Blood Canticle by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online

turned to the phone again, gave the orders, yes, Aunt Queen’s silks, make it all up. “Everything white,” he said to Big Ramona. His voice was gentle and patient. “You know, Jasmine won’t wear the white dresses. Yes, for Mona. If we don’t use them, they will all end up packed away. In the attic. Aunt Queen loved Mona. Stop crying. I know. I know. But Mona can’t go around in this disgusting hospital gown. And someday, fifty years from now, Tommy and Jerome will be unpacking all those clothes and figuring what to do with it all and . . . just bring something up here now.”
    As he turned back to us his eye fastened on Mona and he stopped in his tracks as if he couldn’t believe what he saw, and a dreadful expression came over him, as though he only just realized what had happened, what we’d done. He murmured something about white lace. I didn’t want to read his mind. Then he came forward and took Mona in his arms.
    “This mortal death, Ophelia, it won’t be much,” he said. “I’ll get into the stream with you. I’ll hold you. We’ll say the poetry together. And after that, there’s no pain. There’s thirst. But never any pain.” He couldn’t hold her close enough.
    “And will I always see as I see now?” she asked. The words about the death meant nothing to her.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “I’m not afraid,” she said. She meant it.
    But she still had no real grasp of what had been done. And I knew in my heart, the heart I closed off from Quinn and the heart she couldn’t read, that she really hadn’t consented to this. She hadn’t been able.
    What did this mean to me? Why am I making such a big deal of it?
    Because I’d murdered her soul, that’s why.
    I’d bound her to the Earth the way we were bound, and now I had to see to it that she became that vampire which I’d seen in my moment of intense dream. And when she finally woke to what she’d become she might go out of her mind. What had I said of Merrick? The ones who reached for it went mad sooner than those who were stolen, as I had been.
    But there wasn’t time for this sort of thinking.
    “They’re here,” she said. “They’re downstairs. Can you hear them?” She was alarmed. And as is always the case with the new ones, every emotion in her was exaggerated.
    “Don’t fear, pretty girl,” I said. “I’m on to them.”
    We were talking about the rumblings from the front parlor below. Mayfairs on the property. Jasmine fretful, walking to and fro. Little Jerome trying to slide down the coiling banister. Quinn could hear all this too.
    It was Rowan Mayfair and Fr. Kevin Mayfair, the priest for the love of Heaven, come with an ambulance and a nurse to find her and take her back to the hospital, or at least to discover whether she was alive or dead.
    That was it. I got it. That’s why they’d taken their time. They thought that she was already dead.
    And they were right. She was.

4
    I UNLOCKED the bedroom door.
    Big Ramona stood there with an armful of white clothes.
    Quinn and Mona had disappeared into the nearby bathroom.
    “You’re wanting this for that poor child?” Big Ramona said. Small-boned woman, white hair, sweet-faced, starched white apron. (Grandmother of Jasmine.) Deeply troubled. “Now, don’t you just grab for all this, I’ve got it folded!”
    I stood back to let her march into the room and lay the pile on the flower-strewn bed. “Now, there’s underwear and slips here, too,” she declared. She shook her head. The shower was running in the bath. She passed me as she went out, making her share of little grumbling noises.
    “I can’t believe that girl is still breathing,” she said. “It’s some kind of miracle. And her family down there brought Fr. Kevin with the Holy Oils. Now, I know Quinn loves that girl, but where does it say in the Gospel that you have to let a person die in your house, and what with Quinn’s mother sick, you knew that didn’t you, and Quinn’s mother run off somewhere, did