Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(103)
Author: Anne Rice

“Yeah,” said Michael, “and I want to know.” He was reaching into his pocket, pulling the pack halfway up and then shaking loose the cigarette. “I want to know all about you, of course. I want to study the book, if you still mean to let us do that, see the book.”

“All that is possible,” said Ash, with an easy gesture, one hand resting on his knee. “You are a veritable tribe of witches. We are close, you and I. Oh, it isn’t terribly complicated, really. I have learned to live with a profound loneliness. I forget about it for years and years. Then it surfaces, the desire to be placed in context by somebody else. The desire to be known, understood, evaluated morally by a sophisticated mind. That was always the lure of the Talamasca, from the beginning, that I could go there and confide in my scholars, that we would talk late into the night. It’s lured many another secretive nonhuman. I’m not the only one.”

“Well, that’s what all of us need, isn’t it?” asked Michael, glancing at Rowan. There passed another one of those silent, secret moments, rather like an invisible kiss.

She nodded.

“Yes,” Ash agreed. “Human beings very seldom survive without that kind of exchange, communication. Love. And our breed was such a loving breed. It took so long for us to come to understand aggression. We always seem like children when humans first meet us, but we’re not children. It’s a different kind of mildness. There’s a stubbornness in it, a desire to be gratified at once, and for things to remain simple.”

He fell silent. Then he asked, very sincerely, “What really troubles you? Why did you both hesitate when I asked you to come with me to New York? What went through your minds?”

“Killing Lasher,” said Michael. “It was a matter of survival with me, no more, no less. There was one witness, one man present who could understand and forgive, if a forgiving witness is required. And that man’s dead.”

“Aaron.”

“Yeah, he wanted to take Lasher, but he understood why I didn’t let him. And those other two men, well, that, we could say, was self-defense….”

“And you suffer over these deaths,” said Ash gently.

“Lasher, that was the deliberate murder,” said Michael, as if he were speaking to himself. “The thing had hurt my wife; it had taken my child somehow, taken my child. Though what that child would have been, who can say? There are so many questions, so many possibilities. And it had preyed upon the women. Killed them, in its drive to propagate. It could no more live with us than could some plague or insect. Coexistence was unthinkable, and then there was—to use your word—the context, the way it had presented itself from the beginning, in ghostly form, the way it had … used me from the start.”

“Of course I understand you,” Ash said. “Were I you, I would have killed him too.”

“Would you?” asked Michael. “Or would you have spared him because he was one of the very few of your kind left on the earth? You would have had to feel that, a species loyalty.”

“No,” said Ashlar. “I don’t think you understand me, I mean in a very basic way. I have spent my life proving to myself that I am as good as human. Remember. To Pope Gregory himself I once made the case that we had souls. I am no friend to a migrant soul with a thirst for power, an aged soul that had usurped a new body. This arouses no such loyalty in me.”

Michael nodded as if to say I see.

“To have spoken with Lasher,” said Ash, “to have talked about his remembrances, that might have given me considerable pause. But no, I would have felt no loyalty to him. The one thing that the Christians and the Romans never believed was that murder is murder, whether it is a human murder or a murder of one of us. But I believe it. I have lived too long to hold foolish beliefs that humans aren’t worthy of compassion, that they are ‘other.’ We are all connected; everything is connected. How and why, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s true. And Lasher had murdered to reach his ends, and if this one evil could be stamped out forever, only this one …” He shrugged and his smile came back, a little bitter perhaps, or only sweet and sad. “I always thought, imagined, dreamed, perhaps, that if we did come back, if we had again our chance on the face of the earth, we could stamp out that one crime.”

Michael smiled. “You don’t think that now.”

“No,” said Ash, “but there are reasons for not thinking about such possibilities. You’ll understand when we can sit down and talk together in my rooms in New York.”

“I hated Lasher,” said Michael. “He was vicious and he had vicious habits. He laughed at us. Fatal error, perhaps. I’m not entirely certain. I also believed that others wanted me to kill him, others both alive and dead. Do you believe in destiny?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I was told centuries ago that to be the lone survivor of my people was my destiny. It’s happened. But does that mean it was really destiny? I was cunning; I had survived winters and battles and unspeakable tribulations. So I continued to survive. Destiny, or survival? I don’t know. But whatever the case, this creature was your enemy. Why do you need my forgiveness now for what you did?”

“That isn’t really the worry,” said Rowan. She spoke before Michael could answer. She remained curled in the chair, head to one side against the leather. She could see both of them comfortably, and they were both looking at her. “At least I don’t think it’s Michael’s worry.”

He didn’t interrupt her.

“His worry,” she said, “is something that I’ve done, which he himself could not do.”

Ash waited, just as Michael waited.

“I killed another Taltos, a female,” Rowan said.

“A female?” Ash asked softly. “A true female Taltos?”

“Yes, a true female, my own daughter by Lasher. I killed her. I shot her. I killed her as soon as I realized what she was and who she was, and that she was there, with me. I killed her. I feared her as much as I’d feared him.”

Ash appeared fascinated, but in no way disturbed.

“I feared a match of male and female,” said Rowan. “I feared the cruel predictions he’d made and the dark future he’d described, and I feared that somewhere out there, among the other Mayfairs, he’d fathered a male, and the male would find her and they would breed. That would have been his victory. In spite of all I suffered and what Michael had suffered, and all the Mayfair witches, from the beginning, for this … this coupling, this triumph of the Taltos.”