The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Maeve felt uncomfortable; for all her quarrels with Valerian, she was no snitch. Besides, she owed the other vampire a debt, since he’d given her immortality in the first place. “What if it is?” she asked moderately. Even respectfully.

  Tobias might have sighed then, had he been human, or even a little inclined toward feigning their singular traits. Instead, he just looked resigned and weary. “Valerian has been a nuisance since his making,” he said. “Still, I personally find him entertaining, and therefore I tend to overlook his… foibles.” The elder paused, regarding Maeve with a searching stare for a long moment before continuing. “Did he ask you to lead some kind of campaign against Lisette, as we suspect?”

  Maeve hesitated, then remembered that it would be absolutely useless to lie to an elder. Her thoughts were probably as clear to him as if they were goods on display in a shop window. “Yes. For some reason I cannot quite grasp, Valerian sees me as the next queen. But don’t worry—I’m not interested in a political career.” Exhaustion swamped her, tugged at her consciousness, and she marveled because Tobias seemed unaffected by the vampire’s need to lie dormant during the daylight hours. “I hope you’re—not planning to—sleep here,” she struggled to say. “I have a—reputation to consider—you know.”

  He bent over her. “You must not confront Lisette,” he said clearly. “She is more powerful than you can ever imagine, and we will all suffer if she is angered. Besides, it is not ours to protect humans—that is the task of angels.”

  “Angels,” Maeve repeated softly. And then she drifted into the dreamless place where vampires slumber.

  Gettysburg, 1863

  The battle had ended days before, Calder reflected as he moved among the wounded. The little church on the outskirts of town still brimmed with them, as did the whole of Gettysburg, and the graveyard had long since been filled. In many ways the aftermath was worse than the fighting itself, for there were no surges of adrenaline now, no stirring drumbeats and certainly no talk of glory. This carnage around him, the crushed or sundered limbs, the blinded eyes and deafened ears, the putrid infections and the dysentery, this was the true nature of war.

  A boy dying of gangrene clutched at Calder’s wrinkled shirt as he passed, grinding out a single word. “Doctor—”

  Calder braced himself, knowing the child-soldier was about to plead for something to kill the pain, and there was nothing. The supply of morphine, inadequate in the first place, had been exhausted long before. “Yes, son,” he said gruffly. “What is it?”

  “I reckon the Lady will come for me tonight, as she came for those others I heard about,” the lad said. Instead of desperation, Calder saw hope in the youthful face, along with agony. “She’ll take me home to heaven.” Several moments passed before Calder’s suddenly constricted throat opened up again so he could speak. A week had passed since he’d seen the beautiful specter, and every moment of that time he’d been telling himself she’d been a figment of his imagination. “The Lady,” he said, somewhat stupidly.

  The boy released his hold on Calder’s shirt. “You ever see her?”

  Calder sighed. He was on the verge of collapse as it was, and he didn’t have the strength to lie. “I thought I did,” he admitted. “What’s your name, lad?”

  “Phillips, sir. Private Michael Phillips, Twentieth Maine. I fell when the Rebs tried to take Little Round Top.” Again the boy grasped at Calder, this time closing grubby fingers around his wrist. “You get them to take me outside and lay me in the sweet grass,” he rasped. “They say she won’t come inside the church—that’s mighty strange, for an angel, don’t you figure?—and I want her to take me.”

  Tears stung Calder’s eyes, and he looked away for a moment. Damn, but it still galled him that he couldn’t save them all, every last one, instead of just a few lucky ones here and there. After all this time in medicine, first as a civilian and then as an Army surgeon, he continued to find the reality nearly unbearable. “You seem to know a lot about this Lady,” he said.

  “She’s about all anybody talks about,” Phillips replied weakly. It was plain that he was barely holding on, and the stench of his infection came near to choking Calder. “Will you get me outside, Doctor, so’s she can find me?” Calder raised a hand and signaled for a pair of orderlies. They were actually ambulatory patients, these ready helpers, one of them hailing from Richmond, Virginia, the other from somewhere in the New Hampshire countryside. For them, the fighting was over; one would be sent home, with a permanently lame leg to remind him continually of his brush with glory, and one to a prison camp.

  “This is Private Michael Phillips.” Calder performed the introductions with proper dignity, once the orderlies had reached him. “He wants to see the blue sky when he looks up. Get a stretcher and find a place for him outside.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy from Richmond.

  As gently as they could, the Yankee and the Confederate shifted Phillips onto a canvas stretcher stiff with dried blood and hauled him through the open doorway and down the steps. Calder followed as far as the church porch and stood watching them, gripping the rail.

  He should have been thinking about home, he supposed, or about those peaceful, idyllic days before war had tom the nation into two bleeding parts. Instead his mind was full of the mysterious woman he’d seen moving among the fallen soldiers that night a week before. Had she been real? he wondered yet again. After all, he hadn’t been the only one to see her—she was the hope and comfort of many of the wounded, and their description of her matched the vision Calder himself had glimpsed.

  His hands tightened over the railing until the knuckles ached. The reasoning, scientific part of him said she could not be an angel or a ghost as the others believed. No, as beautiful and real as the Lady was, she was merely a projection of all their tormented brains—his, those of the other doctors and orderlies, and, most of all, those of the patients themselves. The power generated by such grief and suffering had to be formidable.

  Calder watched as Phillips was carefully laid out on the grass, in a space left by a boy who’d passed on that morning, and found himself wishing with his whole heart that the Lady was real. Just then, he very much needed to believe in some benevolent force, however strange and inexplicable.

  He got through the rest of that day by rote, and at sunset a messenger rode in, painted with dust and so weary he could barely sit his horse, bringing word that four doctors would arrive within the week to relieve Calder and the others.

  The news filled him with both relief and despair. He was mentally and physically exhausted; soon he would be of little or no use to the fallen soldiers around him. Still, he hated to leave them, and, even more, he feared that he would never see the Lady again.

  That night, while Calder sat waiting, his back to a birch tree, she returned. It was about two in the morning, he reckoned, though he did not take out his pocket watch, and she went straight to Phillips.

  Calder was fascinated, stricken by her beauty and her magic, unable to move from his post by the tree and approach her as he’d hoped to do. Instead, he simply watched, powerless and silent, while she smoothed back the dying child’s rumpled, dirty hair and spoke softly to him.

  As Calder looked on, the lad raised his arms to her, like a babe reaching for its mother. She drew him close and held him tenderly, and for a moment Calder believed she truly was an angel.

  She rocked the boy against her bosom for a sweet, seemingly endless interval, then bared his fragile neck and buried her face there. Phillips shuddered in her arms and then went still, with that same trusting abandon in his bearing that Calder had seen in the other soldier, the one she’d taken on her last visit. The Lady seemed to nuzzle him, and when she lifted her head, her gaze met Calder’s.

  He felt some kind of quaking, deep in his being, but even then he knew it stemmed from excitement, not fear. He willed her to come to him, and she did, drifting along with steps so smooth that she appeared to be floating.

  When she stood
only a few feet from him, her dark tresses tossing in the slow summer breeze, her pale skin bathed in moonlight, he believed in whatever she was, believed with the whole of his spirit.

  “Who are you?” he managed to whisper after a long time. His voice was a raspy sound, scraping painfully at his throat.

  She drew nearer, knelt beside him, and touched his hair. At first he thought she wasn’t going to speak, because she was just a vision, after all, and therefore without a voice. Then she smiled, and Calder felt a pinch in his defeated heart as she said, “What does it matter who—or what—I am?”

  “It matters,” he confirmed.

  “Perhaps it does,” she said. She removed the pendant she was wearing, an exquisitely wrought golden rose on a long chain, and put it around Calder’s neck. “Very well, then. I am quite real, and this shall be your proof.”

  “You truly are an angel,” Calder marveled hoarsely.

  She laughed softly. “No,” she said. “My name is Maeve, and I am quite another kind of specter.” She searched his eyes for a long moment, an expression of infinite sadness in her face, and then lightly kissed his mouth.

  He felt a surge of sensation, both physical and emotional, and was completely lost to her in the space of a single heartbeat. He groaned and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, she was gone.

  Calder was paralyzed for a time, full of confusion and wonder and a peculiar, spiraling joy, but when he could move, he groped for the pendant. It was there around his neck, real and solid to the touch.

  “Maeve,” he repeated, in a whisper, as though the name itself had the power to work magic in a world sorely in need of just that. “Maeve.”

  Maeve was distracted as she worked at her loom that same night, her mind full of Calder Holbrook. She had been foolish to approach him and worse, to speak to him and leave her precious pendant, like some smitten maiden in a troubadour’s song.

  She felt a surge of emotion that would have caused her to blush, had she been human. For all practical intents and purposes, she thought, she was a virgin. While she and Valerian had often engaged in torrid bouts of mental sex after her making, no man had ever touched her before that. Now, no man ever would.

  The idea was oddly painful, and that made Maeve furious with herself. She had, after all, vowed never to become involved with a mortal, and she wasn’t the least bit like the legendary Lisette, who enjoyed bedding human lads at the height of their physical prowess.

  Maeve murmured a curse, trying to shake the images that suddenly filled her mind, images of herself, coupling with Calder Holbrook. The effort was futile.

  “It would be dangerous,” she said aloud, at once irritated and dizzy with desire, working her shuttle so forcefully that it was in danger of snapping. “Such a thing must never be allowed to happen!”

  But Maeve still felt the hot, powerful yearning, stronger even than the need for blood. Knowing that at the height of her savage passion she might well lose control and actually kill her lover did nothing to ease the wanting.

  She had always been so pragmatic, oblivious to the charms of humans—beyond drawing sustenance from them, of course. What was happening to her?

  “Whatever it is,” a voice intruded, “you’d better put a stop to it before you end up mortal, living in a motor-home and making babies.”

  Valerian. For once Maeve was glad to see him. “Thank you for announcing yourself,” she said coldly. “And for rifling through my thoughts like a pile of rummage in a market stall!”

  Her visitor was dressed in unusually ordinary clothes, for him. He wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of a wolf on the front.

  “Tsk-tsk,” he scolded. “You have much greater problems than my abrupt entrances. Lisette is prowling, Maeve. It is happening.”

  The news wrenched Maeve out of her self-absorption without delay. “What do you mean, she’s ‘prowling’?”

  “Just that. Lisette is not merely taking blood, as the rest of us do, she’s creating new vampires. Indiscriminately. And they are ugly, mindless creatures, with no more discretion than army ants.”

  Maeve abandoned all pretense of working at her weaving, and slipped off her stool to approach Valerian. “Does the Brotherhood know of this?”

  Valerian’s expression conveyed both amusement and well-controlled fury. “They chose to ignore it.”

  Maeve recalled her visit from Tobias. “Then perhaps you should follow their lead, Valerian. I’ve already been instructed not to interfere with Lisette.”

  For a moment it seemed that Valerian would explode with frustration. “Don’t you see what will happen if she isn’t stopped?” he demanded when he’d composed himself again. “The world will be overrun with these monsters, and if that’s allowed to continue, there will soon be no humans to sustain us.” He gripped Maeve’s shoulders in strong hands and looked deep into her eyes. “But it will never come to that, Maeve,” he went on, “because Nemesis will be forced to step in. He will mobilize armies of angels and destroy not just Lisette, but every vampire on earth. He’s been itching to do just that for centuries, and this may be all the excuse he needs. Remember—as a warrior, it is his charge to protect the mortals his Master so cherishes!”

  Maeve felt cold. “Surely the Brotherhood has considered—”

  “Please!” Valerian scoffed furiously. “What has happened to your brain, Maeve—are you thinking with only a tiny portion as mortals do? The Brotherhood is a group of doddering old fools who have long since lost touch with the true state of affairs.”

  Maeve raised the fingertips of her right hand to her mouth, taken aback. Valerian’s words had been bold, even for him. “Be careful,” she warned after a moment of recovery. “It may not be Lisette our Brothers rise against, but you. As it is, they think you’re rash and hot-headed, and they’ve warned me not to listen to your wild ideas.” Valerian’s brow furrowed as he frowned. “Since when does anyone—the Brotherhood included—tell the illustrious Maeve Tremayne what to think and whose words to heed?”

  She did not reply, for Valerian’s question had struck its mark. Maeve valued her right to choose her own path and make decisions for herself above everything but her singular vampire powers.

  The older blood-drinker smiled now and cupped his hands on either side of her face. “All I ask,” he said quietly, “is that you look at what Lisette is doing. Once you’ve seen, you can make your own judgment.”

  Maeve started to argue, but the words stopped in her throat. Instead she simply nodded.

  Valerian wrapped his arms around her, and the embrace became a nebula, spinning faster and faster. Maeve clung to the front of his shirt with both hands and devoutly hoped he knew what he was doing.

  When the whirling stopped and they were still, Maeve was ruffled, and she pushed herself out of Valerian’s arms with slightly more force than necessary.

  “Why do you always have to be such a show-off?” she demanded. “Why can’t you just will yourself from one place to another, the way the rest of us do?”

  Valerian’s eyes laughed, though his mouth was solemn. He raised a long finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he whispered.

  Maeve looked about and realized they were in a hospital, and judging by the high-tech equipment, she determined the time was the late twentieth century.

  A nurse rounded the corner and stopped cold in the dimly lit corridor, clutching a medical chart to her chest. She was staring at Valerian and Maeve with her mouth open.

  “You don’t see us,” Valerian said cordially, approaching the poor startled creature, who was now as immobile as a small animal blinded by a bright light. He rested the back of one hand against her forehead and repeated his words, this time gently, like a parent comforting a distraught child.

  The young nurse stiffened for a moment, as if a charge had gone through her slender form, then proceeded down the hall, her conscious mind clear of impossible creatures knitted of shadows.

  Valerian watched her go, a sort of affectionate concent
ration evident in his handsome face, and then gestured for Maeve to follow him. She did and found herself in a cold, sterile room with metal cabinets lining the walls. There was a human in attendance, but Valerian rendered him unconscious with a touch to the nape of the neck.

  Barely a moment later a metal drawer slid open, seemingly of its own power. Maeve watched in disbelief as a bluish-gray corpse sat up and swung down from its storage place as nimbly as an athlete, though the body was that of a very old man.

  The sight made Maeve shudder, though she’d seen many macabre things in her time; the thing was a vampire, and yet it seemed unaware of itself, unaware that two other blood-drinkers were nearby. It crept slowly toward the sleeping mortal, fangs glinting horribly in the fluorescent night.

  “Do something,” Maeve whispered, for the moment too repulsed to move.

  Valerian stood still, his arms folded, his manner thoughtful and unhurried. “There—a specimen of Lisette’s work,” he said. “And this is only the beginning of the nightmare.”

  23

  The hospital morgue was utterly still.

  Maeve started as the living corpse reached the mortal attendant, who was catatonic with terror, and closed waxen fingers over his shoulders.

  After casting a contemptuous glance at Valerian, who was watching the process with a mixture of clinical interest and smugness, Maeve finally shook off her own morbid fascination and stepped forward.

  She had never, since the night of her making, consumed the blood of an innocent, and she would not stand by and watch while another vampire did so.

  “Stop,” she said clearly, her voice charged with warning.

  The freak looked at her stupidly, clearly confounded, but its hold on the mortal did not slacken. Its face was all the more hideous, it seemed to Maeve, for the ragged vestiges of humanity that still showed in its features.