Sunshine

A clear trace of surprise showed on his face for about a third of a second. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking straight at him, but it was there. “You may come here if you wish. I…” He stopped. I could guess what he was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking. Wasn’t thinking. “Come. I will give you a token.”

He slid easily through the gap in the impedimenta (sorry, this household brought out the worst in my vocabulary; it was like every bad novel and hyperbolic myth I’d ever read crowding round to haunt me in three dimensions) and made off into the dark. I had a sidelong peek at the overturned goblet as I passed it. My dark vision steadied if I kept it on Con’s back, so I did, mostly, resisting the compelling desire to try to figure out what some of the more tortured blacknesses indicated by looking at them directly: hydras with interminable heads; Laocoon with several dozen sons and twice as many serpents; an infestations of trifflds; the entire chariot race from Ben Hur: all frozen in plaster or wood or stone. I hoped. Especially the trifflds.

Con stopped at a cupboard. It had curlicues leaping out of its lid like a forest of satyrs’ horns, and something—things—like satyrs themselves oiling down the edges. It was satyrs. Their hands were its handles. Ugh. Con, his own hand on one of the doors, glanced at me. “Why did the Cup distress you?”

I shrugged. How was I going to explain?

“My question is not an idle one,” he said. “I do not wish to distress you.”

Not till after we’d defeated Mr. Bo Jangles anyway. Oh, Sunshine, give a vampire a break. He probably thinks he’s trying. “I’m not sure I can explain,” I said. “I’m not sure I can explain to me. And vampires aren’t much into family ties, are they?”

“No,” he said.

I already knew vampires aren’t great on irony.

“I…have got into this because of my inheritance on my father’s side. I’m certainly alive to tell about it—so far—on account of that inheritance, right? But—” I looked into his face as I said this, and decided that the standard impassivity was at the soft, understanding end of the range, like marble is a little softer than adamant. “I’m a little twitchy about this bond thing with you, and the idea of—of— a kind of background to it—that your master had dealings with my dad’s family—I don’t like it.” I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad. “And the only training I’ve ever had, if you want to call it training, was a few hours changing flowers into feathers and back with my gran fifteen years ago, and I feel a little…well, exposed. Unready.” I could maybe have said, assailable.

“I see.” Con stared at the ugly door for a moment as if making up his mind, and then opened it. Inside were rows and rows of tiny drawers. I could feel the—well, it wasn’t heat, and it wasn’t a smell, and it wasn’t tiny voices, but it was a little like all three together. There were dozens of things in those drawers and not an inert one in the lot. They were all yelling/secreting/radiating a kind of ME! ME! ME! like the jock kids in school when the coach is choosing teams. I wondered what the cupboard was made of. I didn’t feel like touching it myself and seeing if it might tell me anything. I didn’t like the grins on the faces of the satyrs.

Con opened a drawer and lifted out a thin chain. The other voices/emissions subsided at once, some of them with a distinct grumble (or fart). The chain glimmered in the nonlight—the foxy-colored light of the fire didn’t reach this far—it looked like opal, if there was a way to make flexible connecting loops out of opal. It was humming a kind of thin fey almost-tune; my mind, or my ear, kept trying to turn it into a melody, but it wouldn’t quite go. Con poured it from one palm to the other—it looked fine as cobweb in his big hands—and then held it up again, spreading his fingers so that it hung in a near-circle. The almost-tune began to change. It would catch, like a tiny flaw tripping a recording, making it hesitate and skip; but each time it picked up again the tune had changed. It did this over and over as I listened, as Con held it up; and as I listened the strange, wavering nontune seemed to grow increasingly familiar, as if it were a noise like the purr of a refrigerator or the high faint whine of a TV with the sound turned off. Familiar: comfortable. Safe. I also felt, eerily, that the sound was becoming more familiar because it was somehow trying to become familiar: like the shape of a stranger at the other end of the street becomes your old friend so-and-so as it gets close enough for you to see their face and possibly that ratty old coat they should have thrown out years ago. This sibylline chain was approaching me…and dressing itself up as an old friend.