The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  They proceeded into the great chamber where the Brotherhood had held court since Atlantis itself had crumbled into the sea, both silent, both tense.

  “Great Zeus,” Valerian whispered when they spotted the remains of those ancient vampires, macabre shapes, part charred flesh and bone, part collapsed into naught but pale gray cinders. Obviously the members of the Brotherhood had submitted willingly to their fate, for they lay in a precise row, most with their horrible ashen parodies of arms crossed over their chests.

  Maeve recalled Tobias and the others speaking of the old ones’ desire to be at rest, once and for all. She had not really believed him; the idea of wanting death, of seeking it out, was so foreign to her that she’d had no frame of reference.

  Now, faced with the reality, she felt overwhelming grief.

  “Tobias?” she whispered, looking for him among the ruined bodies, unable to recognize his familiar, lithe shape.

  “He’s not here,” Valerian said calmly. He crouched beside one of the vampire corpses and frowned. “Who could have performed this execution?” he mused aloud. “And how could they have lain so still, and yet tolerated the agonies of burning?”

  Maeve stayed back, trembling slightly. She had not known these creatures well, nor even held them in particular esteem, but they were the first of her kind ever to exist—ancestors, in a way. “Perhaps they were dead before the fire was set,” she suggested.

  Valerian looked up at her, his violet eyes distant as he pondered Maeve’s suggestion. “Perhaps,” he finally agreed, rising to his full height.

  “Could Lisette have done this?” Maeve asked.

  The other vampire shook his head. “Even she would not have dared such a travesty. No, this is the Brotherhood’s own work. They wanted oblivion and rest.” Maeve looked again at the horrible figures so neatly arranged on the chamber floor. “Enough to risk the Judgment of Heaven itself? Enough to face the possibility of hellfire?”

  “Evidently,” Valerian confirmed. “What I wouldn’t give to know what they’re experiencing right now. Is it nothingness or damnation?” He indulged in one of his pseudo-sighs. “Let’s look around a little. There may be scrolls, or treasure.”

  It was then, as they began the search, that Maeve gave voice to what they were both thinking. “The task of destroying these old ones must have fallen to Tobias,” she said. “Isn’t it likely that he would have taken any written record of their secrets when he left?”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” Valerian asked, sounding a bit impatient.

  “Where do you suppose he is? Tobias, I mean?” Valerian lifted the lid of a tarnished brass and copper chest and peered inside. “He has probably gone underground to rest. I seem to remember that Tobias wasn’t quite so enamored with the idea of giving up the proverbial ghost as the others were.” He paused. “Come here. I’ve found something.”

  Maeve left off opening other chests and casks, all of which had proved to be empty, and joined Valerian on the other side of the chamber.

  Inside the chest were a number of parchment scrolls, carefully tied with shriveled, dirty ribbon. When Valerian touched one of the papers, the corner crumbled into dust.

  Feeling a strong sense of excitement, along with a niggling, quiet terror, Maeve drew closer and focused her mind on the contents of those rolls of ancient paper. Opening and reading them in the ordinary way would obviously have destroyed them.

  At first she couldn’t understand the words that flashed into her mind, for they were not only foreign, but archaic in the bargain. When she concentrated, however, the meaning began to come to her.

  Recorded there, by some vampire scribe, were the deepest secrets, sufferings, and philosophies of the Brotherhood.

  “‘The truth is ironic,’” Valerian read aloud, his graceful hands clutching the edge of the chest as he, too, scanned the writings with his mind. “‘It is mortals who will live forever, while all blood-drinkers and other unnatural creatures must one day pass over into death.’” He raised himself to his feet and turned to look deep into Maeve’s widened eyes. “I guess the joke is on us.”

  Maeve’s attention was drawn back to the treatises inside the chest. “There are other things here,” she said in a thoughtful tone. “They lied when they claimed there was no longer a means to change a vampire back into a mortal—the necessary combination of chemicals is recorded here. And they knew, these vampires, how to start fires with their minds, in much the same way Dathan did—”

  Valerian stepped back to allow Maeve to move closer to the scrolls, gesturing her forward, his voice gruff with emotion. “Absorb the magic,” he said. “You are the true queen.”

  Maeve hesitated for a few moments, then knelt, as Valerian had done earlier, and spread both her hands out above the parchments, as inscriptions she had already divined instructed her to do. A breath of fire seemed to consume her, and then the knowledge flowed into her like a continuous charge of electricity. She took in secrets and formulas older than the pyramids, and the experience, far from being a sublime one, was shattering. When she had secreted it all away within herself, she used her thoughts to set the dusty scrolls ablaze.

  “What the hell—?” Valerian burst out, exasperated, looking wildly about for some way to douse the flames. Of course, there was none. “Why did you do that?!” Maeve rose slowly, still half entranced. “It was part of the pact,” she said, knowing Valerian would not understand—not yet, at least—and unable to fully explain. She had consumed the knowledge of the vampyre, but she had yet to assimilate the majority of it.

  Valerian gripped her shoulders, turned her to face him. “We’re doomed, aren’t we?” he rasped. “Tell me!”

  She was still under enchantment, but she sensed the other vampire’s desperation and struggled to answer. “Not necessarily,” she said in the tone of a mother lulling a frightened child to sleep. “We have choices—more choices than you and I have ever dreamed.”

  “Go on!” he pressed, giving her a gentle shake. Maeve shook her head. “Don’t plague me about this now, Valerian—I cannot yet speak of it in any sensible fashion, and there are some things I must never say.” She turned and looked sorrowfully at the burned remains of the old ones, laid out so neatly, like fallen soldiers gathered from a battlefield. “They perished willingly,” she said. “They possessed the power to make themselves bum from the inside, at temperatures so high that the process was over in an instant.”

  Valerian took her hands in his, gentler now that some of his panic had passed. “What now?” he whispered.

  “I must rest,” Maeve replied. “It’s all like—like a maelstrom inside me—”

  A moment later, she collapsed in Valerian’s arms.

  After he’d left Tommy with Mrs. Cartwright, Calder returned to the grand house where he had died by his brother’s hand. There was nothing he wanted from that place or from those people who normally populated it, and yet he needed to put a figurative period to the brief, troubled sentence that had been his mortal life.

  He had fed early in the evening, and thus was at the height of his strength when he assembled himself in a shadowy corner of the main parlor of the Holbrook mansion. Before, he had been careful to stay upstairs, out of the flow of normal activity.

  Only a few feet from where he stood, a newspaper reporter and the chief of police were conferring over strong coffee laced with brandy. Prudence lingered at a little distance from the two men, taking theatrical swipes at a lamp with her feather duster.

  “God knows,” the chief of police, and old friend of Calder’s father, was saying, “there was no love lost between William and his younger brother, but William couldn’t have stolen Calder’s body because he was in jail.”

  Prudence shook her head almost imperceptibly, and in a blinding flash, Calder knew what she was thinking as well as if the thoughts had taken shape in his own mind: These fools were doing a lot of talking, but they were really just covering the same old well-trodden ground. Furthermore, they were no cl
oser to figuring out what had really happened the night Calder disappeared.

  I’m all right, Pru, Calder told his old friend silently. Don’t worry about me.

  Prudence started as if somebody had poked her lightly with the prongs of a pitchfork and cast a wild look around the dimly lit parlor, but Calder made sure she didn’t see him. She was superstitious, he reminded himself, and even a glimpse of him, lurking in the corner where the gaslight didn’t quite reach, might keep her awake nights for years afterward.

  She looked at the chief and the reporter, who were still making inane attempts at figuring out what was going on in that house, noted that they hadn’t sensed or heard anything, and bolted from the room.

  Calder watched fondly until she’d vanished, then transported himself to the jail cell where his brother William sat on the edge of a rusted iron cot, despondency evident in every line of his elegantly slender body, his head in his hands.

  Veiling himself from his brother’s conscious awareness, if not that deeper, more mysterious part of the mind, Calder stood leaning against the bars of the cell, his arms folded.

  Each place he visited, he’d recently discovered, had its own nuances and messages and meanings woven right into the ether itself. In London he had felt the pain and despair of the children; here in America it was the suffering of the soldiers and their families….

  Calder shifted his thoughts to the matter at hand. William would not actually hang, he discerned, since no body would ever be found, and he would not be tried and sent to prison.

  The immediate future unfolded before Calder’s eyes, like a neatly written letter.

  William was to be released on bail, put up by Bernard’s faithful attorneys, in just a few days. Before he could ever be taken before a judge, Calder saw as plainly as if the actual events were being played out in front of his eyes, William would consume a scandalous amount of bourbon and fling himself over the very railing Marie had tumbled from years before. He would break his neck in the fall.

  Looking upon William while he still lived stirred strange emotions in Calder, not the least of which was pity. His half brother was not evil; he was merely weak. His fatal flaw had been nothing more than an unceasing longing for the very distinction he lacked. He’d craved the notice of others, especially Bernard, but tragically his own mediocre personality had rendered him all but invisible.

  Calder laid a hand on William’s shoulder, knowing all the while that the poor wretch would not feel his touch, or even sense his presence. As always, William’s attention was turned inward, and he was unable to perceive Calder as Prudence had done.

  Good-bye, he said, and may God look upon you with compassion.

  With that, Calder left his murderer, the last living member of his family, to his fate and willed himself back to the beautiful house where so much tragedy and heartbreak had taken place. Not wanting to see the place as he knew it, but as it would be, he moved forward in time to the twentieth century.

  He was mildly surprised, standing on the cracked sidewalk in the night and staring at the wreck of that once-grand house, to see its degeneration. Certainly no one in the Holbrook family had survived to live in it and pass it down, but Bernard, having been a far-sighted soul, had made provisions for even that. The mansion would be held in trust indefinitely.

  Calder stared, feeling an expected pang of regret as he noted that the roof had caved in in places, and the windows had been broken out as well—including the fine stained-glass one that had once graced a medieval cathedral. The pillars supporting the roof over the veranda had long since fallen and disintegrated. The grounds, once manicured, were a tangle of weeds, the roses had gone wild decades ago, and the marble fountain that had once given a certain Grecian glory to the loop of the grand driveway was a ruin, marred by the lewd lettering of vandals.

  He rested his forehead against a rusted iron rail of the fence, forgetting to veil himself as Valerian had taught him to do, too engrossed in his own despair to realize he was not alone.

  “Personally, I think they should tear it down,” a blustery male voice said. “It’s an eyesore—brings down the value of the other estates in this area.”

  Calder looked over his shoulder and saw an older gentleman with bright blue eyes and an abundance of white hair. He was dressed in the garish fashion of the late twentieth century, his trousers plaid, his shirt open at the throat. With him on a leash was a golden retriever that made a whimpering sound and backed away from Calder until the strip of leather would allow it to go no farther.

  “What happened to this place?” Calder asked. “It used to be one of the finest houses in Philadelphia.”

  “Hush, Goldie!” the mortal scolded, but the dog would not be soothed. It knew Calder was no ordinary human, even if its master didn’t, and began to leap and plunge desperately at the end of her tether, until the old man could barely restrain her. “They say it used to be downright grand,” he finally replied. “But there was some kind of trouble here, a long way back. What it all comes down to is, people started saying the place was haunted, and the rumors stuck. Why, when I was a boy, we wouldn’t even look toward this house, for fear of being sucked right in and gobbled up by the ghoulies!” By this time the dog was going wild; Calder silenced the animal with an elementary mental trick. The beast’s owner stared down at it for a moment, confounded, then finished up his discourse with, “You from around here? I don’t recall seeing you before.”

  Calder smiled sadly. “I’ve been away for a while.” He released Goldie from her spell, and she immediately started barking and pulling at the leash.

  “Don’t know what’s gotten into this mutt,” the old man fretted. He nodded in friendly farewell and allowed the dog to pull him on down the sidewalk, calling back with a laugh, “Have a care you don’t get yourself bewitched or something!”

  “Bewitched,” Calder echoed with a somber chuckle. What an understatement.

  He looked at the old house for a while longer, remembering—for not all his recollections were unhappy ones, of course—and then turned to walk away.

  Valerian was leaning against the nearest lamppost, arms folded, a disapproving expression on his face. “There you are,” he said, as if he’d conducted a long and weary search. In truth, Calder knew, the elder vampire had simply fastened his thoughts on his troublesome apprentice and willed himself to his side.

  Calder felt a sudden stir of alarm coil itself in his chest, like a snake. “Maeve,” he said, stepping closer to Valerian, who still lounged against the modernized lamppost. “Is she all right?”

  Valerian arched an eyebrow. “What do you care?” he intoned. “You are hardly an attentive lover, the way you keep rushing off all over time and creation.”

  The alarm Calder felt intensified and was joined by a dull, pulsing throb of guilt. “Damn you, Valerian, what’s happened to her?”

  Valerian smiled, but there was a glint of bitterness in the expression, plainly directed at Calder himself and not Maeve. “You are right to be frightened, fledgling,” he said coldly. “Maeve truly became the queen of vampires on this very night, when all the knowledge of the old ones was imparted to her, but the weight of it may crush her. She lies dormant, even now.”

  Calder forgot himself, forgot the other vampire’s vastly superior powers, and grasped the lapels of Valerian’s beautifully tailored velvet waistcoat in both hands. “Where?”

  With pointed grace, Valerian freed himself. “For her sake,” he said in a low, smooth voice, “and for her sake alone, I will not bum you like a stalk of dry grass for your insolence.”

  “Where is she?” Calder repeated, subsiding only slightly. Perhaps foolishly, he cared nothing for his own safety, but only Maeve’s.

  Valerian took his time answering, first straightening his coat and smoothing the lapels Calder had crumpled. “Have you forgotten everything I taught you?” he asked. “Simply think of Maeve and will yourself to be at her side.”

  Calder had forgotten in his anxiety. He sc
owled defiantly at Valerian, then closed his eyes and permeated himself with Maeve’s image.

  Moments later Calder found himself, and Maeve, in a vast, echoing chamber that looked like a medieval dungeon. The place was lit by hundreds of flickering candles, and Maeve lay in the center on a long table draped with velvet, like Sleeping Beauty awaiting her prince’s kiss.

  Her flesh seemed translucent in the candlelight, and the faintest of smiles touched her lips. Calder had seen that serene expression many times—on the faces of mortals who had died with clear consciences, after rising above their pain.

  He took up her hand, kissed the knuckles. “Maeve?”

  She did not respond, of course, or even stir.

  It was only then that he noticed Benecia and Canaan, those horrible vampire children, sitting nearby in ruffled dresses, hair all in curls, swinging their feet. They smiled at him, in unison, but the glitter in their flat eyes was patently savage.

  “If Maeve doesn’t wake up,” they said simultaneously, chilling Calder on some level far beneath his conscious reach, “then Mama will be queen, and we shall be princesses.”

  Calder glared at them. “Get out of here, you little demons!”

  They leaped off their chairs then, fangs bared, making a hair-raising sound that was at once a snarl and a shriek. Calder braced himself for attack, but before they lunged, Valerian materialized, blocking their way.

  “Go dig up a grave or something,” that vampire said, waving a hand.

  Benecia and Canaan looked sullen, to say the least, but they drew in their fangs and vanished.

  Calder glowered at Valerian, even though—or perhaps because—his creator had just saved him an ugly experience. “What took you so long?” he asked, only then realizing that he was still grasping Maeve’s hand, and that his grip was not only possessive, but desperate.

  Valerian sighed, as long-suffering as a martyr about to be burned at the stake. “I had forgotten how trying a fledgling’s insolence can be,” he said. His gaze fell on Maeve then and turned tender in the face of an instant. “I had hoped she would respond to you. Misguided though she may be, she loves you very much.”