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After our confrontation with Bo, life — and, I suppose, unlife slowly settled back into their own kind of equilibrium. In the daylight, my time belonged to other people: long hours up to my elbows in pastry and batter at Charlie's, careful conversations with Mom or Mel which left many words unspoken, afternoons outside with Yolande, talking wards and magic under the last light of the sun. My evenings were my own, and I guarded them jealously. But those last lingering hours before dawn, when the skin of the night was thin — they belonged to Con. Sometimes he appeared at my door unannounced, and sometimes he came when I called. And on some very rare occasions, he called me to him.
The first time he called me in this way, it was several days before deep midwinter, and snow lay heavy on the ground. The bare branches were brittle under a layer of biting frost, and the roads were icy and dangerous. Con's call came near midnight, like a silvery thread wrapping its way around my wrists, insistent and sharp. I didn't wait around, but followed where it led, moving through the distance between us as if it were nothing.
I arrived at Con's earth-place barefoot, with frost on my eyelashes, and he wrapped me in a blanket and pressed something warm into my hands. I sipped at it dubiously, but it was nothing stranger than spiced tea. Con regarded me, unblinking and still, until I was restored enough to speak.
'I assume you have a good reason for hauling me out of my warm bed at midnight?'
Con said nothing, but instead took the empty mug from my hands, and moved deeper into the shadowy depths of the room. When he returned, he was cradling something in his arms, moving carefully towards me.
'I need you to take this for me,' he said.
He was holding what appeared to be a handful of fruit — apples and cherries unseasonably ripe and red in the winter air. But as he drew closer, I noted with astonishment that the fruit was frozen solid, encrusted with ice, as if it had been taken mere moments ago from a tree outside. He handed it over to me, and the cold was harsh and biting. And, underneath, I could feel a faint hum of power, like the memory of trees.
'Of course you would know a place where cherries are in fruit in the depths of midwinter,' I said. 'And of course you'd hand them over to me in the middle of the night like a parcel of stolen goods. Should I be worried? Will hordes of angry vampires be beating down my door, demanding I give them back their treasure?'
Con's mouth quirked upwards, in his approximation of a smile.
'Just the one vampire,' he said. 'The fruit is a kind of protection, to get you through these next few days, when the nights are at their longest and the daylight is at its weakest.'
He didn't need to say that the reduced sunlight meant that I was also at my weakest. I looked at the glittering fruit, which had not begun to thaw even a little bit, in spite of my warm hands, and felt that strange mix of relief and unease that Con's presence and wordless understanding evoked.
'How many more hours of night remain?' I asked him, wondering how long it was safe to linger.
'Enough,' was his reply.
The apples and cherries remained frozen solid for the next week, no matter how warm I heated my house, glittering like rubies in a bowl on the kitchen table, like an icy heart at the centre of my home.
*
I staggered back into Con's earth-place, bruised and battered from our most recent encounter with our newest batch of supernatural enemies. There was blood on my collarbone which I could feel him making a great effort to ignore, and I held my wrist at an awkward angle, hoping it wasn't broken. Con deposited me in one of the deep purple armchairs, and disappeared into the corner of the room to dig through one of the ostentatiously carved cabinets.
After several moments of this, he returned.
'We are not letting that happen again,' he said, handing over the object he had retrieved.
I took it gingerly, my injured wrist causing me to wince in pain. It appeared at first to be an ordinary river stone, grey and smooth and flecked here and there with little flashes of ice-coloured grit. But even I, with vast gaps in my magical education, could recognise it as an object of supernatural power: it had a hole in its centre, self-bored by the endless movement of water, wearing it through before it had been worn down to sand.
'You need to wear it around your neck,' said Con, perched next to me on the chair's arm, holding my wrist carefully in his hand.
I wondered if he was going to inflict his painful healing power on me again, and if it might be less hassle to allow my injury to repair itself in its own time. But I didn't pull away. I concentrated instead on this new gift he had given me.
'Is this your way of saying we're likely to have more encounters for which it would be helpful for me to wear a protective amulet?' I shuddered to imagine the problems it would cause if I showed up for work with a self-bored stone strung around my neck, and the fresh round of SOF questioning it was likely to unleash.
Con said nothing, just closed my fingers more firmly around the stone, which I supposed was answer enough.
*
'Twice in one week?' I joked weakly, leaning heavily on Con's arm as we made our way into the relative safety of his earth-place. He was almost as badly injured as I was, this time, and I wondered if he would take offense if I offered to do something to restore his strength.
'It is not necessary, Sunshine,' he said, putting a placating hand on my shoulder. I tried not to think about the transformation that meant I found the touch of a vampire reassuring and placating, let alone that enabled him to read my mind.
The pair of us sat for a while on one of Con's velvety armchairs, and I tried to avoid bleeding on the upholstery. It took him a good ten minutes before he was back to what passed for normal for him — or at least something approaching that. If he'd been human, I would have offered him bandages and disinfectant, or baked goods, or at least a hot cup of coffee, but as it was Con I just sat with him in silence, and thought of fruit trees in the light of the moon. Sunlight in high summer would have been better for me, but was no good at all for him.
'I can take you back to your house and help you clean your wounds,' he said, once he was sufficiently recovered, 'but I would like to give you something first.'
As on other occasions, he moved to the carved cabinets and started digging through them. After several moments, he was back by my side; he'd moved imperceptibly, which definitely meant he was feeling better. I felt his hands on my shoulders, moving my hair aside, and then all of a sudden, something was around my neck, the metal cold at my throat. I looked down, and felt a flash of recognition.
Con answered my unspoken question.
'This is indeed the twin of the necklace I gave you the first time I called you here. The other one is ... drained from its previous encounters. But you were weaker then. Our strength had not yet been properly pooled.'
I looked at the coiling strands of stone and metal, running my fingers over them, feeling something as ageless and enduring as the earth's depths emanate from the delicate jewellery.
'I thought opals were meant to be bad luck,' I said at last.
'Not for you,' said Con.
*
Several weeks later, I was back at Con's earth-place for what amounted to a strategy meeting. Unusually, neither of us was injured. Con had even found the time to light the fire, and the flames leapt and danced in the fireplace. I'd brought supplies — a flask of coffee, a stack of cherry chocolate brownies — and Con even deigned to take a tiny nibble. After we'd finished planning our next moves — and the next moves that would be necessary when things, inevitably, went wrong, Con stood up, decisively, and gestured for me to join him.
'The first time I called you to this place, you were disturbed by the hoard of treasure, all those strange objects collected here by my old master,' Con said.
That was one way of putting it. 'I felt like they were pulling me in all sorts of different directions. And some of them — it was as if they were speaking. And I didn't like what they were saying.'
'And now?' he asked.
'And now I've found a way to be the kind of person who can travel in all different directions and still be herself,' I replied.
'Indeed.'
He led me through the room, towards the wall lined with cabinets. The dancing flames threw strange shadows around the place, flickering in and out of view out of the corner of my eye. Con paused, standing with that unearthly stillness, stopping me in my tracks with his outstretched arm.
'This is the final step in our current plan. Walk along the cabinets. Keep your mind clear. See what speaks to you.'
The usual cryptic vampire pronouncement, then. I knew I wasn't going to get any more help from Con. I slipped into the same kind of blank alertness I used whenever Yolande taught me magic, falling into a place deep within myself, drawing on the sunlit grove of trees that gave me my strength. Almost immediately I could sense hundreds of little plaintive cries, metal screeching out a memory of fires deep within the earth, woven cloth singing a song of growth and harvest and the cleverness of human hands, precious stones hinting slyly at depths and danger. But none of these were quite right, and so I moved on.
It took me close to five minutes, but I found it at last: a call of such richness and clarity that it was like a bell ringing on a lazy afternoon. I reached into the cabinet, and pulled out a little glass vessel, twisted and green, with coiled handles shaped like some sort of watery dragons. I held it up to the light. The green glass was the strangest colour: at some angles it was almost opaque, like muddy water, and then with a slight turn it began to sparkle like the sea in sunlight.
Con drew closer, his voice at my ear throwing me out of my reverie.
'Every time you drink water, it needs to be poured from this vessel,' he said. 'At least until our current plan has been seen through.'
I assumed this was yet another attempt at pre-emptive protection.
'Water is another avenue of attack,' said Con at last. 'It is hard to ward against, because it keeps moving and changing. For humans, it is life, and that makes it vulnerable. Drinking from this vessel removes that vulnerability.'
His reasoning made a kind of sense, now that I knew more about how magic worked, but something was still bothering me.
'But I don't understand. The first time I came to this place, you told me it was unwise to put all your strength in objects. And yet every time I've visited you here, I've walked away with yet another magical object.'
Con's eyes glimmered emerald green in the firelight.
'These objects are wards and amplifiers. They guard and magnify strength, but they are not strength in and of themselves. The strength is already there, and what these objects give is a kind of protection and focus. But they would not work if you were not strong already.'
I filed that away in the ever-growing corner of my mind marked 'Difficult Things.' We had bigger problems to focus on at the moment.
*
His call was so faint that I almost missed it, a weak undercurrent that pulled me from my sleep and drew me to him. With exasperation, I threw on some warm clothes, and made the lonely journey to his refuge in the earth-place. Con was slumped in front of the unlit fire.
'This is why we're meant to do dangerous things together!' I said, crouching down beside him. 'Whenever you decide to go off on your own and be a hero, you end up with unlife-threatening injuries!'
Con reached into a little casket — it looked like a jewellery box — that had been placed on the floor nearby. He handed me its contents: a single, crumpled piece of paper. I unfolded it carefully, and gasped with astonishment at what I saw.
It was a picture — a painting, exquisitely done, in perfect miniature — of a man's face. The colours were vivid, and the green eyes were alive with emotion. The whole thing seemed somehow ageless, like an icon. It was instantly recognisable to me as Con — but Con as a human.
He heard my unasked question.
'This was made before I was turned. It is a glimpse, a fragment, of old possibilities.'
'Why are you giving it to me now?' I asked, looking between Con-the-vampire and Con-the-man in the picture, my mind whirling.
'It was lost for many years,' he said. 'My old master kept it after I was turned. It was a way of keeping a hold over me. Things in this hideaway have a way of wandering, and of resurfacing later, like a sign or a warning. Well, I can heed the warning of this painting: its existence is a risk. It gives anyone possessing it far too much power and control. We have to destroy it!'
I looked at the painting again, thinking of what Con had been when it had been painted, wondering what he might have hoped and dreamed then, and the thought of burning all that in a fire was unbearable.
'I have another idea,' I said. 'It depends how much you trust me.'
'I trusted you with the sunlight. I have no doubt I trust you at least that much with this.'
That was how Con's portrait ended up twisted into a silver locket around my neck, dangling from the opal necklace, next to the self-bored stone. It was a solution we both could live with.
*
It was several weeks before I saw him again, and I considered briefly calling him to me before realising that for my plan to work, there needed to be a kind of symmetry. I had to go to him, and it had to be in daylight. I took a rare day off — I don't think Charlie really bought my explanation, but by this point everyone was used to omissions and half-truths from me — and returned to Con's strange little underground hideaway. It was midday when I arrived, and I was surprised to find him awake.
The lurid decor looked even more ridiculous in daytime, even though there was no natural light.
'If you're going to keep this place,' I said, 'you really should consider redecorating. There's no need to keep your old master's tasteless gothic horror show in place until the end of time — unless you think he's coming back?'
'There is no chance of that,' said Con, ushering me to one of the chairs.
'Well, that's a relief. That's one terrifying vampire I won't have to deal with.'
My vampire, the one who didn't terrify me — or at least not on a regular basis — watched me from his spot beside the fireplace, his eyes expressionless.
'I did have a reason for dropping by,' I said, reaching into my pocket. 'You gave me a ward to protect me at midwinter, and I thought I'd return the favour, now that we're almost at the longest day of summer.'
I'd been working on wards with Yolande. She was a less patient teacher than Con, and yet always wanted me to work things out for myself, but we'd somehow figured out a way to learn together without coming to blows. She was insistent on the power of wards being made from the hands of the magic-user, and at first I'd thought this meant I needed to spin and weave my own cloth, or something equally ridiculous. This was met with much exasperation, until I finally worked out that different magic-users would of course use different hand-made materials, and that I should use things that were sources of power for me.
This had then resulted in a lot of wards made out of baked goods. But while that had satisfied Yolande, it would have been useless for Con. It had taken me a lot longer to work out a solution for him. I'm a feeder of people, and the only way I could become a feeder of vampires would have been unsustainable and pretty useless as a long-term ward.
But then I'd remembered my other sources of strength: my tree-self and my deer-self, and the sunshine that sustains all growing things, and the resulting ward had woven all these things together. I handed it over to Con: a tangled collection of twigs and leaves and feathers, threaded through with red thread that had been unspooled next to a pool at the heart of a forest where deer came to drink. There were even cherry and apricot stones — I couldn't resist including the parts of trees that fed and gave sustenance.
Con took the ward in his hands, and with one fluid motion slipped it into his pocket, next to the place where his heart would beat, if he were human. My task was complete, and there wasn't really any reason to linger, but even though the summer sunlight called to me, I had made my choice — at least for a little while. I stayed there, under the earth, with him.