Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [85]
“Thank you,” I replied soberly. “It was always my ambition to play Sam Spade, actually. I was all alone and forlorn when the Black Mask magazine first published The Maltese Falcon. I read the novel by the light of the moon. Sam Spade captured my ambition.”
“Well, no wonder you talk like a gangster,” said Dolly Jean. “But Sam Spade’s small time. Go for Bugsy Siegel or Lucky Luciano.”
“Stop this!” screamed Mona. “Don’t you realize what he’s just said?” She was painfully confused, trying to crush her sobs, trying to crush her rage against me. “You can really do this?” she asked in a little bewildered voice. “You can find Ash and Morrigan?”
I didn’t answer. Let her suffer for a night.
I rose from the table. I bent to kiss Rowan on the cheek. My hand found hers and held it tight for a small, heated moment. A precious garden closed against me, is my sister, my beloved bride. Her fingers caught mine and held them with all her strength.
The gentlemen had risen to see me off. I murmured my superficial farewells, and only then did the secret grip release me.
I walked slowly into the formal garden beyond the pool, and would have gone up into the roaring clouds, to be as far away from the Earth as I could be. But Mona’s piteous cry rang behind me.
“Lestat, don’t leave me!”
Across the lawn she came running, her silk dress billowing.
“Oh, you miserable girl!” I said, deliberately gnashing my teeth. I received her in my embrace, sweet bundle of panting limbs. “You intolerable witch. You wicked undisciplined Blood Child. You contemptible pupil. You worsling, you rebellious and obstinate fledgling.”
“I adore you with my whole soul, you’re my creator, my mentor, my guardian, I love you,” she cried. “You have to forgive me!”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I will. Go take a proper leave of your family. I’ll see you tomorrow night. I must be alone now.”
Off to the deepest pocket of the garden I went—
—and thence to the clouds, and the merciless unknowing stars, and as far from mortaldom as I could get.
“Maharet,” I called out to the very most ancient one, “Maharet, I’ve made promises to those I love. Help me to keep them. Lend your most powerful ear to those whom I love. Lend your most powerful ear to me.”
Where was she, the tower of ivory? The great ancestor. The one who now and then came to our aid. I had no clue, because I had never bent my stiff neck to go in search of her. But I knew that in her centuries of endurance she had acquired powers that surpassed all dreams and fears of mine, and that she could hear me if she chose. Maharet, our guardian, our mother, listen to my plea.
I sang the song of the tall ones, the long-extinct ones, come again to form a colony, lost somewhere in the modern world. Gentle beings, out of time, out of place, and maybe out of luck. And of such tragic import to my fledgling and her human kindred. Don’t make me say so much that other immortals might gather up my intent and use it to bad ends. Hear me, Sweet Maharet, wherever you are. Surely you know this world as no one else knows it. Have you spied these tall children? I don’t dare to say their name.
And then I wrapped myself in comforting phantasms, roaming the winds for my own sake, dissolved now and then in the poetry of love, and envisioning bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where I and the one I coveted could dwell. It was a doomed vision and I knew it, but it was mine to enjoy.
19
POST SUNSET. First taste of autumn in the warm air.
Mona and Quinn appeared at the garden doors five minutes after I’d called them. Every man on the dimly lit hotel terrace turned to check out the daring beauty with the flowing red hair. Whoa, short sequined