Sunshine

One of these mornings at four-thirty a.m. I was expecting to find a SOF lurking on a street corner too, and the fact that I didn’t see one didn’t convince me there wasn’t one there somewhere. Pat had made an official offer to have me escorted to and from home, which I didn’t let him finish before I refused. Other than that I hadn’t seen much of him: damage control with the goddess, I assumed. I was interested myself that my desire for autonomy was still stronger than my fear of what might or was about to happen. My unfavoritest corner, when I arrived at Charlie’s before dawn, wasn’t the nearest one, where Mandelbaum met the main road, but across the square, at the mouth of one of the littlest and darkest alleys of Old Town. I pretended to fish for my keys and then made a big pantomime fuss about choosing the right one every morning as I scanned for shadows that didn’t lie right. Shadows never lay right in that corner. I always felt watched, these days. It was just a question of watched by whom. Or what.

After I opened the door and went in, I relocked the door behind me before I turned off the alarm system. Used to be I didn’t bother to relock the door. I’d asked Charlie to program an extra few seconds’ delay to the bell so I could. He’d looked at me worriedly, but he’d done it. And he hadn’t asked any questions. He wasn’t going to say the “v” word if I wasn’t.

We don’t have a state-of-the-art alarm system at Charlie’s—we can’t afford it—but this is one of the ways having SOF friends is useful, and we do have some funny little gizmos that tell you if anything has been disturbed. Nothing went on being disturbed, except my mental state.

I was pulling maple cornbread out of the ovens at about eight one morning when Mary came in to say Theo wanted a word. I thought about it. “Okay,” I said. “Time I had a break, I guess.”

Theo sidled in like the reluctant bearer of unwelcome news. My private bakery kettle was beginning to hiss and burble. “Tea?”

He shook his head.

“Cornbread?”

He brightened immediately. I was as bad as Paulie, really, despite how long I’d been doing this. Someone wants to eat my food, they’re automatically my friend. Someone who doesn’t want to eat my food, they automatically aren’t. This is an awkward attitude if you hang out a lot with a vampire.

Theo was an old enough hand in the kitchen—my kitchen anyway—to know to approach something fresh out of the oven with caution. He took the whacked-off still-squodgy-with-baking end of a loaf of maple cornbread gingerly and watched happily as the approximately quarter-pound of butter he put on it melted through. He would lick the plate when he was done. This was one of the advantages of eating out back: table manners weren’t required. I’d been known to lick plates myself. Once when I was teasing Kyoko about him, I mentioned he was a plate-licker. She looked briefly interested “Oh? Maybe he’s human after all.” Then she shook her head. “Nah He’s SOF.” This was in hindsight a better joke than I’d realized.

“You’d better get it over with,” I said, after he’d finished licking the plate.

He sighed. “Pat would like to see you this afternoon.”

I’d decided in the predawn darkness of the morning after I’d met the goddess what I was going to say the next time Pat wanted to talk to me. “It won’t do him any good. Something burned out the other night. I burned out. I woke up the next morning with a piece missing. It’s still missing.”

He looked surprised, worried, then thoughtful. Then, to my great surprise, hopeful. “He’ll still want to see you.”

“Why are you looking so pleased?”

He hesitated. “The goddess wants to take over. Take you over. She says it’s because Pat destroyed government property, that he’s bungled, that she wants to clean up the mess, that you’re to be sent back where you came from after she’s sure no security has been breached, that it was all glang anyway. But it’s really because she’s pissed off that someone may have thought of something or discovered something before she did. Something that might be important— something she might be able to use.”

“And you think Pat’ll think that merely blowing out the county HQ‘s com system on a bad call is better than the goddess finding out maybe it’s a good call?”

“Yeah.”

I thought of her walking-nuclear-reactor aura. “If I wasn’t afraid of the goddess already, I would be now.”

He smiled. It was a rickety sort of smile. “You don’t know half-You don’t want to know half. You want my advice, you stick to suckers. When do you get off today? Pat’ll come by just before.”

“Three,” I said. His eyes were wandering to the muffin racks. There were bran raisin and oatmeal applesauce allspice waiting to go into the cases up front. “Have one for the road,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. He took two.

Pat drifted in at a few minutes to three. I now knew that it would take a lot to make him look short of sleep, and he looked short of sleep. He looked worse than short of sleep. He raised hollow eyes and said, “Hey, Sunshine.”