I pulled off my apron and untied my hair. “Lost enough for now. If I replace a fuse and the system starts working again, I’ll let you know.”
“Maybe you’re just tired,” said Pat.
“Maybe,” I said amiably.
Pat ran his hand through what there was of his hair. “I don’t like it when you agree with me, Sunshine. It’s not your style. What aren’t you telling me?”
“That I’m relieved not to have to try again,” I said.
I knew he bought it: he sagged, suddenly looking smaller and older. I felt a fierce pang of guilt, but I reminded myself that he believed that the only good vampire was a staked, beheaded, and burned vampire. Briefly and wistfully I considered a scenario where Con and I had a SOF team with us when we…whatever…but I recognized this as a fantasy, like a scenario where the goddess of pain retired from SOF and opened a day care center.
“You look like a man who needs caffeine,” I said. “I’ll grab us something from the counter and meet you outside. Do you want privacy or comfort?” Comfort meant the nice little tables out front, overlooking the square and Mrs. Bialosky’s flower bed, still doing its stuff with chrysanthemums and asters this late in the year.
“Privacy,” he said.
He was sitting at one of the unsteady tables in the grim little courtyard behind the coffeehouse that by never doing anything with we could continue to avoid opening to customers. You got used to the roar of the kitchen fans and Mom had a couple of tough little evergreen shrubs in pots that could survive the cooking fumes. Pat and I didn’t talk about anything much after all. He drank the coffee and engulfed the various buns and other edible objects I’d brought, but absentmindedly, like a refueling procedure. The fact that he didn’t argue with me about trying again, about trying to find out the extent of the burnout—about whether or not there really was a burnout—made me feel more guilty.
Silence fell. Pat stared into nothing. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He looked at me. “I believe you,” he said. He stood up. “I’m not sure I believe the rest of it, but I believe you’re sorry about it.” He paused. “Makes my life easier in some ways.” Another gleam of the normal Pat as he said: “Maybe by the time you’ve decided you’re not burned out any more the goddess will have found someone else to crucify.”
I didn’t say anything. He rubbed both hands through his hair this time, and added, “I didn’t say this. But watch your back, Sunshine.” Then he left.
Mel wandered out a few minutes after Pat had left. I was staring into my teacup. I’d forgotten to bring a sieve out, so there were tea leaves in the bottom of it, but I couldn’t read them. “You look like a woman who needs a good laugh,” he said. “Have you heard the one about the were-pigeon and the streetcleaner?”
“Yes,” I said. “Mel, d’you suppose anyone is exactly who they say they are?”
“Charlie, maybe,” he answered, after a little pause, of surprise or consideration. “Can’t think of anyone else. Hmm.” I watched his hand lift off the table and rub one of his tattoos.
Maybe I should have been thinking about tattoos myself, but there’s a real big drawback to them. Any charm can be turned against you, if you run into the thing it’s supposed to be protecting you from, and the thing is enough stronger than the protection. A powerful enough demon adept or magic handler can overwhelm one too, although that’s serious feud stuff and not common. A tattoo feeds itself on you, so tattoos do tend to be a lot more stable and longer-lived than the ordinary charms you set around and hang up, including the ones you wear next to your skin; but a charm that isn’t living off you can be destroyed a lot more easily if it does go—or is sent—rogue. A rogue tattoo can eat you up. It happens occasionally. Before five months ago I didn’t figure I needed any heavy warding. Now that I did, tattoos were the last thing I was going to try.
“Charlie,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone else either.” Not Mel. Not me.
“Not Mrs. B,” said Mel, smiling. “Sunshine, I don’t like metaphysics unless I’m drunk, it’s only three-thirty in the afternoon, and I’m working tonight. What’s up?”
If Mel had really been trying to pass as a motorcycle hoodlum, his tattoos wouldn’t be as beautiful or as elaborate. Lots of sorcerers go in for a superabundance of tattoos, but they mostly keep them hidden—they’re harder to rogue that way. Hence the long enveloping robe and deep hood technique with inked-up sorcerers when they’re actually handling magic. (For day-to-day, walking-the-dog, doing-the-shopping use, a lot of sorcerers disguise the real shape of their tattoos with cosmetics. Long sleeves and high collars are hot in the summer—and there are favorite sorcerer tattoos that go on your lips and cheeks and forehead too. But—I love this—magic can apparently be a bit perfunctory about certain things in the heat of a transaction. Any tattoo a sorcerer wants working while he or she handles magic can’t be distorted with face paint or pancake foundation because it may turn out to be the apparent figure that performs. Or doesn’t.)
My dad didn’t have any tattoos. That I remembered. But I didn’t remember my dad very well, and not all sorcerers have tattoos.
But sorcerers are sorcerers. Tattooists mostly make their livings punching charms in leather, not live skin, and they’ll try to talk an ordinary member of the public out of it if you already have, say, three magic-bearing tattoos, even little boring ones, and they’ll tell you why. In vivid detail. It isn’t just the rogue possibility: a lot of magic-bearing tattoos can sort of unbalance you. You start not being quite sure where the real-world lines are with a lot of tattoos whispering in your dreams. Of course having lots of magic-bearing tattoos is one way of saying you’re a tough guy—first because the implication is that you need all that charm and ward power, and second because you’re hardy enough to bear the drain and the disorientation.
But there are better ways of showing you are a tough guy than having lots of tattoos, partly because no tattooist who wants to keep his or her license is likely to cooperate, and the ones who don’t have licenses are too likely to make a mess of it. There is only one small secondary quarter-circle’s difference between a ward against drunkenness and another one against eyestrain, for example, and the latter won’t get you home safely with a load on. And that’s one of the common, simple wards, and most of Mel’s tattoos weren’t common or simple. But they were magic bearers, not ornamental. You could smell it, like ozone when a storm is coming. And besides, nobody who had any pretensions to hanging out with a biker gang would dare have ornamental tattoos. Ornies are for wusses.
Mel couldn’t be a sorcerer—sorcery isn’t something you can successfully hide for long—but he did have a lot of tattoos. It was typical of him too that when he had come to talk to Charlie about a job the first time he had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows and his shirt open at the neck, in spite of the fact that it was January and freezing. Although maybe he just had a good take on Charlie, who in his affable, openhearted way, enjoys Charlie’s reputation as a place slightly on the edge.
I said, “Mel, who are you?‘’
Mel picked up both my hands and kissed them. His lips were warm. When he laid them back on the table he didn’t let go. I watched the sunlight twinkle among the fine hairs on the backs of his hands, and the red and gold and black of the tattoos there. Both the hairs and the tattoos had an unusually bright red edge, as if there was firelight on them. Or in them. His hands were warm too. Human temperature. The temperature of the fire of human life. Speaking of metaphysics. “I’m your friend, Sunshine,” he said. “Everything else is just static on the line.”