Taltos Read online

  For a moment Mona didn't answer. She was so shaken she didn't trust her voice.

  He drifted away again, looking out the window, as if he'd already forgotten they were talking.

  She felt a pain in her head, very sharp, through both temples. Maybe the movement of the car was making her sick. That happened when you were pregnant, even if the baby was normal.

  "Uncle Ryan, I can't go to Aaron's funeral," she said suddenly. "The car is making me feel sick. I want to go, but I can't. I have to go home. I know it sounds stupid and self-centered, but ..."

  "I'll take you right home," he said gallantly. He reached up and pressed the intercom. "Clem, take Mona to First Street." He shut off the intercom. "You did mean First Street, didn't you?"

  "Yeah, I certainly did," said Mona. She had promised Rowan and Michael she would move in immediately, and she had. Besides, it was more home than Amelia Street, with her mother gone, and her father dead drunk now, only getting up occasionally at night to look for his bottles or his cigarettes, or his dead wife.

  "I'm going to call Shelby to stay with you," said Ryan. "If Beatrice didn't need me, I'd stay with you myself."

  He was very concerned. This certainly was a whole new ball game. He was positively doting on her, the way he used to do when she was very little, and Gifford would dress her in lace and ribbons. She should have known he would react like this. He loved babies. He loved children. They all did.

  And I'm not a child anymore to them, not at all.

  "No, I don't need Shelby," she said. "I mean, I want to be alone. Just alone up there, with only Eugenia. I'll be all right. I'll take a nap. That's a beautiful room up there, to nap in. I've never been there alone before. I have to think and sort of feel things. And besides, the fences are being patrolled by a force equivalent to the French Foreign Legion. Nobody's going to get in there."

  "You don't mind being in the house itself alone?"

  Obviously he was not thinking of intruders, but old stories, stories that had always excited her in the past. They now seemed remote, romantic.

  "No, why should I?" she said impatiently.

  "Mona, you are some young woman," he said, and he smiled in a way that she'd seldom seen him smile. Perhaps it took exhaustion and grief to bring him to the point where something so spontaneous could happen with him. "You're not afraid of the baby, and not afraid of the house."

  "Ryan, I was never afraid of the house. Never. And as for the baby, the baby's making me sick right now. I'm going to throw up."

  "But you're afraid of something, Mona," he said sincerely.

  She had to make this good. She couldn't go on like this, with these questions. She turned to him and put her right hand on his knee.

  "Uncle Ryan, I'm thirteen. I have to think, that's all. There's nothing wrong with me, and I don't know what scared or frightened means, except for what I have read of those words in the dictionary, OK? Worry about Bea. Worry about who killed Aaron. That's something to worry about."

  "OK, Mona dear," he said with another smile.

  "You miss Gifford."

  "You didn't think I would?" He looked out the window again, not waiting for an answer. "Now, Aaron is with Gifford, isn't he?"

  Mona shook her head. He was really bad off. Pierce and Shelby must know how their father needed them.

  They had just turned the corner of First Street.

  "You have to tell me the minute that Rowan or Michael calls," Mona said. She gathered her handbag and prepared to jump out. "And ... and kiss Bea for me ... and ... Aaron."

  "I will," he said. "You're sure you can stay here alone? What if Eugenia isn't here?"

  "That would be too much to hope for," she said over her shoulder. Two young uniformed guards were at the gate, and one of them had just unlocked it for her. She gave him a nod as she passed.

  When she reached the front door, she put her key into the lock, and was inside within seconds. The door closed as always with a deep, muffled, heavy sound, and she collapsed against it with her eyes shut.

  Twelve weeks, that was flat-out impossible! This baby had started when she slept with Michael the second time. She knew it! She knew it as surely as she knew anything else. Besides, there just wasn't anybody between Christmas and Mardi Gras! No, twelve weeks was out of the question! Crisis! Think.

  She headed for the library. They had brought her computer over last night and she'd set it up, creating a small station to the right of the big mahogany desk. She flopped in the chair now, and at once booted the system.

  Quickly she opened a file: WS MONA SECRET Pediatric.

  "Questions that must be asked," she wrote. "How fast did Rowan's pregnancy progress? Were there signs of accelerated development? Was she unusually sick? No one knows these answers because no one knew at that time that Rowan was pregnant. Did Rowan appear pregnant? Rowan must still know the chronology of events. Rowan can clarify everything, and wash away these stupid fears. And of course there was the second pregnancy, the one no one else knows about, except Rowan and Michael and me. Do you dare ask Rowan about this second ..."

  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 th
e 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?"

  "We're not going to disappear, honey."

  She realized she was staring at the screen, at the questions she had so intelligently and logically listed:

  How fast did Rowan's pregnancy progress? Were there signs of accelerated development?

  Michael would know these answers. No, don't let on.

  "I'm going to go, honey. I'll call you later. We all love you."

  " 'Bye, Michael."

  She hung up the phone.

  She sat quiet for a long time, then began to type rapidly: "It is too early to ask them stupid questions about this baby, too early to have fears which may affect your health and your peace of mind, too early to worry Rowan and Michael, who have on their minds much more important things...."

  She broke off.

  There had been a whisper near her! It was like somebody right next to her. She looked around and then rose and walked across the room, looking back at it to make certain of what she already knew. There had been no one there, no wispy spooks, no shadows even. Her fluorescent desk lamp had taken care of that.

  Guards outside on Chestnut? Maybe. But how could she hear them whispering through eighteen inches of solid brick?

  Minutes ticked past.

  Was she afraid to move? This is crazy, Mona Mayfair. Who do you think it is? Gifford, or your own mother? Oncle Julien come again? Doesn't he deserve a rest now? Maybe this goddamned house was just plain haunted, and always had been, by all kinds of spirits, like the ghost of the upstairs maid from 1859 or that of a coachman who fell to his death tragically from the roof in 1872. Could be. The family didn't write down everything that happened. She started to laugh.

  Proletarian ghosts in the Mayfair house on First Street? Ghosts who weren't blood kin? Boy, what a scandal! Nah, there weren't any ghosts here at all.

  She looked at the gilt frame of the mirror, the dark brown marble mantel, the shelves of old decaying books. A calm descended on her, kind of comfortable and nice. She loved this place best of all, she thought, and there wasn't any spirit gramophone playing, and no faces in the mirror. You belong here. You're safe. You're home.

  "Yes, you and me, kid," she said, talking to the baby again. "This is our house now, with Michael and with Rowan. And I promise you, I will come up with an interesting name."

  She sat down again, and began to type as fast as before: "Nerves on edge. Imagining things. Eat protein, vitamin C for nerves and for general overall condition. Hearing voices whispering in my ear, sounds like ... sounds like, unsure, but think it sounds like someone singing or even humming! Kind of maddening. Could be a ghost or a deficiency in vitamin B.

  "Aaron's funeral is presently under way. This no doubt contributes to overall jumpiness."

  Eleven

  "YOU'RE CERTAIN THIS was a Taltos?" Rowan asked.

  She had put away the bandages and the antiseptic, and washed her hands. She stood in the bathroom door of the suite, watching Yuri as he walked back and forth, a dark, gangly, and unpredictable figure against the carefully fringed silks and abundant ormolu of the room.

  "Oh God, you don't believe me. It was a Taltos."

  "This could have been a human who had a reason for deceiving you," she said. "The height alone does not necessarily mean--"

  "No, no, no," Yuri said, in the same crazed and manic tone in which he'd been talking since he'd found them at the airport. "It wasn't human. It was ... it was beautiful and hideous. Its knuckles were enormous, and its fingers, they were so long. The face could have been human, certainly. Very, very handsome man, yes. But this was Ashlar, Rowan, the very one. Michael, tell her the story. St. Ashlar, from the oldest church in Donnelaith. Tell her. Oh, if only I had Aaron's notes. I know he made them. He wrote down the story. Even though we were excommunicated by the Order, he wouldn't have failed to write everything down."

  "He did make notes, son, and we have them," said Michael. "And I've told her everything I know as well."

  Michael had already explained this twice, if Rowan wasn't mistaken. The endless repetition and circumlocutions of the day had worn on her. She was badly jet-lagged. Her entire constitution had been aged and weakened, she knew that now, if there had ever been any real hope to the contrary. Thank God she had slept on the plane.

  Michael sat against the arm of the fancy French couch, with his socked feet crossed on the gold pillows. He had taken off his jacket, and his chest, in the turtleneck sweater, looked massive, as though it housed a heart that would beat triumphantly for another fifty years. He shot a secretive, commiserating glance at Rowan.

  Thank God y
ou are here, she thought. Thank God. Michael's calm voice and manner were beyond reassuring. She could not imagine herself here without him.

  Another Taltos. Another one of them! God, what secrets does this world harbor, what monsters are camouflaged amid its forests, its big cities, its wilderness, its seas? Her mind played tricks on her. She could not clearly picture Lasher. The figure was all out of proportion. His strength seemed supernatural. That was not accurate. These creatures were not all-powerful. She tried to banish these jarring memories, of Lasher's fingers bruising her arms, and the back of his hand striking her so hard that she lost consciousness. She could feel that moment of disconnection, and the moment of awakening, when, stunned, she'd found herself trying to crawl, for safety, under the bed. But she had to snap out of this, had to concentrate and make Yuri concentrate.

  "Yuri," she said in her most quiet and unobtrusive authoritarian manner, "describe the Little People again. Are you certain--"

  "The Little People are a wild race," said Yuri, words coming in a rush as he pivoted, hands out, as if to hold a magic glass in which he saw the images of all that he described. "They're doomed, said Samuel. They have no women anymore. They have no future. They will die out, unless a female Taltos comes among them, unless some female of their kind is found in some other remote part of Europe or the British Isles. And this happens. Mark my words, it happens. Samuel told me. Or a witch, don't you see? A witch? The wise women in those parts never go near the glen. The tourists and the archaeologists go and come in groups and by day."

  They had been over this, but Rowan had begun to realize that each time he told it, he added something, threw in some new and possibly important detail.

  "Of course, Samuel told me all this when he thought I was going to die in that cave. When the fever broke, he was as surprised as I was. And then Ash. Ash has no duplicity in him whatsoever. You cannot imagine the candor or simplicity of this being. Man, I want to say man. Why not man, as long as you remember that he is a Taltos? No human could be so direct, unless he was an idiot. And Ash is not an idiot."

  "Then he wasn't lying when he told you he wanted to help you," said Rowan, watching him keenly.

  "No, he wasn't lying. And he wants to protect the Talamasca, why I can't tell you. It all has to do with the past, and perhaps the archives, the secrets, though what is really in those archives nobody knows now. Oh, if I could only trust that the Elders were not part of it. But a witch, don't you see, a witch of Mona's power is simply too valuable to Ash and to Samuel. I should never, never have told them about Mona. Oh, I was a fool to tell them all about the family. But you see, this Samuel, he saved my life."