The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  “There can be no looking back now, Maeve. It’ll turn you into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, and rob you of all your power.”

  She turned, looked up into his dark purple eyes, and nodded. “You’re right,” she said.

  Valerian took her hands in his own, and they raised their arms high, in a graceful, simultaneous motion, and then they vanished, Shaleen’s parting words echoing in their ears.

  “Coo, mate!” she cried, no doubt elbowing Calder in the ribs at the same time. “Did you see that?”

  Lisette gave a snarling shriek of outrage when she found Valerian’s cell empty, and the new vampire, Shaleen, gone as well.

  Fools! Did they truly believe they could escape her so easily? Why, when she found those two she’d bind them to trees and bum them, like Joan of Arc at her stake, as a lesson to all vampires!

  She dropped to her knees in the fetid straw, clutching her middle, as the troublesome weakness struck her. It was that rebel Maeve Tremayne’s fault that she suffered now—Lisette had not been the same since their battle in that cave, far away in China.

  She’d been sorely tried in that confrontation, and injured, and she had had to console herself by lying in her crypt beneath the cellar of her villa on the coast of Spain for several days and nights, with two captive mortal lovers to sustain her.

  Even now, curled up in the straw of that miserable castle in the north of Scotland, a bleak spot abandoned even in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s day and naught but a ruin in modern times, Lisette smiled at the memory of the pleasures she’d taken.

  First, she’d prowled the city in her carriage, finding one luscious boy and then another. She’d taken them to her villa, gotten them drunk on wine bottled before their great-grandfathers were born, and then taught them passion, one by one.

  Finally she’d taken them, sated and senseless, to her hiding place deep beneath the floor of the cellar, and slept, waking only long enough to feed off one or the other.

  They’d been dead when she left them, both of them, for she hadn’t wanted to go to the effort of making the poor lads into vampires.

  She frowned, recollecting another experience.

  She’d selected Aidan Tremayne for her favors, one night beside a seventeenth-century road, and taught him ecstasy so keen that each of their trysts had left him dazed and drunk with pleasure. Eventually she’d given her cherished Aidan the ultimate gift, immortality, and he’d thanked her by calling her cursed, by hating and reviling her.

  Lisette raised herself, both hands braced against the filthy carpet of straw. That, she thought bitterly, was why she’d turned no more of her lovely boys into nightwalkers. They were just too thick to comprehend, those ungrateful creatures, that they’d been translated from mere clay to virtual gods.

  A strange exhaustion felled her, and she dropped to the floor again, overcome by the need to sleep. She would find Valerian and the miscreant, Shaleen, later, along with a fine-looking mortal lad to nourish her. In the meantime, though, she’d just rest a little while.

  Calder was awake, inside his hardened husk of a body, just as he’d heard Valerian assert earlier, but he could not so much as twitch a muscle or force the weakest murmur past his lips.

  He tried to piece together his shattered memories, in an effort to make sense of what was happening, but he remembered only two things at first—William firing the bullet that had in effect killed him, and the terrible, fiery elation he’d known when Valerian had drawn the very blood from his veins and then given it back again, forever changed.

  He groped forward mentally, and more came to him. Things were definitely falling into place.

  He, the late Calder Holbrook, was now a vampire, an immortal creature with the power to travel through time and space at will. Granted, he wouldn’t be able to go backward very far—Maeve had told him once that a blood-drinker could venture only so far as the instant following his own death. Since this had occurred so recently, there was no point in going back.

  Still, the future was his. As soon as he was able to move, he would go forward to the final years of the twentieth century and begin soaking up the knowledge he craved. He would soon understand all the newest surgical techniques, know how to mix chemicals into miraculous drugs. Then, then he would return to his own century, and save as many of the soldiers, as many of the suffering children, as he could.

  Calder’s thoughts returned, as he suspected they always would, to Maeve. He knew, even in his distracted state, that he was somehow tethered to her, and he blessed the fact. She would be the center of his life, the sunshine he must now foreswear, the light he warmed himself by, now and forever, world without end, amen and amen.

  He tried again to move, and again found the effort to be futile.

  Valerian pervaded his mind, that imperious and arrogant vampire whom he had mistrusted and disliked from their first encounter. Like it or not, Calder reflected, with a sigh of the spirit, a bond existed between them now. In a very real sense, Valerian had sired him into the new and exciting life that lay waiting, just ahead.

  He struggled, eager to regain consciousness and begin that life, and felt a cool hand come to rest on his forehead, one so small that it might have belonged to a child.

  “There now,” a youthful, feminine voice chided, “just lie still and don’t be so impatient. You’ll be prowlin’ the night soon enough, I’ll wager, and a pretty fellow you is, too.”

  Calder felt the forces of his changing body trying to overcome him, push him under the dark, glimmering surface into oblivion. They wanted to get on with the business of transformation, those forces, and Calder hadn’t the strength or the will to counter them.

  He relaxed his roiling emotions, soothed his tempestuous mind, and went under.

  The old manse was tucked away in the English countryside, long-deserted, overgrown with vines and ivy, almost certainly purported by the locals to be haunted, and Maeve could see that Valerian loved the place on sight. It would, she supposed, appeal to his macabre sense of humor to make mysterious lights appear in the windows on occasion and send out the odd bone-chilling shriek just for the sake of drama.

  Dathan stepped out of a shadowy, cobwebbed corner, seeming to form himself from the particles of dust and darkness that made up the night. He raised his arms, causing his cloak to spread like wings, and grinned.

  “Perfect, isn’t it?” he asked cordially, though Maeve immediately sensed the chilly wariness that had sprung up between the warlock and Valerian.

  Valerian nodded, his jawline unusually taut. “All it needs is a bubbling cauldron and some cackling crones,” he said evenly.

  Dathan laughed, but the sound had a jagged edge. “Stereotypes,” he scolded. “You don’t sleep in a casket, do you, Vampire? Nor, I trust, would a necklace of garlic put you to flight.”

  Maeve interceded, worried by the growing tension. Dathan and Valerian would be no good against Lisette and her forces if they were battling each other. “Stop it,” she said, stepping between the pair and laying a calming hand to each of their chests. She gave Valerian a warning glance, then turned to look into Dathan’s unreadable eyes. “Why did you summon us here?”

  The warlock smiled indulgently, every inch the suave country host, but Maeve was not misled. Dathan was about as warm and welcoming as one of those twentieth-century knives—switchblades, she believed they were called.

  “I have something to show you—” he said, shifting his gaze to Valerian’s glowering countenance only after stretching the moment to very uncomfortable lengths, “—both.”

  Beyond the crumbling stone walls of the manse, in the luxurious, black-velvet darkness of that isolated place, something howled.

  Maeve and Valerian exchanged a quick glance as they followed Dathan deeper into the old cottage.

  No owl, that, Valerian observed in a mental undertone that somehow crept beneath Dathan’s level of awareness.

  I know you’ll protect me, Maeve teased in response.

  They had entere
d what had probably been a parlor at one time, and even though they could all see as clearly as cats, Dathan went through the formality of lighting the nubs of tallow spilling messily from an old candelabra.

  Maeve took in the chandelier, draped with dust, the worn organ that only the mice played now, the stained and peeling wallpaper, and imagined the ghostly forms of a dozen long-dead vicars moving about, colliding with each other.

  “A very colorful thought,” Valerian commented with quiet amusement, making no effort to keep the conversation private this time. “Rather like that attraction in Disneyland.”

  Dathan cast a scathing glance at the clearly unwelcome vampire towering beside Maeve, and then clapped his hands together with brisk authority.

  Immediately two warlocks entered the room from deeper inside the house, the dining room probably, escorting a young man between them.

  Both Valerian and Maeve cried out, in despairing shock, for this enchanted wretch was their Aidan, the one they had both loved and lost.

  Valerian found his voice first. “What have you done to him?” he rasped, springing forward as if to free the poor captive from the warlocks’ hold. He whirled on Dathan, grasped his flowing shirt in both hands, and wrenched him onto the balls of his feet. “God damn your black soul, what have you done?”

  “It’s all right Valerian,” Maeve said gently, for after the first shock she’d realized that however perfect the resemblance, this was not her brother. She ventured close and touched the seemingly frozen, breathtakingly handsome face tentatively. “Aidan is far away and quite safe. This is only someone who looks like him.”

  Dathan shook himself free of Valerian’s grip, his eyes glittering with a suppressed thirst for vengeance, and nodded. “Very astute, Your Majesty. This is Llewellyn, one of our own. We’ve tampered with his mind a bit, as you suggested, and when he comes out of this stupor we’ve so mercifully induced, he’ll believe with all his treacherous little heart that he’s mortal.”

  Valerian looked confused, and started to speak, but Maeve stopped him by reaching out to grasp his forearm.

  “Ingenious,” she said.

  “What is the purpose of this?” Valerian demanded, exasperated.

  Maeve walked around Llewellyn, studying him in amazement. If it hadn’t been for the connection between herself and her twin brother, she would have believed this creature, this warlock, to be Aidan—sweet, stubborn, human Aidan.

  “Smooth your feathers and think for a moment, Vampire,” Dathan said. “How do you believe Lisette would react, were she to encounter our brilliant creation?”

  Maeve sensed the quickening in Valerian as, at last, he made the connection.

  He muttered an amazed exclamation and peered into the exquisitely molded face of the warlock who would, when fully conscious again, wholeheartedly believe himself to be an ordinary man.

  “Did he look this much like Aidan Tremayne in the beginning,” Valerian wondered aloud, “or did you alter him somehow?”

  Dathan sighed, as if weary of silly questions. “There was a resemblance—rather faint really. We accentuated it, knowing of the lovely Lisette’s special fancy for Tremayne. Now the question is, how do we draw her notice to our lad here?”

  Valerian flung a testy glance at the warlock. “And I was so certain that you’d thought of everything.” Dathan seethed but, with visible effort, managed to control his temper. “If that were so,” he replied in a strange, purring growl, “then we’d have no need of you, would we, Vampire?”

  Valerian took a step toward Dathan, and again Maeve moved between them.

  “Once Lisette has taken the bait and poisoned herself with the blood of this lovely warlock,” she said, “the two of you may feel free to ravage each other. In the meantime, everything we hold precious is at stake, and our only hope is to work together!”

  “Take the lad to Spain,” Valerian said moments later in a hoarse, grudging whisper. He named an obscure village. “Lisette has a villa there, on the coast. Wherever she is, she’s attuned to that place, and she’ll sense his presence and come to him.”

  Maeve stared at him. “You knew of this villa, and yet you said nothing?”

  Valerian shook his head. “I had forgotten. Seeing Llewellyn here brought back memories.”

  It was plain enough that the memories in question involved Aidan, but Maeve didn’t pursue the subject because it was so obviously personal.

  “To Spain, then,” Dathan said, clapping his hands again.

  After Llewellyn had been led to the entrance of an especially lively cantina, Dathan broke the spell that had rendered him catatonic, using a brief incantation.

  “Hello, George,” the warlock said, offering his hand to the lad.

  The young man blinked, and then his eyes cleared and he smiled. “Hello,” he said, shaking Dathan’s hand. “Do I know you?”

  The sight of that smile, an eerily exact duplicate of Aidan’s, wrenched Maeve on the deepest level of her being, and she suspected Valerian’s reaction was quite similar.

  “We were acquainted once,” Dathan said, stepping back. “Well, I won’t keep you—you’re obviously bent on meeting friends.”

  George nodded happily. In their clever, mysterious way the warlocks had evidently provided him not only with a new identity, but a past as well. Furthermore, they had altered the memories of several mortals to include him. “I don’t believe I got your name,” he said cheerfully.

  “Not important,” Dathan said, turning away.

  George stared after him in bafflement for a moment, and Maeve feared that the trick had not worked after all, that the youth remembered being a warlock. If that were so, Lisette would not be deceived.

  Then Maeve shifted her consciousness, the way she generally did instinctively when warlocks were around, and the signal from George’s mind came through loud and clear. He believed he was a man, and, therefore, he transmitted that belief to everyone and everything around him.

  Valerian gripped her arm and hustled her away into the darkness. “Much as we might like to hang around and watch,” he explained rather tersely, “Lisette will pick up on our presence and smell a trap if we do.”

  He was right, of course.

  Maeve turned to him when they were well away from the cantina. Dathan and his companions had already vanished, probably for the same reason Valerian had mentioned. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” Valerian said, plainly as irritated by the prospect as she was. “We wait and hope that Lisette bites into our lovely warlock’s jugular and subsequently chokes to death on his blood.”

  Maeve was frowning, worried. “It might not be fatal, you know,” she said. “When Aidan fed on a warlock, he was very ill, but he survived.”

  “I remember,” Valerian said somewhat gruffly. Talk of Aidan always made him either restive or testy, or both. “Even if she does not glut herself with the poison, in her greed Lisette will be seriously weakened. We will close in then, destroy her, and send her ashes to Nemesis along with our most eloquent pleas for mercy.”

  He glanced up at the starry sky and smiled wanly. “Do you suppose Dathan would mind if I explored that delightful old manse?”

  “As if you cared whether he minded or not,” Maeve retorted, amused, eager to feed and then return to Calder. She would send Shaleen away, lie beside her beloved on the slab, and join her dreams to his. “Good-bye for now, my friend.”

  Valerian bent and kissed her forehead lightly. “Fare-thee-well,” he responded, and then he was gone.

  Damn, but he’s good, Maeve thought, still awed by the other vampire’s theatrical flair.

  She raised her arms, then, smiling, and took herself to her favorite hunting grounds—the seediest part of London, where the lowest of the low prowled the night, scheming, indulging in their deliberate evils.

  She was drawn to a dark, stinking attic of a dockside pub, a place even rats and fleas would hesitate to frequent. There a drunken man had cornered his wife, demanding the few pen
ce she’d been able to scrape together while he’d been at sea.

  Maeve knew in a moment that the woman had been beaten half senseless for her trouble, and her wail was pitiful to hear. “Please, Jack—don’t ’urt me no more—I needs the money for the babe that’s comin’—”

  The lout drew back one booted foot to kick his fallen wife, and outrage surged through Maeve, as hot and sour as bile. She gave a snarling shriek, one fit to wake the dead, and flung herself at the brute, who raised meaty hands to shelter himself.

  The woman, whimpering with terror, having no way of knowing that she would not be next, scrambled for the ladder at the edge of the loft.

  Jack’s blubbery, unshaven face was white beneath a layer of filth. “Saints in ’eaven,” he rasped, “what sort of devil are ye’?”

  Only an instant later he found out exactly what sort.

  When his mates from the pub below came scrambling up the ladder to see what poor Mary had been blathering about, they discovered old Jack in a heap, near dead, and him with two bloody holes in his neck in the bargain.

  36

  The cellar where Maeve had left Calder was empty.

  Wild panic seized her. Had Lisette, or some other fiend, found him and stolen him away?

  Frantic, Maeve searched the room and found Shaleen dozing behind a crate of antique china.

  The little hoyden was barely conscious—dawn was so near—but she looked up at Maeve and blinked.

  “What happened?” Maeve demanded, crouching and grasping the child’s bony shoulders. “Where is Calder? Where is he?”

  Shaleen scrambled to her feet, visibly struggling against the inertia that overcame most vampires with the approach of sunrise. “He’s gone, mum, that he is—and it’s been a long time now, too! I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t be stopped—he’s a strong one, he is. Why, he came off that slab like a cannon shot!”

  Maeve felt herself succumbing to the catatonic sleep and knew there was no point in resisting it. Her terror and despair increased even as she began to lose consciousness—there were so many things Calder didn’t know, so many dangers.