Divine Madness (15 page)

Ninon dropped to her knees and reached for the children.

Beauty without grace is a hook without bait.

—
Ninon de Lenclos

After God made man he repented him. I feel this way about Redmond.

—
Ninon de Lenclos

“The Queen’s fate approaches,” said St. Germain coldly.

“Shall we see you again?” asked Countess d’Adhemar.

“Five times more shall you see me. Do not wish for a sixth.”

—
From the Diaries of the Countess d’Adhemar,
Souvenirs de Marie Antoinette

Ninon caught the barest glimpse of a hideous face hovering in the air above her and then something long and white struck at her head, knocking her flat in the hall outside her room. She felt a large mass falling towards her and lashed out with her foot, connecting with some
thing
that felt like a leather sack filled with rods of steel. She kicked again with her other foot, putting all her newfound strength behind the blow. The creature shrieked and backed away. She thought she heard it hiss:
Stay away from my son!

When her vision cleared to the point that she was only seeing two of everything, she looked around and was delighted to find that she was alone except for the two Corazons who were growling in the depths of their twin cat carriers.

Ninon rested a moment longer and then tried to stand. And then tried again.

Because practice makes perfect. And if at first you don’t succeed…

Six times proved to be the charm. She was up. Not jogging,
but able to move if she hugged the wall of the passageway. She picked up the cat carrier, now only one in number but still a bit blurry, and tucked it under her left arm. The right she kept free so she could use her pistol. She wasn’t anxious to start her career as monster-assassin of Mexico, but on the other hand, she’d suffered enough assaults for one day.

Eventually she staggered out onto the street. She had a hand at her temple where a goose egg was forming. No more being nice. The next thing that got in her way was getting shot.

“So, you’ve met Mamita. I thought I saw her fly by.” Miguel handed over a flask and sunglasses. His expression was sympathetic. “It’s scotch. Drink up. You’ve had a shock. Another shock.”

“Did you say ‘Mamita’?” Ninon took the flask even though you weren’t supposed to drink with a concussion. If what Miguel had said was true, the alcohol would have almost no effect on her now.

“Old, ugly, bad breath, violent, levitates?” he paused then and reached for her face. His expression sobered. “Are you hurt?”

“Not really. I don’t think we’re going to get on, though. She said to stay away from her son.” She took a small step away from Miguel and sipped cautiously. “Was it real? It looked real.”

“The levitation? Yes and no. I think a lot of it is about the power of the mind. She believes that she levitates and her belief is so strong that she affects the minds of those around her.” He paused. “Or maybe she levitates. I don’t know. I can’t do it.”

Ninon drank again. Corazon growled some more.

“Your mother…It isn’t fair,” she complained. “My parents are dead. I have nothing to inflict on you.”

“Just your cat.” Miguel peered into the carrier. “He looks angry.”

“He doesn’t like Mamita either.”

“Then it’s unanimous. Should we write bylaws and form a club?”

“Have you thought about killing her?” Ninon asked before thinking. “
Merde!
Sorry, Miguel—chock it up to blood loss. What a thing to say to you.”

Miguel studied her for a moment and then reached for Corazon’s carrier. “As a matter of fact,” he answered, “I have.”

Ninon looked at his back as he walked toward the Jeep. Miguel continued to surprise her.

She decided that maybe they should try the last few moments over again and said so.

“Okay. As long as you pretend my mother didn’t attack you. I’m afraid that makes me angry.”

“Done. I mean, there but for the grace of God…It could still be us one day.”

“You’re kind.”

“Not really. I had a mother too. She was just more of an emotional vampire.” Miguel turned around and she smiled at him. Unable to help himself, he smiled back.

“Hello, beautiful,” she said.

Louis de Mornay looked up at her and then back down at the locket in his veined hands. The sun glinted in his thinning silvered hair. He had forgotten to put on a wig.

“
You haven’t changed at all,” he whispered, his voice a mix of awe and fear. “You haven’t aged a day.”

“If you could see my heart you would know otherwise,” she answered, understanding now that it had been a mistake to seek him out. Her presence would not comfort him for the loss of their son. She added aloud, “I’m just a dream, Louis. Only a dream. And I’ll leave now that I’ve said my good-byes.”

“Ninon!” he cried, but didn’t reach for her, didn’t look up from his locket. She saw each tear as it fell from his eyes and landed on the cold marble of their son’s grave.

Men enjoy a thousand privileges that women do not enjoy. Therefore I shall make myself into a man.

—
Ninon de Lenclos

More genius is needed to make love than to command armies.

—
From a letter by Ninon de Lenclos

“N’avez pas peur, je m’en charge.”

Have no fear, I am in charge.

—
Ninon de Lenclos

Life is too short, according to my ideas, to read all kinds of books and to load our memories with an endless number of things at the cost of our judgment. I do not attach myself to the observations of scientific men to acquire science; but to the most rational, that I may strengthen my reason. Sometimes, I seek for more delicate minds, that my taste may imbibe their delicacy; sometimes, for the gayer, that I may enrich my genius with their gaiety; and, although I constantly read, I make it less my occupation than my pleasure.

—
Self-portrait by philosopher, Saint Evremond, lifelong friend of Ninon de Lenclos

Let’s abandon all pretense, shall we? My real name is Miguel Stuart, though that isn’t the name you know me by. I’ve been writing Ninon’s story because she won’t do it. She maintains that I’m the novelist, and since everyone is going to think this is complete fiction anyway, the telling of the story is my project. Fair enough, but I’m going to do it my way from here on in, because I don’t really know what Ninon has been thinking since our mental connection was broken, and I have a feeling that any thoughts I attribute to her will be pale shadows of what is really on her mind. My own feelings I understand—at least in part—so I’ll work with them.

You bought this thinking it was a romance, and it is. In a good story, especially a romance, you begin with a secret or mystery or an exciting revelation about the hero or heroine that will cause conflict and drive their actions for the remainder of the story. You’ve got one revelation now—this isn’t a work of fiction at all. And the hero is actually a thwarted monster, and the heroine believes she’s damned. Naturally they’ll have issues. I can also promise
that the hero and heroine will have some great adventures, brushes with the bad guy, mind-blowing sex, and then a thrilling final conflict. At some point, the villain, often like Scrooge, should have a change of heart and repent his evil ways and from there you move on to an exciting and morally improving finish where the boy gets the girl and they live happily ever after.

Sadly, I don’t think you’re getting all that in this tale—not if I tell the truth. Call me pessimistic, but I’m betting our villain just won’t repent. We’re going to have to kill the son-of-a-bitch. And I don’t really know if happily-ever-after is an option for people with our kinds of problems. But I am getting ahead of myself.

So, where to begin this autobiography? Perhaps with the moment Ninon entered my life? Or should I begin at the beginning of my life, even if I don’t know all the details from those long-ago days? Yes, maybe it’s best to follow tradition and start here if I can sort it out in my own head. I mean, what am I?

What I know for sure is that I was born for the third time in the summer of 2006. Each time I’ve been born and died it’s been in Mexico. (Which, since it is always painful, is a good argument for never going there again.)

Birth is always excruciating, and so is the life that follows—at least some of the time. I’m the only person I know who has two quasi-mothers and two fathers. Do I have to tell you that holidays are impossible? Filling out the family tree in the front of the Bible is out of the question, and my DNA would baffle the world’s best genealogists. Not that I bother with these things, but sometimes it bugs me that I was stripped of options for a normal life before I was old enough to understand what I was losing.

Other things you should know but may not have gathered from the start of this story—women adore me but I don’t have a girlfriend or even someone I see regularly. There’s just too much guilt when affairs go wrong. Many people have relationships that end badly, but mine have
the potential to be catastrophic. That’s the trouble with having a mother who’s a vampire with poor impulse control and a genetic stepfather—grandfather (I’ll explain)—who’s an Aztec death god. His name is Smoking Mirror but I call him S.M.—which is short for sadistic murderer, though he doesn’t know that. Anyhow, with these unwanted connections, it isn’t healthy for people to hang around me. One close call with a female grad student was enough to drive this lesson home. No male-pattern dimness here. She lived to see the dawn after our third date, but still has nightmares about the experience. Her therapy would advance, I’m sure, if I could tell her that she didn’t really hallucinate the experience, but of course that isn’t an option.

I used to only have one father: Cormac Stuart. He was a geologist. Back in those prenatal days I only had one mother too. Cormac met her in Mexico. It must have been nice—Mom, Dad, and soon-to-be baby makes three…Too bad I can’t remember it. It would have been nice to know my mother before she became a brain-sucking fiend. Fate—that bloody bitch—had other plans.

Mamita went into premature labor while on a hike to see her excited husband’s discovery, an igneous intrusion near Cuatro Cienegas. At the first gush of blood, Mamita lay down by the side of small poza and waited while Dad—Cormac—ran to get the Jeep. He was fast but Mamita hemorrhaged massively and miscarried before he got back. The smell of blood in the water attracted the local death god, who specializes in women dying in childbirth, and while she was bleeding her life away, he dragged her into the water, gave her a vampire spinal tap and a lobotomy. Lucky thing for me, he didn’t notice that I was still—barely—alive, or it would have been the end of yours truly. As it was, I was left on the bank for whatever predator would find me.

Poor Cormac came back with the Jeep and…well, I’m just imagining this part. He would never talk about it. He
loaded up an unconscious and maybe drowned Mamita and his silent son—he did notice I was still breathing—and rushed us to the local doctor.

Cormac’s grasp of Spanish was poor and his travel dictionary didn’t cover the kind of phrases the panicked
medico
was laying on him. Look it up. You won’t find “curse of the Aztec death god” in any conversational Spanish book. Still, Dad must have known the doc had something bad on his mind what with all the crucifixes being waved around and the doctor’s refusal to do anything for his wife who wasn’t dying in spite of massive blood loss and sucking water into her lungs. Dad decided to leave me with the doctor—I was having trouble breathing—while he took a dazed Mamita to her sister’s home and tried to nurse her back to health and coherence.

My aunt was less than thrilled, but she did her best. So did Cormac.

Their marriage lasted only three days—well, three nights—longer. That’s how long it takes for a full transformation from a loving wife into a brain-sucking fiend. Cormac woke up with Mamita’s now very pointed, strawlike tongue probing his ear as she tried to get her first meal from his medulla oblongata. Fortunately she wasn’t very skilled and didn’t know her own strength, so Dad and Aunt Elena were able to get away without killing her. Dad always thought this was a good thing. Me? I’m not so sure. It isn’t that I’m big on spousal murder, but it sure might have spared me some grief later.

Or not. It’s hard to know how things might have gone. I mean, you can bob and weave, but can you really escape Fate when she’s decided to punch out your lights?

What did happen is that we left Mexico that very night, but didn’t get far over the U.S. border before Cormac came down with an ear infection that even the American doctors couldn’t cure. It left him deaf on the left side, and the high fever caused a kind of amnesia about our days in Mexico. Or so he always claimed.

Cormac resigned from his job and we went back to Scotland to work the family croft with Uncle Seamus, who died soon after. Da refused to ever visit the Americas again. Cormac told everyone—including me—that my mother died in childbirth. Seeing how dreadful he looked and how eternally sad he was, no one ever doubted this, least of all me.

I survived a tedious childhood, bored because I was too bright for my own good and had too few intellectual distractions. I learned to play guitar, and did well in school—very well. They had me skipping grades, setting my O-and A-levels at an early age. I could have attended any university but chose Edinburgh so I could stay close to Cormac who, though he had no specific health problem, seemed to grow frailer with each passing year. There was also a girlfriend, Moira, my freshman year, but she died in a car accident before things got too serious.

I was young and my heart tender. I grieved for Moira for the better part of a year, but not as deeply as I should have—I see that now. Of course, there was no way to know that she would be the first and last girl I would have a long-term relationship with. Anyhow, I felt rootless afterward and wanted to get away.

Things were actually going great for me and passing fair for Cormac, who turned easily to the family trade of crofting and seemed happy to leave his twentieth century career to his overachieving son who visited often on holidays.

Like I said, I was growing ever more restless. My world felt too small. I was studying geology with an American called Dukie Deathergard whose father worked in some military-sponsored scientific think tank, and he was the one who lured me to North America. Deathergard—does Fate have a sense of humor, or what? Unlike his father, Dukie was a bit of a mystical poet and talked endlessly about the Four Corners area of the Southwestern U.S. where he had grown up. His love affair with the West was
alluring for one whose horizons had been so limited. At his urging, I decided to spend my winter break looking at rock formations in the American West, maybe visiting a couple of grad schools, and paying my way—I naively assumed—by playing a bit of guitar on the streets as I sometimes did in Edinburgh. Cormac was nervous about these plans and sometimes muttered about having an ocean between us and disaster, but I put it down to the usual parental separation anxieties, nonspecific amorphous dread. Those of you with teens will know what I’m talking about. You’ll also be able to predict that I didn’t listen.

I loved the States, just as Dukie had said. The rocks really were stupendous, and the country vast beyond all imagination to someone raised on a small island. We also had some fun in Las Vegas. I won often because I am good with cards. But that soon palled. I was young and easily distracted, and when a couple of the other blokes we were traveling with suggested a road trip down into Mexico, I went along without much hesitation. I had some idea about maybe getting a few lessons from real flamenco guitarists and maybe picking up some of that Latin charm that the ladies liked.

That didn’t happen. Fate—being a bloody-minded bitch, as I have mentioned before—arranged for me to miss the guitarist I wanted to see. What I thought was a freak storm stranded him in Nogales and, quickly disgusted by Tijuana sex shows that attracted my mates, I went south to Cuatro Cienegas looking for the famous igneous intrusions that Cormac had told me about. I also knew I might still have family there—I had seen a photo with Mamita and her sister—and though she had never contacted me, I decided to see if Tia Elena was still alive.

You can guess how it went. I didn’t see my aunt, but met Mamita at the first full moon. I was camping at the poza where she died and got a little too interested in some old weathered sticks that looked a lot like bones—and of
course they
were
bones, her refuse pile of old kills that she had laid out like a spider’s web. Their crackling warned her I was near.

That meeting was a shock on many levels, for her as well as for me, though she had always been certain that I was alive. Vampirism has not been kind to Mamita. Mexican vampires live longer and stronger than their European kin, but not gracefully. She had aged far beyond what any human should, and had lost all desire to be tidy in person or place. She had developed a bad habit of just flinging her kills into any nearby water. She also was not big on brushing and flossing.

Her ugliness was shocking enough—she looks nothing like the photo I have of her—but while I was still sorting out the less-than-joyous news that this haglike monster pawing my arm was my supposedly dead mother, I met a hungry S.M. Less than delighted at Mamita’s reunion with her long-lost boy, he immediately made sure I got my own involuntary spinal tap—but not a lobotomy.

That’s where he went wrong or Fate got careless. S.M. was having too much fun torturing me and trying to make me renounce my religion. Not that he really cared about my religion. It was just a game for him, an excuse that he knew would bother Mamita. I didn’t renounce my God that night. I might have, but it’s hard to do when you’re paralyzed and can’t speak.

I thought for a while that my brain would implode and I would die from the horror of what was happening, but nothing that easy was in the cards. Maybe a brighter man would have known that this was the end of any chance at normal life, and killed himself when he had the opportunity, but I wasn’t so bright. I was young, and hope and fear were about equal in me then—and both were cruel.

An agitated Mamita perched on a nearby rock and watched me being tortured. She said nothing, but apparently had one of her rare maternal impulses. While S.M. was grabbing a snack—another hiker who heard the muffled
screaming and blundered in on our exciting tableau—she got me away from the poza. It was before the conversion was complete and my brains had been slurpeed. I owe her for that, because I would have ended up a crucified, lobotomized brain-sucker if she hadn’t been caring and lucid enough to intervene at that moment. Anyhow, this is what I refer to as my second birth and why S.M. is sort of my father. Of course, since he also made Mamita what she is, he’s a sort of grandfather too. I have often wondered what a geneticist would make of us, though I’ve never been willing to actually find out. I work for the government now—what I told Ninon about NASA was sort of true, though not what my job actually is. Was. So secret that I still can’t discuss it. Suffice it to say that I know what happens when the Secrets Act gets invoked. At best, governments are self-serving. At worst—and R&D programs are the worst—they are monsters without consciences who wouldn’t hesitate to make me into a lab rat if they thought I had any useful potential for the weapons program. I would kill or die to avoid that. Hell, I’d probably kill you if I had to. Sorry, but it’s true.

If I ever get a tattoo—not likely, as I have enough scars—I think I’ll ask to have a 444 put on my chest: two-thirds of 666. While I often feel far from a human, I’m really only about two-thirds corrupt. The remainder is—was—still a human being. Or at least humane. The rest of me isn’t so nice, of course. I’ve been fairly kind in the portrait I’ve painted of myself up ’til now because of telling the story through Ninon’s eyes. I know better though, and so should you.

That trip I gained a compulsion to drink blood, an ability to hypnotize with my voice, and vampire-induced infertility. In case I was ever insane enough to think of passing this genetic curse on to my children, the option was taken from me when S.M. injected his venom into my spine. I did see a doctor about this at one point when I began having some very graphic dreams about dead babies
that was putting me off sex, and found out then that my semen is a dead zone. That was a lot to gain and lose before my twenty-first birthday. I sometimes meet up with the ghost of my former self in dreams, the
me
I might have been if I had never gone to Mexico. Though I tell myself that I am adjusted to my circumstance, I still wake up sometimes feeling wistful and lost, though I can no longer truly imagine what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Scotland with my father and raised sheep.