I heard the footsteps but I didn’t expect them to pause.
“Pardon me,” said a voice. “Are you all right?” ;
I opened my eyes. An old woman stood there, a little bent over, leaning on the handle of her two-wheeled shopping cart. “You look—tired,” she said. “Can I fetch you anything? There is a shop on the corner. And it has a pay phone. Can I call someone for you?”
She had a nice face. She would be someone you would be glad to have as a neighbor, or as a regular at the coffeehouse you and your family ran. I looked at the shadows that fell half across her face and saw…I don’t know how…that she was a partblood. And that something about my expression was maybe making her guess I might be going through finding that out about myself. And remembering how hard this was she was going to ask me, a total stranger, if I was all right.
I hauled myself back into the ordinary world, and the vision faded. The shadows that fell across her face reverted to being the usual, disorienting, see-through, funny-edged shadows I’d been seeing for a month. She smiled. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I—er—I thought you might perhaps—er—”
“Want to be disturbed?” I said. “Yes. Isn’t it…silly…how…upsetting…just thinking can be?”
“It’s not silly at all. The insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are.”
Scarier than vampires? I thought. Scarier than an affinity for vampires? Well. That was what she’d said, wasn’t it? What my mind contained was an affinity for vampires.
She was fishing around in her cart and pulled out a package of Fig Carousels and another of Chocolate Pinwheels. I laughed. She smiled at me again. “Which?” she said, holding them out toward me. I hadn’t had a Pinwheel in fifteen years, although the secret recipe for Sunshine’s Killer Zebras was the later result of a three-pack-a-week pre-Charlie’s childhood. I pointed to the Pinwheels. She tore open the packet, sat down, and offered it to me. “Thank you,” I said. She took one too.
We sat in silence for a while, and did away with several more Pinwheels. “Thank you,” I said again.
“Maud,” she said. “I’m Maud. I live—there,” and she pointed to one of the old townhouses that surrounded the little park. “I sit here often, in warm weather. I’ve found it’s a good place for thinking; I like to believe Colonel Oldroy was a pleasant fellow, which is why the disagreeable thoughts seem to fall away if you sit here.”
Colonel Oldroy had been one of those military scientist bozos who spent decades locked up in some huge secret underground maze because whatever they were doing was so superclassified that the existence of a lab to do it in was confidential information. It still wasn’t public knowledge where his lab had been, but Oldroy got the credit, or the blame, for the blood test SOF still used on job applicants. Before Oldroy there was no reliable test for demon partbloods. (Remember that demon is a hodge-podge word. A Were can’t be a partblood; you either are one or you aren’t. Anything else, anything alive that is, may be called a demon, although things like peris and angels will probably protest.) Pretty much the first thing that Oldroy discovered was that he was a partblood. He’d retired before they had a chance to throw him out, and spent the last twenty years of his life breeding roses, and naming them things like Lucifer, Mammon, Beelzebub, and Belphegor. Belphegor, under the less controversial name Pure of Heart, was a big commercial success. Mom had a Pure of Heart in her back yard. Oldroy may not have had a very happy life, but it sounded like he’d had a sense of humor. I wondered if he’d had anything to do with synthesizing the drug that made partbloods piss green or blue-violet but pass his blood test, or with setting up the bootleg mentor system.
“Sometimes you have help,” I said. “Sometimes people come along and offer you Chocolate Pinwheels.”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“I’m Rae,” I said. “Do you know Charlie’s Coffeehouse? It’s about a quarter mile that way,” I said, pointing.
“I don’t get that far very often,” she said.
“Well, some time, if you want to, you might like to try our Killer Zebras. There’s a strong family resemblance…Tell whoever serves you that Sunshine says you can have as many as you can carry away, to bring back to this park and eat. In the sunshine.”
“Are you Sunshine then too?”
I sighed. “Yes. I guess. I’m Sunshine too.”
“Good for you,” she said, and patted my knee.
I got home that night at about nine-thirty and had a cup of cinnamon and rosehip tea and stared out at the dark and thought. There was at least one good result of my negative epiphany that afternoon in Oldroy Park: there seemed to me suddenly so many worse things that worrying about Con seemed clean and straightforward. He had saved my life, after all. Twice. Never mind the extenuating circumstances. I stood on my little balcony and remembered: I could not come to you if you did not call me, but if you called I had to come.
“Constantine,” I said quietly, into the darkness. “Do you need me? You have to call me if you do. You told me the rules yourself.”
He’d said Bo was after us. And that Bo would make a move soon. I rather thought that “soon” in this instance meant a definition of soon that humans and vampires could agree on. Con should have been back before now to tell me what was going on, what we were going to do. How far he’d got in tracing Bo. He hadn’t.
There was something wrong.
I slept badly that night, but this was getting to be so usual that it was an effort to try to decide if the nightmares I’d had were the kind I should pay attention to or not. I decided that they probably were, but I didn’t know what kind of attention to pay, so I wasn’t going to. I went in to work, turned my brain off, and started making cinnamon rolls, and garlic-rosemary buns for lunch. Then I made brown sugar brownies, Rocky Road Avalanche, Killer Zebras, and a lot of muffins, and then it was ten-thirty and I had the lunch shift free.
I had pulled my apron off and was about to untie my scarf when Mel’s hand stopped me long enough for him to kiss the back of my neck. I shook my hair out and said “Yes” and we went back to his house together and spent some time on the roof. There’s nothing nicer than making love outdoors on a warm sunny day, and this late in the year it felt like getting away with something too.
Mel used to laugh, sometimes, right after he came, in this gentle, surprised way, as if he’d never expected to be this happy, and then he’d kiss me, thoughtfully, and I’d hang on to him and hope that I was reading the signs right. That afternoon was one of those times. He’d wound up on top, which, I admit, I had slightly engineered, since there was a bit of an autumnal breeze snaking around and it was nice and warm under Mel’s body. His breath smelled of coffee and cinnamon. We lay there some time afterward—I loved that butterfly-wings feeling of a hard-on getting unhard inside me—and while we lay there I was all right and the world was all right and everything that might not be all right was on hold. And it was daylight and with my treacherous eyes shut I could just lie there and feel the sunshine on my face.
After a comfortable, rather dreamy lunch he went downstairs to take apart or put together some motorcycle and I went off to the library. I wanted to talk to Aimil.
She looked up from her desk, smiled faintly and said, “I have a break in, uh, forty minutes,” and went back to whatever she was doing.
I had a pass through the NEW shelves where there was a book hysterically titled The Scourge of the Other. It was a good two inches thick. I considered stealing it and putting it through the meat grinder at Charlie’s, but the library would only buy another one and the detritus of ink and binding glue probably wouldn’t do the quality of Charlie’s meatloaf any good. I knew without picking it up that the chapters would have rabble-rousing headings like “The Demon Menace” and “The Curse of the Were.” I wasn’t going to guess what noun was desperate enough for vampires. Four months ago I would have just scowled. Today it gave me a hard-knot-in-pit-of-stomach feeling. It was turning out I had a lot of Other friends. And Con, of course, whatever he was. Con, are you all right?