Sunshine

I was thinking about my experience of bringing the rest of him back. It was a little difficult not to think about comparative weakness when only one of you could fling the other one across a room and into a wall and you were the one that got flung. Okay, I was not going to pursue that line. I sighed. He had already told me he couldn’t stand against Bo alone. Choosing me as an ally might have made more sense to me if getting calories out of bread and apples and going around in daylight had any discernable relevance to the issue. “Where am I?”

I thought he looked puzzled. Another of those vampire-senses-are-different moments, I suppose. “This is my…home,” he said at last.

“You don’t call it home,” I said, interested.

“No. I might call it my…earth-place, perhaps. I spend my days here. I have done so for many years.”

“Earth-place? Then we are underground?”

“Yes.”

“What about the fireplace?”

He looked at me.

“Doesn’t the smoke say ‘Someone’s here?”

“The smoke is not detectable in the human world.”

Oh. Vampires would hold a lot more than one-fifth of the global wealth if they patented a really good air filter. The cynical view of the Voodoo Wars is that the Others had done us humans a favor, by killing enough of us off and thus lowering the level of industrial commerce to a point that we hadn’t managed to commit species suicide by pollution yet, which we otherwise might well have. Even if they looked at it this way, which I doubted, this would not have been pure philanthropy. Demons and Weres, whichever side of the alliance they’d been on, need most of the same things we do, and vampires…well. Maybe it depends on your definition of “philanthropy.”

I looked around a little more. The only light was from the fire, and my dark vision was sort of half-confounded by something about this place, maybe just the thundering excess. Still, I could see a lot, and it was all pretty bizarre. The fur I was wrapped up in appeared to be real fur, long and silky, in jagged black and white stripes. I couldn’t think what animal it might be. Something that didn’t exist, perhaps, till a vampire killed it. With the slinky black shirt—and the bruises—I felt like something off the cover of this month’s Bondage and Discipline Exclusive. All I needed was ankle bracelets and a better haircut. The buttons on the back of the sofa I was lying on were tiny gargoyle faces, sticking their tongues out or poking their fingers up their noses. Every now and then they weren’t faces at all, but pairs of buttocks. The sofa itself was some kind of purple plush velvet…except that the shadows it laid were lavender. Well, if I could travel through nowheresville I suppose I shouldn’t protest about shadows that were lighter than their source, or about furs from animals that didn’t exist. My knowledge of natural history in black and white didn’t extend much beyond skunks and zebras anyway. Maybe it did exist, whatever it was. The fur could have been dyed, but somehow this didn’t suit my idea of vampire chic. Actually Con didn’t suit my idea of vampire chic. This hectic Gothic sensibility was a surprise. “Interesting decorating principles,” I said.

He glanced around briefly, as if reminding himself what was there. “My master had a sense of the dramatic.”

I was riveted both by my master and had. As in used to have, as in dead, rather than undead? “Your master?” I said experimentally.

“This is his room.”

Silence fell. Con returned to staring motionlessly at the fire. So much for leading questions. I sighed again.

Con, to my surprise, stirred. “Do you wish to hear about my master?” he said.

“Well, yes,” I said.

There was a pause, while he, what? Organized his thoughts? Decided what to leave out? “He turned me,” he said at last. “I was not…appreciative. But I was apt to his purpose. As there was no going back I agreed to do as he wished.” Another pause, and he added, with one of those more-expressionless-than-expressionless expressions, like his more-than-stillness immobility: “A newly turned vampire is perhaps more vulnerable than you would guess. I was dependent on my master at first, whether I wished it or not, and I…chose to let him teach me what I needed to know to survive. That was many years ago, when this was still the New World.”

Eek, I thought. Three or four hundred years ago, give or take a few decades, and depending on which Old World explorers you are counting from. That can’t be right: if he was that old, he shouldn’t be able to go out in moonlight.

“He wished to rule here, when the Liberty Wars came, at least…unofficially.”

The standard human slang was below ground and above ground. Unofficially would be below ground: being the biggest, nastiest junkyard dog of the dark side. Officially would still be pretty unofficial: control another two-fifths of the world economy, presumably, and make our global council into a bit of window-dressing.