Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

"Listen, we cannot answer each other's questions this way," he said. "But what I can tell you now is I am glad the female is dead. I am glad it's dead!" He shook his head, and placed his hand on the sloped back of the chair. He was looking off, hair falling down over his eyes, rather wild now, so that he looked especially gaunt and dramatic, and rather like a magician, perhaps. "So help me, God," he said. "I'm relieved, I'm relieved that you tell me in the same breath it was there and that it is no more."

Michael nodded. "I think I'm beginning to see."

"Do you?" asked Ash.

"We can't share this earth, can we, the two tribes so apparently similar and so utterly unalike?"

"No, we can't share it," Ash said, shaking his head with emphasis. "What race can live with any other? What religion with any other? War is worldwide; and the wars are tribal, no matter what men say they are! They are tribal, and they are wars of extermination, whether it be the Arabs against the Kurds, or the Turks and the Europeans, or the Russian fighting the Oriental. It's never going to stop. People dream that it will, but it can't, as long as there are people. But of course, if my kind came again, and if the humans of the earth were exterminated, well, then, my people could live in peace, but then, doesn't every tribe believe this of itself?"

Michael shook his head. "It doesn't have to be strife," he said. "It is conceivable that all tribes stop fighting each other."

"Conceivable, yes, but not possible."

"One breed doesn't have to reign over another," insisted Michael. "One breed doesn't even have to know about the other."

"You mean that we should live in secret?" Ash asked. "Do you know how quickly our population doubles itself and then triples and then quadruples? Do you know how strong we are? You can't know how it was, you have never seen the Taltos born knowing, you've never seen it grow to its full height in those first few minutes or hours or days or however long it takes; you've never seen it."

"I've seen it," said Rowan. "I've seen it twice."

"And what do you say? What would come of my wanting a female? Of grieving for your lost Emaleth and seeking to find a replacement for her? Of troubling your innocent Mona with the seed that might make the Taltos or might make her die?"

"I can tell you this," said Rowan, taking a deep breath. "At the moment I shot Emaleth, at that moment there wasn't the slightest doubt in my mind that she was a threat to my breed, and that she had to die."

Ash smiled; he nodded. "And you were right."

They were all silent. Then Michael spoke.

"You have our worst secret now," he said.

"Yes, you have it," said Rowan softly.

"And I wonder," said Michael, "if we have yours."

"You will," said Ash. "We should sleep now, all of us. My eyes hurt me. And the corporation waits with a hundred small tasks which only I can perform. You sleep now, and in New York I'll tell you everything. And you will have all my secrets, from the worst to the least."

Twenty-three

"MONA, WAKE UP."

She heard the swamp before she actually saw it. She heard the bullfrogs crying, and the night birds, and the sound of water all around her, murky, still, yet still moving somewhere, in a rusted pipe perhaps, or against the side of a skiff, she didn't know. They had stopped. This must be the landing.

The dream had been the strangest yet. She had had to pass an examination, and she that passed would rule the world, so Mona had to answer every question. From every field the questions had come, on science, mathematics, history, the computer she so loved, the stocks and bonds, the meaning of life, and that had been the hardest part, because she'd felt so alive that she could not begin to justify it. You know, you just know that it is magnificent to be alive. Had she scored the perfect one hundred percent? Would she rule the world?

"Wake up, Mona!" Mary Jane whispered.

Mary Jane couldn't see that Mona's eyes were open. Mona was looking through the glass window at the swamp, at the ragged, tilting trees, sickly and strung with moss, at the vines snarled like ropes around the huge old cypresses. Out there in the light of the moon she could see patches of water through the covering of still duckweed, and the knees of the cypress trees, so many dangerous spikes sticking up all around the thick trunks of the old trees. And black things, little black things flying in the night. Could be roaches, but don't think about it!

Her back ached. As she tried to sit forward, she felt heavy and achy all over, and wanting more milk. They'd stopped twice for milk, and she wanted more. They had cartons and cartons in the ice chest, best to get to the house. Then drink it.

"Come on, honey, you get out and wait for me right here, and I'm going to hide this car where nobody's likely to see it."

"Hide this car, this enormous car?"

Mary Jane opened the door and helped her out, and then stood back, obviously horrified again looking at her, and trying not to show it. The light came from inside the car on Mary Jane's face.

"Lord, Mona Mayfair, what if you die?"

Mona grasped Mary Jane's wrist as she stood up, her feet squarely planted on the soft earth thick with dredged white shells, glowing beneath her. There went the pier, out into the dark.

"Stop saying that, Mary Jane, but I'll give you some thing to think about, just in case it happens," said Mona. She tried to lift the sack of groceries from the floor, but she could not bend down that far.

Mary Jane had just lighted the lantern. She turned around and the light went up into her eyes, making her ghastly. It shone on the weathered shack behind her and on the few feet of dilapidated pier, and on the tendrils of moss that hung down from the dead-looking branches right above her.

God, there were so many flying things in the dark.

"Mona Mayfair, your cheekbones are sticking right out of your face!" said Mary Jane. "I swear to God, I can see your teeth through the skin around your mouth."

"Oh, stop it, you're being crazy. It's the light. You look like a ghost yourself." Whoa, she felt horrible. Weak, and full of aching. Even her feet ached.

"And you wouldn't believe the color of your skin, my God, you look like somebody sunk in a bath of milk of magnesia."

"I'm okay. I can't lift this stuff."

"I'll get it, you rest there against that tree, that's the tree I told you about, the cypress tree, oldest one in these parts, you see this was the pond out here, the little pond???? You know??? Where the family would go rowing??? Here, take the lantern, the handle doesn't get hot."

"It looks dangerous. In the western movies, they are always throwing a lantern like that into the barn where the hero has been trapped by the bad guys. It breaks and sets the barn on fire every time. I don't like it."

"Well, nobody's going to do that out here," shouted Mary Jane over her shoulder, as she moved one sack after another, plunking them down on the shells. "And there isn't any hay, besides, and if there was, it would be soggy."

The headlights of the car bored into the swamp, deep into the endless forest of trunks, thick and thin, and the wild broken palmetto and jagged banana. The water breathed and sighed and trickled again, for all its stagnant stench and motionlessness.

"Jesus Christ, this is a wild place," Mona whispered, but in a way she loved it. She loved even the coolness of the air here, languid and soft, not moving with a breeze, but nevertheless stirred, perhaps by the water.

Mary Jane let the heavy ice chest drop.

"No, lookie, get over to one side, and when I get in the car and turn it around like to go back out, you look yonder where the light shines and you'll see Fontevrault!"

The door slammed, the tires churned the gravel.

The big car backed up to the right, and the beams slid over the spindly phantom trees, and lo and behold, lo and behold, she saw it--enormous, and listing horribly in the light, its attic gable windows flashing and winking out as the car made its circle.

The night went dark, but what she had seen remained, a great black hulk against the sky, impossible. The house

was falling.

She almost screamed, though why she wasn't certain. They couldn't be going to that house, not a house leaning like that, a crippled house. A house underwater was one thing, but a house like that? But even as the car drove away, with a small, healthy blast of white smoke, she saw that there were lights in this impossible ruin. She could see through the upstairs fanlight in the center of the porch, way back, deep inside, lights. And when the last sound of the car was gone, she thought for a moment that she heard something like the playing of a radio.

The lantern was bright enough, but this was country dark, pitch black. There was nothing but the lantern and that dim, glowing coal of light inside the collapsing mansion.

Dear God, Mary Jane doesn't realize this damned place has keeled over in her absence! We've got to get Granny out, assuming that Granny has not already been unceremoniously dumped into the drink! And what drink, what slime! The smell was the greenest smell she had ever smelled, oh, but when she looked up, the sky was that glowing pink that it can be in the Louisiana night, and the disappearing trees stuck their futile little branches out to connect with each other, and the moss became translucent, veils and veils of moss. The birds, listen to the birds crying. The very topmost branches were thin and covered over with webs, silvery webs, were they spiders or silkworms?

"I do see the charm of this place," she said. "If only that house wasn't about to topple."

Mama.

I'm here, Morrigan.

There was a sound on the road behind her. Christ, Mary Jane was running towards her, all alone in the dark. The least she could do was turn around and hold up the lantern. Her back ached now almost unbearably, and she wasn't even lifting anything or trying to reach anything, just holding up this awfully heavy lantern.