Blood Canticle (30 page)

“Stirling, tell her how it went,” I said cautiously. “Tell her the comic parts.”

“If I may say so,” Stirling said, “after an afternoon with Tante Oscar and Dolly Jean, and all their stories of Walking Babies in the swamps, Miravelle and Oberon were ready for a hospital suite. And very likely Michael Curry was glad to see them go.”

“Did they never try to escape the house?” asked Mona.

“Guards all around it,” conceded Stirling. “But Mona, how can anyone let these two go unshepherded into a human world? Yes, the Secret People endured for some five years, it seems, and Oberon and Miravelle told the most wondrous tales of their life with Father and Mother, but the basic concept was falling apart from the start. The Silas Rebellion lasted two years. Rodrigo’s takeover another two, and that’s the story we have at this point.”

“Well, what’s going to happen to them?” Mona demanded.

“Oberon’s placed his fate entirely in Rowan’s hands, and after meeting Michael and wandering about the First Street property, and his high comic rounds with Tante Oscar and Dolly Jean, I think he’s insisting that Miravelle do the same. You might say that Oberon committed himself to Mayfair Medical and committed his sister. That’s where things stand.”

“Any word on Lorkyn?” I asked.

“No,” said Stirling. “None at all. Only Rowan knows what’s happening with Lorkyn. Michael didn’t have a clue.”

“Ah, that’s marvelous!” said Mona bitterly, her lip quivering. “I wonder if she will cut her up alive.”

“Stop it,” I said softly. “Lorkyn’s filthy with the blood of others. She was the cohort of Rodrigo. Rodrigo slew Ash and Morrigan! Let it be.”

“Amen,” said Quinn. “I’ve seldom seen a more frightening creature than Lorkyn. What is Rowan supposed to do with her? Pass her over to the Drug Enforcement people? You think she wouldn’t give them the slip? Rowan has a jurisdiction beyond the law, as we do.”

Mona shook her head. She was becoming ever more fragile by the minute.

“And what about Michael?” she asked, with a note of hysteria in her voice, her face still pallid and her eyes hard with pain. “What’s happening to my beloved Michael in all of this? Does he guess that Rowan’s enchanted with the great Lestat behind his back!”

“Oh, so that’s it,” said Quinn gravely. “And you, the child that bedded him and bore Morrigan, are now coming down upon Rowan for a bevy of kisses. Mona, bear up!”

She shot him a deadly glance. “You’ve never said a mean thing to me, Quinn!” she whispered.

Stirling was quite taken aback by all this.

I spoke not one word.

“You sell the love of Michael and Rowan short and you know you do,” said Stirling with a bit of harshness. “Would that I could break all the confidences bestowed on me. I can’t. Suffice to say Rowan loves Michael with her entire soul. Yes, there were moments of extreme temptation in New York with Ash Templeton. She, no longer able to bear, and this wise immortal, who could so well understand her . . . but she never yielded. And she won’t break the foundations of her life for anyone else now.”

“That’s the truth,” I said quietly.

Quinn reached over and kissed Mona. She yielded to it forgivingly.

“Where is Michael now?” she asked, avoiding my glance.

“Sleeping,” said Stirling. “After Rowan rushed in and took Oberon and Miravelle away, a bit dramatically perhaps, Michael collapsed on his bed upstairs and fell into a deep slumber. I don’t think it helped his peace of mind one bit that Tante Oscar had looked deep into his eyes before she left and declared him ‘the father of doomed progeny.’ ”

Mona was immediately furious. (But it was better than being insane.) Her eyes were moist and rimmed in red. “That’s just what Michael needs! How dare this creature come making such predictions! I’ll bet Dolly Jean latched on to that too. Dolly Jean would never let an opportunity like that slip through her crafty little fingers.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Stirling. “She told Michael he had best sprinkle yellow powder all around his bed. I think that was the last straw for him.”

“You know,” said Mona, her hysteria cresting, her words racing again, “in my glory as Designée of the Mayfair Legacy, when I was going around in a cowboy hat and shorts and big-sleeve shirts, riding in the company plane, worth billions of dollars and eating all the ice cream I ever desired, I wanted to purchase a radio station. And one of my dreams was to give Dolly Jean her own show so that people could call in and chat with her about country ways and country wisdom. I was going to give Ancient Evelyn her own show—

“—you know Ancient Evelyn, don’t you, Stirling?

“—Lestat, Ancient Evelyn just whispers and whispers—

“—and I was going to give a prize to anyone who could actually understand her. I figured whisperers would call in, you know, who would whisper right back to her the way she whispered to them. We’d have an hour of whispering. I’d give them prizes too, Hell, why not? Then there would have been the Michael Curry Hour, when people could have called up with stories of the Irish Channel or Irish songs, and Michael and the callers could have sung them together. And of course I was going to have my own show, all about the world economy and world trends in architecture and art—(sigh). I had designs for every kook in the family. Never got to do that, got too sick. But Dolly Jean’s still jiving. And Michael—Michael’s wife cheating on him with you, and he’s got no one to defend him.”

“Oh, Mona let it go,” said Quinn.

My pain was no one’s concern but my own.

She collapsed back into a pale, glazed-eyed trance, but only for a moment:

“And you know the damnedest thing,” she said, squinting as though she couldn’t quite recall her theme. “Oh yeah, vampires, I mean, real vampires, they don’t have any websites.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” said Quinn. “They shouldn’t have any websites.”

“It’s time for you to hunt,” I said. “You’re both thirsting. Make a night of it. Head up north. Hit the beer joints along the roads. Beat the hours down with hunting. By tomorrow, it’s my guess Rowan will be ready to let us see the remains of Ash and Morrigan. And we can see Miravelle and Oberon too.”

She gave me a dazed look. “Yeah, that sounds great,” she whispered. “A regular sideshow. There’s a part of me that never wants to see Rowan or Michael again. There’s a part of me that never wants to see Miravelle and Oberon ever again. As for Morrigan—.”

“Come on, my precious Ophelia,” said Quinn. “We’re going to take to the air, baby, we’re going to do what the Beloved Boss said. I know that jukebox, pool table route. We go for the Little Drink with the truckers and the cowboys, and maybe we stop to dance to the Dixie Chicks now and then, and along comes some guy with a conscience full of pure coal and we lure him out to where the parking lot falls into the trees and we fight over him.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “Sounds brutal and basic,” she sighed.

He pulled her up out of the chair. She turned, and reached down to give me a warm hug and a kiss.

I was happily surprised. I held her tight. “My pixie,” I said. “You’ve only begun on the Devil’s Road. You have such wonders yet to discover. Be clever. Be swift.”

“But how do real vampires connect on the World Wide Web?” she asked with painful seriousness.

“Beats me, sweetheart,” I said. “I’ve never sufficiently recovered from my first sight of a steam locomotive. I almost got run over. What makes you think real vampires want to connect?”

“Stop putting me on,” she said dreamily. “But you don’t want me to create my own web page?”

“Absolutely not,” I said somberly.

“But you published the Chronicles!” she protested. “Now what about that?” She put her hands on her hips. “How do you defend that, I’d like to know?”

“An age-old form of public confession,” I said, “sacrosanct. Goes back to ancient Egypt. A book goes forth quietly into the world, labeled fiction, to be perused, pondered, passed from one to another, perhaps put aside for the future, to perish if unwanted, to endure if valued, to work its way into trunks and vaults and junk heaps, who knows? I don’t defend myself to anybody anyway. Stay off the World Wide Web!”

“Sounds positively dusty to me,” she said. “But I love you just the same. Now think about this radio station idea. Maybe it’s not too late. You could have your own show.”

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” I cried. “I can’t bear it! You think Blackwood Farm’s the World. It’s not, Mona! There’s just Blackwood Farm, and all the rest is Sugar Devil Swamp, trust me. And how long do you think we’ll have Blackwood Farm, you, me or Quinn? My Lord, you’ve got a direct connection to the one who told you where to find the Secret People, you’re E-mailing Wisdom Central, and you’re carrying on about websites! Be gone from me, now! Save thyself from my wrath!”

I think I scared her just a little. She was so tired and gaunt that she fell back from the sound of my voice. “We’re not finished with this discussion, Beloved Boss,” she said. “Trouble with you is you get too emotional. I question anything and you just blow your stack.”

Quinn picked her up and carried her off, making huge circles on the terrace as he went, singing to her, and so they disappeared from sight and her laughter rang out in the softly purring evening.

A warm breeze came to fill the silence. The distant trees were doing their subtle dance. My heart was suddenly beating too hard and a cold anxiety crept over me. I picked up the statue of Saint Juan Diego from the flagstones and set him properly on the table where he belonged. I said nothing about him. Ah, tacky little dude with thy paper roses, thou art surely destined for better representations.

I was in the depths. The pulsing night sang to me of the nothingness. The stars spread out to prove the horror of our universe—bits and pieces of the body of no one flying at monstrous speed away from the meaningless, uncomprehending source.

Saint Juan Diego, make it go away. Work another miracle!

“What is it?” Stirling asked softly.

I sighed. In the distance the white fence of the pasture looked pretty, and the smell of the grass was good.

“I’ve failed at something here,” I said, “and it’s a major failure.” I studied the man to whom I’d just spoken.

Patient Stirling, the English scholar, the Talamasca saint. The man who got down with monsters. Starved for sleep yet ever attentive.

He turned to look at me. Clever, quick eyes.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “What failure?”

“I cannot impress upon her a sense of the gravity of her transformation.”

“Oh, she knows,” he said.

“You surprise me,” I answered. “Surely you don’t forget who I am. You don’t buy this facade. There’s some reservoir of goodness and wisdom in you that never lets you forget what’s behind this mask. And now you think you know her better than I do?”

“She’s reeling from one shock after another,” he said calmly. “How can it be helped? What did you expect of her? You know she worships you. And what if she teases you with outrageous propositions? It was always her way. I feel no fear when I’m near her, no instinctive wariness of an undisciplined power. In fact, quite to the contrary. I sense that there may come a moment when you look back and realize that somewhere along the line her innocence was lost and you can’t even remember when it happened.”

I thought of the massacre last night, the ruthless elimination of Lord Rodrigo and his soldiers. I thought of the bodies heaved into the everlasting sea. I thought of nothing.

“Innocence is not our stock-in-trade, my friend,” I said. “We don’t cultivate it in one another. Honor, I think we can have, more than you may know, and principles, yes, and virtue as well. I’ve taught her that, and every now and then we can behave magnificently. Even heroically. But innocence? It’s not to our advantage.”

He drew back to think on this, with just a little nod. I sensed that there were questions he wanted to ask me, but he didn’t dare. Was it propriety or fear? I couldn’t tell.

We were interrupted and perhaps it was for the best.

Jasmine came across the lawn with another carafe of coffee for Stirling. She was in a sharp tight red dress and high-heel shoes. She was singing loudly:

“Gloria! Gloria! In Excelsis Deo!”

“Where’d you pick up that hymn?” I asked. “Is everybody around here committed to driving me to madness?”

“Well, of course not,” she said. “What would make you say a thing like that? That’s a Catholic hymn, don’t you know that? Grandma’s been singing it in the kitchen all day. Says it’s from the Latin Mass in the old days. Says she saw Patsy in a dream singing that hymn. Patsy all dressed in pink cowboy clothes, with a guitar.”

“Mon Dieu!”
A shiver passed through me. No wonder Julien was leaving me alone tonight. Why not?

She poured two cups of the steaming coffee. She set down the carafe. Then she kissed me on top of my head.

“You know what Aunt Queen said to me last night in my sleep?” she asked in a cheery voice, her hand on my shoulder. I kissed her satin cheek.

“No, what?” I asked. “But please break it to me gently. I teeter on the brink.”

“She said she was tickled you were sleeping in her bed, said she always wanted a man handsome as you in her bed. She laughed and laughed and laughed. Grandma says when the dead come laughing and laughing in your dreams that means they’re in Heaven.”

“I think it does mean that,” said Stirling very sincerely. “This coffee is perfection. How do you do this?”

“Drink up,” I said. “You have that powerful little MG TD with you, don’t you?”

“I certainly do,” he said. “You could see it right out there in front of the house if you had eyes in the back of your head.”

“I want you to take me for a ride in that thing. I have to deliver this saint here to Oberon.”

“Can you hold this carafe and this cup for me while I drive? Jasmine, you mind if I borrow them?”

“Don’t you want the saucer? That’s Royal Antoinette, the saucer’s the prettiest part. Just look at it. Come in a big package from Julien Mayfair, this pattern, service for twelve, present for
’La Famille.’
”

Zap. “No,” I said. “Not from Julien Mayfair.”

“Oh, yes, it did!” she said. “I have the letter. Keep forgetting to give it to Quinn. Was Julien Mayfair at the wake? I never met a Julien Mayfair.”