Sunshine (26 page)

Furthermore, almost nobody wants to read the gormless old fiction about the Others which is my fave. I picked up a copy of
Sordid Enchantments
on the title alone, and the fourth, and most icky and rare, volume of the
Dark Blood
series, which I was no longer sure I wanted to read—the heroine has a choice to die horribly or become a vampire horribly, and she chooses to die. If I'd realized how
gross
it was going to get after the first volume I wouldn't have bothered—but I'm a completist, I had the first three, and hey.

I was feeling pretty good. In spite of last night. Or in an even funnier way, because of it. It was like I had two days out of time. Everything was on hold until … either the vampire-something worked, or it didn't. Jesse and Theo had been at a table under the awning when Aimil and I left Charlie's, and I'd nodded and kept going. I hoped nothing had come up they wanted to talk to me about. Nothing was allowed to come up for the next two days. I was on vacation in my own mind, cinnamon rolls at four
A.M.
or not.

It must have been Paulie's influence, but I was positively humming a tune—an old folk song about keeping a vampire talking till sunrise: not one of your brighter vampires—while I burrowed through a big sagging cardboard box of junk. Chipped china teacups. Dented tin trays. Small splintery wooden boxes with lids that no longer closed. A bottle opener shaped like a dragon with an extremely undershot lower jaw and pink glass eyes.
Pink
. The Dragon Anti-Defamation Society should hear about this.

At the bottom, when I touched it, it fizzled right through me, like I'd put my arm in a cappuccino machine. I knew it had to be some kind of ward—nonwarding charms are kind of
stickier
—but a live ward shouldn't be in the bottom of a box of cheap junk at a garage sale. Maybe it had fallen out of one of the splintery boxes. I hesitated, then picked it up to get a better look. Gingerly. It had now got my attention, so presumably it wouldn't feel the need to scramble my arm like an egg again.

I didn't recognize the style or the design. It was an oval, not quite the length of the palm of my hand, with a slightly raised edge, the whole of it thick and heavy, like an old coin, before the mints got mean and started stamping out pennies that sometimes bent if you dropped them edgewise on a hard floor. It was silver, I thought, or plate; it was so tarnished I couldn't make out clearly what was on it, except that something was. Three somethings: one each on top, middle, and bottom, rather like an old Egyptian glyph. The only thing I could say for sure was that they weren't any of the standard Other-preventive sigils I knew of, nor the all-purpose circle-star-and-cross one.

The most interesting thing was that it was live. Very live. Wards aren't necessarily as master-specific as most charms, and if they aren't actively in use they can molder quietly for a long time and still be capable of being wakened and doing some warding; but even one that's been tuned to you specifically shouldn't leap avidly out at you and wag its tail like a dog wanting to go for a walk.

I could have put it back. I could have taken it to someone in charge and said “You've made a mistake. This one still works.” But I didn't. It seemed to like lying there in my hand. Don't be ridiculous, I thought. It's not responding to me personally.

As a soldier in the dented-tin-tray army they shouldn't be expecting real money for it, but that could only be because they hadn't noticed it was live. It was still worth a try. I took the two books and the tarnished ward to the suspicious-looking character at the card table with the rusty money box, who snatched them out of my hands as if he knew I was trying something on. But he was so preoccupied with whether or not he should sell me
Altar of Darkness
(in which it takes the heroine four hundred pages to die), which was certainly worth more than the seventeen blinks for two, which is what the sign on the drooping book table said, that he barely registered my little glyph. I'd done piously outraged innocence when he started haranguing me about
Altar
and a few of his other customers scowled at him and muttered about fairness. I won that round. So when he looked at the glyph and said “fifty blinks” I sniffed so he would know that I knew he was a brigand and a bandit, and let it pass. He knew more about books. Even a dead ward made out of silver plate was worth more. A blink is a dollar, and has been since after the Wars, when our economy went to pieces, and the average paycheck disappeared in the blink of an eye.

What was more interesting was that he'd touched the glyph and hadn't said “Wow! That was like putting my hand in a cappuccino machine!”

Aimil had been watching my performance with a straight face. “Well done,” she said, when we got back to the car.
“Dark Blood Four
as two for seventeen blinks! Zora will be mad with jealousy. Now what is that little thing?” I was balancing my glyph on the top of the books, and I watched as she picked it up. That Mr. Rusty Money Box hadn't registered anything was one thing; if Aimil didn't register either it was something else.

She didn't say anything about a feeling like having her funny bone hit with a hammer. “Hmm. It's quite—appealing, isn't it? Even all blackened like this.”

“Appealing”? Maybe it had decided that making people's hair stand on end wasn't such a good way of making friends and influencing people. “Can you figure out any of what's on it?”

She frowned, turning it this way and that in the light. “No clue. Maybe after you get it polished.”

D
ESSERT SHIFT THAT
night was notable only for the number of people who wanted cherry tarts. They were catching on. Rats. I didn't really like little electrical gadgets—most of the other so-called home bakeries in town used kneading
machines
, for example, which I thought beneath contempt—but there was no way I was going to be making cherry tarts without one. I'd already said I would only make individual tarts and customers had to order them with the main course to give me enough lead time. And they were
still
catching on. I didn't want cherry tarts to turn into another Death of Marat. When I was first installed in my new bakery and messing around with the heady implications of Charlie's having built it for
me
, I'd been having fun with puddings that look like one thing and you stick a fork in them and they become something else. A Gothic sensibility in the bakery is not necessarily a good thing. I'd made this light fluffy-looking number in a white oval dish with high sides and presented the first one with a flourish to a group of regulars who had volunteered to be experimented on. Aimil was the one with the knife, and she stuck it in and the raspberry-and-black-currant filling had exploded down the side and over the edge of the dish onto the counter. It was, I admit, a trifle dramatic. “Gods, Sunshine, what is this, the Death of Marat?” she said. Aimil reads too much. Everybody at Charlie's that night wanted a taste, and the Death of Marat, the first of Sunshine's soon-to-be-notorious, implausibly named epic creations, was born, although I think most of our clientele thought Marat was some kind of master vampire. (Aimil is good at names. She's responsible for Tweedle Dumplings and Glutton's Grail and Buttermost Limit too.) The problem is that for months after I was getting constant requests for the damn thing, and light, fluffy puddings with heavy fillings are a brute to make. Our long-time regulars still ask for it occasionally, but I'm older and meaner now and say “no” better. I will make it if I like you enough. Maybe.

Well, the cherry season doesn't last long around here; I'd be back to apple pie before Billy'd had time to miss doing the peeling. (Unless I found some other source of cheap child labor I might have to get an electric
peeler
in another year.) It was true that Charlie's did almost everything from scratch and that anything that one of us wasn't good at didn't get done at all, but it was also true that our loyal customers were compelled to be biddable. If I decided I didn't feel like doing cherry tarts outside of fresh cherry season they could like it or eat at Fast Burgers 'R' Us.

When I got home I fished last night's sheets and nightgown out of the tub where they'd been soaking the bloodstains out (just like the Death of Marat without Marat), hauled them downstairs, and stuffed them in the washing machine. If Yolande had noticed the amount of laundry I'd been doing in the last two months she never said anything.

I put
Altar
and
Sordid Enchantments
on one of the hip-high piles of books to read next in the corner of the living room, and got out the silver polish. Not standard equipment in my household: I'd bought some before I came home. The glyph came up beautifully. Except I still couldn't make out the figures.

It was weirdly heavy for plate. And doesn't plate tend to look platy when you've shined it up? Maybe I only knew cheap plate. Even so.

The symbol at the top was round, with snaky and spiky lines woven through it. The symbol at the bottom was narrow at the base and fat at the top. The one in the middle … might conceivably have four legs, which would presumably make it some kind of animal. Right. Two squiggles and an unknown animal.

The top squiggle
could
be a symbol for the sun. The bottom squiggle
could
be a symbol for a tree.

And if it was solid silver—even if the round squiggle wasn't the sun and the fat-on-the-top squiggle wasn't a tree—it was still a shoo-in as an anti-Other ward. None of the Others liked silver.

Whatever it was, looking at it made my spirits lift. For someone under two death threats—plus, I suppose, the incompatible threats of Pat and Jesse's idea of what my future should include, supposing I had a future, because, if I did, I would spend it incarcerated in a small padded room—this was good enough. I put it in the drawer in the little table next to my bed. I slept that night, you should forgive the term, the sleep of the dead.

S
O WHEN THE
alarm went off I was almost ready to get up. The prospect of the night to come started to creep up on me almost immediately, but there were distractions: Mr. Cagney complained that his roll didn't have enough cinnamon filling at seven
A.M.,
Paulie called at seven-fifteen with a head cold, and Kenny dropped a tray of dirty plates at seven-thirty. He'd been doing better since Mel'd had his word, but he'd decided he'd rather do the early hours than the late ones, and this was only going to work if he got home sooner to do his homework sooner to get to bed sooner. Not my problem. Except in terms of Liz spending time helping to clean the floor instead of unloading cookie trays and muffin tins for me.

Pat came in about midmorning and penetrated my floury lair. “Thought you'd like to know—the girl from the other night. She's come round. She doesn't remember a thing from the time the sucker spoke to her to waking up in the hospital the next morning. She doesn't remember the guy
was
a sucker. And she's fine. A little spooked, but fine.” Translation: the only on-the-spot witness doesn't remember what she saw, or at least isn't saying anything. And Jesse and Theo, who were claiming the strike for SOF (you don't
kill
vampires, of course, although most of us civvies use the term; in SOF-speak you
strike
them), were there only seconds after me and before anyone else. Except maybe Mrs. Bialosky.

But it was one of those days when the coffeehouse schedule breaks down, and Charlie and Mel and Mom and I held the pieces together with our teeth. We always have at least one of these days during a seven-day (or thirteen-day, depending on how you're counting) week. Not to mention the prospect of getting up at three-forty-five on Thursday. During a thirteen-day week. My sense of occult oppression tightened anyway, but it had its work cut out for it. I had forty-five minutes off from ten-forty-five to eleven-thirty, between the usual morning baking and the beginning of the lunch rush, and almost an hour off at three-thirty, while a skeleton staff got us through the late-afternoon muffin and scone crowd, before the more gradual dinner swell began—plus two or three tea with elective aspirin breaks. I went home at nine. Anyone who wanted dessert after that could have ginger pound cake or Indian pudding or Chocoholia. It wasn't a night for individual fruit tarts.

Fortunately I was tired enough to sleep. Before I'd found out I was going to be working all day I had thought I wouldn't sleep at all; by the time I got home I knew I'd sleep, but assumed I'd get a couple of hours and be awake by midnight, waiting for something to happen.

I'd spent some time considering what I should, you know, wear. This vampire in the bedroom thing was a trifle more intensively perturbing than this vampire around at all thing. Even if the disconcertingness was only happening in my mind. There was a corollary to the story about male suckers being able to keep it up indefinitely: that you had to, er, invite them over that threshold first too. But if they could seduce you into
dying
just by looking at you, then they could probably perform other seductions as well. Okay, this particular vampire had declined to seduce me to death when he could have. This was a good omen as far as it went.

I reminded myself that the sound of his laughter made me want to throw up, and that in sunlight he looked … well, dead. Let's get real here. I couldn't possibly be
interested
in …

I involuntarily remembered that sense of
vampire in the room
. It wasn't like the pheromone haze when your eyes lock with someone else's across a room, crowded or otherwise, and
wham
. It really was not at all like that. But it was more like that than anything else I could think of. It probably had something to do with the peak-experience business: with a vampire in the room you are sitting there expecting to die. Sex and death, right? Peak experiences. And since I didn't go in for any of the standard neck-risking pastimes I didn't have a lot of practical knowledge of the hormone rush you get when you may be about to snuff it. Perhaps someone who loved free-fall parachuting or shark wrestling would find vampires in the room less troubling.