The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Bernard broke the silence first, with a choked sigh. “Good God,” he cried, scrambling, groping his way back down the stairs, like a man blinded. “Marie! Oh, dear God help us, Marie!”

  32

  “Oh, Marie,” Bernard Holbrook whispered brokenly, kneeling beside his wife’s motionless body, there on the marble floor of the entryway. He took her limp hand and smoothed the knuckles with a circular motion of his thumb. “Marie—”

  Maeve followed, still invisible to both William and his father, as the former moved slowly down the stairs. Above, in the nursery, the youthful Calder slept, heedless of the fact that his life had just been altered forever.

  “Will she die?” William rasped when at last he’d reached his father and the stepmother he had clearly both loved and despised.

  “I hope not,” Bernard said in an agonized whisper. “Dear God in heaven, I hope not.” Tears gleamed in his eyes. “All the servants are out, so you’ll have to go for help. Get Dr. Blanchard, quickly!”

  William lingered, clenching and unclenching his fists, his collar wet with perspiration. “But what if she dies?” he asked. “They’ll say I killed her. I’ll hang or spend the rest of my life in prison—”

  Bernard stroked Marie’s pale forehead with a tender motion as she stirred and murmured, trapped beneath a crushing burden of pain. The older man spoke with quiet determination. “I know you didn’t mean for this to happen, William. And you are, after all, my son. I will do whatever I must to protect you.”

  William’s look was hot with contempt and totally void of pity as he glared down at the unconscious Marie. “She was nothing but a whore,” he said. “She even tried to lure me to her bed—”

  The elder Holbrook closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and a crimson flush climbed his neck to throb in his face. “Enough,” he growled. “Get the doctor before I change my mind and hang you myself!”

  At last William turned and hurried toward the door, but the expression on his face was hard with a hatred terrible to see, even for a vampire.

  Maeve drew nearer, soothing Marie’s internal suffering as much as she could by means of her thoughts, but she dared not show herself.

  Bernard was weeping quietly, pressing Marie’s small hand to his mouth. “Oh, darling,” he pleaded. “Forgive me.”

  Marie stirred again and moaned softly. “Calder,” she said in the merest shadow of a whisper. “Help him—William will—kill him—”

  A ragged sob escaped Bernard. “No, my darling—I promise you, Calder will be safe. Please, Marie—were you truly leaving me?”

  “Yes,” Marie said. Her eyes were open now, though there was a faraway light in them, as though she looked beyond Bernard, beyond the walls of that grand house, beyond the stormy night sky. She felt no pain, for Maeve had mentally deadened those places inside Marie that measured suffering.

  “Why?” Bernard said, although he must have known.

  “I wanted—needed your love—you wouldn’t give it.” Marie’s gaze shifted, then locked with Maeve’s. The vampire saw quiet acknowledgment in the woman’s eyes.

  It didn’t surprise Maeve that Marie could see her, while she was invisible to both William and Bernard. The dying could often discern shapes where the living saw only thin shadows, or nothing at all.

  After that, Marie closed her eyes and lapsed into the enfolding warmth of a coma, one from which she would never recover.

  Bernard kept his vigil at his wife’s side, smoothing her hair now and then, or stroking the curve of her cheek. Presently William and the doctor burst into the foyer, along with two men they must have recruited along the way.

  The doctor, a diminutive man with a balding pate and blue eyes as fierce as those of a Viking, dropped to one knee to examine Marie. In a soft voice he said, “You’d best prepare yourself for a loss.”

  Marie was carefully placed on a long panel of mahogany, the extension piece from the huge table in the dining room, and carried upstairs to her deathbed by the two strangers.

  When those men had gone, and Dr. Blanchard had joined William and Bernard in the study, Maeve was present, too, a part of the night, listening and watching.

  It was there, in Bernard Holbrook’s august study, that the story of the carriage accident was concocted. A wrecked coach would be easy enough to produce, they agreed grimly, and from that night forward they would all swear that Marie Holbrook had met with tragedy as she fled her unhappy marriage.

  Maeve’s feelings were mixed as she left the study for the nursery upstairs, where the boy who would become the man she loved more than life itself lay sleeping. He was beautiful, that child, with his mother’s coloring and his father’s strength of features, and she stood watching him as long as she dared.

  Gazing at him, Maeve mourned her lost humanity bitterly, if briefly. This sleeping child was the mirror image of the little ones she would never be able to give Calder, despite the staggering depth and breadth of her love for him.

  It would be difficult to go back to that future time, where her cherished one awaited her now as a grown man, and tell him the whole truth. He was bound to be furious with William for causing Marie’s death, even though the act had been committed more by negligence than intent, and he would hate his dead father all over again, for engineering and then perpetuating a lie to protect his elder son.

  Maeve crept close to the bed, brushed the slumbering child’s tousled hair with the lightest pass of her fingertips, indulged in the futile wish that she could somehow spare him the suffering he faced, and then took herself ahead in time.

  Calder was keeping a vigil in the main parlor, where his father lay in state, a pale, solemn figure, grand even in death.

  “What happened?” Calder asked when Maeve appeared at his side.

  She took his hand and drew him away from the casket and the husk of a man inside, toward the glow of the fire. There was no other light in the room, but for that and the shimmer of the summer moon.

  She said the most important thing first, and she said it gently. “Your mother didn’t want to leave you, Calder—it broke her heart, in fact. All the same, she couldn’t stay with your father, and she knew there was no place she might take you where Bernard wouldn’t find you. She wanted to spare you the trauma of being pulled from her arms by some sheriff or detective and taken away again.”

  Calder closed his eyes, absorbing what Maeve had told him. Then he laid his hands on her shoulders and said hoarsely, “There’s more.”

  She nodded and then, slowly, as tenderly as she could, she explained how Marie had really met her death that night—how William had flung her from him, in a fit of thwarted passion, and she’d fallen over the rail at the top of the staircase. How Bernard had staged a carriage wreck and told everyone that Marie had sustained her fatal injuries in the accident.

  Calder’s face, already bruised and abraded from the altercation with William earlier in the rear garden, tightened with rage as he listened. Maeve began to fear that he would go straight to William’s room, drag his brother from his bed, and kill him with his bare hands.

  Maeve’s worry did not stem from the possibility that William Holbrook might be the next to lie in a coffin in that very parlor; it was the knowledge that Calder would be hanged for the act that troubled her.

  “Let me take you back to England,” she pleaded softly when the sorrowful tale had been told and a few moments of silence had passed. “You’ll be away from this place, these people—”

  Calder turned from her abruptly and strode toward the center of the house, and Maeve went after him, forgetting to use her vampire powers, hurrying as a mortal woman would.

  Instead of climbing the stairs, however, Calder turned up the gaslights in the massive foyer and stood on the exact spot where Marie’s shattered body had struck the hard, cold floor. As he looked up at the rail of the highest landing, Maeve knew he was imagining the whole terrible scenario, assimilating the fear his mother must have felt as she fell, the blinding pain that would ha
ve assailed her at impact.

  “Calder.” Maeve said his name quietly, laying calming hands on his broad, tension-corded shoulders. “Let it be over now. Forgive your father and brother and go on.” He whirled, his face as cold and hard as the polished marble beneath his feet. “Forgive them? That would mean saying they were right in what they did!”

  Maeve shook her head, very human tears gathering in her eyes because looking upon Calder’s torment was far worse than bearing her own had ever been. What treacherous business it was, this loving another being so completely, so hopelessly.

  “No, darling—that isn’t the case at all. Forgiving won’t change what Bernard and William did—it’s not something you’d be doing for them, but for yourself. Don’t you see? You’d be rolling back the stone that keeps you inside your tomb.”

  Calder’s smile was rueful and bitter, utterly void of tenderness or mirth. “That sounds like an angel’s reasoning to me,” he said. “Have you been consorting with Gideon, like Dimity?”

  She rested her forehead against his shoulder for a moment, coping with the inner tumult of loving this man, then looked up at him, her hands resting on his chest. Beneath her right palm his heart thumped, pumping the substance that sustained them both, though in very different ways, of course.

  “Whether spoken by a devil or an angel, the truth is the truth,” she said wearily. “Hating your father and brother will serve no purpose but to sap your strength. Now—will you come away with me? Please?”

  He averted his gaze for a long moment, then looked directly at Maeve again. “I can’t,” he said in a voice gruff with desire and regret. “Unless I can share your life—every part of it—then it’s better if I stay here. When I was in London, I was hardly more than a house pet. I can’t live that way.”

  Maeve knew he was right, and she nodded woodenly. Although leaving Calder behind was torture, she had no choice—there was a war being fought in her world, as well as his. The night was passing, and she had yet to find Valerian or confront Lisette. “I love you,” she said, desperate to retain some link between them.

  He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. “I know,” he said. “And I certainly love you. But it appears that we’re a star-crossed pair if ever there was one. Even Romeo and Juliet can’t equal the tragedy of our romance.”

  Maeve’s heart splintered within her. She wanted to deny his words, wanted it with everything in her, but she couldn’t. Again, he was right. “I’ll make you forget me soon,” she said raggedly. “But just now, during this terrible time, I need for you to love me consciously, willingly.”

  “It’s all right,” Calder said. “Kiss me good-bye, darling, and go on about your deadly business.”

  She shook her head again, stepping back. The temptation to give in to her own selfish desires and make Calder into a blood-drinker, like herself, was overwhelming. She couldn’t afford to forget, even for a moment, that if she transformed this man, she would also seal his eternal damnation. From the moment of change, his soul would belong to darkness.

  “I don’t trust myself to kiss you,” she said, feeling as though she would shatter into pieces, crushed between her passion for Calder and the purity of the love she bore him.

  He laid his hands to either side of her face, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones. Then he offered a familiar plea. “Make me a vampire, Maeve. Make me like you. Can’t you see that there’s nothing here for me anymore? That there is no reason for me to go on living as a mortal?” Maeve’s temper flared. “There is every reason!” she cried. “You’re a doctor, and there are human beings suffering in hospitals, on battlefields—”

  He silenced her by moving the pad of one thumb across her mouth. “I would be able to relieve far more of that suffering if I had powers like yours,” he said gently. “As it is, I can do very little, except watch my patients die in agony, or worse, survive, in the kind of pain that can only produce madness.”

  She hesitated, wavering, swayed by Calder’s argument and by the fact that she wanted him near her, now more than ever. Then, however, her prior convictions won out.

  What were a few score years spent as a mortal, compared to an eternity of hellfire?

  “Good-bye,” she said, and then she raised her hands high, closed her eyes, and vanished.

  The warlock, Dathan, was pacing when Maeve met him at the agreed place, the stone monument in the English countryside that had figured so prominently in her experiences. Aidan had died to the life of a vampire and been resurrected here as a mortal man, and she and Valerian had met within the druids’ circle many times, to argue and confer.

  “Where have you been?” the warlock demanded, the night wind catching his dark cloak and causing it to flow behind him.

  “I had business to attend to,” Maeve said stiffly. “And kindly remember that I don’t have to account to you—about anything.”

  Dathan’s strangely beautiful countenance softened, but only slightly. His eyes were still feral and sharp, missing no physical nuance of emotion or intent, no matter how minor. “We will not serve our purposes by arguing,” he said finally. “My forces, because they can move about in daylight, have destroyed a vast number of Lisette’s vampires with stakes and fire. She herself still eludes us, however.”

  “We’ll find Lisette when she wants us to find her,” Maeve said with weary certainty. “What of Valerian? Is there news of him?”

  Dathan looked impatient for a moment, as though he’d rather not trouble himself with the likes of that particular, and undeniably controversial, vampire. Then he sighed like a suffering saint and said, “She’s taken him to a place we cannot reach.”

  Maeve stiffened. “Back in time,” she mused aloud as the realization struck her. “Back to a period before my death as a human, so that I cannot reach him.”

  Dathan nodded. “We warlocks cannot travel between decades and centuries, the way you blood-drinkers do, so we can be of no assistance in this matter. Far better if we simply put all thought of the unfortunate Valerian behind us and concentrate on the business at hand. Time is slipping away, remember. The forces of Nemesis will be on us soon.”

  Turning away, Maeve stepped up onto the curve of a fallen pillar and stood gazing at the dark plain that stretched away to the horizon. She knew well that time was sorely limited, and that the effort to destroy Lisette would neither stand nor fall because of Valerian. Still, he was the one who had given Maeve the dubious yet cherished gift of immortality. It had been he who had shown her her new powers and taught her to use them. He who had loved her once, in his own way, and introduced her to passion.

  No matter what came of it, she decided, gazing up at a star-splattered sky, she could not abandon Valerian. She would have to find a way to help him.

  When she turned to face Dathan again, she saw that he had divined her thoughts, and he was coldly furious.

  “Come,” he said in a charged but otherwise even voice. “Let us seek the troublesome Lisette and move to destroy her.”

  Maeve assessed the sky. “It will be morning soon. I cannot tarry much longer.”

  Dathan looked violently impatient. “Then shift yourself to the other side of the world, where the light won’t reach.”

  His reasoning was simple, and it wasn’t as though the option hadn’t occurred to Maeve many times since her making as a vampire. Some blood-drinkers, however, had experimented with the technique and never been seen again.

  “It would be logical,” she reflected, “for Lisette to do that. It’s evident that she can move about during the day, from what Isabella said about Lisette’s sudden appearance in her and Valerian’s love-nest that morning. But I doubt our queen has progressed to such a point that she can endure the full glare of the sun.”

  “Exactly,” Dathan said. “Let us go there—to China—and search for her.”

  Maeve turned, looked down into the warlock’s handsome face in surprise. “You can do that? Travel so far, simply by the power of your mind?”

  “
Of course we can,” he replied with exaggerated politeness. “Did you think we had no magical powers?” Maeve went to stand facing him, on the stony, much-trampled ground. The druid stones were obviously a popular meeting point for humans, too, though only the most intrepid would venture there at night. “Let us see what powers you have,” she challenged coolly. “Just as dawn arrives, we’ll take a little journey together.”

  They waited, side by side, cloaked in silence and private musings, until the first glow of pink and apricot rimmed the horizon. Then, like a fledgling swimmer plunging into deep water, Maeve thrust herself into the unknown, the darkness on the opposite side of the globe.

  At first, dazed by the swiftness of the trip and the energy it required, Maeve could not discern where she was. She knew only that Dathan was beside her, and that he supported her with a chivalrous arm around her waist.

  After a few moments Maeve’s head cleared. She had not been stricken by the distance, she knew, but by the avoidance of the vampire sleep that would normally have claimed her just then.

  “Fascinating!” Dathan remarked, looking down into a moon-washed pit, where dozens of life-size bronze soldiers marched in formation, accompanied by life-size horses and chariots. The excavation had clearly been abandoned for some time, and Maeve knew intuitively that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, more of these ancient sculptures buried all over China.

  Maeve marveled, but not at the industry of a long-dead civilization. No, it was her own ability to resist that all-encompassing sleep that amazed her. It was probably these reflections, she would conclude later, that prevented her from sensing the impending attack.

  They came out from behind every soldier, those terrible, blood-drinking corpses Lisette had made, making a shrill sound that was part shriek and part groan.