Of Love and Evil - By Anne Rice Page 0,14

were singing softly in the trees.

“I’ll call you as soon as I can call you,” I told her.

“Do something for me,” she said under her breath.

“Anything.”

“Don’t tell me you’ll call, if you won’t.”

“No, darling,” I said. “I’ll call you. I’ll call you come Hell or high water. I just don’t know when exactly that it will be.” I thought for a moment, and then I said, “Give me world enough and time. Remember those words. If I’m late say them. Give me world enough and time.”

I wrapped my arms around her and this time I kissed her, and I didn’t care who saw us, even if it was Little Toby, and when I let her go, she took a step backwards as if she was as off balance as I was myself.

I picked him up and held him up and looked at him and then I kissed him on the forehead and on both cheeks.

“I knew you’d be like this,” he said.

“If I’d told God Himself that I wanted a perfect son,” I said, “and I’d had the nerve to tell God just how to make him, well, God couldn’t have done any better, as far as I’m concerned.”

Then the car was gone and they were gone, and the great beautiful world of the Mission Inn seemed empty as it had never seemed before.

CHAPTER FOUR

I’D REACHED MY SUITE BEFORE I DISCOVERED MALCHIAH waiting for me. He was seated at the black iron table and he was crying. He had his elbows on the table and his hands over his face.

“What’s wrong with you!” I demanded. “What’s the matter?” I sat down. “Is this my fault? What did I do?”

He sat back and slowly smiled the softest, saddest smile. “You really worried about me?” he asked.

“Well, yeah, you’re crying. You looked heartbroken.”

“I’m not heartbroken. But I think I could be. My fault for listening to the Schoolmen,” he said. He meant the theologians of the universities, the men like Thomas Aquinas.

“You mean the men who say you have no heart.”

“You made me cry, the three of you,” he said.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “In your love for one another, I heard the echo of Heaven.”

“Now you’re bringing tears to my eyes,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at him, at the depth of his expression. I wanted to put my arms around him.

“You needn’t comfort me,” he said with a smile. “But I’m moved that you want to do it. You can’t know how mysterious it is to us, the way that humans love, yearning for completeness. Each angel is complete. Men and women on Earth are never complete, but when they reach for that completion in love, they reach for Heaven.”

“Talk about mystery,” I said. “You look like a man, you sound like a man, but you’re not a man.”

“No, I’m most certainly not.”

“How do you look when you’re before the Throne of God?” I asked.

He gave one of those soft reproving laughs. “I am a spirit before the Throne of the Maker,” he said softly. “I’m a spirit now inhabiting a body made for this world. You know that.”

“Are you ever lonely?”

“What do you think?” he asked. “Can I be lonely?”

“No,” I said. “Hollywood movie angels are lonely.”

“So true,” he said smiling broadly. “Even I feel sorry for them. There’ll come a time when you’ll understand what I am because you will be like me, but I will never really know what it’s like to be you now. I can only marvel at it.”

“I don’t want ever to be separated from them,” I said. “My mind’s working overtime on that. If I can’t be with them, they’ll hear my voice over the miles regularly and often. They’re going to have anything that I can provide for them.”

A sharp panic stopped me suddenly. The money I’d piled up all these years was blood money. But it was all I had, and I could use it for them, and it could be cleansed in that way, couldn’t it? I couldn’t take back the trust funds I’d already created. I prayed Malchiah would say nothing on this score.

“You belong to one another now,” he said.

“What are you suggesting?” I asked. “Does that mean that someday somehow I might be with Liona and Toby under the same roof?”

He appeared to reflect for a moment, then he said:

“Consider what’s already happened. By the love you now share, you’re already transformed. Look at you. And in this brief visit you’ve altered the course of Liona’s life and Toby’s