Robin McKinley - Sunshine

“When do you again make—cinnamon rolls?”

Gaping at him was getting to be a bad habit. So was saying, What? I gaped at him. I said, “ What? ”

Patiently he repeated, “When do you go again to your work of feeding humans?”

“Er—tomorrow morning, I guess. What time is it?”

“It will be midnight in two hours.”

“Six hours then. I leave here a little after four.”

Slowly, as if 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.”

What does a vampire actually do at night? Go for long invigorating walks? Research the habits of badgers and owls and—er—I wasn’t very up on my nocturnal wildlife. “Aren’t you—er—hungry?”

Another pause. Time enough for me to decide I’d imagined what he’d just said.

“I am hungry,” he said. “I am not so hungry that I cannot wait six hours.”

I thought of how totally, horribly difficult tomorrow was going to be. I thought of all the stories I was going to have to tell. I thought of all the truth I was going to have to not tell. I thought of lying to Charlie, to Mel, to Mom. To Mrs. Bialosky and Maud. To Aimil, even to Yolande. I thought of facing Pat again. I thought of having to talk to the goddess again—among other things about the disappearance of Mr. Connor, whose address would turn out to be false. I thought of how much easier all these things would be if Con vanished into the night, now, forever. They wouldn’t be easy—nothing was ever going to be completely easy again, after last night. And I hated lying. I had been lying so much lately.

Almost everything would be easier, if Con went away forever.

Con said, “I would rather bear you company a few more hours than slake my hunger.”

I didn’t make up my mind. I heard my voice say, “I’ll get dressed.” I turned—like a walking statue, a badly made puppet—and went to the closet. I managed to turn the knob and open the door before my brain caught up with me. By that time the decision had already been made.

Since my living room closet was now full of com gear, my bedroom closet was impassable. Where, or for that matter when, had I last seen my black jeans? As I say, I don’t do black, and my wardrobe isn’t based on the concept of dematerializing into the shadows. “This may take a minute,” I said. I hoped I didn’t sound like I was begging.

“I will not leave without you,” he said.

His voice was still expressionless, and I could not see him now, as I was, on my knees on the floor of my closet, fumbling through a pile of laundry that might have stayed folded if it had had a shelf to go on, but it didn’t and it hadn’t. Maybe it was because I was thinking about self-unfolding laundry that made it so easy to hear that he was telling the truth. I will not leave without you . I looked at my hands, the hands that had touched Bo and held his heart while it melted and ran stinking down my wrists and dripped sizzling to the disintegrating floor, and which were now efficiently sorting wrinkled laundry. I saw my hands clearly, although it was dark, because I could see in the dark, and they did not look wrong or strange or corrupt to me; they looked like my hands. Deeper in the closet—where were those damned jeans—where it was really very dark, and while I was thinking about jeans, I saw the faintest glimmer of gold on the backs of them, on the backs of my hands, and on my forearms. I had not lost the light-web either.

This was now my life: Cinnamon rolls, Sunshine’s Eschatology, seeing in the dark, charms that burned into my flesh where I could not lose them. A special relationship with the Special Other Forces, where not everybody was on the same side. A landlady who’s a wardskeeper. Untidy closets. Vampires.

Get used to it, Sunshine.

I came out of the closet wearing black jeans and a charcoal gray T-shirt I had always hated. And red sneakers. Hey, red turns gray in the dark faster than any other color.

He held out his hand. “Come then,” he said.

I went with him into the night.