The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Calder felt a communal shudder move through the room, and he was afraid himself, but his fascination had not lessened. Had anyone told him that such creatures as these actually existed, he would have dismissed that person as mad. Now, here he stood, watching as the light and the darkness confronted each other.

  Having spoken, the great angel turned and walked away, bending low again as he passed through the doorway onto the terrace, and, after a quick nod to Maeve, Dimity followed him. The doors closed with a crash behind them.

  A moment later Maeve’s ballroom erupted with the terrified chatter of vampires who faced an enemy they could not hope to defeat.

  “Silence!” Maeve shouted, and, reluctantly, the others obeyed her, though it seemed to Calder that the air fairly crackled with the force of their fear, outrage, and frustration. “What else must happen before you are convinced that our only hope is to rally our forces, join ourselves with the warlocks, and bring Lisette down like the rabid animal she is?”

  No one spoke or even moved. Even Pillings, or perhaps especially Pillings, stood motionless and stricken, watching Maeve.

  “If you stand with us, come forward,” she said, stepping up onto the dais again and indicating an area in front of it. “If you do not, leave now.”

  Still, for what seemed like the longest time, no one moved. Then all the mortals, except for Pillings and Calder himself, headed toward the door, followed by a few sullen vampires. The others gathered, as Maeve had bid them to do, looking up at her with expressions that ranged all the way from fearful reluctance to unbounded admiration.

  Calder watched in wonder as she dispatched groups of vampires to other parts of the world, where they were to do all in their power to find and destroy Lisette’s creations. When the long-case clock in the entryway chimed twelve times, however, she left her followers and strode toward the front door.

  Calder was right behind her, even though he knew instinctively that she didn’t want him there.

  Reaching the massive door, she swung it open, and on the step stood another visitor. He wore a black cloak and pushed back the garment’s yawning hood to reveal a head of shining brown hair and an innocent, boyish face.

  This, Calder knew, was Dathan, the warlock Maeve had spoken of earlier, and the newcomer greeted her with a single word.

  “Well?”

  “We will join forces with you,” Maeve said in a cool, reserved tone. It was plain that she didn’t relish the prospect of dealing with warlocks any more than her colleagues did, despite the fact that she had offered the suggestion herself.

  Dathan inclined his head in a cordial nod. “Very well,” he said. “All that remains is for you and I to plan our strategy.”

  Maeve looked back at Calder over one slender shoulder, and he saw a fathomless grief in her eyes. “Yes,” she answered distractedly. “That is all that remains.”

  Calder felt a chasm open between them, a vast, eternal one, and some part of him died in that instant.

  Dathan spoke again, and his words wrenched Maeve’s attention back from Calder. “We have word of your friend, Valerian.”

  At that, Calder turned away, for there was no love lost between him and Valerian, and he frankly didn’t care what predicament that vampire might be in. His mind was full of the terrible, splendid things he’d seen and heard that night, while at one and the same time his heart was breaking.

  In his rooms he gathered his things together and began packing them neatly into the trunk he’d purchased that day. He wanted to weep, but that release, which would have been so welcome, was denied him by his own long-standing habit of stoicism.

  Although he waited, Maeve did not come to him that night.

  Maeve spent the remainder of the dark hours with Dathan, laying plans to find and destroy Lisette. She did not allow herself to think of Calder, indeed, she could not afford the indulgence, for there were so many things to be decided.

  According to Dathan, Valerian was alive, though he was indeed a captive. Lisette almost certainly planned to use him as a weapon or a pawn, and for the moment there was nothing Maeve could do about that.

  Just minutes before sunrise, she went to Calder’s rooms and found him sprawled across his bed in his clothes, sleeping as deeply as a child. Maeve lay down beside him, wrapped her arms around him, and thought of the great house in Philadelphia.

  In moments they were there, on Calder’s bed, and he was still asleep, though his rest was fitful now and probably haunted by dreams.

  Maeve kissed his forehead and then, with only seconds to spare, vanished, assembling herself inside a small space a dozen feet beneath the surface of the earth. There she settled, in that gravelike place, into the vampire sleep.

  Calder awakened suddenly, his body drenched in sweat, and sat bolt upright. He was stunned to find himself in his own bedroom in the Philadelphia house, bathed in the light of a late-summer sun.

  He blinked, terrified that, his time in London, and Maeve, and the vampire ball, were all just fragments of some feverish dream. He was still trying to discern between reality and illusion when the door of his room flew open and William burst in.

  “Where the hell have you been?” his brother snarled, storming over to the side of the bed and gripping Calder’s shirtfront in clenched fists.

  Calder threw William’s hands off and stood up. “What the devil do you care?” he countered, just as furiously. He groped for the pendant Maeve had given him and found it gone.

  William paled, but with fury not fear. He knew, in some part of his withered little soul, that Calder would never do him actual physical harm, because it would have been a violation of his personal code of honor.

  “It’s Father,” William said. “He’s taken sick, and the doctor says he’s dying. He’s been asking for you, though I can’t think why he’d make the effort. He must know, as I do, that you don’t give a damn about him now any more than you ever have!”

  Calder had believed himself to be utterly without sentiment where his father was concerned, but this news shook him, distracted him from the mysteries Maeve had brought into his life. “Is he here, or did you have him taken to the hospital?” he snapped, already halfway to the door.

  “Father would never set foot in a hospital,” William snapped. “Besides, there isn’t a bed to be had because of this damn war. You ought to know that better than anyone.”

  Calder ignored his half brother, wrenched open the door, and strode down the hallway to his father’s bedroom. He found the old man sitting up, though he looked smaller, as the dying often do, as if his body were crumbling in upon itself.

  Bernard held out one hand imploringly and croaked Calder’s name.

  Calder realized, with shattering suddenness, that the little boy who had loved and idolized his father still lived, tucked away in some part of his psyche. His own caring struck him with the force of a meteor, and tears sprang to his eyes.

  “Papa,” he said, clasping the offered hand in both his own and brushing his lips once across the knuckles. He started to pull away. “I’ll get my bag—”

  “No,” Bernard protested. “Don’t—go. I want you to listen. I’m sorry, Calder, so sorry—for all the things I did and—all the things I should have done—and didn’t. I loved you, and—I loved your mother. But I didn’t have your strength—none of us did. Not your mother—not Theresa or Amalie—not William. You were always so—impatient, so in-intolerant.”

  Calder’s shoulders heaved as grief assailed him for the second time in twenty-four hours. A sob tore itself from his throat. He could not speak.

  “Rest, Papa,” William said from the other side of the bed. It seemed to Calder that his half brother’s voice came through a pipe or tunnel, from somewhere far off. “Don’t try to talk.”

  “I’ve made my peace with you, William,” Bernard said quite clearly. “Go now, and let me do the same with your brother.”

  Calder sat down on the edge of Bernard’s deathbed, still too overcome to utter any of the word
s that crowded his heart and throbbed in his throat.

  His father spread one surprisingly strong hand behind his son’s head and pressed him close, into his shoulder. “Forgive me,” he pleaded again. “Forgive me for not being the man you are.”

  In the next moment Calder felt the old man’s spirit leave his body like warm vapor rising into the air. It was as simple, and as complex, as that, and having witnessed the phenomenon a hundred times before did nothing to lessen its impact.

  He drew back, looked into the familiar face, and saw empty, staring eyes. Gently, with practiced fingers, Calder lowered his father’s eyelids.

  Regret filled him, regret that he had waited so long to face and accept the love he’d always borne for this man. He sat there for a long while, keeping a lonely vigil, and only when Prudence came in, sometime later, did Calder stand and move to the window where he stood staring out at the sunlit courtyard below.

  “He’s gone,” he said quietly.

  Prudence wept and wailed and began to pray, and it seemed to Calder that, for all her noisy suffering, she was better off than he was. She knew how to release her emotions, at least, while he’d carried his own around like the carcass of an albatross.

  It was really no wonder, Calder thought numbly, that he’d lost everything and everyone who had ever mattered to him. He did not know how to love.

  31

  “You made his life miserable, you know,” William said in a wooden voice as he and Calder stood in the formal parlor that afternoon. The undertaker and his assistant were upstairs, in their father’s room, preparing the old man for viewing and subsequent burial.

  Calder was still dazed, by his experiences in London with Maeve, by the death of his sire, and by the realization that he had indeed loved Bernard Holbrook, faults and all, despite his own utter conviction to the contrary. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “Spare me the discourse on my shortcomings as a son,” he said wearily, looking out the window. “I’m well aware, believe me, that I might have been a little more tolerant.”

  “‘A little more tolerant’?” William repeated furiously. The last time Calder had glanced in his direction, his half brother had been standing next to the mantel, brooding over a glass of bourbon. “You crucified him daily with your damnable contempt, your self-righteous assumption that he didn’t want to be better than he was. The man craved your respect and affection, God help him, every day of your life, and you withheld those very things!”

  Calder closed his eyes tightly, for nothing possessed the power to wound quite so deeply as the truth. While he regretted some of the choices he’d made, and bitterly, he’d dance with the devil before apologizing to William. “Are you through?” he inquired with biting politeness. He heard the musical explosion of glass shattering against stone and turned at last to see that William had flung his drink onto the hearth.

  “No, God damn you, I am not through! My father is dead, and his suffering was compounded by your arrogance and insensitivity!”

  “What do you expect me to do?” Calder asked reasonably, his voice as cold as his manner. “Resurrect him? Turn back the clock to the time he was driving my mother to despair, perhaps, and decide that it was all right for him to break her heart with his women? Declare that, after all, ‘boys will be boys’?”

  William’s handsome if faintly ineffectual face went ruddy with anger. “You bastard! I want you to say you’re sorry.”

  “Apologize to you?” Calder rubbed his chin, which was stubbly with a day’s beard-growth. “Never. I’ve done you no wrong, William.”

  William’s features contorted. “Haven’t you? That’s my father lying up there with embalming fluid in his veins! If it hadn’t been for you, he might still be alive!”

  “I won’t take the blame for his death,” Calder replied.

  “He came down with pneumonia and couldn’t rally his strength. I had no part in that.”

  “You robbed him of his strength!” William insisted, and Calder began to fear that if his half brother did not contain his temper, he would burst a blood vessel. “Papa expended all of it, worrying that you had finally vanished forever. He might have used that fervor to cling to life!” Calder shook his head and sighed, too weary and too stricken to be diplomatic. “Damn it, William, open your eyes—you just accused Father of wasting energy, yet your hatred for me and your petty jealousy are eating you alive!”

  William turned away then, lowered his head onto the arm he’d braced against the mantel, and gave a choked sob.

  Calder started toward him, realized there was nothing he could say that would give the other man comfort, and stopped himself. Nothing less than his younger brother’s complete humiliation would satisfy William, and Calder wasn’t willing to supply that.

  Prudence rushed in just then, eyes swollen from weeping, carrying a broom and dustpan. She glared accusingly at Calder and William in turn, and bent to sweep up the shards of glass littering the hearth. “Land sakes,” she huffed. “A body’d think you two could keep civil tongues in your heads at a time like this, but no—here you are, bellowin’ at each other—and with a dead man in the house, too.”

  William lifted his head, seething with abhorrence, and flung a scalding stare in Calder’s direction, at the same time straightening his perfectly tailored coat. If he’d heard Prudence’s admonition, or even taken note of her presence, he gave no indication. “You’ve destroyed this entire family,” he said. “How I wish your whore of a mother had died before ever giving birth to you!” Calder took a step toward his brother, his voice deceptively quiet. “I know you’re suffering, William, and I’ll abide your insults because of that. If you value your hide, however, you will not refer to my mother again, except in the politest of terms. Do you understand me?” Prudence stepped between the two of them, her great, warm girth quivering with outrage, a dustpan full of broken crystal in one hand and a broom in the other. “If I has to take a buggy whip to the both of you so’s you’ll behave respectful-like, that’s just what I’ll do! This ain’t no time to be workin’ out your brother troubles.” Despite Prudence’s words, which made a great deal of sense, Calder still wanted to slam his fist into William’s smug, haughty face, and he expected that his half brother was thinking similar thoughts about him. He breathed deeply, purposely relaxed his hands, and turned away, intending to return to the window and his private musings.

  William made that impossible by spitting defiantly, “Stay out of this, old woman. This is my house now, and I’ll speak to this bitch’s whelp in any way I choose.” Calder crossed the space that separated him from his sibling in two strides. Ignoring Prudence’s fluttering fury, he grasped the lapels of William’s suit coat and hoisted him onto the balls of his feet. “Nothing will appease you but an opportunity to draw my blood, it would seem,” he hissed. “Well, then, so be it.” He flung his brother free, and William scrambled, his face purple with anger, to keep from losing his balance. “We’ll settle this out back,” Calder finished.

  William nodded, spun on his heel, and headed for the door. Calder was right behind him, but Prudence waylaid him by gripping his elbow, with surprising strength, in one large black hand.

  “That man up there didn’t deserve to have his only sons brawlin’ in the backyard like a pair of drunken field hands, no matter what his failin’s might have been!”

  Calder’s head felt light, and he saw the familiar parlor and the woman who had comforted him from childhood through a shifting haze of red. “On the contrary,” he rasped, “my father pitted William and me against each other from the first.” He wrenched his elbow free of Prudence’s grasp. “This is exactly what dear Papa always wanted, to see the two of us fight like roosters until one left the other bleeding in the dust. And you know it as well as I do.”

  Great tears welled in Prudence’s eyes. “Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “William’s hurtin’ something terrible, him bein’ so close to your papa, and he ain’t right in the head.”

/>   Calder shoved splayed fingers through his rumpled hair. “I’m sorry, Pru,” he said gruffly. “I would do anything in the world for you, anything except run from my brother.”

  He heard Prudence weeping as he moved along the hallway leading to the rear of the house and the yard beyond it.

  William was standing in front of the summerhouse, waiting, his jaw hard with conviction, his eyes flashing. He’d already taken off his coat, draping it neatly over the back of a wrought-iron bench, and was in the process of rolling up his sleeves.

  “I half expected you to disappear again, little brother,” he taunted.

  Calder wore no coat, and no gold links bound his cuffs to his wrists. He pushed up his sleeves, one at a time, ashamed of the wicked joy he felt at the prospect of doubling up his fists and pummeling William into a whimpering pulp. “You knew better,” he said with a grim smile. “Of course, you can still save your worthless ass by taking back every rotten thing you’ve ever said about my mother. If you don’t, I’m going to stuff parts of you down every gopher hole on this property.”

  William faltered slightly, but he didn’t relent. On the contrary, he poured salt into raw, gaping wounds. “Did you know she ran away with another man, the night she died, your sainted mama, just the way your wife did years later?”

  Calder felt cold and sick, as though some evil creature, some dragon of the invisible realms, had opened its mouth and spewed forth its vile, frigid breath. “Enough,” he said, all but strangling on that single word.

  His half brother smiled, resting his pale clerk’s hands on his hips. “Oh, no, Calder,” he said. “That wasn’t nearly enough. You’re going to hear the truth about your mother, the beautiful Marie, at long last. She was leaving Papa the night she died in that carriage accident, running away with a lover, just the way your wife left you. And, like Theresa, Marie was abandoning her child as well. She didn’t want you, Calder.”