The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Calder, still trapped in the dream, thrust himself out of bed and ran into the hallway. He’d screamed a warning, putting all his strength into the effort, but not a sound had come from his throat.

  He watched, in horror, as William and Marie argued, saw his half brother grab his mother by the shoulders and shake her, heard his father’s stem order to let her go. Then, cold as a corpse, paralyzed with fear, Calder had watched as Marie tumbled over the stair rail.

  It was torment enough, seeing that horrid spectacle once, but the scene kept repeating itself, over and over again, with a slow, macabre grace.

  Calder thrust himself back to the surface of consciousness, unable to bear it any longer, only to feel his heart lurch at the sight awaiting him.

  William was standing at the foot of the bed, hardly more than a shadow in the thick darkness, so still that he might have been part of the furniture. As Calder stared at him, still half-asleep, still half-entangled in his nightmare, the clouds that must have covered the moon moved on, flooding the room with an eerie silver light.

  A fragment of that light caught on the nickel-blue barrel of the dueling pistol clasped in William’s hands.

  “I’ll say you were killed by robbers,” he said in an odd, strained voice, “rebel deserters who broke in looking for gold and whiskey. Everyone will believe me, just like before.”

  Calder dared not move, either slowly or suddenly. “Put down the gun,” he said in a low, even voice. “They won’t believe you, William. This is murder, and you’ll surely hang for it.”

  He might not have spoken for all the response he received.

  “I hope you bum in hell,” William said, and then light blazed from the pistol’s barrel. There was an explosion, though Calder couldn’t tell whether it had come from within himself or outside, and then there was only darkness.

  34

  William watched dispassionately as Calder sank back against his pillows, a strangled, gurgling sound coming from somewhere deep inside him. In the moonlight William made out the tom place just below Calder’s right nipple, and saw the matting of dark chest hair turn slick and crimson with blood.

  The elder brother moved to turn up the lights, the dueling pistol dangling from his left hand now, resting hot against his thigh, burning right through his trouser leg.

  There were murmurings in the hallway, and sounds of rushing this way and that, but William felt no urgency, no fear. Smiling grimly, he drew up a chair next to Calder’s bed and sat down to watch him die.

  The world, he told himself, would be better off without the likes of Calder Holbrook—if indeed he was entitled to the surname at all—just as it was better off without tramps like Marie.

  Calder was unconscious, but even then he struggled, and a muscle in William’s jaw tightened. Perhaps, he reflected coolly, it would be necessary to reload the pistol and fire a second bullet. This time the barrel would be pressed to Calder’s throbbing temple.

  “Maeve,” Calder choked, though he had not roused. “Maeve—”

  The bedclothes were sodden with blood now, William noted with satisfaction. Surely no one could lose so much and still live.

  He settled back in his chair, undisturbed by the continued noise beyond Calder’s bedroom door. It might as well have been another country, that hallway. Another world.

  William relaxed, stretching out his legs and crossing his booted feet. “I don’t suppose anyone will believe that story I made up about robbers,” he mused aloud, half to himself and half to Calder.

  Just then Prudence burst in, massive in her nightdress and wrapper. “What’s happened in here—” she began, but then her eyes found Calder, and she gave a weeping scream and trundled to his bedside. “Sweet Jesus in heaven, you done shot him!” she cried. “You done murdered your own brother—”

  William sighed as Prudence tried to staunch Calder’s blood-flow with the corner of her wrapper. She was wailing in despair all the while, and when a cluster of other servants jammed into the doorway to gawk, she shouted for someone to get a doctor, and after that a constable.

  Meanwhile, a storm was rising outside, and the wind rattled the sturdy leaded windows in their frames.

  “I did the right thing by killing him, Prudence,” William said calmly. “He’s a bad seed—evil, just like his mama was. You’ll come to see that, all in good time.” Prudence left her patient long enough to round the bed and snatch the dueling pistol from William’s limp grasp. “You gone crazy, that’s what,” the housekeeper said wetly. “You gone plum out of your mind!”

  She stormed back to Calder and laid the dueling pistol on the other nightstand.

  “What made you do such a thing, Mr. William? Ain’t there been enough grief and sufferin’ in this house over the years?”

  William didn’t mind answering the question. In fact, he was certain that, once he had, no further explanations would be required of him. He looked at Calder, whose flesh was pallorous and gray—except, of course, where the blood soaked him—and could not disguise the hatred he felt.

  “I stayed here, all those years, and learned the banking business. I did what Papa wanted, always. I put aside my own wishes, my own dreams, to honor his.” William felt his very soul contort within him; it was an ugly pain. “Calder here was the prodigal, fancy free, and his briefest appearance in this house was cause for killing the fatted calf. Still, fool that I was, I believed Papa appreciated my sacrifices, that someday I would be rewarded for my loyalty. And what happened? Papa left everything to Calder—the house, the bank, the fortunes we made together. All of it was Calder’s, except, of course, for a pittance of an income earmarked for me.”

  “Dear Jesus, save us,” Prudence muttered. She’d taken off the wrapper now and made a bandage of sorts, but William knew her efforts were hopeless. The white flannel she pressed to the wound was already turning scarlet. “You had no call to do this—Mr. Calder would have done right by you. I don’t think he even wanted this old house, nor much money, neither.”

  William recalled the things Calder had said earlier, in the family dining room. He had claimed that he didn’t want any of their father’s bequests, but William hadn’t believed it then and he didn’t believe it now. How could anyone fail to want all that surrounded him, and with the full measure of his soul at that?

  Monumental as it was, his father’s final betrayal wasn’t the whole reason for what William had done. Somehow Calder had found out the truth about the night Marie died, and he’d sworn revenge. However mild his tone, Calder had meant what he said. He would have dogged William to his very grave, making him wonder, making him sweat.

  William offered none of that to Prudence, though, for she had always favored Calder over him, just the way Bernard Holbrook had done.

  “You hold on, precious,” Prudence was murmuring close to Calder’s ear. “You just hold on—don’t you go off nowheres. I won’t have you dead and hauntin’ this place, and always gettin’ underfoot when I’m tryin’ to get my work done!”

  William closed his eyes as the muscles at his nape clenched.

  The constable and an army doctor arrived at the same time.

  “It was him,” William heard Prudence say, and of course he knew without looking that she was pointing a finger in his direction. “He done shot his own brother. And over money, too.”

  William was hauled, none too ceremoniously, to his feet, by the redheaded, blue-eyed policeman. “Afraid you’ll have to come away with me, Mr. Holbrook,” the big Irishman said.

  The doctor had already tom off his suit coat and begun working over Calder.

  “It’s hopeless,” William told him pleasantly as his hands were wrenched behind him by the Irishman and bound with heavy iron cuffs.

  The physician spared him one scathing glance and returned to his futile efforts.

  Lisette’s lair, a beautifully appointed tomb intended for some ancient and very important Chinese personage, was empty.

  Maeve examined everything—the pyre, made entirel
y of ivory and inlaid with twenty-four-karat gold, the chests brimming with treasure, the many jade carvings. The mummified being for which the crypt had been created was gone, but in an anteroom she found horrible evidence that Lisette had spent time here.

  One of the mortal lovers for which she was so noted, a handsome young man, sat upright in a chair, dead. He looked more like a wax statue than a corpse, and on a small table before him rested a cup and an exquisite porcelain teapot.

  “It would seem the poor lad died under sociable circumstances, at least,” Dathan observed. “I’ll wager there isn’t a drop of blood left in him.”

  Maeve shivered as a spider crawled out the spout of the teapot and scurried across the tabletop to perch on one of the corpse’s gray fingers. “There’s no need to give an accounting,” she said. “I have eyes of my own and I can see what’s happened here.”

  Dathan sighed. “At least he didn’t get himself turned into one of those vile creatures Lisette has been plaguing us with these past weeks.”

  It was a small consolation to Maeve. This young man, whoever he was, reminded her of Aidan. He’d had friends and a family, no doubt, and he’d been allotted a share of too-brief, precious years to live and laugh beneath the sun. Lisette had robbed him, carefully and indiscriminately, of a gift stemming from the very heart of the universe.

  “He must have displeased her somehow,” Maeve said sadly. She laid one hand on the lad’s shoulders and was sickened to feel it crumble like dry clay under the fabric of his well-tailored waistcoat.

  “Do you think she’ll return?” Dathan asked. “Perhaps we have only to wait for her here.”

  Maeve shook her head. “No—I’m afraid it won’t be so easy as that. Lisette is through with this place—she wanted us to find it, find her dead lover, and be frustrated.”

  “Well.” Dathan heaved out a heavy sigh and thrust one hand through his hair. “Her plan certainly worked.” Maeve was looking at the corpse, now leaning ludicrously to one side because of the damage to his shoulder. “She seems to favor these dark-haired, blue-eyed lads, the younger and more good-natured and gullible the better. My brother, Aidan, was her lover for a while, before she turned him into a vampire, and there have been many others. A striking number of whom were of similar appearance, now that I think about it.” She stopped and fixed her gaze on Dathan’s grim face. “Have you any warlocks in your army who resemble this poor wretch?”

  A light went on in Dathan’s eyes, one of irritation. “A number of them,” he confirmed quietly. “You want to trap Lisette, lure her by placing one of my more winsome followers under her nose. Brilliant, except that she’ll undoubtedly recognize him for a warlock at first glance.” Maeve raised an eyebrow and then explained patiently, “Vampires recognize warlocks by reading their minds, so to speak. If the warlock in question can be made to believe he is a man, then blood-drinkers will accept him at his own estimate.”

  Now Dathan looked intrigued and thoughtful. “You’re aware, of course, that you’ve just given me a powerful tool with which to deceive vampires, once this current calamity has been thwarted and things go back to normal?”

  “Which means that you owe me something in return.”

  “What?” Dathan asked, moving out of the mortal’s eternal resting place and into the main part of the tomb. He busied himself pocketing gold bracelets and strings of pearls taken from one of the chests while Maeve framed her reply.

  “I want you to teach me the incantation that enables you to start fires,” she said finally.

  Dathan looked at her over one shoulder. “I would be a fool to do that. You could teach it to your vampires, and they’d use it against us.”

  “I would share it with a select few,” Maeve countered. “And you have my word that it would be used against your kind only in self-defense.”

  “Your word,” Dathan mocked, slamming the lid of the chest he’d been looting. “The word of a vampire is hardly something I hold in esteem.”

  Maeve could feel her strength fading. She sat down on the edge of the ivory pyre where Lisette had probably passed many days. “I have told you one of our secrets. I have trusted you with my very life—you’ve had numerous opportunities to drive a stake through my heart while I slept. If I can trust you that much, then you can surely give me the same consideration in return and teach me one small incantation!”

  Dathan crossed the room and lifted Maeve into his arms. “No sleeping here, princess,” he said with grudging affection. “Our intent is to surprise Lisette, not be surprised by her. Think of someplace in England, someplace dark, and I’ll be with you at sunset.”

  Maeve was exhausted, her head lolling against Dathan’s shoulder, but it wasn’t England she fixed in her mind, but America. In fact, she focused on Pennsylvania and the dark cellar beneath Calder’s house.

  Reaching that place, she crouched behind stacks of dusty boxes and crates and closed her eyes.

  Only then, when she was helpless, did images of Calder dying come to her mind. She saw him bandaged, lying unconscious in his bed upstairs, his skin bluish from the loss of blood, but there was nothing she could do. She was trapped, mired, in the deepest, darkest part of her own mind.

  All during the coming day, immersed in the vampire sleep, vivid pictures came to her, like scenes from a dream, and she heard him calling her name. Calling it over and over again, the voice growing fainter with every passing moment, and more hopeless.

  The rain went on throughout the night and the morning, casting an added pall over the circuslike ceremony at Bernard Holbrook’s graveside. Word of the shooting in the Holbrook mansion had gotten out fast, and folks had come from every corner of the city, whether they’d known the dear departed or not, to stare and speculate.

  God knew, the undertaker thought disgustedly, it would be years before folks stopped chattering about how one brother had shot the other one in his bed, while their dead father lay downstairs in his coffin, and how William Holbrook had been brought to the funeral in handcuffs.

  It was a damn pity, all of it, though there was one redeeming element in that ugly situation. Poor Bernard was at peace, and he’d never have to know that he’d spawned a murderer.

  Not that Calder Holbrook was the kind of son a man relished having, either. He’d been stubborn his whole life through, that boy, tormented by things inside him that no one else could see, and he’d broken his father’s heart on more than one occasion with his cussedness.

  The undertaker sighed. Well, Calder was barely clinging to life; that was a fact, for he’d been to the house and seen the young man lying in his bed, unconscious, with half the blood in his body drained away.

  Like as not, there’d be another funeral in a few days, and when they hanged William Holbrook, still another.

  It made a man wonder, that it did. Bernard Holbrook had worked hard all his life, and if he hadn’t always been completely ethical, well, a fellow did what he had to do to make his way. And now it was all gone, blown apart like a house built of matchsticks struck by a high wind.

  When sunset came, Maeve bolted upright.

  All thoughts of Lisette and the impending disaster of war with the angels were barred from her mind. She cared for nothing and no one but Calder, and she transported herself to his room immediately.

  He was indeed dying, just as she had seen in the awful visions while she slept, and his soul had already left his body, bobbing at the far end of the long silver cord that attaches the two, ready to break free. When that happened, Calder would be truly dead, for once the cord is severed, there is no returning.

  A heavy woman in simple calico sat next to the bed, weeping quietly, but she did not look up when Maeve approached on the opposite side because she could not see or hear her.

  Maeve looked with despair upon her lover and found in the murky shallows of his brain the events that had brought him to such an end. William Holbrook had crept into the room with a dueling pistol, stood at the foot of the bed, and shot his only brother, inte
nding to kill him.

  She would go back, she decided, to the night before, when this travesty had taken place, and undo it. She would kill William if she had to, to prevent this from happening.

  When Maeve tried to transport herself, however, her efforts were blocked. In a fury of urgency and despair, she tried twice more, and twice more she failed.

  She needed no explanation for what had happened, for Valerian had explained such matters to her long since. Sometimes, for unknown reasons, time travel simply wasn’t possible.

  Maeve gave up on the attempt to change recent history and instead concentrated on turning herself into a mist, pervading Calder’s being, lending him strength. For a while she was truly a part of him, as close as the breath in his lungs and the thready beat of his heart. Then, suddenly, the shimmering silver cord contracted, wrenching his spirit back into its prison of flesh and blood. The sheer force of the event drove Maeve outside of him again.

  The housekeeper, probably sensing that something was going on in that room that she couldn’t see or hear, grew restless, folded her hands, and began to pray under her breath. Her words were like liquid fire, pouring over Maeve in waves, but Maeve did not flee.

  No matter what she had to suffer, she wasn’t going to leave Calder.

  She huddled in a corner of the room, in the shadows, and presently the housekeeper yawned and went away.

  Maeve made herself solid again, and hurried to Calder’s side, taking one unresponsive hand into both her own. His spirit had retreated again, straining at the invisible tether, trying to escape the pain.

  The best and most unselfish thing to do was let Calder go, let him return to his Maker and be received in that place where she could never venture, and she loved him enough to do just that.

  She raised her hand to her lips and brushed the knuckles with a kiss as light as the pass of a feather. “Good-bye, my darling,” she whispered. Then she rose and turned away, and would have departed forever, except that he spoke to her.

  Not with his lips, but with his mind.