Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(56)
Author: Anne Rice

Stupid fears. She stopped. She sat back and rested her hand on her belly. She didn’t press down to feel the hard little lump that Dr. Salter had let her feel. She simply opened her fingers and clasped her belly loosely, realizing that it was altogether bigger than it had ever been.

“My baby,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. “Julien, help me, please.”

But she felt no answer coming to her. That was all past.

She wanted so to talk to Ancient Evelyn, but Ancient Evelyn was still recovering from the stroke. She was surrounded by nurses and equipment in her bedroom at Amelia Street. She probably didn’t even know that they’d brought her home from the hospital at all. It would be too maddening to sit there babbling out her heart to Ancient Evelyn and then realize that Ancient Evelyn couldn’t understand a word she said.

No one, there is no one. Gifford!

She went to the window, the very one that had been opened that day so mysteriously, perhaps by Lasher, she’d never know. She peered out through the green wooden shutters. Guards on the corner. A guard across the street.

She left the library, walking slowly, falling into a dragging rhythm almost, though she didn’t know why, except that she was looking at everything that she passed, and when she stepped out into the garden, it seemed gloriously green and crowded to her, with the spring azaleas almost ready to bloom, and the ginger lilies laden with buds, and the crape myrtles filled with tiny new leaves, making them enormous and dense.

All the bare spaces of winter had been closed. The warmth had unlocked everything, and even the air breathed a sigh of relief.

She stood at the back garden gate, looking at Deirdre’s oak, and the table where Rowan had sat, and the fresh green grass growing there, brighter and more truly green than the grass around it.

“Gifford?” she whispered. “Aunt Gifford.” But she knew she didn’t want a ghost to answer her.

She was actually afraid of a revelation, a vision, a horrible dilemma. She placed her hand on her belly again and just let it stay there, warm, tight.

“The ghosts are gone,” she said. She realized she was talking to the baby as well as herself. “That’s finished. We aren’t going to need those things, you and I. No, never. They’ve gone to slay the dragon, and once the dragon’s dead, the future’s ours—yours and mine—and you’ll never even have to know all that happened before, not till you’re grown and very bright. I wish I knew what sex you were. I wish I knew the color of your hair—that is, if you have any. I should give you a name. Yes, a name.”

She broke off this little monologue.

She had the feeling someone had spoken to her—somebody very close had whispered something—just a tiny fragment of a sentence—and it was gone, and she couldn’t catch it now. She even turned around, spooked suddenly. But of course no one was near her. The guards were around the periphery. Those were their instructions, unless they heard an alarm sound in the house.

She slumped against the iron post of the gate. Her eyes moved over the grass again and up over the thick black arms of the oak. The new leaves burst forth in brilliant mint-green clusters. The old leaves looked dusty and dark and ready perhaps to dry up and drop away. The oaks of New Orleans were never, really barren, thank heaven. But in spring they were reborn.

She turned around and looked to her right, towards the very front of the property. Flash of a blue shirt beyond the front fence. It was more quiet than she’d ever known it to be. Possibly even Eugenia had gone to Aaron’s funeral. She hoped so.

“No ghosts, no spirits,” she said. “No whispers from Aunt Gifford.” Did she really want there to be any? Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t so sure. The whole prospect of ghosts and spooks confused her.

Must be the baby, she thought, and one of those mysterious mental changes that comes over you, even this early, guiding you to a sedentary, unquestioning existence. Spirits were not the thing, now. The baby was everything. She’d read plenty on these physical and mental changes last night in her new books on pregnancy, and she had plenty more to read.

The breeze stole through the shrubbery as it always had, grabbing loose petals and leaves and little blossoms here and there, and tumbling them across the purple flags, then dying away to nothing. A slow warmth rose from the ground.

She turned and walked back inside, and through the empty house to the library.

She sat down at the computer and began to write.

“You would not be human if you did not have these doubts and suspicions. How can you not wonder whether or not the baby is all right, under these circumstances? Undoubtedly, this fear has some hormonal origin, and it is a survival mechanism. But you are not a mindless incubator. Your brain, though flooded with new chemicals and combinations of chemicals, is still your brain. Look at the facts.

“Lasher guided the earlier disaster from the beginning. Without the intervention of Lasher, Rowan might have had a completely healthy and beautiful …”

She stopped. But what did that mean, Lasher’s intervention?

The phone rang, startling her, even hurting her a little. She reached for it hastily, not wanting it to ring again.

“Mona here, start talking,” she said.

There was a laugh on the other end. “That’s a hell of a way to answer, kid.”

“Michael! Thank God. I am pregnant, Dr. Salter says there is absolutely no doubt.”

She heard him sigh. “We love you, sweetheart,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“We’re in some frightfully expensive hotel in a French-style suite full of fruitwood chairs standing on tiptoe. Yuri is well, and Rowan is examining this gunshot wound of his. It’s become infected. I want you to wait on talking to Yuri. He’s overexcited, and talking out of his head a little, but otherwise OK.”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t want to tell him now about this baby.”

“No, that wouldn’t be good at all.”

“Give me your number.”

He gave her the number.

“Honey, are you okay?”

Here we go again, even he can tell that you’re worried about it. And he knows why you might be worried. But don’t say anything! No, not one word. Something inside her closed up, fearful suddenly of Michael, the very person she’d wanted so to talk to, the very person, along with Rowan, whom she’d felt she could trust.

Play this carefully.

“Yeah, I’m fine, Michael. Ryan’s office has your number?”