The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Hmmmm,” said Calder, obviously not listening. He had opened Valerian’s shirt and was examining the wounds thereupon. “Remarkable,” he reflected, excitement rising in his voice. “He’s healing so rapidly that I can see it happening—just as you did!”

  Maeve closed her eyes for a moment as relief rushed through her. So they hadn’t killed Valerian after all, those rampaging warlocks. He was coming back, getting stronger—his healing faculties were indeed remarkable, as Calder had termed them. Even for a vampire.

  “You really thought he was going to die?” Calder asked, lifting one of Valerian’s eyelids with a practiced thumb and peering into the glassy depths. “I thought members of your—species were immortal.”

  Valerian stirred slightly and made a muttering sound. The word “species” had roused Maeve’s temper just a little, but she stopped herself from indulging it. After all, it was true that vampires and mortals were not of the same genus. “Vampires can be destroyed,” she said quietly, laying a hand on Valerian’s forehead to soothe him as he struggled to regain consciousness. “Some of the lore is true, you see. A stake through the heart will finish us, and so will fire and the light of the sun.” Her voice caught. “The blood of a warlock is a lethal poison, often fatal for us, and Valerian’s wounds tell me he was infused with the stuff.”

  Calder shuddered. “What else?”

  Maeve shrugged, but she felt despondent. Now he would begin to feel repulsed by her, and by the world she lived in. Calder had seen too many of the realities of life as a vampire. “There is nothing else, as far as I know.” Valerian had at last gained the surface of awareness, and with a shake of his head, he raised himself onto his elbows and narrowed his eyes at Calder.

  Calder stared back at him, with interest but not fear. “Who the deuce is this?” Valerian demanded, in the booming and imperious voice of old. His gaze shifted, flashing with accusation and ill temper, to Maeve. “Are you mad, bringing a mortal here?”

  “Incredible,” Calder muttered, surely seeing, as Maeve did, that the last of Valerian’s wounds had knit themselves together.

  “Explain!” Valerian thundered, turning to Maeve again.

  Maeve would not be intimidated—especially by Valerian. “Your manners are insufferable,” she said, and although her tone was lower than Valerian’s had been and much more moderate, it carried an unmistakable warning. “Kindly remember that I am not required to explain anything to you.”

  Valerian subsided a little, but he still looked petulant. “This is the mortal lover,” he said with a theatrical sigh of realization. “I should have known from the first.” Calder watched Valerian with amazed fascination and said nothing.

  Maeve had long since set the lantern aside, but now she grasped its curved handle and handed it to Calder. More misgivings stirred in her as she considered the possible meanings for the doctor’s fascination—the most alarming of which was that Calder might see her, and Valerian, as specimens to be studied. “We have things to do,” she said to Valerian. “Are you well enough to wage war?”

  28

  Calder followed Maeve and her strange friend slowly up the winding stone staircase that led to the main part of the house. The place was as dark as a deep well, and if not for the flimsy light of the lantern he carried, he would have been completely blind.

  Maeve and the other vampire were silent, and yet Calder knew they were communicating; he could feel their unspoken words flowing like a river, just beyond the edge of his understanding, rapid and urgent and angry.

  He supposed at least some of the discussion concerned him, but at that point Calder didn’t care. He was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened to him during the course of that evening.

  He’d been standing in his father’s parlor, he clearly remembered that, thinking about the war that was tearing his country apart, and William had been there, too, hectoring him about something. Then Maeve had appeared, in that dramatic way of hers, and Calder had been so glad to see her that he hadn’t really thought beyond his joy.

  After that she had transported him here, to this vast, elegant and vaguely spooky house, where he suspected she meant to hold him prisoner.

  Calder objected to that on principle, even though he was sure she believed she was protecting him from some mysterious peril. He wasn’t an inanimate object, and he wouldn’t be swept up and whisked off to faraway places on Maeve’s whim.

  Yes, he decided, as they gained the main floor of the dark, empty house, Maeve would have to take him back to his real life straightaway. He had patients to look after, wards full of them, thanks to the war, and then there were the medical books she’d brought him from the twentieth century. Practically every spare moment had been spent poring over those volumes, though free time was rare in his life, and on some level of his being he’d been sorting and assimilating the knowledge the whole time, waking and sleeping.

  Maeve’s friend turned his leonine head to glare at Calder in brazen assessment. For the first time since the three of them had left the cellar, the vampire spoke in audible language. “I say he’ll be nothing but trouble,” he told Maeve. “Furthermore, as you might expect, I’m long overdue for a feeding.”

  Maeve glided between them, and Calder’s feelings about that were immediate and mixed. On the one hand, he was insulted that any female should think he needed physical protection, and conversely, he was relieved because he knew Valerian would probably have devoured him had Maeve not been there to intervene.

  “Lay a hand on him,” she said evenly, her backbone rigid, “and I will kill you for it, Valerian. I swear that by the heart that beats in my brother’s breast.”

  There was a short, thunderous silence, during which the two vampires glared at each other in unspoken challenge.

  Then, with a contemptuous sweep of his eyes and a dismissive and patently arrogant gesture of one hand, Valerian subsided. “He’s probably anemic anyway,” he said. An instant later he simply vanished, leaving not so much as a wisp of vapor in his wake.

  Calder immediately turned Maeve to face him. “Time for some explanations, my love,” he said, his hands still resting on her shoulders. “First of all, why did you bring me here?”

  The expression in her eyes, which were alight with fierce pride, implored him to understand, to trust. “You are in the gravest of danger—we all are. I must keep you safe, within these walls, until it is past. For the time being, I can say no more than that.”

  Calder drew in a great breath, thrust it out again in a raspy, exasperated sigh. “You didn’t seem to think I was particularly safe a moment ago, when you stepped between me and your friend.”

  “You weren’t,” she conceded. “You needn’t worry, however—Valerian won’t do you any harm now. He knows I meant what I said about killing him.”

  Calder shook his head, and a grim chuckle escaped him. “I’ve never been defended by a woman before—at least, not in that way. It’s going to take some getting used to.”

  Maeve straightened her shoulders and raised her chin a degree. “I am not a woman,” she reminded him. “I am a vampire, and whether you like it or not, I am far stronger than you.”

  In truth, Calder didn’t know whether he “liked it or not”—he was attempting to digest an already complicated reality. “I want to go back to my own life, Maeve. The change was too abrupt, and there are things there that need doing.”

  She shook her head, and an infinite sorrow showed in her wide eyes. “I can’t oblige, my darling,” she said. She raised one cool, graceful hand and laid it against his cheek. “I love you so that it grieves me to refuse you anything, but I cannot do what you ask. You will simply have to occupy yourself here and trust me until I can take the time to explain fully.”

  They were in the kitchen, and, despite the strangeness of the situation, Calder was suddenly hungry. He went to a wooden icebox, worked the brass latch, and opened the door. There was a platter of cold chicken inside.

  He was devouring his se
cond piece when he spoke again. “All right,” he said, amused at himself because he sounded as though he thought he had a choice in the matter, which he plainly did not. “I do indeed love you, Maeve Tremayne, and I will trust you. All the same, I am a man, with a life and responsibilities, and you cannot simply pick me up and haul me from continent to continent the way a child drags a rag doll from one room to another. You have twenty-four hours to convince me that I belong here, and at the end of that time I want to go back. I will book passage on a ship if you refuse to take me there by means of your hocus-pocus. Agreed?” She regarded him with those sorrowful eyes, taking a long time before she replied. “I can promise you nothing, Calder, except that I will perish myself before I will see harm come to you.” She came a step nearer, and this time it was she who laid her hands on his shoulders. “I must go. Amuse yourself as best you can—there will be plenty of food because the servants are all human—but please don’t venture outside this house, no matter what the temptation.”

  Calder lifted a drumstick and started to wave it in protest, but in the space of an instant Maeve was gone, and he was alone in that enormous, echoing kitchen. Even with the gaslights burning, the place seemed bleak and dark without her.

  He sat down at a long trestle table, where there were benches instead of chairs, and tried to steady himself, to catch up with reality. Calder might have thought he was hallucinating, but the experience was undeniably solid, and the proof of that was all around him.

  After an interval of gathering his strength, as well as yearning for a double shot of brandy, he raised himself to his feet. If he couldn’t get an explanation from Maeve, then perhaps he could find one by exploring.

  Calder found the brandy he wanted in a cabinet in the main parlor and poured a generous portion into a cut-glass snifter. Then, carrying the drink in one hand and a small kerosene lamp in the other, he set out on his private expedition.

  The first floor alone was vast. There was a ballroom with floors of gray marble, three massive chandeliers, and mirrors for walls, as well as formidable library, a gallery, two parlors, servants’ quarters, and various nooks and crannies where perfectly ordinary things were stored. On the second level of the house was Maeve’s bedchamber, where Calder had awakened earlier in the evening, completely bewildered and suffering from the headache of a lifetime. He’d wondered wildly where he was and how he’d come to be there, connected it all to Maeve, and then gone in search of her.

  That was when he’d found her in the cellar, with one seemingly fragile wrist pressed to Valerian’s lips.

  Calder decided to think about that later, and continued his tour of the house.

  It was on the third floor, in a huge chamber with high slanted ceilings and towering mullioned windows, that Calder found what he believed to be the heart of Maeve’s home. There, in that solitary place, stood an ancient weaver’s loom, with a half-finished tapestry spilling from one end.

  The light of the moon flowed unobstructed through the great arched windows, and Calder set aside the lamp, having no need of it. He examined the loom first, and then the weaving itself.

  It showed a woman’s delicate slippered feet, the skirts of her gauzy dress, a scattering of pale rose petals and autumn leaves on the ground. Behind the figure of the woman was a low stone wall, but Calder could make out nothing more because the rest of the image had not yet been woven.

  He stood for a long time, looking at the partial scene, feeling a strange urgency to understand. He knew the work was Maeve’s and that it was important to her, but the meaning of the thing, like so much of her life, was a mystery.

  Calder finally turned away from the tapestry and crossed the bare wooden floor to the windows. Beyond them lay London, a scattered tangle of light and darkness, good and evil, joy and sorrow.

  London.

  He took out the watch his mother had given him, one long-ago Christmas, flipped open the case, and narrowed his eyes to read the numerals. The watch had stopped, and he was too distracted and too tired to work out the difference between American time and British; it was enough just to comprehend that he’d been taken from that place to this one in minutes or even moments.

  It was incredible.

  Terrifying.

  Fabulous.

  Calder finished the brandy and turned the snifter thoughtfully in one hand. What would it be like to possess such powers? To travel through time and space so easily as ordinary mortals moved from their front parlors to the post office or the grocer’s?

  Was it possible to go backward in time, as well as forward? To the terrible period preceding his daughter Amalie’s death, for instance? Could that tragedy be undone somehow, or even prevented?

  Uncomfortable with the turn his thoughts had taken, Calder reined in his imagination, picked up the lamp he had set down just inside the door of Maeve’s private refuge, and left the room.

  The brandy was taking effect, and he was weary. He returned to the second floor, entered one of the guest suites, and collapsed, fully clothed, on the bed.

  Calder immediately tumbled headlong into a fathomless sleep, but after a little while he began to dream of Amalie. He saw the five-year-old chasing butterflies in a sun-spangled meadow, her laughter riding softly on the breeze.

  He called to his child, shouted her name over and over again, but she couldn’t hear him. It was as though an invisible wall stood between them, transparent, eternal and utterly insurmountable.

  Calder sat bolt upright, prodded awake by a stabbing sense of grief, and felt the wetness of tears on his face. “Amalie,” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Your child?” Maeve’s soft voice did not startle him, even though he hadn’t known she was there. She stepped out of the shadows to lay a cool hand on his forehead.

  Calder nodded, full of a misery that was at once ancient and brand-new, and even though he suspected that Maeve knew all about Amalie, despite her question, he answered readily. “She was five.”

  Maeve sat down on the bed beside him and gathered him close in her arms. He realized in that moment of bittersweet tenderness that she was everything to him—goddess and lover and comforter—and the weight of the love he bore her was terrifying.

  “What happened?” she asked, although she knew all the secrets of his heart, and although dawn, her most vicious enemy, was already tingeing the darkness with the first faint strains of apricot and crimson. Calder was well aware that Maeve had tendered the question only because she knew he needed to answer it, and he loved her all the more for her charity of spirit.

  “My wife, Theresa, fell in love with an old friend of mine and left Amalie and me behind. Secretly I blessed the bastard for stealing the woman before she drove me mad with her sniveling and her petty concerns, but Amalie was a child, hardly more than a baby, and she missed her mother.” A memory came back to haunt Calder then; he saw Amalie standing at one of the windows on either side of the door of the town house they’d rented in Philadelphia, her face pressed to the glass, waiting for Theresa to come back. “She was listless, Amalie was, as though her spirit was dying. She fell sick about the time of the first snow, and by Christmas she was consumed by fever. She developed spinal meningitis, and when the new year came, she was gone.”

  Maeve pressed her dry cheek against his damp, beard-roughened one. She didn’t speak—indeed, there was no need for that, for Calder knew her feelings as though they were his own.

  He put his hands on either side of her smooth and unbearably beautiful face. “Go now,” he said. “The sun will be up soon.”

  She turned her head slightly, kissed the palm of his right hand, and nodded. Then, without another word, she rose and left the room, her movements graceful and unhurried, and when she was gone, Calder believed for a few moments that she wasn’t real at all, that he had only dreamed her.

  Valerian lay in bed beside Isabella, a saucy mortal who was one of his favorite companions, and marveled.

  It was morning. All his instincts told him this was so, even thou
gh the light could not reach into that hidden place, tucked away beneath the oldest part of Madrid.

  He waited for the trancelike sleep to suck him under, just as it had at dawn every morning for nearly six hundred years, but nothing happened. He was wide awake, full of energy and ideas and questions.

  Could he stand daylight, for instance? He considered testing the theory, then decided not to push his luck. This was no time for impulsive moves.

  Wait until Maeve heard about this, he thought, settling back against the pillows with a self-satisfied smile. Even she, with all her power, had never managed such a feat.

  Isabella stirred, rustling the sheets, and opened one of her lovely dark eyes to peer up at him. She knew Valerian was not made of flesh and blood as she was, though he had never, in the course of their long association, explained the exact specifics. They had met often, always at night and always in places where the rays of the sun could not reach. In the past, however, Valerian had invariably awakened her well before dawn and escorted her back to the world she knew.

  She reached out and made a twirling motion on his belly with the lip of one index finger. “It is morning,” she observed in soft Spanish. “And you have not sent me away.”

  Valerian wanted to shout with joy, but at the same time he was frustrated because he couldn’t tell another vampire about the miracle. Not until nightfall, at least, for all but a select few were asleep in their lairs.

  “Sí,” Valerian responded with a smug smile. “It is morning, and you are still here.” When night came, he would stand with Maeve against the warlocks and the unpredictable Lisette, but for now he would remain where he was—safe in the bowels of the great Spanish city, under layers of brick cobblestones, dirt, and rocks.

  She smiled mischievously. “You do not wish me to hurry away?”

  “No,” he said, turning onto his side to look deeply into her eyes. He could almost hear her warm, rich, vital blood coursing beneath the flawless surface of her flesh, and he felt a wounding thirst. He bent his head, kissing her throat, and she gave a crooning whimper, never guessing how she tempted him. Her pulse throbbed beneath his lips, a sweet torment, and Valerian relished it, as he always relished the forbidden.