Sunshine

I lay there, considering. Point one: wherever the hell I was (and I hoped this was not too literal a remark), it had a smooth, glassily smooth, stone floor. The wall I had caromed into at a guess was the same material.

Point two: what the hell had happened?

Point three: where did I want to start counting?

I hoped I was going to have the opportunity to tell Yolande that she didn’t have to make me anything special, that the herbs and candles had worked fine. If you wanted to call this fine.

I remembered, with an effort, that when I’d arrived—so to speak—Con had been cold and not breathing. But for all I knew this is merely the vampire equivalent of a nap. Lots of humans are cranky when they’re woken unexpectedly. No. I didn’t think his eyes would go stagnant-pond-colored for a nap. Okay. Maybe I had accomplished my mission—that he’d been in some kind of vampire trouble and I’d got him out of it.

I should have been embarrassed. I should have been paralyzed with embarrassment. I was sitting—no, I was crooked up—naked on a cold stone floor in the dark, having been cannoned off the wall by a…well, a creature…that I had been under the impression I was about to have an intimate encounter with. Maybe I should try to be grateful at having been spared intimacy with the most dangerous or the Others.

Gave a whole new meaning to the phrase under the dark.

I wasn’t grateful. You want to talk cranky, coitus interruptus takes me well beyond cranky. My engorged labia felt like they were pressing on my brain—what there was of my brain—and if I didn’t get to fuck someone, something, now—a vampire would do—I was going to fucking explode. My cunt ached like a bruise.

Beyond cranky, rather fortunately, doesn’t transmute into embarrassment. It transmutes into fury. As my blood pressure began to rearrange itself to a more standard unengorged pattern I was seething. I couldn’t care less that I was also naked and alone in the dark of I had no idea where. Well, I couldn’t care much. Not very much. Really.

It was a large room. Empty—except for me—and the ceiling was so high even my dark-sighted eyes couldn’t make it out. No furniture. No windows. No anything. Funny sort of place for a nap. Or maybe for a solitary siege. But then I wasn’t a vampire.

It was at least as dark as the inside of my closet. So nothing flickered when I looked at it. What there was to look at. Wow, what a bonus. I would try to control my euphoria.

He reappeared. He was wearing what I was beginning to think of as his standard get-up of long loose black shirt and black trousers. No shoes. I couldn’t be sure but I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in shoes. He was carrying something else, which he came close enough to hand over without looking at me. I unfolded it and discovered another long loose black shirt. When I had pulled it over my head it came nearly to my knees. Gods bloody damn it all. I was not in a good mood.

He was still not looking at me. I was still seething.

“I beg your pardon most profoundly,” he said.

“Yeah.” I said. “Nice to see you too.”

He made one of those quick vampire gestures, too rapid for human eyes. My no-longer-quite-human eyes could about follow it: at any rate they registered frustration. Good. That made two of us. Although on second thought, or maybe semi-thought, I doubted he was indicating physical frustration. Uncomfortably I began to be glad of the long black shirt, which probably made me look like death, especially in this light, er, this no-light: black is not my color, any way you hang it. But then looking like death might be very attractive to a vampire. In which case there was even less to explain why…My anger was subsiding. I didn’t want it to subside. I needed the warmth. But he’d thrown me away, hadn’t he? Whatever his dick said, he didn’t want me. Anger was much better than misery. Misery approached. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered.

Maybe he saw the shiver. “After your—” He paused. “You need food,” he said. “I can’t even feed you.” He glanced down at himself as if perhaps he was expecting a peanut-butter sandwich to be suspended about his person. If he was contemplating opening a vein and offering it to me, the answer was No. If he was contemplating it, he rejected the notion. I wondered what he meant by can’t even feed me.

“I must also thank you for…retrieving me,” he said. Finally he looked at me.

Retrieving? Shiva wept.

“Any time,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy reviewing my assortment of new scars and recalling how I got them too. The ones from being slammed on my back and landed on like a sack of boulders, and the ones a few seconds later from being thrown across the room into a wall.”

I saw him flinch. One for the human.

“Sunshine,” he said. He made a move toward me, and I flinched away. One for the vampire.