Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [88]
“You’re a bully and a tyrant!” she said. “You treat me like a child or a slut. I won’t change it. Will you help me find Morrigan or not? Now make up your mind.”
“You’re the one who has to make up her mind. You act like a child and a slut. You have no dignity, no gravitas! No mercy! We have things to discuss before we get to the finding of Morrigan. You didn’t behave very well last night. Now change your clothes, before I change them for you.”
“You dare touch me!” she said. “You liked it well enough when every human being at that party turned to look at me. What don’t you like about this dress now?”
“Take it off!” I said. “It’s needlessly distracting.”
“And if you think you’re going to preach to me about the way I behaved with my family. . . .”
“That’s just it, they’re not simply your family now. There’s infinitely more to it, and you know it. You’re forfeiting your intelligence for cheap emotional outbursts. You abused your powers last night, your singular advantages. Now change that dress.”
“And what are you going to do if I don’t change it!”
Her eyes were blazing.
I was flabbergasted.
“Have you forgotten that this is my flat?” I said. “That I am the one who has made you welcome here! That you exist because of me!”
“Go on, throw me out!” she declared. Her whole face went red. She shot to her feet and leaned over me, her eyes on fire.
“You know what I did last night after you left us and went away just because you were oh, so in love with Rowan! Oh, so very in love with La Doctor Dolorosa. Well, guess what! I read your books, your maudlin mawkish melancholy Vampire Chronicles, and I can see why your fledglings despise you! You treated Claudia like a doll just ‘cause she had the body of a child! And what was that all about, making a child a vampire in the first place?—”
“Stop it, how dare you!”
“And your own mother, you give her the Dark Gift, and then you try to stop her from cutting her long hair or wearing men’s clothes, and this in the eighteenth century, when women have to go around looking like wedding cakes, you’re an autocratic monster!”
“You insult me, you abuse me! If you don’t stop—.”
“And I know why you’re so fired up over Rowan, she’s the first adult female other than your own mother who’s ever caught your attention for more than five minutes, and Hello! Lestat Discovers The Opposite Sex! Yeah, females do come in grown-up sizes! And I happen to be one of them, and this is not the Garden of Eden, and I am not taking off this dress!”
Quinn got to his feet. “Lestat, wait, please!”
“Get out!” I roared. I stood up. My heart was cut so deep I could hardly talk. I felt that stinging hurt again all over my skin, the hurt I’d felt when Rowan had been railing at me at the Retreat House, an enervating, crippling pain.
“Out of my house, you wretched little ingrate,” I shouted, “get out now before I throw you down the steps! You’re a Power Slut, that’s what you are, using every edge your sex or youth can give you, a moral lilliputian in grown-up shoes, a career adolescent, a professional child! You don’t know the meaning of philosophical insight, or spiritual engagement, or true growth—. Out, out of here now, Heiress to the Mayfair Legacy, what a fiasco that must have been, go beat up on your mortal family at First Street, rave at them until you drive them out of their minds and they crack you over the head with their shovel and bury you alive in the backyard!”
“Lestat, I beg you—.” Quinn put his hands out.
I was too angry. “Take her to Blackwood Farm!”
“Nobody’s taking me anywhere!” she cried. She ran out the door, hair whirling, sequins sparkling, slamming the door shut. Clatter down the iron steps.
Quinn shook his head. He was in silent tears. “This just shouldn’t have happened,” he whispered. “It was entirely avoidable. You don’t understand, she’s not even accustomed to being out of a sickbed, to putting one foot in front of the other, to putting one word after another—.”
“It was inevitable,” I said. I was shaking. “It’s why I gave her the Dark Gift instead of you, so the