to go back to the great house. He wanted to possess it, it was his house, and it made him deeply angry that Michael was there. But he knew he must bide his time. Emaleth had to come to him, tall and strong. There had to be the Beginning. He wanted them to come together in the glen at Donnelaith. Beginning was everything. There was nothing if there was no beginning.
Prosper, my daughter.
Taltos.
No one lived in Donnelaith anymore. But they would live there—Father and Emaleth and their children. Hundreds of children. It would become the shrine of the Beginning. “Our Bethlehem,” he whispered to her. And that would be the beginning of all time.
It was dark. Mother cried against the pillow, Michael, Michael, Michael.
Emaleth knew when the sun rose.
The color of everything brightened, and she saw Mother’s hand high above her, dark and thin and immense, covering the whole world.
Two
THE HOUSE WAS all dark now. The cars were gone, and only one light burned in Michael Curry’s window, in the old room where Cousin Deirdre had died. Mona understood exactly what had happened tonight and had to admit she was glad. She had almost planned it, almost…
She’d told her father she would go back to Metairie with Uncle Ryan and Cousin Jenn and Clancy, but then she hadn’t told Uncle Ryan. And Uncle Ryan was long gone, assuming as everyone would that Mona had gone home to Amelia Street with her father, which of course she had not.
She’d been in the cemetery losing her bet that David wouldn’t do it with her, right there on Mardi Gras Night in front of the Mayfair tomb. David had done it. Not so very great, actually, but for a fifteen-year-old not bad. And Mona had loved it—sneaking away with him, his fear and her excitement, their climbing the whitewashed wall of the cemetery together and creeping through the alleyways of high marble tombs. To lie right down on the gravel path in the dampness and cold, that had been no small part of the dare, but she’d done it, smoothing her skirt under her, so that she could pull down her panties without getting dirty. “Now do it!” she’d said to David, who hadn’t needed any more encouragement, or direct orders, by that time at all. She’d stared past him at the cold cloudy sky, at a single visible star, and then let her eyes move up the wall of little rectangular tombstones to the name: Deirdre Mayfair.
Then David had finished. Just like that.
“You’re not afraid of anything,” he had said after.
“Like I’m supposed to be afraid of you?” She’d sat up, cheated, having not even pretended to enjoy it, overheated and really not much liking her cousin David, but still satisfied that it had been done.
Mission accomplished, she would write in her computer later, in the secret directory \WS\MONA\AGENDA, where she deposited all her confessions of the triumphs she could not share with anyone in the world. No one could crack her computer system, not even Uncle Ryan or Cousin Pierce, each of whom she had caught, at various times, firing up her system, and searching through various directories—“Some setup, Mona.” All it was, was the fastest 386 IBM clone on the market, with max memory and max hard drive. Ah, what people didn’t know about computers. It always amazed Mona. She herself learned more about them every day.
Yes, this was a moment that only the computer would witness. Maybe they would start to be a regular occurrence now that her father and mother were truly drinking themselves to death. And there were so many Mayfairs to be conquered. In fact, her agenda did not even include non-Mayfairs at this point, except, of course, for Michael Curry, but he was a Mayfair now, most definitely. The whole family had him in its grip.
Michael Curry in that house alone. Take stock. It was Mardi Gras Night, ten p.m., three hours after Comus, and Mona Mayfair was on her own, and on the corner of First and Chestnut, light as a ghost, looking at the house, with the whole soft dark night to do as she pleased.
Her father was surely passed out by now; in fact somebody had probably driven him home. If he’d walked the thirteen blocks up to Amelia and St. Charles, that was a miracle. He’d been so drunk before Comus even passed that he’d sat right down on the neutral ground on St. Charles, knees up, hands on a naked