The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,490

strange, and then he realized it was much longer than any lily he’d ever seen, and its petals seemed unusually fragile.

Pretty. Rowan must have picked it when she was walking back from the house. He went into the bathroom, filled a glass with water, and put the lily in it, and brought it back to the table.

He didn’t remember about touching Ryan’s hand until the dinner was long over and he was alone upstairs again, with his books. He was glad he hadn’t done it. The dinner had been too much fun, what with young Pierce regaling them with old legends of New Orleans—all the lore he remembered but which Rowan had never heard—and entertaining little anecdotes about the various cousins, all of it loosely strung together in a natural and beguiling way. But Pierce’s mother, Gifford, a trim, beautifully groomed brunette, and also a Mayfair by birth, had stared at him and Rowan fearfully and silently throughout the meal, and talked almost not at all.

And of course the whole dinner was, for him, another one of those secretly satisfying moments—comparing this night to the event of his boyhood when Aunt Viv had come from San Francisco to visit his mother, and he had dined in a real restaurant—the Caribbean Room—for the very first time.

And to think, Aunt Viv would be here before the end of next week. She was confused, but she was coming. What a load off his mind.

He’d sock her away in some nice comfortable condominium on St. Charles Avenue—one of the new brick town houses with the pretty mansard roofs and the French windows. Something right on the Mardi Gras parade route so she could watch from her balcony. In fact, he ought to be scanning the want ads now. She could take cabs anywhere she had to go. And then he’d break it to her very gently that he wanted her to stay down here, that he didn’t want to go back to California, that the house on Liberty Street wasn’t home to him anymore.

About midnight, he left his architecture books and went into the bedroom. Rowan was just switching off the light.

“Rowan,” he said, “if you saw that thing you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“What are you talking about, Michael?”

“If you saw Lasher, you’d tell me. Right away.”

“Of course I would,” she said. “Why would you even ask me that? Why don’t you put away the picture books and come to bed?”

He saw that the picture of Deborah had been propped up behind the lamp. And the pretty white lily in the water glass was standing in front of the picture.

“Lovely, wasn’t she?” Rowan said. “I don’t suppose there is a way in the world to get the Talamasca to part with the original painting.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not likely. But you know that flower is really remarkable. This afternoon, when I put it in the glass, I could swear it had only a single bloom, and now there are three large blooms, look at it. I must not have noticed the buds.”

She looked puzzled. She reached out, took the flower carefully from the water and studied it. “What kind of lily is it?” she asked.

“Well, it’s kind of like what we used to call an Easter lily, but they don’t bloom at this time of year. I don’t know what it is. Where did you get it?”

“Me? I’ve never seen it before.”

“I assumed you’d picked it somewhere.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Their eyes met. She was the first to look away, raising her eyebrows slowly, and then giving a little tilt to her head. She put the lily back in the glass. “Maybe a little gift from someone.”

“Why don’t I throw it away?” he said.

“Don’t get upset, Michael. It’s just a flower. He’s full of little tricks, remember?”

“I’m not upset, Rowan. It’s just that it’s already withering. Look at it, it’s turning brown, and it looks weird. I don’t like it.”

“All right,” she said, very calmly. “Throw it away.” She smiled. “But don’t worry about anything!”

“Of course not. What is there to worry about? Just a three-hundred-year-old demon with a mind of his own, who can make flowers fly through the air. Why shouldn’t I be overjoyed about a strange lily popping up out of nowhere? Hell, maybe he did it for Deborah. What a nice thing to do.”

He turned and stared at the photograph again. Like a hundred Rembrandt subjects, his dark-haired Deborah appeared to be looking right back at him.

He was startled by