“That’s all right then,” I said.
“Good.” Charlie opened the door again and ambled out.
I went to bed wearing jeans and a flannel shirt again that night. I woke at midnight and stumbled into the bathroom for a pee, tripping over the sill on the way. I went back to bed and fell asleep again immediately. The alarm went off at three-forty-five.
He hadn’t come.
The sense of outrage of the day before—the absurd sense of having been stood up like a teenager on her way to the prom—was gone, as if it were a candle flame that had been blown out. I was worried.
The fact that the wound on my breast, for the past four days, since he’d told me it was poisoned, was burning like the ‘fo had set a match to my skin, was almost by the way. It was as if now that I had the diagnosis I didn’t care what the diagnosis was: knowing was enough. For a few days. It was seeping so badly I not only had to keep it bandaged, I had to change the gauze pad at least once a day. I didn’t care. I did it and didn’t think about it. The heavy, permanent sense of tiredness made this easier than it might have been if I’d been sharp and alert. The only problem was finding places to put the adhesive tape that weren’t already sore from having adhesive tape there too often already. I could have bought the surgical tape that doesn’t take your skin off with it, but that would have been admitting there was a problem. I wasn’t admitting anything. So the area around the slash looked peeled.
The thing that really wasn’t all right was that he’d said he’d be back, and he wasn’t.
Things are getting bad if I was worried about a vampire. Well, they were bad, and I was worried. I didn’t see him as the stand-you-up kind. If you could apply human guidelines to a vampire, which you couldn’t.
But if he’d said he’d be back, he’d be back. I was sure. And he wasn’t.
I had the rest of the day off after I finished the morning baking. Paulie, still hoarse but no longer sneezing, came in and started on Lemon Lechery and marbled brown sugar cake, and I went home to comb every globenet account I could find on vampire activity. Because of my peculiar hobby I paid for a line into the cosworld better than most home users bothered with, so I didn’t have to go to the library every time I wanted the hottest new reportage on the Others. If there was anything to find I should be able to find it. When some big vampire feud came to a head there was usually more than enough mayhem to alert even the dimmest of the news media. And maybe this was only a tiny, local feud, but our media aren’t among the dimmest. I couldn’t believe that, this time, knowing what he knew, he wouldn’t sell himself dearly, if Bo had caught him again.
If, that is, he hadn’t come back because he’d been prevented. If I hadn’t been stood up like a teenager going to the prom with a known loser. One might almost say a deadbeat. Ha ha.
I couldn’t find anything. After I looked through all the local stuff I started on the national, and then the international. The nearest report of anything like what I thought I might be looking for was happening in Macedonia. I didn’t think it would happen in Macedonia.
I wanted to start looking up glyphs, to see if I could translate mine, but I couldn’t make myself be interested enough. I cleaned the apartment instead. I rearranged the piles of books to be read immediately. Altar of Darkness went on the bottom, although I dusted it first. I mopped floors. I scrubbed sinks. I baking-soda’d the tea stains out of the teapot and my favorite mugs. I vacuumed. I folded laundry. I even cleaned a few windows. I hate cleaning windows. I was too tired to work this hard but I couldn’t sit still. And it was overcast outdoors: not a day that insisted I go out and lie in it.
By evening I was exhausted and slightly queasy.
I had an egg-and-Romaine sandwich on two slabs of my pumpernickel bread at six, and went to bed at seven. I gave up. I wore the nightgown I’d been wearing four nights ago, and got between the sheets. I had a little trouble going to sleep, but it was as if my thoughts were spinning so fast—or maybe it was effect of the poison winning at last—eventually I got dizzy and fell over into unconsciousness.
When I woke up three hours later he was there. Darkness, sitting in my bedroom chair. Darkness, I noticed, barefoot. I couldn’t remember if he’d been barefoot the other night or not.
I sat up. I was too sleepy and too relieved not tell the truth. “I’ve been worrying about you.”
I’d figured out last time that vampires don’t move when they’re startled, they go stiller. He did that different-kind-of-stillness thing.
“You know,” I said. “Concern. Unease. Anxiety. You said you’d come back two nights ago. You didn’t. There’s this little threat of annihilation going on too, you know? I thought maybe you’d got into trouble.”
“The preparations took longer than I anticipated,” he said. “That is all. Nothing to…worry you.”
“Nothing to worry me,” I said, warming to my theme. “Sure. The annihilation threat includes me and I’m wearing a poisoned wound that is slowly killing me. I wouldn’t dream of worrying about anything.”
“Good,” he said. “Worry is useless.”
“Oh—” I began. “I—” I stopped. “Okay. You win. Worry is useless.”
He stood up. I tried not to clutch the bedclothes into a knot. He pulled his shirt off and dropped it on the floor.
Eeeeek.
He sat on the edge of my bed again. He had one leg folded under him and the other foot still on the floor, sitting to face me cringing into the headboard. I thought, okay, okay, he still has one foot on the floor. And he only took his shirt off.
“Do you still have the knife you transmuted?” he said. “That would be the best.”
The best what. I knew this was going to have blood in it. I knew I wasn’t going to like it. And that particular knife, of course…“Uh. Well, yes, I still have it.” I didn’t move.
“Show me,” he said. A human might have said, what’s your problem? So where is it? He just said, show me.
I opened the bedside table drawer. When my jeans went in the wash, the contents of my pockets went in there. The knife was there. It was lying next to the glyph as if they were getting to know each other.
The light was visible at once in the darkness. I picked the knife up and cradled it in my hand: a tiny, clement sun that happened to look like a pocketknife. In ordinary daylight or good strong electric light it still looked like a pocketknife. I held it out toward him.
“This has been—since that night?”
“Yes. It happened—do you remember, right at the end, I transmuted it again, into the key to my door?”
“Yes.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s when it happened. It had been something-in-the-dark-colored when I pulled it out. I don’t…it was something to do with making the change at night, I think. I think I’m not supposed to be able to do stuff after dark. But I did do it. I felt something…crack. Snap. In me. And since then it’s been like this. I shifted it back to a knife the next day—didn’t notice till evening what had happened. I thought it would fade after a while, but it hasn’t.”
I think I’m not supposed to be able to do stuff after dark. I had done this somehow though. And I happened to have been being held in the lap of a vampire at the time. That had been another of the things I hadn’t been thinking about, the last two months. Because if it was something to do with the vampire—this vampire—why had my knife become impregnated with light?
I hadn’t told anyone, shown anyone. It was very odd, finally having someone to tell. I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone at the coffeehouse, any of the SOFs. When I spent the night with Mel, I was careful to keep my knife in its pocket. I was still trying to be Rae Seddon, coffeehouse baker, in that life. Even after I’d exposed my little secret that it had been vampires at the lake—that I was a magic handler and a transmuter—I still hadn’t wanted to tell anyone about my knife. The only person, you should forgive the term, left to tell was him. The vampire. The vampire I had now agreed to ally myself with in the hopes of winning against a common enemy.