Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [126]
“Oh, he never did, he loved Mother!” cried Miravelle. “Please don’t say all those old hateful things! We have Oberon free again. We’re together! Rodrigo, you have to let us stay together.”
“Shoot them!” screamed Rodrigo. He cursed Lorkyn a thousand times over in Spanish.
“Why not kill this one now?” Quinn asked pointing to Rodrigo.
“Lorkyn, where are the Mother and the Father?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“Safe on ice,” she said.
“And where precisely would that be?” Mona asked with exhausted exasperation.
“I won’t speak to anyone but Rowan Mayfair,” said Lorkyn.
“Let me see them, please!” cried Miravelle. “Oberon, make her unlock the penthouse.”
“Rodrigo, I don’t think there’s any reason now to keep you alive,” I said.
“Let me shoot him,” said Oberon.
“No,” I said, “you’d take the gun and shoot Lorkyn.”
Rodrigo went mad after a fashion. He tried to jump from the front balcony. I turned his head around on his neck, killing him instantly. I dropped him down to the tiles below. He lay there in a splat of blood.
I turned around in time to see Lorkyn shoved back against the wall, her arms out in the form of a crucifix. She’d reached for the gun in her holster and Quinn had done this by pure force. Lorkyn was staring at him. Her calm was impressive.
Mona was studying her as if trying in vain to understand her.
Oberon was glaring at Lorkyn, and bitterly weeping. Miravelle clung to him.
“You were in with them all the time,” Oberon said despairingly. “What were you, the brains behind Rodrigo’s glory? You with all your intellect and cunning? You could have reached help! You could have gotten us off this island! Damn you for what you did! Why did you do it?”
Lorkyn of the kitten face didn’t answer. Her face never lost its softness, its expression of receptivity.
I went to her and gently removed her automatic weapon and broke it into pieces. I took the gun and threw it way out over the patio into the sea. She had a knife in her boot. Beautiful knife. I took it and put it in my own boot.
She said nothing to me, her exquisite eyes watching me as patiently as if I was reading her a poem.
I scanned but it got me nowhere.
“Take us to the Mother and the Father,” I said.
“I’ll reveal them to Rowan Mayfair and no one else,” said Lorkyn.
“They’re in the penthouse on ice!” said Miravelle. “Rodrigo always said. On ice. Let’s go. I can lead the way. Rodrigo said that when he came into the penthouse, Father said ‘Don’t kill us, we can’t do you any harm, keep us on ice and you can sell us to Rowan Mayfair and Mayfair Medical for millions of dollars.’ ”
“Oh, please,” said Oberon through his tears, “Miravelle, darling dear, for once don’t be a perfect idiot! They can’t be in the penthouse on ice. I know where they are. I know where they have to be. If you can keep Lorkyn in custody, I know precisely where to go.”
We moved as quickly as we could. Quinn had Lorkyn firmly by the arm. Oberon led the way. Down the stairs and down the stairs.
Once again, the giant kitchen.
A pair of huge doors. Refrigerator? Freezer? One was laden with locks.
I broke them off immediately.
As soon as the white mist cleared I stepped inside and I saw in the light over my shoulder the bodies frozen on the floor.
The tall black-haired man with the white hair above his ears, and the red-haired woman, both with their eyes closed, serene, tender to behold in each other’s arms, white cotton garments, bare feet, angels sleeping together. Covered with frost, as if in the deep claw of intentional winter.
Scattered end to end on them, but not on their faces, were frozen yet once beautiful flowers.
I stood to one side gazing down at them, as the others peered through the door. I gazed at the frozen fluids on the floor, at the discoloration of their skin here and there, at the perfection of their embrace and their utter stillness.
Miravelle let out a high-pitched scream: “Mother. Father.”
Oberon sighed and turned away. “And so down the long centuries he comes to this,” he murmured,