Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [7]
In fact, this strange unwelcome being had a Mind Gift that was almost as strong as mine. I sounded for his name and he yielded it up to me: Stirling Oliver, my old friend, from the Talamasca. And at the same moment, as I detected his identity, I heard his mind recognize me.
Quinn, he said mentally, just as if he were addressing me. But what did he know of me? It had been years since I had set eyes on Stirling. Did he sense already the change that had been worked in me? Could he tell such a thing with his quick telepathy? Dear God, I had to banish it from my own mind. There was time to get out of this, time to go back to the Hermitage and leave Stirling to his furtive investigation, time to flee before he knew just what I’d become.
Yeah, leave—and now—and let him think I’d become a common mortal reader of the Chronicles, and come back when he’s nowhere in sight.
But I couldn’t leave. I was too lonely. I was too hell-bent on confrontation. That was the perfect truth. And here was Stirling, and here was the entranceway perhaps to Lestat’s heart.
On impulse I did the most forbidden of all things. I opened the unlocked back door of the flat and I went inside. I paused for only a breathless second in the dark elegant rear parlor, glancing at its roaring Impressionist paintings, and then I went down the corridor past the obviously empty bedrooms and found Stirling in the front room—a most formal drawing room, crowded with gilded furniture, and with its lace-covered windows over the street.
Stirling stood at the tall bookcase to the left side, and there was an open book in his hand. He merely looked at me as I stepped into the light of the overhead chandelier.
What did he see? For the moment I didn’t seek to find out. I was too busy looking at him, and realizing how much I loved him still for those times when I was the eighteen-year-old boy who saw spirits, and that he looked much the same as he had in those days—soft gray hair combed back loose from his high forehead and receding temples, large sympathetic gray eyes. He seemed no older than sixty-odd years, as if age hadn’t touched him, his body still slender and healthy, tricked out in a white-and-blue seersucker suit.
Only gradually, though it must have been a matter of seconds, did I realize he was afraid. He was looking up at me—on account of my height just about everybody looks up at me—and for all his seeming dignity, and he did have plenty of that, he could see the changes in me, but he wasn’t sure what had happened. He knew only that he felt instinctive and mindful fear.
Now, I am a Blood Hunter who can pass for human but not necessarily with someone as savvy as this man was. And then we had the question of telepathy, though I’d done my best to close up my mind the way my Maker had told me, that by simple will, it could be done.
“Quinn,” said Stirling. “What’s wrong with you?” The soft British accent took me back four and a half years in a finger snap.
“Everything’s wrong with me, Stirling,” I answered before I could rein myself in. “But why are you here?” Then I came right to the point like the blunderer I was. “Do you have Lestat’s permission to be in this flat?”
“No,” he said immediately. “I must confess I don’t have it. And what about you, Quinn?” His voice was full of concern. “Why are you here?”
He shoved the book back into place on the shelf and took a step towards me, but I stepped back into the shadows of the hall.
I almost buckled on account of his kindness. But another inevitable element had come sharply into play. His sweet delectable human scent was strong, and suddenly I saw him divorced from all I knew of him. I saw him as prey.
In fact, I felt the immense impossible gulf that now divided us, and I was hungry for him, hungry as if his kindness would pour into me in his very blood.
But Stirling was no Evil Doer. Stirling wasn’t game. I was losing my fledgling mind as I looked at him. My acute loneliness was