“I was a wardskeeper,” she said easily, as if she was commenting on the pleasantness of the evening, as if my question wasn’t entirely rude.
Wardskeeper.
I wanted to laugh. No wonder her house wards were so good. You didn’t earn that title easily. There were hundreds of licensed wardcrafters, first, second, and third class, for every wardskeeper. The rank of wardskeeper granted an unrestricted authority to design and create any protection against any Others that any client wished to hire you for. Even wardskeepers had specialties: large business, small business, home, personal bodyguard, and the whole murky business of watchering, which ranged from honest protective surveillance to downright spying. But you didn’t get your wardskeeper insignia unless you could make a more than competent stab at all of it.
Wardskeeper. She must then…her own house…but Con…I realized I’d said the first word aloud—I hoped only the first word—because she was answering me.
“No, I’m not your idea of a wardskeeper, am I?” she said. “I was never anyone’s idea. But once I was established, new business came to me by word of mouth, and my prior clients usually had the good sense to warn future clients that they were going to meet a drab little old lady—I have been old and drab since my teens, by the way—who gave the impression of being hardly able to cross the road by herself.” She looked at me, smiling. “I admit that crossing the road alone has never been one of my greater gifts. Cars move much too quickly to suit me, and frequently from unexpected directions. I was always a much better maker of wards.”
I couldn’t think how to ask my next question. I couldn’t even summon up the spare attention to hoot at the idea of Yolande being drab.
“But then,” she went on, almost as if she was reading my mind, “people often are not what one might expect them to be. I would not expect a young, likable, sensible—and sun-worshipping—human woman who works in her family’s restaurant to have a friend who is a vampire.”
Then I could say nothing at all.
“My dear,” Yolande said, “I have now told you almost as much as I know about your private affairs. Yes, there are more wards about this house and garden than you are aware of, and the fact that you haven’t been aware of them is perhaps an indication to me that I have not yet lost my skill. I knew, of course, that a vampire had been visiting, but I also knew that you had not merely invited him in, but that you were under no coercion to do so. A good ward, my dear, will also prevent a forced invitation from achieving its object. And my wards are good ones.
“It took no great effort of intellect to puzzle out some of what happened to you during the two days you were missing last spring, especially not with the reek of vampire on you. Sherlock Holmes—do young people still read him, I wonder?—made the famous statement that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This is a very useful precept for a maker of wards, and I am not, perhaps, wholly retired. Vampires, as vampires will, caused you harm; but in this case, very unusually, not terminal harm. This one particular vampire therefore can be assumed to have done you some service, and that service created some kind of bond between you. This wild theory, suggestive of someone farther into her dotage than she wishes to believe, has been lately fortified when he returned, not once, but twice.
“I know that your unlikely friend is a vampire, a male vampire, and that there is only the one of him whom you invite across your threshold. This I have found very reassuring, by the way. Had there been more than one, I think my determination to assume the best rather than the worst might have failed. Although I admit I have doubled the wards around my own part of the house…I have nothing to indicate that he is my friend too, you understand, and the human revulsion toward vampires generally is well justified.”
Yolande leaned forward to look into my face. “In the roundabout way of an old lady who perhaps spends too much of her time alone, I am offering you my support, in this impossibly difficult task you have taken on. The natural antipathy between vampires and humans means, I feel, that it is some task; I doubt either you or your friend is enjoying the situation. I don’t suppose your new SOF colleagues know about either the task or the friend, do they?”
I managed to shake my head.
“I am not surprised. I doubt SOF is very…adaptable. Lack of adaptability is the root cause of much trouble in large organizations.”
I thought of Pat turning blue and smiled a little. But only a little. She was right about their attitude toward vampires. She was right about the universal human attitude toward vampires.
“I had not planned to say anything to you. I had at first assumed that whatever happened four months ago was over. But the vampire taint on you remained: that wound in your breast was some vampire’s handiwork, wasn’t it?”
So much for the camouflage provided by high-necked shirts. I nodded.
“And then your friend came, and now there is no wound. The two events are related, are they not?”
I nodded again.
“That is as good a definition of friendship as I need. But…I will no longer call it a taint…the fleck, the fingerprint of the vampire is still upon you. I am afraid the metaphor that occurs to me is of the eater of arsenic. If you eat a very, very little of it, over time you can develop a limited immunity to it. I do not know why you should choose to…immunize yourself like this. Or why he should…My dear, forgive me if I have been a hopeless busybody. But your inevitable and wholly justified dismay, confusion, and preoccupation of four months ago has changed, certainly, but it has not decreased. It has increased—alarmingly so.”
She paused, as if she hoped for an answer, but I could say nothing.
“My dear, there is something else my wards have told me: that your nickname is more than an affectionate joke. I can believe no evil of someone who draws her strength from the light of day. If I can help you, I will.”
The sense of a burden unexpectedly lifted was so profound it made me dizzy, not least that by its lifting I realized how heavy it was. I had assumed—I had known—that there was no one I would be able to tell about my unlikely friend—there was certainly no one I would have risked telling. And now Yolande had told me. There were two of us who knew.
Maybe that meant the task was not impossible after all. Whatever the task was.
Well, wiping Bo out would be a service to all humankind, certainly, whether Con and I survived or not. But offhand I couldn’t see how even having a wardskeeper on our side was going to be useful. Besides, I had a selfish desire to stay alive myself. Bag the future of humanity.
And Con was failing to show up to help me make plans. He was the one who had told me that time was short. The new dry guys in Old Town bore something of the same message.
But there was now another human who knew about Con and me—and hadn’t freaked out. I felt better even if I shouldn’t’ve.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me yet,” said Yolande. “I haven’t done anything yet, except pry into your private affairs. I would not have done so if I had felt I could risk not enquiring into them.”
Well, thank the gods and the angels for nosy landladies. This nosy landlady.
“Is there such a thing as a—an—antiward? Something that attracts?” I said.
Yolande raised her eyebrows.
“My—unlikely friend. He should have come back, and he hasn’t. And I don’t know how to find him.”