Divine Madness Read Online Free PDF Page A

prayer. He hadn’t told her thatit was life everlasting, though. Or about the lightning, the Saint Elmo’s fire—that heart-stopping fire she would have to bathe in every half century in order to sustain herself but whose power to heal would slowly fade. He hadn’t told her that she would live forever, her brain slowly slipping away unless she would commit the sin of suicide.
    Sin? Do you really believe in that anymore?
    Yes , a part of her still did. You could take the girl out of the Church, but you couldn’t take the Church out of the girl. That was sadly all too true. As a child she had lived in a world of religious constraints that had threatened to repress her soul. Mass three times a day and hours of prayer in between. She had finally sought to escape the constant boredom by living with her hedonistic father, and then through a traditional male education that exercised her active mind. Neither act of societal defiance had set her truly free, because though one unchained her body and the other her mind, neither could unchain her soul. One parent or other had to win the tug-of-war for their child’s philosophy, and she had decided on music, mathematics, learning—and, yes, hedonism—over life in the convent. But in spite of her decision, her mother’s early teachings had deep barbs that she felt in her heart, an anchor to her past. She worked diligently to rid herself of her mother’s indoctrination, but some clung like burrs in shoelaces. Memories of childhood could be the cruelest of taskmasters, tyrants of the mind that refused to be dethroned. She might love God, but she also feared Him.
    Her decision to visit the magician at Gentilly had been her last naive effort at external escape from that parental tug-of-war. Shortly after her encounter with him, she had learned one of life’s most valuable lessons: The things that constrained her were within, and no one on the outside could ever set her free as long as she chose to limit to herself with others’ expectations.
    Mea culpa. But Christ-on-a-crutch! Who’d have ever guessed it would come to this?
    Cherie, I wish you would not use American English to swear. It’s vulgar .
    Ninon looked at her cat, who had two tiny wiggling legsstill sticking out of his mouth, and she thought: Now that is vulgar .
    “You need a napkin, my pet.”
    Corazon just licked his lips and then belched delicately. He returned his eyes to the oil lamp he watched with fascination. He always had enjoyed candle-gazing, especially at night when there was no moon. He was the perfect familiar. She shared his need of light that evening. Night was vast in the desert, far larger than it was in the city. But even this darkness did not provide adequate hiding places for them. They were in a dark part of the world now where dark things with dark sight dwelled, and she also liked to keep a night-light on.
    Not that she needed external light that night. Ninon looked at the shutters where slices of moonlight cut the darkness. Unwillingly, she thought again of Saint Germain. He had a smile like the moon, only it went through no dimming phases, so it shone almost endlessly on everyone around him. Like the moon, it was beautiful and cold. People did not notice the cold, so dazzled were they by his physical presence. And what his beauty could not seduce, his drugging voice could. He was charming, he was handsome. And he was soulless. In so many ways, he was worse than his father, who had at least been drawn to the dark arts out of scientific curiosity.
    He scares you badly , the voice said. More than the father .
    She had seen the Dark Man only once in the last century, but that had been enough to repulse her. The first thing she had noted about Saint Germain’s father was that he called to mind rotten cheese. He had certainly been malodorous to her heightened sense of smell, a faint stench leaking out through the pores in his waxy skin. His flesh itself has been yellow like rancid tallow, falling