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

УWhat do you think, Sunshine?Ф said Charlie. УIs it going to be enough?Ф
УI donТt know,Ф I said. УCharlie, I donТt know.Ф
August was less death-defying than usual in terms of temperature (which among other things meant that I hadnТt had to beg Paulie not to quit) if not in terms of numbers of Earth Trek coachloads, and possibly, because all the heat August hadnТt used had to go somewhere, we went straight into Indian Summer September, do not pass Go, do not collect two thousand blinks. So I got out all my least decent little-bit-of-nothing tank tops and wore them. The scar was visible but the skin was flat and smooth, no puckering, and the white mark itself seemed weirdly old and sort of half-worn-away-looking the way old scars get sometimes.
I was still having trouble with the idea that what had happened that night counted as healing, but whatever it was, it had worked.
I started going home with Mel a lot. He was glad to have me aroundЧglad to stop arguing about my going to another doctor. He didnТt know about Con, of course, but he knew plentyЧtoo muchЧ about recent events. He would know that I needed reassuring without knowing I needed to feelЕhuman.
This is really stupid, but I also discovered that I somehow believed that he was the one human at CharlieТs who might be able to stop me in time if my bad genes suddenly kicked in and I picked up my electric cherry pitter and went for the nearest warm body. That heТd drown me efficiently in a vat of pasta sauce while everyone else was standing around with their mouths open wringing their hands and saying, who are we going to get to cover the bakery on such short notice?
This was at its worst during Monday movie evenings. The Seddon living room had never seemed so small, or so packed with flimsy, vulnerable human bodies. If Mel didnТt feel like going I didnТt go either.
As a romantic fantasy I donТt think itТs going to make it into the top tenЧmost women pining for the presence of their lovers arenТt worrying about needing their homicidal tendencies foiledЧbut it did mean I felt a little safer with Mel around.
I probably didnТt believe it at all. I just didnТt want to give him up. He was warm and breathing and had a heartbeat.
Human. Yeah. I hadnТt been willing to go see a specialist human doctor, as Mel had kept asking me to. No. I asked a vampire for help. And took it instantly when he offered it.
Mel must have wondered what happened to the wound on my breast. But he didnТt say anything. He was very good at not saying things. It had only been since the Night of the Table Knife that IТd begun to wonder if his reticence was for my sake or his.
And if it was for hisЕNo. I needed him to be steady, solid, secure. I needed it too badly to pursue that one. Too badly to wonder about the number of live tattoos he had. Even for a motorcycle thug.
Another of the things IТd never thought about was the way when we went home together it was always his home. HeТd been inside my apartment a handful of times. If we had an afternoon together we went hiking or went back to his place. If we had an evening together and we decided to go out, we went where he wanted to go because there wasnТt anywhere I wanted to go. I knew his friends. He didnТt know mine. His house wards were set to know me. Mine werenТt set to know him.
I didnТt have friends. I had the coffeehouse. A few librariansЧchiefly Aimil, who had been a CharlieТs regular all her lifeЧwas as far afield as I went.
It is halfway true that if you are involved in a family coffeehouse you donТt have a life. But only halfway. Mel had a life.
IТve said before that Mel had been a bit of a hoodlum in his younger days, although nobody seemed to be quite sure how much, or maybe his War service had wiped earlier misdeeds off the record. He wasnТt old now but heТd had time to go wrong and then change his mind. There must have been signs he wasnТt going wrong right, though, even at the time. Some of his tattoos were for pretty strange things. Some of them I didnТt know the purpose of because when IТd asked heТd said УUmФ and gone silent.
Anybody who spent a lot of time on or about motorcycles would have a couple of the regulation anti-crushed-by-flying-metal-or-running-into-trees-at-high-speeds wards, either pricked into your skin or on a chain round your neck or a secret pocket in your belt or the soles of your biker boots. He had those. But he also had a seeing-things-clearly charm that I hadnТt recognized when I saw it the first time: okay, a useful thing for someone on the wrong side of the law (or the wrong side of the battle zone) who needs to have his eyes peeled for trouble, but MelТs wasnТt the conventional block-and-warn ward that most petty crooks used for the purpose.
(You could sometimes half-identify the variety of malfeasant you were dealing with by whether or not you could see that ward. Scammers, of course, kept it well hidden: wouldnТt do to have it dangling on a bracelet or tattooed on your wrist when you popped your cuffs at someone you were trying to schmooze. A couple of MelТs old gang who had also changed their minds about being professional bad guys had it on the backs of their gonna-punch-you-in-the-nose hands, so the guy who was about to get punched would see it on the fist being held under his nose.)
Anyway. Mel still bought and sold motorcycles. He still drank beer with friends at the Nighthouse or the Jug. Wives and steady girlfriends (very occasionally boyfriends) were expected to show up if they wanted to. (Better yet, we were expected to talk. Of course the women who could talk about ignition mixtures and piston resistance were preferred, but you canТt have everything.) HeТd bought a house in what had been Chesterfield but was now called Whiteout, the worst-Wars-hit section of New Arcadia, had it cleared and re-warded, and was slowly doing it over into something even my mother would recognize as habitable (although the motorcycle-refit garage on what had been the ground floor would probably have given her spasms). He loved cooking and CharlieТs but he wasnТt owned by them.
I felt like maybe I should be asking to borrow his survival textbook. Maybe the problem was that the first chapters in it were about running away from home at fourteen and lying about your age, and then being a biker bandit for a few years before deciding that the fact you always seemed to wind up frying the sausages over the fire for everybody was maybe a pointer toward a different way of life with better retirement options, which five years of the Wars had given him plenty of time to consider.
Mel would have understood why I drove out to the lake that night. He probably did understand without my telling him. I would have liked hearing him understand. But I didnТt want to tell him. Because I couldnТtЧcouldnТtЧtell him what happened after.
But you donТt have to talk when youТre making love, and bodies have their own language. Also you donТt have to use your eyes so much. There are other things going on.
Meanwhile I was still reaching the wrong distance to pick up the edges of baking sheets and muffin tins or the handles of spoons, and fumbling them when I managed to grab them at all, and I walked into doors a little too often instead of through them. At least I knew the recipes I used all the time by heart and didnТt have to bother peering at print midmix or identifying the lines on measuring jugs. Nor had I lost my sense of whether a batter or a dough was going together right or not, or what to do if it wasnТt.
I could tell Jesse and Pat about seeing in the dark and let them tell me what to do about it. Or with it. As far as my strange new talents went it beat hell out of Unusual Usages of Table Knives. And maybe if I told them I could bear to tell the people at CharlieТs.
Nobody had to know anything about why I could now see in the dark. Including the dark of the day.
One day when Pat and John came in for hot-out-of-the-oven cinnamon rolls at about six-thirty-two, I tipped them onto a plate myself and took them out while Liz was still yawning over the coffeepot. УYou have some free time soon maybe?Ф I said, trying to sound casual in my turn. They both shifted in their seats, trying not to point like hunting dogs. Not very many people, even at CharlieТs, are at their best at that hour, but it doesnТt pay to be careless. And Mrs. Bialosky was there, pretending to read a newspaper while waiting for one of her confederates to turn up to make a clandestine report. УFor you, Sunshine, anything,Ф said Pat.
УIТm off at two,Ф I said.
УCome round the shop,Ф said Pat. УThere are two desks in the entry, okay? You go up to the right-hand one and say PatТs expecting you and theyТll let you straight in.Ф
I nodded.

There was a young woman at that desk with a nameplate and a sharp uniform and a sharp look like she should have had a rank to go on the nameplate, but what do I know? She hit two buzzers, one that opened the inner door and one that, presumably, warned Pat, because he came walking out to meet me before IТd gone very far down the faceless hallway Mel must have brought me out of the last night of the gigglerТs existence on this earth, but it was so characterless I was ready to believe I had crossed one of those distance-folding thresholds and was now on Mars. If so, Pat was there with me. Maybe weТd been on Mars that night too. УWhat if the wrong person showed up first and said you were expecting them?Ф I said.
УI told them middling tall, skinny, weird-looking hair because it will have just been let out of being tied up in a scarf for working in a restaurant and you never comb it, wearing a fierce look,Ф said Pat. УI was pretty safe.Ф
УFierce?Ф I said. I also thought, Skinny?, but I have my pride. The part about my hair is true.
УYeah. Fierce. Through here,Ф and he opened a door and shepherded me through. This was, presumably, PatТs office. The chair behind the desk was empty, but had that pushed-back-someone-just-got-up look. Jesse was sitting on a chair to one side of the desk. УSomeone I want you to meet,Ф Pat said, nodding toward the other person in the room, who stood up out of her chair, and said in a rather stricken voice, УHi.Ф
Aimil.
I looked at her and she looked at me. With my funny vision the sockets of her deep eyes and the hollows of her cheeks had a glittering dark periphery. УOkay,Ф I said, planning not to lose my temper unless it was absolutely necessary. УWhat are you doing here?Ф
УTea?Ф said Pat blandly.
УTell me what Aimil is doing here first,Ф I said.
УWell, weТre in putting-all-our-cards-on-the-table vogue now, arenТt we?Ф said Pat, still bland. УSince the other night. So itТs time you knew Aimil is one of us.Ф
УOne of you,Ф I said. УSOF. And here I thought she was a librarian.Ф
УUndercover SOF,Ф Jesse said.
УPart time,Ф added Pat.
УI am a librarian,Ф said Aimil. УBut IТm sometimes aЧerЧlibrarian for SOF too.Ф
I thought about this. IТd known Aimil since I was seven and she was nine. She and her family had had Sunday breakfast at CharlieТs most weeks for years, were already regulars when Mom started working there and then when I started hanging out there. She was one of the faces I recognized at my new school. IТd lost half a year being sick and then Mom crammed the crap out of me the second half of the year so I didnТt lose a grade when I went back to school in the fall. (Yes, I mean crammed. Second grade is freaking hard work when youТre seven or eight.) In hindsight that was the beginning of CharlieТs being my entire life: I didnТt have time to make friends the six months I was being crammed. The only kids I met were kids who came to CharlieТs, not that I got to know many of them because I wasnТt allowed to annoy the customers. But Aimil used to ask for me, so I was allowed to talk to her. She talked to me because she felt sorry for me: I was weedy and undersized and hangdog that half year, and always doing homework. I forget how it startedЧmaybe she saw me sitting at the counter studying, which I was allowed to do when it wasnТt too crowded.
WeТd managed to stay friends outside of school although not inside so much; two years is the Grand Canyon when youТre a kid. SheТd gone off to library school my junior year and did an internship at the big downtown library the year after I started working full time at CharlieТs and we used to get together to complain about how hard working for a living was. Two years later she got a job at the branch library near CharlieТs. Sometimes she still had Sunday morning breakfast at CharlieТs with her parents.
УWhen did you become SOFЧundercover, part time, or hanging upside down on a trapeze?Ф I said. I did not sound friendly. I did not feel friendly.
УTwenty months ago,Ф she said quickly.
I relaxed. Slightly. УOkay. So why did you?Ф
Aimil sighed. УIt seemed like a good idea at the time.Ф She glanced at Pat and Jesse. I glanced at Pat and Jesse too. If they looked any more bland and nonconfrontational they were going to dissolve into little puddles of glop.
Aimil looked back at me. УYouТre not going to like this,Ф she said.