“Especially when she picks up a sucker,” said Pat.
They all saw me freeze. “Hey, kiddo,” said Pat. “That’s kind of the point, you know? Nailing vampires. Remember?”
I nodded stiffly. The rift—or did I mean rifts—in my life were getting deeper and wider all the time. I only just stopped myself from reaching up to touch the thin white scar on my breast. If any of these people had noticed that I’d spent the entire sweltering summer wearing high-necked shirts they hadn’t mentioned it, and they weren’t mentioning that I had suddenly stopped wearing them for a mere autumn burst of pleasantly warm weather either.
“I—I just don’t like talking about vampires,” I said, after a moment. If one-fifth of the world’s wealth—or possibly more—lay in vampire hands, of course there were a lot of them out there with not just basic com gear to handle their bloated bank balances but monster com networks that meant they had probably stopped noticing they weren’t able to go outdoors in daylight. Plenty of human com techies never went out in daylight either. But com networks would include trog lines into the globenet. And some vampires who had them no doubt amused themselves chatting up humans.
I knew this. But those vampires were scary faceless bogeypeople that SOF existed to deal with. What was I doing here in a SOF office?
Partbloods sticking together, I suppose. What if I told them I didn’t know I was one of the lucid ten percent? I shivered.
Did Bo have a line into the globenet? He was a master vampire. Of course he did.
Did Con?
I shivered again. Harder.
“Sunshine, I’m sorry” Aimil said. “I know it doesn’t mean much, but sometimes when I’m tracking some—some thing, even that much contact, through however many miles of trog and ether, it starts to make me sick. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you.”
True.
“Now, about that tea,” said Pat.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here, like, today, now, this minute, in Pat’s office,” I said to Aimil.
She shook her head. “Serendipity, I guess. I showed up this afternoon to plug in my usual report and Pat brought me in here, said I was about to meet an old friend who was also a new recruit, and maybe I could reassure her that having anything to do with SOF doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to lose your interest in reading fiction and will wake up some morning soon with an overwhelming urge to wear khaki and start a firearm collection.”
Pat, who was wearing navy blue trousers and a white shirt, said, “Hey.”
“Navy blue and white are khaki too,” said Aimil firmly. “But Rae, I didn’t know it was you till you walked through the door.”
“Then why are you saying you’re sorry about what happened to me? What do you know about it?”
Aimil stared at me, visibly puzzled. “What happened—? Since the—the other night all of Old Town knows you were in some kind of trouble with suckers, those two days you went missing last spring— and a lot of us were already wondering. What else could it have been?”
Right. What else could it have been?
“It could have been a rogue demon,” I said obstinately.
Aimil sighed. “Not very likely. A lot of partbloods can spot other partbloods, right? I haven’t got Pat’s gift for that. But a fullblood demon—if you’d been held by rogues, I’d’ve known it. Like cat hair on your shirt. So would whoever from SOF interviewed you have known it. SOF wouldn’t have assigned someone to interview you who wouldn’t have known it.”
“And Jocasta’s good,” said Pat. “Even better than me.”
“Good” wasn’t the adjective I’d’ve chosen for my experience of that interview, but I let it pass.
“So would a lot of other people who come into Charlie’s have known it,” Aimil continued. “Haven’t you noticed—well, like that Mrs. Bialosky hardly lets you out of her sight these days?”
“Mrs. Bialosky is a Were,” I said.
“Yeah. And her sense of smell is real good,” said Pat.
“She’s another undercover SOF, I suppose,” I said.
Pat laughed. “SOF couldn’t hold her,” he said.
She and Yolande should get together, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. If SOF had no reason to look into my landlady I wasn’t going to suggest it to them. If Pat thought she was a siddhartha, all the better.
And if they already had looked, I didn’t want to know.
Jesse said gently, “You know there’s such a thing as friends as well as colleagues and neighbors, don’t you?”
I had my mouth open to say, “Sure, and you’d’ve been hanging around Charlie’s watching me with at least four eyes a day if I’d just been some poor mug that got mixed up in something ickily Other, right?” And then I closed it again, because I realized that the answer was yes. They might not have been watching me so intensely, and they might not have been watching me in the hopes that whatever had happened might lead them to something they could use without reference to a continuing and uninterrupted supply of cinnamon rolls, but they would have been watching me. Because that was what SOF was for—in theory the first and most important thing it was for—to keep our citizens safe. And SOF for all its faults took that pretty seriously. I sighed. “So, how about that cup of tea? And then maybe you’ll finally tell me why you wanted me to meet Aimil here.”
Pat spun his combox around so the screen faced Aimil. She sat down and tapped herself in, and the screen cleared to the globenet symbol. I averted my eyes. Since I’d started seeing in the dark I couldn’t look at any comscreen for long, TV, net, personal, GameDeluxe (not my territory, but Kenny had an amazing one), whatever. Brrrr. Vertigo wasn’t in it, although migraine came close. At least I wasn’t wasting subscription fees on Otherwatch and Beware by not having gone near my combox lately.
I could tell, however, watching out of my peripheral vision, that Aimil was calling up lists of mailsaves. She chose a list, hit a button, and mailtext blocks appeared. I felt an almost physical jolt, and reached out to steady myself on the back of her chair.
“Aah,” said Pat, watching me.
“What” I said nastily. I don’t like surprises. Especially this kind of surprise, and this was my second since I came through the front door of SOF HQ.
Aimil said, studying the screen, “I save anything that—well, that I guess comes from an Other, right? That feels funny. That’s what these guys pay me for. There are a lot of us doing it—we don’t know who each other are of course but I doubt we’re all librarians—and when some nettag is making a lot of us jumpy, SOF tries to find out more about who’s—or what’s—behind it. Jesse asked me to separate off some tags that are on SOF’s active list that I personally think feel like vampires rather than something else, and…”
“We wondered if any of them might mean something to you, you know, locationally,” said Jesse.
Locationally? I thought irrelevantly. Is this the same English I speak?
“After what happened the other night,” said Jesse. “The way you knew where it was even though it was too far away for you to, er, hear, in the usual way. Or see. What made you jump when Aimil opened her mailsave list?”
I shook my head. “Presumably I’m reacting to what you want me to be reacting to, yes,” I said. “But whether it’s going to be anything but a sensation like putting your finger in an electric socket I don’t know.”
“Try it,” said Jesse.
Aimil stood up from the chair and I sat down, trying to examine myself for signs that my evil gene was waking up. This would be a logical moment for it, I felt, and probably quite a practical one too, from the perspective of lingering final moments of philanthropic sanity. Jesse and Pat would be trained in hand-to-hand, and even amok, and thor as hell with the muscles you get if you bash The Blob into trays of cinnamon rolls every morning, I should be a pushover for a couple of veteran SOF field agents.