Blood Canticle (8 page)

8

S
O
,
NOBODY EVER ACCUSED ME
of acquiring any real wisdom in my two hundred years on this Earth. I know only one way to proceed.

Clem let us out in front of the hotel, a new one, quite luxurious, and most expensive, and in the thick of things, so to speak, with an address on Canal Street, the great shabby divide of New Orleans, and an entrance out back to the French Quarter, the little world I preferred.

Mona was in such a trance that we had to propel her to the elevator, I on her left and Quinn on her right. Naturally everyone in the lobby took note of us—not because we were blood-sucking immortals bent on destroying two of our kind on the fifteenth floor, but because we were exceedingly and severely gorgeous, especially Mona, wrapped in feathers and shimmering fabric and poised atop a pair of breakneck heels.

Quinn was thirsting now as strongly as Mona was, and it would see him through what we had to do.

But I wasn’t immune to the questions he’d raised in the car. Poetry, love. And me secretly aspiring to sanctity! What an everlasting life! And remember, honorary Children of the Night, what I said about telepathy. It ain’t the real thing, no matter how good it is.

As soon as we reached the suite, I pushed the door in fairly quietly, without breaking its hinges, since I intended to close it again, and the spectacle into which I plunged on feline feet astonished me.

Ah, the Savage Garden of this Earth that hath such creatures in it!

The mavericks were dancing in dim light to the most intense music—a Bartók concerto for violin and orchestra flooding the room at max volume. The music was sad, ripping, overpowering—a command to abandon all things cheap and tawdry, a full-blown engulfing majesty.

And though they themselves were infinitely more arresting than I had ever anticipated, these two, I spied beyond them on the long deep burgundy-colored couch a cluster of mortal children, bruised, unconscious and obviously being used at random as blood victims.

All three of us were in the room with the door closed, and the insurgents danced oblivious to us, their senses drenched in lustrous sound and rhythm.

They were absolutely spectacular in appearance, with tanned skin, rippling jet black hair to the waist—being both of Semitic or Arabic descent—very tall and with large facial features, including magnificent mouths, and they were inherently graceful. They danced with closed eyes, oval faces serene, in huge swaying and arching gestures, humming through closed lips to the music, and the male, who was on the surface almost indistinguishable from the female, every now and then shook out his immense veil of hair and swung it rapidly around him in a circle.

Their sleek black leather clothes were stunning and unisexual. Supple pants, sleeveless and collarless tops. They wore gold bracelets on their naked upper and lower arms. They embraced each other now and then and let each other go, and as we watched, the female dipped down into the cluster of mortal children and brought up to her lips a limp little boy, and drank from him.

Mona let out a scream at the sight of this, and at once the two vampires froze, staring at us. So similar were their movements, one would have thought they were grand automatons operated by a central system. The unconscious child was dropped to the couch.

My heart became a little knot inside me. I could scarcely breathe. The music flooded my brain, the ripping, sad, compelling voice of the violin.

“Quinn, shut it off,” I said, and scarcely had I spoken when the music stopped. The parlor was plunged into a ringing vibrant silence.

The pair drew together. The figure they made was statuesque.

They had exquisite arched black eyebrows, heavily lidded eyes with thick eyelashes. Arabic, yes, from the streets of New York. Brother and sister, petty merchant class, real hard work, sixteen when made. It came flooding out of them, and also a torrent of worship for me, a torrent of exuberant happiness that I had “appeared.” Oh, God help me. Juan Diego stand by me.

“We didn’t dream we’d see you, actually see you!” said the female, with heavily accented words, voice rich and beguiling and reverent. “We hoped and prayed, and here you are and it is really you.” Her lovely hands unfolded and reached out to me.

“Why did you kill innocent victims in my town,” I whispered. “Where did you get these innocent children?”

“But you, you drank from children yourself, it’s in the pages of the Chronicles,” the male said. Same accented words, courteous, gentle tone. “We were imitating you! What have we done that you have not done!”

The knot in my heart grew tighter. Those accursed deeds, those accursed confessions. Oh God, forgive me.

“You know my warnings,” I said. “Everyone knows. Stay out of New Orleans, New Orleans belongs to me. Who doesn’t know those warnings?”

“But we came to worship you!” said the male. “We’ve been here before. You never cared. It was as if you were a legend.”

Suddenly they realized their immense miscalculation. The male raced for the door, but Quinn caught his arm effortlessly and swung him around.

The female stood shocked in the center of the room, her jet black eyes staring at me, then silently moving over Mona.

“No,” she said, “no, you can’t simply destroy us, you won’t do it. You won’t take from us our immortal souls, you will not. You are our dream, you are our model in all things. You cannot do this to us. Oh, I beg you, make of us your servants, teach us all things. We’ll never disobey! We’ll learn everything from you.”

“You knew the law,” I said. “You chose to break it. You thought you’d slip in and out, leaving your sins behind you. And you murder children in my name? You do this in my city? You never learned from my pages. Don’t throw them in my face.” I began to tremble. “You think I confessed what I did for you to follow my example? My faults were no template for your abominations.”

“But we adore you!” said the male. “We come in pilgrimage to you. Bind us to yourself and we’ll be filled with your grace, we’ll be perfected in you.”

“I have no absolution for you,” I said. “You stand condemned. It’s finished.”

I heard Mona let out a little moan. I could see the struggle in Quinn’s face.

The male tensed his entire body trying to get loose. Quinn held him with one hand wrapped around his upper arm.

“Let us go,” said the male. “We’ll leave your city. We’ll warn others never to come. We’ll testify. We’ll be your holy witnesses. Everywhere we go, we will tell others that we’ve seen you, heard the warning from your own lips.”

“Drink,” I said to Quinn. “Drink till there’s no more to drink. Drink as you’ve never done it before.”

“I begrudge nothing!” whispered the male and he closed his eyes. All the struggling left him. “I am your fount in love.”

Without hesitation, Quinn put his right hand on the huge mass of springy hair of the male and brought the head to the proper position, twisting it until the neck was bared, and then, closing his eyes, he sank his teeth.

Mona stared enthralled, then turned sharply to the female. The thirst transformed Mona’s face. She appeared half asleep, eyes fastened to the female.

“Take her,” I said.

The female gazed fearlessly on Mona. “And you, so beautiful,” the vagrant said in her sharpened words, “you so beautiful, you come to take my blood, I give my blood, here, I give it to you. Only spare me for eternity.” She opened her arms, these arms with gold bracelets, long fingers beckoning.

Mona moved as if in a trance. She embraced the sleek body of the female with her left arm, and pushed the hair away from the right side of the female’s face, and bent her supple body down and took her.

I watched Mona. It was always a spectacle—the vampire feeding, a seeming human with her teeth locked to another, eyes closed as if in deep sleep, no sound, only the victim shuddering and twisting, even her fingers motionless as she drank deeply, savoring the drug of the blood.

And so she was launched on the Devil’s Road with this wretched sacrament, without the need of prodding, letting the thirst carry her through it.

The male collapsed at Quinn’s feet. Quinn was dazed. He staggered backwards. “So far away,” Quinn whispered. “An ancient one, from Jericho, can you imagine it, and he made them, and taught them nothing? What am I to do with this treasure of images? What am I to do with this curious intimacy?”

“Keep it close,” I said. “Store it where the finer things are stored until such time as you need it.”

I moved towards him slowly, then took the limp, soft victim from the floor and brought him into the tiled bathroom of the suite, a palatial marvel with a spacious tub completely surrounded by steps of green marble, and I threw the unfortunate one into the tub where he tumbled like a marionette without strings, settling silently. His eyes had rolled up into his head. He was murmuring in his native tongue, a fine collection of bronzed limbs and glints of gold, and the massive hair nesting beneath him.

In the parlor, I found Mona with her victim on their knees, and then Mona drew back, and for a moment it seemed she would lose consciousness herself, and they would be together in this, these two, their hair intermingling, but Mona rose and lifted the female.

I beckoned.

She carried the female, as a man would carry a woman, arm under her knees, arm around her shoulder. Dark hair streaming down.

“There in the tub, with her companion,” I said.

Mona heaved her over with a sure gesture, letting her tumble in beside him.

The female was silent, unconscious, dreaming.

“Their Maker was old,” Mona whispered, as if not to wake either of them. “He was tramping through eternity. Sometimes he knew who and what he was. And other times he didn’t. He made the pair of them to run his errands. They found out everything on their own. They were so cruel. They were cruel for pleasure. They would have killed the children in the other room. They would have left them here.”

“You want to kiss them good-bye?” I asked.

“I loathe them,” she responded. She sounded so sleepy. “But why are they so lovely? Their hair so fine? It wasn’t their fault. Their souls might have been beautiful.”

“You think so? You
really
think so? You didn’t taste their free will when you drank from them? You didn’t taste an immense sweep of modern knowledge when you drank from them? And what was the summit of their existence, may I ask, other than bashing innocent souls; was it dancing and listening to fine music?”

Quinn came up behind her, keen for my words, and wrapped his arms around her. She raised her eyebrows and nodded.

“Watch what I do,” I said. “Remember it.”

I let loose the Fire with all my consuming power. Let it be merciful, Saint Lestat. I saw the outline of their black bones in the flames for a second, the heat blasting my face, and it was in that second, and that second only, that the bones moved.

The fire flashed to the ceiling, scorched it, and then shrank to nothingness. A tracery of the bones vanished. All that remained was black grease in the spacious tub.

Mona gasped. Her cheeks were beating with the blood she’d drunk. She stepped forward and peered down at the black bubbling grease. Quinn was speechless and plainly horrified.

“And so you can do that to me when I want to go, can’t you?” Mona said, her voice raw.

I was shocked.

“No, dolly dear,” I said. “I couldn’t. Not if my life depended on it.”

I let loose the Fire again. I sent it into the oily residue until there was nothing left.

And so the tall graceful long-haired dancers would dance no more.

I felt slightly dizzy. I shrank back into myself. I felt sick. I moved away from my own power. I collected all my force into my human-shaped self.

In the parlor, in the gentle manner of a human, I examined the children. There were four of them, and they had been beaten as well as bled. They were lying in a heap. All were unconscious, but I detected no blows to the head, no rushing of blood within the skulls, no permanent damage. Boys in shorts and skivy shirts and tennis shoes. No familial resemblance. How their parents must have been weeping. All could survive. I was certain of it.

The sins of my past rose up to taunt me. All my own excesses mocked me.

I made the requisite call to see to their care. I told the astonished clerk what I had discovered.

In the hallway, Mona was crying. Quinn held her.

“Come on, we’re headed for my flat now. So it wasn’t perfect, Quinn, you were right. But it’s over.”

“Lestat,” he said, his eyes glittering as we pulled the weeping Mona into the elevator. “I thought it was nothing short of magnificent.”

9

W
E HAD TO DRAG
M
ONA
through the French Quarter streets. She fell in love with the colors made by spilt gasoline in mud puddles, with exotic furniture in the store windows of Hurwitz Mintz, with antique shop displays of threadbare gilded chairs and lacquered square grand pianos and idling trucks belching white smoke from their upturned exhaust pipes and laughing mortals passing us on the narrow sidewalks carrying adorable babies, who twisted their little necks to peer at us—

—and an old black man playing a tenor saxophone for money, which we gave him in abundance, and a hat-wearing hot dog vender from which Mona could not buy a hot dog now save to stare at it and sniff it and heave it into a trash bin, which gave her staggering pause—

—and of course we attracted attention everywhere, in very unvampirelike fashion, Quinn being taller than anyone we passed and perhaps four times as handsome, with his porcelain face, and all the rest you know, and every now and then Mona with hair flying broke from us and ran ahead frantically, the lazy evening crowds opening and closing for her as though she were on a Heavenly errand, thank God, and then she’d circle back—

—dancing and clicking and stomping like a flamenco dancer, letting the feather wrapper fly out, trail, sag, and then gathering it in again, and crying to see her reflection in shop glass, and darting down side streets until we grabbed ahold of her and claimed custody of her and wouldn’t let her go.

When we got to my town house I gave two hundred dollars to my two mortal guards who were happily astonished, and as Quinn and I started back the open carriageway, Mona gave us the slip.

We didn’t realize it until we’d reached the courtyard garden, and just when I was about to exclaim about the ancient cherub fountain and all the tropical wonders blooming against my much cherished brick walls, I sensed that she was totally gone.

Now, that is no easy feat. I may not be able to read the child’s mind, but I have the senses of a god, do I not?

“We have to find her!” Quinn said. He was instantly thrown into protective overdrive.

“Nonsense,” I said. “She knows where we are. She wants to be alone. Let her. Come on. Let’s go upstairs. I’m exhausted. I should have fed. And now I don’t have the spirit for it, which is a Hell of a situation. I have to rest.”

“You’re serious?” he asked as he followed me up the iron stairway. “What if she gets into some sort of jam?”

“She won’t. She knows what she’s doing. I told you. I have to crash. This is no selfish secret, Little Brother. I worked the Dark Trick tonight, and forgot to feed. I’m tired.”

“You really believe she’s all right?” he demanded. “I didn’t realize you were tired. I should have realized. I’ll go and look for her.”

“No, you won’t. Come on with me.”

The flat was empty. No otherworldly bodies hovering about. No ghosts, either.

The back parlor had been cleaned and dusted earlier this very day and I could smell the cleaning lady’s distant perfume. I could smell her lingering blood scent too. Of course I had never laid eyes on the woman. She came by the light of the sun, but she did her job well enough for me to leave her big bills. I loved giving away money. I carried it for no other purpose. I slapped a hundred on the desk for her. We have desks everywhere in this flat, I thought. Too many desks. Didn’t every bedroom have a little desk? Why so many?

Quinn had only been here once and only under the most lamentable circumstances, and he was suddenly enthralled by the Impressionist paintings, which were quite divine. But it was the new and slightly somber Gauguin which caught my eye for a moment. Now, that was my purchase and had only been delivered in the last few days. Quinn hooked into that one too.

I made my usual beeline for the front parlor over the street, peeking into each and every bedroom on the way, as though I really needed to, in order to know that no one was home. The place had too much furniture. Not enough paintings. Too many books. What the hallway needed was Emile Nolde. How could I get my hands on the German Expressionists?

“I think I should go after her,” Quinn said. He followed me, taking in everything reverently, mind on Mona, no doubt monitoring her every move.

Front parlor. Piano. There was no piano now. I should tell them to get a piano. Hadn’t we passed an antique piano in a window? I had a sudden urge to play the piano—to use my vampiric gift to rip at the keys. It was that Bartók concerto still assaulting my mind, and the picture of those two macabre dancers accentuating the music.

Oh, give me all things human.

“I think I should go get her,” Quinn said.

“Listen, I’m not one to talk much about gender,” I said, flopping down in my favorite of the velvet wing chairs and throwing one foot up on the chair before the desk, “but you have to realize that she’s experiencing a freedom you and I don’t appreciate as men. She’s walking in the darkness and she’s afraid of nothing, and she loves it. And just maybe, just maybe she wants to taste a little mortal blood and she’s willing to take the risk.”

“She’s a magnet,” he whispered. He stood at the window, his hand pulling gently at the lace. “She doesn’t know I’m tracking her. She isn’t that far away. She’s taking her time. I hear her idle thoughts. She’s walking too fast. Somebody’s going to notice—.”

“Why are you suffering, Little Brother?” I asked. “Do you hate me for bringing her over? Do you wish it hadn’t been done?”

He turned and looked at me as though I’d grabbed him by the arm.

“No,” he said. He walked away from the window and sort of tumbled into the chair in the far corner opposite me, diagonally, his long legs sprawling as though he wasn’t sure what to do with them. “I would have tried it if you hadn’t come,” he admitted. “I couldn’t have watched her die. At least I don’t think so. But I am suffering, you’re right. Lestat, you can’t leave us. Lestat, why are those guards outside the house?”

“Did I say I would leave you?” I countered. “I hired those guards after Stirling came here,” I said. “Oh, it’s not that I think any of the Talamasca will come back here. It’s just that if Stirling could walk right in here, then somebody else might.”

(Flash on the Talamasca: Order of Psychic Detectives. Don’t know their own Origins. At least a thousand years old, maybe much older. Keep records on all sorts of paranormal phenomena. Reach out to the telepathically gifted and isolated. Know about us.)

Quinn and I had visited with Stirling at the Oak Haven Retreat House of the Talamasca right after the exorcism of Goblin, and the immolation of Merrick Mayfair. Merrick Mayfair had grown up in the Talamasca. Stirling had a right to know she was no longer one of the (sigh) Undead. The Retreat House was an immense square plantation house on the River Road just outside of town.

Stirling Oliver had not only been a friend of Quinn’s during his mortal years, but he was a friend of Mona’s as well. The Talamasca knew much more about the entire Mayfair family than they knew about me.

It gave me no pleasure to think of Stirling now, much as I admired him and liked him. Stirling was about sixty-five years old and very dedicated to the highest principles of the Order, which for all its avowed secularity might have been Roman Catholic with its strictures against meddling in the affairs of the world or using supernatural persons or forces for one’s own ends. If the Order hadn’t been so fabulously and mysteriously and undeniably wealthy, I would probably have been a patron of it.

(I am also fabulously and mysteriously and undeniably wealthy, but who cares?)

I felt compelled to go see Stirling at the Retreat House and tell him what had happened with Mona. But why?

Stirling wasn’t Pope Gregory the Great, for the love of Heaven, and I wasn’t Saint Lestat. I didn’t have to go to Confession for what I’d done to Mona, but a terrible Contrition settled over me, a profound awareness that all my powers were dark powers and all my talents evil talents, and nothing could come from me but evil no matter what I did.

Besides, hadn’t Stirling told Quinn last night that Mona was dying? What had been the meaning of that information? Wasn’t he in some way in collusion with what had happened? No. He wasn’t. Quinn hadn’t left him last night to seek out Mona. Mona had come to Blackwood Manor on her own.

“Sooner or later, I’ll explain all this to Stirling,” I said under my breath. “It’s as though Stirling will absolve me but that just isn’t true.” I looked at Quinn. “Can you still hear her?”

He nodded. “She’s just walking, looking at things,” he said. He was distracted, the pupils in his eyes dancing slowly. “Why tell Stirling?” he asked. “Stirling can’t tell the Mayfairs. Why burden him with the secret?” He sat forward. “She’s wandering along Jackson Square. A man’s following her. She’s leading him. He senses something isn’t right with her. And she’s on to him. She knows what he wants. She’s luring him. She’s certainly having a great time in Aunt Queen’s high-heel shoes.”

“Stop watching her,” I said. “I mean it. Let me tell you something about your little girl. She’s going to make herself known to the Mayfairs very soon on her own. Nothing’s going to stop her. There are things she wants to know from the Mayfairs. I had a sense of it when—.”

The room was empty. No Quinn. I was talking to all the furniture.

I heard the back door open and close, it was that fast.

I stretched out and scrunched down and put my head back and drifted, eyes shut at once.

I was half dreaming. Why the Hell hadn’t I fed? Of course I didn’t need to feed every night or even every month, but when you work the Dark Trick, no matter who you are, you must feed afterwards, you’re giving from the very sap stream of your life. All is vanity. All is vanity under the sun and under the moon.

I’d been in a weakened state when I’d gone down to deal with Rowan Mayfair, that was my problem, that was why the creature obsessed me. Never mind.

Someone pushed my foot off the desk chair. I heard a woman’s piercing laugh; I heard dozens of people laughing. Heavy cigar smoke. Glass breaking. I opened my eyes. The flat was full of people! Both windows to the front balcony were open and it was jammed with people, women in long low-cut sparkling dresses, men in fine black dinner jackets with flashing black satin lapels, the roar of conversation and merriment almost deafening, but deafening to whom, and a tray went by, held high by a waiter in a white coat who all but tripped over my legs, and there sat a child on the desk, a rosy child, staring at me, a dainty girl with quick black eyes and beautifully waved black hair, seven or eight, enchanting, precious.

“Ducky, I’m sorry!” she said, “but you’re in our world now, I do hate to say it. We have you!” She was mocking up a British accent. She had on a little sailor dress, white with blue trim, and high white socks and little black Mary Janes. She drew up her knees. “Lestat,” she laughed. She pointed at me.

Then, down into the desk chair facing me, slipped Oncle Julien, dressed for the party, white tie, white cuffs, white hair. The crowd pressed in on him. Someone was shouting from the balcony.

“She’s right, Lestat,” Oncle Julien said in flawless French, “we have you in our world now, and I must say you have a divine apartment here, and I so admire the paintings which have only just come from Paris, you and your friends are so very clever, and the furniture, there is so much of it, yes, it seems you’ve crammed every nook and cranny, yet who could have asked for anything finer?”

“But I thought we were mad at him, Oncle Julien,” said the little girl in English.

“We are, Stella,” he said in French, “but this is Lestat’s house, and whether we are angry or not we are Mayfairs first and foremost, and Mayfairs are always polite.”

This sent little Stella into a regular riot of laughter, and she gathered up her little self—soft cheeks, sailor suit, socks, shiny shoes—and leapt from the desk right into my lap, plop.

“I’m so glad,” she said, “because you are so absolutely dandy; don’t you think, Oncle Julien, he’s too beautiful to be a man, oh, I know, Lestat, you’re not one to talk about gender—.”

“Stop it!” I roared. A flashing, cleansing power went out of me, flushing against the walls.

Dead quiet.

Mona stood there, eyes wide, wrapper gone, sleek silk, Quinn right beside her, towering over her, face full of concern.

“Lestat, what is it?” asked Mona.

I got up, I staggered into the hallway. Why was I walking like this? I glanced back at the room. All the furniture had been moved—just a little. Things were askew! The doors were open to the balcony!

“Look at the smoke,” I whispered.

“Cigar smoke,” said Quinn questioningly.

“What is it, Boss?” asked Mona again. She came up to me and put her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. I kissed her forehead, smoothed back her hair.

I didn’t answer her.

I didn’t tell them. Why didn’t I tell them?

I showed them the bedroom with the sealed-up window that was painted to look like a window. I showed them the steel plating on the door and the lock. I told them about the human guards twenty-four hours. They were to pull the curtains around the bed, and sleep in each other’s arms. No ray of the sun, no immortal, no mortal intruder, no one would bother them here. Of course they had a long time before sunrise. Talk, talk, yes. They could wander. But no spying on the Mayfairs, no. No probing for secrets, no. No searching for a lost daughter yet, no. No going home to Blackwood Manor, no. I told them I would meet them tomorrow at dusk.

Now I had to leave, had to.

Had to get out of here. Had to get out of there. Had to get out of everywhere.

The open country.

Near the Talamasca Retreat House.

Distant rumble of trucks on the River Road. Smell of the River. Smell of the Grass. Walking. Grass wet.

Field of scattered oaks. White clapboard house tumbling to ruin, the way they do in Louisiana, swaying walls and caving roof embraced and held suspended by the vines.

Walking.

I spun around.

He was there. Technicolor ghost, black tailcoat, walking as I had been, through the grass, tossing aside the champagne glass, coming on. Stopped. I lunged at him, grabbed him before he could vanish, had him by the throat, fingers dug into what sought to be invisible, holding him, hurting what would be immaterial. Yeah, got you! You impudent phantom, look at me!