“Anything you want to talk about?” Charlie said in his best offhand manner.
I thought about it. Charlie ambled over and closed the bakery door. Doors don’t get closed much at the coffeehouse, so when one is, you’d better not open it for anything less than a coachload of tourists who didn’t book ahead, have forty-five minutes for lunch before they meet their guide at the Other Museum, which is a fifteen-minute coach ride away (it’s only seven minutes on foot, but try to convince a coachload of tourists of that), they all want burgers and fries and won’t look at the menu, we’re not heavily into burgers so our grill is kind of small, and we don’t do fries at all, except on special, when they’re not what burger eaters would call fries anyway.
This really happened once, and by the time Mom got through with that tour company the president was on his knees, offering her conciliatory free luxury cruises for two in the Caribbean, or at least all future meal bookings of his tour groups when they came to New Arcadia, made well in advance. She accepted the latter, and the Earth Trek Touring Company (the president’s name is Benjamin Sisko, but I bet that wasn’t the one he was born with, and you should see the logo on their coaches) was now one of our best customers. We could almost retire on what they brought us in August. And we taught his regular tour leaders how to find the Other Museum on foot. This made the coach drivers love us too.
This is not what the city council had in mind when they were drooling over the prospect of seeing New Arcadia on the new post-Wars map, but the Other Museum is why coachloads of the kind of tourists who sign up with a company called Earth Trek now come to New Arcadia. The public exhibits are still lowest common denominator, but there are more of them than there used to be, and the Ghoul Attack simulation is supposed to be especially good: yuck-o, I say. We do also have a few more prune-faced academics on teeny stipends renting rooms in Old Town, but it’s nowhere as bad as I’d feared. The proles win again. Ha.
Charlie ambled back from closing the door and sat on the stool in the corner. It wasn’t so hot a day that we were going to die of being in the bakery with the ovens on and the door closed tor at least ten minutes.
“Because of the other night,” I said, “the SOF guys want me to be a kind of—unofficial SOF guy.”
Charlie said carefully, “I didn’t think a table knife was…usual.”
I sighed. “What did you think, when you followed me out there that night? Just that I’d lost my mind?”
Charlie considered this before he answered. “I thought something had snapped, yes. I didn’t think it was your mind…But I didn’t have much time to think. By the time I got there it was all over. And I guess I realized then that I’d, we’d, had the wrong end of the…table knife all along.”
“Since I disappeared for a couple of days.”
“Yeah. It had to be the Others, one way or another. Sorry. It just…the way you were… you didn’t want to talk to any cops, but you really didn’t want to talk to SOF.”
I hadn’t thought it was that noticeable.
“You were okay with the rest of us at Charlie’s, us humans, not just us, strangers too. Nervy—like something really bad had happened, which we already knew—but okay. Anyone, you know, pretty human.”
Except TV reporters. If they were human.
“It wasn’t Weres, because you were here on full-moon nights like usual, after. And they don’t usually go around biting people except at the full moon.”
And however fidgety and whimsical I’d felt, I wouldn’t have driven out to the lake alone on a full-moon night. There are some Weres out there. Just like there are a few Weres in Old Town. More than a few. It doesn’t hurt to be nice to them; they’ll remember that you were, the other twenty-nine days of the month. Unlike suckers, who tend to prefer the urban scene, the Weres you really want to avoid mostly hang out in the wilderness.
“And—sorry—since you didn’t have any visible pieces missing it couldn’t be zombies or ghouls.”
I was the Other expert at Charlie’s. Most of the staff didn’t want to know, like most of the human population didn’t want to know, and our SOFs were just customers who wore too much khaki. Mel said stories about the Others made his tattoos restless.
“Sadie and I thought it must be some kind of demon. Sadie well, Sadie talked to a couple of those specialist shrinks you wouldn’t talk to, and they said this stuff can be as traumatic as it gets, and to leave you alone about it if you didn’t want to talk.”
I wished that was the only reason for the charms and the uncharacteristic reserve. Maybe it was. Or maybe I could make it be all. I was my mother’s daughter, after all. Maybe I had hidden depths of Attila the Hun-ness. I said cautiously, “Did she tell them about my dad?”
Charlie shook his head. “I’d nearly forgotten about your dad myself, till the other night. It had never seriously occurred to me that what happened to you had anything to do with vampires. Uh—people don’t get away from vampires. Any more than people get rid of vampires with table knives.”
Even Charlie knew that much. “Yeah. That’s what the SOFs say too.”
Charlie was silent a minute. I was thinking, if Charlie had forgotten about my dad then he must not be a part of the Bad Cross Watch. My mother had never told him about Great-Great-Aunt Margaret, who had a limp because her left foot was short, horny, and cloven. Or whoever Great-Aunt Margaret had been and whatever demon mark they’d had. I mean Mom was keeping her fears to herself. I told you she was brave: she’d let her parents cut her off to marry my dad, she’d taken on the Blaises singlehanded when she left him. Any sensible woman who was not Attila the Hun in a previous existence would have been more than justified in leaving me behind for my dad’s family to cope with. And they would have: if I had gone bad they might have denied I was theirs, but they’d have coped. And if I had gone bad, they’d’ve wanted to be there, performing damage control, for their sake if not mine. So she’d been doubly brave, or foolhardy. And there may not have been very many Blaises left before the Wars but they were formidable.
Some demons are very tough. Tougher than any human. Although the tough ones also tend to be the stupid ones.
Charlie said: “What do you want to do?”
“Go on making cinnamon rolls,” I said instantly.
Charlie smiled faintly. “That’s what I want to hear, of course—”
“Is it?” I said. “Do you want someone so—so obviously—not just some kind of freak magic handler but someone who—someone who— I mean with vampires—do you want someone like this—like me— making your cinnamon rolls?”
“Yes,” said Charlie. “Yes. You make the best cinnamon rolls, probably in the history of the world. Never mind all the rest of it. We pay taxes for SOF to take care of the Others. We need you here. If you want to be here. I don’t care who your dad is. Or what else you can do with a table knife.”
I looked at him. He’d have every right to fire my ass—humans don’t like weird magic handlers on the cooking staff of their restaurants. But I was a member of this family, this clan, a member of the bizarre community that was Charlie’s. A key member even. I owed it to these people not to go mad. With or without an axe.
And to stay alive.
Charlie’s Coffeehouse: Old Town’s peculiar little beacon in the encroaching darkness.
An interesting perspective on current events.