of age, and her figure boyish.
But one embraces such details in the boiling wake of the acknowledgement of such love. In and of themselves they are nothing. Or, if one believes that a woman so strong has shaped the lineaments of her face, the set of her brows, the straightness of her posture, the frankness of her gestures, the very way that her hair falls about her face, the length of her stride, the sound of her footfall-then perhaps they mean everything.
Beside the flaming red-haired Mona, she was the color of ashes, a woman drawn in charcoal, with a sexless and piercing gaze, and a soul so immense it seemed to fill every fiber of her frame and to emanate outwards into infinity, her knowledge of the world around her dwarfing that of everyone she'd ever
known or would know.
Imagine it, such isolation.
She didn't talk down to people. She simply didn't talk to them. Only God knew the number of lives she'd saved. And only she knew the number of people she had murdered.
In the Mayfair Medical Center she had only just begun to fulfill her immense dreams. It was an engine of great and continuous healing. But what drew her through the world were projects yet unrevealed for which she had the wealth, the knowledge, the laserlike vision, the nerve and the personal energy.
What threatened this mammoth individual who had found for herself through tragedy and heritage the perfect goal? Her sanity. From time to time she gave in to madness as if it were strong drink, and when in her cups she fled from her sublime designs, drowning in memories and guilt, all judgment and sense of proportion lost, murmuring confessions of unworthiness and half-explored plots of escape that would seal her off forever from all expectations.
At this precious moment she regarded sanity as her State of Grace, and she saw me as the Demon who had brought her back to it.
For her I connected the two worlds. That meant that she could.
Blood Child.
She lusted for me. For the entirety of what I was-that is, for all she'd sensed in our three encounters, and what she knew to be true now, both from my profession and her apprehension.
She wanted me completely. It was a desire rooted in all her faculties, that overrode and obliterated her love of Michael. I knew it. How could I not? But she had no intention of yielding to it. And her will? It was iron. You can draw iron with charcoal too, can't you?
Chapter 17
17
"THIS SECRET HAS TO BE KEPT by you from anyone else," Mona said. Her voice was quaking. She had a firm hold on Quinn's hand. "If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Quinn knows everybody at Blackwood Farm. I can have some time for my leave-taking. What did you mean when you called me Blood Child?"
Rowan looked at her across the round table. Then with sudden impersonal impatience, Rowan tore off the thick purple robe and stepped out of it, as if from a broken shell, a tense figure in a sleeveless white cotton nightgown.
"Let's go out there," she said, her soft deep voice more sure of itself, her head slightly bowed. "Let's go where the other ones were buried. Stirling's out there. I've always loved that place. Let's talk in the garden." She started walking, and only then did I notice she was barefoot. Her hem just skirted the floor.
Michael rose from the table and followed her. It seemed his eyes avoided ours. He caught up with Rowan and put his arm around her.
Immediately Mona led the way after them.
We passed through a classic butler's pantry of high glass cabinets crammed full of vivid china, and then on through a modern kitchen, out French doors and down painted wooden steps onto a sprawling flagstone patio.
There ahead lay the huge octagonal swimming pool, shimmering with a wealth of submerged light and beyond that, a tall dignified cabana.
Long limestone balustrades enclosed the garden patches, which were bursting with tropical plants, and very suddenly the air was filled with the strong scent of the night jasmine.
Great arching branches of the rain tree poured over us from the left. And the cicadas sang loudly from the many crowding trees. There were no traffic sounds from the world beyond. The very air itself was blessed.
Mona