“You betcha.”
“Why? You haven’t got any proof yet that what Aimil and I are doing is anything but psycho doodling.”
Pat was silent a moment, and then gave a heavy sigh. “You know, Sunshine, you’re a pain to work with. You think too much. Have you read anything about the little black boxes that are supposed to register Other activity? Called tickers.”
“Yeah. They don’t work.”
“Actually they work pretty well. The problem is that there is a larger number of unregistered partbloods in the general pop than anyone wants to talk about—well gosh isn’t that surprising—and the tickers keep getting confused. Or, you know, sabotaged. It’s been a real bad problem in SOF for some reason. Can’t imagine why. There’s ways around this problem, however, once you all know you’re reading off the same page. So we got some tickers that give us pretty good readings, once we figured out how to set ‘em up. And I’ll tell you that a couple we got down in No Town about fused their chips when you did your locating trick for us a few days ago, and they did it again that afternoon when, it turns out, you were committing your felony with Aimil.”
“Felony my ass,” I said.
“Attempting to consort with an enemy alien is a felony, my pretty darling, and all Others are enemy aliens. It’s not one of those rules anyone wants to pursue too close, but it has its uses. And trying to locate ‘em is near enough to trying to consort with ‘em for me. Anyway, we’ve never had readings like these readings. What you’re up to may be psycho doodlings, all right, but they’re great big strong psycho doodlings and we’re beginning to hope you may be the best chance we’ve seen in years and not another one of my over-optimistic bad calls.”
I considered having a nervous breakdown on the spot. I probably could have thrown a good one too, about how I couldn’t take the strain, that my life had crashed and burned those two nights I went missing by the lake and all Pat and SOF were doing now was stamping out the ashes and oh by the way if you have an axe handy I’ll run mad with it now and get it over with since my genes are being slower off the mark than I’ve been expecting since I figured it out two months or whatever ago, and by the way, that was SOF’s doing too, you guys and your sidelong suggestive little chats. While half my brain was considering the nervous breakdown recourse the other half was considering whether maybe I could locate Bo well enough and then let SOF handle it. Con and I wouldn’t have to go within miles (vampire miles or human miles) of No Town. We could sit at home drinking champagne and waiting for the headlines: NEW ARCADIA SOF DIVISION ELIMINATES MAJOR VAMPIRE LAIR AND DESTROYS ITS MASTER. Our correspondent, blah blah blah.
My imagination wanted MOST IMPORTANT STRIKE SINCE VOODOO WARS, but it wouldn’t be. It felt global to me because it was my life on the line.
But it wasn’t going to happen that way. I didn’t even know why, not to be able to explain it. But I could feel it, like you feel a stomachache or a cold coming on, or somebody’s eyes staring a hole in your back. SOF could go in and mess things up for a little while, stake a few young vampires and maybe wreck Bo’s immediate plans. But…maybe this was something else I was learning to see in the shadows. Maybe it was from traveling through nowheresville or walking Con’s short ways last night when I was somewhere else: watching my reality stream by, finding out there are other places with other rules. I was beginning to understand how the connections in the vampire world really aren’t like our human connections in our human world.
I was tethered to Con as absolutely as he had been shackled to the wall of the house beside the lake. And he and Bo had a bond that required one of them to be the cause of the destruction of the other one. I guessed now that this was as natural a situation to a vampire as making cinnamon rolls was to me. I wondered what happened if a vampire involved in one of these lethal pacts did the vampire equivalent of falling under a bus: did the other one, foiled of catharsis, spin off into the void instead? The really nasty void, that is. Which could explain why it was so godsbloodyawful a place to visit.
He could have warned me, I thought. Con could have said something, that second morning by the lake. Would it have occurred to him? No. Besides, what was he going to say? “Die now or later”? That had been the choice all along. And as far as my situation now being the mere sad inevitable result of my being in the wrong place at the wrong time: grow up, Sunshine. Bo would be just a tiny bit irritated with me personally. Having not only escaped but taken his prize prisoner with me. What had kept me alive so far—my scorned and ignored magic-handling talent, my reluctant and harrowing alliance with Con—was also what was causing the bond. Ordinary mortals don’t get bound up in ceremonial duels to the death with master vampires. But ordinary mortals don’t survive introductory vampire encounters either.
I cast back to that second morning at the lake and thought, he did warn me—or remind me. I just didn’t hear it. Why should I? And why should he think I needed warning? “…That we are both gone will mean that something truly extraordinary has happened. And it almost certainly has something to do with you—as it does, does it not?— and that therefore something important about you was overlooked. And Bo will like that even less than he would have liked the straightforward escape of an ordinary human prisoner. He will order his folk to follow. We must not make it easy for them.” I was the one who’d assumed the time limitations around Con’s annotations of our predicament.
More recently Con had said, I knew what happened at the lake would not be the end. And it wasn’t like I’d been surprised.
Okay, what if—just as a matter of keeping our position clear here—what if we managed to off Bo now? What new chains of vengeance and retaliation would we have forged instead?
I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t want to come up with a likely story to explain to Pat what I was finding to laugh at. Unless I wanted to make the laughter hysterical, as a lead-in to my nervous breakdown.
But I didn’t. I wanted to find Bo and get on with it. Whatever happened next. Whatever. I would think about whatever if there was a tomorrow to think about it in. Right now today was enough—like getting away from the lake alive had been enough. If Aimil’s cosmail was Bo, and I could trace it, and SOF could offer some protection from being traced back, then I’d risk doing it with SOF. I wanted to find Bo. And hadn’t I just been saying there was a bond between Bo and me as well? Big ugly mega yuck.
What I didn’t want was to get sucked in again and maybe somehow this time pop out on top of Bo. As things I couldn’t bear to think about went, this was very high on the list.
My sunshine-self, my tree-self, my deer-self. Didn’t we outnumber the dark self?
What I had to figure out, fast, was if there was going to be a way I could make a mark, leave a clue, carry some bad-void token away with me that Con and I could follow or interpret better or faster than SOF could. There’d been kind of a lot going on and I hadn’t sorted what I had found—or half found, or begun to find—in Aimil’s living room. If sorting was a possibility. Aimil had been afraid I’d died…
No. I’d figure it out. I had to.
Did the tickers do anything but register activity, could they define it?
They’d pick up Con and me too, when we started going somewhere—wouldn’t they? If. Supposing our rough human-world guesses were right, and what we all wanted was in No Town. But…if SOF was now going to start keeping a closer watch on me, were they going to plant a ticker near Yolande’s house? Oh, gods. Could she disable a SOF ticker?