The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,437

earth can make most of us ever even think of them, and that’s how it’s been all your life with you. And now you find you’ve got a mutant power, something that exceeds the laws of choice and impulse and self-control, something that calls for a more subtle understanding, and you have that understanding. You have the strength to know your own strength.”

She nodded; but she was still shaking all over. And he could tell that she didn’t believe him. And in a way, he wasn’t sure he believed himself. What was the use of denying it? If she didn’t control this power, she would inevitably use it again.

But there was something else he had to say, and it had to do with the visions and the power in his hands.

“Rowan,” he said, “you asked me to take off the gloves the first night we met. To hold your hands. I’ve made love to you without the gloves. Just your body and my body, and our hands touching and my hands touching you all over, and what is it I see, Rowan? What do I feel? I feel goodness and I feel love.”

He kissed her cheek. He kissed her hair and brought it back off her forehead with his hand.

“You’re right in many things you’ve said, Rowan, but not in that. I’m not meant to hurt you. I owe my life to you.” He turned her head towards him and kissed her, but she was still cold and trembling, and far far beyond his reach.

She took his hands and moved them down and away from her, gently, nodding, and then she kissed him gently, but she didn’t want to be touched now. It didn’t do any good.

He sat there for a while, thinking, looking at the long ornate room. Looking at the high mirrors in their dark carved frames, and the dusty old Bözendorfer piano at the far end, and the draperies like long streaks of faded color in the gloom.

Then he climbed to his feet. He couldn’t sit still any longer. He paced the floor in front of the couch, and found himself at the side window, looking out over the dusty screen porch.

“What did you say a moment ago?” he asked, turning around. “You said something about passivity and confusion. Well, this is it, Rowan, the confusion.”

She didn’t answer him. She was sitting crouched there, staring at the floor.

He went back to her and gathered her up, off the couch and into his arms. Her cheeks were still splotched with pink, and very pale. Her lashes were dark and long as she looked down.

He pressed his lips against her mouth softly, feeling no resistance, almost no awareness, as if it were the mouth of someone unconscious or deep asleep. Then slowly she came back to life. She slipped her hands up around his neck, and kissed him back.

“Rowan, there is a pattern,” he whispered in her ear. “There is a great web and we’re in it, but I believe now as I believed then, they were good, the people who brought us together. And what they want of me is good. I gotta figure it out, Rowan. I have to. But I know it’s good. Just as I know that you are good, too.”

He heard her sigh against him, felt the lift of her warm breasts against his chest. When at last she slipped away, it was with great tenderness, kissing his fingers as she let them go.

She walked out towards the center of the long room. She stood under the high broad archway that divided the space into two parlors, and she looked up at the beautiful carving in the plaster, and at the way the arch curved down to meet the cornices at either end. She seemed to be studying this, to be lost in contemplating the house.

He felt bruised and quiet. The whole exchange had hurt him. He couldn’t shake a feeling of misery and suspicion, though it was not suspicion of her.

“Who gives a damn!” she whispered as if she were talking to herself, but she seemed fragile and uncertain.

The dusty sunlight crept in from the screened porch and showed the amber wax on the old boards. The motes of dust swirled around her.

“Talk, talk, talk,” she said. “The next move is theirs. You’ve done everything you could. And so have I. And here we are. And let them come to us.”

“Yes, let them come.”

She turned to him, inviting him silently to draw closer,