Well.
“What do we do now?” I said.
“I take you home,” said Con.
“Okay, that’s today. What about tonight? Tomorrow?” I said.
“We must find Bo.”
My stomach cramped. Maybe it was just the apples. I also had to learn that shilly-shallying was not a vampire gift. I wondered if I could teach him to say “perhaps” and “not before next week.”
I knew this wasn’t going to be a matter of loading up on apple-tree stakes (or table knives) and knocking on Bo’s front door. “You don’t know where he, uh, lives.”
“No. I had only begun to search, since our meeting by the lake. He is well defended and well garrisoned.”
I glanced up at the invisible ceiling. Given the furnishings the ceiling was probably phenomenal. Or antiphenomenaclass="underline" like Medusa’s head or the eye of a basilisk. “I hope you are better defended,” I said.
“I hope so too.”
I didn’t like hearing a vampire talk about hope.
“My master specially collected things that defend, or could be turned to defense. He felt that his attempt to win what he desired by aggression had failed, and he wished his subsequent seclusion to be uninterrupted.”
Gargoyles and tchotchkes: the vampire arsenal.
“I have always preferred solitude, and have improved on his arrangements. I have some reason to believe that if I never left this place no one would be able to come to me.”
“You are forgetting the road through nowheresville,” I said. Feelingly.
“I am not forgetting,” he said. “I am assailable by you in a way I am assailable to no one and nothing else.”
Assailable. An interesting choice of adjective. I looked up at him, and he looked down at me. I couldn’t see into the shadows on his face. They remained shadows. They didn’t wiggle or sparkle and they didn’t have red edges. They didn’t go down a long way. They were just shadows. Cute. The only person who still looked normal out of my eyes wasn’t a person and wasn’t normal.
The look between us lengthened. He might not be able to lure me to the same doom he almost had the second night at the lake, but it seemed to me it was still doom I saw in his eyes. I looked away. “Improvements,” I said. “You mean some of this—this—” The phrases that occurred to me were not tactfuclass="underline" this tragic reproduction of William Beckford’s front parlor, or perhaps Ludwig II’s. “You mean some of this, er, stuff is, er, yours?”
“Nothing you may see, no. I do not like tying up my strength in objects. It was an old argument with my master. Physical shape has a certain durability that the less tangible lacks, but I feel it is a brittle durability. He believed otherwise.”
And he’s the one who got skegged, I thought. “Do you know what Bo’s philosophy of, er, defense is?”
Pause. Finally he said: “He puts most of his energies into his gang. This will not help us locate him.”
I sighed. “This is another of those vampire-senses-are-different things, isn’t it?” I supposed I had to tell him what I’d found through the globenet—how I’d first found the bad nowheresville, the beyond-dark human-squishing space, and what else seemed to be in there. If “in” was the right preposition. Out? On? Up? With? After? Over? English has too many prepositions. Did I have to mention SOF?
I didn’t have to tell him anything yet. He didn’t seem to be in a big hurry to get me home. How close, in ordinary human-measured geography, was this earth-place to Yolande’s house? Ally or no ally, I didn’t like the idea of our being neighbors.
“Bo isn’t his real name, is it?” I said. “It sounds like something you’d call a sheepdog.”
“It is short for Beauregard.”
I laughed. I hadn’t known I had a laugh available. A vampire named Beauregard. It was too perfect. And he probably hadn’t got it accidentally from his stepdad who ran a coffeehouse.
“How much time do we have?” I said. “Bo, I mean, not today’s dawn.”
I was beginning to learn when he was thinking and when he was merely thinking about what to say to me, a bumptious human. This time he was thinking.
“I have been out of context since we last met,” he said. Yes, he said context. “I do not know. I will find out.”
“Same time, same place,” I murmured. “Not.”
“I do not understand.”
“We have to meet again, right?” I said. “And I have things to tell you too. I may have a—a kind of line on Bo myself.”
He nodded. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or outraged. Maybe he thought he’d chosen his confederate well. Equal partners with a vampire: an exhilarating concept. Supposing you lived long enough to enjoy the buzz. But I guess “Hey, well done, congratulations, wow” weren’t in common vampire usage. Maybe I could teach him that too, with “probably” and “not before next week.”
“I will come to you, if I may,” he said.
“You would rather I didn’t come here again.” I hadn’t meant to say that either, but it popped out.
A clear trace of surprise showed on his face for about a third of a second. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking straight at him, but it was there. “You may come here if you wish. I…” He stopped. I could guess what he was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking. Wasn’t thinking. “Come. I will give you a token.”
He slid easily through the gap in the impedimenta (sorry, this household brought out the worst in my vocabulary; it was like every bad novel and hyperbolic myth I’d ever read crowding round to haunt me in three dimensions) and made off into the dark. I had a sidelong peek at the overturned goblet as I passed it. My dark vision steadied if I kept it on Con’s back, so I did, mostly, resisting the compelling desire to try to figure out what some of the more tortured blacknesses indicated by looking at them directly: hydras with interminable heads; Laocoon with several dozen sons and twice as many serpents; an infestations of trifflds; the entire chariot race from Ben Hur: all frozen in plaster or wood or stone. I hoped. Especially the trifflds.
Con stopped at a cupboard. It had curlicues leaping out of its lid like a forest of satyrs’ horns, and something—things—like satyrs themselves oiling down the edges. It was satyrs. Their hands were its handles. Ugh. Con, his own hand on one of the doors, glanced at me. “Why did the Cup distress you?”
I shrugged. How was I going to explain?
“My question is not an idle one,” he said. “I do not wish to distress you.”
Not till after we’d defeated Mr. Bo Jangles anyway. Oh, Sunshine, give a vampire a break. He probably thinks he’s trying. “I’m not sure I can explain,” I said. “I’m not sure I can explain to me. And vampires aren’t much into family ties, are they?”
“No,” he said.
I already knew vampires aren’t great on irony.
“I…have got into this because of my inheritance on my father’s side. I’m certainly alive to tell about it—so far—on account of that inheritance, right? But—” I looked into his face as I said this, and decided that the standard impassivity was at the soft, understanding end of the range, like marble is a little softer than adamant. “I’m a little twitchy about this bond thing with you, and the idea of—of— a kind of background to it—that your master had dealings with my dad’s family—I don’t like it.” I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad. “And the only training I’ve ever had, if you want to call it training, was a few hours changing flowers into feathers and back with my gran fifteen years ago, and I feel a little…well, exposed. Unready.” I could maybe have said, assailable.