I put Altar and Sordid Enchantments on one of the hip-high piles of books to read next in the corner of the living room, and got out the silver polish. Not standard equipment in my household: I’d bought some before I came home. The glyph came up beautifully. Except I still couldn’t make out the figures.
It was weirdly heavy for plate. And doesn’t plate tend to look platy when you’ve shined it up? Maybe I only knew cheap plate. Even so.
The symbol at the top was round, with snaky and spiky lines woven through it. The symbol at the bottom was narrow at the base and fat at the top. The one in the middle…might conceivably have four legs, which would presumably make it some kind of animal. Right. Two squiggles and an unknown animal.
The top squiggle could be a symbol for the sun. The bottom squiggle could be a symbol for a tree.
And if it was solid silver—even if the round squiggle wasn’t the sun and the fat-on-the-top squiggle wasn’t a tree—it was still a shoo-in as an anti-Other ward. None of the Others liked silver.
Whatever it was, looking at it made my spirits lift. For someone under two death threats—plus, I suppose, the incompatible threats of Pat and Jesse’s idea of what my future should include, supposing I had a future, because, if I did, I would spend it incarcerated in a small padded room—this was good enough. I put it in the drawer in the little table next to my bed. I slept that night, you should forgive the term, the sleep of the dead.
So when the alarm went off I was almost ready to get up. The prospect of the night to come started to creep up on me almost immediately, but there were distractions: Mr. Cagney complained that his roll didn’t have enough cinnamon filling at seven a.m., Paulie called at seven-fifteen with a head cold, and Kenny dropped a tray of dirty plates at seven-thirty. He’d been doing better since Mel’d had his word, but he’d decided he’d rather do the early hours than the late ones, and this was only going to work if he got home sooner to do his homework sooner to get to bed sooner. Not my problem. Except in terms of Liz spending time helping to clean the floor instead of unloading cookie trays and muffin tins for me.
Pat came in about midmorning and penetrated my floury lair. “Thought you’d like to know—the girl from the other night. She’s come round. She doesn’t remember a thing from the time the sucker spoke to her to waking up in the hospital the next morning. She doesn’t remember the guy was a sucker. And she’s fine. A little spooked, but fine.” Translation: the only on-the-spot witness doesn’t remember what she saw, or at least isn’t saying anything. And Jesse and Theo, who were claiming the strike for SOF (you don’t kill vampires, of course, although most of us civvies use the term; in SOF-speak you strike them), were there only seconds after me and before anyone else. Except maybe Mrs. Bialosky.
But it was one of those days when the coffeehouse schedule breaks down, and Charlie and Mel and Mom and I held the pieces together with our teeth. We always have at least one of these days during a seven-day (or thirteen-day, depending on how you’re counting) week. Not to mention the prospect of getting up at three-forty-five on Thursday. During a thirteen-day week. My sense of occult oppression tightened anyway, but it had its work cut out for it. I had forty-five minutes off from ten-forty-five to eleven-thirty, between the usual morning baking and the beginning of the lunch rush, and almost an hour off at three-thirty, while a skeleton staff got us through the late-afternoon muffin and scone crowd, before the more gradual dinner swell began—plus two or three tea with elective aspirin breaks. I went home at nine. Anyone who wanted dessert after that could have ginger pound cake or Indian pudding or Chocoholia. It wasn’t a night for individual fruit tarts.
Fortunately I was tired enough to sleep. Before I’d found out I was going to be working all day I had thought I wouldn’t sleep at all; by the time I got home I knew I’d sleep, but assumed I’d get a couple of hours and be awake by midnight, waiting for something to happen.
I’d spent some time considering what I should, you know, wear. This vampire in the bedroom thing was a trifle more intensively perturbing than this vampire around at all thing. Even if the discon-certingness was only happening in my mind. There was a corollary to the story about male suckers being able to keep it up indefinitely: that you had to, er, invite them over that threshold first too. But if they could seduce you into dying just by looking at you, then they could probably perform other seductions as well. Okay, this particular vampire had declined to seduce me to death when he could have. This was a good omen as far as it went.
I reminded myself that the sound of his laughter made me want to throw up, and that in sunlight he looked…well, dead. Let’s get real here. I couldn’t possibly be interested in…
I involuntarily remembered that sense of vampire in the room. It wasn’t like the pheromone haze when your eyes lock with someone else’s across a room, crowded or otherwise, and wham. It really was not at all like that. But it was more like that than anything else I could think of. It probably had something to do with the peak-experience business: with a vampire in the room you are sitting there expecting to die. Sex and death, right? Peak experiences. And since I didn’t go in for any of the standard neck-risking pastimes I didn’t have a lot of practical knowledge of the hormone rush you get when you may be about to snuff it. Perhaps someone who loved free-fall parachuting or shark wrestling would find vampires in the room less troubling.
Never mind. Let’s leave it that vampires infesting your private spaces are daunting, and one of the ways to stiffen—er—boost morale is to wear carefully-selected-for-the-occasion morale-boosting clothing.
I went to bed wearing my oldest, most faded flannel shirt, the bra that had looked all right in the catalog but was obviously an escapee from a downmarket nursing home when it arrived, white cotton panties that had had pansies on them about seven hundred washings ago and were now a kind of mottled gray, and the jeans I usually wore for housecleaning or raking Yolande’s garden because they were too shabby for work even if I never came out of the bakery. Food inspector arrest-on-sight jeans. Oh, and fuzzy green plaid socks. It was a cool night for summer. Relatively. I lay down on top of the bedspread.
And slept through till the alarm at three-forty-five. He hadn’t come.
That was not one of my better days at work. I snarled at everyone who spoke to me, and snarled worse when no one snarled back. Mel, who would have, wasn’t there. Mom, fortunately, didn’t have time to get into a furious argument with me, so we shot a few salvos over each other’s bows, and retired to our separate harbors.
We did try to stay out of each other’s way but it wasn’t like Mom to avoid a good blazing row with her daughter when one was offered. What had she been guessing while I’d been doing my guessing? There was quite a lot in the literature of bad crosses about petty, last-straw exasperations that tipped the balance. I’d been checking globenet archives when I could have been reading Sordid Enchantments.
“I’m not a goddam invalid!” I howled at Charlie. “I don’t need to be treated with gloves and—and bedpans! Will you please tell me I’m being a miserable bitch and you’d like to upend a garbage bin over my head!”
There was a pause. ‘Well, the idea had crossed my mind,“ said Charlie.
I stood there, buttery fists clenched, breathing hard. “Thank you,” I said.