Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [71]
Michael looked at her with quiet sadness.
“Go on, Rowan,” I said. “I’m listening to you.”
“You’re making me angry,” said Mona in a low sharp voice. “I think I hate you.”
I was appalled.
“Oh, yes, you always did,” Rowan said, raising her voice but not her wandering eyes. “Because I couldn’t make you well. And I couldn’t find Morrigan.”
“I don’t believe you!” Mona said.
“She’s not lying to you,” said Quinn in a chastising voice. “Remember what you just said. For years you’ve been sick, confused.”
“Mona, honey, we don’t know where Morrigan is,” said Michael.
Mona leaned against Quinn and he put his arm around her shoulder.
“Tell us, Rowan, tell us what you have to say,” I said. “I want to hear it.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said Mona, “go on with the Saga of Rowan.”
“Mona,” I whispered, leaning to clasp her head and draw her to me, my lips at her ear: “these are mortals and with mortals we have a certain eternal patience. Nothing is as it was. Curb your strength. Curb your old mortal envy and spite. They have no place here. Don’t you realize the power you have now to search for Morrigan? What’s at stake here is the rest of your family.”
Reluctantly she nodded. She didn’t understand. Her mortal sickness had divided her from these people. I was only now realizing the extent of it. Though they’d come into her hospital room probably every day and all day, she’d been drugged, full of pain, alone.
A soft rustling sound broke my concentration. The person in the servants’ quarters had awakened, and was rushing down the wooden steps. The screen door banged shut, and there came the skittering feet through the rattling foliage.
It might have been a tiny gnome, this creature that emerged from the elephant ears and the ferns, but it was simply a very old woman—a tiny bit of a thing with a small completely wrinkled face, black eyes and white hair in two long neat braids tied at the ends with pink ribbon. She was dressed in a stiff flowered robe, and clumsy padded fuzzy pink slippers.
Mona rushed to greet her, crying out: “Dolly Jean!” and picked up the bit of a creature in her arms and spun around with her.
“Lord, God in Heaven,” cried out Dolly Jean, “but it’s true, it’s Mona Mayfair. Child of Grace, you set me down right now and tell me what’s gotten into you. Look at those shoes. Rowan Mayfair, why didn’t you tell me this child was here, and you, Michael Curry, giving me that rum, you think your mother in Heaven doesn’t know the things you do, you thought you had me down for the count, I know, don’t think I don’t, and look at Mona Mayfair, what did you pump into her?”
Mona had no awareness that with her vampiric strength she was holding the woman in the air, and how perfectly abnormal it looked.
The spectators were speechless.
“Oh, Dolly Jean, it’s been so long, so terribly long,” Mona sobbed. “I can’t even remember the last time I saw you. I was all locked up and taped up and dreaming. And when they told me Mary Jane Mayfair had run away again I think I just went into a stupor.”
“I know, my baby,” said Dolly Jean, “but they wouldn’t let me in the room, they had their rules, but don’t you think for a moment I wasn’t saying the rosary every day for you. And one of these bright days Mary Jane’ll run out of money and come home, or turn up dead in the morgue with a tag on her toe, we’ll find her.”
By this time we had all risen, except for Rowan, who remained sunk in her thoughts as if none of this was taking place, and Michael quickly took the apparently weightless Dolly Jean from Mona and set her in a chair between himself and Rowan.
“Dolly Jean, Dolly Jean!” Mona sobbed as Quinn led her back to her place at the table.
Rowan had never once even looked at either Mona or Dolly Jean. She was murmuring, her narrative moving along in her head, unbroken, and her eyes probing the dark for nothing.
“All right, settle down Dolly Jean, and you too Mona, and let Rowan talk,” said Michael.
“Who in the world are you!” Dolly Jean demanded of me. “Holy Mother of God, where did you