"Mona, you almost died in this story," I said. "How could it not be yours as well?"
"Oh, I forced my way into it," she said. "I wanted Michael. And she'd deserted him. All those nights in the hospital-I wondered, had she really forgiven me? And my child had lived and-. " She shook her head and raised her hand as though to banish a specter.
I stroked her hair back from her forehead. She inclined to me, and I kissed her forehead.
"We have to go there, Beloved Boss!" she whispered. "We promised Michael. She's got to tell me the truth. "
"This is all wrong," said Quinn. He shook his head. He clearly didn't like the idea at all. No one at Blackwood Farm knew Quinn's secrets. Even his clever Aunt Queen had died believing him her innocent boy.
"It's the only way to save the sanity of Rowan Mayfair," I said. "She knows but she doesn't know for sure, and it will eat at her and it will obsess her, and on account of her bond with Mona, she and Michael will never let it go. The damage has been done. Only some form of truth will repair it. "
"You're right," said Mona. "But if they tell you and Quinn about the Taltos, if they take you into their trust, tell you things that even most all of the Mayfairs don't know, there will be a bond, and maybe that bond can somehow save us all. "
Taltos.
So that was the name of this species. That was the name of the creature of the curious fragrance and the back-garden graves and the dying womb.
"Michael and Rowan have obviously kept one terrible set of secrets," I said. "They're fit to keep another. And the innocent Mayfairs will come to receive Mona. And her life won't have to be of the shadows. She'll come and go as you do, Quinn. That's the way it will work. "
Quinn studied me silently, respectfully. Then he spoke up.
"Are you in love with Rowan?"
"Doesn't matter one way or the other," I said.
Mona flashed on me, the blood rising in her cheeks very hot, and her eyes quivering.
Intense, painful moment. Why was my soul not crusted over with barnacles for every life I'd taken? I spoke with the tongue of a mortal.
"We're going there to save Rowan, are we not?" I said. "Quinn, call for a car, will you?"
I left them and opened the door and went out onto the rear balcony. The breeze had picked up. The banana trees were dancing against the brick walls. I could see the white roses in the dark. An illicit fire
burnt inside me. " 'The rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys,' " I whispered. " 'Thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee. ' " How reverently the wind received these strange words.
I would have liked the long way-a walk uptown through streets narrow and wide, the open-mouthed roar of the streetcar or its heavy metal clatter through Chrondelet Street, the vision of the pilgrim oaks struggling on lower St. Charles Avenue, the festering flowers of the Garden District, and the glistening moss on the bricks.
But there was no time for that except in my memory. My heart was thudding. And in Quinn's heart my heart was on trial.
"You know," Mona said as we waited at the curb for the limousine. "I haven't seen the house on First and Chestnut for two years. The day the ambulance came I thought I'd be back in a week or two, like always. Hmmm. I wonder if Oncle Julien's on the prowl in the old rooms. "
No, darling, I thought, though I didn't voice it. He's right across the s
treet, in the shadows of a shop bolted for the night, the discredited spirit, glowering at me. Goddamn you! But who knows, maybe he'll come along.
Chapter 15
15
LOVE. Who knows about another's love? The more you love, the more you know the burnt out loss of love, the more you heed the silence of unknowing in the face of another's spiritual bondage.
Behold the house, which Quinn described in years-ago summer days when he went to call on beloved Mona, the house with crape myrtles pressed against its black fence, and the two famous sentinel oaks with their erupting roots beneath the broken flagstones.
White columns upstairs and down, side hall door, long windows, rocking chairs on the porch, cast-iron railings beneath their spilling festoons of flowering vines. And the great secretive side yard stretching back into a private and concealed darkness. It was into that sunny gulf that Oncle Julien had lured the young Quinn and told him of his Mayfair blood and that he must never marry Mona. Some ghosts just never give up! I spied the sparkle of the waters of the swimming pool far back there, and who knows what beyond, the graveyard of the mysterious Taltos ?
Led into the double parlor by a trusting Michael with a relieved smile, I sensed at once a telltale fragrance. Alien species. Faint but true. Mona caught it, nose uplifted in that quick, slight vampiric gesture.
Quite a room.