Sunshine

I flinched at the first sound of his voice, both because he had spoken at all, and also because his voice sounded as alien as the rest of him looked, as if the chest that produced it was made out of some strange material that did not reflect sound the same way that ordinary—that is to say, live—flesh did. His voice sounded much odder—eerier, direr—than the voices of the vampires who had brought me here. You could half-imagine that Bo’s gang had once been human. You couldn’t imagine that this one ever had.

As I flinched I squeaked—a kind of unh? First I thought rather deliriously about Alice and her pudding, and then the meaning of his words began to penetrate. Remind him I was a rational creature! I wasn’t at all sure I still was one. I tried to pull my scattered wits together, come up with a topic other than Lewis Carroll…“I—oh—they called you Connie,” I said at random, after I had been silent too long. “Is that your name?”

He made a noise like a cough or a growl, or something else I didn’t have a name for, some vampire thing. “You know enough not to look in my eyes,” he said. “But you do not know not to ask me my name?” The words came closer together this time, and there was definitely a question mark at the end. He was asking me.

“Oh—no—oh—I don’t know—I don’t know that much about vam—er,” I gabbled, remembering halfway through the word he had not himself used the word vampire. He’d said “me” and “my.” Perhaps you didn’t say vampire like you didn’t ask one’s name. I tried to think of everything Pat and Jesse and the others had told me over the years, and considered the likelihood that the SOF view of vampires was probably rather different from the vampires’ own view and of limited use to me now. And that having Immortal Death very nearly memorized was no use at all. “Pardon me,” I said, with as much dignity as I could pretend to, which wasn’t much. “I—er—what would you like me to talk about?”

There was another of his pauses, and then he said, “Tell me who you are. You need not tell me your name. Names have power—even human names. Tell me where you live and what you do with your living.”

My mouth dropped open. “Tell you—” Who am I, Scheherazade? I felt a sudden hysterical rush of outrage. It was bad enough that I was going to be eaten (or rather, drunk—my mind would revert to Alice), but I had to talk first? “I—I am the baker at Charlie’s Coffeehouse, in town. Charlie married my mom when I was ten, just before the—er.” I managed not to say “before the Voodoo Wars,” which I thought might be a sensitive subject. “They have two sons, Kenny and Billy. They’re nice kids.” Well, Billy was still a nice kid. Kenny was a teenager. Oh, hell. I wasn’t supposed to be using names. Oh, too bad. There are more than one Charlie and Kenny and Billy in the world. “We all work at the coffeehouse although my brothers are still in school. My boyfriend works there too. He rules the kitchen now that Charlie has kind of become the maitre d‘ and the wine steward, if you want to talk about a coffeehouse having a maitre d’ and a wine steward.” Okay, I thought, I remembered not to say Mel’s name.