Like a Whisper, She Was Gone.
From here.
Sunshine burst into tears. Con was up from his chair, across the office and kneeling by her side in the bare minimum of time it would take a human do so. She could feel her affinity slam into the shoulder his hand rested upon - whirl through his hand and up his arm, across, down to the other hand where her sunlight-knife would be hidden, the knife that burned him when he touched it.
The others in the office stood around looking stuffed - the Goddess of Pain and her minions benefited from the fact that senses of compassion, sympathy and decency were not pre-requisites for fighting ruthlessly for the continued dominance of the human race.
When Rae's tears slowed, Con held up the hand with her knife resting in its unburned palm. "Miss Seddon, you will have to keep my knife a little longer - I'm afraid tonight's events have robbed me of my pockets."
The automatic curiosity that answered him (Do vampires even have pockets?) made her give him a watery smile.
----
They were being let go, though Sunshine's tear-streaked but respectful assurances of future compliance were as sincere as the Goddess' sympathetic noises and grimaces. Sunshine just wanted to get away from there - to get home, and take a bath. Numerous baths. She and Con were still wearing the remains of the clothes they had been wearing the night before, through all the blood and darkness. They hung as rags in places, thick and stiff with dried blood. What blood had dried on their skin had begun to crackle and slough off. As they left SOF headquarters, Con's arm around Sunshine (presumably to keep her steady, more accurately to keep the skin contact that kept him undiscovered and unburned), Rae held her poor, defiled hands up to the light of the rising sun, as though twenty extra inches of extended arm would make a big difference in sunlight's curative properties. Whether it was the weakness of the November sun, the dark blood shielding her skin, or something within them that kept her affinity from reaching that which plagued her, Rae didn't know.
Pat drove them home. He would have loved to split them up into separate cars. Rae recognized this desire for the dominance display it was - she had seen them, sometimes, when gangs of bikers came by the coffeehouse or to one of the bars where she and Mel were. Shoving-matches, stare-downs, so everyone knew their place. Pat wanted to put Con in his place, and thereby find out what that place was. He wanted this as Sunshine's self-appointed semi-protector and semi-exploiter; he wanted this as a business-like SOF, and he wanted this as her friend. He also wanted this as a friend of Mel's, who he at least knew was human. Sunshine could always feel Mel not responding to such challenges, but she got no such feeling from Con. Though presumably vampires also had their shoving matches - they had just survived a prime example of one, after all.
Rae used her spare house-key from under the potted herbs - opening the door to her apartment and letting them in. She found the rooms still filled with the dozens of roses she had bought and placed everywhere in the apartment, two days and a century ago. She had forgotten. It seemed like another life. Another world - the human world. Roses. Cinnamon rolls. She was supposed to be dead.
She would have to go to work tomorrow. Rae looked down at her hands, still half-expecting them to turn on her and try to tear her own throat out. These hands earned their living making human food - there wasn't much that was more nakedly hands-on than kneading dough.
Con was left in the middle of the room, in the rose-scented shadows of early morning, while Rae went out to the balcony. The ward wrapped around the railing had a ragged hole burnt through it, presumably from when they'd walked through it into Other-space the night before. Rae lifted her ruined hands as though they were things she were carrying, not as though they were part of her, and rested them on the railing. On their backs, fingers slightly curled, they looked dead.
"There is nothing wrong with your hands," Con said from the shadows behind her. Rae couldn't answer - she shook her head.
"Tell me," he said.
"I had to... touch him," she said, low, knowing he'd hear her. "I tried not to, but he was too strong. He was winning. I put my hands into... I touched him. Bo."
Saying it was like torture. As she spoke, everything else she was resolutely not remembering came flooding back. She felt herself beginning to fragment again - she had known what she was doing, facing the Goddess. Now, with no immediate threat to organize herself around - she shivered, even in daylight. She knew that thin autumn sunlight wouldn't be able to heal what had been done to her hands.
"Sunshine," said Con, gently, "He had no power to hurt you physically. He had had no such power for many years. His strength was in his will and in the physical strength of those he controlled by his will. If his creatures had not hurt you, he could not."
She could feel her throat closing on the words that she wanted to say, sick bile twisting her stomach. She wanted to say - But he did hurt me, Con. His creatures did hurt me - they taught me what I could do, what I was capable of. I could never had done what I did to Bo, if I had not already done it to his followers. All she managed to get out was, "He almost killed me!"
It seemed feeble, an unendurably anticlimactic way of describing what had happened. Merely dying... that was nothing. Maybe she had been hanging out with vampires too much.
"Yes," Con answered, calmly. "By sheer force of evil. Only that."
"Only that," Rae said, her throat tight. "Only that."
"Yes."
Sunshine looked over her shoulder to look at him, leaving her hands lying awkwardly where they were. 'Mr. Conner' of the Goddess' office was gone; her Constantine was back. There was a vampire in the room, but that was all right. He was ragged and filthy, and looked tired, like a human might look tired - her vampire looked tired.
Sunshine turned and went back to the shadows to Con. Automatically, she reached out to touch him, but something twisted in her and she pulled her treacherous hands away at the last moment.
Very calmly, Con took her hands by the wrists and lifted them - he kissed the back of each fist, turned them over and waited, patiently, until the fingers relaxed, and kissed each palm. It felt less like a kiss to Sunshine, more like a doctor applying a salve, or a priest last rites. "Sunshine," he said. "There is nothing wrong with your hands. The touch of evil poisons by the idea of it. Reject the idea and you have rejected the evil."
Rae was being lectured in morality by a vampire - she wanted to laugh, but couldn't. Con was wrong. She would have been able to laugh if he had been right. "My hands feel... they've been changed. They- they don't belong to me any more. They're just attached. They feel as though... they've become... may be... evil."
"Bo's evil was a very powerful idea."
"I thought I was coming to pieces. I'm not sure I'm not. My hands are just... two fragments of what is left of me." Two ruined fragments.
"Yes."
"How do you know?" she said, quietly. Sunshine waited for him to drop her hands and move away from her. He was only still with her because the sun trapped him here until sunset.
But he didn't move away. "I see it in your eyes."
Rae gaped at him in surprise, "What-"
"I cannot read your secrets," he interrupted, his green, too-green eyes holding her gaze. "But I can read your fears. My kind are adept at reading fear, and you look into my eyes as no other human has."
She looked away. War and Peace, her fears. The complete globenet directory, her fears. She hoped he was a speed reader.
Con put a finger under her chin, with gentle pressure, "Look at me."
She let him lift her chin. He could break her neck if he wanted to - this way, hey, he didn't have to.
"You are not afraid of everything," he said, calmly.
"Nearly," she protested, "I'm afraid of you. I'm afraid of me."
"Yes," he said.
There was a curious comfort in that 'yes.' The splinters that her peace of mind (if not, perhaps, her sanity) had been smashed into were sending little scouting filaments across the gaps, looking for other pieces. They'd start winding themselves together again, knitting themselves back into rows. There would be some scars and lumps and some pretty weird holes, and the final texture of the weave was going to change, but Sunshine had never done uniformity and consistency. Even her cinnamon rolls tended to have individual personality. She could probably cope with a few more wodgy bits in her own makeup.
Maybe her medulla oblongata was refusing to take any shit from her cerebrum again. Shut up and get on with the reconstruction. If you can't find the right piece, use the wrong one.
She stood in shadow, but there was sunlight on her back - warm, like the touch of a friend. Something was struggling out of the murk of her still-reeling mind, trying to make her think it: if good is going to triumph over evil, good has to stay sane.
It was ridiculous - Sunshine was still focusing on breathing. And fighting for "good" was the professional jurisdiction of square-jawed hulking Anglo-Saxons with swords, with any vestigial senses of humor surgically removed years before being accepted to Hero School.
But... that was kind of where she'd ended up, wasn't it? Even if she'd missed out on the jaw and the training. Because she was definitely against evil, in her lumpy, erratic way. And she knew what she was talking about, now, because she'd met evil.
And she'd touched it.
She was going to have to remember that she'd touched it, that her hand had sunk into it, grasped, and pulled...
But the anti-evil guys had to stay sane. Lumpy and holey, maybe, but sane. Bo was gone - she wasn't going to let him get the last word now.
Rae stood there, still gazing into the greenness of Con's eyes, for the space of three of her heartbeats. Then, she said, "I'm going to run a bath. Flip you for who goes first."
"Flip?"
Sunshine almost laughed. Vampires. They know nothing.
-------
She was almost sorry to win, so she limited herself to one bath. She just made it count. Perhaps she scrubbed her hands more raw than specifically necessary for an idea, but at least her hands felt like hands while she was doing it.
The wound on her breast hadn't reopened. She kept rubbing soap over her front, as though she had mislaid it somehow. The scar was there as it had been before - perhaps it looked a bit wider, shinier, than it had the day after Con had healed it, but it was only a scar.
She also found that her opalescent golden chain was gone. Instead, there was a new scar, dipping over the old one on her breast, in the shape of the chain that had looped her neck. Together they almost had the look of a rune, but if it were one, Sunshine couldn't read it.
But there was no sign of the golden web of light set into her skin, no matter how hard she scrubbed.
Rae was alone in the bathroom, and that was when the thoughts she was trying to push away came forcing their way back. What had she been saying about going on fighting for the forces of good in that mad little moment right after Con had said something comforting? Going on doing anything like what she'd been doing these last five months - culminating horribly in what she had done last night - was approximately the last thing she wanted. Especially if it meant bearing the knowledge of what she'd done.
Going on doing it would mean bearing more of doing horrible things and more of knowing what sorts of things she'd done.
But Pat had said they had less than a hundred years left. Humans. No, she corrected herself. Not us humans. Us on the right side. And there aren't enough of us.
Irony upon irony - if she did go on doing the heavy magic-handling fight, she was likely to be around in a hundred years.
------
While Con was in the bath, Rae began making breakfast. He joined her in the kitchen, afterward, wearing her spare robe. The clothes Rae had worn the night before were in the trash. The clothes Con had worn had been washed, and were drying in the sunlight out on the balcony railing. Rae looked up when he came in, holding a frying pan with three beautifully fried eggs in it. Then it hit her - "I can't even feed you." She heard what she was saying - and what she was saying it to - the moment after the words came out, but Con's gaze didn't falter.
"I do not eat often - I do not need food."
Rae shook her head. If she'd narrowly avoided mental breakdown as a result of facing ancient all-consuming evil, she wouldn't let herself lose it over giving a vampire breakfast. It was ridiculous, but she could feel tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. "I can't eat in front of you. It's so... I feed people for a living. If I don't, I'm a failure. I identify as a feeder of -"
"People," said con. "I am not a person."
Like she hadn't been having this conversation with herself in the bathroom. "Yes, you are," she said, firmly. "You're just not human."
"Your food grows cold. It's better hot, yes?"
Sunshine shook her head, mutinously. Though he was right - it would be a sin to waste such ravishing eggs.
After a moment, he relented. "I will drink with you."
"Orange juice? It doesn't count unless there's calories in it."
"Very well."
...
"What does it taste like?" she asked, a few minutes later.
"It tastes like orange juice," he replied at his most enigmatic. Rae smiled slightly as she took another bite of the delicious eggs.
---------
There was no way the two of them would get through the day without sleep, not after the night before. Rae let Con have the bedroom, as it had only a small window with curtains, and all of the living room got touched by full sunlight at some point during the day. Rae lay on the couch, unable to sleep, watching the autumn sunlight lengthen across the floor, reaching to caress her piles of books, embrace her desk, stroke the sofa, and finally draw its fingers kindly across her face.
She was comfortable, and safe - safer than she'd been since before the night she first drove out to the lake, and met Con. Bo was gone. It didn't seem possible. She couldn't take it in without taking in everything else it involved. She had gone in knowing that what they sought to do was impossible, and yet they had done it. Done was a thumping, solid, nail in the coffin sort of word.
And she didn't feel safe at all - she felt as though she were still waiting for something awful to happen. No. She felt as though the thing she most dreaded had already arrived, and it wasn't death after all. It was herself.
She went into her bedroom - but there wasn't a vampire in the bed.
"What are you doing on the floor?"
"I am sorry. I cannot sleep."
"Neither can I. So... you do sleep. I mean, vampires sleep."
"We rest. We become... differently conscious than when we are... awake. It is likely not what you would call sleep."
No, Rae thought, and I bet orange juice doesn't taste like orange juice to you, either.
She sat on the bed. "I - we did it, you know? But I don't feel like we did. I feel like we failed. That everything - that I am - worse not than before."
"I do not think in terms of better or worse. What happened last night has changed us, yes. Inevitably. You have lived - what? One quarter of one century? I have existed many times that. Experience is less to me than it is to you, for I have endured much more of it. Yet last night troubles me too - I can only guess how much more it must trouble you."
She looked down. 'Troubled' didn't seem to do the feeling justice.
"Sunshine. You are not worse." She looked up at him. She was so tired. "I will do anything it is in my power to do for you. Command me."
There was a vampire in the room. A vampire, standing on the far side of her bed, wearing her robe, telling her he'd do anything she asked.
Steady, Sunshine.
She sighed. "I don't want to feel alone. Lie down on the bed, and let me lie down beside you? And put your arms around me. I know... I know you can't do anything about the heartbeat, but I know you can breathe like a human, so... would you?"
He lay down, and she lay down, and he put his arms around her. She thought the lack of heartbeat would bother her more, but... somehow the solidity of him, the fact that her open eyes could see little more than his throat above the collar of the robe, and his jaw above that, felt strangely as though he were protecting her, as if he could protect her from what she had brought back with her.
She slept.
--------
And she dreamed, of course. Again she was fighting to reach Bo. Again she saw Con do things she would rather not see anyone do - again she did things she would rather not have done nor know that she had the capacity to do, even to survive. There are things you cannot live with, with having done.
Again her hands plunged into Bo's chest, grasped his heart, and tore it free. Again she watched it burn. Watched it burn in her grasp, burn with her power.
And again.
And again.
She felt the poison of that contact sink through her skin, burning away the light web. She wept in her sleep, and her tears burned. As Bo burned, she too burned. The tears left runnels of fire down her face, not water. She burned to ash, and blew on the wind in endless directions. Eventually, what little was left of her was blown out of the darkness and into the light, and as the light touched her, she began to take shape again. What had been Rae struggled against this - she was ash and fragments. She was nothing and nobody; she had no self and no responsibilities. She would rather be ash, dry and weightless, without duty or care or memory. Or severed loyalties.
There was a memory. She was sitting on the porch of the cabin by the lake. It was dusk, and the high clouds still had a tinge of pink. She could hear the ping of her car's engine as it cooled behind the cabin. It was a beautiful night.
It was the moment before her death had begun.
She listened for vampires, knew she wouldn't hear them coming - it was too early in the progress of her death for her to hear them.
Instead she heard light, human footsteps rustle the grass. Rae's grandmother walked up the steps to the porch and sat down beside her. She took Rae's hands as she had when Rae was a child, in the magic-game of changing flowers to feathers and back again.
"Constantine is telling the truth," she said, serene but not without sympathy. "There is nothing wrong with your hands. There is nothing wrong with you, except, perhaps, that you came into your strength too quickly, and all alone, which is not how it should happen. If it is any comfort, if it had not happened thus to you, you would not have been able to do what you have done, because you would have known it was impossible. And so you would have died."
"Would that have been so bad?" Rae said, trying to keep her voice level. "Mel would have mourned, and Aimil, and Mom and Charlie and Kenny and Billy... even Pat... but would it have been so bad?"
Her grandmother turned her head to look out at the lake. "I am not the one to answer that, for I am your grandmother, and I love you. But yes, I think it would have been so bad."
"What we can do, we must do," Rae's grandmother continued. "We must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing - a very hard thing - or you would not have to ask if your failure and early death would be so bad a thing to happen instead. But my dear, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?"
"Which difficult things?" Rae said, bitterly. "Right now it feels as if they're all difficult things."
"Yes," she replied, and there was sadness in her voice. "There are many, and they have been almost too much for you. Remember what Constantine told you - that he too is shaken, for all that he is older and stronger than you are."
"Con is a vampire," Rae said. "he's one of the difficult things."
"Yes," she said. "I'm sorry."
Rae sat with her, her poor hands warmed by her grandmother's holding them. She didn't tell Rae everything was all right, that she would be better soon, that it would all go away...
Rae said at last, surprising even herself - "I would be sorry never to see the sun again. I would be sorry... never to make cinnamon rolls again, or brownies, or muffins... or Sunshine's Eschatology. I would be sorry never to work twenty hours straight on a hot day in August and tear my apron off at midnight and swear I was going to get a job in a factory, where conditions were more reasonable. I would be sorry never to leave my stomach behind when Mel opens the throttle on this week's rehab project. I would be sorry never to tell Mom to mind her own damn business again, never to have Charlie wander into the baker and ask me if everything is okay when I'm in rabid-bitch mode... I'd be sorry not to make it to Kenny and Billy's high school graduations, supposing either of them manages to graduate. I would be sorry never to reread Child of Phantoms again, never to argue with Aimil about Le Fanu and M.R. James, never to lie in Yolande's garden at high summer..."
It was coming out in a rush, and there were tears falling on her hands, cool against their fevered warmth.
She almost didn't say it. She whispered: "I would be sorry never to see Con again. Even if he is one of the difficult things."
Rae awoke with tears on her face and Con's hair in her eyes. Night had fallen.
"It's dark out," she said, and sat up. Con did the same. Rae didn't see him shed the robe or walk out of the room, but suddenly he wasn't there, and the robe was a puddle of fabric on the dark floor. He came back, wearing his own clothes, now clean and dry, and looked at her. She looked back.
"It is over. Last night is over. And Bo is gone forever. But we... we are still bound, you and I," he said. "If you call me, I will come."
"You could also call me," she said, in return.
"Yes."
"But," Rae said, touching the new scar on her neck, the one that looped her neck where the chain had rested. "I have lost the chain you gave me. I couldn't find the way, even if you did call me."
"You have not lost it," he said. "The necklet is still there."
"Oh." Well, she supposed if a pocketknife could be transmuted into a key, a chain could be transmuted into a scar. Carefully, she said: "I would not want to call you if you did not want to come."
A pause. "I would want to come."
"Oh," she said again.
Another pause.
"Would I need to be in danger of dying?" she asked, carefully.
"No," he said, turning his head to look out the window, as though longing to be gone.
Rae took a deep breath and thought of cinnamon rolls, and Mel, and trying to help save the world in less than a hundred years. "I'm sorry. I'm trying to turn this into some kind of human goodbye thing. You're free to go."
"I am not human," he replied. "I am not free."
"I am not some kind of trap - or jail cell!" Rae said, angrily. "I am not a rope around your neck or a shackle around your ankle! So - so GO."
Perhaps it was her anger. She thought she heard the rustle of leaves.
Con's reply was as calm as ever. "When do you go again, to feed humans?"
"What? Um..." Rae was caught off guard. "It's around ten, so... in about six hours."
Slowly, as though he were an archaeologist deciphering a fragment of a long-dead language, he said, "You could come with me. Tonight. I would return you here in time for your leaving to go to the preparation of cinnamon rolls. If you... are sufficiently rested. If you... wished to come."
"Aren't you... hungry?"
Another pause. Long enough for her to wonder if she'd imagined his offer.
"I am hungry," he said, "but I am not so hungry that I cannot wait six hours."
Rae thought about how horribly difficult tomorrow was going to be. Thought of all the stories she was going to have to tell - all the truth she was going to have to not tell. Thought of lying to Charlie, to Mel, to Mom, to Mrs. Bialosky and Maud. To Aimil, even to Yolande. I thought about facing Pat again, having to talk to the Goddess again, when the disappearance of Mr. Conner, whose address would turn out to be false, would come to light. I thought of how much easier all these things would be if Con vanished into the night, now, forever. They wouldn't be easy, still - nothing was ever going to be completely easy again, after last night. But almost everything would be easier, if Con just went away.
"I would rather bear you company for a few more hours than slake my hunger," Con said, quietly.
Rae didn't make up her mind. She heard herself say, "I'll get dressed."
Her closet was a mess. She had to dig around for clothes that were suitable. For a moment, she gazed at her hands sorting laundry in the darkness. The hands had touched Bo and held his heart while it burned and melted and ran down her wrists and dripped sizzling into the floor. She could see them clearly, because she would see in the dark, and they didn't look wrong or strange or corrupt - they looked like hands. Deep in the closet- where were those damn jeans? - where it was really very dark, Rae thought she was the faintest glimmer of golden light on the backs of her hands and forearms.
This was now her life: Cinnamon rolls, Sunshine's Eschatology, seeing in the dark, charms burned into her flesh where she could not lose them. A special relationship with the Special Other Forces, where not everyone was on the same side. A landlady who's a wardskeeper. Untidy closets. Vampires.
Get used to it, Sunshine.
She came out of the closet wearing black jeans and a charcoal grey t-shirt. And red sneakers.
Con held out his hand. "Come then," he said.
Sunshine went with him into the night.
Sunshine burst into tears. Con was up from his chair, across the office and kneeling by her side in the bare minimum of time it would take a human do so. She could feel her affinity slam into the shoulder his hand rested upon - whirl through his hand and up his arm, across, down to the other hand where her sunlight-knife would be hidden, the knife that burned him when he touched it.
The others in the office stood around looking stuffed - the Goddess of Pain and her minions benefited from the fact that senses of compassion, sympathy and decency were not pre-requisites for fighting ruthlessly for the continued dominance of the human race.
When Rae's tears slowed, Con held up the hand with her knife resting in its unburned palm. "Miss Seddon, you will have to keep my knife a little longer - I'm afraid tonight's events have robbed me of my pockets."
The automatic curiosity that answered him (Do vampires even have pockets?) made her give him a watery smile.
----
They were being let go, though Sunshine's tear-streaked but respectful assurances of future compliance were as sincere as the Goddess' sympathetic noises and grimaces. Sunshine just wanted to get away from there - to get home, and take a bath. Numerous baths. She and Con were still wearing the remains of the clothes they had been wearing the night before, through all the blood and darkness. They hung as rags in places, thick and stiff with dried blood. What blood had dried on their skin had begun to crackle and slough off. As they left SOF headquarters, Con's arm around Sunshine (presumably to keep her steady, more accurately to keep the skin contact that kept him undiscovered and unburned), Rae held her poor, defiled hands up to the light of the rising sun, as though twenty extra inches of extended arm would make a big difference in sunlight's curative properties. Whether it was the weakness of the November sun, the dark blood shielding her skin, or something within them that kept her affinity from reaching that which plagued her, Rae didn't know.
Pat drove them home. He would have loved to split them up into separate cars. Rae recognized this desire for the dominance display it was - she had seen them, sometimes, when gangs of bikers came by the coffeehouse or to one of the bars where she and Mel were. Shoving-matches, stare-downs, so everyone knew their place. Pat wanted to put Con in his place, and thereby find out what that place was. He wanted this as Sunshine's self-appointed semi-protector and semi-exploiter; he wanted this as a business-like SOF, and he wanted this as her friend. He also wanted this as a friend of Mel's, who he at least knew was human. Sunshine could always feel Mel not responding to such challenges, but she got no such feeling from Con. Though presumably vampires also had their shoving matches - they had just survived a prime example of one, after all.
Rae used her spare house-key from under the potted herbs - opening the door to her apartment and letting them in. She found the rooms still filled with the dozens of roses she had bought and placed everywhere in the apartment, two days and a century ago. She had forgotten. It seemed like another life. Another world - the human world. Roses. Cinnamon rolls. She was supposed to be dead.
She would have to go to work tomorrow. Rae looked down at her hands, still half-expecting them to turn on her and try to tear her own throat out. These hands earned their living making human food - there wasn't much that was more nakedly hands-on than kneading dough.
Con was left in the middle of the room, in the rose-scented shadows of early morning, while Rae went out to the balcony. The ward wrapped around the railing had a ragged hole burnt through it, presumably from when they'd walked through it into Other-space the night before. Rae lifted her ruined hands as though they were things she were carrying, not as though they were part of her, and rested them on the railing. On their backs, fingers slightly curled, they looked dead.
"There is nothing wrong with your hands," Con said from the shadows behind her. Rae couldn't answer - she shook her head.
"Tell me," he said.
"I had to... touch him," she said, low, knowing he'd hear her. "I tried not to, but he was too strong. He was winning. I put my hands into... I touched him. Bo."
Saying it was like torture. As she spoke, everything else she was resolutely not remembering came flooding back. She felt herself beginning to fragment again - she had known what she was doing, facing the Goddess. Now, with no immediate threat to organize herself around - she shivered, even in daylight. She knew that thin autumn sunlight wouldn't be able to heal what had been done to her hands.
"Sunshine," said Con, gently, "He had no power to hurt you physically. He had had no such power for many years. His strength was in his will and in the physical strength of those he controlled by his will. If his creatures had not hurt you, he could not."
She could feel her throat closing on the words that she wanted to say, sick bile twisting her stomach. She wanted to say - But he did hurt me, Con. His creatures did hurt me - they taught me what I could do, what I was capable of. I could never had done what I did to Bo, if I had not already done it to his followers. All she managed to get out was, "He almost killed me!"
It seemed feeble, an unendurably anticlimactic way of describing what had happened. Merely dying... that was nothing. Maybe she had been hanging out with vampires too much.
"Yes," Con answered, calmly. "By sheer force of evil. Only that."
"Only that," Rae said, her throat tight. "Only that."
"Yes."
Sunshine looked over her shoulder to look at him, leaving her hands lying awkwardly where they were. 'Mr. Conner' of the Goddess' office was gone; her Constantine was back. There was a vampire in the room, but that was all right. He was ragged and filthy, and looked tired, like a human might look tired - her vampire looked tired.
Sunshine turned and went back to the shadows to Con. Automatically, she reached out to touch him, but something twisted in her and she pulled her treacherous hands away at the last moment.
Very calmly, Con took her hands by the wrists and lifted them - he kissed the back of each fist, turned them over and waited, patiently, until the fingers relaxed, and kissed each palm. It felt less like a kiss to Sunshine, more like a doctor applying a salve, or a priest last rites. "Sunshine," he said. "There is nothing wrong with your hands. The touch of evil poisons by the idea of it. Reject the idea and you have rejected the evil."
Rae was being lectured in morality by a vampire - she wanted to laugh, but couldn't. Con was wrong. She would have been able to laugh if he had been right. "My hands feel... they've been changed. They- they don't belong to me any more. They're just attached. They feel as though... they've become... may be... evil."
"Bo's evil was a very powerful idea."
"I thought I was coming to pieces. I'm not sure I'm not. My hands are just... two fragments of what is left of me." Two ruined fragments.
"Yes."
"How do you know?" she said, quietly. Sunshine waited for him to drop her hands and move away from her. He was only still with her because the sun trapped him here until sunset.
But he didn't move away. "I see it in your eyes."
Rae gaped at him in surprise, "What-"
"I cannot read your secrets," he interrupted, his green, too-green eyes holding her gaze. "But I can read your fears. My kind are adept at reading fear, and you look into my eyes as no other human has."
She looked away. War and Peace, her fears. The complete globenet directory, her fears. She hoped he was a speed reader.
Con put a finger under her chin, with gentle pressure, "Look at me."
She let him lift her chin. He could break her neck if he wanted to - this way, hey, he didn't have to.
"You are not afraid of everything," he said, calmly.
"Nearly," she protested, "I'm afraid of you. I'm afraid of me."
"Yes," he said.
There was a curious comfort in that 'yes.' The splinters that her peace of mind (if not, perhaps, her sanity) had been smashed into were sending little scouting filaments across the gaps, looking for other pieces. They'd start winding themselves together again, knitting themselves back into rows. There would be some scars and lumps and some pretty weird holes, and the final texture of the weave was going to change, but Sunshine had never done uniformity and consistency. Even her cinnamon rolls tended to have individual personality. She could probably cope with a few more wodgy bits in her own makeup.
Maybe her medulla oblongata was refusing to take any shit from her cerebrum again. Shut up and get on with the reconstruction. If you can't find the right piece, use the wrong one.
She stood in shadow, but there was sunlight on her back - warm, like the touch of a friend. Something was struggling out of the murk of her still-reeling mind, trying to make her think it: if good is going to triumph over evil, good has to stay sane.
It was ridiculous - Sunshine was still focusing on breathing. And fighting for "good" was the professional jurisdiction of square-jawed hulking Anglo-Saxons with swords, with any vestigial senses of humor surgically removed years before being accepted to Hero School.
But... that was kind of where she'd ended up, wasn't it? Even if she'd missed out on the jaw and the training. Because she was definitely against evil, in her lumpy, erratic way. And she knew what she was talking about, now, because she'd met evil.
And she'd touched it.
She was going to have to remember that she'd touched it, that her hand had sunk into it, grasped, and pulled...
But the anti-evil guys had to stay sane. Lumpy and holey, maybe, but sane. Bo was gone - she wasn't going to let him get the last word now.
Rae stood there, still gazing into the greenness of Con's eyes, for the space of three of her heartbeats. Then, she said, "I'm going to run a bath. Flip you for who goes first."
"Flip?"
Sunshine almost laughed. Vampires. They know nothing.
-------
She was almost sorry to win, so she limited herself to one bath. She just made it count. Perhaps she scrubbed her hands more raw than specifically necessary for an idea, but at least her hands felt like hands while she was doing it.
The wound on her breast hadn't reopened. She kept rubbing soap over her front, as though she had mislaid it somehow. The scar was there as it had been before - perhaps it looked a bit wider, shinier, than it had the day after Con had healed it, but it was only a scar.
She also found that her opalescent golden chain was gone. Instead, there was a new scar, dipping over the old one on her breast, in the shape of the chain that had looped her neck. Together they almost had the look of a rune, but if it were one, Sunshine couldn't read it.
But there was no sign of the golden web of light set into her skin, no matter how hard she scrubbed.
Rae was alone in the bathroom, and that was when the thoughts she was trying to push away came forcing their way back. What had she been saying about going on fighting for the forces of good in that mad little moment right after Con had said something comforting? Going on doing anything like what she'd been doing these last five months - culminating horribly in what she had done last night - was approximately the last thing she wanted. Especially if it meant bearing the knowledge of what she'd done.
Going on doing it would mean bearing more of doing horrible things and more of knowing what sorts of things she'd done.
But Pat had said they had less than a hundred years left. Humans. No, she corrected herself. Not us humans. Us on the right side. And there aren't enough of us.
Irony upon irony - if she did go on doing the heavy magic-handling fight, she was likely to be around in a hundred years.
------
While Con was in the bath, Rae began making breakfast. He joined her in the kitchen, afterward, wearing her spare robe. The clothes Rae had worn the night before were in the trash. The clothes Con had worn had been washed, and were drying in the sunlight out on the balcony railing. Rae looked up when he came in, holding a frying pan with three beautifully fried eggs in it. Then it hit her - "I can't even feed you." She heard what she was saying - and what she was saying it to - the moment after the words came out, but Con's gaze didn't falter.
"I do not eat often - I do not need food."
Rae shook her head. If she'd narrowly avoided mental breakdown as a result of facing ancient all-consuming evil, she wouldn't let herself lose it over giving a vampire breakfast. It was ridiculous, but she could feel tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. "I can't eat in front of you. It's so... I feed people for a living. If I don't, I'm a failure. I identify as a feeder of -"
"People," said con. "I am not a person."
Like she hadn't been having this conversation with herself in the bathroom. "Yes, you are," she said, firmly. "You're just not human."
"Your food grows cold. It's better hot, yes?"
Sunshine shook her head, mutinously. Though he was right - it would be a sin to waste such ravishing eggs.
After a moment, he relented. "I will drink with you."
"Orange juice? It doesn't count unless there's calories in it."
"Very well."
...
"What does it taste like?" she asked, a few minutes later.
"It tastes like orange juice," he replied at his most enigmatic. Rae smiled slightly as she took another bite of the delicious eggs.
---------
There was no way the two of them would get through the day without sleep, not after the night before. Rae let Con have the bedroom, as it had only a small window with curtains, and all of the living room got touched by full sunlight at some point during the day. Rae lay on the couch, unable to sleep, watching the autumn sunlight lengthen across the floor, reaching to caress her piles of books, embrace her desk, stroke the sofa, and finally draw its fingers kindly across her face.
She was comfortable, and safe - safer than she'd been since before the night she first drove out to the lake, and met Con. Bo was gone. It didn't seem possible. She couldn't take it in without taking in everything else it involved. She had gone in knowing that what they sought to do was impossible, and yet they had done it. Done was a thumping, solid, nail in the coffin sort of word.
And she didn't feel safe at all - she felt as though she were still waiting for something awful to happen. No. She felt as though the thing she most dreaded had already arrived, and it wasn't death after all. It was herself.
She went into her bedroom - but there wasn't a vampire in the bed.
"What are you doing on the floor?"
"I am sorry. I cannot sleep."
"Neither can I. So... you do sleep. I mean, vampires sleep."
"We rest. We become... differently conscious than when we are... awake. It is likely not what you would call sleep."
No, Rae thought, and I bet orange juice doesn't taste like orange juice to you, either.
She sat on the bed. "I - we did it, you know? But I don't feel like we did. I feel like we failed. That everything - that I am - worse not than before."
"I do not think in terms of better or worse. What happened last night has changed us, yes. Inevitably. You have lived - what? One quarter of one century? I have existed many times that. Experience is less to me than it is to you, for I have endured much more of it. Yet last night troubles me too - I can only guess how much more it must trouble you."
She looked down. 'Troubled' didn't seem to do the feeling justice.
"Sunshine. You are not worse." She looked up at him. She was so tired. "I will do anything it is in my power to do for you. Command me."
There was a vampire in the room. A vampire, standing on the far side of her bed, wearing her robe, telling her he'd do anything she asked.
Steady, Sunshine.
She sighed. "I don't want to feel alone. Lie down on the bed, and let me lie down beside you? And put your arms around me. I know... I know you can't do anything about the heartbeat, but I know you can breathe like a human, so... would you?"
He lay down, and she lay down, and he put his arms around her. She thought the lack of heartbeat would bother her more, but... somehow the solidity of him, the fact that her open eyes could see little more than his throat above the collar of the robe, and his jaw above that, felt strangely as though he were protecting her, as if he could protect her from what she had brought back with her.
She slept.
--------
And she dreamed, of course. Again she was fighting to reach Bo. Again she saw Con do things she would rather not see anyone do - again she did things she would rather not have done nor know that she had the capacity to do, even to survive. There are things you cannot live with, with having done.
Again her hands plunged into Bo's chest, grasped his heart, and tore it free. Again she watched it burn. Watched it burn in her grasp, burn with her power.
And again.
And again.
She felt the poison of that contact sink through her skin, burning away the light web. She wept in her sleep, and her tears burned. As Bo burned, she too burned. The tears left runnels of fire down her face, not water. She burned to ash, and blew on the wind in endless directions. Eventually, what little was left of her was blown out of the darkness and into the light, and as the light touched her, she began to take shape again. What had been Rae struggled against this - she was ash and fragments. She was nothing and nobody; she had no self and no responsibilities. She would rather be ash, dry and weightless, without duty or care or memory. Or severed loyalties.
There was a memory. She was sitting on the porch of the cabin by the lake. It was dusk, and the high clouds still had a tinge of pink. She could hear the ping of her car's engine as it cooled behind the cabin. It was a beautiful night.
It was the moment before her death had begun.
She listened for vampires, knew she wouldn't hear them coming - it was too early in the progress of her death for her to hear them.
Instead she heard light, human footsteps rustle the grass. Rae's grandmother walked up the steps to the porch and sat down beside her. She took Rae's hands as she had when Rae was a child, in the magic-game of changing flowers to feathers and back again.
"Constantine is telling the truth," she said, serene but not without sympathy. "There is nothing wrong with your hands. There is nothing wrong with you, except, perhaps, that you came into your strength too quickly, and all alone, which is not how it should happen. If it is any comfort, if it had not happened thus to you, you would not have been able to do what you have done, because you would have known it was impossible. And so you would have died."
"Would that have been so bad?" Rae said, trying to keep her voice level. "Mel would have mourned, and Aimil, and Mom and Charlie and Kenny and Billy... even Pat... but would it have been so bad?"
Her grandmother turned her head to look out at the lake. "I am not the one to answer that, for I am your grandmother, and I love you. But yes, I think it would have been so bad."
"What we can do, we must do," Rae's grandmother continued. "We must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing - a very hard thing - or you would not have to ask if your failure and early death would be so bad a thing to happen instead. But my dear, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?"
"Which difficult things?" Rae said, bitterly. "Right now it feels as if they're all difficult things."
"Yes," she replied, and there was sadness in her voice. "There are many, and they have been almost too much for you. Remember what Constantine told you - that he too is shaken, for all that he is older and stronger than you are."
"Con is a vampire," Rae said. "he's one of the difficult things."
"Yes," she said. "I'm sorry."
Rae sat with her, her poor hands warmed by her grandmother's holding them. She didn't tell Rae everything was all right, that she would be better soon, that it would all go away...
Rae said at last, surprising even herself - "I would be sorry never to see the sun again. I would be sorry... never to make cinnamon rolls again, or brownies, or muffins... or Sunshine's Eschatology. I would be sorry never to work twenty hours straight on a hot day in August and tear my apron off at midnight and swear I was going to get a job in a factory, where conditions were more reasonable. I would be sorry never to leave my stomach behind when Mel opens the throttle on this week's rehab project. I would be sorry never to tell Mom to mind her own damn business again, never to have Charlie wander into the baker and ask me if everything is okay when I'm in rabid-bitch mode... I'd be sorry not to make it to Kenny and Billy's high school graduations, supposing either of them manages to graduate. I would be sorry never to reread Child of Phantoms again, never to argue with Aimil about Le Fanu and M.R. James, never to lie in Yolande's garden at high summer..."
It was coming out in a rush, and there were tears falling on her hands, cool against their fevered warmth.
She almost didn't say it. She whispered: "I would be sorry never to see Con again. Even if he is one of the difficult things."
Rae awoke with tears on her face and Con's hair in her eyes. Night had fallen.
"It's dark out," she said, and sat up. Con did the same. Rae didn't see him shed the robe or walk out of the room, but suddenly he wasn't there, and the robe was a puddle of fabric on the dark floor. He came back, wearing his own clothes, now clean and dry, and looked at her. She looked back.
"It is over. Last night is over. And Bo is gone forever. But we... we are still bound, you and I," he said. "If you call me, I will come."
"You could also call me," she said, in return.
"Yes."
"But," Rae said, touching the new scar on her neck, the one that looped her neck where the chain had rested. "I have lost the chain you gave me. I couldn't find the way, even if you did call me."
"You have not lost it," he said. "The necklet is still there."
"Oh." Well, she supposed if a pocketknife could be transmuted into a key, a chain could be transmuted into a scar. Carefully, she said: "I would not want to call you if you did not want to come."
A pause. "I would want to come."
"Oh," she said again.
Another pause.
"Would I need to be in danger of dying?" she asked, carefully.
"No," he said, turning his head to look out the window, as though longing to be gone.
Rae took a deep breath and thought of cinnamon rolls, and Mel, and trying to help save the world in less than a hundred years. "I'm sorry. I'm trying to turn this into some kind of human goodbye thing. You're free to go."
"I am not human," he replied. "I am not free."
"I am not some kind of trap - or jail cell!" Rae said, angrily. "I am not a rope around your neck or a shackle around your ankle! So - so GO."
Perhaps it was her anger. She thought she heard the rustle of leaves.
Con's reply was as calm as ever. "When do you go again, to feed humans?"
"What? Um..." Rae was caught off guard. "It's around ten, so... in about six hours."
Slowly, as though he were an archaeologist deciphering a fragment of a long-dead language, he said, "You could come with me. Tonight. I would return you here in time for your leaving to go to the preparation of cinnamon rolls. If you... are sufficiently rested. If you... wished to come."
"Aren't you... hungry?"
Another pause. Long enough for her to wonder if she'd imagined his offer.
"I am hungry," he said, "but I am not so hungry that I cannot wait six hours."
Rae thought about how horribly difficult tomorrow was going to be. Thought of all the stories she was going to have to tell - all the truth she was going to have to not tell. Thought of lying to Charlie, to Mel, to Mom, to Mrs. Bialosky and Maud. To Aimil, even to Yolande. I thought about facing Pat again, having to talk to the Goddess again, when the disappearance of Mr. Conner, whose address would turn out to be false, would come to light. I thought of how much easier all these things would be if Con vanished into the night, now, forever. They wouldn't be easy, still - nothing was ever going to be completely easy again, after last night. But almost everything would be easier, if Con just went away.
"I would rather bear you company for a few more hours than slake my hunger," Con said, quietly.
Rae didn't make up her mind. She heard herself say, "I'll get dressed."
Her closet was a mess. She had to dig around for clothes that were suitable. For a moment, she gazed at her hands sorting laundry in the darkness. The hands had touched Bo and held his heart while it burned and melted and ran down her wrists and dripped sizzling into the floor. She could see them clearly, because she would see in the dark, and they didn't look wrong or strange or corrupt - they looked like hands. Deep in the closet- where were those damn jeans? - where it was really very dark, Rae thought she was the faintest glimmer of golden light on the backs of her hands and forearms.
This was now her life: Cinnamon rolls, Sunshine's Eschatology, seeing in the dark, charms burned into her flesh where she could not lose them. A special relationship with the Special Other Forces, where not everyone was on the same side. A landlady who's a wardskeeper. Untidy closets. Vampires.
Get used to it, Sunshine.
She came out of the closet wearing black jeans and a charcoal grey t-shirt. And red sneakers.
Con held out his hand. "Come then," he said.
Sunshine went with him into the night.