Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [66]
“And I will somehow wake from this gnosis,” she went on, “and in the course of things, yes . . . the vital course of things, protect it utterly, this truth, and return to penetrate the world I’ve made to need me so much.”
“Baby, you’ve come back,” Michael whispered.
This was the creature I adored.
And when our eyes met I saw her full recognition, and a respect and comprehension of my devotion so profound that I could find no words in the swimming silence.
So poetry rises, surpassing the literal, You are beautiful, my love, terrible as an army with banners, turn away your eyes for they have overcome me, a garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
16
WHY DID I LOVE HER so much? Surely someone will read these pages and ask: What was so lovable about her? What was it that caused you, of all beings, so to love? You, a lover of men and women, a vampire, a destroyer of innocent souls, so to love? You, the focus of so much easy affection, and forever flaunting your hopeful stinging charm—why did you love her?
What should I say? I didn’t know her age. I can’t write it here. I can’t describe her hair other than to say it was clipped and turned-in on the ends, and her face was still smooth without the slightest trace of the furrows of age, and her figure boyish.
But one embraces such details in the boiling wake of the acknowledgement of such love. In and of themselves they are nothing. Or, if one believes that a woman so strong has shaped the lineaments of her face, the set of her brows, the straightness of her posture, the frankness of her gestures, the very way that her hair falls about her face, the length of her stride, the sound of her footfall—then perhaps they mean everything.
Beside the flaming red-haired Mona, she was the color of ashes, a woman drawn in charcoal, with a sexless and piercing gaze, and a soul so immense it seemed to fill every fiber of her frame and to emanate outwards into infinity, her knowledge of the world around her dwarfing that of everyone she’d ever known or would know.
Imagine it, such isolation.
She didn’t talk down to people. She simply didn’t talk to them. Only God knew the number of lives she’d saved. And only she knew the number of people she had murdered.
In the Mayfair Medical Center she had only just begun to fulfill her immense dreams. It was an engine of great and continuous healing. But what drew her through the world were projects yet unrevealed for which she had the wealth, the knowledge, the laserlike vision, the nerve and the personal energy.
What threatened this mammoth individual who had found for herself through tragedy and heritage the perfect goal? Her sanity. From time to time she gave in to madness as if it were strong drink, and when in her cups she fled from her sublime designs, drowning in memories and guilt, all judgment and sense of proportion lost, murmuring confessions of unworthiness and half-explored plots of escape that would seal her off forever from all expectations.
At this precious moment she regarded sanity as her State of Grace, and she saw me as the Demon who had brought her back to it.
For her I connected the two worlds. That meant that she could.
Blood Child.
She lusted for me. For the entirety of what I was—that is, for all she’d sensed in our three encounters, and what she knew to be true now, both from my profession and her apprehension.
She wanted me completely. It was a desire rooted in all her faculties, that overrode and obliterated her love of Michael. I knew it. How could I not? But she had no intention of yielding to it. And her will? It was iron. You can draw iron with charcoal too, can’t you?
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.