Blood Canticle (The Vampire Chronicles 10)

"Honey, please, my darling, please," Michael pleaded with Rowan for everyone and for his exhausted, bewildered self, holding Rowan effortlessly as she scratched at his arms.

I went to her, disentangled her from her lawfully wedded husband, and caught her up and peered into her intense manic eyes. I said:

"I did it because she was dying. Lay the sin on me. "

She saw me. Truly saw me. Her body rigid as driftwood. Michael, behind her, stared. "Both of you attend," I said. "I speak now without sound. "

Stuff of legend, vulgar names, hunters of the night, locked out of the day forever, live off human blood, hunt the evil ones only, feed on the trash lives if there are such things, always thriving among humankind, from the dawn of time, pass for human, body transformed by the Blood, perfected within its potential by the Blood, Quinn, Mona, me. You are right, you see, she is dead, but only dead to human life. I worked the magic. Filled her with the enlivening Blood. Accept. It's done. It's irreversible. I did it. A dying girl defined by pain and fear could not consent. Two centuries ago, I didn't consent. A year ago, Quinn didn't say yes to it. Maybe no one really consents. It was my conviction a

nd my power. Lay the sin on me. And so she thrives. And so she hunts the filthy blood. But she is Mona again. The night belongs to her, and by day the sun can't find her. I am guilty. Lay all blame on me.

I went silent.

She closed her eyes. She gasped as though exorcising a deep invisible clotted horror from her lungs. "Blood Child," she whispered. She lay against me. Her left hand went up to clasp my shoulder. I held her close, my fingers reaching into her hair.

Michael looked down as though, the window having closed, he wanted to think in solitude. Leaving her to me, he seemed adrift in the room. But he had caught all of my revelation and it had sunk deep into him and he was wearied, and sad.

Mona went to him and opened up his arms, and he received her with the utmost tenderness. He kissed her cheeks as though the truth had broken open in him a powerful chaste communion. He kissed her on the mouth, the hair.

"My baby darling," he said, "my pretty girl, my baby genius. " It was almost like the embrace he had given her only a half hour before, only this time I really understood it. And the knowledge of her nature worked on him, slowly transforming the way in which he touched her.

There was lust in him, yes, bred into him, and fed over many years, a practical, vital lust, and it was part of his constitution, his vision, but for her he didn't feel it. Six years of caring for her had punished it enough, and now this aberrant truth made it so he could caress her once again and kiss her freely, and croon to her, and smooth her hair with his hands, yes, and she was with him again, father of her child, father of her death.

"Like the Taltos," she murmured. She flashed her wholesome, sweet smile. Intrepid youth. And surely he saw in the dusky room her gleaming skin more truly now, and the unnatural glisten of her eyes, and the volume of her red hair as it surrounded her beaming face.

She didn't catch the drifting sadness in him, the enormous ache. He let her go with such tact, and took one of the chairs and sat at the table. He bent over and ran his hands through his hair.

Quinn took the chair opposite him. He looked at Michael. And then Mona went quietly to Quinn's side. And so they were settled.

I stood holding Rowan. Where was my lust? The blood tempest that sweeps into its vortex all desire to know, to absorb, to abide, to possess, to kill, to love? It was a drenching storm inside of me. But I am so very strong. That is a given, is it not? And when you love another as I loved Rowan, you don't strive to hurt. Never. The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul.

I lifted her face, my thumb pressed into her cheek, a gesture which if done to me I couldn't have borne, but I was tentative and ready to draw away had she showed the slightest unwillingness. She only looked at me with muted understanding. And all her flesh yielded to me, and the hand that held my shoulder closed warmly over my neck.

"And so," she said with that remarkable rich voice, that deep lustrous voice, "we Mayfairs of the inner circle, we have another sacrosanct secret, yet another breed of immortal come to us. "

Slight and tenuous, she slipped from my embrace, and secretly kissing my hand, she went to Michael and laid her hands on his shoulders and looked across the table at Mona.

"And I will somehow wake from this gnosis," she went on, "and in the course of things, yes . . . the vital course of things, protect it utterly, this truth, and return to penetrate the world I've made to need me so much. "

"Baby, you've come back," Michael whispered.

This was the creature I adored.

And when our eyes met I saw her full recognition, and a respect and comprehension of my devotion so profound that I could find no words in the swimming silence.

So poetry rises, surpassing the literal, You are beautiful, my love, terrible as an army with banners, turn away your eyes for they have overcome me, a garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Chapter 16

16

WHY DID I LOVE HER so much? Surely someone will read these pages and ask: What was so lovable about her? What was it that caused you, of all beings, so to love? You, a lover of men and women, a vampire, a destroyer of innocent souls, so to love? You, the focus of so much easy affection, and forever flaunting your hopeful stinging charm-why did you love her?

What should I say? I didn't know her age. I can't write it here. I can't describe her hair other than to say it was clipped and turned-in on the ends, and her face was still smooth without the slightest trace of the furrows of age, and her figure boyish.

But one embraces such details in the boiling wake of the acknowledgement of such love. In and of themselves they are nothing. Or, if one believes that a woman so strong has shaped the lineaments of her face, the set of her brows, the straightness of her posture, the frankness of her gestures, the very way that her hair falls about her face, the length of her stride, the sound of her footfall-then perhaps they mean everything.

Beside the flaming red-haired Mona, she was the color of ashes, a woman drawn in charcoal, with a sexless and piercing gaze, and a soul so immense it seemed to fill every fiber of her frame and to emanate outwards into infinity, her knowledge of the world around her dwarfing that of everyone she'd ever