Anne Rice [Vampire Chronicles Blood Canticle (v5.0) (epub) id

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.(The loving and the uplifting??? Like me, for instance??? So the kid makes mistakes.Besides, I was so in love with him that I put on a damned good show for him.And can I be damned for loving people who bring out the love in me? Is that so awful for a full-time monster? You will shortly come to understand that I am always talking about my moral evolution! But for now: the plot.)I can “fall in love” with anybody—man, woman, child, vampire, the Pope.It doesn’t matter.I’m the ultimate Christian.I see God’s gifts in everyone.But almost anybody would love Quinn.Loving people like Quinn is easy.Now, back to the question at hand: Which brings me back to Quinn’s bedroom, where Quinn was at this delicate moment.Before either of us had risen tonight—and I had taken the six-foot-four inches tall, blue-eyed black-haired boy to one of my secret hiding places with me—a mortal girl had arrived at the Manor House and affrighted everybody.This was the matter that had Clem looking up the steps, and Big Ramona muttering, and Jasmine worried sick as she went about in her high-heel pumps, wringing her hands.And even little Jerome was excited about it, still dashing up and down the circular stairs.Even Tommy and Nash had broken off their mourning laments earlier to have a glance at this mortal girl and offer to help her in her distress.It was easy enough for me to scan their minds and get a picture of it, this grand and bizarre event, and to scan Quinn’s mind, for that matter, as to the result.And I was making something of an assault on the mind of the mortal girl herself as she sat on Quinn’s bed, in a huge random display of flowers, a truly marvelous heap of helter-skelter flowers, talking to Quinn.It was a cacophony of minds filling me in on everything from the beginning.And the whole thing sent a little panic through my enormous brave soul.Work the Dark Trick? Make another one of us? Woe and Grief! Sorrow and Misery! Help, Murder, Police!Do I really want to steal another soul out of the currents of human destiny? I who want to be a saint? And once personally hobnobbed with angels? I who claimed to have seen God Incarnate? Bring another into the—get ready!—Realm of the Undead?Comment: One of the great things about loving Quinn was that I hadn’t made him.The boy had come to me free of charge.I’d felt a little like Socrates must have felt with all those gorgeous Greek boys coming to him for advice, that is, until somebody showed up with the Burning Hemlock.Back to now: If I had any rival in this world for Quinn’s heart it was this mortal girl, and he was up there offering her in frantic whispers the promise of our Blood, the fractured gift of our immortality.Yes, this explicit offer was coming from the lips of Quinn.Good God, kid, show some backbone, I thought! You saw the Light of Heaven last night!Mona Mayfair was this girl’s name.But she’d never known or even heard of Merrick Mayfair.So cut that connection right now.Merrick was a quadroon, born among the “colored” Mayfairs who lived downtown, and Mona was a member of the white Mayfairs of the Garden District and Mona had probably never heard a word spoken of Merrick or her colored kin.As for Merrick, she’d shown no interest ever in the famous white family.She’d had a path all her own.But Mona was a bona fide witch, however—sure as Merrick had been—and what is a witch? Well, it is a mind reader, magnet for spirits and ghosts and a possessor of other occult talents.And I’d heard enough of the illustrious Mayfair clan in the last few days from Quinn to know that Mona’s cousins, witches all, if I’m not mistaken, were undoubtedly in hot pursuit of Mona now, no doubt desperate with worry for the child.In fact, I’d had a glimpse of three of this remarkable tribe (and one of them a witch priest, no less, a witch priest! I don’t even want to think about it!), at the funeral Mass for Aunt Queen, and why they were taking so long 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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