I shuddered.
“Steady, Sunshine,” said Pat.
I had been worrying about the shackles in the walls. I was going to have to revert to not remembering, when Pat and Jesse asked me about the second shackle, the one with the ward signs on it.
There were no shackles. Just holes in the walls. I almost laughed. Thanks, Bo, I said silently. You’ve done me a favor.
Pat and Jesse were examining the holes, Pat still half keeping an eye on me. The holes looked like they’d been torn—as if the shackles had been ripped out of the walls by someone in a rage. By some vampire: no human could’ve done it. But I guessed the rage part was accurate. A frustrated—possibly frightened—rage, or on orders? On orders, I thought. I doubted Bo’s gang did anything that Bo hadn’t told them to do first. But however it had happened, I didn’t have to explain a shackle with ward signs on it.
They did, of course, want to know about the second set of holes.
“This is where I was,” I said, pointing to the holes nearer the corner.
“And this?” said Jesse, kneeling in front of the other holes.
“I don’t remember,” I said automatically.
There was a silence. “Can we have an agreement, maybe,” said Pat. “That you stop saying ‘I don’t remember’ and do us the kindness of telling the truth, which is that you’re not going to say what you remember.”
There was a longer silence. Pat was looking at me. I met his eyes. He had held his breath till he turned blue last night. He’d already made up his mind to trust me, even knowing that I was lying about what had happened. That made me feel pretty bad until it occurred to me that there was another angle on last night’s demonstration: not only that Pat and Jesse and Theo were willing to trust me, but that they understood sometimes you had to lie.
“Okay,” I said.
“So,” said Jesse. “This second set of holes.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m not going to tell you.”
“Okay,” said Jesse. “I think these holes are from another shackle. If it had been empty while you were here, Rae, you wouldn’t mind telling us that. So, there must have been another prisoner, and it’s this other prisoner you aren’t going to tell us about.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Interesting,” said Jesse.
Pat stared out one of the windows, frowning. “Shackles in a ballroom aren’t standard equipment, so the suckers will have put them in special. The thing is, the space cleared around this house has been done recently too. You have to assume they did that as well. Why?”
I could keep silent on this one a little more easily. It seemed pretty weird if you didn’t know. And this one they couldn’t guess. I hoped.
They went off to look at the rest of the house. I stayed in the ballroom. I sat on the windowsill nearest my shackle, the one on the long wall—the window I’d peed out of. The window I’d knelt in front of when I’d changed my knife to a key. The lake looked a lot like it had the day I’d been here: another blue, clear day. It was hotter today though, summer rather than spring. I leaned back against the side of the window and thought about cinnamon rolls and muffins and brownies and the cherry tarts I’d started experimenting with since Charlie had ordered an electric cherry pitter out of a catalog and gave it to me hopefully. Charlie’s idea of post-traumatic shock therapy: a new kitchen gadget. I thought about the pleasure of sitting in bright sunlight. With two humans in easy call. I might have opened my collar and let the sun shine there, but I had the gash taped up and I wasn’t going to risk Pat or Jesse seeing it.
I thought about the fact that Mel, easygoing, laid-back, mind-your-own-business Mel, kept nagging me to look for a doctor who could do something about it, and found my refusal inexplicable and dumb.
Jesse and Pat came back into the ballroom and hunkered down on the floor in front of me in my window. There was a silence. I didn’t like this. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get away from the lake, from what had happened here, from being reminded of what had happened here. I’d done what they’d asked, I’d found them the house. I didn’t want to talk about this stuff any more. I wanted to go back to the car and make sure it was going to start, and get us out of here before sundown. I wanted to sit in the sun somewhere other than beside the lake.
“So, last night,” said Jesse. “What happened?”
“I don’t—” I said. Pat looked at me and I smiled faintly. “I wasn’t going to say I don’t remember. I was going to say I don’t know. It was—it was like instinctive, except who has that kind of instinct? If it was an instinct, it was a really stupid instinct.”
“Except that it worked,” Pat said dryly. “So, you didn’t think, ah ha, there’s a sucker a couple of streets over, I think I’ll go stake the bastard? Never mind that I don’t know how I know it’s there or that I’m going to stake it with a goddam table knife?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think at all. I didn’t think from the time I—I stood up from where I was sitting at the counter to when—when Jesse had hold of me and was yelling that it was all over.”
“So why did you stand up—and pick up a table knife—and take off at a speed that wouldn’t have shamed an Olympic sprinter?”
“Um,” I said. “Well, I heard him. Um. And I didn’t like having him…on my ground. I was, um, angry. I guess.”
“Heard him. Heard him what? Nobody else heard anything.”
“Heard him, um, giggle.”
Silence.
“Was this by any chance a sucker from two months ago?” Pat said gently. “From what happened here?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us any more?”
He’s the one that made this mark on me, I thought. This slice in my flesh that won’t close. You could say I had a score to settle. That doesn’t explain why I managed to settle it though. “He was—he was the other one that had hold of me, coming here. I don’t know how many of them there were altogether—a dozen maybe.” I thought of the second evening, the twelve of them fanning out around me and the prisoner of the other shackle, coming closer. Slowly coming closer. How I’d been pressing myself against the wall so hard my spine hurt. “Most of them didn’t say anything. The one I think was the Breather—he seemed to be giving the orders. I thought of him as—as the lieutenant of the raiding party. He talked. And he held one of my arms, bringing me here. This—the one from last night, he held my other arm. He talked. He was the one with the…sense of humor.” Her feet are already bleeding. If you like feet.
“The lieutenant of the raiding party,” said Jesse thoughtfully. “That sounds like there was a colonel back at headquarters.”
“You’d expect that, a setup as elaborate as this one,” said Pat. “This is a gang run by a master vampire.”
They both looked at me. “Do you know anything about the master?” said Jesse.
I could have said, I’m not going to tell you. I said, “No.”
There was another silence. I tried not to squirm. This should be when the SOFs revert to type and start yelling at me for withholding important information and so on.
“We have a problem, you see, Sunshine,” said Pat at last. “Okay, we know you’re not telling us everything. But…well, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but that happens oftener than you might think, people not telling SOF everything. Hell, SOF not telling SOF everything. I mean aside from the nomad blood of guys like Jesse and me. We could probably live with that if that was all it was. We wouldn’t like it, maybe, but we’ve had a lot of practice not being told everything, and if you get too pissed off at people then they really won’t talk to you.