Blood Canticle (The Vampire Chronicles #10) 1

17

"THIS SECRET HAS TO BE KEPT by you from anyone else," Mona said. Her voice was quaking. She had a firm hold on Quinn's hand. "If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Quinn knows everybody at Blackwood Farm. I can have some time for my leave-taking. What did you mean when you called me Blood Child?"

Rowan looked at her across the round table. Then with sudden impersonal impatience, Rowan tore off the thick purple robe and stepped out of it, as if from a broken shell, a tense figure in a sleeveless white cotton nightgown.

"Let's go out there," she said, her soft deep voice more sure of itself, her head slightly bowed. "Let's go where the other ones were buried. Stirling's out there. I've always loved that place. Let's talk in the garden." She started walking, and only then did I notice she was barefoot. Her hem just skirted the floor.

Michael rose from the table and followed her. It seemed his eyes avoided ours. He caught up with Rowan and put his arm around her.

Immediately Mona led the way after them.

We passed through a classic butler's pantry of high glass cabinets crammed full of vivid china, and then on through a modern kitchen, out French doors and down painted wooden steps onto a sprawling flagstone patio.

There ahead lay the huge octagonal swimming pool, shimmering with a wealth of submerged light and beyond that, a tall dignified cabana.

Long limestone balustrades enclosed the garden patches, which were bursting with tropical plants, and very suddenly the air was filled with the strong scent of the night jasmine.

Great arching branches of the rain tree poured over us from the left. And the cicadas sang loudly from the many crowding trees. There were no traffic sounds from the world beyond. The very air itself was blessed.

Mona gasped, and smiled and shook out her hair and turned for Quinn's reassuring embrace, murmuring fast like a hummingbird beating its wings. "It's all the same, so lovely, more lovely even than I remembered it. Nothing's changed."

Rowan stopped and looked up at the moving clouds as though allowing time for Mona to absorb it all. For one second she glared at me. Blood Child. File folder of facts. Then at Mona. Then at the clouds again. "Who would change such a place?" she asked gently in her low melodic voice, responding to Mona.

"We're only the custodians," said Michael. "Someday other Mayfairs will live here, long after we're gone."

We waited, clustered together. Quinn very anxious. Mona in bliss.

I scanned for the ghost of Julien. Nowhere around. Too risky with Michael able to see him.

From a black iron gateway to the left, Stirling came to meet us, ever the gentleman in crisp tailored linen, and strangely silent, and Rowan walked on, fearless in her bare feet, and pointed toward the garden from which Stirling had just come.

Stirling's eyes locked on Mona for one quick intake of information, and then he went after Rowan and Michael back the way he had come.

We all followed into a different world, beyond the measurements of Italian balustrade and perfectly square flagstone.

It was all rampant elephant ear and banana trees back here, and a broad lawn beneath a huge old oak, and an iron table there and modern iron chairs, more comfortable I suspected than the relics of my courtyard. A high brick wall bounded the place opposite the gateway and a row of yews concealed it from the carport to the left, and an old two-story wooden servants' quarters shut it off from the world to the right, the building itself mostly hidden from us by high thick ligustrum.

There was someone out there in the servants' quarters. Sleeping. Dreaming. An elderly soul. Forget about it.

Wet earth, random flowers, mingling, rattling leaves in the wet summer air, all the night songs, scent of the river only eight blocks from here over the the Irish Channel, where a train whistle cut the night, leading the distant soft roar of box cars.

The cicadas died down suddenly, but the song of the tree frogs was strong, and there were the night birds, which only a vampire could hear.

Low lights along the cement path provided a very feeble illumination. And there were other such beacons scattered in the farthest reaches of the garden. Two floodlights fixed high in the oak spilled a soft luminescence over the scene. As for the moon, it was full but veiled behind the pink panoply of clouds, and so we were in a thin rosy and penetrable darkness, and all around us the garden was alive and balmy and seeking to feed upon us with countless tiny mouths.

As I stepped on the lawn I caught the faint scent of the alien species, the scent that Quinn had caught when he came here as a boy led by the ghost of Oncle Julien. I saw the scent hit Mona with her heightened gifts. She drew herself up as though revolted, and then took a deep breath. Quinn dipped down to kiss her.

Stirling played host with the gathering of the chairs about the table. He tried to disguise his amazement at the vision of Mona. The miracle of Quinn as vampire he'd seen in frightening circumstances, and then again, later, the night we went to tell him that Merrick Mayfair was no more. But Mona . . . he couldn't

quite keep it to himself.

Rowan's snow white gown dragged in the mud. She didn't care. She was murmuring or singing, I couldn't tell which or catch any words or meaning to it. Michael stared at the oak as though talking to it. Then he took off his wrinkled white jacket. He put it over the back of a chair. But he stood staring at the tree as though finishing a soliloquy. He was a big chunk of a man, gorgeously made.

Stirling helped Mona to her chair, and bid Quinn to sit beside her. I waited for Rowan and Michael.

Suddenly Rowan turned and threw her arms around me. She fastened to me about as tight as a mortal woman could do it, so much divine silk and softness to me, whispering feverish words I couldn't catch, eyes racing over me, while I stood stark still, my heart beating frantically. And then she began to touch me all over, open hands on my face, on my hair, then grabbing up my hands and slipping her fingers through my fingers. At last she thrust my hand between her legs and then drew back shuddering, letting me go and staring into my eyes.

I came quite close to losing my mind. Did anyone have a clue as to the crash and thunder inside me? I locked the casket of my heart. I punished it. I endured.

All this while, Michael never looked at us. He had sat down at some point, his back to the oak, facing Mona and Quinn, and he was talking to Mona, singing the fatherly chant again in a soothing voice as to how sweet and pretty she was, and that she was his darling daughter. I could see all that out of the corner of my eye, and then in sheer weakness, the lock inside me broke, and all was released. I gathered up Rowan's supple limbs and I kissed her forehead, the hard sweet skin of her forehead, and then her soft unresisting lips, and let her loose arms go, watching her slip into the chair beside Michael. Silent. Done.

I went to the other side of the table and sat beside Mona. I was bitterly full of desire. It was unspeakable to need someone in this way. I closed my eyes and listened to the night. Ravenous, repulsive creatures singing magnificently. And working the soft fertile earth, creatures of such loathsomeness I couldn't dwell on it. And the clatter of the riverfront train unendingly. And then the absurd song of the calliope on the riverboat that took the tourists up and down the waterway as they feasted and laughed and danced and sang.

"The Savage Garden," I whispered. I turned away as if I hated them all.

"What did you say?" Rowan said. Her eyes broke from their feverish movement just for one moment.

Everyone went quiet, except the singing monsters. Monsters with wings and six or eight legs, or no legs at all.

"It's just a phrase I used to use for the Earth," I said, "in the old times when I didn't believe in anything, when I believed the only laws were aesthetic laws. But I was young then and new to the Blood and

stupid, expecting further miracles. Before I knew we knew more of nothing, and nothing more. Sometimes I think of the phrase again when the night is like this, so accidentally beautiful."

"And now you do believe in something?" Michael asked.

"You surprise me," I said. "I thought you'd expect me to know everything. Mortals usually do."

He shook his head. "I suppose I have a sense," he said, "that you're figuring it all out step by step, like the rest of us." He let his eyes wander over the banana trees behind me. He seemed preoccupied by the night, and deeply hurt by things I couldn't hope to learn from him. He didn't mean to show it off, this hurt. It simply became too great for him to conceal, and so his mind drifted, almost out of courtesy.

Mona was struggling not to cry. This place, this secret backyard, so well hidden from the world of the Garden District streets with its crowded houses, was obviously sacred to her. She slipped her right hand into my left. Her left hand was in Quinn's hand, and I knew she held him as tight as she held me, pressing for reassurance over and over again.

As for my beloved Quinn, he was severely discomforted and unsure of everything. He studied Rowan and Michael uneasily. Never had he been with this many mortals who knew what he was. In fact, he had never been with more than one, and that was Stirling. He, too, sensed the presence of the old one in the back house. He didn't like it.

And Stirling, who had correctly surmised that the disclosure had been made, that Rowan was now subdued and deep in thought, seemed frightened in a dignified way also. He was to my far left, and his eyes were on Rowan.

"What do you believe in now?" Mona asked me, her voice unsteady but insistent. "I mean, if the old resignation of the Savage Garden was wrong, what has replaced it?"

"Belief in The Maker," I replied, "who put it all together with love and purpose. What else?"

"Amen," said Michael with a sigh, "someone better than us, has to be-somebody better than every creature who walks the Earth, somebody who shows compassion. . . ."

"Will you show compassion to us?" Quinn asked. It was sharp. He looked directly at Michael. "I want my secret kept as well as Mona's."

"Trouble with you is you think you're still human," Michael replied. "Your secret's utterly safe. It will be exactly the way you want it. Wait a safe period of time. Then Mona can return to the family. It's not a difficult thing at all."

"This seems amazingly easy for you," Quinn replied suspiciously. "Why is that so?"

Michael gave a short bitter laugh. "You have to understand what the Taltos was, and what they did to us."

Rowan said in a low voice, "And what I did to one of them too quickly, too foolishly." Her eyes moved away into memory.

"I don't know or understand," said Quinn. "I think what Lestat had in mind was an exchange of secrets. There are things Mona simply can't explain. They hurt her too much. They involve you. She becomes caught up in a web of loyalty, and she can't be free. But one thing is clear. She wants to find her daughter, Morrigan."

"I don't know if we can help," said Michael.

"I can look for Morrigan now myself," Mona protested. "I'm strong again." Her hand tightened on mine. "But you have to tell me all you know. For two years I lay in that bed confused and crazy. I'm still mixed- up. I don't know why you haven't found my daughter."

"We'll take you all through it again," said Michael soothingly.

Rowan murmured under her breath, then came to the surface, eyes remote, uncertain, moving rapidly again over the table as over nothing.

"I knew about you," she said. Her words were hushed and ran on smoothly, "I mean, what you are-Blood Children, Blood Hunters, Vampires. I knew. It wasn't a simple matter. Michael knew. The knowledge came in stages." She looked directly at me for the first time as she continued:

"I had seen one of your kind one time, walking, in the Quarter. It was a male with black hair, very handsome, and set apart from everything around him. He appeared to be searching for someone. I'd felt a paralytic conflict, an attraction to him, and a fear of him also. You know my powers. They're not developed as they ought to be. I'm a witch who won't be a witch, a Mad Scientist who won't be Mad. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to follow him. It was a long time ago. I never forgot about it- knowing he wasn't human, and that he wasn't a ghost. I don't think I told anyone about him.

"But then this woman disappeared from the Talamasca. Her name was Merrick Mayfair. I hadn't known her, but I'd known of her-that she was a colored Mayfair, descended from a downtown branch of the family. I can't remember. I think it was Lily Mayfair, yes, or was it Lauren-I despise Lauren, Lauren has an evil mind-Lauren who told me there were lots of colored Mayfairs, but this Merrick wasn't very close to any of them. This Merrick, she had tremendous psychic powers. She knew about us, the First Street gang, but she really didn't want contact. She'd spent most of her life in the Talamasca and we'd never even known of her. Mayfairs hate it when they don't know about Mayfairs.

"Lauren said that she'd come once, this Merrick Mayfair, when the house was opened for a Holiday Tour,

you know, a benefit for the Preservationists, after Michael had restored everything, after all the bad times were over, and before Mona was really sick. This person, Merrick, she'd gone through First Street with the tourists, imagine, just to see the nucleus. And we hadn't been here. We hadn't known."

A sword went through me at these words. I glanced at Stirling. He too was suffering. I flashed back on Merrick climbing on the flaming altar, taking with her into the Light the spirit that had plagued Quinn all of his life. Don't reveal. Don't revive. Can't help.

But Rowan was talking about a time long before the other night when Merrick disappeared forever. Rowan was talking about Merrick's turning to us.

"Then she disappeared," Rowan said, "and the Talamasca was thrown into confusion. Merrick gone. Whispers of evil. That's when Stirling Oliver came South." She looked at Stirling. He was watching her fearfully but calmly.

She lowered her eyes again, her voice continuing soft and low, just above a threatening hysteria.

"Oh yes," she said to me, "I know. I thought I was losing my mind at times. I built Mayfair Medical not to be the Mad Scientist. The Mad Scientist is capable of the unspeakable. Dr. Rowan Mayfair has to be good. I created this immense Medical Center to commit Dr. Rowan Mayfair to good. Once this plan was under way, I couldn't afford to go down into madness-dreaming of the Taltos and where they'd gone, dreaming of strange creatures I'd seen and lost without a trace. Mona's daughter. We tried everything we could to find her. But I couldn't live in a shadow world. I had to be there for all the ordinary people, signing contracts, rolling out blueprints, calling doctors all over the country, flying to Switzerland and Vienna to interview physicians who wanted to work in the ideal medical center, the medical center that surpassed every other in its equipment, its laboratories, its staff, its comforts, its protocols and projects.

"It was to rivet me to the sane world, it was to push my own medical visions to the very limits-."

"Rowan, it's a magnificent thing that you did," Quinn said. "You speak as though you don't believe in it when you're not there. Everyone else believes in it."

She went on in the same soft rush of words as though she hadn't heard him. "All kinds of people come to it," she said, her words flowing as if she couldn't stop them, "people who have never given birth to Taltos, people who have never seen ghosts, people who have never buried bodies in a Savage Garden, people who have never seen Blood Children, people who have never even hoped for the extraordinary in any form, it helps all manner of human beings, it embraces them, it's real to them, real, that's what was important. I couldn't let it go, I couldn't ever retreat into nightmares or scribblings in my room, I couldn't ever fail my interns and residents, my laboratory assistants, my research teams, and you know, with my background, the neurosurgeon, the scientist at heart, I brought to every aspect of this giant organism a personal approach; I couldn't run away, I couldn't fail, I can't fail now, I can't be absent, I can't. . . ."

She broke down, her eyes closed, her right hand forming a fist on the table.

Michael looked at her with quiet sadness.

"Go on, Rowan," I said. "I'm listening to you."

"You're making me angry," said Mona in a low sharp voice. "I think I hate you."

I was appalled.

"Oh, yes, you always did," Rowan said, raising her voice but not her wandering eyes. "Because I couldn't make you well. And I couldn't find Morrigan."

"I don't believe you!" Mona said.

"She's not lying to you," said Quinn in a chastising voice. "Remember what you just said. For years you've been sick, confused."

"Mona, honey, we don't know where Morrigan is," said Michael.

Mona leaned against Quinn and he put his arm around her shoulder.

"Tell us, Rowan, tell us what you have to say," I said. "I want to hear it."

"Oh, yeah, yeah," said Mona, "go on with the Saga of Rowan."

"Mona," I whispered, leaning to clasp her head and draw her to me, my lips at her ear: "these are mortals and with mortals we have a certain eternal patience. Nothing is as it was. Curb your strength. Curb your old mortal envy and spite. They have no place here. Don't you realize the power you have now to search for Morrigan? What's at stake here is the rest of your family."

Reluctantly she nodded. She didn't understand. Her mortal sickness had divided her from these people. I was only now realizing the extent of it. Though they'd come into her hospital room probably every day and all day, she'd been drugged, full of pain, alone.

A soft rustling sound broke my concentration. The person in the servants' quarters had awakened, and was rushing down the wooden steps. The screen door banged shut, and there came the skittering feet through the rattling foliage.

It might have been a tiny gnome, this creature that emerged from the elephant ears and the ferns, but it was simply a very old woman-a tiny bit of a thing with a small completely wrinkled face, black eyes and

white hair in two long neat braids tied at the ends with pink ribbon. She was dressed in a stiff flowered robe, and clumsy padded fuzzy pink slippers.

Mona rushed to greet her, crying out: "Dolly Jean!" and picked up the bit of a creature in her arms and spun around with her.

"Lord, God in Heaven," cried out Dolly Jean, "but it's true, it's Mona Mayfair. Child of Grace, you set me down right now and tell me what's gotten into you. Look at those shoes. Rowan Mayfair, why didn't you tell me this child was here, and you, Michael Curry, giving me that rum, you think your mother in Heaven doesn't know the things you do, you thought you had me down for the count, I know, don't think I don't, and look at Mona Mayfair, what did you pump into her?"

Mona had no awareness that with her vampiric strength she was holding the woman in the air, and how perfectly abnormal it looked.

The spectators were speechless.

"Oh, Dolly Jean, it's been so long, so terribly long," Mona sobbed. "I can't even remember the last time I saw you. I was all locked up and taped up and dreaming. And when they told me Mary Jane Mayfair had run away again I think I just went into a stupor."

"I know, my baby," said Dolly Jean, "but they wouldn't let me in the room, they had their rules, but don't you think for a moment I wasn't saying the rosary every day for you. And one of these bright days Mary Jane'll run out of money and come home, or turn up dead in the morgue with a tag on her toe, we'll find her."

By this time we had all risen, except for Rowan, who remained sunk in her thoughts as if none of this was taking place, and Michael quickly took the apparently weightless Dolly Jean from Mona and set her in a chair between himself and Rowan.

"Dolly Jean, Dolly Jean!" Mona sobbed as Quinn led her back to her place at the table.

Rowan had never once even looked at either Mona or Dolly Jean. She was murmuring, her narrative moving along in her head, unbroken, and her eyes probing the dark for nothing.

"All right, settle down Dolly Jean, and you too Mona, and let Rowan talk," said Michael.

"Who in the world are you!" Dolly Jean demanded of me. "Holy Mother of God, where did you come from?"

Rowan turned suddenly and stared at Dolly Jean with apparent wonder. Then she turned back into her solitude and crowded reminiscence.

The old woman went quiet and still. Then muttered: "Oh me, poor Rowan, she's off again." Then, staring at me again, she let out a huge gasp and cried: "I know who you are!"

I smiled at her. I couldn't help it.

"Please, Dolly Jean," said Michael, "there are issues we have to settle here."

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" cried Dolly Jean, staring this time at Mona, who was hastily wiping away her latest tears. "My baby, Mona Mayfair, is a Blood Child!" Then her eyes discovered Quinn, and there came another huge gasp, and she cried out, "It's the black-haired one!"

"No, it's not!" Rowan declared in a furious rasping whisper, turning to the old woman again. "It's Quinn Blackwood. You know he's always loved Mona." She said it as if it was the answer to every question in the universe.

Dolly Jean made a jerky little turn in her chair, and with two dips or bobs of her head made a thorough examination of Rowan, who was looking at her with gleaming eyes as if she hadn't even seen her before.

"Oh, my girl, my poor girl," Dolly Jean said to Rowan. She put her tiny hands on Rowan and smoothed her hair. "My darling girl, don't you be so sad, always so sad on account of everybody. That's my girl."

Rowan stared at her for a long moment as though she didn't understand a word Dolly Jean spoke, and then she looked away again at nobody, half dreaming, half thinking.

"At four o'clock this very afternoon," Dolly Jean said, still stroking Rowan's hair, "this poor little soul was digging her own grave in this very yard. I noticed how well you covered it up, Michael Curry, you think you can cover everything up, and when I came down here to ask her what she was doing standing in a hole of wet mud she asked me to pick up the shovel and bury her while she was still breathing."

"Be quiet, be still," whispered Rowan, looking far off as if at the night sounds. "It's time now for a larger vision. The Initiates have multiplied, and this is the inner circle. Be worthy of it, Dolly Jean. Be quiet."

"All right, my girl," said Dolly Jean, "then you just talk on as you were, and you, my sparkling Mona, I'll say my rosary all day long for you, and you too Quinn Blackwood. And you, the blond one, you gorgeous creature! You think I don't know you, but I do!"

"Thank you, Madam," I said quietly.

Quinn spoke up: "So all of you will keep our secret? This grows more dangerous for us by the moment. What can come of this?"

"The secret can be kept," said Stirling. "Let us talk this out. There's no going back now, anyway."

"Why, you think we're going to try to make the whole Mayfair clan believe in Blood Children!" Dolly Jean laughed and slapped the table with both her hands. "That's just hilarious! We can't even get them to believe in the Taltos! This brilliant doctor, here, she can't make them believe in the giant helix, she can't get them to behave themselves on account of the risk of having another Walking Baby! And you think they'd listen to us if we told them all about the Blood Children? Honey, they just take the phone off the hook when we call."

For a moment, I thought that Rowan was going to start raving. She glared at Dolly Jean. She was trembling violently. Her face had gone white, and her lips were moving but she was not forming words.

Then the strangest laugh came out of Rowan. A soft free laugh. Her face became girlish and full of delight.

Dolly Jean went into ecstasy.

"Don't you know it," she cried to Rowan. "You can't get them to believe in pneumonia! You can't get them to believe in the flu!"

Rowan nodded and the laugh slowly but sweetly died in a smile. I had never seen such expressions in Rowan, obviously, and they were glorious to behold.

Mona was crying and trying to talk at the same time.

"Dolly Jean, please simmer down," said Mona. "We've got to get some things settled here."

"Then get me a drink of rum," said Dolly Jean, "for Heaven's sakes, go on your young legs, you know where it is, no, tell you what, bring me the Amaretto, go get it with a shot glass. That'll make me real happy."

Mona went off at once, darting across the lawn and towards the pool, high heels clicking when they hit the flagstones, and off around the bend on her errand.

Michael sat there musing and shaking his head. "You drink that on top of all that rum and you're going be sick," he murmured.

"I was born sick," said the old woman.

Stirling stared at Dolly Jean as though she was something perfectly horrible. I almost burst out laughing.

Rowan continued to smile at Dolly Jean. It was sweet and secretive and honest.

"I'm going to pour that bottle of Amaretto down your throat," Rowan said gently in her husky confidential voice. "I'm going to drown you with it."

Dolly Jean bobbed up and down in the chair with squeals of laughter. She grabbed Rowan's face and held her tight.

"Now, I made you laugh, I did, you're all right, my genius girl, my doctor, my boss lady, my mistress of the house, I love you, girl, I'm the only one in the entire Mayfair clan that's not afraid of you." She kissed Rowan on the mouth and then let her go. "You just keep on taking care of everybody, that's what God put you here to do, you understand, you take care of everybody."

"And I fail and fail again," said Rowan.

"No, you don't, darlin'," said Dolly Jean. "Put another wing on that hospital. And don't you fret anything, you sweet girl."

Rowan sank back in her chair. She looked dazed. Her eyes closed.

Across the lawn, Mona came flying, silver tray in hand, with several bottles of liqueurs and bright shiny glasses. She set this down on the iron table.

"Now, let me see," she said. "We have three human beings." She put the glasses in front of Stirling, Michael, Dolly Jean, and Rowan. "Oh, no, four human beings. Okay, now here you are, all human beings have glasses."

I thought Quinn would perish from mortification on the spot. I merely cringed.

Michael picked up the bottle of Irish Mist and poured himself a small amount. Dolly Jean took the bottle of Amaretto for herself and swallowed a good mouthful. Stirling poured a shiny nugget of cognac and sipped it. Rowan ignored the proceedings.

A silence ensued in which Mona took her old place.

"Rowan," I said, "you were trying to explain how you knew about us. You were talking about Merrick Mayfair, about when she disappeared from the Talamasca."

"Oh, that's a good one," said Dolly Jean. She drank more of the Amaretto. "I can't wait for this. Go on, Rowan, if you've a mind to talk for once, I want to hear it. Carry on as if I wasn't here to cheer you along."

"You have to understand what the Talamasca meant to us," Rowan said. She paused. Then went on in a low voice, filling the quiet completely. "The Talamasca has known the Mayfair family through all its thirteen generations. Mona understands. Quinn, I don't know that you ever understood, but we could tell them anything. They knew all about the Taltos. They knew. It was like going to Confession to go to them. They have the solidity and the eternal self-confidence of the Roman Church. And Stirling was so patient. Mona loved him."

"Don't talk about us as if we're not here," said Mona.

"Patience, Mona," I said.

Rowan continued as if she hadn't even heard:

"Then it was Dolly Jean, our precious Dolly Jean Mayfair from Fontevrault Plantation, who said that Merrick Mayfair had become a Blood Child: 'Sure enough! That's what happened to that one!' Dolly Jean knew it. She'd called Tante Oscar. Tante Oscar had told her."

Rowan smiled at Dolly Jean, who nodded and took another huge mouthful of Amaretto. Rowan leaned over and so did Dolly Jean and their foreheads touched, and then they kissed tenderly on the mouth. It was as if these two women were lovers.

"You do right by me, now," Dolly Jean retorted. "Or I'll shout you down. Truth is I can't recollect what happened."

"Hush up," said Rowan softly, with another tender smile.

Dolly Jean nodded and took another drink.

Rowan sat back and went on:

"Dolly Jean had Henri take her and me downtown in the big car to visit Tante Oscar. It was the French Quarter, off the beaten path. Tante Oscar's an elderly colored Mayfair who lives up three flights of stairs in a flat with a balcony from which you could see the River. Tante Oscar was over one hundred years old. Still is."

Rowan's words were gaining speed.

"Tante Oscar was wearing at least three sets of clothes, dresses over dresses, and at least four fancy worked scarves around her neck, and topped by a long maroon coat with golden fur along the collar, I think it was foxes, little foxes with heads and tails, I don't know, and she had a ring on every bony finger, and a long oval face, and jet black hair, and huge egg-shaped yellow eyes. And there was wall-to-wall furniture in the flat, three buffets in a row, and three desks in a row, and dining room tables in three

rooms, and couches and chairs all over, and carpets laid on carpets, and little tables with doilies and bisque figurines and photographs in frames, and sterling silver tea services everywhere you looked. Armoires were bulging with clothes and all askew."

Dolly Jean began to cackle as she took another drink, and Mona laughed under her breath. Rowan continued as if she didn't hear them.

"Gorgeous little twelve-year-old mulatto children were running everywhere, getting us coffee and cake, and getting the mail, and running downstairs for the newspapers. There was a TV on in every room and an overhead fan blowing. I've never seen such beautiful children as I've seen in New Orleans. The colors of these children were simply indescribable.

"Tante Oscar went to the refrigerator, which she called the ice box though it was brand-new, and opened it to show us that the telephone was in there because she never talked on it, and there was the telephone all right, right there in the middle of the milk and the yogurts and the jars of jam, but when Dolly Jean had called, Tante Oscar had heard the ring through the refrigerator door because it was Dolly Jean, and she had answered.

"Tante Oscar told us that Blood Children had been living in the Quarter for two hundred years, feeding off the blood of the riffraff, and Merrick Mayfair was now one of them. It was meant to be. Merrick Mayfair's old Oncle Vervain had foreseen it, that his beloved little Merrick Mayfair would one day walk with the Blood Children, and he had told Tante Oscar and no one else. Oncle Vervain had been a great Voodoo doctor, and everyone respected him, but when he saw that in the future, it broke his heart. Tante Oscar said that now Merrick Mayfair would live forever."

I winced. If only I had seen that Light. . . . But how many chances would God give me?

"Of course Oncle Julien had tried to prevent this catastrophe-I think Oncle Julien is paying for his sins by wasting his time on earth-."

"I like that very much," I uttered before I could stop myself.

Her words flowed right on.

"-Tante Oscar explained to us. Oncle Julien had come in a dream to Merrick Mayfair's Great Nananne when she was dying and told Great Nananne to give Merrick Mayfair to the Talamasca. But Tante Oscar said it was the curse of Oncle Julien that his interference in the world of the living always failed."

"Did she really say such a thing?" I asked.

Michael smiled and shook his head. He looked at Mona and Mona was looking at him.

Rowan continued her tale:

"When I described the black-haired one, the one I'd seen walking, Tante Oscar knew him. She called him Louis. She said the Sign of the Cross would drive him off, though it had no power over him. He merely respected it. She said the one to fear was the blond-haired one who had a strange name and who, 'talked like a gangster and looked like an angel.' I never forgot those words, I thought they were so strange."

She fixed me in her gaze. I was lost to her.

"And then years later and only days ago, you came into the double parlor at Blackwood Farm and Jasmine called you 'Lestat' and you talked like a gangster and looked like an angel. I knew what you were deep, deep down in my mind where I didn't want to know. I knew. I could remember the camphor-ball smell of Tante Oscar's apartment and the way she said, 'the black-haired one will never drink if it means a struggle, but the blond-haired one, he'll do terrible things to you. He's the one to fear.' "

"It's not true," I said softly. "Even the damned can learn. It isn't like it says in our prayer books. Even vampires and angels can learn. God has to be an all-merciful God. Nobody is beyond redemption."

"Redemption!" she whispered. "How can I ever be redeemed?"

"Darling, don't say that," said Michael.

"You can never love this girl enough," said Dolly Jean. "Every morning she gets up, eats breakfast and goes to Hell, I swear it."

Rowan smiled at me. In the pale light she looked girl-like, the lineaments of her face so refined and smooth, her gray eyes resting for the moment before they began their feverish searching again.

Oh to know the kiss of your lips, for your love is better than blood.

A pause. Her lawfully wedded husband distracted, unaware, and Rowan's eyes fixed on mine.

Forgive me.

"But I'm skipping all around in time," she said. "This is not an orderly story, is it?" She looked around herself, as if surprised to discover the garden and the dark, and the bottles glimmering in the light and the pretty shine of the glasses.

"Go on, Rowan, please," I said.

"Yes. Let me go back," she said, "to when Merrick Mayfair disappeared, yes." She nodded. "But overall,

you see, I had heard and I had seen, and I told Michael these things, and Michael just listened as he always does to terrible things, with that ominous yet charming Celtic gloom growing ever greater in him year by year, but when I talked to Stirling I could see in his face that he understood everything. He wanted to meet Tante Oscar. And he did. He would only say, however, that they missed Merrick Mayfair, and nothing more than that.

"Then Lauren Mayfair, you know, the great lawyer of the firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, who knows all things legal and therefore knows nothing, she took it into her arid little mind to find out about this strange disappearance of a Mayfair who might just need her white family. Crap."

"Right on," said Dolly Jean. She took another slug from the bottle. "Lauren was just up in arms to find out a Mayfair of any kind was in the Talamasca, that's what she didn't like."

"She knew the house where Merrick Mayfair had been born," Rowan said, "and she checked it out and found that Merrick Mayfair still owned it. She went downtown. And whatever she saw frightened her. She called me. She said, 'It's renovated like a palace down there in a dangerous neighborhood, and all the neighbors are terrified to go near it. I want you to come with me.' And so I said I would. I was still laughing from that strange encounter with Tante Oscar. I thought, why not go downtown? I only have a hospital and research center to finish. Who am I to say that I'm too busy to do it?

"Dolly Jean said that we were fools to do such a thing-you just don't go near a Blood Child, specially if you know what it is, but if we were determined to go then do it after nightfall. A Blood Child only walked in the dark, and Dolly Jean said furthermore that we were to go by the front gate, very strictly, and knock on the front door, and not to do an untoward thing that would give a Blood Child legitimate cause to hurt us. (Dolly Jean was nodding and cackling all through this speech.) Then we rang up Tante Oscar, who heard our ring through the refrigerator door, and said all the same things all over again. Lauren Mayfair was fit to be tied, as they say here. She said she had had a bellyful of congenital insanity in the Mayfair family before her twenty-first birthday. She said if one more person used the words 'Blood Child' to her she would sue. So I said, naturally, 'Well, why don't we call them vampires?' "

Mona burst out laughing and so Dolly Jean laughed so hard she had to pound the table with her left fist. She almost choked. Mona finally dissolved into giggles. Michael gestured to them to be quiet. Rowan was obviously waiting.

Rowan went on, her eyes fixing on me, then moving away.

"We went down there. It was the most godforsaken slum I'd ever seen. The very slabs of the sidewalks had floated away in the mud, buildings had collapsed into heaps of lumber, and the weeds were like fields of wheat. And there stood this classic raised cottage with its fresh white paint and planted garden. It had a high picket fence and gate, and a bell at the gate and we rang, and up on the porch, a tall woman opened the door and stood there in her bare feet with the light of the hall behind her. It was Merrick Mayfair.

"She knew who we were. It was astonishing. She complimented me on the Medical Center, and she thanked Lauren for coming to Great Nananne's wake years and years ago. She was very pleasant to us, but she didn't ask us in. She was quite fine, she said. She hadn't really disappeared at all, just become a hermit. I remember using every grain of second sight that I might possess when I looked at her, and a deep spell overtook me. It was the timbre of her voice, and the way that she walked, which set her apart. The center of gravity was not in her hips as it should have been in a human female. And her voice, it had a rich musical dimension to it. As for the rest of her, she was a shadow up there.

"Of course, Lauren had satisfied her abysmal legal mind that all was well. The superficial idiot. And her next attack was upon the Talamasca, which she proposed 'to run out of Louisiana,' but when she came up against their endless list of London and New York law firms, and the fact that an entire contingent of the family went up in arms against her, myself and Michael included, she settled very quickly for a schism in the firm, and for telling me how 'insane' I was, and that she was going to 'put Tante Oscar in a home.' I grabbed her and shook her. I didn't mean to do it. I've never done that to any person before. It was a terrible thing to do. But when she said that about Tante Oscar, I lost my temper. I just did it. I told her if she dared to attempt such a thing with any Mayfair, colored or white, anywhere, at any time, I would kill her. I went sort of out of my mind. How could she think she had the power to do such a thing? I backed away from her. I was afraid that-. I was afraid I would do something even more dreadful to her. And the whole matter was dropped. And she doesn't come near me anymore.

"And I had so much to do with the Medical Center that I really didn't want to talk the night away with Dolly Jean about Blood Children and what they did or didn't do. Though I couldn't resist going up to Tante Oscar's apartment one more time with Dolly Jean, but when they started talking about the 'Walking Babies' born out in the swamps, and I knew they meant actual Taltos babies, and the way the terrified swamp Mayfairs hacked them to death, I thought I was going into trance mode, and I left.

"And now we come forward almost to the present, and suddenly Miss McQueen is dead, Quinn's beloved aunt, whom everyone adored, and it's her funeral we're gathered for, and Mona's much too sick to even be told, and the funeral's in grand New Orleans style, and there in the pew in St. Mary's Church before me I see you-Quinn, Lestat-and this tall woman, with the scarf around her head, and I see Stirling come up to her and he calls her Merrick, and I knew, I knew she was the same woman I'd seen before, and this time I was certain she wasn't human. Only I couldn't concentrate on it.

"At one point she turned and lifted her sunglasses and looked directly into my eyes, and I thought, What does it have to do with me? She smiled. And after that I felt sleepy and unable to concentrate on any thought in particular, except that Aunt Queen was dead and everyone was the lesser for it.

"I wouldn't look at Quinn. I wouldn't think about the change in Quinn's voice on the phone-how over a year ago, his voice and his entire audial demeanor had changed. That might be a mistaken notion after all. What did it matter to know such things? And what if the blond-haired tan-skinned guy next to Quinn in the pew looked like an angel? How was I to guess that when I met him in the double parlor at Blackwood Manor only a day or two later he would have 'captured' Mona and he'd talk like a gangster?" She laughed softly, just a little sweet private laugh.

"I had Mayfair Medical as my life, my mission in the real world. And this was a funeral Mass, I closed my eyes and prayed, and then Quinn stood at the podium and said warm and lovely things about Aunt Queen, and he had young Tommy Blackwood with him. Now would somebody who is not alive do that?

"And I had to get back to the Medical Center and find Mona in her bed of needles and bandages and the tape tearing her skin, and somehow convince her that Quinn was hale and hearty and fine, and had grown four inches since he'd gone to Europe so long ago, her beloved. . . ."

She stopped again, as though all the words had run out. She was staring at nothing in front of her.

"These matters are of no use to us," said Mona in a hard voice.

I was shocked.

Mona went on: "Why do you tell us all this? You're not the prima donna of what's happened here! All right, so, you tried to help me not die for years! If it hadn't been you, it would have been some other doctor. And you dug up the corpses of the Taltos out here, so what-."

"Stop, no!" Rowan whispered. "You're talking of my sins, you're talking of my daughter!"

"That's the whole point! I can't!" Mona cried. "That's why you have to do it. But you ramble on-."

"So you gave birth to one of them too," I said gently to Rowan. I reached across the table and covered her hand with mine. Her hand was cold, but at once she clasped my fingers.

"Traitor!" Mona said to me.

"Poor darling girl," said Dolly Jean, who was now drunk and falling asleep, "having those Walking Babies, and getting her womb torn out."

Rowan gasped at those words. She drew back her hand and her shoulders slumped as though she was drawing into herself.

Michael was deeply alarmed and so was Stirling.

"Dolly Jean, put a lid on it," Michael said.

"Rowan, can you go on?" I pleaded. "I understand everything you've said. You've been telling us exactly how and why you can keep our secrets."

"That's right," Quinn said. "Rowan's telling us how she can abide what we are."

The deep hurt flashed in Michael's eyes, private and almost lonely. "That's very true," he said under his breath.

"I gave birth to two," Rowan said. "I let the evil in after twelve generations. That's what Mona wants to hear. That's the secret we have to divulge in exchange for yours-."

"Oh yes!" cried Mona sarcastically, "more of the saga of Rowan! I want to know about my own child! About the man who took her away."

"How many times must I tell you, I can't find them!" said Rowan. "I've searched and searched."

I became furious at Mona. I had to take a deep breath. I reached over and snatched her out of Quinn's protective hold and turned her to face me.

"Now you listen to me," I said in a small voice. "Stop abusing your power. Stop forgetting that you have it. Stop forgetting the inevitable limitations of your kindred here! If you want to search for your daughter now, you have resources that Rowan and Michael can't even dream of! Quinn and I are here to find out what the Taltos is because you won't tell us! (She stared at me wide-eyed and slightly in terror.) Every time we ask you about it you dissolve into tears. In fact, you've wept more in the last thirty-six hours than any fledgling I've ever encountered in all my years, and it's becoming an ontological, existential, epistemological, and hermeneutical nuisance!"

"How dare you ridicule me!" she hissed. She took a deep cool breath. "You let me go this instant. You think I'm going to obey you in thought, word and deed! You're dreaming. I'm not the Wander Slut you make me out to be. I was the Design¨¦e of the Legacy of the entire Mayfair family. I know what it means to have self-possession and power. You don't look like an angel to me, and you sure as Hell don't have the charm of a bona fide gangster!"

I was stunned. I let her go. "I give up!" I said disgustedly. "You're a brash little infidel! Go your own way."

Quinn whipped her around and looked down into her eyes.

"Be still, please," he said. "Let Rowan talk the way she wants to talk. If you're ever to be Mona Mayfair again, that must be allowed to happen."

"Mona, this is very true," said Stirling. "Remember, this is an exposition of souls, a bartering of extraordinary revelations."

"Oh, let me get it straight," said Mona. "I triumph over death, and we gather here to listen to the personal

memories of Rowan Mayfair?"

Dolly Jean, who had been dozing with the bottle, suddenly jumped into life, bouncing up and down and leaning forward, crinkled little eyes staring hard at Mona.

"Mona Mayfair, you button your lip," she said. "You know perfectly well, no matter how sick you've been, that Rowan almost never talks at all, and when she does talk she's got something to say, you and your fancy friends are learning about the Mayfair family, now how's that supposed to hurt you, I'd like to know, don't you want your handsome escorts to understand you? Shut up."

"Oh, you're just joining in with the chorus!" Mona said sharply to Dolly Jean. "Drink your Amaretto and leave me alone!"

"Mona," said Quinn as amiably as he could. "There are things we do need to know for your sake. Does it hurt so much to listen to Rowan?"

"Very well," Mona replied miserably, and she sat back in the chair. She wiped at her face with one of her thousands of handkerchiefs. She glared at me.

I glanced at her, then back to Rowan.

Rowan was watching all this with a remote expression, her face more relaxed than it had been all evening. Dolly Jean took another drink of Amaretto and sat back and closed her eyes. Michael was studying the three of us. Stirling waited, but our cross words had fascinated him.

"Rowan," I said. "Can you tell us what the Taltos is? We lack that basic knowledge. Can you give it to us?"

"Yes," she answered in a resigned voice. "I can tell you as much as anyone can."