Taltos

Eight

MICHAEL TOLD CLEM he wanted to leave by the front gate. He’d bring the suitcases out. There were only two of them-Rowan’s and his. This was no vacation that required trunks and garment bags.

He looked at his diary before he closed it. There was a long statement there of his philosophy, written on Mardi Gras night, before he had ever dreamed that he would be awakened later by a plaintive gramophone song or by the vision of Mona dancing like a nymph in her white nightgown. Bow in hair, fresh and fragrant as warm bread, fresh milk, strawberries.

No, can’t think any more about Mona just now. Wait for the phone call in London.

Besides, it was the passage he wanted to read:

And I suppose I do believe, in the final analysis, that a peace of mind can be obtained in the face of the worst horrors and the worst losses. It can be obtained by faith in change and in will and in accident; and by faith in ourselves, that we will do the right thing, more often than not, in the face of adversity.

Six weeks had passed since that night, when, in illness and in grief, he’d written those sentiments. He’d been a prisoner of this house then, and up until this very moment.

He closed the diary. He slipped it into his leather bag, tucked the bag under his arm, and picked up the suitcases. He went down the stairs, a bit nervous since neither hand was free to reach for the rail, reminding himself that he would suffer no dizzy spell now, or any other form of weakness.

And if he was wrong about that, well, then he would die in action.

Rowan stood on the porch talking to Ryan, and Mona was there, with tears in her eyes, peering up at him with renewed devotion. She looked as delectable in silk as in anything else; and when he looked at her now, he saw what Rowan had seen, saw it as he had once been the first to see it in Rowan-the new swell of the breasts, the higher color of the cheeks, and a brilliance in Mona’s eyes, as well as a slightly different rhythm to her subtlest movements.

My child.

He’d believe it when she confirmed it. He’d worry about monsters and genes when he had to. He’d dream of a son or a daughter in his arms when there was a real chance of it.

Clem took the suitcases quickly, and carried them out the open gate. Michael liked this new driver so much better than the last, liked his good humor and his matter-of-fact ways. He made Michael think of musicians he’d known.

The trunk of the car was shut. Ryan kissed Rowan on both cheeks. Only now did Michael pick up Ryan’s voice.

“… anything further that you can tell me.”

“Only that this situation won’t last long. But don’t for a moment think it’s safe to let the guards go. And don’t let Mona out alone under any circumstances.”

“Chain me to the walls,” said Mona with a shrug. “They would have done it to Ophelia if she hadn’t drowned in the stream.”

“Who?” asked Ryan. “Mona, so far I have taken this whole thing very well indeed, considering the fact that you are thirteen years old and-”

“Chill, Ryan,” she said. “Nobody’s taking it better than I am.”

She smiled in spite of herself. Ryan stood baffled, staring at her.

This was the moment, Michael figured. He couldn’t endure a long Mayfair goodbye. And Ryan was confused enough.

“Ryan, I’ll be in touch with you as soon as possible,” he said. “We’ll see Aaron’s people. Learn what we can. Come home.”

“Now, can you tell me exactly where you’re going?”

“No, can’t do it,” said Rowan. She had turned and was headed right out of the gate.

Mona suddenly clattered down the steps after her. “Hey, Rowan!” she said, and Mona flung her arms around Rowan’s neck and kissed her.

For one moment Michael was terrified that Rowan would not respond, that she’d stand like a statue beneath the oaks, neither acknowledging this sudden desperate hug, nor trying to free herself from it. But something entirely different happened. Rowan held Mona tight, kissing Mona’s cheek and then smoothing her hair, and even laying her hand on Mona’s forehead.

“You’re going to be all right,” Rowan said. “But do everything that I’ve told you to do.”

Ryan followed Michael down the steps.

“I don’t know what to say except good luck,” Ryan said. “I wish you could tell me more about all this, what you’re really doing.”

“Tell Bea we had to go,” said Michael. “I wouldn’t tell the others any more than you have to.”

Ryan nodded, obviously full of suspicion and concern, but basically stymied.

Rowan was already in the car. Michael slipped in beside her. In seconds they were sliding away beneath the lowering tree branches, and Mona and Ryan made a little picture, standing together in the gate, both waving, Mona’s hair like a starburst, and Ryan clearly baffled as ever and highly uncertain.

“Seems he’s doomed,” said Rowan, “to run things for a coterie who will never tell him anything that’s really happening.”

“We tried once,” said Michael. “You should have been there. He doesn’t want to know. And he will do exactly what you tell him. Mona? Will she? I have no idea. But he will.”

“You’re still angry.”

“No,” he said. “I stopped being angry when you gave in.”

But this wasn’t true. He was still hurt to the quick that she had planned to leave without him, that she had seen him not as a companion on this trip, but as some keeper of the house, and of the baby inside Mona.

Well, hurt wasn’t anger, was it?

She’d turned away. She was looking forward, and so he felt maybe it was safe to look at her. She was too thin still, far too thin, but her face had never been more lovely to him. The black suit she wore, the pearls, the high heels-all of it had given her a deceptively wicked glamour. But she had not needed these things. Her beauty lay in her purity-in the bones of her face, in the dark straight eyebrows that so vividly determined her expression, and in her soft long mouth which he wanted to kiss now with a brutal male desire to waken her, part her lips, make her soften all over in his arms again, have her.

That was the only way, ever, to have her.

She lifted her hand and pressed the button for the leather privacy panel to go up behind the driver. Then she turned to Michael.

“I was wrong,” she said, without rancor or pleading. “You loved Aaron. You love me. You love Mona. I was wrong.”

“You don’t have to go into this,” he answered. It was hard for him to look her in the eye, but he was determined to do it, to calm himself inside, to stop being hurt or mad or whatever this was right now.

“But there’s something you have to understand,” she said. “I don’t plan to be kind and law-abiding with these people who killed Aaron. I don’t intend to answer to anyone about what I do-even to you, Michael.”

He laughed. He looked into her large, cold gray eyes. He wondered if this was what her patients had seen as they looked up, right before the anesthesia began to work on them.

“I know that, honey,” he said. “When we get there, when we meet Yuri, I want to know, that’s all, what he knows. I want to be there with you both. I’m not claiming to have your capabilities, or your nerve. But I want to be there.”

She nodded.

“Who knows, Rowan?” he asked. “Maybe you’ll find a purpose for me.” The wrath had come out. It was too late now to draw back in. He knew that his face had gone red. He looked away from her.

When she spoke this time, it was a secret voice he’d never heard her use except with him, and in the past months it had gained a new depth of feeling.

“Michael, I love you. But I know you’re a good man. I’m no longer a good woman.”

“Rowan, you don’t mean that.”

“Oh yes, I do. I’ve been with the goblins, Michael. I’ve been down into the inner circle.”

“And you’ve come back,” he said, looking at her again, trying to put the lid on these feelings that were about to explode out of him. “You’re Rowan again, and you’re here, and there are things to live for other than vengeance.”

That was it, wasn’t it? He had not roused her from her waking sleep. It had been Aaron’s death that had done the trick, bringing her back to all of them.

If he didn’t think of something else quick, he was going to lose his temper again, the hurt was so intense, it was so out of his control.

“Michael, I love you,” she said. “I love you very much. And I know what you’ve suffered. Don’t think I don’t know, Michael.”

He nodded. He’d give her that much, but maybe he was lying to both of them.

“But don’t think you know what it’s like to be the person I am. I was there at the birth, I was the mother. I was the cause, you might say, I was the crucial instrument. And I paid for that. I paid and I paid and I paid. And I’m not the same now. I love you as I always did, my love for you was never in question. But I’m not the same and I can’t be the same, and I knew it when I was sitting out there in the garden, unable to answer your questions or look at you or put my arms around you. I knew it. And yet I loved you, and I love you now. Can you follow what I’m saying?” Again he nodded.

“You want to hurt me, and I know you do,” she said.

“No, not hurt you. Not that. Not hurt you, just … just … rip your little silk skirt off, perhaps, and tear off that blazer that’s been so skillfully painted on and make you know I’m here, I’m Michael! That’s shameful, isn’t it? It’s disgusting, isn’t it? That I want to have you the only way I can, because you shut me out, you left me, you …”

He stopped. This had sometimes happened to him before, that in the midst of cresting anger, he had seen the futility of what he was doing and saying. He had seen the emptiness of anger itself, and realized in a moment of utter practicality that he could not continue like this, that if he did, nothing would be accomplished except his own misery.

He sat still and he felt the anger leave him. He felt his body grow relaxed and almost tired. He sat back against the back of the seat. And then he looked at her again.

She’d never turned away. She looked neither frightened nor sad. He wondered if, in her secret heart, she was bored and wishing him safe at home as she plotted the next steps she would take.

Clear away these thoughts, man, because if you don’t, you can’t love her again, ever.

And he did love her. There wasn’t any doubt suddenly. He loved her strength, he loved her coldness. That’s how it had been in her house on Tiburon, when they’d made it beneath the bare beam roof, when they had talked and talked, with no possible inkling of how they had, all their lives, been moving towards one another.

He reached out and touched her cheek, very aware that her expression hadn’t changed, that she seemed as totally in control as she ever had.

“I do love you!” he whispered.

“I know,” she said.

He laughed under his breath.

“You do?” he asked. He felt himself smile, and it felt good. He laughed silently and shook his head. “You know it!” he said.

“Yes,” she said with a little nod. “I’m afraid for you, always have been. It’s not because you aren’t strong, aren’t capable, aren’t everything you ought to be. I’m afraid because there’s a power in me that you don’t have, and there’s a power in these others-these enemies of ours who killed Aaron-a power that comes from a total lack of scruples.” She flicked a bit of dust off the tight little skirt. When she sighed, the soft sound of it seemed to fill up the car, rather like her perfume.

She lowered her head, a small gesture that made her hair go very soft and longish around her face. And as she looked up, her brows seemed especially long and her eyes both pretty and mysterious.

“Call it witch power, if you will. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe it’s in the genes. Maybe it’s a physical capability to do things that normal people can’t do.”

“Then I have it,” he said.

“No. Coincidentally, perhaps, you have the long helix,” she said.

“Coincidentally, like hell,” he said. “He chose me for you, Rowan. Lasher did that. Years ago when I was a kid and I stopped at the gate of that house, he chose me. Why do you think he did that? Not because he ever thought I’d be a good man and destroy his hard-won flesh, no, that wasn’t it. It was for the witch in me, Rowan. We come from the same Celtic root. You know we do. And I’m the worker’s son and so I don’t know my story. But it goes back to the same beginnings as yours. The power’s there. It was there in my hands when I could read the past and the future in people’s touch. It was there when I heard the music played by a ghost especially to lead me to Mona.”

She gave a small frown, and her eyes grew small for one tiny instant and then large again and wondering.

“I didn’t use that power to bring Lasher down,” he said. “I was too scared to use it. I used my strength as a man, and the simple tools, as Julien had told me I would. But the power’s there. It has to be. And if that’s what it takes for you to love me, I mean really love me, then I can reach down inside me and find out just what that power can do. That has always been my option.”

“My innocent Michael,” she said, but it had the tone of a query rather than a declaration.

He shook his head. He leant forward and kissed her. It was not the best thing to do, perhaps, but he couldn’t stop himself. He held her by the shoulders, and he did press her back against the seat and cover her mouth with his mouth. He felt her instant response, the way her body was united at once in passion, arms sliding up around his back, mouth kissing him back, back arching as if she would press her entire self against him.

When he let her go, it was only because he had to.

The car was moving swiftly along the freeway. The airport loomed ahead. And there was no time now for the passion he felt, for the consummation of anger and hurt and love that he needed so desperately.

This time it was she who reached out for him, who clasped his head in her hands, and kissed him.

“Michael, my love,” she said, “my one and only love.”

“I’m with you, darling,” he said. “And don’t ever try to change it. What we have to do-for Aaron, for Mona, for the baby, for the family, for God knows what-we do together.”

It wasn’t until they were over the Atlantic that he tried to sleep. They’d eaten their gluttonous fill, and drunk a little too much, and talked for an hour about Aaron. Now the cabin was dark and silent, and they bundled beneath a loose half-dozen blankets.

They needed sleep, he figured. Aaron would advise them to sleep now, wouldn’t he?

They’d land in London after eight hours, and it would be early morning there, though it was really night to their bodies, and there would be Yuri, eager to hear and entitled to hear how Aaron had died. Pain. Grief. The inevitable.

He was slipping off, not certain whether he was going right straight into a nightmare or into something as bright and meaningless as a bad cartoon, when he felt her touch his arm.

He let his head roll on the leather seat as he turned to her. She lay back beside him, hand clasping his hand.

“If we see this through,” she whispered, “if you don’t back off from what I do, if I don’t shut you …”

“Yes …”

“Then nothing will ever come between us. Nobody ever will. And anything you might have with a girl bride will be forfeit.”

“I want no girl brides,” he said. “I never did. I didn’t dream of other women while you were gone from me. I love Mona in my own way, and always will, but that’s part of who we are, all of us. I love her and I want the child. I want the child so much I don’t even want to talk about it. It’s too soon. I’m too desperate. But I want only you, and that’s been true since the first day I was with you.”

She closed her eyes, her hand still warm and tight on his arm, and then it slipped away rather naturally, as if she’d gone to sleep. Her face looked serene and utterly perfect.

“You know, I’ve taken life,” he said in a whisper. But he wasn’t sure she was awake still. “I’ve taken life three times, and I’ve walked away from those deeds without regret. That changes anyone.”

No answer from her lips.

“I can do it again,” he said, “if I have to.”

Her lips moved.

“I know that you can,” she said softly, not opening her eyes, still lying there as if in deep sleep. “But you see, I’m going to do it whether I have to or not. I have been mortally offended.”

She drew in close and kissed him again.

“We’re not going to make it to London,” he said.

“We’re the only ones in the entire first-class cabin,” she said, raising her eyebrows, and then kissing him again. “I was once riding on a plane when a certain sort of love was made known to me. It was Lasher’s first kiss, you might say. It had a wild, electric quality to it. But I want your arms. I want your cock. I want your body! I can’t wait until London. Give it to me.”

Enough said, he thought. Thank God she’d opened the blazer, or he might have torn the buttons in proverbial romantic fashion.