Blood Canticle (The Vampire Chronicles 10)

"I think I should go after her," Quinn said. He followed me, taking in everything reverently, mind on Mona, no doubt monitoring her every move.

Front parlor. Piano. There was no piano now. I should tell them to get a piano. Hadn't we passed an antique piano in a window? I had a sudden urge to play the piano-to use my vampiric gift to rip at the keys. It was that Bart¨®k concerto still assaulting my mind, and the picture of those two macabre dancers accentuating the music.

Oh, give me all things human.

"I think I should go get her," Quinn said.

"Listen, I'm not one to talk much about gender," I said, flopping down in my favorite of the velvet wing chairs and throwing one foot up on the chair before the desk, "but you have to realize that she's experiencing a freedom you and I don't appreciate as men. She's walking in the darkness and she's afraid of nothing, and she loves it. And just maybe, just maybe she wants to taste a little mortal blood and she's willing to take the risk. "

"She's a magnet," he whispered. He stood at the window, his hand pulling gently at the lace. "She doesn't know I'm tracking her. She isn't that far away. She's taking her time. I hear her idle thoughts. She's walking too fast. Somebody's going to notice-. "

"Why are you suffering, Little Brother?" I asked. "Do you hate me for bringing her over? Do you wish it hadn't been done?"

He turned and looked at me as though I'd grabbed him by the arm.

"No," he said. He walked away from the window and sort of tumbled into the chair in the far corner opposite me, diagonally, his long legs sprawling as though he wasn't sure what to do with them. "I would have tried it if you hadn't come," he admitted. "I couldn't have watched her die. At least I don't think so. But I am suffering, you're right. Lestat, you can't leave us. Lestat, why are those guards outside the house?"

"Did I say I would leave you?" I countered. "I hired those guards after Stirling came here," I said. "Oh, it's not that I think any of the Talamasca will come back here. It's just that if Stirling could walk right in here, then somebody else might. "

(Flash on the Talamasca: Order of Psychic Detectives. Don't know their own Origins. At least a thousand years old, maybe much older. Keep records on all sorts of paranormal phenomena. Reach out to the

telepathically gifted and isolated. Know about us. )

Quinn and I had visited with Stirling at the Oak Haven Retreat House of the Talamasca right after the exorcism of Goblin, and the immolation of Merrick Mayfair. Merrick Mayfair had grown up in the Talamasca. Stirling had a right to know she was no longer one of the (sigh) Undead. The Retreat House was an immense square plantation house on the River Road just outside of town.

Stirling Oliver had not only been a friend of Quinn's during his mortal years, but he was a friend of Mona's as well. The Talamasca knew much more about the entire Mayfair family than they knew about me.

It gave me no pleasure to think of Stirling now, much as I admired him and liked him. Stirling was about sixty-five years old and very dedicated to the highest principles of the Order, which for all its avowed secularity might have been Roman Catholic with its strictures against meddling in the affairs of the world or using supernatural persons or forces for one's own ends. If the Order hadn't been so fabulously and mysteriously and undeniably wealthy, I would probably have been a patron of it.

(I am also fabulously and mysteriously and undeniably wealthy, but who cares?)

I felt compelled to go see Stirling at the Retreat House and tell him what had happened with Mona. But why?

Stirling wasn't Pope Gregory the Great, for the love of Heaven, and I wasn't Saint Lestat. I didn't have to go to Confession for what I'd done to Mona, but a terrible Contrition settled over me, a profound awareness that all my powers were dark powers and all my talents evil talents, and nothing could come from me but evil no matter what I did.

Besides, hadn't Stirling told Quinn last night that Mona was dying? What had been the meaning of that information? Wa

sn't he in some way in collusion with what had happened? No. He wasn't. Quinn hadn't left him last night to seek out Mona. Mona had come to Blackwood Manor on her own.

"Sooner or later, I'll explain all this to Stirling," I said under my breath. "It's as though Stirling will absolve me but that just isn't true. " I looked at Quinn. "Can you still hear her?"

He nodded. "She's just walking, looking at things," he said. He was distracted, the pupils in his eyes dancing slowly. "Why tell Stirling?" he asked. "Stirling can't tell the Mayfairs. Why burden him with the secret?" He sat forward. "She's wandering along Jackson Square. A man's following her. She's leading him. He senses something isn't right with her. And she's on to him. She knows what he wants. She's luring him. She's certainly having a great time in Aunt Queen's high-heel shoes. "

"Stop watching her," I said. "I mean it. Let me tell you something about your little girl. She's going to make herself known to the Mayfairs very soon on her own. Nothing's going to stop her. There are things

she wants to know from the Mayfairs. I had a sense of it when-. "

The room was empty. No Quinn. I was talking to all the furniture.

I heard the back door open and close, it was that fast.

I stretched out and scrunched down and put my head back and drifted, eyes shut at once.

I was half dreaming. Why the Hell hadn't I fed? Of course I didn't need to feed every night or even every month, but when you work the Dark Trick, no matter who you are, you must feed afterwards, you're giving from the very sap stream of your life. All is vanity. All is vanity under the sun and under the moon.

I'd been in a weakened state when I'd gone down to deal with Rowan Mayfair, that was my problem, that was why the creature obsessed me. Never mind.

Someone pushed my foot off the desk chair. I heard a woman's piercing laugh; I heard dozens of people laughing. Heavy cigar smoke. Glass breaking. I opened my eyes. The flat was full of people! Both windows to the front balcony were open and it was jammed with people, women in long low-cut sparkling dresses, men in fine black dinner jackets with flashing black satin lapels, the roar of conversation and merriment almost deafening, but deafening to whom, and a tray went by, held high by a waiter in a white coat who all but tripped over my legs, and there sat a child on the desk, a rosy child, staring at me, a dainty girl with quick black eyes and beautifully waved black hair, seven or eight, enchanting, precious.