So had whatever-it-was moved there since my time, or was I just more sensitive now than I had been? No Town was actually a lot cleaner now than it had been when I was sixteen and seventeen, which was right after the Wars. Having been once captured by vampires, did I now overreact to their presence? If “overreact to vampires” wasn’t a contradiction in terms.
Or was this another horrible, specific one-off, like my having heard the giggler when no one else could?
I didn’t know if I wanted the answer to be yes or no. If it was no, then it might mean my sucker connection was general, which didn’t bear thinking about. But if it was yes, then it meant I was picking up something to do with Bo. Which didn’t bear thinking about.
Unless it was Con. Unless this had been his daylight wards, protecting him, protecting us, in the company of a couple of sucker-hating SOFs.
No. It wasn’t Con. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Con.
Pat drove around into the SOF back lot again. Neither of them had said any word of blame or failure or frustration to me, although I felt I could hear them both thinking. Words like “triangulation.” I didn’t know if they’d marked where I made them turn around. Probably. But neither of them mentioned it. Yet. “I’d take you straight to Charlie’s but I don’t think you want the neighborhood seeing you show up in a SOF car,” Pat said, as offhand as if we’d been buying groceries.
I started to shake my head—unmarked SOF cars were like SOFs out of uniform; you still knew—but changed my mind. “Thanks.” I fumbled for the door handle.
“Do you want to come back in? You look a little…worn. There are a few bedrooms in the back. They’re pretty basic but they have beds and they’re quiet. Or I could run you home.”
This time I did manage to shake my head. Carefully. “No. Thanks. I’m going for a walk. Clear my head.” The last thing I wanted to do was lie down in a small dark room and try to go to sleep. I didn’t want to go home either. There might be a dead rat in the living room.
I got out of the car, lifted my face to the sunlight. It felt like a good fairy’s kiss. Except good fairies don’t exist.
As I walked toward the exit Pat called after me, “Hey. Didn’t you want to tell us something? When you came in.”
I looked at him, at the way the shadows fell across his face. He was leaning on the roof of the car, which was unmarked-cop-car blue. That was probably why the shadows in the hollows of his eyes, his upper lip, his throat, looked blue. “I forget now,” I said. “It’ll come back to me.”
Pat smiled a little: a twitch of the lips. “Sorry, Sunshine.”
I raised a hand and turned away again. He said softly, “See you.” He could have meant only that he’d see me at Charlie’s, where we’d seen each other for years. But I knew that wasn’t what he meant. I went for a long walk. I spiraled slowly through Old Town, from the outside edge, where SOF headquarters and City Hall lie on the boundary between Old Town and downtown, to the next circle where the area library and the Other Museum and the older city buildings are, through several small parks and down the long green aisle of General Aster’s Way (purple in autumn with michaelmas daisies, some municipal gardener’s idea of a joke), and then into the back streets of Charlie’s neighborhood, where everyone gets lost occasionally, even people who have lived there all their lives, like Charlie and Mary and Kyoko. I was used to getting lost. I didn’t mind. I’d come to something I recognized eventually.
I wandered and thought about the latest thing I didn’t want to think about. There seemed to be so many things I didn’t want to think about lately.
I didn’t want to think about my increasing sense that something had happened to Con.
And that it mattered.
There is no fellowship between humans and vampires. We are fire and water, heads and tails, north and south…day and night.
Maybe I was imagining the bond. Maybe it was a way of dealing with what had happened. Like post-traumatic thingummy.
Con himself said the bond existed, but he could be wrong too. Vampires are deadly, but no one says they’re infallible.
I blinked my treacherous eyes, watching the things in the shadows slither and sparkle. I had plenty to worry about already. I didn’t have to worry about vampires too. One vampire. The last thing I wanted to be doing was worrying about him.
No, the next to last thing. The last thing I wanted was to be bound to him.
I hadn’t thought I had any—did I mean innocence?—to lose, after those two nights on the lake. I didn’t know you could go on finding out you’d had stuff by losing it. This didn’t seem like a very good method to me.
Over two months of being slowly poisoned probably hadn’t been really good for me either. And the nightmares had been bad. But in a way they’d still been pure. I’d made a mistake—a mistake I’d paid dearly for—but it had been a mistake.
A month ago, I’d called on Con. Okay, I was at the end of my tether. But I’d still asked a vampire for help—not Mel, not a human doctor of human medicine. And he’d helped me. The nightmares I’d had since weren’t pure at all.
My thought paused there, teetering on the edge of a precipice, and then fell over.
What if it hadn’t been a mistake, driving out to the lake? What if I’d had to do it—if not that exact thing, then something similar. What if that restlessness I hadn’t been able to name had caused exactly what it was meant to cause?
That question I hadn’t asked Con, out by the lake, is my dad another of your old enemies? Or your old friends?
Between the dark thoughts inside my head and the leaping, glittery shadows my eyes saw, I had to stop. I was at the edge of Oldroy’s Park. I groped my way to a bench and sat down.
I sat there, and stared at the tree opposite me, and the way the rough ridges of its bark seemed to wiggle where they lay in shade. My thoughts were stuck on that night at the lake. I never liked coincidence much, but I hated the sense I was making now.
I watched the wiggling bark. It occurred to me that this was new. I’d been seeing into shadows, but merely what was there, as if there was a rather erratic light on it. This was something else. Which gave me something I could bear to think about, so I thought about it. A few more minutes passed and it seemed to me it was as if I was watching the tree breathing. I found a leaf in shadow, and looked at it for a while; it twinkled, as if with tiny starbursts, but rather than thinking ugh—weird, I kept watching, till there seemed to be a pattern. I thought, it’s as if I’m watching its pores opening and closing. I looked down at my hands. The shadows between the fingers gleamed like a banked fire. The tiny shadows laid by the veins on the backs of them were a tiny, flickering dark green edged with a tinier, even more flickering red. The daylight part of the veins looked as it always did. In the shadow places I could see the blood moving.
I was sitting in sunlight, not shade. I automatically chose sun if there was any sun to be had. I remembered the sun on my back the first morning at the lake, like the arm of a friend. I closed my eyes.