The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Maeve. The name was an entreaty.

  She whirled to stare at him, waiting, her whole being suspended. Her soul cried out silently to his, begging him to stay.

  Help me.

  Maeve was in agony. I am helping you, darling. Look for the Light, and follow it.

  You are the light.

  No! Don’t you see? I am the darkness.

  Don’t leave me, Maeve. Don’t let me die.

  She took a step closer to Calder, standing at his bedside. Without another word, she lay down beside him, covered him in her cloak, and thought of London.

  If there was a way under heaven to save Calder, besides turning him into a fiend, like herself, into a being who would one day hate her for her trouble, Maeve vowed she would find it.

  Dimity was out of practice when it came to time travel, and she made several abortive efforts before she landed herself in the middle of Valerian’s cell.

  The place was rank, and a half dozen frail-boned, ragged humans slept in a pile in the corner, like puppies huddling on a cold night. All of them were alive, but they would need to consume a great deal of calves’ liver before their blood could truly serve them again.

  “Valerian?” Dimity said, annoyed, placing her hands on her hips. “Show yourself!”

  He appeared suddenly, directly in front of her, and made her jump backward with a little cry of fright.

  “What the—?”

  Valerian’s grin was a bit wan, but just as audacious as ever. “Sorry,” he said, though he plainly wasn’t. “It gets boring, being stuck away in a rat’s nest like this one, so I’ve taken to practicing my magic.”

  Dimity looked around the gloomy cell. “Well, it’s no palace, of course, but it could be worse.” She nodded toward the pile of rags and flesh in the corner. “At least Lisette’s kept you well fed, and you don’t look as if you’ve been abused—only neglected.”

  Valerian drew himself up to his full and haughty height at that point and glared down his patrician nose. “She’s been fattening me up like a Christmas goose,” he said, “and I’ll thank you not to minimize my sufferings until you’ve been through a similar ordeal yourself.”

  She affected a sigh. “All right,” she conceded. “If you want my sympathy, you have it. Now, are you through with your travail, or would you like to enjoy it a little while longer? If you’re quite satisfied that you’ve undergone sufficient agony, then let’s discuss getting you out of here.”

  Valerian flushed, a sign of recent feeding more than anger, and narrowed his eyes at her. “You are a most caustic individual, for one who avails herself to the favors of angels.”

  Dimity glared. “And you are a hardheaded, arrogant idiot,” she retorted, standing her ground. She was not acquainted with Valerian, although she’d often heard of his exploits, but she had encountered plenty of creatures just like him, both human and immortal. She knew only too well that if she allowed it, he’d run roughshod over her. “Do you wish me to rescue you, or leave you here to rot?”

  The legendary vampire was plainly furious, and no doubt his pride was injured as well. After all, he’d been captured by a vampire of the feminine gender, and now his only hope of salvation was in the hands of yet another female.

  Dimity smiled. A little humility was good for the soul. “Well?” she prompted.

  “All right,” the great Valerian snarled. “Yes, of course I want to get out of here—I feel like a mouse shut up in a shoe box! But how do you propose to achieve this magnificent feat? Have you grown more powerful than Lisette and failed to mention the fact heretofore?”

  Dimity rolled her eyes. “Lisette grows careless. There are weaknesses in the mental barrier she’s put up around you, or I wouldn’t have been able to get in.” She crossed the room to the heavy iron door and fixed her gaze on the ancient, cumbersome lock.

  “There’s no point in attempting that old trick,” Valerian said. “I’ve tried to move that lock a hundred times, and it won’t give.”

  A smile came to Dimity’s lips as the works splintered inside the lock under the force of her thoughts. “I guess you just didn’t try hard enough,” she said sweetly. “Who’s guarding you?”

  Valerian’s exasperation was plain, but so was his relief. “A conniving, back-stabbing little chit named Shaleen,” he said. “I like her.”

  Dimity swung open the door and stepped into the stone passageway beyond. “You would,” she replied. “Come along. I’ve found this whole experience a little enervating, frankly, and I’d like to get back to London and my beloved nineteenth century in time for an extra feeding.”

  “‘I’ve found this whole experience a little enervating,’” Valerian mimicked sourly, following her along the hall. Dimity imagined it would be quite some time before he got over his pique at being saved by a lesser vampire. “You haven’t saved me yet,” he said aloud, reminding her that he was an old blood-drinker, like herself, and a skilled one.

  “You’re right,” she replied diplomatically. “Let’s try to be civil to each other, shall we? After all, we’re both up to our necks—if you’ll forgive the expression—in trouble.”

  As if on cue, a shape rose up ahead of them in the corridor, with a soul-splintering shriek.

  “Please,” Valerian said contemptuously.

  For one terrible moment Dimity thought the creature confronting them was Lisette itself, and that Valerian had further sealed their doom by mocking her, but a closer inspection revealed the little spitfire Valerian had mentioned before, the fledgling called Shaleen.

  “Step aside,” Dimity ordered quietly. “You must know, naive as you are, that you haven’t the strength to prevail over two mature vampires.”

  Shaleen seemed to wilt, until she looked like what she’d been before her making, a scrap of a girl who’d never had enough love or food, enough of anything, in the whole brief span of her mortal life. “I want to go with you,” she said. “The queen will stake me out in the courtyard to burn in the daylight if she comes back and finds that her prize captive has escaped.”

  Valerian nudged Dimity from behind. “She’ll make a handy soldier in our present trouble, with that fiery spirit of hers.”

  “I suppose you want to be her tutor,” Dimity said dryly. “I don’t think you’re going to have the time, though. Maeve seems to think she needs your help to prevail against Lisette.”

  There was a scrabbling sound behind them, and Dimity whirled, as did Valerian, to see the pale boys creeping out of the cell and groping their way along the wall in the other direction.

  Shaleen pushed between Valerian and Dimity to stop them, but Valerian caught her arm as she passed. It was then that Dimity got her first glimpse of the peculiar nobility that was as much a part of the fabled vampire beside her as his blatant hedonism and his deft sarcasm. “Let them go,” he said.

  Shaleen’s face was a study in angry confusion. “But why? Why did you suffer them to live? It’s not as though they matter at all—”

  “Everything matters,” Valerian said, his voice firm but kind as well. “Now, come with us. We blood-drinkers have far weightier things to contend with than a pack of anemic beggars and thieves.”

  Shaleen cast another greedy glance after the victims she’d no doubt gathered herself for the prisoner she both feared and admired, but then she slipped off in the other direction, leading the way.

  “There’s a weak place, here,” she said finally when they came to a little chamber at the end of a virtual rabbit’s warren of twists and turns. “It’s how I get in and out with the lads for this one’s supper.” She nodded her tousled head in Valerian’s direction. “Herself didn’t want him to have no supper, you know, but I couldn’t stand to think of it.”

  Valerian grinned and reached out with one graceful hand to muss the girl’s hair, and she beamed at this attention.

  Dimity was impatient. “Come,” she snapped, raising her arms. “Lisette might return at any moment, and I for one do not want to be invited into her parlor fo
r tea.”

  Valerian found Maeve in the echoing chamber on the uppermost floor of her London house, working feverishly at her loom. The tapestry had lengthened considerably since he’d last viewed it, but the vampire took no time to examine it again. Instead he stared, confounded, at the bloodless, near-dead mortal lying on a pallet beside the towering windows, awash in moonlight.

  “Calder Holbrook,” he muttered, both irritated and confused.

  Maeve whirled, for she hadn’t sensed his presence, and in looking at her Valerian knew why. She was almost gaunt, and there were enormous shadows under her eyes.

  “Valerian,” she half sobbed, half whispered, and ran to him.

  He enfolded her in his arms, this vampire he had made more than two hundred years ago, and for the first time wished that he’d left her alone that fateful night. At least then she’d have been spared whatever cancerous grief was devouring her now.

  “Look at you,” she said, her sunken eyes too bright as she took in his splendid tunic of dark gold velvet and the sleek leggings that matched. “You look like a duke or an earl.”

  “I’ve been in a sixteenth-century mood of late.” The explanation was inane, in light of the suffering he saw in Maeve. “What has happened?” he demanded in an urgent whisper, glancing once again at the mortal still lying senseless on his pallet. “I beg of you—tell me how to help you!”

  35

  “The last thing this world needs is another vampire,” Valerian said, the frown he’d worn throughout Maeve’s explanation still in place. He glanced thoughtfully at Calder, who stirred on his deathbed, just beneath the surface of consciousness. “On the other hand, the soul in question is his own. If he wants to be a blood-drinker, then it seems to me that he has the right to make that choice.”

  Maeve had been over the same arguments in her own mind, with tedious attention to detail. In fact, the dilemma had tortured her, sapped her strength and dulled her wits—all this at a time when she most needed all her powers.

  She looked at Calder, one hand over her heart, and whispered, “He’ll hate me for it someday, just the way Aidan hated Lisette.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Maeve saw the great vampire wince—though not, she was sure, at the mention of Lisette, but that of Aidan. He had loved her brother, she knew, with a poetic poignancy that transcended simple sex, vampire or mortal, and it was likely that he still cherished those feelings.

  “That’s a selfish argument,” Valerian observed gruffly. He crouched beside Calder’s pallet and touched his waxen face with gentle fingers. “How have you kept him alive this long?”

  Maeve hesitated before revealing her terrible secret. “I’ve been giving him blood—just small infusions of it—in the hope of sustaining him until he rallies from his own strength.”

  Valerian’s magnificent features tightened, and his eyes flashed. “The process is already begun, then,” he said in a brusque whisper. “Great Zeus, Maeve, it’s a miracle he hasn’t become one of those wretched things Lisette has been plaguing us with!”

  She swayed under the shock of the older vampire’s words and gripped the framework of one of the tall windows to steady herself. “What?”

  Kneeling now, Valerian bared Calder’s throat with one hand, all the while gazing up at Maeve with fiery frustration in his violet eyes. “You’ve never wanted to make a vampire, to my knowledge, so I saw no reason to explain the process.” His thumb stroked the fragile skin over Calder’s jugular vein gently, almost caressingly, as he spoke. “There is no halfway measure, Maeve. Vampires can give blood to each other, but it is very dangerous with humans. How do you think Lisette made those dreadful creatures of hers? By subjecting them to only part of the process! It’s the very reason they have no logic, no individuality, but only unrelenting, terrible hunger.”

  Maeve covered her mouth with one hand to stifle a cry of pain at what she might have done to Calder. “Why didn’t I just let him die?” she pleaded. “Why?”

  “There is no time for self-recrimination now, my darling,” Valerian scolded, but with the utmost gentleness. “Steps must be taken to rectify what you’ve done—if not, he’ll become an enemy, one we’ll have to destroy.”

  She sank to her knees at the foot of Calder’s pallet, watching with both hope and horror as Valerian bent over the love of her immortal life and began the transformation. She wanted to look away a hundred times, nay, a thousand, as the vampire emptied Calder of his blood, but that would have been a form of disloyalty, of cowardice. So she kept her terrible vigil.

  Calder was, for all practical intents and purposes, dead during those moments before Valerian sunk his fangs into that fragile flesh again and restored the blood, changed.

  At last Valerian thrust himself away from Calder, a gleam of some unholy satisfaction in his eyes, and rose gracefully to his feet. “Now,” he said, “if this fledgling wishes to hate anyone for his transfiguration, let him hate me.”

  Maeve stood and moved around to the side of the pallet to look down into Calder’s face. He was still asleep, but the lines of suffering were smoothed away by some inner magic even as she watched. He seemed larger somehow, his body harder and more powerful.

  “We’d best move him to a safer place,” Valerian suggested with a sigh. “He cannot bear the sunlight any more than we can.”

  Maeve nodded, closed her arms around Calder, and willed the both of them to the dank gloom of the secret part of the cellar were she herself reposed. Valerian, a showman at heart, was there before them and in the process of lighting the candles.

  “What will happen now?” Maeve asked when Calder had been settled comfortably on the slab. She had had no experience with the making of vampires, as Valerian had pointed out earlier, and did not remember anything helpful about her own metamorphosis.

  “The transformation has already begun, of course,” Valerian said. “He’s lying there, wide awake and cognizant of everything we say and do, but unable to communicate in any way.” He moved to Calder’s side, touched his shoulder with that same tenderness he had exhibited before. “Do not worry, fledgling,” he said gently. “Do not struggle. In a day, or perhaps two, you will be completely functional.”

  After a moment of thoughtful silence, Valerian turned his attention to Maeve. “I would suggest, my love, that you leave your darling in the care of another vampire, one less vital to our cause, and join the rest of us in the effort to save ourselves.”

  Maeve nodded, though the reluctance she felt at the idea of abandoning Calder, especially now, was a keen sorrow in itself. “Yes, you’re right, of course—but who can we trust?”

  “Trust?” Valerian smiled grimly and arched one eyebrow. “Why, no one, Your Majesty—perhaps not even each other. Still, I know of a fledgling who is most anxious to endear herself to me—a thought should be sufficient summons.” With that, he closed his eyes, and an instant later a young, brown-haired snippet appeared in the room with an unceremonious crash, toppling several crates and boxes.

  “What the bloody hell?” she screeched in a voice that made Maeve want to put her hands over her ears. The new arrival focused her spritely brown gaze on Valerian, then a glorious smile spread across her smudged face. “Oh, it’s you, then!”

  Valerian shook his head. “Yes, it’s me. Where are those pretty clothes I gave you, chit? And how do you manage to stay sooty as a chimney pot even after a washing?”

  The young vampire looked chagrined and, at the same time, very pleased that Valerian had taken notice of her in any way. She would have blushed splendidly, had she been a mortal creature; instead, she simply turned to Maeve and executed an awkward curtsy.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, mum,” she said.

  “This is Shaleen,” Valerian explained with a smile in his eyes.

  Maeve smiled herself, for the first time since before Calder’s shooting. Valerian was the most ferocious of vampires and, some said, the most ruthless, and yet he loved playing the mentor. Now that she thought of it, Maev
e could not remember a time when he hadn’t had some fledgling under tutelage—herself, for instance, and Aidan, and others too numerous to name.

  “How do you do?” Maeve said grandly, extending her hand to the feisty little spitfire and hoping she wasn’t making a mistake in abandoning Calder to her care.

  “Enough of the social refinements,” Valerian snapped, suddenly impatient with the whole proceeding. “There is a war on, in case you’ve both forgotten.” He gestured toward Calder. “This one has just been changed. We’ll be wanting you to look after him, stand guard, so to speak. You’ve had experience with that, now haven’t you?” Shaleen quailed a little under Valerian’s fierce glare, but then she made a visible effort to muster her pride and succeeded to a degree. “I’ll look after him, all right. Won’t no mortals come and stake him, I’ll see to it personal—”

  Valerian closed his eyes for a moment, a study in impatient grandeur. “We are quite convinced,” he said sternly.

  His apprentice subsided, chagrined. “Well, then,” she murmured, dragging a crate over for use as a chair and taking up her post beside Calder, “I’ll just button me lip, then, won’t I?”

  Maeve’s amusement ebbed as she thought of leaving Calder, especially in so fragile a state, but she knew she must not tarry. She went to the other side of the slab where her lover lay, opposite the bristly, determined Shaleen, and bent to kiss his mouth.

  “I’ll be back soon, darling,” she whispered. “Please don’t be afraid.”

  “Great Zeus,” Valerian snapped, gesturing wildly with one arm toward the greater world beyond that cellar, “we’re about to be overrun by legions of avenging angels! Must we dally in this dusty pit all night?” Maeve laid her ear to Calder’s chest, hearing no heartbeat, feeling no rise and fall of breathing, and knew an infinite sorry, as well as joy. They would be together for eternity, if they were fortunate, rich with power and full of strength, and yet Calder’s soul had been stolen this night, and she’d been a party to the theft.

  She felt Valerian’s hands come to rest on her shoulders, gentle, elegant, and firm. He spoke quietly.