you misused the word 'bequeath.' "
"Cool!" She dashed out of the room.
Naturally, she left the door open.
I went after her.
She was already pounding the keyboard, the computer humming on one of my many Louis XV desks; her red eyebrows puckered, her green eyes locked to the monitor when I took up my position, arms folded, looking down on her.
"Yeah, what, Beloved Boss?" she asked without stopping her writing.
Quinn was stretched out comfortably on the bed, staring at the tester. The whole flat was full of beds with testers. Well, six bedrooms, anyway, three on each side.
"Call Rowan Mayfair and tell her you're all right. What do you think? Can you pull it off? The woman's suffering."
"Bummer!" Clackity-clack.
"Mona, if you possibly could do it-for their sakes, of course. Michael is suffering."
She looked sharply up at me and froze. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she lifted the phone to the right of her on the desk and she punched in the number so rapidly with her thumb I couldn't follow it. Her generation, with Touch-Tone phones. Big deal! I can write with a quill pen in a flurry of curlicues you wouldn't believe; let's see her do that. And I don't spill a drop of ink on the parchment, either.
"Yo, Rowan, Mona here." Hysterical crying on the other end. Mona overriding: "I'm just fine, I'm hanging with Quinn, look, don't worry about me, I'm all better, totally." A storm of literal questions. Mona overriding: "Rowan, listen, I'm feeling great. Yeah, a kind of miracle. Like I'll call you later. No, no, no (overriding again), I'm wearing Aunt Queen's clothes, they fit me perfectly, yeah, and her shoes, really cool, like she has tons of these high-heel shoes, yeah, and I never wore shoes like this; yeah, fine, no, no, no, stop it, Rowan, and Quinn wants me to wear them, they're brand new, they're really great. Love you, love to Michael and everybody. Bye." Down with the phone over Rowan shouting.
"So it's done," I said. "I really appreciate it." I shrugged.
She sat there white faced, the blood having fled her cheeks, staring into space.
I felt like a bully. I was a bully. I've always been a bully. Everybody who knows me thinks I am a bully. Except perhaps Quinn.
Quinn sat up on the bed.
"What's the matter, Ophelia?" he asked.
"You know I have to go to them," she said, her eyebrows knitted. "I have no choice."
"What do you mean?" I said. "They just want off the hook. Now, admittedly, it's a very complex hook."
"No, no, no," she said, "for my sake." Her voice and her face were suddenly pitiless. "For what I have to find out," she continued coldly, shuddering all over as though a wind had blown through the room. "I know she's lied to me. She's lied to me for years. I'm afraid of how much she might have lied to me. I'm going to make her tell me."
"That was wrong of me, making you talk to her?" I asked.
"Ophelia," said Quinn, "take your time. It's yours to take."
"No, had to happen, you were right," she said to me. But she was shaking. Tears standing in her eyes. Preternatural emotions.
"It's about the Woman Child," I said under my breath. Was I free to reveal it to Quinn? What I'd seen: her monstrous woman offspring? "Doll face," I said, "why should we have secrets now?"
"You can tell him anything," she said, trying not to cry. "Dear God, I . . . I . . . I'm going to find them! If she knows where they are, if she's kept that from me. . . ."
Quinn was watching all this, keeping his counsel. But years ago she'd told him she had had a child, that she had had to give up that child. She had spoken of it to him as a mutation. But she had never explained the nature of that mutation.
And, to recap, in the Blood I'd seen a grown woman, something decidedly not human. Something surely as monstrous as us.
"You don't want to lay it all out for us?" I asked gently.
"Not now, not ready, not yet." She sniffled. "I hate it, all of it."
"I just saw Rowan Mayfair," I said. "I saw her at the Talamasca Retreat House. Something's deeply wrong with her."
"Of course something's wrong with her," she said with an air of exasperation. "I don't care what happens to her when she sees me. So she sees something that will never make human sense