Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

"They can do that without hurting her." He was so tired, and almost sick. In a m

inute he was going to throw up. But he couldn't leave her now, he refused to be ignominiously sick. "Rowan, the family, the family first, all the family."

"Frightened people. No. Not Pierce and Ryan and Bea and Lauren ..."

"Not alone, Rowan. We can't make the right choices alone, and the girls, the girls are swept off their feet, the girls are walking the dark paths of magic and transformation, she belongs to the girls."

"I know," Rowan sighed. "The way that he once belonged to me, the spirit who came to me, full of lies. Oh, I wish in some horrible, cowardly way ..."

"What?"

She shook her head.

There was a sound at the door. It popped a few inches, then rode back. Mona stood there, her face faintly streaked from crying too, her eyes full of weariness.

"You won't hurt her."

"No," he said. "When did it happen?"

"Just a few days ago. Listen, you've got to come. We've got to talk. She can't run away. She can't survive out there on her own. She thinks she can, but she can't. I'm not asking you to tell her if there's really a male somewhere, just come, accept my child, listen."

"We will," said Rowan.

Mona nodded.

"You're not well, you need to rest," said Rowan.

"It was the birth, but I'm all right. She needs the milk all the time."

"Then she won't run away," said Rowan.

"Perhaps not," said Mona. "Do you see, both of you?"

"That you love her? Yes," said Rowan. "I see."

Mona slowly nodded her head. "Come down. In an hour. I think by then she'll be all right. We bought her lots of pretty dresses. She likes those. She insists we dress up too. Maybe I'll brush her hair back and put a ribbon in it the way I used to do in mine. She's smart. She's very smart and she sees ..."

"Sees what?"

Mona hesitated. And then her answer came, small and without conviction. "She sees the future." The door closed.

He realized he was looking at the pale rectangular panes of the window. The light was waning fast, the twilight of spring so quick. The cicadas had begun outside. Did she hear all that? Did it comfort her? Where was she now, this, his daughter?

He groped for the lamp.

"No, don't," Rowan said. She was a silhouette now, a line of gleaming light defining her profile. The room closed and then grew vast in the darkness. "I want to think. I want to think out loud in the darkness."

"Yes, I understand," he said.

She turned, and very slowly, with highly effective movements, she slipped the pillows behind him so that he could lean back, and hating himself, he let her do it. He rested, he pulled a deep breath of air into his lungs. The window was glazed and white. And when the trees moved, it was like the darkness outside trying to peer in. It was like the trees listening.

Rowan talked:

"I tell myself we all run the risk of horror; any child can be a monster, a bringer of death. What would you do if it were a baby, a tiny pink thing like they ought to be, and a witch came and laid her hands on it and said, 'It will grow up to wage war, it will grow up to make bombs, it will grow up to sacrifice the lives of thousands, millions.' Would you choke it? I mean if you really believed? Or would you say 'No'?"

"I'm thinking," he said. "I'm thinking of things that make a kind of sense, that she's newborn, that she must listen, that those who surround her have to be teachers, and as the years pass, as she grows older, then ..."

"And what if Ash were to die without ever knowing?" Rowan asked. "Do you remember his words? What was it, Michael? 'The dance, the circle, and the song ...' Or do you believe the prediction in the cave? If you do believe it, and I don't know that I do, but if you do, what then? We spend our lives keeping them apart?"

The room was completely dark. Pale white streaks of light fell tentatively across the ceiling. The furnishings, the fireplace, the walls themselves had disappeared. And the trees outside still held their color, their detail, because the streetlights were shining up at them.

The sky was the leftover sky--and the color of rosy flesh, as sometimes happens.

"We'll go down," he said. "And then we'll listen. And then perhaps, perhaps, we'll call the entire family! Tell them all to come, come as they did when you were lying in this bed, when we thought you were going to die--all of them. We need them. Lauren and Paige and Ryan, yes, Ryan, and Pierce and Ancient Evelyn."

"Perhaps," she said. "Know what will happen? They will look at her, in her undeniable innocence and youth, and then they'll look to us, wondering, 'Is it true, is it so?' and begging for us to choose some path."

He slid gently off the bed, fearing nausea, making his way through the dark easily from bedpost to bedpost and then into the narrow white marble bathroom. A memory came back--the first time they had come into this part of the house, he and the Rowan he meant to marry. And there had been small bits of a broken statue lying here, on the white tiles that now appeared in the soft, colorless drench of the light. The Virgin's veiled head, snapped unevenly at the neck; one small plaster hand. What had it been, an omen?

Dear God, if Ash found her, and she found him! Dear God, but that is their decision, is it not?

"It's out of our hands," Rowan whispered from the dark.

He leaned over the basin, turned on the tap, washed his face with the cold water. For a while it ran almost warm through the pipes, and then it came from the deep earth and it was really cold. At last he dried off, patting his skin with a little mercy for once, and then he laid aside the towel. He slipped out of his jacket, stiff crumpled shirt with the stench of sweat all over it now. He wiped himself dry, and took the recommended spray can from the shelf to kill his scent. He wondered if Ash could have done that, killed the scent cold so that they wouldn't have picked it up from farewell kisses he'd given them both.

And in ancient times, could the human female pick up the scent of the human male coming through the forest? Why have we lost that gift? Because the scent is no longer the predictor of danger. The scent is no longer a reliable indicator of any threat. For Aaron, the hired killer and the stranger were one and the same. What had scent to do with two tons of metal crushing Aaron against the wall?

He pulled on a fresh shirt, and a light sweatshirt over that. Cover it all up.

"Shall we go down now?" He snapped off the light, and searched the darkness. He thought he saw the outline of her bowed head. He thought he saw a glimmer of the deep burgundy of her coat, and then he did see the white blaze of her blouse as she turned, so Southern the way she was dressed, so finished.

"Let's go," she said, in the deep, commanding voice that made him think of butterscotch and sleeping with her. "I want to talk to her."

The library. They were gathered already.

As he came in the door, he saw that Morrigan herself sat at the desk, regal in white Victorian lace with high neck and fancy cuffs and a cameo at her throat, a flood of taffeta skirt showing behind the mahogany. Mona's twin. And Mona, in softer, more careless lace, curled in the big chair, the way she'd been that day when he had appealed to Ryan and Pierce to help him find Rowan. Mona, needing a mother herself and certainly a father.

Mary Jane held down the other corner, picture perfect in pink. Our witches come in pastels, he thought. And Granny. He had not realized she was there, at the corner of the sofa, until he saw her tiny wrinkled face, her playful little black eyes, and a crinkled smile on her lips.

"There they are!" she said with great flair, stretching out her arms to him. "And you a Mayfair too, out of Julien, think of it. I would have known." He bent to be kissed, to smell the sweet powder rising from her quilted robe, the prerogative of the very old, to go about clothed for bed perpetually. "Come here to me, Rowan Mayfair," she said. "Let me tell you about your mother. Your mother cried when she gave you up. Everyone knew. She cried and turned her head away when they took you from her arms, and never was the same again, ever."

Rowan clasped the small dry hands, and she too bent to receive the kiss. "Dolly

Jean," she said. "You were there when Morrigan was born?" She cast her eye on Morrigan. She had not had the nerve yet to take a good look at her.

"Sure, I was," said Dolly Jean. "I knew she was a walking baby before she ever stuck her foot out of the womb. I knew! And remember, whatever you say, whatever you think, this is a Mayfair, this girl. If we've the stomach for Julien and his murdering ways, we've the stomach for a wild thing with a long neck and an Alice-in-Wonderland face! You listen now. Maybe this is a voice you've never heard before."

He smiled. Well, it was damned good that she was there, that she had taken it so in her stride, and it made him want to reach for the phone now, and begin the calls that would bring all Mayfairs together. Instead he merely sat facing the desk. And Rowan took the chair beside him.

All looked at the ravishing red-haired thing that suddenly laid her head against the high back of her chair, and curled her long white hands around its arms, breasts pushing through her stiff starched lace, waist so frail he wanted to put his hands around it.

"I'm your daughter, Michael."

"Tell me more, Morrigan. Tell me what the future holds. Tell me what you want from us, and what we should expect from you."

"Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say those words. Do you hear that?" She looked back and forth at the others and then at Rowan. "Because I've been telling them that is what was bound to happen. I have to forecast. I have to speak. I have to declare."

"Then go ahead, my dear," he said. And quite suddenly he couldn't see her as monstrous at all; he could only see her as alive, as human, as tender and fragile as all of those in this room, even himself, the one who could kill the others with his bare hands if he wanted to. And Rowan, who could kill any human with her mind. But not this creature.

"I want teachers," she said, "not the confines of a school, but tutors, with Mother and with Mary Jane, I want to be educated, to learn everything in the world, I want the solitude and protection in which to do this, with assurances that I will not be cast out, that I am one of you, that someday ..." Here she stopped as if a switch had been thrown. "Someday I shall be the heiress as my mother has planned for me, and after me, another from her line who is human perhaps ... if you ... if the male ... if the scent ..."

"Play it off, Morrigan," said Mary Jane.

"Just keep talking," said the little mother.

"I want those things which a special child would ask, of searing intelligence and insatiable hungers, but one which is reasonable and lovable, yes, surely, one whom it is possible to love and educate and thereby control."