The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Perhaps just a taste…

  “Valerian.” The feminine voice jolted him; he whirled to see Lisette standing at the foot of the rumpled bed. She looked like a beautiful witch, fresh from the pages of a storybook, in her high-necked satin gown, with her rich auburn hair tumbling almost to her waist. “Did you think you were the only vampire who could be abroad while the sun was up?”

  “Go,” Valerian whispered to Isabella in a hoarse voice, all but shoving her from the bed.

  Lisette watched with amusement as the naked woman scrambled for her clothes, trembling and casting quick, frightened glances in Valerian’s direction.

  Miraculously Lisette allowed Isabella to escape, but when she turned her attention on Valerian again, he saw the hatred in her eyes and remembered the last time he’d seen the other vampire.

  They had stood face to face on either side of Aidan Tremayne’s bed, while he slept, unknowing and vulnerable, between them. At that time Aidan had been newly human—he had risked everything, even his immortal soul, to be changed back into a man—and Lisette had meant to transform him again, to rob Aidan of his hard-won humanity. The idea had been all the more ironic for the fact that she had been the one to condemn Aidan to a life he hated in the first place.

  Valerian had moved to defend Aidan, one of only two mortals he had ever loved with honor and purity of heart, but Lisette had been much stronger and rendered him virtually powerless. Had it not been for the intercession of another, she would have succeeded in making Aidan into a vampire again.

  It was the ease with which she’d overcome him that Valerian recalled most vividly at that moment. He was indeed afraid, but he wasn’t foolish enough to show that. He would deal with Lisette in the same way an old snake charmer in India had taught his students to deal with cobras—by keeping calm and making no sudden moves.

  “We meet again,” he said, rising slowly from the bed, making no effort to hide his nakedness. He reached for his clothes—doeskin breeches and a loose silk shirt with no buttons—and donned the trousers unhurriedly.

  Lisette was watching him with a troubled, curious expression. “I will not destroy you immediately,” she mused aloud. “I have uses for you, as it happens.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it,” Valerian responded in the most cordial of tones, pulling the shirt on over his head. “Did you know there may be a war because of you and those damned brainless creatures you’ve been making?”

  “War? With whom?”

  Valerian pretended to sigh. “None other than Nemesis himself, I’m afraid. Then there are the warlocks—”

  “I don’t care about angels or warlocks!” Lisette interrupted, spitting like a cat.

  “That’s because you’re quite mad,” Valerian answered as pleasantly as if he’d been chatting with a pretty prospect in some elegant vampire’s drawing room. He ran the fingers of both hands through his love-mussed hair and smiled indulgently. “You really ought to put yourself out of all this misery, poor darling. I’d be happy to oblige by driving a stake through your shriveled little heart.”

  Lisette glowered at him for a long, tense moment, then erupted in a burst of musical laughter. It was not a melodious sound, of course, but something better equated with a funeral dirge. “Great Zeus,” she said. “You’ve never lacked for balls, Valerian, I’ll say that for you, even if you are the most self-indulgent, arrogant, and impulsive vampire on the face of the earth.”

  He executed a mocking half-bow. “At your service,” he said. Then, in the desperate hope that his other powers had gotten stronger when the mysterious change had occurred that made him able to function during the daylight hours, he fixed his thoughts and energies on a place far away.

  It was rather like flinging himself at a rock wall with all his strength, he discovered in the next instant, when the impact of Lisette’s opposing wishes slammed into him from every direction.

  Valerian slipped to one knee, dazed by the intangible blow she’d struck, but soon raised himself back to his feet.

  “No more of your foolish tricks,” Lisette scolded coyly, almost crooning the words. She came to stand before Valerian and wound a lock of his hair around one index finger. “You are a splendid creature. How sad I will be to destroy you.” Her whole countenance darkened as her mood and expression changed. “Make no mistake, Valerian. This time no one will save your miserable hide. This time you will perish, as you should have months ago, when I bound you to the earth in that old cemetery behind that beloved abbey of yours to await the sunrise.”

  Valerian did not allow himself the shudder that threatened as he entertained that memory. Lisette had caught him in a state of great weakness, and staked him out in a neglected graveyard. Aidan, still a vampire then, had been her real prey; Valerian had been little more than bait. Had it not been for Maeve’s timely arrival, and that of Tobias, both he and Aidan would have been roasted like pigs at Easter.

  “If you think you can draw Maeve into a trap by holding me prisoner,” he said in tones of contemptuous reason, “you are misguided as well as mad. She has no great love for me, and even if she bore me the utmost tenderness, she is entirely too cunning to fall for such a silly trick.”

  Lisette looked and sounded disturbingly sane, which was, no doubt, only another indication that her mind was as diseased as her spirit. “You are right—Maeve Tremayne loves another, a mortal, and most devotedly, too. She came to help you after your little episode with the warlocks, however, and she will appear again.”

  For once Valerian was not thinking of his own difficult position, but of the singular vulnerability of Maeve’s cherished mortal. He still didn’t really care what happened to Dr. Calder Holbrook, late of Philadelphia and Gettysburg, but Maeve’s happiness mattered to him. In fact, it mattered far more than he would ever have guessed.

  “Tread carefully, Lisette,” he warned in his soft, smooth snake-charmer’s voice. “Maeve is no ordinary vampire.” He smiled in his most irritating fashion. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, darling. Your day is over. You’re out of your league with her.”

  “Enough,” Lisette snarled, raising her arms from her sides. In the next instant Valerian lost all conscious awareness.

  “Damn that vampire,” Maeve murmured, tapping one foot. “Where is he?” She’d tried focusing her mind on Valerian, a technique that had always worked before, but this time no image came into her head, no whispered warning or cry for help.

  “Aren’t all vampires damned?” Calder asked dryly. They were in Maeve’s front parlor, where gaslights flickered and popped, and night was thick at the windows.

  “That isn’t funny,” Maeve snapped, pacing now.

  Calder leaned against the huge mahogany desk that served Maeve in that century and the succeeding one as well, his arms folded across his chest. He needed a shave, and his dark hair was rumpled from repeated combings with his fingers.

  “Twenty-four hours have passed, my love,” he said with gentle solemnity. “As delightful as I find your company—and rare though it is—I still want to go home.”

  Maeve looked at him and ached. “I’m sorry, that’s impossible.”

  What he said next rocked her to the center of her being. “Then make me a vampire, Maeve,” he suggested quietly. “Give me the powers you enjoy, and the immortality.”

  She stood still, staring at him, stunned and brimming with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, she wanted to make Calder a blood-drinker, like herself, and keep him at her side forever. On the other, she recollected only too well how Aidan had hated Lisette for changing him. In Calder’s case, after all, the alteration would be irrevocable.

  “I couldn’t bear it if you despised me,” she whispered.

  Calder approached her, looking honestly puzzled, and laid his hands lightly on her shoulders. “I could never do that,” he said. He sounded sincere, but he didn’t really understand what he was facing.

  “Before, when you said all vampires were damned,” she began miserably, “you were very
close to the truth. Becoming an immortal means wagering your soul against an eternity in a fiery hell, Calder. It means that you can never walk in the sunlight again, and that many years would pass before you could get through even a single night without taking blood. In fact, my darling, being a vampire means living forever—and forever is a very long time.”

  He bent his head and touched his mouth to hers. “Would you watch me get old and die instead?” he asked, after giving her a kiss so gentle that it nearly broke her heart. “Damn it, I don’t care how long eternity is—and I don’t mind the other things, either—not if I can be with you.”

  She studied him uncertainly, weighing his words in her mind. She had never changed a human into a vampire before, and the decision was not one she could make easily—especially when someone she loved so desperately was involved.

  She recalled his great love for his lost daughter and felt a new level of sadness. “There would never be any children,” she said. “Vampires mate, but they do not reproduce.”

  Calder curved a finger under her chin, and Maeve tried to probe his thoughts, but as before, she had no success. The love she bore this man seemed to function as a barrier between his mind and her own.

  “I would have liked having another child,” he said quietly. “I won’t deny that. But given the choice between marriage to a mortal woman and all that entails, and the adventure of living with you, there is no contest. I love you, Maeve, and it’s you I want.”

  His words warmed Maeve’s heart and at the same time wrung it painfully. For the first time in her two centuries as a vampire, she missed mortality and all its sweet, if temporal, joys.

  “I must go,” she told him after a moment of struggling with her emotions. “Please, darling—trust me, and do as I ask. Stay here until I come back.”

  He nibbled at her lips, tempting her to stay, and she decided to punish him with a very special kind of pleasure. “All right,” he conceded, with a heavy sigh. “I’ll wait. But don’t be long, because I want to make love to you.”

  She smiled mysteriously and straightened his collar. “When I return tomorrow night, I will show you more of my magic.”

  A twinkle lit his eyes, though there was frustration there as well, and sorrow. “What sort of magic?”

  Maeve ran her fingers lightly down his chest and made a circle around his belt buckle. “You’ll see,” she said. Then she stood on tiptoe, kissed the slight cleft in Calder’s chin, and vanished.

  29

  Maeve did not like leaving Calder unguarded, for even in that house, where few vampires and even fewer warlocks would dare to venture uninvited, he was a target. Still, the day of Nemesis’s revenge was drawing nearer with each passing moment, and her instincts told her that skirmishes between vampires and warlocks were breaking out all over the planet. On top of that, every night when the moon rose there were more of Lisette’s creatures to contend with.

  Powerful as she and Valerian were, Maeve reasoned, they wouldn’t be able to handle the entire situation alone. They might go after Lisette personally, but other vampires and even warlocks, if they could be enlisted, would have to be sent out to battle the corpselike wretches she continued to create.

  Maeve fed twice, within the space of an hour, near the London docks, and still there was no sign of Valerian. Her irritation with him began to turn to concern. Normally, of course, she would have been able to track the other vampire’s thoughts, or at least pick up on his whereabouts, but things were far from normal.

  She hurried distractedly along a crowded roadside, pondering. Likely as not, Valerian was simply being his usual thoughtless and undependable self, playing sultan in a harem or pretending to be a gunslinger in some saloon in the American West. She was probably worrying needlessly.

  Still, Maeve couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that Valerian was in trouble again. After all, the last time he’d disappeared, she’d found him lying at the bottom of a mine shaft, half dead of a warlock attack.

  One way or the other, she must find the unpredictable vampire or tackle the job of destroying Lisette on her own.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” a feminine voice said.

  Maeve turned her head and saw that Dimity had fallen into step beside her. She was carrying a dulcimer, and Maeve could hear the faint hum of the strings in the night breeze.

  “You wouldn’t go after Lisette if you were me?” Maeve retorted with grim impatience. “Well, then, can you offer a better suggestion? In less than two weeks Nemesis and his legions of angels will be turned loose, and the situation with the warlocks and Lisette’s vampires gets worse every night.”

  “You’ll need Valerian’s help—as well as mine and that of every other vampire you can manage to recruit.”

  “I can’t find Valerian,” Maeve said in frustration. Drunken sailors, men who hadn’t been within a furlong of a bathtub in months, were stopping in the street to stare at Dimity and Maeve, their eyes glittering with lust and speculation. “Concentrate, Dimity. See if you can pick up an image or something. I’ve tried, but there’s nothing.”

  Dimity stepped into an alleyway, and, of course, Maeve followed. While she watched, the angelic blond vampire closed her blue eyes and fixed her thoughts on Valerian.

  More sailors gathered at the mouth of the alley, leering, plainly getting ideas. Neither Maeve nor Dimity paid them any attention for, as mortals, they were no threat.

  “I see a dark-haired woman with beautiful brown eyes,” Dimity said after several moments. “She’s in Spain—Madrid, I think. I’m sorry, that’s all I can determine.”

  “Isabella,” Maeve murmured. Usually she didn’t keep track of Valerian’s many and varied playmates, but she knew about this particular mortal because he had told her once in a moment of candor. The woman was a simple soul, he’d said, though beautiful and possessed of a fiery spirit; she worked in a cantina, serving wine and ale.

  Dimity cast a glance toward the growing crowd of sailors, and her sweet mouth formed a smile. “It would seem that we have admirers, you and I,” she said.

  Maeve curled her lip in contempt. “You can have the lot of them,” she replied. “I’m going to find Isabella and ask if she’s seen Valerian. In the meantime, I would appreciate your help.”

  “Anything,” Dimity answered as the little cluster of men started toward them. She smoothed her hair and skirts, as though intending to waltz with each one in turn, instead of feeding on their life-blood and then tossing them aside like chicken bones.

  “Spread the word to as many vampires as you can that there will be a ball at my house tomorrow night, immediately after sunset.”

  Dimity inclined her lovely head in agreement. “As you wish,” she said.

  Maeve hesitated for a few moments, watching as the first misguided sailor reached out a grubby fist to grab a handful of Dimity’s silky blond hair.

  The magnificent vampire made a snarling sound and tore into her would-be assailant like a tigress. The man screamed, probably more from terror than pain, and his companions turned to scramble toward the relative safety of the street.

  It did them no good, trying to flee, Maeve noted with a certain grim satisfaction. Dimity had worked some mental trick, thickening the air around them until it was like invisible quicksand, and though they ran, their efforts took them nowhere. They had surely planned a savage rape, but they had expected to be the hunters, not the prey.

  By Maeve’s reckoning, having to deal with Dimity was no less than the blackguards deserved; she clasped her hands together and vanished without giving the matter another thought.

  She found Isabella alone in the back room at the cantina, polishing copper mugs. The woman started violently at Maeve’s sudden appearance, crossed herself, and murmured a rapid petition to the Holy Mother.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Maeve said in unhesitating Spanish. One of the talents she’d acquired upon becoming a vampire was an ability to learn languages and indeed memorize the histories of whole societies, simply by p
aging through books on those subjects. “I mean you no harm. I’m Valerian’s friend and I want to know if you’ve seen him.”

  Tears brimmed in Isabella’s dark, thickly lashed eyes. Maeve could glean no real information from the woman’s brain because the poor creature’s emotions were in absolute chaos.

  “He was killed by a witch!” Isabella sobbed after several false starts and so much blubbering that Maeve wanted to shake her. “We were—together, Valerian and I. She came—” Again the mortal paused and made the sign of the cross with a swift, practiced motion of one hand. “She appeared out of nowhere, just as you did. Valerian told me to go quickly—Madre de Dios, I ran for my life—and I did not look back.” Isabella stopped to draw in a great, snuffling breath, then lifted her apron to her face and wailed, “He is dead! I know he is dead!”

  “Stop it!” Maeve said firmly, her mind already racing. It wasn’t hard to figure out who the “witch” had been. The question was, what had Lisette done with Valerian? “I want you to take me to the place where all this happened. Right now.”

  Isabella mopped her face, now puffy and tear-streaked, on the apron. “I c-cannot,” she said balefully, interspersing her words with hiccoughs. “It was a secret. Valerian worked some spell to take me there.”

  “But you must know where it is, if Valerian sent you away on your own when the witch came,” Maeve insisted, speaking more moderately this time. She was worried about Valerian, of course, but beneath her fear ran an undercurrent of pure annoyance. If the vain creature hadn’t been so occupied with his pleasures, he might have sensed trouble in time to protect himself.

  Instead, he’d quite literally been caught with his pants down.

  If Valerian managed to survive this latest escapade, Maeve thought furiously, she would probably kill him herself.