The pale, shriveled petals lay scattered across the dusty marble tabletop, their curled edges the color of tea. Clearly Aidan had been away for some time.
Maeve took a certain bittersweet solace in this confirmation that her twin had not forgotten his promise to let her know whether his grand and foolhardy experiment had met with defeat or triumph.
The message of the roses was unmistakable: Aidan had surrendered his immortality to become a man again.
Maeve reached for a papery white petal, turning it slowly in her long, pale fingers. Aidan had never known a moment’s happiness as a vampire, she reflected, in an effort to console herself. He had, after all, been changed against his will by a vindictive lover, the legendary Lisette.
For more than two centuries Aidan had despaired of his wondrous powers, instead of glorying in them, as Maeve had in her own. Even now it amazed her that her brother hadn’t appreciated the extent of his gifts; vampires could travel through time and space at will, manipulate objects and human beings by mental tricks, disguise their presence from any lesser creature and most equals, and think with the entire brain, rather than just a small portion, as mortals did.
Oh, yes, vampires were far superior to those pitiful creatures, with their fragile organs and brittle bones. Immortals were able to see and hear as well or better than the average alleycat, and except under very bizarre circumstances, they need not fear the specter of death that awaited all humans.
Maeve shuddered, remembering the nightmare scene that had taken place only a few months before in an isolated graveyard on a hilltop behind an ancient abbey. Aidan had nearly died the most horrible of vampire deaths, a hellish, fiery ordeal triggered by the light of the sun.
Damn Aidan and his fatuous nobility, she thought. He’d gone willingly into Lisette’s trap in an effort to rescue another nightwalker, his friend Valerian. If it hadn’t been for Maeve herself, and for Tobias, one of the oldest vampires on earth, Aidan would have perished, screaming and writhing in the snow.
Maeve gathered petals in both hands and pressed them to her face. She caught their faint scent and tucked it away among her memories to recall at another time.
“Aidan,” she whispered brokenly. “Oh, Aidan.”
She was alone in the vastness of creation now, Maeve told herself, parting her hands and letting the rose petals rain gracefully down upon the tabletop. She had only enemies and acquaintances, but no friends.
Vampires were not particularly social creatures, since they feared certain angels and warlocks, as well as seemingly blundering humans who were in truth ruthless hunters, out to destroy them. Moreover, blood-drinkers mistrusted each other, and with good reason, for they tended to be greedy and unprincipled, unabashedly devoted to their own best interests.
Maeve sighed and wandered into Aidan’s study, where he had worked so many nights on those damnable journals and sketches of his. He had always fed early, if possible, and then returned to this great, ponderous, lonely house to pretend he was a mortal, with a piddly life span of seventy-six years or so. It still mystified her that he’d admired them so, these awkward beings who were almost completely oblivious to the marvelous powers evolving in the secret depths of their own spirits.
She took the first volume of Aidan’s many bound journals down from the shelf and felt a stab of grief when she saw the sketch of herself and her brother on the initial page. She recalled their human beginnings, in eighteenth-century Ireland, when they’d been born to a bawdy but very beautiful tavern wench, with a rich English merchant for a sire.
Alexander Tremayne had taken good care of his by-blows, Maeve had to confess, considering that he had another family, a legitimate one, back in Liverpool. His great sin, the one Maeve would always despise him for, had been in separating the twins when they were just seven years old.
Just prior to that fateful parting, Aidan and Maeve’s flighty, superstitious mother had taken them to an old gypsy fortune-teller. The crone had studied their small palms and then rasped, “Cursed! Cursed for all eternity, and beyond!”
At that, the ancient creature had risen from the steps of her colorful wagon and tottered inside. Moments later she had returned with duplicate medals, rosebuds shaped of gold and suspended from sturdy chains. With great ceremony she had hung a pendant around each child’s neck.
“These cannot save your souls,” she’d said, “but they will remind you to uphold the qualities of mercy and faith, no matter what befalls you. From those will come your strength and your power.”
Maeve had kept the gypsy’s gift ever since, taken comfort from it after she was sent away from her mother and brother.
From an upstairs room in an Irish tavern, Maeve had gone to a nunnery, where she’d been taught to sew, weave, and embroider, as well as to read and write. Aidan had been sent to an expensive school for boys, far away in England, and he, too, had kept his pendant close.
The two children had soon discovered an eerie ability to communicate via images held in their minds, and that contact had been Maeve’s consolation during dark, lonely hours.
Then, when Aidan had reached young manhood, he’d met Lisette, the most powerful of all female vampires, and had mistaken her for a mortal woman. In the end Lisette had murdered Aidan, and then restored him as a nightwalker by giving him back his own blood, altered.
When Maeve had discovered the truth, through the offices of an exasperating, impudent, and unbelievably handsome immortal called Valerian, she was shattered. From then on, she knew, all eternity would lie between herself and Aidan, for he would live forever, while she was destined to grow old and die.
Valerian had graciously explained the benefits of becoming a vampire, as well as the obvious drawbacks.
On the one hand, an immortal could do virtually anything he or she wished, on the strength of a single clearly focused thought. The world, even the universe, was their playground. But on the other, Valerian had said with a shiver, there was no doubt that if the fundamentals of religion were true, all vampires would surely be damned. There would be no help for them, and certainly no mercy; if they were judged before the courts of heaven, they’d be cast into the Great Pit as well.
Raised in a convent, Maeve had heard plenty about hell and been taught to fear it with her whole soul, but she was also irrepressibly adventurous. Moreover, she could not bear for Aidan to leave her behind, and, in the last analysis, the consumption of blood seemed a small price to pay for the privileges vampires knew.
After all, she wouldn’t have to kill her victims if she didn’t choose to, and even in her innocence she knew there were plenty of scoundrels in the world to take nourishment from. She needn’t pick on anyone with an honest heart.
When all these matters had been carefully reviewed, Maeve made her decision and asked Valerian to make her a vampire, since she knew Aidan would never consent to do it himself. At first, Valerian had refused, but he’d been attracted to Maeve, too, and she’d used the fact to her advantage.
Eventually Valerian had changed her, and it was not at all the unpleasant experience Aidan had described. In fact, Maeve had known unbounded ecstasy that night.
Aidan had been enraged when he discovered that his sister had followed in his footsteps; he’d called her all sorts of a fool and cursed Valerian to rot under a desert sun, and then he’d simply vanished.
For a time Maeve had been Valerian’s lover, as well as his apprentice. He had introduced her to the pleasures of vampire sex, a mostly mental pursuit vastly superior to the comical wrestling humans seemed to enjoy with such abandon. Since Maeve had been a virgin when Valerian transformed her, she’d been spared the indignity of sweating and straining and thrashing under some man’s thrusting hips the way mortal women did.
Valerian had introduced her to many other things besides the intense delights of mating, of course. She’d learned all the nightstalker’s tricks and learned them well. One night, when she caught Valerian playing vampire games with a beautiful fledgling named Pamela, Maeve
had decided to strike out on her own.
She’d done well, too, eventually reconciling with a still-vexed Aidan and hurling herself into one wonderful adventure after another.
Now, as Maeve stood in the deserted room that had once been her brother’s favorite retreat, holding the golden rose pendant between two fingers, she struggled to accept another reality, another turning in the road.
She must leave Aidan to his humanity, though the temptation to seek him out was almost irresistible. It was to be hoped that he’d made a happy life for himself.
Maeve figured she would never know; Aidan was dead to her, and she to him, and there could be no returning to their old bonds.
There was nothing to do now but feed and retire to the attic studio of her home in London, where she liked to go when she was sad or injured. There she would sit at her loom, letting her thoughts drift while she worked the shuttle, allowing her deeper mind to dictate the image that would appear, as if by magic, on the resultant tapestry.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July 14, 1863
When Calder Holbrook slept—a rare event in itself—his dreams were haunted by the bone-jarring thunder of cannon fire and the screams of schoolboys-turned-soldier. Not a moment passed, sleeping or waking, when he didn’t want to lay down his surgical instruments and go home to Philadelphia, but he couldn’t leave the wounded. The color of their tattered uniforms meant nothing to him, though some of the other doctors refused to treat “the enemy.”
That particular summer night was hot, weighted with the metallic scent of blood and the more pungent stenches of urine and vomit. After operating for twenty hours straight, Calder had stretched out gratefully on the soft, cool grass covering an old grave, there in the sideyard of the small clapboard church, and plunged headlong into a fitful slumber. In the early hours, well before dawn, something awakened him, something far more subtle than the cries and moans of the injured boys inside, sprawled end to end on the pews.
Aching with despair and fatigue, Calder lifted himself onto an elbow and scanned the churchyard. There were so many wounded, such an impossible number, that they spilled out on the crude sanctuary to lie in neat rows on the grass. Even so, this was only one of many improvised hospitals, all overburdened, overwhelmed.
Some of the patients shivered or sobbed in their inadequate bedrolls—if they were lucky enough to have a blanket in the first place. Some moaned, and some had suffered only minor injuries and were just marking time, waiting to be sent home or to rejoin the Union troops at the front. The Confederates, of course, would be marched to some prison camp, or hauled there in whatever rickety wagon could be spared.
Calder came back from his musings and squinted. Something was different; he had an eerie, fluttery feeling in the pit of his stomach, made up partly of excitement and partly of fear. He dragged himself upright, his back against the cool marble headstone, ran blood-stained fingers through his dark hair, and strained his tired eyes.
And then he saw her.
She was a creature made of moonlight, moving so gracefully between the rows of fallen soldiers that she seemed to float. Her gown was pale, sewn of some shimmering, gauzy fabric, and her ebony hair tumbled down her back in a lush cascade.
Calder rubbed his eyes, then the back of his neck, mystified, certain that he must be hallucinating, or at least dreaming. This was not one of the good women of the town, who had been assisting so tirelessly with the injured of both sides since the terrible battle earlier in the month; none of them would have worn something so impractical as a white frock into the midst of such filth and overwhelming gore.
An angel, then? Calder wondered. Some of the stricken boys had spoken of a beautiful guardian spirit who came in the night and gave nurture and comfort to those who were the nearest to death. Of course, they’d been seeing what they wanted to see, being so far from their mothers, wives, and sweethearts.
Calder narrowed his eyes again, trusting neither his vision nor his reason. The woman did not vanish, as he had expected, but instead knelt beside a sorely wounded lad and drew him against her bosom with such tenderness that Calder’s throat tightened over a wrenching cry.
Her glorious hair, seemingly spun from the night itself, was like a veil, hiding the lad’s head and shoulders from view.
Calder finally gathered enough of his senses to scramble awkwardly to his feet. “You, there,” he said in a low but forceful voice. “What are you doing?”
The creature raised her head, her exquisite face pale and glowing like an alabaster statue in the silvery wash of the moon. The boy lay in her arms, his head back in utter abandon, an expression of sublime jubilation plain in his features. Even from that distance, Calder knew the soldier was dead.
The doctor scrambled to his feet, swayed slightly from weariness and hunger, and started toward the woman. She laid the boy on the ground with infinite gentleness, bent to kiss his forehead, and then rose gracefully to her full height. Just as Calder drew near enough to see her clearly, she raised her arms and clasped her hands together, high above her head. She favored the physician with one brief, pitying smile, and vanished like so much vapor.
Calder gaped, shaken, terrified that he was at last and indeed losing his mind, and oddly joyous, all of a piece. After a moment or so he composed himself and crouched beside the boy the woman had held so lovingly, searching with practiced fingers for a pulse.
There was none, as he had expected, but Calder felt the familiar mixture of rage and grief all the same. The soldier had obviously been trying to grow a beard, and he’d produced peach fuzz instead. His features were more those of a child than a man.
Damn this war, Calder thought bitterly, and damn the politicians on both sides for sending mere children into the fray. He was about to straighten the boy’s head, and cover him so that the overworked orderlies would know to carry him away in the morning, when he noticed the odd marks at the base of the lad’s throat—two neat puncture wounds, just over two inches apart.
“What the hell?” Calder whispered.
Tom Sugarheel, an earnest but largely incompetent fellow who had been dragged out of some second-rate medical college and pressed into government service, suddenly appeared, squatting at Calder’s side. “That’ll be one less to bawl and snuffle for his mama,” the other man said.
Calder reminded himself that he was here to attend the sick and injured, not to kill, then glared at Sugarheel. It galled him to ask an opinion of this oaf, but sometimes even idiots possessed insights that escaped other minds. “Look at these marks,” he said, pointing to the boy’s throat. “Have you seen anything like this before?”
Sugarheel shrugged, reaching into the tom, bloodstained pocket of the dead lad’s dark blue tunic. “Not as I recollect.” He found a small tintype, probably intended for the soldier’s mother or young bride, and ran a dirty thumb over the cracked glass while he pondered the already fading throat wounds. “Looks almost like something a snake would do.”
“You’re the only snake in the immediate vicinity,” Calder pointed out impatiently, snatching the photograph in its blood-speckled leather case from Sugarheel’s grubby grasp. “Rustle up a couple of orderlies, and don’t touch this boy’s personal belongings again.”
Sugarheel’s expression was wry and defiant. “Most of these lads carry a paper with the name of their folks and such. I just wanted to make sure his kin got any valuables he might have.”
Calder felt a crushing weariness, deeper than physical exhaustion, something that lamed the spirit. “That’s the chaplain’s duty, not yours. Make no mistake, Doctor—if I catch you stealing, be it from the quick or from the dead, I’ll cut you open like a bloated cow and fill your guts with kerosene. Is that clear enough, or were there too many syllables for you?”
Hatred replaced the amusement in Sugarheel’s narrow, pockmarked face, but he didn’t respond. Instead he got to his feet and ambled off to fetch the requested orderly.
Calder rose a moment later, after silent
ly bidding the fallen soldier Godspeed, and stumbled back to the soft mound, hoping to sleep again, knowing with despairing certainty that he would not.
Maeve reached her new lair, a long-abandoned wine cellar in an old villa in nineteenth-century Italy, just moments before the light of the morning sun came flooding over the low hills to blaze in the olive groves and vineyards and dance, sparkling, on the sea. The inevitable sleep overtook her, and she sank into utter unconsciousness. All levels of her mind were blank, as usual, empty of the random images and fragmentary dreams some vampires experienced.
When she awakened, however, hours later, at the precise moment of sunset, a man had taken up residence in her thoughts—a mortal man, no less. He was very handsome, in a patrician sort of way, with dark hair, good teeth, and broad shoulders, but Maeve still resented the intrusion. Why, she wondered pettishly, should she find herself pondering the likes of a beleaguered army surgeon like Calder Holbrook?
Maeve rose from her improvised bed of dusty crates and smoothed her hair, feeling even more irritated at the realization that she’d taken the trouble to ferret out his name before leaving the Civil War field hospital for more pleasant surroundings. She had no particular fascination with human beings—beyond feeding on them when the need arose, that is.
In a flash, much of the doctor’s history flooded, unbidden, into Maeve’s mind. Calder Holbrook was the second son of a wealthy Philadelphia banker. He’d graduated from Harvard Medical School with honors and taken further training in Europe. He’d been married once, to a selfish socialite who had deserted her husband and their small daughter to run away with a lover. Holbrook had endured this betrayal with admirable equanimity, but when his beloved child had perished of spinal meningitis a year later, he’d turned bitter and cold, devoting himself to his work. His father had begged him to spend the war years in Europe, advancing his studies, but Holbrook had accepted a commission and left his comfortable life in Philadelphia without so much as a backward glance….
The Black Rose Chronicles Page 32