Blood Canticle

by Rice, Anne

  (I winked at Dolly Jean. She nodded and wagged her finger.)

  Michael looked directly at Mona and leaned in towards her as he addressed her.

  "I hope we've given you what you need," he said. "As for the files, I'll see that they're all copied and

  delivered to you wherever you like. They'll prove our efforts to track down every lead. We'll give you

  every scrap of paper we have on Ash Templeton."

  "Of course," said Dolly Jean, "they could both be stone-cold dead in the grave like Romeo and Juliet!

  Two Walking Babies all wrapped up in each other's arms, just rotting away somewhere to cartilage. Like

  maybe he couldn't stand her ranting and raving and all her plans, and he tied a silk stocking around her

  neck and-."

  "Stop it, Dolly Jean!" cried Mona. "Don't you say another word or I'll scream!"

  "You're screaming now, be still!" whispered Quinn.

  In my heart of hearts I entered into a debate with myself, and then I spoke:

  "I'll find them," I said quietly.

  I startled everyone.

  Mona turned to me resentfully. "Just what do you mean by that!" she demanded. Her handkerchief was

  full of blood tears.

  I looked at her as disdainfully as I could, considering how tender and pretty she was, and how wicked and

  fiendish I was, and then I looked across the table at Rowan.

  "I want to thank you all for sharing your secrets with us," I said. I looked at Michael. "You've trusted us,

  and treated us as if we were sinless and kind, and I don't know that we are. But I know that we try to be." A slow broad smile lit up Rowan's face, extraordinary to behold. "Sinless and kind," she repeated. "How

  marvelous are those words. If only I could work them into a hymn and sing it under my breath day and

  night, day and night. . . ." We looked at each other.

  "Give me a little time. If they still exist, if they've parented a colony, if they're anywhere in the wide

  world, I know those who will know where they are-without question."

  Rowan raised her eyebrows and looked off thoughtfully, and the smile came again-a lamp of loveliness. She nodded.

  Michael seemed vaguely stimulated by my words, and Stirling was curious and respectful.

  "Sure enough," said Dolly Jean, without opening her eyes, "you didn't think he was the oldest Blood Child in the world, did you? And you mark my words," she said to me, "you big old great thing, you sure are pretty as an angel, and you've got plenty charm enough to be a gangster. I've seen every gangster movie ever made three times and I know what I'm talking about. They put a little boot black on your hair, you could play Bugsy Siegel."

  "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.

  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 job with straps, hem above her knees, and the audacious heels making her naked calf muscles flex, yes, hmmm, and Quinn in minutely tailored khaki and dress shirt and red tie, was her dazzling escort.

  I'd been hanging back on the outskirts of the thick sinister little party, scanning one mind after another, letting the hubbub crash against me, smelling the perfume of the cigarette smoke, hot blood and male cologne, and grooving now and then on the pure avarice and cynicism of the group.

  Speakers all around poured out a low thumping steel-band music that came on like a collective heartbeat.

  The subject was women, Russian women, imported through the young arrogant pimp-slick brown hair, fashionably emaciated, Armani jacket, shiny enthusiastic face, who worked his guests, buyers all, in methamphetamine fits and starts, bragging about the "white flesh, the blond hair, the freshness, the class" he had coming in from his connections in Moscow and St. Petersburg. "You've never seen so much white gash."

  The trade was so rich they could replace the girls every six months; we pass them on down the line, don't you worry, how was that for a guarantee? "I'm talking crème de la crème, I'm talking girls who'll score a thousand a half-hour, we package with clothes or without, I'm talking unbroken flow to point of purchase­." Slam. He'd seen Mona.

  She and Quinn caught up with me. Buzz on her thickening. She was the only woman on the terrace. What gives? Was she the door prize?

  I narrowed in on the pimp, and the big rawboned oversold bodyguard who was hovering around him, a drone in a badly cut dinner jacket with traces of white powder on his lapels. Drug slobs. All of them drug slobs.

  "We're
going to do it right here," I said in a whisper. Mona let out a cool laugh. Look at those naked arms. Whiff of cedar to the dress. Aunt Queen's closets. Quinn only smiled, sharpened for the hunt.

  The music thumped and went into Brazilian jazz samba.

  Even the white-jacketed waiters passing everywhere with little bits of ridiculous food and splashing glasses of champagne were high. The bald-headed man from Dallas pushed his way to the pimp: how much for the redhead? He wanted a right to top anybody's price, "hear me?" They were all giving him the word in passing whispers, and he was now staring at me full-time. A guy from Detroit with beautiful white hands was murmuring on about how he'd put her up in a pad in Miami Beach and give her anything she wanted, girl like that, you couldn't let this business dumb you down to where-.

  I smiled at the pimp. I had my elbows on the black iron fence behind me, heel hooked on the lower bar, violet sunglasses down. Purple turtleneck, formal cut, butter-soft black leather suit coat and pants, how I love my own clothes. Mona and Quinn were dancing just a little, back and forth, Mona humming to the music.

  The pimp sidled over, throwing sharp highly personal smiles here and there like cheap necklaces at Mardi Gras. On my right side (she was on my left) he said, "Give you a hundred grand for her now, no questions asked, got the cash in my coat."

  "What if she doesn't go for it?" I asked, eyes on the shifting clattering party. Sudden smell of caviar, cheeses, fresh fruits, hmmm.

  "I'll take care of that," he said, with a scornful laugh. "You just take the other guy and leave her here."

  "And later on?" I asked.

  "There is no later on. Don't you know who I am?" He felt sorry for me. "You're fancy but you're stupid. Two hundred thousand for her. Take it or leave it. Five seconds. No more."

  I burst into a soft laugh.

  I looked into his heartless frenzied eyes. Pupils enormous. Harvard Law School, drug trade, female slavery. Up and up and down and down. He flashed his glossy perfectly bleached teeth. "You should have asked around about me," he said. "Want a job? I'll teach you so much people will think you're smart."

  "Let's rock, baby," I said. I slipped my hand under his left armpit and gently swung him around so that he hit the fence between me and Mona. I bent over and covered his mouth with my left hand before he could make a sound. She pivoted and opened her lips on his throat, her hair a perfect veil of privacy.

  I felt the life drawn out of his frail limbs, heard her gasping swallows, his whole frame giving one full spasm.

  "Leave him alive," I whispered. Who was I kidding?

  Hand on my shoulder. I looked up. The big stupid-eyed bodyguard, almost too stoned to know why he was suspicious or what to do about it, yeah right, but Quinn was already drawing him away and had him paralyzed, the guy with his broad hunched back to the press of the party and Quinn drawing quietly and slowly for the blood. What does that look like, that he's whispering in the dude's ear? Most likely.

  The laughing, gulping, gurgling crowd rolled on, a waiter nearly stepping on me with his precarious tray. "No thanks, I don't need a drink," I said, which was true.

  But I liked the pale yellow color of the champagne in those glasses. And I liked the spattering and burbling and dancing of the water in the fountain in the middle of the crowd, and I liked the pure rectangular lights of all the hotel windows climbing and climbing in beauteous parallel rows above us to the rosy sky, and I liked the low raw saxophone of the jazz samba dancing with itself, and I liked the fluttering of the leaves in the potted trees, which everyone on the terrace ignored but me. I liked-.

  The dazed bodyguard staggered. An underling caught his arm, scheming and proud to have him at a disadvantage. The pimp was dead. Oops. Such a brilliant career slumped over the fence. Mona's eyes were electric. Drugs in the blood.

  "Get the host a chair," I said to the first waiter I could snare. "I think he's overdosed and he's holding."

  "Oh Ma God!" Half the drinks on his tray crashed into the other half. Customers turning, murmuring. After all, the host had slipped down to the tile floor. Not so good for the slave trade.

  Out of there.

  Luscious gloom of hotel mezzanine floor, marble and golden lights, mirrored elevator, swoosh of doors, glowing fields of carpet, gift shop full of pink stuffed monsters, heavy glass, outside pavements, filth, shrieks of tourist laughter, innocent and deodorized half-naked people of all ages in wrinkle-free scraps of brightly dyed clothing, paper trash in the gutters, glorious heat, screeching roar of the crowded St. Charles Street car rounding the bend onto Canal.

  So many . . . many good people . . . so very happy.

  WE WERE BACK at the flat. Rear parlor. My darlings on the couch. The drugs in their blood had played out on the walk back. Me at the desk but facing them.

  I told her to change clothes. That short sequined dress was just too damned distracting. And we had some heavy matters to address immediately.

  "Are you serious!" she demanded. "You're not honestly telling me what I can and cannot wear, you don't for one minute think I'm going to listen to this, this is not the eighteenth century, baby. I don't know what castle you grew up in, but I assure you I don't change my mode of dress for feudal lords, no matter-."

  "Beloved Boss, could you not simply ask Mona to change her dress instead of telling her!" said Quinn with restrained exasperation.

  "Yeah, what about that!" she said, leaning forward, accentuating her cleavage swelling under the sequined band across her breasts.

  "Mona, my darling," I said with perfect candor, "ma chérie, my beauty, please change into something less fetching. I find it hard to think, for you are so lovely in that dress. Forgive me. I lay my shameful omnisensual impulses at your feet. A tribute. I, having spent two centuries in the Blood, should possess a wisdom and restraint that makes such a request unnecessary, but alas, within my heart I feed a human flame that it may never completely go out, and it is the heat of this flame which distracts me now and renders me so powerless in your presence."

  She narrowed her eyes and puckered her brows. Exploring me as best she could for mockery. Finding none. Then her lower lip began to tremble.

  "Can you really help me find Morrigan?" she asked.

  "I don't talk till you change the dress," I replied.

  "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 o
f 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.