My mother’s parents had been dead against the marriage. They hadn’t spoken to her since she refused to give my dad up. She’d been very young, and in love, and I could guess that even in those days she didn’t take direction well. Maybe they didn’t tell her. Just booted her out: never darken our door again, etc. They’d never made any attempt to meet me, their first grandchild, either. Maybe my mother found out later, somehow, after I was born. Maybe it was my dad who’d found it out…
I’d never seen my father again after my mother left him, nor any of the rest of his family. Only my gran. Who was maybe choosing to see me privately and alone not in deference to my mother’s feelings but because her own family had ordered her to have nothing to do with me.
Maybe my gran had some other reason for believing I was okay. Or maybe she didn’t know why my mom had left. Maybe she thought it was my dad’s business associates. Magic-handling families can be pretty conceited about their talent, and pretty offended by commoners feeling they have any rights to inconvenient opinions. Maybe my gran thought her family were just being arrogant.
If you were in the ninety percent, it showed up early. Usually. If you weren’t born with a precocious ability to hoist yourself out of your crib and get into really repulsive mischief, the next likeliest time for you to begin running amok was in the preteen years, when magic-handling kids are apprenticed for their first serious magic-handling training. When my gran taught me to transmute.
The sane five or ten percent most often have personalities that are uninterested in magic. One of the recommendations, for someone who finds out they’re in the high-risk category, is not to do magic, even the most inconsequential. My mother would never have let me have all those meetings with my gran if there’d been any chance…
She might have. My mother makes Attila the Hun look namby-pamby. If she wanted me not to be a bad-magic cross, then I wouldn’t be, by sheer force of will if necessary. But she might still have wanted to know what she was up against.
I hadn’t come home and started knifing old ladies or setting fire to stray dogs.
I was kind of a loner though. A little paranoid about being close to people. A little too interested in the Others.
My mother would have assumed that my gran had tried to teach me magic and that she hadn’t been successful. So my mother would have assumed the Blaise magic genes were weak enough in me, or her own compromised heritage had missed me out.
Maybe my mother could be forgiven for being a little over-controlling. Because she’d never be sure.
Bad-magic crosses don’t invariably show up early. Some of our worst and most inventive serial murderers have turned out to be bad-magic crosses, when someone finally caught up with them. Sometimes it turns out something set them off. Like doing magic. Like finding out they could.
And I hadn’t done any magic in fifteen years.
No.
I stopped chewing.
Pat and Jesse assumed I’d thought of all this before. They were assuming that’s why I hadn’t been able to talk to them. Had been afraid to talk to them. The licensing thing was piffle. They would know that I knew that too. If it was just a question of not being a certified magic handler, hey, I could get my serial number and my license. The bureaucrats would snuffle a little about my not having done it before, but I was a model cinnamon-roll-baker citizen; they’d at least half believe me that I’d never done any magic before, they probably wouldn’t even fine me. Licensing was a red herring. Pat wouldn’t have turned blue over a question of late magic-handling certification. So I had to be afraid of something else.
I was afraid of something else. They’d just guessed wrong about what it was and how I got there.
They were, in fact, offering me a huge gesture of faith. They were telling me that they believed I wasn’t a bad cross. They must really love my cinnamon rolls.
What they didn’t know was that I’d rescued a vampire. Which might be read as the polite, subtle version of becoming an axe murderer.
“Have some more scotch,” said Jesse.
And now, of course, they only thought I was dreading telling them about what had happened two months ago.
Okay. Let this dread be for the telling of the story. Nothing else. The story of how I rescued a vampire. Which I wasn’t going to tell them.
I put my mug down because my hands were beginning to shake. I crossed my arms over my breast and began rocking back and forth in my chair. Pat dragged his chair over next to mine, gently pulled my hands down, held them in his. They were a pale blue now, and not so knobbly. I couldn’t see if he still had the sixth fingers.
I said, speaking to Pat’s pale blue hands, “I didn’t hear them coming.” I spoke in a high, peculiar voice I didn’t recognize as my own. “But you don’t, do you, when they’re vampires.”
There was a growl from Theo—not what you could call a human growl.
It was a creepy, chilling, menacing sound, even knowing that it was made on my behalf. Briefly, hysterically, I wanted to laugh. It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t been the one human in the room, a few minutes ago, when I’d felt like a rabbit in headlights.
Jesse let the silence stretch out a little, and then he said softly, “How did you get away?”
…There was another muddle leaning up against the wall in front of us…someone sitting cross-legged, head bowed, forearms on knees. I didn’t realize till it raised its head with a liquid, inhuman motion that it was another vampire…
I took a deep breath. “They had me shackled to the wall in—in what I guess was the ballroom in—in one of the really big old summer houses. At the lake. I—I was—some kind of prize, I think. They— they came in to look at me a couple of times. Left me food and water. The second day I—transmuted my jackknife into a shackle key.”
“You transmuted worked metal?”
I took another deep breath. “Yes. No, I shouldn’t have been able to. I’d never done anything close. I hadn’t done anything at all in fifteen years—since the last time I saw my gran. It almost…it almost didn’t occur to me to try.” I shivered and closed my eyes. No: don’t close your eyes. I opened my eyes. Pat squeezed my hands. “Hey. It’s okay,” he said. “You’re here.” I looked at him. He was almost human again.
I wondered what I was. Was I almost human?
“Yeah,” he said. “What you’re thinking.”
I tried to look like I might be thinking what he thought I was thinking. Whatever that was.
“SOF is full of Others and partbloods because it’s vampires that are our problem. Sure there are lousy stinking demons—”
And bad-magic crosses.
“—but there are lousy stinking humans too. We take care of the Others and the straight cops take care of the humans. If we got the suckers sorted the humans would calm down—sooner or later—let the rest of us live, you know? And then we’d be able to organize and really get rid of the ‘ubis and the goblins and the ghouls and so on and we’d end up with a relatively safe world.”
There was a story—I hoped it was no more than a myth—that the reason there still wasn’t a reliable prenatal test for a bad-magic cross was the prejudice against partbloods.
Jesse said patiently, “You transmuted worked metal.”
I nodded.
“Do you still have the knife?”
I dragged my mind back to the present. I’d decided earlier that the light in the office was good enough, so I nodded again.