Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [65]
Stuff of legend, vulgar names, hunters of the night, locked out of the day forever, live off human blood, hunt the evil ones only, feed on the trash lives if there are such things, always thriving among humankind, from the dawn of time, pass for human, body transformed by the Blood, perfected within its potential by the Blood, Quinn, Mona, me. You are right, you see, she is dead, but only dead to human life. I worked the magic. Filled her with the enlivening Blood. Accept. It’s done. It’s irreversible. I did it. A dying girl defined by pain and fear could not consent. Two centuries ago, I didn’t consent. A year ago, Quinn didn’t say yes to it. Maybe no one really consents. It was my conviction and my power. Lay the sin on me. And so she thrives. And so she hunts the filthy blood. But she is Mona again. The night belongs to her, and by day the sun can’t find her. I am guilty. Lay all blame on me.
I went silent.
She closed her eyes. She gasped as though exorcising a deep invisible clotted horror from her lungs. “Blood Child,” she whispered. She lay against me. Her left hand went up to clasp my shoulder. I held her close, my fingers reaching into her hair.
Michael looked down as though, the window having closed, he wanted to think in solitude. Leaving her to me, he seemed adrift in the room. But he had caught all of my revelation and it had sunk deep into him and he was wearied, and sad.
Mona went to him and opened up his arms, and he received her with the utmost tenderness. He kissed her cheeks as though the truth had broken open in him a powerful chaste communion. He kissed her on the mouth, the hair.
“My baby darling,” he said, “my pretty girl, my baby genius.” It was almost like the embrace he had given her only a half hour before, only this time I really understood it. And the knowledge of her nature worked on him, slowly transforming the way in which he touched her.
There was lust in him, yes, bred into him, and fed over many years, a practical, vital lust, and it was part of his constitution, his vision, but for her he didn’t feel it. Six years of caring for her had punished it enough, and now this aberrant truth made it so he could caress her once again and kiss her freely, and croon to her, and smooth her hair with his hands, yes, and she was with him again, father of her child, father of her death.
“Like the Taltos,” she murmured. She flashed her wholesome, sweet smile. Intrepid youth. And surely he saw in the dusky room her gleaming skin more truly now, and the unnatural glisten of her eyes, and the volume of her red hair as it surrounded her beaming face.
She didn’t catch the drifting sadness in him, the enormous ache. He let her go with such tact, and took one of the chairs and sat at the table. He bent over and ran his hands through his hair.
Quinn took the chair opposite him. He looked at Michael. And then Mona went quietly to Quinn’s side. And so they were settled.
I stood holding Rowan. Where was my lust? The blood tempest that sweeps into its vortex all desire to know, to absorb, to abide, to possess, to kill, to love? It was a drenching storm inside of me. But I am so very strong. That is a given, is it not? And when you love another as I loved Rowan, you don’t strive to hurt. Never. The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul.
I lifted her face, my thumb pressed into her cheek, a gesture which if done to me I couldn’t have borne, but I was tentative and ready to draw away had she showed the slightest unwillingness. She only looked at me with muted understanding. And all her flesh yielded to me, and the hand that held my shoulder closed warmly over my neck.
“And so,” she said with that remarkable rich voice, that deep lustrous voice, “we Mayfairs of the inner circle, we have another sacrosanct secret, yet another breed of immortal come to us.”
Slight and