"Mckinley,.Robin.-.Sunshine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

УButЕФ I said, groping for the answer I wanted. Needed. УYou told meЧlong ago. By the lake. You have to ask. You can take noЕblood that is not offered. She has to have said Сyes.Т Ф
After a little while he said: УAnimals do not draw the distinction between life and death that humans do. If an animal is caught, by age, by illness, by some creature stronger than it, and cannot escape, it accepts death.Ф A longer pause. УAlsoЕmy kind were all once human. There perhaps can be no truly clean death between one of your kind and one of mine.Ф
I thought: If that is true, then it works both ways. The death of the giggler at my hands is no cleaner than the death he was offering that girl. I shivered. I felt ConstantineТs hand on the back of my neck.
УI told you last time that Bo and I chose different ways of being what we are. You magic handlers know you risk, with every sending, the recoil. Bo is burdened by many years of the recoil of the torment that provides the savor to his meals. The savor is realЧyes, I too have tasted itЧbut it is not worth the price.У
I was looking across the room, at a corner near the ceiling, where one of the occupied cobwebs hung. I could see the tiny dot that was the folded-up spider at the center.
I raised my head and turned round, knelt up, put my hands on his knees, stared into his face, into his eyes. I had looked full into his eyes briefly last night, while I held the knife, before he had taken from me the action I could not perform. I stared at him now, minute after minute, night flowing past us as morning had done by the lake, two months and a lifetime ago, when I told him I would take him with me, through the daylight, out of the trap we shared. УYou used the blood of a doe, to spare me the death of a human. You said you would notЧwere notЧturning me. Why are you not telling me not to look in your eyes?Ф
УI have not turned you,Ф he replied. УIn three hours, when the sun rises, you will find that sunshine is your element, as it always has been. I do not think you can be turned. You can be killed, as any human can be, as the poison Bo set in your flesh would at last have killed you, but I believe you cannot be turned.
УThere is nothing I can do to you with my gaze, any more, whether I wish it or not. I was not ableЕto give you the doeТs clean blood cleanly. I caught and carried her blood for you, for tonightТs necessary rite, but I am not a clean vessel. Sunshine, we are on territory neither of us knows. We are bound now, you to me as I already was to you, for I have saved your life tonight as you saved my existence two months ago.Ф
УI think the honors were about even, two months ago,Ф I said, struggling. He picked my hands up off his knees, held them between his hands.
УThat-which-binds did not judge so; the scales did not rest in balance. You will begin, now, I think, to read those lines ofЕpower, governance, sorcery, as I can read them. By what has happened between us tonight. Onyx BlaiseТs daughterЧthe daughter who did what you did, that second morning by the lakeЧalways held that capacity. Now you must learn to use it. That-which-binds reckons I have been bound to you by what happened two months ago. I could not come to you if you did not call me, but if you called I had to come. You are now bound to me as well. I did not do this deliberately; to save your life, it was the only choice I had, and I was bound to try.
УWhen I came to you four nights ago, I had no knowledge of the wound you still carried. I was thinking only of how I could convince youЧto go into battle with me. That I should succeed did not seem likely, though you were calling to ask me for help. I came here that night thinking how I might give youЧanything I could give youЧto help you in that battle, if you agreed. It would have required some greater tie between us, but nothing likeЕ
УI do not know what I have given you tonight.Ф Another silence. He added, УI do not know what you have given me.Ф
Another, longer silence.
УWell,Ф I said, shakily, clinging to his hands holding mine, УI think I can see in the dark.Ф

PART THREE
So, I would have said that not much could be worseЧshort of being dead or undeadЧthan those first weeks after the night I went out to the lake and met some vampires up close and personal. I would have said that being paralyzed from the neck down or having an inoperable brain tumor would be worse. Not a lot else. Just shows how limited the human imagination can be.
The first weeks after Con healed the wound on my breast were worse.
ItТs funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the nights at the lake, that the great crisis was about What I Was or Who IТd Become or What Terrible Thing Was Wrong With Me (and About to Go Wronger) and Why All Was Changed As a Result. But I was still struggling against the idea that all was changed.
Sticking the giggler with the table knife should have shaken me out of this fantasy even if the sucker-sunshade trick hadnТt, but I was too busy being grossed out by the sheer grisliness of the latter experience to have thought much about the philosophical implications. What the little chat with Jesse and Pat had revealed to me had done my head in worse, and the news that the suckers were on to conquer the world within the next century had been worse yet. I felt like a pancake in the hands of a maniac flipper. But when youТre being caromed around your life like a squash ball you havenТt got leeway to think about what happens next. When youТre feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you arenТt thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week. Maybe you should be, but you arenТt. Now is more than enough.
Before the detox night with Con I still thought I could say no somehow, could still stick my head back in the sand. Hey, I wasnТt going to be around in a hundred yearsЧunless maybe I started handling a lot of magic, which I didnТt want to, right? That was exactly what I didnТt want to be doing; magic handling extending your lifespan was a myth anywayЧso what did I care?
You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when youТre scared enough. I was scared enough.
Of course I had had this apparently permanent leaking wound on my breast, I had had these nightmares, and I had been doing a pretty bad job after all of suppressing thinking about what it all meant, what had happened at the lake. But I was still obstinately trying to pretend IТd only had a piece of very, very bad luck, and the fact of my having survived it wasnТtЕirredeemable. My gran had shown me all that transmuting stuff fifteen years ago, and IТd never used it before. Maybe it would be another fifteen years before I used it again. Maybe thirty this time. And one vampire more or less? Who cares?
And the table knife venture was just that the gigglerТd been the one who cut me, poisoned me. It was a one-off. There was an answer in there somewhere: it wasnТt me, it wasnТt my warped, screwed-up genetic heritage.
And if IТd delivered the world of one sucker, sort of accidentally having preserved it another one, then my final effect on the vampire population was nil, invisible, void. Which was exactly the profile IТd choose.
I told myself I had always been my fatherТs daughter. I was facing what had been there all the time.
But I was also facing stuff that hadnТt been there.
Being able to see in the dark sounds great. Never trip over the bathroom threshold on your way for a pee at midnight again, right? But itТs not that simple. Human eyes donТt see in the dark. They donТt have the rods and cones for it or whatever. Therefore you are doing something that isnТt human. ItТs not like youТve awakened a latent talent, like someone who finds out they have a gift for playing jazz piano after a life previously devoted to Bach. That may be odd, but itТs within human scope. Seeing in the dark isnТt. And you know it. That doesnТt mean I know how to explain it; but trust me, you can tell the difference between seeing because thereТs enough light and УseeingФ because something weird and vampiry is going on in your brain that chooses to pretend to be happening in your eyes because thatТs the nearest equivalent. Like if some human had had a poisoned wound healed by some weird reciprocal swap with the phoenix, maybe theyТd be able to fly afterward, apparently by flapping their arms.
(Mind you no one has seen the phoenix in over a thousand years, and it has never been inclined to do humans any good turns. Rather the opposite. Very like vampires, I suppose. Except a lot of people think the phoenix is a myth, and not many are stupid enough to think vampires are. I think the phoenix has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being true, because itТs nasty. What this world doesnТt have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who invented this system?)
I saw in the dark pretty well. I thought, do I want to see Bo coming?
Oh yeah, and seeing in the dark doesnТt mean when the sun goes down. It also means all the shadows that fall in daylight. This would not be a big issue for a vampire, of course, but it troubled the hell out of me. Even an ordinary table knife throws a shadowЧalthough I didnТt really need any more reminders that table knives would never be ordinary to me again.
It throws your balance off, seeing through shadows. Your depth perception goes wrong, like trying to look through someone elseТs glasses. Everything has funny dark-light edges to it, and sometimes those edges have themselves threadlike red edges. You get your new looking-through-bad-spectacles distortion on everything, including your own hands, your own body, the faces and bodies of the people you love and trust. Oh, the one time this goes away is when you look in a mirror. Or it did with me. Just in case I needed reminding that I got it from a vampire. Thanks.
I hated it that I now УsawФ more easily in the dark than I did in the light. In the dark it all made sense. I hated this.
I was so clumsy for the first ten days or so that Charlie did another of his drifting-into-the-bakery-and-closing-the-door numbers. Golly, twice in two weeks: I must be a worse pain in the butt than I realized. Damn. He wandered around the bakery for a minute like he was thinking about what to say. I knew better; he figures this stuff out beforehand. When I still lived with him and Mom I used to see him ambling around the house in that fake idle way, figuring out what he was going to say to someone, what they might say back. He thinks of it on the move and he says it on the move. He wandered a lot during the time the city council was trying to upgrade us. The media, who love a good story and truth is noncompulsory, presented CharlieТs as the focus of the neighborhood campaign to stay the way we were: downmarket and crappy. This was not entirely false. ThatТs when CharlieТs kind of got on the New Arcadia map rather than merely the Old Town map, and one of the results was that Charlie could afford to build my bakery. (I have to say he used to wander a lot when Mom and I were at each otherТs throats the worst too. There was some overlap between these two eras. Kenny and Billy are probably scarred for life.)
But having him wandering around again in that way I recognized made me feel bad. I didnТt live with him any more, but I had the impression he didnТt wander as much as he had then: that heТd mostly figured out how to say the sort of things he needed to say as Charlie of CharlieТs.
I suppose a magic-handling baker with an affinity for vampires is kind of an unusual problem for a coffeehouse. Maybe the bitchiness factor was trivial.
УYouТve been having a little trouble lately,Ф he said, mildly and gently, addressing one of the ovens.
УThat oven is working fine,Ф I said, thinking, if youТre going to me you can just do it.
He turned around. УSorry. WeЕCharlieТs has had its rough times, butЕhaving SOFs interested in one of my staff is a new one.У
I refrained from pointing out that our regular SOFs had always sort of jived with me. I had thought because I was the one who wanted to hear their stories, but as it turned out, I now knew, because they remembered my father, even if CharlieЧand for that matter Mom and IЧdidnТt. УYeah,Ф I said. УIt blows. IТve been thinking, okay, my dad has always been my dad, but that doesnТt help. I could have gone on not knowing what it meant.Ф
Charlie hesitated. УWellЕI doubt it, Sunshine. If you just kept coffee hot, maybe. But someone who canЕФ His voice faded. УHave you talked to Sadie about it?Ф
I shook my head. Have I sawn myself in half with a blunt knife? No.
УYou know what Sadie is likeЧno one better. You inherited her backbone, her doggedness.Ф
The big difference between my mom and meЧbesides the fact that she is dead normal and IТm a magic-handling freakЧis that sheТs the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other peopleТs points of view, but sheТs honest about it. SheТs a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. IТm a brass-bound bitch because I donТt want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am. УAnd her nasty temper,Ф I said.
Charlie smiled. УShe knew your dad pretty well. Do you know she loved him? She really did. Still does, in her secret heart. Oh, she loves me, donТt worry. And weТre happy togetherЧthatТs the point. SheТs happy running the admin side of CharlieТs.Ф
And ripping self-important assholes to shreds, I thought. But get under cover if there havenТt been any self-important assholes around lately.
УShe was often joyfulЧeuphoricЧwith your dad, especially at the beginning. But his wasnТt a world she could live in. Mine is.
УMy guess is she got out of your dadТs world when she did and took you with her because she knew what you were. I think she knew you were going to be someone pretty unusual. I think she was hoping that what sheТs given youЧboth by being your mom and by raising you in a place like CharlieТsЧis going to be enough. Enough ballast. When what your father gave you started coming out.Ф
IТd already figured out that she hadnТt included him in the Bad Cross Watch, so what I was in CharlieТs version of events didnТt include the possibility of a demon taint. On the whole I thought my version was more plausible than CharlieТs. Possibly because it was more depressing.
I drifted in a very Charlie-like manner over to the stool and sat down. I looked at my hands, which had a funny red-outlined light-dark edge. I thought about bad gene crosses. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes.