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Con said something, but I didn't quite catch it, too busy wondering if the brass statue of the monkey in the corner of the room was there the last time I came up to Con's place for one of these little shindigs.
(I was pretty sure it hadn't been, but then that raised the question of whether or not it was something that belonged to his former master, brought out of the infinite storage space this vampire cave seemed to have, or something that he brought back himself. I hoped it was the former, because its blank stare was starting to unnerve me, and I didn't like to think of the possible reasons Con might have chosen to put it there, of all places. Though I'd be the last to say that I picked my company for their taste in home decor, the kind of friends one makes says something about the person they are, right? The point was, the thing was uglier than the flat-faced porcelain dogs one of my old neighbors once gave my mother for Christmas. I was starting to wish I'd 'casually' draped my jacket over it when I came in.)
"Sunshine," Con said again, and I realized it was the fifth time he'd called my name in as many minutes. This time, even his perpetually implacable voice had a hint of reproach in it. Reluctantly, I decided the problem of the monkey could wait for another time, and I turned to look at him properly.
His expression was typically blank, but his gaze was direct and questioning enough to make me flinch away from it, shaking my head.
"Sorry. I'm a little--" I waved a hand, trying to find a way to indicate something nebulous that even I wasn't entirely sure of. "--distracted." As apologies went, I could have done better, but I hope the expression on my face conveyed an appropriate level of earnest guilt. After all, I didn't have the excuse of a long day at work or an early start tomorrow to excuse my lack of attention. It was hard to shake the feeling that this was roughly the equivalent of crashing into someone's house and accosting them before they've even had breakfast.
Even if I did have an open invitation, these days, which I still thought was funny because I wasn't sure I could pull the trick that brought I here again if I had all the time in the world to figure it out.
It'd been a few months since what happened in No Town, and as many things were different as they were the same. For one, foreboding dreams aside, I (and everybody else, for that matter) certainly didn't see many vampires around anymore, or even rumors of them. In fact, there seemed to have been a lot less supernatural activity overall. While no news was good news, what this meant in practice was that I saw a lot of Pat and the rest of the SOF these days, warming seats at Charlie's and nursing their cups of coffee like they had a grudge against them. I got the impression they'd be picking disconsolately at my cinnamon rolls if they could, but the fact of the matter was that it was impossible to sit in front of one of my cinnamon rolls and remain miserable.
That wasn't just my ego talking, either: science says eating makes people happier, though I didn't need science to know that. A warm, full stomach might not mend every ill in the world, but it could come awfully close.
Still, even the best food in the world can only do so much. Whatever was keeping Pat and his crew making long faces at their tables, it had everything to do with the goddess of pain breathing down their necks and making their lives miserable. I was worried, for a while, that she might try to go after me too, but either she was clever enough to know that her best bet is waiting til my guard is down, or maybe she just has other things on her plate. Either way, not knowing which it was worried me.
I don't like being worried. It makes tension settle into my neck and shoulders, makes me beat the icing just a little bit too hard, knead the dough a little bit too roughly. It was so bad the other day that I actually had to ask Paulie to do it, and the slack-jawed, slightly terrified look he gave me afterwards told me that the day's icing wasn't going to be worth using for anything but possibly mortar for brick houses later.
Things at Charlie's, were, well... complicated wasn't exactly the right word. Mel was... Mel, mostly. While we hadn't made any official announcements, my mother's accusing stares over every tray of muffins I passed to her said clearly that our distance hadn't gone unnoticed. I was dreading the day she'd decide she was better off taking matters into her own hands.
I still liked Mel, which made it worse, but even I knew there was something seriously off about having a boyfriend who may or may not have been keeping an eye for you for someone else.
What hadn't changed, for the most part, was Con. Maybe that was why started looking forward to these nights, even if they usually ended with me walking away with my head buzzing and aching like a hive of bees had moved into my skull.
Con didn't know much about magic, or at least not the kind a Blaise would have, but his master had collected books. Old books, the kind that look like they'd disintegrate into a pile of dust if you so much as looked at them funny. Trying to understand magic from books was hard, though. I'd always learned better when I worked with my hands, which was why it had been so much easier when my grandmother had taught me. Without people trying to attack me on a regular basis, there wasn't a real urgency or much practical application for most of it.
The end result was a lot of frustration for both of us, and more dead ends than progress.
"Sorry," I said again, even though he hadn't said anything this time. "I know you're trying to help. I just—"
He was silent for a while, considering that. "Perhaps," he said with his usual soft deliberation, turning his head to the side as though he was glancing out of a window that would have hypothetically existed had this been any other house, "it is the approaching solstice."
I stared. Con had a way of coming up with things that left me confused most of the time, mostly because they didn't seem to have any relation to what I'd just said (or even the rest of the conversation) but even this was pretty out there for him. I opened my mouth to ask him where he'd gotten that idea from, but he held up a hand, and I stopped.
"I am not saying that it is something to be concerned about. But sunlight is as much a part of you as the air is to others. The events of the last year may have left you ... unbalanced."
Trust Con to put what could be me going crazy as delicately as possible. I frowned, thinking about it. Winter had always been the time of the year I spent outside as much as possible, catching as much of the sun as I could. Waking up early was never a problem, in the summer, but it had always been difficult to wake up in winter, like I had to fight off the desire to sink into the ground and not emerge until spring. I spent my winters dreaming of the summer, yearning for the sun.
Until now.
"Sunshine," Con said at last. Sixth time, I thought, irrationally. Trust me to get hung up on the stupid details like that. It must mean he was being serious again, or at least more serious than he usually was. Which, compared to other people, meant being practically funereal.
"I gave you something, some time ago. It was not... the gift I would have preferred. I have something more suitable." I was about to tell him I'd liked the chain just fine even once it had been burned into my skin, and that I sure hoped he wasn't talking about giving me the brass monkey in the corner because it would be likelier to give me nightmares than peace of mind.
Then he said, "It was something my former master gave me, too, when the winter left me restless." My stomach fell to somewhere around my knees when I realized he was talking about the other gift he'd given me: life, given with a mouthful of heart's blood.
He beckoned for my hands, then, and like the great big trusting idiot I am, I took them. More often, these days, I was starting to be a sucker for a sucker - one of them, anyway. We hadn't touched each other so directly in a while, but the coolness of his fingers against mine was still oddly familiar. Suddenly nervous, though I couldn't explain why, I held on tight without really thinking about it, enough to grind bones together. If it hurt him, he didn't complain.
"Close your eyes," he said, and despite my better judgment, I obeyed, losing sight of the green of his irises for the blackness behind my eyelids instead. "Be still, and look inside yourself. Listen."
I searched for my tree-self and found it leafless, branches exposed to the air in anticipation of the coming spring; I sought my deer-self, and found her curled in on herself for warmth, clinging to the last of my sun-self, dimmed and diminished. And my dark self, the self I usually tried so hard to pretend didn't exist, and if it did was none of my business?
My dark self was singing, low and sweet, happier than it had ever sounded before.
Just like that, I knew what to do.
***
There were few things more awkward and out of place than a vampire in a kitchen, but a vampire up to his elbows in flour had to beat that out by far.
As in all things, Con took even this seriously, sifting the ingredients together in the bowl with the same fixed concentration he used for everything else. I directed him through it, mostly, and he bore it with surprisingly good grace. In my own kitchen, everything had to be mixed by hand, and the resulting batch of batter was only enough for a small batch.
It wouldn't have lasted a minute at Charlie's, but I had a good feeling about these.
Con couldn’t appreciate the smell of baking food the way a human could, or at least I didn't think he could: even I wasn't immune to the smell of a good batch of pastry warming in the oven. My stomach rumbled a little when I sniffed the air, and he turned to look at me at that, brows inching fractionally higher.
"This is not something you have made before." That he could tell, even if he didn't come by Charlie's that often, should have been unsettling. It was oddly comforting instead.
"It's new," I said, rolling my shoulders back to work out the knots that had formed in them. "I don't know what I should call it yet." Names for new things usually came to me as instinctively as the recipe, but this one had come from nowhere.
"A Winter Soulstorte," he answered, immediately. When I stared at him, he shrugged, almost looking abashed. "I was guessing what you might name them."
A golden crust cradling a dark, rich filling, with a thin line of frosting to add a barrier between them. Something to remind myself that not all things in the dark were something to fear, that there could be sweetness in it too, and I smiled, feeling foolish and hopeful.
"Sounds good to me."