The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  “If you don’t have any candy, it’s okay,” the child put in with quick charity. “Aunt Neely won’t let me eat anything I get from strangers anyhow.”

  Aidan was almost deafened by a rushing sound stemming from some wounded and heretofore abandoned place in his spirit. Neely. He made note of the woman’s name—it was a detail that had seemed unimportant, in the face of the devastating affect she’d had upon him—and it played in his soul like music. His control was weakening with every passing moment; he had to flee the pair before he broke his own all-but-inviable rule and ravaged them both.

  Still, he was so shaken, so captivated by this unexpected mortal woman, that movement was temporarily beyond his power.

  “I have something better than candy,” he heard himself say, after a desperate inner struggle. He made himself move, took a coin from the ancient cherry-wood box on the hallway table and dropped it into the plastic pumpkin the little boy held out to him. “Happy Halloween.”

  Neely’s brown eyes linked with Aidan’s, and she smiled. He watched the pulse throb at the base of her right ear, imagined the vitality he could draw from her, the sheer, glorious life. The mere thought of it made him want to weep. He did not risk speaking again.

  “Thank you,” she said, turning to start down the porch steps.

  The small vampire lingered on the doormat. “My name’s Danny. We’re practically your neighbors,” he said. “We live at the Lakeview Trailer Court and Motel, on Route Seven. My dad is the caretaker there, and Aunt Neely cleans rooms and waits tables in the truck stop.”

  The blush that rose in the woman’s cheeks only made Aidan’s deadly hunger more intense. Just when he would have lunged at her, he thrust the door closed and willed himself away quickly—far away, to another time and another place, where he could stalk without compunction.

  Aidan chose one of his favorite hunting grounds, a miserable section of nineteenth-century London known as Whitechapel. There, in the dark, narrow, stinking streets, he might select his prey not from the prostitutes, or the pickpockets and burglars, but from procurers, white slavers, and men who made their living in the opium trade. Occasionally he indulged a taste for a mean drunk, a wife-beater, or a rapist; circumstances determined whether his victims saw his face and read their fate there or simply perished between one breath and the next. He did not actually kill the majority of his victims, however, and he had never made vampires of his prey, even though he knew the trick of it only too well. It was all a matter of degree.

  He kept a room over a back-alley tavern, and that was where he materialized on that particular night. Quickly he exchanged his plain clothes for an elegant evening suit and a beaver top hat. To this ensemble he added a black silk cape lined with red, as a private joke.

  A cloying, yellow-white fog enveloped the city, swirling about the lampposts and softening the sounds of cartwheels jostling over cobblestones, of revelry in the taverns and whoring in the alleys. Somewhere a woman screamed, a high-pitched, keening sound, but Aidan paid no attention, and neither did any of the other shadowy creatures who haunted the night.

  He’d walked only a short way when he came upon a fancy carriage stopped at the curb. A small man, clad in a bundle of rags and filthy beyond all bearing, was pressing a half-starved child toward the vehicle’s open door.

  Inside, Aidan glimpsed a younger man, outfitted in clothes even more finely tailored than his own, counting out coins into a white, uncalloused palm.

  “I won’t do it, do you ’ear me!” the little one cried, with unusual spirit for such a time and place. Although Aidan sensed that the small entity was female, there was nothing about her scrawny frame to indicate the fact. She couldn’t have been older than eight or ten. “I won’t let some bastard from Knightsbridge bugger me for a shilling!”

  Aidan closed his eyes for a moment, filled with disgust, vividly recalling the human sensation of bile bubbling into the back of his throat in a scalding rush. After all the time that had passed since his making, it still came as a shock to him to realize that vampires and werewolves and warlocks weren’t the only fiends abroad in the world.

  “Get’n the carriage and tend to your business!” shouted the rag-man, cuffing the child hard between her thin shoulders. “I’ll not stand ’ere and argue with the likes of you all night, Shallie Biffle!”

  Aidan stepped forward, deliberately opening himself to their awareness. Closing one hand over the back of the ragman’s neck, instantly paralyzing the wretched little rodent, he spoke politely to the urchin still standing on the sidewalk.

  “This man”—he nodded toward his bug-eyed, apoplectic captive—“is he your father?”

  “’ell, no,” spat Shallie. “’e’s just a dirty flesh-peddler, that’s all. I ain’t got no father or mother—if I did, would I be ’ere?”

  Aidan produced a five-pound note, using that special vampire sleight of hand too rapid for the human eye to catch. “There is a woman in the West End who’ll look after you,” he said. “Go to her now.”

  He put the street name and number into the child’s mind without speaking again, and she scrambled off into the shifting murk, clutching the note she’d snatched from his fingers a second after its appearance.

  The horses pulling the carriage grew restless, but the dandy and his driver sat obediently, bemused, as helpless in their own way as the rag-man.

  Aidan lifted the scrap of filth by the scruff of his neck and allowed him to see his fierce vampire teeth. It would have been the purest pleasure to tear open that particular jugular vein, to drain the blood and toss away the husk like a handful of nutshells, but he had settled on even viler prey—the wealthy pervert who had ventured into Whitechapel to buy the virtue of a child.

  He flung the procurer aside, heard the flesh-muffled sound of a skeleton splintering against the soot-stained wall of a brick building. Fancy that, Aidan thought to himself with a regretful smile.

  He climbed easily into the leather-upholstered interior of the carriage, and there he settled himself across from his intended victim. With a thought, he broke the wicked enchantment that had held both the driver and his master in stricken silence.

  “Tell the man to take you home,” Aidan said companion-ably enough, examining his gloves to make sure he hadn’t smudged them while handling the rag-man’s dirty person.

  The carriage was dark, but Aidan’s vision was noonday perfect, and he saw the young nobleman swallow convulsively before he reached up with a shaking hand and knocked three times on the vehicle’s roof. The lad loosened his ascot as he stared at Aidan in confounded fear, his pulse plainly visible between the folds of silk.

  Yes, Aidan thought with quiet lust, eyeing the man’s throat. Soon, very soon, the terrible hunger would be satisfied, at least for the time being.

  “Wh-Who are you?” the nobleman finally managed to stammer out.

  Aidan smiled cordially and took off his hat, setting it carefully on the leather seat beside him. “No one, really. You might say that you’re having a remarkably authentic nightmare—Bucky.”

  The young man paled at Aidan’s easy use of his nickname, which, of course, he hadn’t given. Bucky swallowed again, gulped really, and a fine sheen of perspiration broke out on his upper lip. “If it’s about the child—well, I was only looking for a little harmless diversion, that’s all—”

  “You are a man of peculiar tastes,” Aidan said without expression. “Does your family know how you amuse yourself of an evening?”

  Bucky squirmed in the seat. On some level, Aidan supposed, the specimen’s mind was developed enough to discern that the curtain was about to come down on the last act. “If this is about blackmail—”

  Aidan interrupted with a tsk-tsk sound. “For shame. Not all of us are willing to stoop to such depths as you do, my friend. Blackmail is far beneath me.”

  A flush flowed into Bucky’s pasty face, sharpening Aidan’s desire to feed to something very like frenzy. He would wait, however, allowing the prospect to grow sw
eeter, in much the same way he had let fine wine breathe before indulging in it, back in those glorious days when the only blood he’d needed was that which coursed through his own veins.

  “What do you want then, if not money?” Bucky sputtered.

  Aidan smiled, revealing his fangs, and watched in quiet, merciless resolution as a silent scream moved up and down Bucky’s neck but failed to escape his constricted throat. He looked frantically, helplessly, toward the carriage door. “There is no escape,” Aidan told him pleasantly. Bucky’s eyes were huge. “No more—no more children—I swear it—”

  Aidan shrugged eloquently. “I quite believe you,” he conceded. “You will never again have the chance, you see.”

  The carriage rattled on through the foggy London night, and the trip must have seemed endless to Bucky. Indeed, for him it was surely an eternity. Finally, when Aidan knew time was growing short, that dawn would come soon, he decided he’d savored the salty, vital wine long enough.

  Slowly he put his hands on Bucky’s velvet-clad shoulders, drew him close, even snarled a little, as a media vampire might, to give the moment a touch more drama. Then he sank his teeth into the tender flesh of Bucky’s neck, and the blood flowed, liquid energy, not over Aidan’s tongue but through his fangs.

  As much as he hated everything he was, feeding brought the usual ecstasy. Aidan drank until his ferocious thirst had been quelled, then snapped Bucky’s neck between his fingers and flung him to the floor of the carriage.

  Aidan rarely fed in Bucky’s circles, and he frowned as he imagined the furor the finding of a dandy’s blood-drained hulk would arouse in the newspapers. He felt some regret, too, for the confusion that would reign among the diligent, well-meaning souls at Scotland Yard when they tried to make sense of the incident.

  They would, of course, blame the Ripper.

  Aidan stopped the carriage by freezing the driver’s already addled mind, bent to straighten Bucky’s stained ascot, then climbed out onto a virtually empty sidewalk.

  His sister Maeve’s grand house loomed before him, beyond an imposing wrought-iron fence, its chimneys and gables rimmed with the first gray-pink tatters of dawn.

  The vampire met the carriage driver’s blank stare, dismissed him with no memory of visiting Whitechapel or even encountering a stranger. The vehicle lumbered away through the slow, silent waltz of the fog.

  Aidan let himself into the house via a special entrance next to the wine cellar and took refuge in a dark, tomblike room where inhabitants had once hidden from Oliver Cromwell’s men. He bolted the door, then removed his hat and the cloak and settled in a half-crouch against a cold stone wall.

  He yawned as the fathomless sleep began to overtake him. He’d been careless, coming here, but after his dawdling with poor, misguided Bucky, there hadn’t been time to return to his lair in twentieth-century Connecticut. Besides, satiation always dulled his wits for a while.

  He would just have to hope—it was futile for a vampire to offer a prayer—that none of his enemies had been watching when he came to this only-too-obvious place to rest.

  Aidan yawned again and closed his eyes. He didn’t fear most vampires, for all but a few had to hide from the sun just as he did, but there were other arch-demons, other abominations of creation, who preyed upon his kind, terrible, beautiful things that flourished in the daylight.

  Usually Aidan did not dream. All consciousness faded to dense blackness when he slumbered, leaving him vulnerable while his being assimilated the food that made him immortal.

  Tonight, however, Aidan saw the woman, Neely, on the stage of his mind, and the little boy with wax vampire teeth, and even in his stupor he was wildly troubled. In two centuries no mortal female had captured his imagination. This one, this Neely, was different.

  It wasn’t just her looks—she was pretty enough, though by no means beautiful—but something far deeper, an ancient and cataclysmic affection of the soul, a bittersweet paradox. It was as if he’d been captured by a cunning and much-feared foe and at the same time found a vital part of himself that he hadn’t known was lost.

  Again, the long-dead gypsy witch’s ominous words echoed, fragmented and sharp as splintered glass, in his mind. Cursed—damnation or salvation…

  When he awakened, many hours later, he knew immediately that he was not alone in the dark chamber.

  A match was struck; the light flared, searing Aidan’s eyes. Before him stood Valerian, majestic in his vampirism, a giant, beautiful fiend with chestnut-brown hair, patrician features, and a dark violet gaze that could paralyze any lesser creature in a twinkling.

  “You are a fool, Aidan!” Valerian spat, and the motion of his lips made the candlelight flicker. Like Aidan, Valerian had no breath. “What possessed you to come here!?” He waved one elegant arm in barely bridled fury. “Have you forgotten that she searches for you? That she needs neither darkness nor sleep?”

  Aidan yawned and raised himself to his feet, using the wall behind him for support. “‘She,’” he quoted mockingly. ‘Tell me, Valerian, are you so terrified of Lisette that you will not even say her name?”

  The older vampire’s eyes narrowed to slits; Aidan could feel his fury singing in the room like the discordant music of a thousand warped violins. “I have no reason to fear Lisette,” he said after a moment woven of eternity. “It is you, Aidan, who have incurred her everlasting hatred!” Aidan scratched the back of his neck, another habit held over from mortal days. The only itch that ever troubled him now came from far beneath his skin, driving him to take blood or die in the cruelest agony of thirst. He arched one eyebrow as he regarded his long-time acquaintance.

  “No doubt, if Lisette is near, it’s because she followed you,” he said reasonably.

  Again Valerian’s lethal anger stirred. “I am nearly as powerful as she is—I can shroud my presence from her when I wish. You, on the other hand, might as well have lain down to sleep in the full light of the sun as to take refuge here! How long will you walk about with your thoughts naked to whatever demon might be listening? Do you want to perish, Aidan? Is that it?”

  Against his will, Aidan thought of the woman, Neely, who lived and breathed back in the cold, fresh air of twentieth-century Connecticut. He felt the most torturous and inexplicable grief, coupled with a joy the likes of which no fiend could expect to entertain. “Perhaps I do,” he confessed raggedly. Then he lifted his eyes to Valerian’s magnificent, terrible face and asked, “Do you never yearn for peace? Don’t you ever grow so weary of what you are that you’d risk the wrath of heaven and the fires of hell to escape it?”

  “Fool,” Valerian spat again, plainly exasperated. “Why do I bother myself with such an idiot? For us, the pure light of heaven would be as great a torment as the blazes of Hades! We would escape nothing by fleeing this life!”

  “This is not life,” Aidan replied with unexpected fury. “This is a living death. Hell itself could not possibly be worse!”

  Valerian gentled, for he was an unpredictable creature, and laid his gracious hands on Aidan’s shoulders. “Poor Aidan,” he mocked. “When will you accept what you are and stop playing at being a man?”

  Aidan turned away and snatched his cloak and top hat from the top of the wine crate where he’d left them that morning before giving himself up to a tempestuous sleep. Valerian’s words had struck a chord of terror in his spirit.

  Did the other vampire know about Neely and the little boy? Was that what he’d meant by “playing at being a man”? If Valerian had taken notice of their existence while Aidan’s mind was unguarded in slumber, he might see it as his duty to destroy them.

  In the next moment Aidan’s worst fears were confirmed. “You are an even greater fool than I thought,” Valerian said with rueful affection. “Imagine it, your being besotted with a fragile mortal!” He paused, sighed. “You do me injury,” he murmured, before going on to say, in his usual imperious way, “Come with me, Aidan. I will show you worlds and dimensions you have never dreamed of. I wil
l teach you to cherish what you are, to relish it!”

  Aidan retreated a step, covered his ears with his hands, as though that could keep out the brutal truth of Valerian’s words. “Never!” he gasped out. “And if you go near the woman or the child, I swear by all the unholy vows, whatever the cost may be, I will destroy you!”

  Valerian looked stung, which was another of his many affectations, of course. Aidan knew the other vampire was not capable of anything so prosaic as getting his feelings hurt, and he certainly didn’t fear a being of lesser powers.

  The creature sighed theatrically. “Perhaps Maeve can reason with you,” he said. “I am weary of the effort.”

  “Leave me,” Aidan replied.

  Miraculously Valerian conceded the point and disappeared.

  Aidan tilted his head back as if to see through the thick ceiling. His senses told him that Maeve was not in residence but off hunting in some other place and century.

  A small, aching coil of loneliness twisted inside Aidan’s breast. Whatever their differences, he cherished his sister. Her companionship would have been comforting, a warm hearth in the dark bewilderment that tormented him now.

  He closed his eyes and thought of Connecticut, and when he looked again, he was there, standing in the darkness of a bedroom he never used.

  Aidan tossed the top hat and cloak onto a wing chair upholstered in rich leather and wrenched at the high collar that suddenly seemed to constrict his throat. Somehow, in those few treacherous minutes when Neely had stood on his doorstep, escorting a little beggar in a vampire suit, Aidan had made a truly terrible error. He had brought the woman into his mind, just to admire her effervescence for a few moments, and she had taken up stubborn residence there.

  What in blazes was this fascination he’d acquired?

  He looked toward the bed, remembering what it was like to lie with a daughter of Eve, to give and take physical pleasure, and was possessed of a yearning so fierce that it horrified him. He had merely glimpsed this troublesome woman, and yet he found himself wanting her, not as sustenance, but bucking beneath him in wild spasms of passion, clutching his bare shoulders in frantic fingers, crying out in the sweet fever of ecstasy…