Blood Canticle (The Vampire Chronicles 10)

I sat up and crossed my legs, Indian style. "Come in," I said.

Mona burst into the room, dressed in a fresh long-sleeved rose-colored silk dress and rose satin stacked heels, a quivering page of paper once more held aloft.

"Hit me with it," I declared.

" 'It is my ultimate goal to transmute this experience into a level of life participation which is worthy of the immense powers that have been bequeathed to me by Lestat, a level of life experience which knows no moral shrinking from the most obvious yet painful theological questions which my transfigured state has made utterly inescapable, the first of which is, obviously, How does God view my essential being? Am I human and vampire? Or vampire only? That is, is damnation, and I speak now not of a literal Hell with flames, but of a state which is defined by the absence of God-is damnation implicit and inherent in what I am, or do I still exist in a relativistic universe in which I may attain grace on the same terms as humans can attain it, by participating in the Incarnation of Christ, an historical event in which I totally believe, in spite of the fact that it is not philosophically fashionable, though what questions of fashion have to do with me now in this transcendent and often luminous condition is moot. ' " She looked at me. "What do you think?"

"Well, I think you ducked out of the paragraph on that 'fashionable question. ' I think you should scrap the thing about fashionable and try to make a more solid finish, perhaps with some very concise statement about the level on which you believe in the Incarnation of Christ. And you can always use 'transcendent' and 'luminous' in another sentence. Also you misused the word 'bequeath. ' "

"Cool!" She dashed out of the room.

Naturally, she left the door open.

I went after her.

She was already pounding the keyboard, the computer humming on one of my many Louis XV desks; her red eyebrows puckered, her green eyes locked to the monitor when I took up my position, arms folded, looking down on her.

"Yeah, what, Beloved Boss?" she asked without stopping her writing.

Quinn was stretched out comfortably on the bed, staring at the tester. The whole flat was full of beds with testers. Well, six bedrooms, anyway, three on each side.

"Call Rowan Mayfair and tell her you're all right. What do you think? Can you pull it off? The woman's suffering. "

"Bummer!" Clackity-clack.

"Mona, if you possibly could do it-for their sakes, of course. Michael is suffering. "

She looked sharply up at me and froze. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she lifted the phone to the right of her on the desk and she punched in the number so rapidly with her thumb I couldn't follow it. Her generation, with Touch-Tone phones. Big deal! I can write with a quill pen in a flurry of curlicues you wouldn't believe; let's see her do that. And I don't spill a drop of ink on the parchment, either.

"Yo, Rowan, Mona here. " Hysterical crying on the other end. Mona overriding: "I'm just fine, I'm hanging with Quinn, look, don't worry about me, I'm all better, totally. " A storm of literal questions. Mona overriding: "Rowan, listen, I'm feeling great. Yeah, a kind of miracle. Like I'll call you later. No, no, no (overriding again), I'm wearing Aunt Queen's clothes, they fit me perfectly, yeah, and her shoes, really cool, like she has tons of these high-heel shoes, yeah, and I never wore shoes like this; yeah, fine, no, no, no, stop it, Rowan, and Quinn wants me to wear them, they're brand new, they're really great. Love you, love to Michael and everybody. Bye. " Down with the phone over Rowan shouting.

"So it's done," I said. "I really appreciate it. " I shrugged.

She sat there white faced, the blood having fled her cheeks, staring into space.

I felt like a bully. I was a bully. I've always been a bully. Everybody who knows me thinks I am a bully. Except perhaps Quinn.

Quinn sat up on the bed.

"What's the matter, Ophelia?" he asked.

"You know I have to go to them," she said, her eyebrows knitted. "I have no choice. "

"What do you mean?" I said. "They just want off the hook. Now, admittedly, it's a very complex hook. "

"No, no, no," she said, "for my sake. " Her voice and her face were suddenly pitiless. "For what I have to find out," she continued coldly, shuddering all over as though a wind had blown through the room. "I know she's lied to me. She's lied to me for years. I'm afraid of how much she might have lied to me. I'm going to make her tell me. "

"That was wrong of me, making you talk to her?" I asked.

"Ophelia," said Quinn, "take your time. It's yours to take. "

"No, had to happen, you were right," she said to me. But she was shaking. Tears standing in her eyes. Preternatural emotions.

"It's about the Woman Child," I said under my breath. Was I free to reveal it to Quinn? What I'd seen: her monstrous woman offspring? "Doll face," I said, "why should we have secrets now?"

"You can tell him anything," she said, trying no

t to cry. "Dear God, I . . . I . . . I'm going to find them! If she knows where they are, if she's kept that from me. . . . "