Sunshine

Oh yeah, and seeing in the dark doesn’t mean when the sun goes down. It also means all the shadows that fall in daylight. This would not be a big issue for a vampire, of course, but it troubled the hell out of me. Even an ordinary table knife throws a shadow—although I didn’t really need any more reminders that table knives would never be ordinary to me again.

It throws your balance off, seeing through shadows. Your depth perception goes wrong, like trying to look through someone else’s glasses. Everything has funny dark-light edges to it, and sometimes those edges have themselves threadlike red edges. You get your new looking-through-bad-spectacles distortion on everything, including your own hands, your own body, the faces and bodies of the people you love and trust. Oh, the one time this goes away is when you look in a mirror. Or it did with me. Just in case I needed reminding that I got it from a vampire. Thanks.

I hated it that I now “saw” more easily in the dark than I did in the light. In the dark it all made sense. I hated this.

I was so clumsy for the first ten days or so that Charlie did another of his drifting-into-the-bakery-and-closing-the-door numbers. Golly, twice in two weeks: I must be a worse pain in the butt than I realized. Damn. He wandered around the bakery for a minute like he was thinking about what to say. I knew better; he figures this stuff out beforehand. When I still lived with him and Mom I used to see him ambling around the house in that fake idle way, figuring out what he was going to say to someone, what they might say back. He thinks of it on the move and he says it on the move. He wandered a lot during the time the city council was trying to upgrade us. The media, who love a good story and truth is noncompulsory, presented Charlie’s as the focus of the neighborhood campaign to stay the way we were: downmarket and crappy. This was not entirely false. That’s when Charlie’s kind of got on the New Arcadia map rather than merely the Old Town map, and one of the results was that Charlie could afford to build my bakery. (I have to say he used to wander a lot when Mom and I were at each other’s throats the worst too. There was some overlap between these two eras. Kenny and Billy are probably scarred for life.)

But having him wandering around again in that way I recognized made me feel bad. I didn’t live with him any more, but I had the impression he didn’t wander as much as he had then: that he’d mostly figured out how to say the sort of things he needed to say as Charlie of Charlie’s.

I suppose a magic-handling baker with an affinity for vampires is kind of an unusual problem for a coffeehouse. Maybe the bitchiness factor was trivial.

“You’ve been having a little trouble lately,” he said, mildly and gently, addressing one of the ovens.

“That oven is working fine,” I said, thinking, if you’re going to me you can just do it.

He turned around. “Sorry. We…Charlie’s has had its rough times, but…having SOFs interested in one of my staff is a new one.”

I refrained from pointing out that our regular SOFs had always sort of jived with me. I had thought because I was the one who wanted to hear their stories, but as it turned out, I now knew, because they remembered my father, even if Charlie—and for that matter Mom and I—didn’t. “Yeah,” I said. “It blows. I’ve been thinking, okay, my dad has always been my dad, but that doesn’t help. I could have gone on not knowing what it meant.”

Charlie hesitated. “Well…I doubt it, Sunshine. If you just kept coffee hot, maybe. But someone who can…” His voice faded. “Have you talked to Sadie about it?”

I shook my head. Have I sawn myself in half with a blunt knife? No.

“You know what Sadie is like—no one better. You inherited her backbone, her doggedness.”

The big difference between my mom and me—besides the fact that she is dead normal and I’m a magic-handling freak—is that she’s the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people’s points of view, but she’s honest about it. She’s a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I’m a brass-bound bitch because I don’t want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am. “And her nasty temper,” I said.

Charlie smiled. “She knew your dad pretty well. Do you know she loved him? She really did. Still does, in her secret heart. Oh, she loves me, don’t worry. And we’re happy together—that’s the point. She’s happy running the admin side of Charlie’s.”

And ripping self-important assholes to shreds, I thought. But get under cover if there haven’t been any self-important assholes around lately.

“She was often joyful—euphoric—with your dad, especially at the beginning. But his wasn’t a world she could live in. Mine is.