Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

"I hope so," he said.

"Let's go home," she whispered.

"Pierce, how's Mona, you've got an update?" Michael asked. They climbed into the car. He had forgotten what it meant to ride in normal automobiles, live in normal houses, have normal dreams. Ash's voice sang to him in his sleep. He heard the musical whisper in his ear even now. And would they ever truly see Ash again? Or would Ash vanish behind all those bronze doors, shutting them out, insulated by his company, his billions, remembering them only perhaps with occasional notes, though they might call, come to New York, press his bell in the very dead of night. "I need you!"

"Ah, Mona, yes," said Pierce. "Well, she's acting strange. When Dad talks to her, she sounds like she's high as a kite. But she's okay. She's hanging around with Mary Jane. And yesterday a team started work on Fontevrault."

"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that," Michael said. "So they're going to save that place."

"Well, it had to be done, obviously, since neither Mary Jane nor Dolly Jean will stand to see it demolished. Oh, I think Dolly Jean is with them too. Now Dolly Jean looks like a withered apple, but they say she is very quick."

"I'm glad she's there," he said. "I like old people." Rowan laughed softly, resting her head on his shoulder. "Maybe we'll ask Aunt Viv to come over," he said. "And how is Bea? What is happening with Bea?"

"Well, now," said Pierce with a little tilt of his head. "Ancient Evelyn has worked the miracle there, simply by coming home from the hospital and needing care, and guess who has dashed up to Amelia to feed her soft-boiled eggs and make her talk, and make her grip tight with both hands? Dad says it's the perfect antidote for grief. I wonder if Mother's spirit isn't there."

"All the news is good news now," Rowan said with a wan smile, her voice deep as always. "And the girls will be in the house, and the silence will have to wait, and the spirits recede into the walls."

"You think they're still there?" Pierce asked with touching innocence.

God bless the Mayfairs who have never seen, and don't really believe.

"No, son," Michael said. "It's just a big beautiful house, and it's waiting for us, and for ... new generations to come."

"For Mayfairs yet unborn," whispered Rowan.

They had just turned onto St. Charles Avenue, the heavenly corridor of green, oaks in blinding spring leaf, sun mellow, traffic slow, flash of one lovely house after another. My town, home, everything all right, Rowan's hand in mine.

"Ah, and Amelia Street, look," he said.

How dapper the Mayfair house looked in the San Francisco style, with its fresh coat of peach with white trim and green shutters. And all the weeds gone. He almost wanted to stop, to see Evelyn and Bea, but he knew he had to see Mona first, he had to see the mother and child rolled into one. And he had to be with his wife, talking quietly in the big bedroom upstairs, about all that had happened, the tales they'd heard, the strange things they'd seen and might never tell anyone ... except Mona.

And tomorrow he would go out to the mausoleum where Aaron was buried, and he'd do the Irish trick of just talking to Aaron, out loud, as if Aaron were answering, and if anybody didn't like it, well, they could just get out of there, couldn't they? All his family had always done that, his father going out to St. Joseph's Cemetery and talking to his grandmother and grandfather any time he felt like it. And Uncle Shamus when he was so sick, saying to his wife, "You can still talk to me after I'm gone. The only difference is I won't be answering you."

Once again the light changed, darkening, and the trees expanded, crowding out the sky and breaking it into tiny glowing fragments. The Garden District. First Street. And wonder of wonders, the house on the comer of Chestnut, amid its spring banana trees and ferns, and azaleas in bloom, waiting for them.

"Pierce, you must come in."

"No, they're waiting for me downtown. You rest. Call us when you need us." He had already slipped out to lend a manly hand as Rowan climbed from the car. And then his key was in the gate, and he was waving goodbye to them.

A uniformed guard walked along the side fence, disappearing discreetly around the end of the house.

The silence was healed, the car slipping off in light and shadow, noiseless, removed, the dying afternoon burnished and warm and without the slightest resistance. The scent of the sweet olive hung over the whole yard. And tonight he'd smell the jasmine again.

Ash had said that fragrance was the sharpest trigger of memory, a transport into forgotten worlds. And he had been so right, and what did it do to you, to be taken away from all the fragrances you needed to breathe?

He opened the front door for his wife, and felt a sudden impulse to carry her over the threshold. Hell, why not!

She gave a little unrestrained cry of delight, clutching his neck as he scooped her up.

The thing about gestures like this was not to drop the lady in question.

"And now, my dear, we are home," he growled against her soft neck again, forcing her head back as he kissed her beneath her chin, "and the smell of the sweet olive gives way to Eugenia's ever-present wax, and the scent of the old wood, and something musty and expensive and delicious to breathe."

"Amen," she said.

As he went to put her down, she clung to him for a moment. Ah, that was nice! And his aging, battered heart had not begun to pound. She would hear it, wouldn't she, with a doctor's ear? No, he stood hale and quiet, holding her against him, smelling her clean soft hair, and gazing down the polished hall, past the great soaring white doorway, at the distant murals of the dining room, touched still by the afternoon sun. Home. Here. Now, as it has never, never been for either of us.

At last she slipped from him, landing on her feet. The tiniest frown came to her forehead. "Oh, it's nothing," she said. "Only certain memories will die hard, you know. But then I think of Ash, and that is something to contemplate rather than all the sad things."

He wanted to answer, he wanted to say something about his own love for Ash, and something else, something else that was almost torturing him. It would be better to leave it alone, that's wha

t others would advise, if ever he asked them. But he couldn't. He looked into her eyes, opening his own very wide, perhaps wide enough to look angry when he didn't mean to at all.

"Rowan, my love," he said. "I know you could have stayed with him. I know you made a choice."

"You're my man," she said with a soft explosion of breath, "my man, Michael."

Nice to carry her up the stairs, but he'd never make it, not all twenty-nine steps, and where were the young ladies, and Granny, the resurrected one? No, they could not shut themselves away now, unless by some luck the entire tribe had gone out for an early dinner.

Closing his eyes, he kissed her again. Nobody could stop him from doing that at least a dozen times. Kiss. And when he looked up again, he saw the red-haired beauty at the end of the hall, two in fact, one very, very tall, and that mischievous Mary Jane, blond braids on top of her head again, three of the most gorgeous necks in the universe, young girls like that are swans. But who was this new beauty who stood incredibly tall, and looked, why, she looked exactly like Mona!

Rowan turned, staring back down the hall.

The Three Graces, they were, against the dining room door, and Mona's face seemed to occupy two different places. This wasn't resemblance, it was duplication, and why did they stand so still, all of them in their cotton dresses, merely staring as if from a painting?

He heard Rowan gasp. He saw Mona break into a run, and then rush towards him across the polished floor.

"No, you can't do anything. You can't. You have to listen."

"Dear God," Rowan said, her weight falling heavily against him, her body shaking.

"She's my child," Mona said. "My child and Michael's, and you won't hurt her."

Suddenly it struck him, as things often do, in a rush of different stages, all clattering together to take his breath away. The baby is this young woman. The giant helix produced this. This is a Taltos as surely as Ash is a Taltos, as surely as those two under the tree are Taltos. Rowan is going to faint, she is going to go down, and the pain in my chest is killing me.

He clutched for the newel post.