel in the doorway. I dropped the pan.
He caught it. It was clearly impossible, Con was just abruptly there, holding this boiling-hot pan in his hands. He set it on the ground at his feet, quickly but not too quickly - the water didn't even spill - and then made a show of waving his hands around as though he'd been burned.
"Nice save," said Charlie, easily. "Sunshine, he should probably run his hands under the tap."
"...Right." Well, what are you going to do? I hustled him over to the sink. It was very strange, seeing him in the yellow light of the kitchen. The skin of his hands under the cold water was sort of muddy-olive toned. His palms weren't red or blistered at all. I wrapped them in a clean dishtowel.
"I'll get the first-aid kit," said Mel, and went into the kitchen. I looked after him a little desperately.
"Charlie Seddon," said Charlie to Con. "I'd offer to shake, but..." he gestured, smile charming.
Con inclined his head. "Jack Connor."
Jack? I opened my mouth incredulously and searched his face for any possible way in which he could be a Jack. I wasn't seeing it at all.
"Ah," said Charlie. "Connor. Then I guess we've all got more to thank you for than just the pudding rescue."
Con did something with his mouth that gave the strong impression of being a normal, if reserved, human smile. "There is obligation on both sides."
"Oh for gods' sake." I really couldn't help it. "Please let's not start talking about who owes who for what."
For a second, there was one of Con's not-laughs on his face. He remembered almost immediately and went back to passing for human, but it was there. I stared at him, thinking of how his real laughter sounded: like a nightmare, something to make you throw up with fear and horror.
Charlie looked between us, then said mildly, "I should take the people their Death of Marat. Table eight, right?"
I think I nodded. He stooped and plated it carefully, and then Con and I were alone.
"Jack?" I said. Con just looked at me. He wasn't actually any less frustrating when he was pretending to be human. "Are you insane? And is your name really...?"
"I gave you my name after our first meeting," he said, paused, and then said, as though it was absurd, ridiculous human perversity and something he would never have thought of in however many centuries, "Do you wish to know of me when I was--"
I'm sure the shushing wave-gesture I made here was a marvel of flailing hysteria.
"--younger?" he finished.
"I..." I gave up. "I don't know what I want to know. Need to know. Gods and frigging angels, Con, what are you doing here?"
"It was easily found," he explained, completely unhelpfully. "It is one of your places."
"But...!"
"Sunshine," he said. "You need to sleep. At least now and then."
I pushed myself up onto the edge of the counter, flour and specks of batter sticking to my hands, and put my head between my legs.
Less choices to make than I thought. Choices people make with you.
"I guess I do," I said, my voice a little muffled.
He pulled one hand out of the towel and put it gently on my shoulder. Out in the kitchen I could hear Paulie starting in on the dishes, and from further out in the dining area came the murmur of human voices.
There was something still out there, beyond these walls, I knew. It was the night, in all its possibilities.