Sunshine is a novel by Robin McKinley. It tells the story of Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, a young woman who works in her stepfather's coffeehouse as a baker. The novel is set in a unpleasant alternate reality about ten years after the Voodoo Wars. These wars left the world in rather a mess — "bad spots", effectively magical toxic waste spills, get mentioned several times.
The novel begins with a ten-page Infodump about the title character's life as a coffeeshop baker, followed by five pages of Expospeak about her world's vampires. After that, the book moves on with the plot: she wakes up in the forest, surrounded by vampires, who take her off to a large lake house where they have a rival vampire, Constantine, chained to the wall. Sunshine is being provided as his dinner, as part of an attempt to torture/corrupt those Friendly Neighborhood Vampire tendencies out of him before killing him.
Unfortunately for the vampires, Sunshine's father was a sorcerer, and her grandmother taught her to use her heritage to transmute, which lets her make a key for her shackles. Really unfortunately for the vampires, Sunshine's world has elemental magic, and Sunshine's element is, well... such that even though she escapes during the day, she can take Constantine with her.
The rest of the book is concerned with the fallout from her kidnapping (including a Wound That Will Not Heal Without Vampiric Blood Magic, the intense interest of the Special Other Forces, and partially-faked PTSD), and also with the fact that the gang of vampires who kidnapped her is run by a master vampire, Beauregard, who does not take their escape well. Fortunately for Sunshine, Constantine comes back and helps her deal with the problems, and being a mage with an affinity for sunshine does make it easier to kill the bad vampires, as well as save the good ones...
Sunshine includes examples of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Reluctantly, but once Sunshine starts staking vampires with nothing more than a table knife or her bare hands she definitely qualifies.
- Achievements in Ignorance: When Sunshine laments that her grandmother didn't leave a stipulation for her to be apprenticed more thoroughly, Yolande points out that maybe it was a good thing she never had a traditional magic education, or she would have learned that things like teleporting down her connection to Con are impossible.
- After Action Patch Up: After they escape together, Constantine treats Rae's injuries and helps her eat and drink a bit. She struggles with it afterwards, as it goes well beyond the Enemy Mine arrangement she had assumed.
- Alien Geometries: Vampires do not seem to interact with space in quite the same way as other races. While Bo could easily track Sunshine as long as she remained in the forest around the lake, simply by leaving it Sunshine made it difficult for Bo to follow her further. Similarly, Sunshine is able to take an Extradimensional Shortcut to and from Con's home without traversing the normal space, and the final confrontation with Bo takes place in some location which overlaps with but is not New Town.
- Alliterative Name: Rae "Sunshine" Seddon. Her mother is Sadie Seddon.
- Anger Born of Worry: Rae and her mother have some heated arguments after she escapes the vampires — or, from her mother's perspective after she disappears for three days; turns up bedraggled, injured, with no car; and refuses to talk about what happened. This is also when her mother starts giving her excessive amounts of Protective Charms.
- Anti-Hero: Constantine. He's a vampire, with all that implies, but he doesn't do anything particularly evil in the book; other, much nastier vampires are out to destroy him implicitly because he's unusually nice. He's still off-putting, reticent, prideful, extremely violent (in a pinch and against other vampires), all but says he's drained people's blood in the past and takes quite a while to become comfortable with Sunshine — almost as long as it takes for her to become comfortable with him.
- Arcadia: New Arcadia was once a backwater, and is still surrounded by nature.
- Badass Biker: Mel. He fought in the Voodoo Wars and has magical tattoos with unusual and unspecified functions.
- Badass Family: The Blaises are implied to be one. At the very least, they had powerful magic and were active in the Voodoo Wars.
- Betty and Veronica: With a Badass Biker as a Betty to a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Veronica.
- Beyond the Impossible: Sunshine's narration explains that successfully staking a vampire is actually very difficult and specifically requires an iron or wooden stake, preferably of a particular type of wood, to stand any chance of being effective. Thus, when she manages to kill a vampire with an ordinary metal table knife, everybody takes notice.
- Bittersweet Ending: While Sunshine destroys Bo and covers for Con with SOF, there is still the question of where their friendship ends and a magical bond begins. There's a hint that her grandmother is alive, and that the war is still ongoing. Sunshine also doesn't know who or what she is now, but Con promises to be there to help her figure it out. She goes with him at night when he's feeding, so she can protect him and vice-versa.
- Blessed with Suck:
- Being partially demonic is more of a curse than a gift due to Fantastic Racism. Sunshine mentions how a star athlete she knew lost all of his scholarships and trophies after he found out he has demonic heritage. Also, the SOF is more likely to forcibly recruit you because it's "rotten" with part blood demons. On top of that, demonic blood combined with magical talent is not a recipe for lifelong mental stability.
- Sunshine's luckier in that she's a magic handler, and magic handlers merely need a license and training. Even so, she hates that her affinity for sunlight makes her really good at killing vampires, especially when she and Con manage to escape Bo. She doesn't want to kill, ever.
- Con's healing rite heals the poisoned cut on Sunshine's chest, so she won't die of it; she even gains some of his abilities. However, it involved drinking a doe's blood (with Con as the vessel) when Sunshine is very staunchly a vegetarian, it conferred some of his vampiric nature upon her and she really doesn't want that, and seeing the way vampires do turns out to be annoying because she can see equally clearly in light and shadow and her brain just can't parse it properly. Con, for his part, isn't thrilled about picking up some of Sunshine's humanity and is severely weakened by the rite... and then the metaphysical link forged between them saves his life. Which he feels awkward about.
- Blue-Collar Warlock: Good old Mel is heavily implied to be one of these, although it's unclear how active he currently is.
- Book Dumb: Sunshine (true more to the spirit of the trope than the name; she's a fan of books). She may have barely graduated high school, but she also survives three encounters with vampires.
- The Call Knows Where You Live: Which Sunshine realizes while dealing with the giant cut on her breast and skewering a vampire with a metal table knife. If she and Con don't deal with Bo before Bo finds her, then she may as well say goodbye to her bakery life. And her life, period.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: And puts them under arrest due to Sunshine being in a state of hysteria and covered in Bo's blood.
- Cheerful Child: Paulie, Sunshine's apprentice. It annoys her when he starts to whistle.
- Chef of Iron: Sunshine's baking draws a lot of business to the coffee shop. The story of her killing a vampire with a kitchen knife brings a fair bit more.
- Close-Knit Community: The coffeehouse and its customers.
- The Comically Serious: Con, who is ominous, ancient, and entirely without the context that would allow him to respond to most of Sunshine's jokes or references. Sometimes it's a little scary, and sometimes it's just funny.
- Compelling Voice: The media puts an electronic effect onto vampire voices, just in case it turns out they can do this.
- Collector of the Strange: Constantine's deceased Master/sire. Unlike Con, he liked to accrue physical things, especially magical objects. His taste was very... baroque, and Sunshine spends some time making fun of it.
- Contrived Coincidence: Sunshine gets drawn into the plot when Bo's vampires kidnap her on a nighttime walk. Unknown to them, she's descended from a famously powerful magical bloodline, and the ordeal reawakens her own long-forgotten magic — which happens to be The Power of the Sun. Constantine breaks into ghoulish laughter and lampshades the improbability.
- Cool Old Lady: Sunshine's landlady Miss Yolande.
- Cowardly Lion: Sunshine considers herself a "wimp", but she doesn't like bullies and rescues a girl from a vampire.
- Crapsack World: "I think the [myth of the] phoenix has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being true, because it's nasty. What this world doesn't 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?"
- Cycle of Revenge: Bo is supposedly out to kill Con because Con killed Bo's Master; Con did that because Bo's Master killed his Master. Con implies that, while those deeds were committed, the feud is actually an excuse to get rid of him before his ideas about surviving without a gang spread to Bo's followers and reduce Bo's power.
- Damsel out of Distress: When she gets kidnapped, Sunshine calls on her long-unused powers to not only rescue herself but also forge a friendship with Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Con as she rescues him too. In broad daylight, which is supposed to be impossible.
- Dark Is Evil: The vampires are all about darkness. A human under a vampire's thrall is said to be "under the dark".
- Dark Is Not Evil: Conversely, Con himself is a good guy, and Sunshine's new dark-sight gives her several visions where darkness is a positive thing (such as the roses in Yolande's garden loving the darkness under the earth where their roots grow).
- Daywalking Vampire: Downplayed with Con. While he can't stand sunlight at least without Sunshine interfering, he can endure moonlight and starlight, which few vampires of his age can.
- Deadly Euphemism: The preferred formal term In-Universe is "striking" a vampire, not "killing" or "destroying" it.
- Disappeared Dad: Sunshine's father, Onyx Blaise, mysteriously disappeared many years ago. No one knows what happened to him, and we don't find out.
- Elemental Powers: Magic-users are described as usually having a particular elemental affinity which gives them resistance to things that the element opposes or neutralizes. The most common ones are (of course) fire, air, water, and earth, but metal and wood are also known possibilities. The title character's is, appropriately, sunlight, which is an unusual affinity falling somewhere between air and fire and "something else". It makes her unusually repellent and destructive against vampires, who have an affinity for darkness (somewhere between earth and blood — i.e. water — and "something else").
- Emotion Eater: Dabbled with; vampires can draw sustenance from tears in a place of blood, although it is weaker.
- The End of the World as We Know It: Averted during the Voodoo Wars (fifteen years before the book starts) but expected to happen within a century after the book ends — the vampires will own humanity, and all we'll be to them is livestock.
- Enemy Mine: Sunshine initially views her rescue of Con as this and freaks out about helping a species that is Always Chaotic Evil, at least in the media. Later on, she develops a genuine bond with him.
- Exact Words: At one point, Jesse says Sunshine had better not be thinking of taking on Bo's gang (although he doesn't know that's what it is) on her own. That is to say, without SOF. Sunshine replies with perfect honesty that she's not thinking of handling the vampires on her own. That is to say, she's going to do it with Con. Jesse can tell there's something up with her response, but not what (since he also has no way of knowing that she has a vampire partner).
- Expospeak: Sunshine often digresses from the main plot to explain details of her world — we find out, for example, that the man who invented the test for demonic ancestry that SOF uses discovered quickly that he himself was a partblood, quit before he could be fired, and spent the rest of his life breeding roses with ridiculous names.
- Eye Colour Change: It initially seems that Con's eyes are naturally a sort of dull, scummy green. Later, Sunshine learns this is only because he's exhausted and unfocused; when he's on the hunt, his eyes become blazing and intimidating emerald green.
- Faking Amnesia: Sunshine pretends she has PTSD that made her forget or block her memories after escaping from being held captive by vampires. Mostly she does have PTSD but she hasn't forgotten anything (at least not permanently), she just doesn't want to talk about it or explain A) that she saved a vampire and B) how she saved a vampire.
- Family Theme Naming: We're given the proper names of two members of the Blaise family, Onyx and his daughter Raven. Both names are synonyms for 'black.' Whether or not other members of their bloodline have similar names is not specified.
- Fantastic Racism: Humans with demon ancestors (partbloods) tend to have a lot of trouble getting and holding jobs or promotions. The same holds for weres; the drug to prevent the change is technically illegal but people use it anyway because taking sick days around full moons too often can ruin your career.
- Film the Hand: Sunshine shoves her hand in front of the camera to avoid being filmed by an overly zealous reporter. At the time, she doesn't know whether vampires would be watching the broadcast, and she is still desperately trying to make things go back to normal.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Or allies, at least. Because Sunshine rescues Con, he helps her escape without getting tracked. In this universe, that actually creates a metaphysical bond that they both have to deal with. Very awkwardly.
- Fluffy the Terrible: A mild example. The evil vampire's name is Beauregard, and his nickname is Bo. Sunshine comments that it sounds like a name someone would give their sheepdog.
- Food as Bribe: Inverted; if you eat Sunshine's food, she becomes your friend. This is a problem with Con because he doesn't eat pastries; his least creepy meals are raw meat and bottled water.
- A Friend in Need: Many.
- Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Most vampires form gangs and torture humans in order to taste the fear in their blood when they finally get around to eating them. Constantine may be creepy and has experimented with the nastier ways of being a vampire in the past, but we never see him hurt a human, and he has several opportunities. This behavior means Constantine is both unusually powerful and independent, since he has no problems moving around (other vampires his age have become so corrupted over the years that they can't come outside at all, even during the darkest nights, because the faint light from the stars is enough to harm them. They rely on their gangs to get things done). Sunshine's never heard of any others like Con, though, so they're either very rare or very secretive. Con states that one of the reasons Bo wants him dead is because if the friendly neighborhood school of vampirism catches on, it will deprive the master vampires of much of their power—if newbie suckers learn they don't have to spend their unlives as sadistic thugs working for Orcus on His Throne, they won't.
- Future Slang: Well, Alternate History slang. "Kali" means variously intense, tough, and/or dangerous; "thor" can mean something is awesome or strong, but depending on the situation may also imply recklessness or a sense of being over-the-top. "Sheer" seems to occupy roughly the same place in Sunshine's English that "cool" does in ours. Meanwhile, Sunshine's delicious muffins are "spartan", and dry store-bought bread made with cheap flour and additives is "carthaginian" (lower-case letters as written).
- Girl Next Door: The magic-wielding, vampire-slaying version.
- Gone Horribly Right: Sometimes Sunshine makes dishes too well. She remembers making a fluffy pudding with a thick fruit filling that earned the name Death of Marat; it was so popular that she got sick of making it, since it's a "brute" to make fluffy puddings with heavy fillings. A similar thing happens with cherry tarts after Charlie gets her a cherry pitter when the fruit is in season.
- Good Stepmother: Sunshine loves her stepdad Charlie, and even took his last name. He gave her mom a job, and her a place in the kitchen when she was old enough to handle responsibility. Sunshine has more issues with her biological mother, while Charlie serves as a buffer between them.
- Greasy Spoon: Charlie's restaurant is a positive example by design. It serves good, affordable, diner-style food; has a Close-Knit Community in the neighbourhood; and looks after everyone who comes in, whether or not they have money.
- Human-Demon Hybrid: It's relatively common to have a demon in the family tree; some people never find out, or only learn when something happens like manifesting Wrong Context Magic or sprouting tusks in high school. Demons are only otherworldly, not evil, but partbloods often face prejudice if word gets out.
- Human Disguise: Constantine is somehow able to look like a normal human in front of the SOF. Since he can turn it on on cue and it makes him distinctly shorter, it appears to be a supernatural ability.
- Hybrids Are a Crapshoot: People with both human sorcery and demonic ancestry have at least a 90% chance of going violently, irredeemably insane, and might manifest powerful Wrong Context Magic on top. Families with strong magical bloodlines tend to inbreed in order to avoid having a child with an unknown demonic partblood. The further back your magical ancestry is, the safer you are from losing it and going on a killing spree. Sunshine is afraid that this might be the case with her. She never learns for sure, but her maternal grandparents disowning her mother for marrying a sorcerer, and her own mother's attitude about the divorce and about keeping Sunshine away from her biological dad, fit uncomfortably well into the theory.
- Hypnotic Eyes: You never, ever look into a vampire's eyes. Things get very weird for Sunshine when that no longer works on her.
- I Am a Monster: Sunshine struggles with this through the book, first as she helps Con escape from Bo since humans do not rescue vampires, and later as she gains Con's vampiric abilities and becomes (she believes) tainted from killing Bo.
- I Gave My Word: She worries when Constantine does not show up on time. He had said he would. She's right to worry. Several characters at several times note that Constantine has a rigid sense of personal honour.
- I Know Your True Name: Vampires use name magic. Constantine laughs at the narrator for asking him his name, and later reveals it as a gesture of trust. Unlike most works, in Sunshine, the name is the name — or names — you use. The narrator is as vulnerable through her nickname "Sunshine" as through her legal name ("Rae Seddon"), and more so than through her birth name ("Raven Blaise"). Fortunately for Sunshine, she hasn't used "Raven" in years, and old and evil vampires can't even say words related to sunlight...
- Impostor-Exposing Test: When Sunshine and Con are being interrogated by the police, Con is exposed to sunlight as they suspect of him being a vampire. Sunshine manages to use her magic to keep him from frying and hence passing the test.
- Innate Night Vision: Vampires can see perfectly in the dark, as can Rae after Constantine treats her with his blood. She realizes it's not actually sight, but a Bizarre Alien Sense that the mind interprets visually.
- Just Before the End: The human race is still hanging on, but only just.
- Lady in Red: Sunshine is dressed in a blood-red dress before being given to Constantine. This could be metaphorical as red = availability, because she is available to be eaten, and even vampires themselves are not immune to the traditional metaphors linking vampirism and sex.
- The Last Dance: When Sunshine realizes she has two days before she has to face Bo and end the conflict, her list consists of eating an entire pan of Bitter Chocolate Death (which she can't finish), buying several dozen roses, and not telling anyone that she's going on a Suicide Mission.
- The Lightfooted: Vampires move silently and subtly in ways that the human eye can't even follow, thanks in part to being able to step partially or wholly into an extradimensional "Other-space" as they go.
- Light Is Good: Or at least used by the protagonist to destroy an unquestionably evil vampire. Notably, a vampire's aversion to light seems to be directly proportionate to the amount of evil they've inflicted. Also invoked by Yolande, who noticed immediately when her tenant got a vampire gentleman caller, being a master wardcrafter, but waited for Sunshine to explain because she couldn't believe the evil of someone with sun magic. (Although she adds that she would have worked up to believing it fast if there were more than one vampire involved.)
- Light Is Not Good: On the other hand, the goddess of pain is described as "without shadows", but in an extremely terrifying and aggressive way - Sunshine compares her to a living nuclear reactor, radiant and poisonous.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Everyone except Sunshine knows about her family heritage. While technically she does know her father was a "big deal", it's been a very long time and she doesn't want to remember most of it. She speculates her mother was trying to protect her by concealing any possible demonic heritage and getting her interested only in normal, non-magical pursuits.
- Lost Property Live Drop: Rae's big show of "returning" the pocketknife she "borrowed" from Constantine even convinces the SOF agents interviewing them. Casting her protective magic on him through her knife keeps him from combusting when the sun rises, making his Human Disguise much more credible.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Vampires burst in a shower of long-dead meat when staked. Even veteran SOF officers have a hard time looking at the blast zone.
- The Man Makes the Weapon: Vampires are immune to most weapons, yet Rae stabs one to death with a common table knife in a moment of anger, and later repeats the feat bare-handed. It's uncertain whether it's because of her unique sun affinity, but everyone agrees it's supposed to be flat-out impossible.
- Man of Kryptonite: As a sun-aspected mage, Rae has power to destroy things of darkness... such as vampires.
- Mayfly–December Romance: Sort of. At the very least, Sunshine and Con have a very strong platonic bond due to them saving each other.
- Meaningful Name: Sunshine. It's a nickname, but it's been assimilated so thoroughly by everyone who knows her that nobody calls her anything else.
- Meaningful Rename: Sunshine's birth name is Raven Blaise, but her mother made a dedicated effort to bury that name after the disappearance of Sunshine's father and her remarriage to Charlie Seddon. Raven Blaise therefore became Rae Seddon, and by the time the book starts everyone knows her as "Sunshine."
- The Mentor: Sunshine's beloved grandmother taught her the basics of transmuting, but disappeared after the Voodoo Wars.
- Mind Probe: The goddess of pain tries it on Sunshine to compel her to tell the truth. Sunshine refers to it as "trolling", detects it and resists. It is illegal to do this without due cause or consent, and anything found cannot be used in court, but as Sunshine notes, once you know something you can't un-know it.
- Mugging the Monster: Lampshaded by Con when Sunshine tells him her real name. If he had drunk her blood, as Bo had intended while they were chained side by side, he would have become powerful enough to utterly destroy Bo and his entire gang in a few days. Sunshine by herself proves to be quite a formidable threat once she and Con escape.
- Must Be Invited: Here's an interesting little wrinkle to the traditional rules about entering dwellings, where are also in play: a vampire can't do much to a human that the human doesn't want them to do, other than kill them. Not even drain them after killing them. Unfortunately, vampires have such powerful mental domination abilities that they can indeed convince a human they want to be drained of blood. (Sunshine muses a little on if the restriction applies to other forms of invitation. It turns out it does, but vampires don't usually bother having sex with humans. By some of Con's behavior, it seems they can certainly enjoy it, but that it might be a bit of a Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex situation.)
- My Beloved Smother: Sunshine's mother comes off like this, wanting her daughter to move back home. Her excuse is that when they left Onyx, Sunshine quickly became ill in the terrible apartment they had because there was no access to sunlight, and it's implied her mom is scared of the Blaises tracking down her daughter. Sunshine mentions arguing with her mother frequently because she needs her independence.
- Nature Lover: Constantine's stated motive for living near New Arcadia.
- Never Was This Universe: Simply very similar. Among other things, America appears to be called Libertalia and England is Albion. The American War of Independence is referred to as the Liberty Wars. Additionally, the religious landscape is significantly different—Hinduism and Buddhism both exist, but Christianity seems to have been replaced as the dominant religion by an undefined kind of neopaganism. Vampires are repelled (in theory, anyway) with ward signs such as the staked heart and the perfect triangle, rather than crosses; Sunshine receives solstice rather than Christmas presents; and people generally swear by gods and angels.
- Noiseless Walker: Vampires don't make any noise when they move unless they want to, even on surfaces like creaky stairs that shouldn't be able to bear their weight silently. It's implied that they exist partially outside the physical world.
- No Name Given: The goddess of pain is only ever referred to as that. Blink and you'll miss that her surname is Jain.
- Noodle Incident: Con is capable of feats that are said to be impossible for a vampire of his age and strength — his ability to move around in strong moonlight being the most obvious. It's implied that this is because he has rejected the darker ways of being a vampire (and in doing this he upsets the nastier sort, who don't want their underlings to get ideas), but we never get an explicit explanation. More amusingly, the reason why pissing off were-skunks is a bad idea gets left to the reader's imagination.
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Sunshine mentions this in passing; she keeps all the recipes in her head and teaches them personally to Paulie. When she thinks about how she'd spend her last days on Earth, she notes sourly that she'd have to write the recipe down.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: "The goddess of pain," who, ironically enough, is completely correct in suspecting Con to be a vampire. Her specific obstructiveness is in her pursuing nothing but power while flagrantly abusing the power she already has; she follows the letter of SOF's mission (pursue and expose Other influence on humankind) while ignoring the spirit (protecting the innocent).
- Occult Detective: Special Other Forces (SOF). As befits The Unmasqued World, they're a fully-funded non-secret government agency described as cops for the nonhumans.
- One-Drop Rule:
- Anyone known to have non-human ancestry might as well give up on trying to get into certain jobs, and can face a fair amount of social prejudice as well. SOF is especially strict about hiring only pure humans, though the part-bloods in the organization made sure to work loopholes into the tests.
- Anyone who has both human magic and any amount of demonic ancestry has about a 90% chance of going spectacularly, violently insane.
- Our Demons Are Different: Although we never see any full-blooded demons, we do see a few humans with demon ancestry who have things like extra teeth, horns, the habit of turning blue when they hold their breaths, and so on. SOF has some impressive technology designed to ensure that they hire only pure-blooded humans. Part-bloods have varied and equally-impressive means of getting around said technology, and quite a few of them work for SOF.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: Were-chickens, were-rats, were-skunks and others. Werewolves exist but are relatively rare. Drugs exist to suppress the Change, though they are illegal.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires are much less human in Sunshine than in most works and not at all integrated into human society (despite it being reinforced that all of them were human once; that might even be the problem), and they get progressively less human as they age. This process apparently is much slower for Friendly Neighborhood Vampires than for the other kind: Constantine can deal with twilight and moonlight, and most vampires his age can't. They're also slightly separate from physical space and don't experience it the way humans do; simply by leaving the area of the lake, Sunshine makes it almost impossible for Bo to track her, even though she doesn't go into hiding and her face ends up on TV several times.
- Out-of-Clothes Experience: Rae's first self-guided foray into vampiric Other-space brings her body along without anything on it.
- Poke in the Third Eye: Bo's daytime protections include an automatic "bug zapper" ward that shorts out attempts to spy through Sympathetic Magic or vampiric Other-space. It's powerful enough to blow up a computer, but not intelligent enough to register Rae's repeated attempts.
- The Power of the Sun: As sunlight is Rae's primary element, it replenishes her magic and heals her body. She can also protect vampires from the harmful effects of sunlight and has a "counter-affinity" for powers of darkness that she's only beginning to explore.
- Power Tattoo: Tattooed wards a directly linked to the bearer's life force, which makes them much more stable than disposable wards but is also a vulnerability that an enemy can exploit to deadly effect. Sorcerers often wear dramatic hooded cloaks specifically to hide the details of their tattoos.
- Pyrrhic Victory: Humanity won the Voodoo Wars, but they lost too much strength in the process and allowed the vampires to gain the upper hand. Without a miracle, the vampires will rule humanity outright in another century at most.
- The Quiet One: When Constantine says things, he's definite about them. Otherwise, he'd rather say nothing. You get "Yes," and "No," and not much else unless he's really excited. He also has a tendency toward Brutal Honesty; Sunshine wonders if she could teach him to say "Perhaps," or the comforting words humans say when they're worried.
- Reasonable Authority Figure:
- Charlie Seddon is the owner of Charlie's and Sunshine's stepdad. He's able to calm her down when she's in a bad mood and fends off the press. However, she can't tell him about Con.
- The SOF guys, Pat and Jesse. Though they are the magic fuzz and no one trusts SOF, Sunshine likes them because they're a Nice Guy pair and love her baking. They investigate Sunshine's disappearance, clean her up at the headquarters when she makes a vampire explode all over her — using a table-knife instead of a stake — and reassure her she's not in trouble for hiding the truth from them since she obviously went through a traumatic experience when she vanished. When she tells them vampires kidnapped her, they both look like they want to find some vampires to hunt on her behalf. Pat and Jesse want to recruit her part-time due to her gifts, but respect her wishes to think about it and help out once in a while. They can see she needs time to process everything, including the fact that she's a powerful magic-user but wants to keep baking and making cinnamon rolls rather than roll up her sleeves and go into battle. When she gets rid of a giant vampire gang leader, they suspect what Con may be but don't press him when realizing there's no proof. It's hinted they may recruit her in the future but will gently poke rather than enforce it, and protect her from the goddess of pain.
- Refusal of the Call: Sunshine doesn't really want to be a SOF agent, but she can off suckers with common household utensils, and they want her out there doing it.
- Secret Secret-Keeper: After several months, Rae's elderly landlady Yolande turns out to have known about a vampire visiting Rae all along, thanks to all the Protective Charms on the property. Fortunately, she's sympathetic, and Rae is immensely relieved to have someone to talk to about it all.
- Spiked Blood: There's an In-Universe urban legend that vampires won't touch people who are too badly intoxicated. Rae doesn't believe it and suspects that some vampires actually enjoy the extra kick, or wouldn't mind victims who can't flee. However, one of Bo's people inflicts a cut on Sunshine that poisons her blood, in the hopes of harming Constantine once he finally breaks and consumes her.
- The Stoic: Con doesn't emote much. Or possibly he emotes quite often, but it doesn't come across to a non-vampire. Sunshine notes that he speaks almost without inflection.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Sunshine becomes one after she and Con escape from Bo. It only gets worse as she skewers a vampire with a table knife, and by the end, she's convinced that killing Bo has tainted her.
- Stronger with Age: This definitely applies to vampires. It's normally counterbalanced by their increasing aversion to sunlight, but there's a slight loophole: A vampire's aversion to sunlight seems to be proportionate not to their age, but to the evil they have inflicted. Constance, who is the closest thing we see or hear of to a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, thus has far greater mobility than normal for a vampire of his age.
- Super-Toughness: Vampires are vulnerable to sunlight, but the only other known way to destroy one is to stake it through the heart. This is harder in this universe than in some others, because vampires are extremely fast and have fully-functional rib cages and breastbones protecting the heart. You get one shot, and if you miss, you die. Also? The stake has got to be wood or wrought iron, preferably wood from an apple tree with mistletoe growing on it; try with anything else, and you won't even get that one shot.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Sunshine has a boyfriend the entire book. Still doesn't keep her from having some pretty intense moments, including something that could only count as foreplay, with Con. It doesn't go anywhere definite; though Sunshine makes it clear that she's attracted to him, Con is resistant for reasons that, as usual, he isn't interested in explaining, aside from feeling inducing "intensity" to an already-fraught relationship would be a bad idea.
- Take a Third Option: Pat and Jesse offer to recruit Sunshine for SOF, seeing that she's good at killing vampires with metal table knives. Sunshine is demurring because she wants to be a normal baker. They compromise when she helps them with investigating magic links to the vampires who kidnapped her and keep her away from any knives that might trigger a violent instinct.
- Talk About the Weather: Yolanda does this very well.
- Through His Stomach: In the generalized form. Sunshine is the Cinnamon Roll Queen.
- Tom the Dark Lord: Rae has to laugh when she learns that the malevolent master vampire terrorizing her is named Beauregard.
- Took a Level in Badass: Rae when she starts using her magic again as she helps Con escape along with her.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Favorite dish; Sunshine's specialty is "cinnamon rolls as big as your head." These make strong men weak, and strong women race over cobblestones in high heels.
- Uncanny Valley: In-Universe, vampires are described as human-shaped but wrong in an inherently threatening way, though they can suppress it well enough to pass for humans when they want. Then there's the matter of their unnatural movements, their slightly inhuman voices, and their persistent smell of fresh blood.
- Undead Abomination: Vampires come across as by far the most alien of the Others and are definitely the most feared. In their final confrontation, Rae perceives Bo as an unspeakable being Made of Evil that could destroy her with its presence alone.
- Undeathly Pallor: Vampires have conspicuous grey skin that Rae repeatedly likens to mushrooms — spoiled mushrooms, when Constantine is in bad condition.
- The Unmasqued World: Everyone sort of woke up to the existence of magic, vampires, werecreatures and demons before or during the war that wiped out most of the normal humans.
- Unreliable Expositor: Some of Sunshine's Expospeak is later revealed to be mistaken; see e.g. Wizards Live Longer below. Sometimes she even contradicts herself without external help, e.g. first she says that by handling magic without a license she committed the kind of crime that SOF really hates, but a bit later she tells us that the licensing thing was piffle (she may simply have meant in comparison to undeclared demonic heritage, since demon blood mixed with strong magical talent tends to produce people who make Hannibal Lecter look minor league). Several times she also discusses the fact that not everything she thought she knew is turning out to be true. ("Where did sorcerers get their tattoos? Maybe I didn't know anything anymore.")
- Unresolved Sexual Tension: With Con.
- Vampires Are Rich: Despite their existence being illegal, vampires are estimated to control at least a fifth of the global economy. Constantine inherited a sumptuous home and a huge trove of priceless artifacts from his master and has added them to his collection, though an existence outside mortal society gives him little use for his wealth.
- Weakened by the Light: All vampires have this to some degree. It seems to be a kind of accumulated karmic backlash from the acts of evil they have inflicted: Constantine (the closest thing to a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire we know of) can handle anything but direct sunlight, at least for a little while, while Beauregard (who is unusually horrible even for a vampire) can never go outside or even speak words related to sunlight.
- Wizards Live Longer: Sunshine has always thought of this trope as wish fulfillment. She learns from a retired professional magic handler that while most ordinary magic handlers won't notice much difference, those who are powerful and steep themselves in magic can live to be very old indeed. This is not a cheerful thought, given that The End of the World as We Know It is predicted within the next century. If she continues doing what she does but doesn't do it well enough, she might live to see it.
- Wooden Stake: Possibly thanks to trees' immunity to Dark magic, a wooden stake bypasses vampiric Super-Toughness and kills them instantly if it pierces the heart. Cold Iron also works as an inferior substitute.
- Wound That Will Not Heal: A member of Bo's gang gives Rae a cut that turns out to contain poison meant for Con. It takes Blood Magic to heal it, and only Rae's magic keeps it from killing her in the interim.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: While Sunshine reads a lot of gory, goth-y vampire literature, her reading material shows vampires as Always Chaotic Evil, which means that Bo is more or less what she expects (only worse), but she's totally unprepared for Con — the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire trope simply doesn't exist in her world.
- A Year and a Day: How long her mother kept her warded from her father's family.
- Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: They do things like trying to spot vampires, for instance. What would they do if they actually found one?
