I’d touched it.
And I was going to have to remember for the rest of my life that I’d touched it. That these hands had grasped, pulled…
But us anti-evil guys have to stay sane. Lumpy and holey, maybe, but sane. Listen, Sunshine: Bo was gone. He wasn’t going to get the last word now.
I hoped.
At least not until later this morning.
“I’m going to run a bath. I’ll flip you for who goes first.” I had a jar on my desk, next to the balcony, that held loose change.
“Flip?” Vampires. They don’t know anything.
I won. I was almost sorry. I felt obliged to have only one bath, and a fast one, but I made it count. If I rubbed my palms a little rawer than I needed to for an idea, at least my hands felt like my hands while I was doing it. Perhaps the touch of the rose petals, when I’d had to move all the floating roses out of the bath so I could get me into it instead, had helped.
There was no wound on my breast. I hadn’t believed it at first. I kept rubbing the soap all over my front, from throat to pubic line, as if maybe I’d mislaid it somehow. But it wasn’t there. The scar was. I thought it looked a little…wider, shinier, than it had, the day after Con had closed it the first time. But it was a scar.
But my chain was gone too, and there was a new scar, which dipped over the old one, in the shape of a chain hanging around my neck. Together they looked like some new rune, but I couldn’t read it.
There was no sign of the golden web, no matter how hard I scrubbed.
…What had I been saying about going on fighting for the forces of good? In that mad little moment right after Con had said something comforting? That a vampire had seemed to say something comforting should have told me I was having a crazy moment, not a returning-sanity-and-hope moment.
Going on doing anything like what I’d been doing these last five months—horribly culminating in what I had done last night—was approximately the last thing I wanted.
Especially when it meant bearing the knowledge of what I’d done. And that going on doing it would mean bearing more of doing and more of knowing.
But Pat had said we had less than a hundred years left. Us humans. No, not us humans. Us-on-the-right-side. And there aren’t enough of us.
Okay, here’s the irony: if I went on with this heavy magic-handling shtick I was likely to be around in a hundred years.
I pulled the plug and started toweling myself dry. I rubbed violently at my hair like I was trying to friction-burn undesirable thoughts out of my head. I washed and dried my little knife tenderly, however, and put it back in my fresh, clean, dry pocket. I was dressed in the first thing out of the top cupboard in the bathroom, where all my oldest, rattiest clothes lived. Then I started another bath and called Con.
I found a one-size-fits-all kimono in the back of my closet that Con could get into, or rather that would go round him; at least it was black. I could give him the shirt in the back of my closet but it wouldn’t be long enough on him.
Right. I was clean. Con had something to wear. On to the next thing. Food. I didn’t have to think any more long-view thoughts yet. I still had small immediate things to organize myself around.
I was frying eggs when he came out, looking very exotic in the kimono. I stood there holding a skillet with three beautifully fried eggs in it and said miserably, “I can’t even feed you.” How I’d organized my entire life: feeding other people. I heard what I was saying—or what I was saying it to—a moment after the words came out, but his gaze did not waver.
“I do not eat often. I do not need food.”
I shook my head. I’d narrowly avoided mental breakdown as a result of facing ancient all-consuming evil, and now I was about to lose it over giving a vampire breakfast. I felt tears pricking at my eyes. This was ridiculous. “I can’t eat in front of you. It’s so…I feed people for a living. If I don’t do it I’m a failure. I identify as a feeder of…”
“People,” said Con. “I am not a person.”
I’d just been having this conversation with myself in the bathroom. “Yes you are,” I said. “You’re just not, you know, human.”
“Your food grows cold,” said Con. “It is better hot, yes?”
I shook my head mutinously. He was right, though, it was a pity to ruin such ravishing eggs.
“I will drink with you,” said Con.
“Orange juice?” I said hopefully. It had to have calories in it. Water didn’t count.
“Very well. Orange juice.”
I moved three white roses out of one of my nice glasses, gave it a quick wash, and poured orange juice in it. It was one of the tall ones with gold flecks. Silly thing to drink juice out of. I didn’t see him drink—it occurred to me I hadn’t seen him drink his tea in the goddess’ office either—but nearly half a gallon of orange juice disappeared while I ate my eggs and two toasted muffins and a scone. (What a good thing that it hadn’t occurred to me to empty my refrigerator before I died.) Did that mean he liked it, or was this his demanding standard of courtesy again?
“What does it taste like?” I asked.
“It tastes like orange juice,” he said, at his most enigmatic.
How was I planning on putting us-on-the-right-side, anyway? Con had been on the right side as compared to Bo. Con was still a vampire. He still…
I did the dishes in silence while Con sat in his chair. The kimono made him look very zen, sitting still doing nothing. I’d seen it first at the lake, that capacity for sitting still doing nothing with perfect grace: although that wasn’t how I’d thought of it when we were chained to the wall together. And it was interesting that he retained it when he wasn’t under the prospect of immediate elimination with no way out, which might be expected to focus the mind. If it didn’t blow it to smithereens.
I did the dishes slowly. We’d done washing and eating. There wasn’t anything to come except to figure out sleeping arrangements. Con had acknowledged that vampires did something like sleep during the day. And my body had to have sleep soon or I was going to fall down where I stood. But my mind couldn’t deal with it. I’d tried to convince myself to haul some laundry downstairs but I couldn’t face the effort: stairs: the assault on Everest, and where were my Sherpas? I rescued Con’s trousers from where he had rinsed and wrung them out and draped them over the towel rack (you don’t think of vampires in domestic-chore terms, but I suppose even vampires have to come to some arrangement about getting their clothes washed), and hung them on the balcony for the sun and wind to dry them; at least they were still trousers, if a trifle ravaged by events, which was more than could be said for the remains of his shirt. I scuffled around in my closet again—at some peril to life and limb, since my com gear tended increasingly to get left in there—and pulled the spare shirt out, and left it on the closet doorknob.
Every utensil was scoured within an inch of its life and dried and put away too soon.
Sleep. No way.
At least, being this tired, and still half-watching my hands for renegade moves, I wasn’t interested in—or maybe I should say I wasn’t capable of brooding about—what else might happen in a bed-type situation. Or could happen. Or wasn’t going to happen.
I was capable of brooding about being afraid to be alone. Afraid to sleep.
“You’ll have to have the bed,” I said. “There are no curtains for the balcony, and the sun gets pretty much all round the living room over the course of the day. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”