The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Neely felt sane again, and real. She knew the sensation might be temporary, but she grasped it and held on tightly.

  Over mugs of dark amber beer and orders of fish and chips served on newspaper and sprinkled with malt vinegar, Wendy and Neely chatted, being sure to include Jason in their conversation. Wendy described her life in London, then propped one elbow on the table, cupped her chin in her hand, and demanded, “Okay, so what was this you mentioned on the telephone, about the senator and some drug cartel?”

  Neely drew a deep breath, then told the story, beginning with her first suspicions, a year after going to work as Senator Hargrove’s assistant, that something shady was happening. She told of copying files, letters, and memos, and finally turning everything over to the FBI.

  Wendy’s eyes were bigger than ever. “They didn’t help you?”

  “I approached the wrong people the first time. The evidence I gave them probably went no further than the office shredder.”

  “Did you contact the police?” Jason asked.

  Neely shook her head. “No. After the debacle with the Bureau, I was afraid to trust anyone else. I hid the duplicates I’d made of everything—” She paused, blushed, then met Wendy’s gaze. “I drove to your cottage up in Maine and hid the papers under a floorboard in the shed. Then I took a bus to Bright River, Connecticut, where my brother lives. I wanted to lay low for a while, for obvious reasons.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t smart to go straight to Ben that way,” Wendy observed. If she’d caught the connection between Neely’s purloined evidence, the cartel’s determination to silence her, and the explosion that had leveled the cottage, she didn’t let on. “I mean, that would be the first place they’d look.”

  “I know.” Neely sighed. “I wasn’t thinking straight—I was so scared and confused.” She would leave the most astounding part of the story—falling wildly in love with a true vampire—for another time. Say, some future incarnation, when such phenomena might be commonplace.

  With regret Wendy glanced at her watch. “As fascinating as this is,” she told Neely, “Jason and I have a class in ten minutes.” She nodded toward the narrow windows that afforded a view of passing feet and deepening snow. “Have you noticed that we’re having the storm of the century? You’d better stay in the city tonight—public transportation will be hell.”

  Neely nodded distractedly; a little snow was the least of her problems.

  “I’d invite you to stay at my flat, but all I’ve got is a fold-out couch,” Wendy said, rising from her chair. Jason helped her into her coat before donning his own, and Neely felt a stab of envy. Jason and Wendy were living ordinary lives, sharing days as well as nights. They would probably grow old together, unlike Neely and Aidan; only Neely would age. Aidan was immortal, for all practical intents and purposes, though he was not invulnerable.

  Neely said good-bye and promised to call soon, and then her friends were gone, and she felt as if she’d been abandoned in an empty universe.

  All her carefully cultivated bravado deserted her.

  She toyed with the remains of her french fries for a while, then left the restaurant to brave the frigid streets. She rented the last available room in a shabbily elegant old hotel across the street—apparently quite a few Londoners had decided not to risk the commute—and called Mrs. F. to let her know she wouldn’t be returning that night.

  The doting housekeeper warned her to keep her feet warm and put extra lemon in her afternoon tea, and Neely promised to follow instructions.

  After hanging up, she ventured as far as the gift shop in the hotel’s gilt-trimmed lobby, where she purchased several newspapers, that week’s issue of Time, and a paperback romance novel. Back in her room she ordered hot tea and biscuits from room service and settled in to wait out the storm.

  The air in Valerian’s cramped hiding place fairly throbbed with Lisette’s presence. He felt her energy and her boundless hatred, but he was half-starved now, and far too ill to do battle with such a powerful creature.

  She became visible at twilight, curled up beside him, as if they were twins sharing a stony womb. He looked at her bleakly, too spent to speak aloud or with his mind.

  It made everything infinitely worse, the fact that Lisette was so beautiful. Valerian had always cherished beauty, whether he found it in a woman-creature or a male, and the reminder that sometimes pure evil was lovely to look upon was like a fresh wound to him.

  Lisette laughed, curling a finger playfully under Valerian’s chin, where the flesh was paper-thin and dry as fine ash. “So you think me evil?” she chimed in a merry voice. “How very hypocritical of you, Valerian—you, who have always sought pleasure wherever it was to be found.” Slowly, and at great cost, Valerian shook his head. “No,” he croaked. “I have no taste for innocence.”

  She smiled, but her aquamarine eyes were hard with anger. “So very noble,” she taunted. “Wasn’t the lovely Maeve Tremayne an innocent when you found her? And what of your many and varied lovers, Valerian? Were they all vampires when you seduced them, or were some of them hapless humans who had no idea what sort of fiend they were consorting with?”

  Valerian closed his eyes for a moment. “Stop,” he rasped. “You will gain nothing by torturing me.”

  “I will gain everything,” Lisette snapped. “And the torture has only begun.” With that, she glared at the outer wall of Valerian’s narrow lair, and the stones themselves seemed to explode, bursting outward into the purple-gray chill of a winter evening, scrabbling onto the ground.

  Briefly Valerian yearned for life, and for mercy, but these frail wishes were soon swamped by his despair. What good was there in saving himself, even if he had been able? What right had he, who had fouled what was holy, to live forever?

  He did not move but remained curled up inside the crumbling wall.

  Lisette scrambled over him, being purposely ungraceful, he was sure, and stood in the soft, powdery snow, the night wind playing in her coppery hair. With a murmur of irritation she reached into the chasm and clasped Valerian in both hands, using her legendary strength to wrench him out like a baby tom too soon from its mother’s belly.

  He was fragile, like something broken, and lay helpless in her arms, his head against her cold breast. For a time she just stood there, cradling him, crooning some demented lullaby, but then she began to glide over the ground.

  They must have traveled that way, a hideous pair abroad on a winter’s night, for the greater part of fifteen minutes. Then Valerian recognized the unsanctified ground beyond the outer walls of the abbey, the forgotten place where heretics and murderers had been buried. The weeds and the soft ground had long since swallowed up all but one of two of the few crude markers that had been there in the first place, but Valerian was aware of the moldering skeletons and half mummified corpses beneath the earth, and he shuddered.

  Lisette laid him in the center of that desolate place, and he still had no strength to resist. She spread his arms and legs wide of his wasted body and pinned him there, with a mental command, a bond stronger than any steel manacle. He felt the first faint stirrings of fear.

  She smiled down at him when she’d completed her work, her arms folded. “Aidan will sense your despair and come to save you like the fool he is. And when he does, I will destroy him.”

  Valerian moaned, blocking Aidan’s image from his mind with the last shreds of his strength. If he didn’t cry out to Aidan, didn’t think of him, the other vampire might not be drawn into the trap.

  Lisette knew Valerian’s efforts and laughed, flinging her head back in a fit of mirth. “You’re all idiots,” she said after the terrible, shrill sound of her amusement had faded away into the night. “Since when do vampires behave like besotted humans, rescuing each other, pretending to honor and chivalry? Where is your white charger, Valerian?”

  Valerian didn’t reply. He was losing consciousness; he could feel his spirit seeping into the cold ground, curling like smoke around the bones of the long-dead and
eternally unforgiven. As terrible as the experience was, he knew he would long to be as insensate as those corpses when morning came and the sun found him. The hot rays would consume his flesh like a rain of acid, but slowly. Long after his physical body was nothing but a smoldering shell, he would still be imprisoned inside himself, and he would feel agony until his thoughts were snuffed out like the flame of a candle.

  And after that he might find himself in Dante’s version of Hell, on the threshold of an eternity of suffering.

  He groaned aloud at the prospect, and Lisette laughed again, then shrieked into the night sky, “Let all vampires see, and remember, what it means to betray me!”

  In the next moment a soft, cool snow began to fall. Flakes covered Valerian’s closed eyes, the hollows in his gaunt face and body, and suddenly, vividly, he recalled being a human boy, no older than eight. He remembered the drawing of breath and the steady thump of his heartbeat; he heard his own laughter, felt it in his throat, felt the warm, pliant muscles in his legs as he ran, in just such a snowfall as this.

  For the merest fragment of time, Valerian was innocent again. He was free and whole, and the greatest powers of heaven looked upon him with benevolence.

  Just before he swooned, a smile touched his mouth.

  Aidan awakened in Maeve’s cellar, well-rested from a day of slumber and determined to avoid Neely for as long as he possibly could. He knew the Brotherhood was keeping an account of his whereabouts and his actions, allowing him an illusion of freedom while the members decided his fate among themselves, and the last thing he wanted was to draw their attention to the woman he loved.

  His soul still hummed with the joy Neely had brought him by offering herself in passion and in trust.

  In a blink he transported himself to his room on the second floor of the mansion. He seldom used the chamber, but there were fresh clothes in the wardrobe, and he felt like sprucing himself up. He would hunt in nineteenth-century London, perhaps among the riffraff along the waterfront, and then look in on Valerian. Surely the other vampire would be over his sulk by now, and they could talk. Aidan was eager to tell his friend that it was possible to be mortal again; he wondered if other vampires would step forward and ask to be changed, if he succeeded in making the transformation.

  Aidan whistled as he put on his most elegant evening clothes—black trousers with a glistening silk stripe down either leg, a cutaway coat with tails, a ruffled white shirt of the finest linen, a narrow string tie, and a top hat. He wore spats over shiny shoes and completed his ensemble with a long cape lined in gold.

  He looked down at himself, decided he looked like a proper vampire, raised his arms above his head, and disintegrated into a wispy vapor.

  I’m going to miss doing that, Aidan admitted silently when he reassembled himself in a filthy, rat-infested alleyway behind a combination brothel and opium den within a stone’s throw of London’s waterfront.

  Snatches of fog curled around him, around empty crates and whiskey barrels and piles of garbage, like dancers in a spectral ballet troupe. Aidan sighed and waited; there was a corpse sitting upright, just a few doors down, crouched against a brick wall with its head resting on its updrawn knees.

  He shuddered in distaste and tried to ignore the thing, but that was difficult. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the ghost rise from the body, heard it wail in despairing protest.

  Suddenly it flew at Aidan, a bluish-gray blob of wavering light, keening and shrieking. The creature was—or had been until about half an hour before—a seagoing lad, barely fifteen years of age. He’d been robbed of the few pence he possessed, then stabbed under the ribs with a fisherman’s knife.

  “Go on,” Aidan told it, speaking kindly but in a tone that would brook no argument. “There is nothing for you here. Look around you for the Light, and follow where it leads.” He was no more certain that there was an afterlife than the shade itself was, he supposed. He said the words because he had heard his mother say them to a dying man when he, Aidan, was a small boy. The unlucky fellow had gotten in the way of a runaway coach, and his legs, pelvis, and rib cage had been crushed beneath the horses’ hooves and the wheels, but he’d taken comfort from a tavern maid’s pretty assurances and passed on peacefully.

  Aidan was just about to move along when a great, loud hoyden of a woman burst through a rear doorway, dragging a gawky, half-starved child along with her. Gripping the young girl’s hair—she was twelve, Aidan saw, by glancing briefly into her mind—the drunken harridan flung her victim hard against the brick wall.

  The child sobbed, almost hysterical, as helpless as an animal with one limb in a trap. She’d stolen from the kitchen, a piece of bread, a crumbling morsel of moldy cheese, and the woman had caught her.

  “Now I’ll box your ears for you!” the drudge shrilled. “See if you dare steal from Dorcus Moody again, you workhouse brat!”

  Aidan stepped out of the shadows, resplendent in his gentleman’s clothes, and both the old witch and the child stared at him, obviously confounded.

  “What is your name?” he asked the girl gently.

  Mistress Moody did not move, for Aidan had frozen her in place.

  “Effie,” came the whispered response.

  “You took the cheese and bread for your mother,” Aidan said, having already discerned the fact.

  Effie nodded.

  “She’s sick.”

  The child nodded again. “We got throwed out of the workhouse—my brother made trouble when one of the blokes as looked out for us there tried to put his hand down me dress.”

  Aidan gestured for Effie to wait, slipped inside the tavern’s gloomy kitchen, and gathered up two loaves of bread, a block of cheese, and a joint of venison. After dropping the loot into a cloth sack, he brought it outside and silently offered it to the girl.

  Dorcus Moody was still facing the wall with one meaty hand raised to slap, eyes staring, muscles as rigid as if rigor mortis had set in.

  Effie snatched the bag of food, turned on her bare feet, which were blue with cold and encrusted with the filth of the street, and ran, without giving Aidan, Mistress Moody, or the sailor’s corpse a second look.

  Aidan walked around Dorcus Moody’s hulking frame and smiled into her senseless face. She had a wart beside her nose, and a thin trail of spittle trickled down her chin.

  “May I have this dance?” Aidan asked with a slight bow. He put his hands on her, as if for a waltz, then bent his head to her jugular vein and drank.

  He left her beside the dead sailor, staring witlessly into space, her pulse thready but regular. She was a vile creature, was Mistress Moody, Aidan observed to himself as he walked away, but her blood was as potent as a fine Madeira.

  He turned, there in the gloom of the alley, and took his hat off to her. “May you live to nourish another vampire, Gentle Dorcus,” he said.

  She made a soft, whimpering sound, low in her throat.

  The image struck Aidan from out of nowhere as he left the alley; he saw Valerian, staked to the ground in some snowy cemetery, awaiting the dawn.

  Aidan muttered a curse, then focused all his powers into one single thought. Valerian!

  The reply was faint, but it formed instantly in Aidan’s mind. Stay away. I beg you, stay away!

  Aidan was on the point of ignoring the injunction and seeking Valerian out in the same way he would have sought Maeve, or Neely, when someone on the fringe of a passing mob of drunken swabs bumped into him, hard.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Tobias said good-naturedly. “You could never save Valerian alone.”

  Tobias was right, but Aidan could not turn his back, even though the scale was balanced between himself and Valerian, and all debts had been canceled. Yes, the other vampire had cared for him when he was ill, nourished him, even brought Neely to his side, but Aidan had saved Valerian once, too, after the attempt to travel too far back in time.

  “I can’t leave him to burn,” Aidan answered.

  “Suppose I told you
that you have one chance to become a man again, and that you must take that opportunity now, this moment, or lose it for all of eternity?” Tobias asked in a reasonable tone. He, too, wore evening clothes, and the two of them strolled down the street together, an odd sight indeed in that grim, desolate part of London.

  Aidan thought of Neely, of all his dreams. He wanted to come to her as a man, not a monster. He wanted to lie beside her in a real bed, make love to her as often as possible, and work in the sunlight every day, until his skin glistened with sweat and his muscles ached. He wanted to vote and attend PTA meetings and drink beer on the beach and complain about taxes.

  For all of that, he still could not desert Valerian. Aidan knew only too well that, if their positions were reversed, the older vampire would try to help him.

  “I guess I’d say I have rotten luck, and you and the Brotherhood have lousy timing,” Aidan finally replied. “So long, Tobias.”

  With that, he did his vanishing number, and almost immediately found himself standing on the ruined wall of an old abbey. His cape floated in the wind, in due vampire tradition, and Aidan felt a certain bitter amusement. Damned if Valerian hadn’t found a way to screw up his plans after all, even if it had been an inadvertent move.

  Aidan focused his powers into a single invisible beam and found Valerian almost immediately. He was on the hillside, well beyond the outermost wall of the abbey, and he was helpless.

  “Damn,” Aidan said. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and found Valerian spread-eagle at his feet.

  The other vampire seemed delirious, drifting in and out of consciousness, and when he saw Aidan crouched beside him, he moaned. “I told you,” he rasped, “to stay away. She’s—she’s here—waiting.”

  “Lisette,” Aidan said. “Yes, I figured as much.”

  Just then, a weird, shrill music filled the cold night air, and Aidan raised his eyes from his stricken friend to see Lisette pirouetting gracefully atop a crude stone slab.