He was silent for a moment, and I thought he might argue. I’m not sure I wasn’t waiting hopefully for an argument. But all he said finally was, “Very well.”
Of course I couldn’t sleep. I would have liked to pretend—even to try to pretend—that it was because I wasn’t used to sleeping during the day, but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago “something or other or die” had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other.
Sleep was no friend today. Every time my heavy, aching eyes closed, some scene from the night before shot onto my private inner-eye movie screen, and I prized them open again and lay, dismally, in the soft golden sunlight of early autumn, surrounded by the smell of roses.
I don’t know how long I lay there. I turned on my side so I could watch the sunlight lengthen across the tawny floor as the sun rose higher, as the light reached out to pat my piles of books, embrace the desk, stroke the sofa, draw its fingers tenderly across my face. I was comfortable, and safe: safer than I’d been since before the night I drove out to the lake, and met Con. Bo was gone, Bo and Bo’s gang. But I couldn’t take it in. Or I couldn’t take it in without…taking in everything it had involved. We’d done it, Con and I. We’d done what we set out to do, and, furthermore, what we’d known, going in, we wouldn’t be able to do. Or I had known we wouldn’t be able to do it. What I hadn’t known was that I’d been counting on not being able to do it. And I’d been wrong. We’d done it. Done is a very thumping sort of word. I felt like I was hitting myself with a club.
I didn’t feel safe. I felt as if I was still waiting for something awful to happen. No. I felt as if the thing I most dreaded had arrived, and it wasn’t death after all. It was me. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of me.
As little as three months ago I’d thought that finding out I might be a partblood, and might as a result go permanently round the twist once the demon gene met up properly with the magic-handling gene, was the worst thing that could happen. It was the worst thing I could imagine. I’d pulled the little paper protector of disuse off the baking-soda packet of my father’s heritage and dropped it into the vinegar of my mother’s. The resultant fizz and seethe, I’d believed, was going to blow the top of my head off. Now those fears seemed about as powerful as the kitchen bomb every kid has to make once or twice to fire popcorn at her friends. I felt as if mere ordinary madness would have been a reprieve. I’d known about the bad odds against partbloods with human magic-handling in their background. I hadn’t knovn anything about Bo. About what a thing like Bo could be.
Black humor alert. And I still didn’t know if my genes were getting ready to blow the top of my head off. Although it seemed to me they’d had the best opportunity any bad-gene act could possibly have wanted, and had let it pass them by.
I wrapped the blanket closer around me and stood up and went into the bedroom. I’d drawn the curtains tightly together and the bed was in heavy shadow and I wasn’t paying attention, so it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t in it.
He couldn’t have left. It was daylight out there. Panic rose up in me. I would have guaranteed I didn’t have the energy for panic. One more thing to be wrong about. And what was I panicking about anyway? Being left alone with myself? I’d rather have a vampire around?
Well. Yes.
I didn’t have time to finish panicking. He stood up—or more like unfolded, like a particularly well-jointed extending ladder or something: stood up doesn’t really describe it—from the far side of the bed. “What are you doing on the floor?”
He just looked at me, and I remembered the room I had once found him in. The room that wasn’t his master’s. At least he was still wearing the kimono.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t sleep.”
“Nor I,” he said.
“So you do sleep,” I said. “I mean, vampires sleep.”
“We rest. We become…differently conscious than when we are…awake. I am not sure it is what you would call sleep.”
No, and orange juice probably doesn’t taste like orange juice to you either, I thought.
I couldn’t sleep, but I was too tired to stand up. I sat down on the bed. “I—we did it, you know?” I said. “But I don’t feel like we did it. I feel like we failed. I feel like everything is worse now than it was before. Or that I am.”
He was still standing. “Yes,” he said.
“Does it feel like that to you too?”
He turned his head as if he was looking out the window. Maybe he was. If I could see in the dark, maybe a vampire could see through curtains. Maybe it was something you learned to do after the first hundred years or so. One of those mysterious powers old vampires develop. “I do not think in terms of better and worse.”
He paused so long I thought he wasn’t going to say any more. It’s probably an occupational hazard, becoming a fatalist, if you’re a vampire.
But he went on finally. “What happened last night has changed us. Yes. Inevitably. You have lived—what? One quarter of one century? I have existed many times that. Experience is less to me than it is to you, for I have endured much more of it. And yet last night troubles me too. I can—a little—guess how much more it must trouble you.”
I looked down, partly so he couldn’t read anything in my eyes, although he probably already had. Maybe that was why he had been looking through the curtains. Vampire courtesy. Previously observed.
Troubled, I thought. Okay.
“Sunshine,” he said. “You are not worse.”
I looked up at him, remembered what I saw him do. Remembered what I had seen myself do. Remembered Bo. Tried to remember that we were the victors.
Failed. If this was victory…
I was so tired.
“I will do anything it is in my power to do for you,” he said. “Command me.”
A vampire, standing on the far side of my bed, wearing my kimono, telling me he’d do anything I asked. Steady, Sunshine.
I sighed. I wasn’t up to it. “I don’t want to feel alone,” I said. “Lie down on the bed and let me lie down beside you, and put your arms around me. I know you can’t do anything about the heartbeat, but I know you can breathe like a human if you want to, so will you please?” I looked at his face in the shadows—the shadows that lay motionless and fathomless across it—but it was expressionless, of course. He lay down, and I lay down, and he put his arms around me. (Note: do vampire limbs get pins and needles?) And breathed like a human. More or less. It was a little hard to ignore the lack of heartbeat that close—no, you may not think you’re aware of a pulse in the body lying next to you, barring your actual head on an actual chest, but, trust me, you are—but he was the right temperature and that helped. And somehow the solidity of him, the fact that my open eyes could see nothing but his throat above the folds of the kimono and his jaw above that, felt strangely as if he was protecting me, as if he could protect me from what I had brought back with me, had roused to consciousness within me, the previous night. I curled my deceitful hands under my chin. And I found myself falling asleep after all.
I dreamed, of course. Again Con and I were in Bo’s lair, and there were vampires coming at us from all directions, flame-eyed, deadly, horrible. Again I saw Con do the things I would rather not have seen anyone do; again I did things myself I would rather not have done nor know that I had done. It does not matter if it is them or us, after a certain point. It does not matter. There are some things you cannot live with: with having done. Even to survive.