Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [39]
I nodded, then said hastily, “He doesn’t mean any harm, you saw that. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that you stopped me. I don’t think I could have survived my killing him. I’m sure of it. It would have been the finish for me, and I’m terrified of my own clumsiness, that a death like that—. But you must realize he won’t do any harm to us, either of us—.”
“Oh, yes, now you’re out to save him from destruction. Stop worrying. The Talamasca’s off limits, I told you. Besides, I gave them what they’ve wanted for some time, don’t you see?”
“Yes, a sighting of you, a talk with you.”
“Correct, and they’ll mull that over, and letters will be sent to the Elders, but I know perfectly well they can’t harm us. And he and his cohorts won’t come out here looking for you. They’re too damned honorable. But you must tell me now, in case I’ve underestimated them, do you lie by day in a safe place?”
“Very safe,” I said quickly. “On Sugar Devil Island, which they could never conceivably find. But surely you’re right, Stirling will keep his promise not to come looking for me or seek me out. I believe in him utterly. That’s why it’s so ghastly that I almost hurt him, I almost took his life.”
“And would it have been to the finish with him?” he asked. “Have you no self-control once you’ve begun?”
I was full of misery.
“I don’t know what self-control I have. On the night of my making I committed a blunder, taking an innocent life—.”
“Then that was your Maker’s blunder,” he retorted. “He should have been with you, teaching you.”
I nodded.
“Let me dream that I would have broken off with Stirling, but I wasn’t just frightened of him, frightened of him knowing about me, I was hungry for his death. I’m not sure how it would have gone. He was fighting me with an elegance of mind. He has that, an elegance of mind. Yes, I think I would have taken his life. It was tangled with my love for him. I would have been damned for it forever, and I would have found some way to put an end to myself right away. I’m damned for almost doing it. I’m damned for everything. I live, I live in a fatal frame of mind.”
“How so? What do you mean?” he asked, but he wasn’t surprised by what I’d said.
“It’s as if I’m forever in the grip of Last Rites or dictating a Last Will and Testament. I died the night my Maker brought me over; I’m like one of the pathetic ghosts of Blackwood Manor who doesn’t know he or she is dead. I can’t come back to life.”
He nodded, raising one eyebrow and then relaxing. “Ah, well, you know that argues much better for a long existence rather than recklessness and devil-may-care behavior.”
“No, I didn’t know,” I said quickly. “What I know is that I have you here and you helped me with Goblin, and you see what Goblin can do. You see that Goblin has to be . . . has to be destroyed. And maybe me too.”
“You haven’t the smallest idea of what you’re saying,” he returned quietly. “You don’t want to be destroyed. You want to live forever. You just don’t want to kill to do it, that’s all.”
Now I knew that I was going to cry.
I took out my pocket handkerchief and I wiped at my eyes and my nose. I didn’t turn away to do this. That would have been too cowardly. But I did look about me without moving my head, and when I looked back at him I thought, what a staggeringly beautiful creature he was.
His eyes alone would have done the trick, but he’d been gifted with so much more, the thick massive blond hair, the large finely shaped mouth and an expression eloquent of comprehension as well as intelligence, and under the light of the gasolier he was the matinee idol drifting before me, carrying me out of myself into some unmeasured moment in which I relished his appearance as if he couldn’t or didn’t know.
“And you, my timeless one,” he said in a soft sure voice with no hint of accusation in it, “I see you here in your exquisite setting of mirrors and gold, of human love and obvious patrimony, and robbed of it all in essence by some careless demon who’s left you orphaned and uneasily,