The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Maeve knew that reasoning would not reach the creature, nor would the threat of greater powers, for it was conscious of nothing but its own mindless, unceasing hunger. Feeling a strange, disconsolate pity even as she moved to destroy, she reached out and closed her fingers over the creature’s clammy throat.

  “Be careful,” Valerian coached dispassionately, sounding a little like a university professor overseeing a flock of mediocre students. “Its bite may be venomous. We don’t know much about these aberrations, you know.”

  “Thank you so much for your input,” Maeve replied, her gaze never shifting from her prey. She gave the ghoul a hard shake, and its grasp on the human, now blathering, was broken. The mortal scrambled to safety, making a low and wholly pitiful whimpering sound as he went.

  Maeve did not pause to watch the attendant’s flight, but instead concentrated on forcing the lesser vampire onto a shining steel autopsy table. She hissed an order, and Valerian finally troubled himself to stir, handing her a pair of scissors.

  Maeve subdued the demon when it struggled, dared to murmur a prayer for its true soul, and drove the long, narrow blades of the scissors through the beast’s chest wall and straight into a heart that had long since stopped beating.

  The monster would not rise again.

  A clamor stirred in the outer hallway; clearly the terrified attendant had been carrying tales about the strange and fearful goings-on in that eerie way station for the dead.

  Valerian sighed. “We’d best get out of here,” he said.

  “In a few seconds a horde of panicky mortals will come bursting through the doorway, and I would rather not deal with the poor wretches at the moment.”

  Maeve glared at him, even as she raised her hands over her head for a swift departure.

  To Maeve’s frustration, when she reassembled herself in the center of an ancient stone formation in the English countryside, the place where rumor had it that Aidan had been found, months before, Valerian was already there.

  “Well,” he began, in that imperious tone that came so naturally to him, “do you believe me now?”

  Maeve was still shaken and not a little disgruntled, for she had felt a potential strength stirring in the being she had destroyed, a primitive agility that would be terrible if it were even properly channeled.

  Still, she did not want Valerian to be right.

  About anything.

  “Any vampire could have made that—that thing,” she said. “We have no proof that Lisette was responsible.” Valerian gave a raspy, tormented cry, full of profound exasperation. “Very well,” he snapped. “Let us suppose, for a moment, that Lisette is not the culprit. The fact would remain that we are dealing with a renegade of some sort—one that must be stopped.”

  Maeve felt a chill, even though the night was warm, and a painful sense of desolation settled behind her heart, leeching her strength. She missed Aidan more sorely in those moments than she ever had, and yearned for his counsel.

  She spoke patiently. “It could have been a random episode, an act of passion or revenge. We have no reason to believe it will be repeated.”

  Valerian gazed deeply into her eyes. “You are fooling yourself,” he told her, touching a deep, well-hidden nerve with his words. He knew her so well and often taught her things about herself that she would rather have ignored. “This is no time to bury your head in die sand, Maeve—the existence of all vampires may depend on the choices you make.”

  She turned from him, let her forehead rest against one of the cool, towering stones that had witnessed her brother’s transformation from blood-drinker to mortal. Weariness swept over her, and for the first time in over two hundred years she wanted to retreat, as Valerian and others had done through the centuries, to lie dormant in some hidden tomb until the challenges facing her now had passed.

  “Perhaps,” she finally said after a long while, still not looking at Valerian, “vampires should not be saved. It could be that our time has ended—”

  Valerian gripped her shoulders and wrenched her around to face him. “You cannot stand back and allow this to happen,” he growled, showing his fine white teeth, including the sharp incisors that were only slightly longer than their counterparts. “The rest of us have sacrificed much—indeed, our very souls—for our immortality and our singular powers. Do you think that would be the end, if we all perished, that we would lie peacefully in our graves, oblivious to the universe around us? You must know that we would be sent into the pit, multitudes of us, to suffer agony for all eternity. Will you condemn us to such a fate, Maeve? We who have been your friends—your lovers?”

  Maeve felt a stab of conscience, a certain annoyance, and no small amount of fear. “I have had only one lover,” she was compelled to point out, even though the fact had no relevancy to the dilemma she faced.

  Valerian narrowed his magnificent, mesmerizing eyes.

  “Vampires are not creatures of conscience or charity,” he admitted softly, “but we are living beings who feel sadness and pain, as well as pleasure—and far more keenly than mortals do. Will you not fight for us? Will you not defend us, your sisters and brothers?”

  “Why me?” Maeve cried in an agony almost as great as the one she’d endured when Aidan abandoned her. “Why not you? Or Tobias?”

  The vampire laid his hands on either side of her face. “Deep inside, in the center of your mind and heart, you know the answer, Maeve,” he said, his voice soft and grave. “Some unconscious consensus of the species has appointed you to take up the sword in our behalf.” Maeve was silent for a time, considering. She hesitated so long, in fact, that the first pinkish-gold light of dawn was tracing the horizon before she replied. “I will find out what is happening, but that is all I am willing to promise.”

  Valerian, to her weary annoyance, was smiling as she locked her hands together high over her head and vanished.

  Calder Holbrook sat glumly in his father’s august study, an overfull snifter of brandy close at hand, gazing out one of the windows overlooking the formal rose garden that had been his mother’s pride. In one hand he fingered the necklace the Lady had given him, as though it were a rosary instead of a simple pendant on a chain.

  Only a few feet away, in the carefully cultivated soil of the garden, the roses conducted a silent riot of color, their reds and pinks and yellows gaudy and rich in the afternoon sunlight. It seemed ironic to Calder that such shameless beauty could exist in a world where young boys played soldier, blowing each other to shreds at the behest of politicians and merchants and bankers.

  “You needn’t go back, you know.” The voice came from the broad archway behind Calder, die doorway leading into the main part of die house, and, though it was unexpected, it did not startle him.

  He did not turn to face his father, but instead closed his fingers tightly around the strange, simple pendant His inner organs seemed to stiffen as he bolstered himself against this quiet, ruthless man who had sired him.

  “Do not suggest buying my way out of the Army again,” he warned. “I volunteered and I will serve my time.”

  Calder could imagine Bernard Holbrook’s rage, as fathomless and cold as a well lined in slippery stones. “When will I understand you?” Bernard asked, and the clink of crystal meeting crystal echoed in die muggy, ponderous room as he poured a drink of his own.

  Calder sighed but did not turn his attention from the lush roses, which seemed to frolic even in the still air, like trollops in gaudy dresses. “Perhaps never,” he replied. “We are too different from each other.”

  “Nonsense,” blustered Bernard, who preferred not to entertain realities that weren’t to his liking. William, Bernard’s elder son and Calder’s half brother, looked and thought like their father and was a fawning sycophant in the bargain, but that apparently did not satisfy the old man. “Nonsense,” Bernard said again. “You are flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. We are more alike than you want to believe.”

  Suppressing a shudder at such a prospect, Calder dro
pped the pendant into the pocket of his starched linen shirt—he had long since tossed aside his suit coat—and summoned up a somewhat brittle smile. “Think what you wish, Father—as you always do.”

  Bernard was a portly man, with a wealth of white hair, a ruddy complexion, and shrewd blue eyes that were often narrowed to slits in concentration. Whatever his other faults, and they were many, his mental powers were formidable, and he could discern much that would escape a lesser mind.

  “Surely you won’t try to convince me that you—even you, with your curious ideas of mercy—actually want to go back to another of those damnable field hospitals. Good God, Calder, the places have got to be horrible beyond comprehension.”

  Calder’s broad shoulders sagged slightly. “They are,” he confessed in a tone that betrayed more than he would have revealed by choice. He rubbed his temples with a thumb and forefinger, remembering the incessant screaming, the sound of saws gnawing at bone, the vile, smothering stenches.

  Bernard took a pensive sip of his brandy, looking out at his late wife’s roses as though in fascination. Calder knew the expression was deceptive; he would have wagered the last decade of his life that the older man didn’t even see the blossoms. Finally, when he was damn good and ready, he spoke again.

  “Why, then, do you insist on going back?” he asked, and for a moment the question seemed reasonable to Calder, and he did not know how to answer. “Well?” Bernard prompted when an interval had passed. “Is it because you want so badly to spite me?”

  Calder sprang from his chair, invigorated by a sudden rush of fury, and turned his back on the man who had sired him to gaze up at the woman in the portrait displayed above the mantelpiece. “Damn it, Father,” he bit out after several seconds when he did not trust himself to speak, “when are you going to realize that the sun and the planets do not revolve around you?”

  “When,” Bernard countered quietly, “are you going to realize that in throwing your life away like this you injure yourself far more grievously than you could ever hurt me?”

  Slowly Calder turned to face the other man. “I am not ‘throwing my life away,’” he said coldly in measured tones. “I am a doctor, Father. Is there a more logical place for me to be than in the midst of suffering and pain?”

  “Yes,” Bernard said with a patient sigh. “You could be a society doctor, like many of your schoolmates, and treat rich ladies with the vapors.”

  Again Calder felt such contempt that he dared not speak. Instead he moved close enough to the place where he’d been sitting to retrieve his half-finished brandy. He tossed back the contents of his snifter and felt the fire spread through his veins, the sudden, almost painful slackening of the muscles in his neck and shoulders.

  “Calder,” Bernard went ruthlessly on, his voice level and sensible like that of a snake charmer. “Listen to reason. I have friends who can arrange an honorable discharge. You can spend the rest of the war in Europe if that’s what you want, learning those new surgical techniques you’re forever yammering about.”

  Calder closed his eyes, shaken and shamed. A part of him wanted to do as his father urged, to flee the carnage plaguing his own continent and lose himself in the knowledge he craved, to pretend there was no unnecessary pain in the world, no savagery.

  “No one would blame you,” Bernard pressed, probably sensing his advantage.

  Calder came back to himself in a flash of conviction and hurled his empty snifter against the polished black marble of the fireplace. The crystal shattered into thousands of glittering shards, and he wondered if that was not how God must see His creation: as broken, shining bits of something originally meant to be beautiful. “I would blame me,” he said softly.

  Bernard sighed again. “Would that your sainted mother, God rest her soul, had taken her stubbornness to the grave with her,” he said, “rather than leaving it in your keeping.”

  Calder said nothing. He was, in fact, already looking toward the doorway, yearning to be away.

  As had ever been, Bernard did not seem to know when to quit. “If you will not put the war behind you for your own sake,” he said, “then do so for mine. I need you here, under this roof.”

  “You have William,” Calder replied, unmoved. Bernard offered no comment on that statement; he could not fault his elder son without faulting himself, for they shared the same thoughts and feelings and opinions. “Why in the name of heaven do you hate me so much?” he asked. “You have never been abused, and you have lacked for nothing. I saw that you had the finest possible education, even when you insisted on wasting that marvelous mind of yours on ordinary medicine. Tell me—I think I deserve to know—why is it that you have chafed and strained against me from the time you learned to grip the rail of your baby bed and hold yourself upright?”

  Calder raised his eyes to the lovely, guileless face in the portrait over the mantel, the face of his mother. Somewhere deep in his mind her sweet voice echoed, shaping the words of some silly lullaby.

  Finally he turned to Bernard. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “I cannot spare the energy hatred demands.”

  “But you do not love me, either. You never have.”

  “Wrong,” Calder said in a low, insolent voice. “She loved you once”—he gestured toward the painting that dominated the room—“and so did I. Until I saw that you were destroying her with your polite cruelties and gentle betrayals.”

  Bernard threw up his hands, then let them slap to his sides in frustration. His face was redder than usual, and the white line edging his mouth gave evidence that he was shocked as well as infuriated.

  “Great Scot,” he whispered. “After all this time, are you telling me that you have scorned my every effort to be a father to you because of a few fancy women?”

  “She thought you loved her,” Calder said, looking up at his mother’s face, feeling again the terrible helplessness and despair he’d known as a small child. She’d wept over her errant husband, the beautiful, naive Marie Calder Holbrook, until Calder had thought his own heart would break. And in the end her abiding grief had caused her death.

  “Marie was weak,” came a third voice from the inner doorway.

  Calder’s gaze shot to his half brother, who was fifteen years his senior. William might have been a comfort to Marie, even a friend, for he’d been quite near her own age; instead, he had tormented her for taking his dead mother’s place in that yawning tomb of a house.

  A charge moved in the room, a silent crackling, nearly visible for its sheer strength.

  “Do not tempt me to do you harm, brother,” Calder said to William. “The pleasure of the prospect is very nearly more than I can resist.”

  William, who would look exactly like Bernard in another thirty years, started to speak and then wisely restrained himself.

  Calder pushed past him to enter the wide hallway just beyond.

  Bernard shouted his name, but Calder did not turn back. Instead he kept walking, his strides long, until he was far from the great house and the others who lived beneath its heavy slate roof.

  Benecia and Canaan Havermail were having one of their ludicrous tea parties when Maeve appeared in the ancient graveyard behind their family castle.

  Benecia, a gold-haired wisp of a girl, and Canaan, her younger sister, who was dark of coloring, appeared at first glance to be children. They were in fact vampires, with some four centuries of grisly escapades behind them, and all the more terrible for their doll-like beauty.

  Seeing Maeve, Canaan clapped her tiny, porcelain-white hands. Her nails were delicate pink ovals, microscopic in size and smooth as the interior of a sea shell.

  “You’ve come to have tea with us!” she cried in childish delight.

  Maeve felt a pang, looking upon this exquisite monstrosity, and wondered again if she hadn’t been right, during her last encounter with Valerian, when she’d suggested that it might be better to let all vampires perish.

  “Sit down,” Benecia trilled, drawing back a dusty chair. Her golden
sausage curls bounced in her eagerness to welcome the unexpected guest.

  Maeve took in the scene without speaking or moving. The tea table was a dusty monument, smudged with moss and draped with the weavings of spiders, but it was the other guests that gave her pause.

  The sisters had disinterred two corpses and a skeleton, no doubt from graves in other parts of the cemetery, and arranged them around the tombstone-table in a hideous parody of a favorite human tradition. One body, mummified by some strange subterranean process to a hard brown thing, mouth open wide as if to scream, had been neatly broken at the waist so that it would sit like a proper guest. The other was a gray, dirty thing, with rags hanging from its frame, its bony, long-dead fingers curled around a pretty china cup. The skeleton was perhaps the least ludicrous of the party, for it was clean of grave-dust, and no atrophied muscles clung to its ivory smoothness.

  Maeve shook her head, marveling, not bothering to decline the invitation to join in the festivities. Before she could speak, a fourth creature lumbered into view, and she gave a little cry of amazement when she recognized what it was.

  The grayish corpse, only recently dead, had been changed, like the poor creature Maeve had destroyed in the hospital morgue, into a low-grade vampire.

  “Where did you find this beast?” Maeve demanded of the ancient children as the blood-drinker went from one horrible guest to another. It bared its long fangs as it wrenched one after the other to its mouth, then tossed each aside in blind frustration when there was no blood to drink.

  Benecia, the elder of the two most terrifying fiends in the lot, batted her enormous china blue eyes in feigned innocence. “We stumbled across him when we were out feeding,” she said in a sweet voice underlaid with vicious determination. “He’s perfectly dreadful, isn’t he?”

  Canaan had plagued the wretched thing into chasing her, and she giggled with all the merriment of a human child frolicking with a kitten. In that moment Maeve understood her brother Aidan’s revulsion for the ways of vampires as she never had before.

  “We’ve named him Charlie,” Benecia said cheerfully. Maeve tried again. “Where did you find him?” A suspicion dawned in her mind, ugly and totally feasible. “Or did you make this abomination yourselves?” Canaan stopped her happy dance to stare at Maeve, and Benecia was still as well.