The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  He had to see her again, if only to convince himself that he had built her up into something more than she was, to end this reckless obsession that could so easily end in obliteration for them both.

  When he had regained his composure somewhat, Aidan exchanged his gentleman’s garb for well-worn jeans and a wheat-colored Irish cable-knit sweater. He brushed his dark, longish hair—a style suited to the current century and decade—and formed a clear picture of Neely in his mind.

  In the space of a second he was standing in the parking lot of the truck stop on Route 7, a soft Connecticut snow falling around him, and she was just coming out through the front door, scrambling into her cheap coat as she walked.

  She stopped when she sensed his presence, met his gaze, and sealed his doom forever simply by smiling.

  “Hello,” she said. Her gamine eyes were bright with some hidden mischief, and the snowflakes made a mantilla for her short hair.

  Long-forgotten and deeply mourned emotions wrung Aidan as he stood there, powerless before her innocent enchantment. “Hello,” he replied, while sweet despair settled over him like snow blanketing a new and raw grave.

  Somewhere deep inside him a spark kindled into flame.

  It was true, then, what the gypsy sorceress had said so long before. Here, before him, stood the reason for his creation, the personification of his fate.

  2

  It almost seemed that he’d been waiting for her.

  Neely Wallace felt both an intense attraction and a rush of adrenaline as she stood in the parking lot of the Lakeview Cafe, gazing into that enigmatic pair of eyes. A spontaneous “hello” had tumbled over her lips before she’d given full consideration to the fact that this man was a virtual stranger.

  Remembering that there were people in the world who wanted to silence Neely, or even kill her, she was surprised at her own reaction. Briefly, futilely, she wished she had never worked for Senator Dallas Hargrove, never found the evidence of his criminal acts, thus making herself a target.

  He smiled, the snow drifting and floating softly between them, cosseting the land in a magical silence. Something about his gaze captivated her, made her want to stand there looking at him forever. It was as though he had looked inside her, with those remarkable eyes of his, and awakened some vital part of her being, heretofore unknown and undreamed of.

  Neely cleared her throat nervously but kept her smile in place. She should have taken the time to call her brother, Ben, when her shift was over, as he was always telling her to do, so he could come and walk her back to the trailer court. If she hadn’t seen the man the night before, when she and Danny had gone out trick-or-treating, she might have thought he was a mugger or a rapist, or that her former boss had finally sent someone to make sure she never talked about his close association with drug dealers. “The café’s closed,” she said. “We’ll open up again at five.”

  He came no nearer, this man woven of shadows, and yet his presence was all around Neely, in and through her, like the very essences of time and space. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  Neely figured a serial killer might say the same thing, but the idea didn’t click with her instincts. She realized she wasn’t truly afraid, but her stomach was fluttery, and she felt capable of pole-vaulting over the big neon sign out by the highway. “I don’t think I caught your name,” she said, finally breaking the odd paralysis that had held her until that moment.

  “Aidan Tremayne,” he said, keeping his distance. “And yours?”

  “Neely Wallace,” she answered, at last finding the impetus to start across the lot, the soles of her boots making tracks in the perfect snow. Idly she wondered if she would end up as a segment on one of those crime shows that were so popular on TV. She could just hear the opening blurb. Ms. Cornelia Wallace, motel maid and waitress, erstwhile personal assistant to Senator Dallas Hargrove, disappeared mysteriously one snowy night from the parking lot of the Lakeview Truck Stop, just outside Bright River, Connecticut….

  A high, dense hedge separated the parking area from the motel and trailer court beyond, and Neely paused under an arch of snow-laced shrubbery to look back.

  Aidan Tremayne, clearly visible before in the glimmer of the big floodlights standing at all four corners of the parking lot, was gone. No trace of him lingered, and the new layer of snow was untouched except for Neely’s own footprints.

  She stood perfectly still for a moment, listening, but she heard nothing. She drew a deep breath and walked on at a brisk pace, making her way past the two-story motel and into the trailer court. Reaching the door of her tiny mobile home, which was parked next to Ben’s larger one, she looked back over her shoulder again, almost expecting to see Tremayne standing behind her.

  “Weird,” Neely said to herself as she turned the key in the lock.

  The trailer wobbled, as usual, when Neely stepped inside. She flipped on the light switch and peeled off her coat in an almost simultaneous motion. Then, as an afterthought, she turned the lock on her door and put the chain-bolt in place.

  Her utilitarian telephone, a plain black model with an old-fashioned dial, startled her with an immediate jangle. She grabbed up the receiver, oddly exasperated.

  “Damn it, Neely,” her brother said, “I told you to call me when you were through closing up the café so I could come over and walk you home. Don’t you read the newspapers? It isn’t safe for a woman to be out alone so late at night.”

  Neely calmed down by reminding herself that Ben truly cared about her; except for Danny and her best friend, Wendy Browning, he was probably the only person in the world who did. She put away her coat, sat down on her hide-a-bed sofa with a sigh, and quickly kicked off her snow boots.

  “I’m sorry, Ben,” she responded, rubbing one sore foot. She frowned, spotting a run in her pantyhose. Even hairspray or nail polish wouldn’t stop this one. “Yes, it’s late, and that’s exactly why I didn’t call. I knew Danny would be in bed, and I didn’t want you to have to leave him alone.” She paused, drew a deep breath, and plunged. “Ben, what do you know about Aidan Tremayne, that guy who lives in the mansion down the road?”

  Ben sounded tired. “Just that. His name is Aidan Tremayne, and he lives in the mansion down the road. Why?”

  Neely was unaccountably disappointed; she’d wanted some tidbit of information to mull over while she was brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. “I was just wondering, that’s all. Danny and I went there on Halloween night. He struck me as sort of—different.”

  “I guess you could say he’s a recluse,” Ben said, barely disguising his indifference. “Listen, sweetheart, I’m beat. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Emotion swelled in Neely’s throat. She and Ben had more in common than their late parents. He’d lost his wife, Shannon, to cancer a few years before, along with his job in a Pittsburgh steel mill, and he’d been struggling to rebuild his life and Danny’s ever since. Neely had been forced to give up an entire way of life—her work, her apartment, her friends—because she knew too much about certain very powerful people.

  “Good night,” she said.

  Neely’s trailer consisted of one room, essentially, with the fold-out bed at one end and a kitchenette at the other. The bathroom was quite literally the size of the hall closet in her old apartment.

  Resolving to dwell on what she had—her life, her health, Danny and Ben—instead of what she’d lost, Neely took off her pink uniform and hung it carefully from a curtain rod.

  After showering, she put on an old flannel nightshirt and dried her hair. Then she heated a serving of vegetable soup on a doll-size stove and sat in the middle of her lumpy fold-out bed, eating and watching a late-night talk show on the small TV that had once occupied a corner of the kitchen counter of her spacious apartment in Washington.

  Neely didn’t laugh at the host’s monologue that night, though she usually enjoyed it. She kept thinking of Aidan Tremayne, wondering who he was and why he’d stirred
her the way he had. He was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met, and inwardly she was still reeling from the impact of encountering him unexpectedly as she’d left the cafe.

  Not to mention the way he’d vanished in the time it took to blink.

  She walked to the edge of the bed on her knees, balancing her empty soup bowl with all the skill of a good waitress, then got up and crossed to the sink. After rinsing out her dish, she returned to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. The thing to do was sleep; she would think about Mr. Tremayne another time, when fatigue did not make her overly fanciful.

  Aidan was especially ravenous that night, but he did not feed. The hunger lent a crystalline sharpness to his thought processes, and as he sat alone in his sumptuous study, with no light but that of the fire on the hearth, he allowed himself to remember a time, a glorious time, when he’d been a man instead of a monster.

  He closed his eyes and tilted his head back against the high leather chair in which he sat, recalling. Like most mortals, Aidan had not realized what it really meant to have a strong, steady heartbeat, supple lungs that craved air, skin that sweated, and muscles that took orders from a living brain. He had thought with his manhood in those simple days, not his mind.

  Now he was a husk, an aberration of nature. Thanks to his own impetuous nature and unceasing pursuit of a good time, thanks to Lisette, he was a fiend, able to exist only by the ingestion of human blood. He longed for the peace of death but feared the possibilities of an afterlife too much to perish willingly.

  Aidan could travel freely in time and its dimensions, but the Power that pulsed at the heart of the universe was veiled to him. He knew only that it existed, and that its agents were among his most dangerous enemies.

  He could not bear to consider the fate that might await him should he succumb to the mystery of true death; he’d had enough religious training in his early years at school to sustain a pure and unremitting terror. Nor did Aidan choose to think of Neely Wallace, for to do that in his present mood would be to transport himself instantly into her presence.

  He engaged in a sad smile, letting decades unfold in his mind, and then centuries. He’d been twenty-two when the unthinkable had happened. The year had been 1782, the place an upstairs room in a seedy English tavern, not far from Oxford….

  Lisette’s waist-length auburn hair was spread across Aidan’s torso like a silken veil, and her ice-blue eyes were limpid as she gazed at him. “Lovely boy,” she crooned, stroking his chest, his belly, and then his member. “I can’t bear to give you up.”

  Aidan groaned. They’d been together all night and, as always, as the dawn approached, she grew sentimental and greedy. He was amazed to feel himself turn hard, for he’d thought she’d drained him of all ability to respond.

  Lisette was older than Aidan by a score of years, and her experience in intimate matters was vast, but other than those things, he knew little about her. One night a few weeks before, when Aidan had been out walking alone, a splendid carriage drawn by six matched horses had stopped beside him in the road. Lisette, a pale and gloriously beautiful creature, had summoned him inside with a smile and a crook of her finger. They’d been meeting regularly ever since.

  Now she laughed at his reluctance to surrender even as his young body betrayed him.

  She set the pace as the aggressor and the seducer. She took him, extracted yet another exquisite response from him, and left him half-conscious in the tangled bedclothes immediately afterward.

  Aidan watched his lover through a haze as she paced the crude plank-board floor, once again clad in her gauzy, flowing gown, her hair trailing down her back in a profusion of coppery curls. He was glad it was nearly sunrise, that she would leave him then as always, because he knew that one more turn in her arms would kill him.

  “See that you don’t go dallying with a wench while I’m away,” she flared. “I won’t have it!”

  He hauled himself up onto his elbows, but that was all he could manage. “You don’t own me, Lisette,” he said. “Don’t be telling me what you’ll have and what you won’t.”

  She whirled on him then, and he saw something terrible in her face, even though there was no light but that of a thin winter moon fading into an approaching dawn. “Do not speak to me in that disrespectful way again!” she raged.

  Aidan was a bold sort—indeed, his father’s solicitor swore the trait would be his undoing—but even he did not dare challenge Lisette further. She was no ordinary woman, he’d guessed that long since, and she was capable of far more than ordinary mischief. He guessed that had been her appeal, along with her insatiable appetites and the envy her attentions generated among his peers.

  Lisette cast a sullen glance toward the window, then glared at Aidan again, her eyes seeming to glitter in the gloom. They looked hard, like jewels, and they flashed with an icy fire. She made a strangled sound, a mingling of desire and grief, and then she was upon him again.

  He tried to throw her off, for the sudden ferocity of her attack had unnerved him, but to his annoyance he discovered that she was far stronger than he was.

  “Soon,” she kept murmuring, over and over, like a mother comforting a fitful child, “soon, darling, all the earth will belong to us—”

  Aidan felt her teeth puncture his neck, and his heart raced with fresh horror. He fought to free himself, but Lisette was like a marble statue, crushing him, breaking his bones. At that point he began to recede into unconsciousness; he was going to die, never see Maeve again, never laugh or paint or drink wine and ale with his friends.

  He renewed his efforts, struggling to return to full awareness, even though there was pain and fear, mortal fear so intense that his very soul throbbed with it.

  “Now, now,” Lisette whispered, lifting her head to look into his eyes. “Your friends will think you’re dead, poor fools, but you will only be sleeping. I will return for you, my darling, before they bury you.”

  Aidan was appalled and wildly confused. He felt strange; his body was weak to the point of death, and he could barely keep his eyes open, yet his soul seemed to soar on the wings of some dark euphoria. “Oh, God,” he whispered, “what’s happening to me?”

  Lisette rose from the bed, but it made no difference that she’d finally freed him, for Aidan could not move so much as a muscle.

  “You’ll see, my darling,” she said, “but don’t trouble yourself by calling out to God. He turns a deaf ear to our sort.”

  Aidan fought desperately to raise himself, but he still had no strength. He could only watch in terrified disbelief as Lisette’s form disintegrated into a swirling, sparkling mist. She was gone, and even though Aidan was conscious, he knew full well that she had murdered him.

  He could not speak, could not move. His heart had stopped beating, he wasn’t breathing, and as the room filled with sunlight, his sight faded. His flesh burned as surely as if he’d been laid out on a funeral pyre, and yet Aidan knew the pain wasn’t physical. He was dead, as Lisette had said, yet only too aware of all that happened around him.

  A wench, probably come to fill the water jug and tidy the bed, found him later that morning. Her shrieks stabbed his mind; he tried to move, to speak, to show her he was conscious, but it was all for naught. Aidan was a living soul trapped inside a corpse.

  He was aware of the others, when they came, for it was as though the conscious part of him had risen to a corner of the ceiling to look down on the lot of them. There were two men, the tavern owner and his burly, stupid son, but a priest soon arrived as well.

  The boy took the door from its hinges, and they laid Aidan’s helpless body out on that wooden panel. He could do nothing to resist them.

  “Poor soul,” said the priest, grasping the large crucifix he wore around his neck on a plain cord and making the sign of the cross over Aidan’s mortal remains. “What do you suppose happened to him?”

  “He died a happy man,” the idiot-boy replied, leering. It didn’t seem to bother him that he was addressing a man
of God. “That’s if the lady I saw him with and the sounds I heard comin’ from this here room meant anything!”

  Aidan returned to his wasted body from his vantage point near the ceiling, struggled to move something, anything—an ear, an eyelash, one of the tiny muscles at the corners of his mouth. Nothing. Blackness covered him, swallowed him up, mind and soul, and he was no one, nowhere.

  When Aidan wakened, he still could not move. He knew, with that peculiar extra sense he’d acquired soon after Lisette’s attack, that he was in the back of the undertaker’s shop, laid out on a slab, with coins on his eyes. At first light he’d be closed up in a coffin and probably sent home to Ireland in the back of a wagon, no longer a troublesome responsibility to his prosperous English father. His mother, a dark-haired tavern maid, a woman of light laughter and even lighter skirts, would mourn him for a while, but Maeve would suffer the sorest grief. Maeve, his twin sister, his childhood companion, the counterpart of his personality.

  Hope stirred in Aidan’s being when he felt a cool hand come to rest on his forehead; his hope died when he heard his murderess’s voice. “There now, I told you I’d come back for you,” she said, placing a frigid kiss where her fingers had been. “Sweet darling, have you been afraid? Perhaps you’ll remember, after this, what it means to defy me.”

  Aidan knew a pure anguish of emotion, but he could say nothing. He cried out inwardly when she bent over him again, when he felt her teeth puncture the skin of his throat like pointed quills thrust through dry parchment. In the next instant, liquid ecstasy seemed to flow into every part of him; he could see clearly again and hear with crystal clarity, even though he still had no breath or heartbeat. An unearthly and wholly incredible power was spawning inside him, growing, grumbling, surging upward like lava thrusting at the inside of a mountain.