Of Love and Evil - By Anne Rice Page 0,58

was more to it, this restlessness and confusion I felt. I felt fear. I was in the presence of a visible angel and I felt fear. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it hurt, as if someone were subjecting me to an electrical current just strong enough to burn.

I took out another bottle of soda, savoring the coldness of it, even though I was still cold, and then drank again.

I sat down in the chair by the desk. “All right, you don’t hate us, of course not,” I said. “But you surely must become impatient with us, with our constant striving for a simple solution.”

He smiled as if he liked the way I’d worded that, and then he answered,

“What would be the point of my becoming impatient?” he asked gently. “In fact, what is the point of your addressing my thoughts and emotions at all?” Again he shrugged.

“I don’t understand when and how you intervene and when and how you don’t.”

“Ah, now that is a valid question. And I can give you a rule,” he responded calmly. His voice was as gentle in all ways as Malchiah’s voice, but he sounded younger, almost boyish. It was like a boy speaking with the restraint of an older man. “Your own free will is what matters,” he explained, “and we will never interfere with that. So what we say or do, or how we appear, will always be governed by that imperative, that you have the free will to act.”

I nodded. I finished off the second soda. My body felt like a sponge. “All right,” I said, “but Malchiah showed me my whole life.”

“He showed you your past,” he said. “What’s bothering you now is the future. You’re talking to me but you are thinking of a multitude of things, all having to do with the future. You’re wondering when and how you might see Liona again, and what will happen when you do. You’re thinking of things you have to do in this world to erase the evidence of your hateful past as Lucky the Fox. You don’t want your past deeds ever to harm Liona and Toby. And you’re wondering why this last assignment from Malchiah was so different from your first assignment, and what the next assignment might involve.”

All that was perfectly true. My mind was feverish with these questions.

“Where do I start?” I asked.

But I knew.

I went into the bathroom, and took the longest shower in my own personal history. And it did seem my own personal history consumed my thoughts. Liona and Toby. What did their presence in my life require me to do next? I didn’t think about phone calls or checks to them, or visits. I mean, what did it require of me with regard to my ugly past? What did Lucky the Fox have to do about that past?

I shaved and dressed in a clean blue shirt and pressed jeans. I had a little mischievous desire to see if my guardian angel would change his garb because I’d changed mine.

Well, he didn’t. He was sitting in the high-backed chair by the fireplace when I came out, and staring at the empty hearth.

“You’re right,” I said to him as if we’d never stopped talking. “I want to know all the answers as to the future, and as to my future. I have to remember that you are not here to make this easier for me.”

“Well, in a way we are and in a way we aren’t,” he said. “But you have things to do now and you should do them. Do again what profited you the most before.”

He had a slight dip to his eyebrows, his pupils moving ever so slightly but constantly, as though in watching me, he was watching some immense display of movement and detail that I couldn’t comprehend.

“You spend too much time studying our faces,” he offered. “You’ll never be able to read us in this way. We couldn’t explain to you the way we think even if we wanted to.”

“Can your facial expression be dishonest, or deceiving?” I asked.

“No,” he said, with a placid smile.

“Do you enjoy being visible to me?”

“Yes,” he said. “We enjoy the physical universe. We always have. We enjoy your physicality. We find it interesting.”

I was fascinated.

“Do you enjoy talking to me so that I can actually hear your voice?” I asked. “Do you really like it?”

“Yes,” he said. “I like it very much.”

“You must have had a horrible ten years when I was a killer,” I said.

He