“May we leave now, please?” I continued, holding my poisonous hands out placatingly, palms up. “I will come back whenever you like, but I’m so tired I can’t think. And I want a bath.” Several baths. And what I was wearing—the remains of what I was wearing—would so into the trash. No, the bonfire. I would start running out of clothing soon if I wasn’t careful. If I had a future it would have to include some shopping.
She made gracious-cooperation noises that were about as sincere as my respectfulness, and we were allowed to leave—Con and I, and Pat and John and Theo and Kate and Mike. In the windowless hallway Con and I drifted nonchalantly apart. I was trying to remember if there were any unexpected windows around blind corners. I hadn’t been at my best when we’d come through the first time. I wasn’t at my best now, but against all odds, I was improving.
Pat expelled a long noisy breath. “Well held, you guys,” he said. He glanced at Con. I could guess he was torn between wanting to celebrate a partial victory against the goddess and wanting to know who and what the hell my apparent ally really was. He caught my eyes and I watched him decide to trust me. I watched him watching me watching him decide to trust me. It was true: I owed him. That was something else I’d have to figure out later.
“Can I give you a ride home, Sunshine?” he said casually.
“That would be great,” I said feelingly. Even supposing I had bus fare in my pocket, which I didn’t, I didn’t yearn for the experience of getting Con and me anywhere in public. Any sane bus driver would refuse to let us on board, the way we looked, not to mention the nearest stop was a mile and a half from Yolande’s and I didn’t think I could walk that far.
I doubted that any nowheresville way was available in—from— daylight. And if I was too tired to walk from the bus stop I was way beyond too tired to deal with any nowheresvilles.
And turning up at Charlie’s, looking like this and with Con in tow, wasn’t an option.
“John, you want to take Mr. Connor—”
“He can come with me,” I said firmly. “We have to—talk.”
“I bet you do,” said Pat. “Okay, Sunshine, I won’t ask, but take notes, okay? I’m not going to do my heavy SOF guy trick and make you do your talking here because you’ve already had that from the goddess, and besides, if she found out I’d taken you to my office and got more out of you than she did she’d bust my ass back to Tinker Bell patrol.”
There is a legion of little old ladies (of assorted ages and sexes) who manage to believe that the Others are mostly small and cute and harmless, and live under toadstools, and wear harebells as hats. A lot of them ring up their local SOF div to report sightings, because that is the citizenly thing to do, and since there are a few ill-tempered Others who sometimes pretend to be small and cute and harmless— I’d never heard of any of them wearing harebells, however—these have to be checked out. But it is not a popular job.
“I’ve been getting reports from No Town right along, you know,” continued Pat, “and I want to know what you guys did. And I want it in triplicate, you got that? But I’m a patient man and I’ll wait. I won’t even tell the goddess I took you home together.”
“He’s lost his house keys anyway,” I said glibly, “and we can call a locksmith from my house.”
“He keep a fresh change of clothes at your house too?” said Pat. “Does Mel know? I didn’t say that.”
No windows yet. The other SOFs went their own ways, and it was just Pat and Con and me. Down a few more corridors, and now we were walking toward the glass doors into the parking lot. Con unobtrusively moved near me again and I tucked my arm under his arm and pretended to lean against him. It didn’t take a lot of pretending, any more than my tears for the goddess had.
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.