Sunshine

Pat’s glance flicked over us again and I realized he was having to make an effort not to go all, well, male. He wanted badly to try to put Con in his place and thus find out what his place was. He wanted this as a pretty high-ranking SOF officer, he wanted this as my friend and self-designated semiprotector and semiexploiter, and he probably even wanted this for Mel, who he was at least sure was genuinely human, although ordinarily he would consider my private life strictly my own business. And he’d be having mixed feelings about suspecting Con as some kind of freaky partblood for the obvious reasons. But I recognized the signs in this (comparatively) respectable middle-aged SOF agent from the staring and grunting contests we got occasionally at Charlie’s, and from some of the biker bars I’d been to with Mel. I had a sudden frivolous desire to laugh…as we walked through the swinging doors and out into the morning.

The sun was still low but the sunshine on my face felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me. I couldn’t help it: I stopped, and raised my face to it. Con stopped with me of course. “Sunshine for Sunshine,” Pat said mildly. “I’ll get the car,” and he went on, running his hands over his head as if smoothing down feathers from his frustrated dominance display. I hadn’t picked up any response from Con—I could always feel Mel not responding—but then Con didn’t noticeably respond to much of anything. And it wasn’t that vampires didn’t have their own shoving competitions—we had, after all, just survived a particularly extravagant one of these. I didn’t feel like laughing any more.

I put Con’s arm around my waist so I could raise both hands to the sun, as if an extra twenty inches of extended arm was going to make a big difference to its curative properties. I didn’t care. I held them, palm up, till I saw Pat’s car coming toward us, and Con handed me carefully into the back seat, and slid in after me.

I curled up and pretended to go to sleep on Con’s shoulder so we didn’t have to make conversation and Pat wouldn’t try. This really was pretense: I couldn’t go to sleep, at least not yet, and was afraid to try. Even keeping my eyes closed was an effort, but I listened intently to all the normal noises of morning in the city, smelled gas fumes and early coffee bars, and felt Con’s arm around me—and his spiky hair occasionally brushing my face—and managed to keep the sights of the night before from replaying themselves against my eyelids. The smell of coffee—penetrating even through the smell of us—reminded me of Charlie’s, and there was one of those weird bits of mental slippage that trauma produces: I thought, oh, what a good thing I’m not dead, I never did write that recipe down for Paulie…

It felt like a long drive, although it wasn’t, still well before rush hour, and in a real car instead of the Wreck. “Check in as soon as you can,” was all Pat said when he dropped us off.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Con.

Again that flick of gaze to one, then the other of us. “Yeah,” said Pat, and drove away.

I had avoided losing my house key by not taking it with me. I fished it out from under the pot of pansies and the crack in the porch floor and opened the door, half-watching my hands still, as if they might turn on me and try to tear my own heart out. Con followed me up the dark stairs. My apartment was full of roses. I’d forgotten about the roses. None of them was more than half open. It felt like some kind of miracle: it felt like centuries since I’d bought them, two days ago. I was supposed to be dead. I would be going to work tomorrow. Cinnamon rolls. Roses. They were from another world. The human world. I glanced at my hands again. Hands that earned their living making human food. There isn’t much that is a lot more nakedly hands-on than kneading dough.

The ward wrapped around the length of the balcony railing had a big charred hole in the middle of it. When we’d walked through it last night, into Other-space, presumably. The poor thing: it had probably felt like a garage mechanic presented with a lame elephant: wait just a sec here, I never said I did all forms of transport. It had been a good ward, and it had survived my smoke-borne passage on my way to find Con. I’d find out later if it could be patched up or if it was blown (or squashed) for good.

I left Con in the middle of the shadowy floor and went out into the daylight again, holding my hands out in front of me like sacrifices or discards. Con moved forward till he was standing at the edge of the shadow. “There is nothing wrong with your hands,” he said.

I shook my head, but I lowered my hands till they rested on the balcony railing. There were scorch marks on the railing. On their backs, with the fingers curled up, my hands looked dead.

“Tell me,” he said.