Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(102)
Author: Anne Rice

She herself hardly noticed what she’d taken hastily from her suitcase. Something red, something soft, something loose and short that barely touched her knees. Michael had put the pearls around her neck, a small, neat necklace. It had surprised her. She’d been so dazed then.

Ash’s servants had packed up everything else.

“I didn’t know whether or not you wanted us to get Samuel a bulldog,” the young one, Leslie, had said several times, very distressed that she’d displeased the boss.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ash had said finally, hearing her, perhaps for the first time. “In New York we will get Samuel bulldogs. He can keep his bulldogs in the garden on the roof. Do you know, Leslie, there are dogs who live on the rooftops of New York who have never, never been to the street below?”

What must she think he is? Rowan had wondered. What do they all think he is? Is it to his advantage that he is blindingly rich? Or blindingly handsome?

“But I wanted a bulldog tonight,” the little man had fussed until he’d passed out again, “and I want it now.”

The little man had on first sight terrified Rowan. What was that, witch genes? Witch knowledge? Or was it the physician in her, horrified by the folds of flesh slowly covering his entire face? He was like a great variegated and living piece of stone. What if a surgeon’s scalpel removed those folds, revealing eyes, a full, correctly shaped mouth, the bones under the cheeks, the chin? What would his life become?

“Mayfair witches,” he’d said when he saw them, Rowan and Michael.

“Does everyone in this part of the world know us?” Michael had asked testily. “And does our reputation always go before us? When I get home, I mean to read up on witchcraft, to study it in earnest.”

“Very good idea,” Ash had said. “With your powers, you can do many things.”

Michael had laughed. They liked each other, these two. She could see it. They shared certain attitudes. Yuri had been so frenzied, shattered, so young.

All the way back from the grim confrontation at Stuart Gordon’s tower, Michael had told them the long story related to him by Lasher, of a life lived in the 1500s, and of Lasher’s strange account of earlier memories, of his sense that he had lived even before that. There had been nothing clinical in the telling—rather a ragged outpouring of the tale which he and Aaron alone had known. He had told it once before to Rowan, yes, and she remembered it more as a series of images and catastrophes than words.

To have heard it again in the black limousine, flying over the miles towards London, was to see it again and in greater detail. Lasher the priest, Lasher the saint, Lasher the martyr, and then, a hundred years later, the beginning of Lasher the witch’s familiar, the invisible voice in the dark, a force of wind lashing the fields of wheat, and the leaves from the trees.

“Voice from the glen,” the little man had said in London, jabbing his thumb to point at Michael.

Was it? She wondered. She knew the glen, she would never forget it, forget being Lasher’s prisoner, being dragged up through the ruins of the castle, never forget the moments when Lasher had “recalled” everything, when the new flesh had reclaimed his mind and severed it from whatever true knowledge a ghost can possess.

Michael had never been there. Maybe someday they would, together, visit that place.

Ash had told Samuel to go to sleep as they drove for the airport. The little man had drunk another pint of whiskey, with a lot of grunting and groaning and occasional belching, and had been comatose when carried onto the plane.

Now they were flying over the Arctic.

She closed and opened her eyes. The cabin shimmered.

“I would never hurt this child Mona,” said Ash suddenly, startling her, waking her more fully. He was watching Michael with quiet eyes.

Michael took a final drag off the stubby little cigarette, and crushed it out in the big glass tray so that it became a hideous little worm. His fingers looked large, powerful, dusted with dark hair.

“I know you wouldn’t,” said Michael. “But I don’t understand it all. How can I? Yuri was so frightened.”

“That was my fault. Stupidity. This is why we have to talk to each other, we three. There are other reasons as well.”

“But why trust us?” asked Michael. “Why befriend us at all? You’re a busy man, some sort of billionaire, obviously.”

“Ah, well, we have that in common then, too, don’t we?” said Ash, earnestly. Rowan smiled.

It was a fascinating study in contrasts, the deep-voiced man with the flashing blue eyes and the dark, almost bushy eyebrows; and the tall one, so beguilingly slender, with graceful movements of the wrist that made you almost dizzy. Two exquisite brands of masculinity, both bound up with perfect proportions and fierce personality, and both men—as big men often do—seemed to luxuriate in a great self-confidence and inner calm.

She looked at the ceiling. In her exhaustion, things were distorted. Her eyes were dry and she would have to sleep soon, simply have to, but she couldn’t now. Not now.

Ash spoke again.

“You have a tale to tell which no one can hear but me,” said Ash. “And I want to hear it. And I have a tale to tell that I will tell only to you. Is it that you don’t want my confidence? That you don’t want my friendship or ever, possibly, my love?”

Michael considered this. “I think I want all that, since you ask,” said Michael, with a little shrug and laugh. “Since you ask.”

“Gotcha,” said Ash softly.

Michael laughed again, just a low little rumble. “But you know, don’t you, that I killed Lasher? Yuri told you this. You hold this against me, that I killed one of you?”

“He was not one of me,” said Ash, smiling kindly. The light glinted on the white streak coming from his left temple. A man of thirty, perhaps, with elegant gray streaks, a sort of boy genius of the corporate world, he must have seemed, prematurely rich, prematurely gray. Centuries old, infinitely patient.

It gave her a small warm burst of pride, suddenly, that she had killed Gordon. Not him.

She had done it. It was the first time in all her sad life that she had enjoyed using the power, condemning a man to death with her will, destroying the tissues inside him, and she had confirmed what she had always suspected, that if she really wanted to do it, if she really cooperated with it, rather than fighting this power, it could work awfully fast.

“I want to tell you things,” Ash said. “I want you to know them, the story of what happened and how we came to the glen. Not now, we’re all too tired, surely. But I want to tell you.”