Turned out once I was dressed in long sleeves and a high neck and jeans you didn’t see the bruises much. There was one on my jawline that was going to be visible as soon as I tied my hair back and a gouge down my forearm that I decided I had to put a bandage on even if this made it look worse than it was. Couldn’t be helped. You can’t ooze in a public bakery any more than you can cook anything without rolling your sleeves up first. I’d worry what to tell Mel later.
Paulie was glad to see me. It had been a busy morning, but then it was always a busy morning. “We’re full up with SOFs,” he said. I grunted. I’d seen them on the way in, glancing through the door to the front, having thoughtfully come in the side way for staff only (and hungry derelicts), just in case of things like SOFs. I put a clean apron on and tied my hair up at lightning speed (lightning bolt, golden sword, Mach hundred and twelve), threw a little flour in my face to camouflage the bruise on my jaw, and was up to my elbows in pastry by the time Pat had drifted apparently aimlessly into the bakery. I hadn’t seen him on my way in; he’d been moving pretty fast himself if they’d called him over from HQ. “A word with you on your next break?” he said.
“I’ve only just got here,” I said, smudging flour and butter and confectioner’s sugar together briskly.
“Whenever,” he said, loitering.
“It’ll be a couple of hours,” I said quellingly. I could feel Paulie raising his eyebrows behind my back: Pat was usually a friend with privileges. That had been before I’d found out my loyalties were not merely divided, they had hacked me in two and were disappearing over the horizon in opposite directions.
“Whatever you say, ma’am,” he said, saluting, although not very convincingly. “I don’t suppose there are any cinnamon rolls left?”
“No,” I said.
“Walnut sticky bun?” said Paulie. “Blueberry muffin, pumpkin muffin, orange, carrot and oat muffin, pear gingerbread, honeycake?”
“One of each,” said Pat, and disappeared.
Paulie hadn’t been with us long enough yet to pretend to be impervious to the sincere flattery of people gorging themselves on the stuff you had made. He rubbed his face with a sugary hand to disguise the grin and went off to load up a plate and shout for Mary to take it out front.
I was tempted not to admit when I went on break but I was having to do enough lying just plugging through my days—and nights—and didn’t want to get too used to it. It was like I didn’t want to forget the difference between daylight and nighttime: and both my funny eyes and my funny new life-and-undead style seemed to be prodding me relentlessly in that direction. Not funny.
My sunshine-self. My tree-self. My deer-self. Didn’t we outnumber the dark self? My hands patted the two pockets that contained the knife and the seal, leaving two more smudges on my apron.
I took the apron off and washed my hands and made myself a cup of tea and went out front. Pat had either come back or was still there. Paulie’s piled-up plate two and a half hours ago hadn’t been enough; he was now eating Lemon Lust pastry bars and Killer Zebras. Any normal human ought to have a gut he’d have to carry around on a wheelbarrow, the way he ate. This had crossed my mind once or twice before, being many years acquainted with Pat’s eating habits, but he was SOF, you know? So he got a lot of exercise and had a high metabolism rate. I wondered again what kind of demon he was. If he was a rubberfoot, which came in blue sometimes, he could walk up walls, for example, which must burn a lot of calories. I nodded to him and went out to sit on the wall of Mrs. Bialosky’s flower bed. The sun was shining.
He followed me. “Listen to the news last night?” he said.
I was making it, I thought. I suppressed a shudder. “No.”
“One killed and three missing in No Town,” he said. “The one killed is confirmed sucker.”
“You can’t be sure this soon that the other three are anything but missing,” I said. “Maybe they ran away.”
Pat looked at me.
“They may have run away from something else,” I said, “that had nothing to do with vampires.”
“The moon may be one of Sunshine’s Killer Zebras, but I doubt it,” said Pat. “A lot of people saw these four hanging around together earlier in the evening.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Four is a lot for one night, even in No Town.”
I still didn’t say anything.
“We’d like you to come round this afternoon and have another stroll through a few cosmails,” said Pat.
“I don’t get off till ten tonight.”
“We’ll wait,” Pat said grimly. “There’s one little snag—Aimil doesn’t want to do it. She says you tried it on your own a few days ago and it took you away somewhere. She said she thought you’d died. Now, why would you want to try it on your own, I wonder?”
“Why do you think?” I said, looking at him steadily. The shadows on his face lay plain and clean. I slid a little further into my strange seeing. These shadows had a slightly rough or textured quality I was beginning to guess meant partblood—I’d seen it in Maud’s face first, but Aimil had it too—and in Pat’s case this not-quite-human aspect was distinctly blue. But the shadows said there was no deceit beyond the basic subterfuge of passing for pureblood human. Pat was who he said he was, and believed what he said he believed. “I want to find these guys too,” I said. “And SOF, begging your pardon, makes me nervous.”
Pat sighed and rubbed his head with his hand, making his short SOF-norm hair stand on end. “Look, kiddo, I know all the usual complaints about SOF and I agree with most of them.” He saw me looking at his hair and smiled a little. “So I don’t happen to mind the hair and the uniform, that’s not a crime, is it? But we can protect you better at SOF HQ than you can protect yourself anywhere else. What if what you were tracking had noticed you were searching for it the other day? You think you could have got back out fast enough for it not to follow you home? The fact that Aimil is still alive proves that it didn’t notice. But I think that was dumb luck. Nobody has ever lived a long happy life depending on dumb luck, and depending on any kind of luck is as good as tearing your own throat out when you’re messing with suckers. I don’t care what extra powers you got, Sunshine.”
I swallowed. “Did you say all that to Aimil?”
“You bet I did, babe, and more besides. She is, after all, on our payroll and subject to our rules. You aren’t. Yet, although I’ve thought about it. But SOF doesn’t pay so good and generally we have to blackmail people like you and Aimil, to put it bluntly, not to mention figuring out what the official description of what we wanted you for would be. I could probably tie you up in a big knot of top-secret intelligence bureaucracy—we’ve got powers to compel ordinary citizens in certain circumstances, did you know that? And we could make these the right kind of circumstances, never fear—but it would take too long and I suspect it would make you ornery. We need you too badly to risk pissing you off, if we can get you any other way. By the way, you were planning on coming to us with anything you found on the other end of Aimil’s cosmails, weren’t you? You don’t have any noble, suicidal plans to take these suckers on by yourself, do you? Tell me you are not that stupid.”