Sunshine (20 page)

“I did know something. My gran—my dad's mother—showed up again a year after we geared off. I used to visit her—at our old cabin at the lake. She'd meet me there. My mom wasn't happy about it, but she let me go. My gran told me some—taught me some.”

“Taught you,” Jesse said sharply.

“Yeah. Stuff changing mostly. Little stuff. Enough to know that I had something, but not so much that I—had to use it, you know?”

They nodded again. Magic handling, like Other blood, often makes its presence known, whether
you
want to know or not. But if it wasn't too strong, it would also leave you alone, if you left it alone. Probably.

“Then my gran disappeared. When I was about ten. Just before the Wars. And just when Charlie married my mom. Charlie didn't seem to mind having me around. He adopted me, let me get underfoot at the coffeehouse. And yeah. I
was
drawn to cooking. I've been cooking, or trying to cook, since I was like
four
. Pretty sad, huh? A Blaise with frosting on the end of her nose. And once I got to Charlie's I thought that was the end of the story.”

“And then two months ago,” said Jesse. Why did I feel there was something else going on with these guys? Like we were having two conversations, one of them silent. It seemed to me that this out-loud one was enough.

I sighed. “All I did was drive out to the lake on my night off. I had a headache, I wanted some peace and quiet, you don't get that anywhere around my family, including away from the coffeehouse. I'd just had my car tuned, it was a nice night. There hasn't been any trouble at the lake that I know of since the Wars were over, so long as you stay away from the bad spots. I drove out to our old cabin, sat on the porch, looked at the water.…”

That was as much of the story as I had told before. I still wasn't expecting my heart rate to speed up, my stomach to hop back and forth like water on a hot griddle, and tears to start pricking the backs of my eyes at the prospect of telling even a little bit more. I looked down at my shapeless jersey kids'-pajama lap, and then glanced at the table knife on Jesse's desk. The world started to turn faster and at a funny angle.

Jesse reached into a bottom drawer and brought out a bottle of … oh, hey, single-malt scotch. Some SOFs did know how to live. Theo had turned the Prime Time bag upside down. There was an assortment of greasy-paper-wrapped bundles and they smelled … like food. Real human food. “Have a sandwich,” said Theo. “Have some chips. Have—hey, Pat, you're living dangerously. Have a Prime Time brownie.”

“No thanks,” I said automatically. “Too much flour, too much raising agent, and the chocolate they use is only so-so.”

“Your color's improving,” said Jesse. “Tell us more about Prime Time's sins. I'm sure their bread isn't as good as yours either.” It isn't. “Have some scotch.” I held out my (empty) tea mug.

I had half a Swiss cheese and watercress sandwich (on mediocre anadama) to give my stomach something else to think about.
The dark stains on the walls in the alley. The gobbets among the cobblestones
… Stop that. Okay, I should maybe think about what Pat and Jesse and Theo were trying to give me space to say. To be afraid of? Something that had to do with, however good their cover, how they must be afraid of being found out as partbloods?

… No.

It hadn't occurred to me before.
I didn't think there was a word for a human so sicko as to rescue a vampire, because no
human
had ever done it. Before
.

Dear gods and angels,
no
.

It's not only paranoia and bureaucratic oppression that demands partbloods be registered. Human magic-handling genes and certain demon genes mix really, really badly. There are lots of minor charm-twisters who have a touch of both the human capacity for magic and the demonic, and there's a story that some of them can do stuff no one else can, although it tends to be more goofy than useful. But this is strictly trivial magic handling.

Not all demons can do magic; some of them just
are
, although the areness of demons can seem magical when it isn't. A swallow demon—to take a rare but spectacular example—can fly less because of its hollow bones, although it has those too, than because something funny goes on with some of its atoms, which behave in certain ways as if they exist in some other universe. One of these ways is that they have no gravity in this one. So a swallow demon, despite being the size of anything from a large wardrobe up to and including a small barn, flies. It isn't magic. Swallow demons don't do magic. It only looks like magic. But a lot of demons also handle magic, some of them as powerfully as powerful humans do. And a drop of their blood into a strong human magic-handling gene pool is a disaster.

Strong magic-handling genes and even a weak unmanifested-for-generations magic-operating demon gene in the same person gives you about a ninety percent chance of being criminally insane. It might be as high as ninety-five percent. There are asylums specially built to hold these people, who tend to be extremely hard to hold.

Important magic-handling families for obvious reasons therefore become kind of inbred. Although this isn't an ideal solution either, because over the generations you start getting more …
third cousins
who
can maybe write a ward sign that almost works
… say. And usually fewer children total. In one way this is a relief. Someone whose human magic-handling DNA isn't up to more than a ward sign that almost works is in little if any danger from a big thor demon-blooded great-great-grandmother on the other side even if her magic genes have played very neat hopscotch over the intervening generations and come through nearly intact. (That's actually another tale. Yes, there are stories, at least one or two of them impressively documented, about strong doers in apparently on-the-skids magic-handling families whose magic turns out to be demonic in origin. But all of those stories—all the ones with happy endings anyway—are about families whose magic handling has been moribund for
generations
. People with fathers under even the suspicion of being sorcerers need not apply.) On the other hand, important magic-handling families need to go on handling magic to remain important magic-handling families.

The Blaises' name still casts a long shadow. But even I knew they'd hit their peak a while back, and that there weren't many of them—us—around any more. There didn't seem to be any at all left since the Wars. I hadn't thought about this. It might have been an issue if I had wanted to be a magic handler, but I didn't. It's pretty amazing what you can
not
think about. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I missed my gran, but it was a lot
simpler
to be Charlie Seddon's stepdaughter.

Outcrosses in a magic-handling family on the decline … like me … are viewed with mixed feelings. We may be salvation. We may be catastrophe. It depends on the bloodline on the other side.

Dubious outcrosses are often exiled or repudiated by the family. It's easier if the alien parent is the mother too, because then they can claim she was fooling around. Paternity tests applied to bad-magic crosses are notoriously unreliable.

No. There was no whisper of demon blood in my mother's family.

Would I know? My mother's sisters were both several sandwiches short of a picnic in terms of common sense. They were not the kind of people who would be entrusted with dark family secrets. And I didn't have to waste any time wondering if my mother would have told me. “Overprotective” is my mom's middle name. She wouldn't have told me.

My mother's parents had been
dead
against the marriage. They hadn't spoken to her since she refused to give my dad up. She'd been very young, and in love, and I could guess that even in those days she didn't take direction well. Maybe they didn't tell her. Just booted her out: never darken our door again, etc. They'd never made any attempt to meet me, their first grandchild, either. Maybe my mother found out later, somehow, after I was born. Maybe it was my dad who'd found it out.…

I'd never seen my father again after my mother left him, nor any of the rest of his family. Only my gran. Who was maybe choosing to see me privately and alone not in deference to my mother's feelings but because her own family had ordered her to have nothing to do with me.

Maybe my gran had some other reason for believing I was okay. Or maybe she didn't know why my mom had left. Maybe she thought it was my dad's business associates. Magic-handling families can be pretty conceited about their talent, and pretty offended by commoners feeling they have any rights to inconvenient opinions. Maybe my gran thought her family were just being arrogant.

If you were in the ninety percent, it showed up early. Usually. If you weren't born with a precocious ability to hoist yourself out of your crib and get into really
repulsive
mischief, the next likeliest time for you to begin running amok was in the preteen years, when magic-handling kids are apprenticed for their first serious magic-handling training. When my gran taught me to transmute.

The sane five or ten percent most often have personalities that are uninterested in magic. One of the recommendations, for someone who finds out they're in the high-risk category, is
not
to do magic, even the most inconsequential. My mother would never have let me have all those meetings with my gran if there'd been any chance.…

She might have. My mother makes Attila the Hun look namby-pamby. If she wanted me not to be a bad-magic cross, then I
wouldn't
be, by sheer force of will if necessary. But she might still have wanted to know what she was up against.

I hadn't come home and started knifing old ladies or setting fire to stray dogs.

I was kind of a loner though. A little paranoid about being close to people. A little too interested in the Others.

My mother would have assumed that my gran had tried to teach me magic and that she hadn't been successful. So my mother would have assumed the Blaise magic genes were weak enough in me, or her own compromised heritage had missed me out.

Maybe my mother could be forgiven for being a little overcontrolling. Because she'd never be sure.

Bad-magic crosses don't invariably show up early. Some of our worst and most inventive serial murderers have turned out to be bad-magic crosses, when someone finally caught up with them. Sometimes it turns out something set them off. Like doing magic. Like finding out they could.

And I hadn't done any magic in fifteen years.

No
.

I stopped chewing.

Pat and Jesse assumed I'd thought of all this before. They were assuming that's why I hadn't been able to talk to them. Had been afraid to talk to them. The licensing thing was piffle. They would know that I knew that too. If it was just a question of not being a certified magic handler, hey, I could get my serial number and my license. The bureaucrats would snuffle a little about my not having done it before, but I was a model cinnamon-roll-baker citizen; they'd at least half believe me that I'd never done any magic before, they probably wouldn't even fine me. Licensing was a red herring. Pat wouldn't have turned blue over a question of late magic-handling certification. So I had to be afraid of something else.

I
was
afraid of something else. They'd just guessed wrong about what it was and how I got there.

They were, in fact, offering me a huge gesture of faith. They were telling me that they believed I wasn't a bad cross.

They must really love my cinnamon rolls.

What they didn't know was that I'd rescued a vampire. Which might be read as the polite, subtle version of becoming an axe murderer.

“Have some more scotch,” said Jesse.

And now, of course, they only thought I was dreading telling them about what had happened two months ago.

Okay. Let this dread be for the telling of the story. Nothing else.

The story of how I rescued a vampire.

Which I wasn't going to tell them.

I put my mug down because my hands were beginning to shake. I crossed my arms over my breast and began rocking back and forth in my chair. Pat dragged his chair over next to mine, gently pulled my hands down, held them in his. They were a pale blue now, and not so knobbly. I couldn't see if he still had the sixth fingers.

I said, speaking to Pat's pale blue hands, “I didn't hear them coming.” I spoke in a high, peculiar voice I didn't recognize as my own. “But you don't, do you, when they're vampires.”

There was a growl from Theo—not what you could call a human growl.

It was a creepy, chilling, menacing sound, even knowing that it was made on my behalf. Briefly, hysterically, I wanted to laugh. It occurred to me that maybe I
hadn't
been the one human in the room, a few minutes ago, when I'd felt like a rabbit in headlights.

Jesse let the silence stretch out a little, and then he said softly, “How did you get away?”

…
There was another muddle leaning up against the wall in front of us … someone sitting cross-legged, head bowed, forearms on knees. I didn't realize till it raised its head with a liquid, inhuman motion that it was another vampire.…

I took a deep breath. “They had me shackled to the wall in—in what I guess was the ballroom in—in one of the really big old summer houses. At the lake. I—I was—some kind of prize, I think. They—they came in to look at me a couple of times. Left me food and water. The second day I—transmuted my jackknife into a shackle key.”

“You transmuted
worked metal?”

I took another deep breath. “Yes. No, I shouldn't have been able to. I'd never done anything close. I hadn't done anything at all in fifteen years—since the last time I saw my gran. It almost … it almost didn't occur to me to try.” I shivered and closed my eyes. No: don't close your eyes. I opened my eyes. Pat squeezed my hands. “Hey. It's okay,” he said. “You're here.” I looked at him. He was almost human again.