Taltos by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online

teen-aged hick cousin who was “brilliant” and “psychic” and wandered about the way Mona did, on her own.
    Nineteen and a half. Until Mona laid eyes on this brilliant bit of work, she had not considered someone of that age a true teenager.
    Mary Jane was just about the most interesting discovery they had made since they’d started rounding up everyone for genetic testing of the entire Mayfair family. It was bound to happen, finding a throwback like Mary Jane. Mona wondered what else might crawl out of the swamps soon.
    But imagine a flooded plantation house of Greek Revival grandeur, gradually sinking into the duckweed, with globs of plaster falling off “with a splash” into the murky waters. Imagine fish swimming through the stairway balusters.
    “What if that house falls on her?” Bea had asked. “The house is
in
the water. She can’t stay there. This girl must be brought here to New Orleans.”
    “Swamp water, Bea,” Celia had said. “Swamp water, remember. It’s not a lake or the Gulf Stream. And besides, if this child does not have sense to get out of there and take the old woman to safety—”
    The old woman.
    Mona had all of this fresh in her memory this last weekend when Mary Jane had walked into the backyard and plunged into the little crowd that surrounded the silent Rowan as if it were a picnic.
    “I knew about y’all,” Mary Jane had declared. She’d addressed her words to Michael too, who stood by Rowan’s chair as if posing for an elegant family portrait. And how Michael’s eyes had locked onto her.
    “I come over here sometimes and look at you,” said Mary Jane. “Yeah, I do. I came the day of the wedding. You know, when you married her?” She pointed to Michael, then to Rowan. “I stood over there, ’cross the street, and looked at your party?”
    Her sentences kept going up on the end, though they weren’t questions, as though she was always asking for a nod or a word of agreement.
    “You should have come inside,” Michael had said kindly, hanging on every syllable the girl spouted. The trouble with Michael was that he did have a weakness for pubescentpulchritude. His tryst with Mona had been no freak of nature or twist of witchcraft. And Mary Jane Mayfair was as succulent a little swamp hen as Mona had ever beheld. Even wore her bright yellow hair in braids over the top of her head, and filthy white patent leather shoes with straps, like a little kid. The fact that her skin was dark, sort of olive and possibly tanned, made the girl look something like a human palomino.
    “What did the tests say on you?” Mona had asked. “That’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it? They tested you?”
    “I don’t know,” said the genius, the mighty powerful swamp witch. “They’re so mixed up over there, wonder they got anything right. First they called me Florence Mayfair and then Ducky Mayfair, finally I says, ‘Look, I’m Mary Jane Mayfair, looky there, right there, on that form you got in front of you.’ ”
    “Well, that’s not very good,” Celia had muttered.
    “But they said I was fine and go home and they’d tell me if anything was wrong with me. Look, I figure I’ve probably got witch genes coming out the kazoo, I expect to blow the top off the graph, you know? And, boy, I have never seen so many Mayfairs as I saw in that building.”
    “We own the building,” said Mona.
    “And every one of them I could recognize on sight, every single person. I never made a mistake. There was one infidel in there, one outcast, you know, or no, it was a half-breed type, that’s what it was, ever notice that there are all these Mayfair types? I mean there are a whole bunch that have no chins and have kind of pretty noses that dip down just a little right here and eyes that tilt at the outside. And then there’s a bunch that look like you,” she said to Michael, “yeah, just like you, real Irish with bushy brows and curly hair and big crazy Irish eyes.”
    “But, honey,”