Blood Canticle

by Rice, Anne

  He came at me. Angry phantom! In the midst of my vision! Was he in the room? This tall, white-haired man assaulting me, trying to wrench her from me! Who the Hell are you? I sent him flying back, receding so fast he became a tiny speck. Damn you, let her go!

  We lay on the bower of flowers, she and I in each other's arms, no time, look at him, he's coming again, Oncle Julien! I was blind. I drew back, tore my wrist again, pushed my wrist to her mouth, clumsy, spilling blood, couldn't see, felt her clamp hard, body lurch,Oncle Julien, you're out! She drank and drank. Oncle Julien's face furious. Faint. Vanish. "He's gone," I whispered. "Oncle Julien gone!" Did Quinn hear? "Make him go, Quinn."

  I swooned, giving her my life, see it, see it all, see the devastated core, move beyond regret, go on, her body growing stronger, the iron of her limbs, her fingers digging into my arm as she drank from my wrist, go on, take it, sink those teeth into my soul, do it, now I'm the paralyzed one, can't escape, brutal little girl, go on, where was I, let her drink on and on, I can't, I snuggled my face against her neck, opened my mouth, no power to-.

  Our souls closing to each other, the inevitable blindness between Maker and Fledgling meaning she was made. Couldn't read each other's thoughts anymore. Drink me dry, beautiful, you're on your own.

  My eyes were shut. I dreamt. Oncle Julien wept. Ah, so sad, was it? In the realm of shadows, he stood with his face in his hands and he wept. What is this? An emblem of conscience? Don't make me laugh.

  And so the literal dissolves. She drinks and she drinks. And alone I dream, a suicide in a bathtub with streaming wrists, I dream: I saw a perfect vampire, a soul unlike any other, tutored in courage, never looking back, lifted from misery, and seeking to marvel at all things without malice or lamenting. I saw a graduate of the school of suffering. I saw her.

  The ghost came back.

  Tall, angry, Oncle Julien, will you be my Hound of Heaven? Arms folded. What do you want here? Do you realize what you are up against? My perfect vampire does not see you. Go away, dream. Go away, ghost. I have no time for you. Sorry, Oncle Julien, she's made. You lose.

  She let me go. She must have. I drifted.

  When I opened my eyes, Mona stood beside Quinn and they were both looking down on me.

  I lay amongst the flowers, and there were no thorns on the roses. Time had stopped. And the distant commotions of the house didn't matter.

  She was fulfilled. She was the vampire in my dream. She was the perfect one. Ophelia's old poetry dropped away. She was the Perfect Pearl, caught speechless in the miracle and staring down at me, wondering only what had become of me, as another fledgling of mine had done long ago-when I'd worked the Dark Trick just as fiercely and just as thoroughly and just as dangerously to myself. But understand that for Lestat there are only temporary dangers. No big deal, boys and girls. Look at her.

  So this was the splendid creature with whom Quinn had fallen so fatally in love. Princess Mona of the Mayfairs. To the very roots of her long red hair the Blood had penetrated, and it was full and shining, and her face was oval with plumped and smiling cheeks and lips, and her eyes clear of all fever, those fathomless green eyes.

  Oh, she was dazed by the Blood vision, of course, and above all by the vampiric power that pervaded the cells of her entire frame.

  But she stood resolute and quick, staring at me, as robust no doubt as she'd ever been, the hospital gown now skimpy and straining to contain her. All that juicy and enticing flesh restored.

  I brushed off the petals that clung to me. I got up on my feet. I was dizzy still, but healing fast. My mind was clouded and it was almost a nice feeling, a delicious blurring of the light and warmth in the room, and I had a swift, profound sense of love for Mona and Quinn and a profound sense that we'd be together for a long time, just the three of us. Three of us.

  Quinn appeared shining and steadfast in this feverish vision of mine. That had been his charm for me from the beginning of knowing him, a secular crown prince of sorts, full of openness and self-confidence.

  Love would always save Quinn. Losing Aunt Queen, he had been sustained on the love he'd felt for her.

  The only one he had hated, he had killed.

  "May I give her my blood?" he asked. He reached out for me, squeezed my shoulder and bent forward

  hesitantly and then kissed me.

  How he could take his eyes off her I didn't know.

  I smiled. I was gaining my bearings. Oncle Julien was nowhere about that I could see.

  "Nowhere," echoed Quinn.

  "What are you saying?" asked the shining newborn.

  "Oncle Julien, I saw him," but I shouldn't have said it.

  Sudden shadow in her face. "Oncle Julien?"

  "But he was bound to-." Quinn said. "At Aunt Queen's funeral I saw him, and it was as if he was warning

  me. It was his duty, but what does it matter now?"

  "Don't give her your blood," I said to Quinn. "Keep your minds open to each other. Of course you'll

  depend on words, no matter how much you read of each other's thoughts, but don't exchange blood. Too

  much, and you'll lose the mutual telepathy."

  She reached out her arms to me. I embraced her, squeezed her tight, marveling at the power she'd already

  achieved. I felt humbled by the Blood rather than proud of any excess to which I'd taken the whole

  process. I gave a little accepting laugh as I kissed her, which she returned in her enchantment.

  If any one trait in her made me a slave it was her green eyes. I hadn't realized how clouded they'd been by

  her illness. And now as I held her back, I saw a sprinkling of freckles across her face, and a flash of her

  beautiful white teeth as she smiled.

  She was a small thing for all her magical health and restoration. She brought out the tenderness in me, which few people do.

  But it was time to move out of the rhapsody. Much as I hated it. The practical matters came to intrude. "Okay, my love," I said. "You're going to know one last bout of pain. Quinn will see you through it. Take her into the shower, Quinn. But first, arrange some clothes for her. On second thought, you leave that to me. I'll tell Jasmine she needs a pair of jeans and a shirt."

  Mona laughed almost hysterically.

  "We're always subject to this mixture of the magic and the mundane," I replied. "Get used to it."

  Quinn was all seriousness and apprehension. He went over to his desk, punched in the intercom number for the kitchen and gave the order for the clothes to Big Ramona, telling her to leave them right outside the door. Okay, good. All the roles of Blackwood Farm are played smoothly.

  Then, Mona, stunned and dreaming, asked if she might have a white dress, or if there might be a white dress downstairs in Aunt Queen's room.

  "A white dress," said Mona, as if she were caught in some poetic net as strong as her mental pictures of drowning Ophelia. "And is there lace, Quinn, lace that nobody would mind if I wore . . ."

  Quinn turned to the phone again, gave the orders, yes, Aunt Queen's silks, make it all up. "Everything white," he said to Big Ramona. His voice was gentle and patient. "You know, Jasmine won't wear the white dresses. Yes, for Mona. If we don't use them, they will all end up packed away. In the attic. Aunt Queen loved Mona. Stop crying. I know. I know. But Mona can't go around in this disgusting hospital gown. And someday, fifty years from now, Tommy and Jerome will be unpacking all those clothes and figuring what to do with it all and . . . just bring something up here now."

  As he turned back to us his eye fastened on Mona and he stopped in his tracks as if he couldn't believe what he saw, and a dreadful expression came over him, as though he only just realized what had happened, what we'd done. He murmured something about white lace. I didn't want to read his mind. Then he came forward and took Mona in his arms.

  "This mortal death, Ophelia, it won't be much," he said. "I'll get into the stream with you. I'll hold you. We'll say the poetry together. And after that, there's no pain. T
here's thirst. But never any pain." He couldn't hold her close enough.

  "And will I always see as I see now?" she asked. The words about the death meant nothing to her.

  "Yes," he said.

  "I'm not afraid," she said. She meant it.

  But she still had no real grasp of what had been done. And I knew in my heart, the heart I closed off from Quinn and the heart she couldn't read, that she really hadn't consented to this. She hadn't been able.

  What did this mean to me? Why am I making such a big deal of it?

  Because I'd murdered her soul, that's why.

  I'd bound her to the Earth the way we were bound, and now I had to see to it that she became that vampire which I'd seen in my moment of intense dream. And when she finally woke to what she'd become she might go out of her mind. What had I said of Merrick? The ones who reached for it went mad sooner than those who were stolen, as I had been.

  But there wasn't time for this sort of thinking.

  "They're here," she said. "They're downstairs. Can you hear them?" She was alarmed. And as is always the case with the new ones, every emotion in her was exaggerated.

  "Don't fear, pretty girl," I said. "I'm on to them."

  We were talking about the rumblings from the front parlor below. Mayfairs on the property. Jasmine fretful, walking to and fro. Little Jerome trying to slide down the coiling banister. Quinn could hear all this too.

  It was Rowan Mayfair and Fr. Kevin Mayfair, the priest for the love of Heaven, come with an ambulance and a nurse to find her and take her back to the hospital, or at least to discover whether she was alive or dead.

  That was it. I got it. That's why they'd taken their time. They thought that she was already dead.

  And they were right. She was.

  I UNLOCKED the bedroom door.

  Big Ramona stood there with an armful of white clothes.

  Quinn and Mona had disappeared into the nearby bathroom.

  "You're wanting this for that poor child?" Big Ramona said. Small-boned woman, white hair, sweet-

  faced, starched white apron. (Grandmother of Jasmine.) Deeply troubled. "Now, don't you just grab for all this, I've got it folded!"

  I stood back to let her march into the room and lay the pile on the flower-strewn bed. "Now, there's underwear and slips here, too," she declared. She shook her head. The shower was running in the bath. She passed me as she went out, making her share of little grumbling noises.

  "I can't believe that girl is still breathing," she said. "It's some kind of miracle. And her family down there brought Fr. Kevin with the Holy Oils. Now, I know Quinn loves that girl, but where does it say in the Gospel that you have to let a person die in your house, and what with Quinn's mother sick, you knew that didn't you, and Quinn's mother run off somewhere, did you know that, Patsy's up and gone-"

  (Flash on memory of Patsy, Quinn's mother: country-western singer with poofed hair and painted fingernails, dying of AIDS in the bedroom opposite, no longer up to putting on her fringed leather outfits with the high boots and war paint makeup and going out, just pretty on the couch in white nightgowns when I had last seen her, lady full of irrational and overriding hate for Quinn, a twisted kind of sibling rivalry from a woman who'd been sixteen when Quinn was born to her. Now vanished.)

  "-and leaving all her medicine behind, sick as she is. Oh Patsy, Patsy, and Aunt Queen just laid in the grave, and then this redheaded child coming here, I'm telling you!"

  "Well, maybe Mona's dead," I said, "and Quinn's washing her corpse in the bathtub."

  She broke into laughter, muffling it with her hand.

  "Oh, you're a devil," she said. "You're worse than Quinn," she went on flashing her pale eyes at me, "but don't you think I don't know what they're doing in that shower together. And what if she does die in there, what about that, are we going to be patting her dry with towels and laying her out like it didn't happen and-"

  "Well, she'll be really clean," I said with a shrug.

  She shook her head, trying not to laugh out loud, and then shifted emotional gears as she headed back to the hall, laughing and talking to nobody as she went on, ". . . and what with his mother running off, and she sick as a dog, and nobody knows where she is, and those Mayfairs downstairs, it's a wonder they didn't bring the sheriff." And into the back bedroom she went, The Angel of Hot Coffee, where Nash and Tommy talked in hushed voices, and Tommy cried over the loss of Aunt Queen.

  It occurred to me with uncommon strength that I had grown too fond of all these people, that I understood why Quinn insisted on remaining here, playing the mortal as long as he could, why the entirety of Blackwood Farm had a hold on him.

  But it was time to be a wizard. Time to buy some time for Mona, time to make her absence somehow acceptable to the witches below.

  Besides, I was curious about the creatures in the double parlor, these intrepid psychics who fooled the mortals around them as surely as we vampires did, pretending to be wholesome and regular human beings while they contained a host of secrets.

  I hurried down the circular stairs, grabbed up tiny Jerome with his big tennis shoes off the banister just in time to save his life as he nearly fell some ten feet to the marble tile floor below, and put him in the waiting arms of a very anxious Jasmine; and then, gesturing to her that everything would be all right, I went into the cooler air of the front room.

  Dr. Rowan Mayfair, founder and head of Mayfair Medical, was seated in one of the mahogany chairs (picture nineteenth-century Rococo, black lacquer and velvet), and her head turned sharply as if jerked by a cord when I entered.

  Now, we had seen each other before, as I noted, at Aunt Queen's funeral Mass in St. Mary's Assumption Church. In fact, I'd sat dangerously close to her, being in the pew right in front of her. But I'd been better camouflaged at the time by ordinary clothes and sunglasses. What she saw now was the Brat Prince in his frock coat and handmade lace, and I'd forgotten to put on my sunglasses, which was just a stupid mistake.

  I hadn't had a really good look at her at all. Now I found myself instantly fascinated, which wasn't too comfortable since it was my role to fascinate as our conversation went on.

  Her lean oval face was delicately sculpted and as clean as a little girl's and needed nothing in the way of paint to make it remarkable, with its huge gray eyes and cold flawless mouth. She wore a severe, gray wool pants suit, with a red scarf wrapped around her neck and tucked down into her lapels, and her short ash blond hair appeared to curl under naturally just below the soft line of her jaw.

  Her expression was intensely dramatic, and I sensed an immediate and sweeping probe of my mind, which I locked up tight. I felt chills down my backbone. She was creating this.

  She had fully expected to read my thoughts and she couldn't. And she was blocked from knowing what was going on upstairs. She didn't like it. But to put it more Biblically, she was deeply grieved.

  And being shut out, she tried to make sense of my appearance, not at all concerned with the superficial eccentricity of the frock coat and my messy hair, but of elements which were more purely vampiric-the subtle sheen of my skin and the electric blue of my eyes.

  I had to start talking quickly, but let me fill you in first on my instantaneous take on the other Mayfair-Fr. Kevin-who was standing at the far mantel, the only other occupant of the room.

  Nature had dealt him the same cards as Mona-deep green eyes and red hair. In fact, he could have been her big brother, the genes were so close, and he was my height, six feet, and well built. He wore clerical black with the white Roman collar. And he was not the witch Rowan was, but he was more than slightly psychic, and I could read him easily: he thought I was weird and he was hoping Mona was already dead.

  I sparked off the memory of him at Mass in his Gothic robes holding the chalice in his hands.This is my blood. And for reasons I couldn't possibly explain, I was taken slap back to my village childhood in France, to the ancient church and the village priest saying those very same words, chalice in hand, a
nd for a moment I lost my perspective on everything. Other mortal memories threatened, perfected in color and lucidity. I saw the monastery where I'd studied, so happy, where I'd so wanted to be a monk. Oh, this was sickening.

  And with another decided chill, I realized that Dr. Mayfair had caught these images out of my mind before I closed it up again.

  I shook it off, annoyed for a moment that the double parlor was so crowded with shadow. Then my eyes latched on to the stark, don't belong, figure of Oncle Julien, three-dimensional and exquisitely solid in a slim gray suit, standing in the far corner, arms folded, eying me with calculating opposition. He was fiercely actual, and fiercely bright.

  "What's wrong with you?" Dr. Rowan Mayfair asked. Her voice was deep, husky and sensual. Her eyes were still picking me apart.

  "You don't see any ghost in here, do you?" I blurted out without thinking, the ghost just standing there all the while as it came clear to me that of course they didn't, neither of them. This shining and self-contained menace had it in for me.

  "No, I don't see anything," Rowan answered promptly. "There's a ghost in this room that I ought to see?"

  Women with these husky voices have a miraculous advantage.

  "You do have your ghosts here," Fr. Kevin said acceptingly. Yankee accent. Boston. "As Quinn's friend, I thought you'd know."

  "Oh, I do, yes," I said. "But I never get used to them. Ghosts scare me. So do angels."

  "And didn't you hold an exorcism to get rid of Goblin?" asked the priest, throwing me off guard.

  "Yes, and it worked," I said, glad of the distraction. "Goblin's gone from this house, and Quinn's free of him for the first time in his life. I wonder what it will mean to him."

  Oncle Julien didn't budge.