“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
P
OST 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 MaGod!” 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.
20
W
E 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 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 anger would come at me, don’t you see? But how could she attack so violently the things that have happened to me! She has no moral modulation, no moral rhythm, no moral patience, no moral kindness. She’s a pitiless little hellion! I don’t know what I’m saying. Go after her. She’s so blatantly and arrogantly careless! Just go.”
“Please, please,” he said, “don’t let this be a split between us.”
“Not between you and me,” I said, “no, never. Just go.”
I could hear her sobs from the courtyard.
I stormed out onto the balcony. “You get off my property!” I shouted down to her. She was glowing in the dark. “Don’t you dare stand there weeping in my courtyard. I won’t have it! Get out!” I came down the steps.
She fled from me down the carriageway. “Quinn!” she wailed. “Quinn!” as if I was murdering her. “Quinn, Quinn,” she squealed.
He brushed against me as he passed me.
I turned around and went up the steps. I clung to the balcony railing for a long moment, forcing some calm upon myself, my hands trembling, but it did little good.
As soon as I’d closed the door I saw Julien out of the corner of my eye. I tried again to quell my pounding heart. I refused to tremble. I collected myself, eyes roving the ceiling, ready for the next cheap diatribe to be flung in my face.
“Eh bien,”
he said, going on in French, his arms folded, his dinner jacket very black against the damask striped wallpaper. “You’ve done a fine job,
Monsieur,
haven’t you? You’ve fallen deep in love with a mortal who’ll never yield to you, only succeeding in driving a true rivet into her heart which her innocent husband won’t fail to detect sooner or later. And now my innocent niece, whom you’ve so cleverly brought over into your world, is running rampant through the streets with a boy lover who hasn’t a clue as to how to comfort her or contain her mounting madness. You are a fine example of the Ancien Régime,
Monsieur,
oh, but I should be calling you Chevalier, should I not? Or, what precisely was your title, anyway? Was there something lower?”
I sighed, and then slowly I smiled. I wasn’t shaking too badly.
“
Les bourgeois
have always disappointed me,” I said gently. “My father’s title means nothing to me. That it means so much to you is tiresome. Why don’t we let the matter drop?”
I took my chair at the desk, caught the heel of my shoe on the rung and just looked at the ghost admiringly. Flawless white shirt. Patent leather shoes. Now, he knows how to dress, doesn’t he? In my exhaustion and my grief for what had just taken place with Mona, I looked into his eyes and I prayed silently to Saint Juan Diego. What is there that can come of this that might be good?
“Oh?” he asked. “You’ve come to be fond of me?”
“Where’s Stella?” I asked. “I want to see Stella.”
“You do?” he asked, arching his eyebrows and tipping his forehead slightly.
“I don’t like to be alone,” I said, “as much as I give out. And I don’t want to be alone at this moment.”
He lost his look of resolute superiority. Grim gaze. He’d been a handsome man in his time, trim white curls, clever black eyes.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “But since you do go and come as you will, it seems I must get used to you.”
“You think I like what I do?” he asked with sudden bitterness.
“I don’t think you know much about what you do,” I replied. “Maybe we have that in common. I’ve been hearing about you. Rather ominous things, it seems.”
Blank expression, then a slow yield to appraisal.
I heard a skipping step in the hall, definitely a child skipping. And there she came into the room, in a snow white dress, with her white sox and her black Mary Janes, a darling girl.
“Hello, Ducky, you have the most amazing digs,” she said. “I simply love your paintings. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to look at them. I love the soft colors. I love the sailboats and all the agreeable people, people in lovely long dresses. There’s a sweetness to these paintings. If I weren’t a little girl, I’d suspect that they soothe people’s nerves.”
“I can’t claim to have chosen them myself,” I replied, “someone else did. But now and then I add one or more to the collection. I like the brighter, stronger colors. I like the greater, more savage force.”
“What do you intend to do about all this?” asked Julien, plainly irritated by this exchange.
My heart had begun to assume its normal rhythm.
“About all what?” I asked. “And let me assure you that your mixing in it isn’t a good omen, from what I’ve learnt. Seems some of your mortal descendants believe you’re doomed to failure in all your Earthly visitations, did you know that? It’s a special curse visited upon you, apparently, or so I’m told.”
Stella had plopped into a Louis XV chair, her white dress going poof all around her. She looked up at Julien with alarm.
“You do me a bitter injustice,” he said coldly. “You can’t know my accomplishments. And only very few of my descendants know them either. Now let’s get back to your present obligation. Certainly you don’t intend to let my niece run rampant with the powers you’ve given her.”
I laughed. “I told you before,” I said, “that if you want her, you will have to tell her. Why are you so afraid of her? Or is it that she won’t acknowledge you? That she’s completely unreceptive? That she’s off on a supernatural tear and you’re small potatoes to her now, hmmm?”
His face became hard.
“You’re not fooling me, not for a moment,” he said. “You’re cut to the quick by Mona’s words, you’re cut to the quick by Rowan, that you can’t have her, no matter how much harm you try to do to her. You’re paying for your sins. You’re paying now as we speak. You’re terrified you’ll never see either of them again. And maybe you won’t. And maybe if you do, they’ll show you a defiance that will demoralize you even more truly than you’re demoralized now. Come, Stella. Let’s leave this mountebank to his nightmares. I tire of his company.”
“Oncle Julien, I don’t want to leave!” she said. “These are new shoes and I love them. Besides, I find Lestat charming. Ducky, you must forgive Oncle Julien. Death has had the most oppressive effect upon him. When he was alive, he would never have said such things!”
She bounced to the floor, ran to me and threw her soft little arms around me and kissed my cheek.
“Bye, Lestat,” she said.
“
Au revoir,
Stella.”
And then the room was empty.
Perfectly empty.
I turned, disconsolate and shuddering, and put my head down on my arm, as if I could go to sleep on my desk.
“Ah, Maharet,” I said, naming again our great ancestor, our mother, one who was for all I knew on the opposite side of the globe. “Ah, Maharet, what have I done and what can I do? Help me! Let my voice reach you over the miles.” I closed my eyes. Once again, I used the very strongest of my telepathic power.
I have such need of you. I come to you ashamed of my failures. I come to you as the Brat Prince of the Blood Drinkers. I don’t claim to be anything better or worse. Listen to me. Help me. Help me for the sake of others. I beg you. Hear my prayer.
I was in this dark frame of mind, alone with this message, which engaged my soul completely, when I heard a step on the iron stairs outside.
Knock at the door.
My guard from the gate: “It’s Clem from Blackwood Farm out front.”
“How in the world did he find this address?” I asked.
“Well, he’s looking for Quinn, says they need Quinn back there right away. Seems he’s been up to the Mayfair house looking for Quinn and they sent him over here.”
I might as well hang out a tasteful neon sign.
Now I had an immediate and mundane use for my telepathy: scan the blocks around for the Dazzling Duo and relay this message to Quinn.
Zap: nothing to it.
Quinn and Mona were in a small café on Jackson Square, Mona sobbing into an immense heap of paper napkins, Quinn enfolding her and hiding her from the world.
Gotcha. Tell Clem to meet me at Chartres and St. Ann. And please, Lestat, I beg you, come with me.
Meet you at Blackwood Farm, sweet boy.
Eh bien,
so after the proper messages were conveyed to Clem, who was presiding over the choking, wheezing, seething limousine outside in the Rue Royale, at least I had a moment of stillness in which to think, and then a destination.