Sunshine

There was a project drawn up not too long ago with a list of volunteers to be thing-thralls but that never got off the ground, maybe partly because the ‘ubis like choosing their own prey and bait on a string doesn’t interest them, but mainly because there was this huge public outcry against it. Mind you, you have to wonder about the volunteers. ’Ubis may be a bigger problem than anybody knows because thing-thralls are usually having a very good time and it’s their loving friends and families (sometimes their pissed-off colleagues) that start to wonder why they’re sleeping twelve or fourteen hours a day and spending the rest of the time looking like they just had amazingly terrific sex. Nobody knows whether thing-thralls really are having sex with their things either, or whether they only think they are. But even the best sex your nerve endings can be made to imagine they’re having has to be balanced against the fact that your IQ tends to drop about one point for every month you’re a thing-thrall. The cleverer ubis cut and run before the brain drain gets obvious, and a lot of people aren’t using their brains to begin with and don’t miss them. But sometimes it’s too late for the thrall to have any future more intellectually demanding than night shift shelf restocker. There is a bagger I know at our local Mega Food who had been New Arcadia’s top criminal defense lawyer before an ‘ubi got him. I used to read the reports of his courtroom antics and thought being a thing-thrall had improved his personality beyond recognition, but it had knocked hell out of his career prospects.

There was a series of articles about how many different kinds of Weres there are, another favorite topic. Wolves are the famous one, of course, but they’re actually comparatively rare. There are probably more were-chickens than there are were-wolves, which if you’re asking me explains why comparatively few Weres go rogue as against, say, how many demons. And possibly why the black market in anti-Change drugs is so slick, although the idea of black marketeers with either a sense of humor or of compassion is maybe stretching it a little. More likely the were-chickens will pay anything for the drugs, and do.

But there are were-pumas, for example, and were-bears. Were-coyotes are enough of a scourge that the SOFs go after them and do a horrible sort of mop-up about once a year. Were-raccoons are nasty little beggars and were-skunks are, well, beyond a nightmare. Get a were-skunk mad at you and your life isn’t worth living. There’s a special flying SOF unit for were-skunks. Every city over about a hundred thousand has a SOF were-rat unit, speaking of horrible mop-ups. New Arcadia has one. But according to Pat and Jesse you can stay one jump ahead (so to speak) of all the Weres, even the rats, as long as you don’t get careless. Nobody ever stays a jump ahead of vampires.

Maybe because there was all this other stuff about the Others, and because, of course, I wanted not to be noticing, I ignored for a while that there were more local stories about vampires. Sucker sightings, sucker activity, which is to say fresh desiccated corpses, aka dry guys. As I say, New Arcadia is pretty clean, but nowhere is really clean of vampires. And so I didn’t notice right away—who wants to notice bad stuff happening next door? And even if it was happening, it didn’t mean it had anything to do with my little adventure. I could ignore it if I wanted to.

…That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you—as it does, does it not?—and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner…