Blood Canticle Page 0,9

to come after Mona was mystifying me, unless they were deliberately playing this one out slowly for reasons that will soon become clear.

We vampires don't like witches. Can you guess why? Any self-respecting vampire, even if he or she is three thousand years old, can fool mortals, at least for a while. And young ones like Quinn pass, no question. Jasmine, Nash, Big Ramona-they all accepted Quinn for human. Eccentric? Clinically insane? Yes, they believed all that about him. But they thought he was human. And Quinn could live among them for quite a while. And as I've already explained, they thought I was human too, though I probably couldn't count on that for too long.

Now, with witches it's another story. Witches detect all kinds of small things about other creatures. It has to do with the lazy and constant exercise of their power. I'd sensed that at the funeral Mass, just breathing the same air as Dr. Rowan Mayfair and her husband, Michael Curry, and Fr. Kevin Mayfair. But fortunately, they were distracted by a multitude of other stimuli, so I hadn't had to bolt.

So okay, where was I? Yeah, cool. Mona Mayfair was a witch, and one of supreme talent. And once the Dark Blood had come into Quinn about a year ago, he had forsworn ever seeing her again, dying though she was, for fear she might at once realize that evil had robbed him of life, and contaminate her he would not.

However, of her own free will and much to everyone's amazement:

She'd come about an hour ago, driving the family stretch limousine, which she'd hijacked from the driver outside the Mayfair Medical Center where she'd been dying for over two years. (He'd been walking the block, poor unlucky guy, smoking a cigarette, when she'd sped off, and the last image in her mind of him was of his running after her.)

She'd then gone to florist after florist where the Mayfair name was good as gold collecting giant sprays of flowers, or loose bouquets, whatever she could get immediately, and then she'd driven across the twin span as they call the long lake bridge and up to the Blackwood Manor House, stepping out of the car barefoot and wrapped in a gaping hospital gown, a perfect horror-a wobbling skeleton with bruised skin hanging on her bones and a mop of long red hair-and had commandeered Jasmine, Clem, Allen and Nash to take the flowers to Quinn's room, asserting that she had Quinn's permission to heap them all over the four-poster bed. It was a pact. Don't worry.

Scared as they all were, they did as they were told.

After all, everybody knew that Mona Mayfair had been the love of Quinn's life before Quinn's beloved Aunt Queen, world traveler and raconteur, had insisted Quinn go to Europe with her on her "very last trip," which had somehow stretched into three whole years, and Quinn had come home to discover Mona in isolation at Mayfair Medical quite beyond his reach.

Then the Dark Blood had come to Quinn in venality and violence, and another year passed with Mona behind hospital glass, too weak even for a scribbled note or a glance at Quinn's daily gift of flowers and-.

Now back to the anxious passel of attendants who rustled the flowers up to the room.

The emaciated girl herself, and we're talking about twenty years old, that's what I'm calling a girl, could not possibly make it up the circular staircase, so the gallant Nash Penfield, Quinn's old tutor, cast by God to be the perfect gentleman (and responsible for a great deal of Quinn's finishing polish), had carried her up and laid her in her "bower of flowers" as she'd called it, the child assuring him that the roses were thornless, and she had lain back on the four-poster twining broken phrases from Shakespeare with her own, to wit:

"Pray, let me to my bride bed, so bedecked, retire, and let them strew my grave hereafter."

At which point, thirteen-year-old Tommy had appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, and had been so upset by the sight of Mona, in his raw grief for lost Aunt Queen, that he'd begun to shake, and so the amazed Nash had taken him out while Big Ramona had stayed to declare in a stage whisper worthy of the Bard:

"That girl's dying!"

At which the little red-headed Ophelia laughed. What else? And asked for a can of cold diet soda.

Jasmine had thought the child was going to give up the