Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

"Why, Mona Mayfair, you've got a voice."

"Every Mayfair has a voice, Mary Jane. But really I haven't. Not like my mother did, or Gifford. You should have heard them. They were real sopranos. My voice is low."

She hummed the tune now without the words, picturing the forests, and the green land, and flowers. " 'Oh, Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today, queen of the angels, queen of the May. Oh, Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today....' "

She rocked on her knees, her hand on her belly, the baby rocking gently with the music, her red hair all around her now, looking magnificent in the water of the womb, as if it were orange ink dropped into water, billowing out, that weightless, that translucent, that beautiful. Such tiny feet and tiny fingers. What color are your eyes, Morrigan?

I can't see my eyes, Mama, I can see only what you see, Mama.

"Hey, wake up, I'm scared you're gonna fall."

"Oh yes. I'm glad you called me back, Mary Jane, you did right to call me back, but I pray to heaven and the Blessed Mary Ever Virgin that this baby has green eyes like mine. What do you think?"

"Couldn't be a better color!" Mary Jane declared.

Mona laid her hands on the cardboard box in front of her. This was the right one. It reeked of him. Had he written these sheets in his own blood? And to think his body was down there. I ought to dig up that body. I mean, everything is changed now, Rowan and Michael are going to have to accept that, either that or I'm simply not going to tell them, I mean, this is an entirely new development and this one concerns me.

"What bodies are we going to dig up?" asked Mary Jane with a puckered frown.

"Oh, stop reading my mind! Don't be a Mayfair bitch, be a Mayfair witch. Help me with this box."

Mona ripped at the tape with her fingernails and pried back the cardboard.

"Mona, I don't know, this is somebody else's stuff."

"Yesssss," said Mona. "But this somebody else is part of my heritage, this somebody else has her own branch on this tree, and up through the tree from its roots runs this potent fluid, our lifeblood, and he was part of it, he lived in it, you might say, yes, ancient, and long-lived and forever, sort of like trees. Mary Jane, you know trees are the longest-lived things on earth?"

"Yeah, I know that," she said. "There's trees down near Fontevrault that are so big???? I mean there's cypress trees down there with knees sticking up out of the water?"

"Shhhh," said Mona. She had pushed back all the brown wrapping--this thing was packed like it had to carry the Marie Antoinette china all the way to Iceland--and she saw the first page of a loose stack covered in a thin plastic, and bound with a thick rubber band. Scrawl, all right, spidery scrawl, with great long l's and t's and y's, and little vowels that were in some cases no more than dots. But she could read it.

She made her hand a claw and tore the plastic. "Mona Mayfair!"

"Guts, girl!" said Mona. "There's a purpose to what I do. Will you be my ally and confidante, or do you wish, right now, to abandon me? The cable TV in this house gets every channel, you can go to your room, and watch TV, if you don't want to be with me, or take a swim outside, or pick flowers, or dig for bodies under the tree--"

"I want to be your ally and confidante."

"Put your hand on this, then, country cousin. You feel anything?"

"Oooooh!"

"He wrote it. You are looking at the writing of a certified nonhuman! Behold."

Mary Jane was kneeling beside her. She had her fingertips on the page. Her shoulders were hunched, her flaxen hair hanging down on both sides of her face, spectacular as a wig. Her white eyebrows caught the light against her bronzed forehead, and you could practically see every hair. What was she thinking, feeling, seeing? What was the meaning of the look in her eyes? This kid is not stupid, I'll say that for her, she's not stupid. Trouble is ...

"I'm so sleepy," Mona said suddenly, realizing it as soon as she said it. She put her hand to her forehead. "I wonder if Ophelia went to sleep before she drowned."

"Ophelia? You mean Hamlet's Ophelia?"

"Oh, you know what I mean," she said. "That's just great. You know, Mary Jane, I just love you."

She looked at Mary Jane. Yes, this was the Ultimate Cousin, the Cousin who could be a Great Friend, the Cousin who could know everything that Mona knew. And nobody, really, nobody knew everything that Mona knew.

"But I'm so drowsy." She let herself fall gently to the floor, stretching out her legs and then her arms until she lay flat, looking up at the bright, pretty chandelier. "Mary Jane, would you go through that box? If I know Cousin Ryan, and I do, the genealogy is marked."

"Yeah," said Mary Jane.

How refreshing that she had stopped arguing.

"No, I'm not arguing, I figure we've gone this far, and beings this is the writing of a certified nonhuman being, beings we've gone this far ... well, the point is, I can put it all back when we're through."

"Precisely," said Mona, laying her cheek against the cool floor. The smell was very strong in the floorboards! "And beings," she said, imitating Mary Jane, but without malice, no, no malice whatsoever, "and beings that knowledge is precious, one has to get it where one can."

Wow, the most incredible thing had happened. She'd closed her eyes and the hymn was singing itself. All she had to do was listen. She wasn't pushing these words out, these notes, it was just unfolding, like she was in one of those brain experiments where they zap part of your brain with an electrode and wham, you see visions, or you smell the creek on the hill behind your house when you were a little kid!

"That's what both of us have to realize, that witchcraft is an immense science," she said drowsily, talking easily over the pretty hymn, since it sang itself now. "That it is alchemy and chemistry and brain science, and that those things collected make up magic, pure lovely magic. We haven't lost our magic in the age of science. We have discovered a whole new bunch of secrets. We're going to win."

"Win?"

Oh Mary we crown thee with blossoms today, queen of the angels, queen of the May, oh Mary we crown thee ... "Are you reading the pages, Mary Jane?"

"Well, hey, lookie, he has a whole folder here of Xerox copies. 'Inventory in Progress: Relevant Pages, incomplete genealogy.' "

Mona rolled over on her back again. For a moment she didn't know where they were. Rowan's room. There were tiny prisms in the crystal baubles above. The chandelier that Mary Beth had hung there, the one from France, or had it been Julien? Julien, where are you? Julien, how did you let this happen to me?

But the ghosts don't answer unless they want to, unless they have a reason of their own.

"Well, I'm reading this here incomplete genealogy."

"You got it?"

"Yeah, the original and a Xerox. Everything here is in duplicate. Original and Xerox. Little packets like. What he's got circled here is Michael Curry, all right, and then all this stuff about Julien sleeping with some Irish girl, and that girl giving up her baby to Margaret's Orphanage, and then becoming a Sister of Mercy, Sister Bridget Marie, and the baby girl, the one in the orphanage, marrying a fireman named Curry, and him having a son, and then him, something, Michael! Right here."

Mona laughed and laughed. "Oncle Julien was a lion," she said. "You know what male lions do, when they come to a new pride? They kill all the young, so that the females go into heat at once, and then they sire as many young as they can. It's the survival of the genes. Oncle Julien knew. He was just improving the population."

"Yeah, well, from what I heard, he was pretty picky about who got to survive. Granny told me he shot our great-great-great-grandfather."

"I'm not sure that's the right number of 'greats.' What else do all those papers say?"

"Well, sugar plum, to tell you the truth, I couldn't have made this out if somebody hadn't marked it. There's just all kinds of things here. You know what this is like? It's like the writing that people do when they're high on drugs and they think they're being brilliant and the next day, lo and behold, they look at the tablets and see they've written little bitty jagged lines, like the lines, you know??? That make up an electrocardiogram?"

"Don't tell me you've been a nurse?"

"Yeah, for a while, but that was at this crazy commune where they made us all take an enema every day to get rid of the impurities in our system."

Mona started to laugh again, a lovely sleepy laugh. "I don't think a commune of the Twelve Apostles could have made me do that," she said.

This chandelier was damned near spectacular. That she had lived this long without lying on the floor and looking up at one of these things was just inexcusable. The hymn was still going, only this time, miracle of miracles, it was being played on some instrument, like a harp perhaps, and each note merged with the next note. She could almost not feel the floor under her, when she concentrated on the music and on the lights above.

"You didn't stay in that commune, did you?" she asked drowsily. "That sounds horrible."

"Sure didn't. I made my mother leave. I said, lookie, you leave with me or I cut out of here on my own. And as I was about twelve years old at the time, she wasn't about to let that happen. Lookie, here's Michael Curry's name again. He drew a circle around it."

"Lasher did? Or Ryan?"

"You got me. This is the Xerox, I can't tell. No, I see, the circle's drawn on the Xerox. Must have been Ryan, and this says something about 'waerloga.' Well, you know??? That probably means 'warlock.' "