Calder felt very human tears burning in his eyes as he looked down at Maeve. He had neglected her in the excitement of discovering and exploring his new powers, and he had never felt more remorse than he did then.
“Forgive me,” he whispered, not caring that Valerian could hear.
Valerian stood on the other side of the slab. “Come back to us if you can, Maeve,” he said with a strange mixture of gentle urging and sternness. “We need you if we are to survive. Nemesis’s angels are nearly upon us.”
There was not so much as a flicker of an eyelash from Maeve.
“How did this happen?” Calder demanded, as if knowing could make a difference, or somehow undo whatever it was that had brought Maeve to lie there on that slab, unmoving, unresponsive.
Valerian gave a complicated explanation, speaking of vampire corpses and a natural chamber far beneath the earth and a chest full of crumbling scrolls. Maeve had somehow absorbed the contents of those ancient parchments, all the knowledge the old ones had brought with them from Atlantis and gathered since. He finished with another brisk injunction for Maeve to wake up and resume her duties as leader of the vampires.
“Leave her alone,” Calder said distractedly. “Just leave her alone.”
He bent and rested his forehead lightly against Maeve’s, and that was when he felt the spiritual storm raging in and around her. She was struggling, fighting some internal battle on which everything outward hinged.
Calder raised himself and, clasping both her hands tightly in his, willed his own strength into her, without stint or reservation. He grew weak and swayed on his feet, ignoring Valerian’s orders to stop.
Maeve heard Calder’s voice above the howling tempest within her own being. She struggled toward him, reaching and straining, and finally letting him lead her.
Then she felt the inrush of vitality, as if she were feeding on the mysterious ambrosia that sustained all vampires. She felt him grasp her somehow, and pull her upward with all his fledgling power.
She opened her eyes just in time to see what price Calder had paid to help her. His face was waxen and strangely gaunt, and as she watched, her joy and relief turning now to horror and regret, his eyes rolled back, and he toppled across her, completely spent. Perhaps even dead.
Maeve screamed a protest as Valerian clasped Calder’s shoulders and gently pulled him away. She was still weak, and her efforts to sit up were futile.
“Valerian,” she pleaded. “Tell me—I beg of you—is he—gone?”
The other vampire’s voice was hollow. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t make a connection—”
Fear shot through Maeve and propelled her off the slab. She stood beside it, trembling, and saw Valerian kneeling on the floor where Calder lay, unmoving. She had never seen that terrible stillness in any other vampire, not even the dormant ones she’d occasionally stumbled across when she was abroad and looking for a temporary lair.
She closed her eyes, trying to link her mind with Calder’s, but like Valerian, she failed. She could not sense her lover’s spirit or his formidable intelligence.
“He did this for me,” she said in despair, dropping to her knees. She took his hand and called to him silently with all the force and substance of her soul. And then she felt it—a spark, then a flicker of life, somewhere inside him.
Maeve bent closer and brushed his still, waxen lips with her own. “Come back to me,” she told him. “I love you, and I need you—”
Valerian must have felt Calder’s spirit rallying as well, for he gave a soft, joyous exclamation.
Calder grew stronger, and then stronger still. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he opened his eyes, stared blankly for a few moments, and then gave Maeve an insouciant wink.
With a strangled sob, intertwined with a burst of laughter, Maeve leaned down again and kissed him full on the mouth. “Don’t you ever do anything like that again!” she said as his lips formed a smile against her own.
She knew when Valerian left them alone, and was grateful.
Still kneeling, Maeve laid one hand to either side of Calder’s face, full of exaltation and love and fury that he’d nearly left her forever. “What happened?”
With considerable effort Calder raised himself onto his elbows. “Nothing,” he answered thoughtfully. “All I saw was darkness. My awareness kept shrinking until it was only a pinpoint.” He reached up, entangled his fingers in her hair, and tugged gently. “Then I heard your voice, and I followed it back.”
Maeve’s eyes burned with tears. “You were foolish to expend all your strength that way. Why did you do it?” He strained upward to give her a nibbling kiss. “You know why,” he answered hoarsely.
She did know, and it made everything worthwhile—all the suffering that lay behind her, and all the perils waiting ahead.
Calder Holbrook loved her.
38
The knowledge that the old ones were gone came to Lisette as she dreamed in her secure chamber beneath the Spanish villa, and although she had long ago parted company with the Brotherhood, she felt their loss. One, Zarek, had been her childhood sweetheart and later her husband, when they were both still mortal, of course. She had left him behind soon after they became vampires, for Zarek had been something of a philosopher, and he had not approved of the way Lisette used her powers.
She stirred on her cool marble slab, vaguely aware of the luscious mortal moving about abovestairs, helping himself to her chocolates, her brandy, and probably her money as well. She felt mild amusement; when George became a vampire, he would no longer have use for such human comforts. Let him enjoy them while he could, for soon she would be introducing him to much keener pleasures.
One of the first things she meant to do, she reflected, floating just beneath the surface of wakefulness, where mortals and vampires alike are awash in dreams, was change George’s name. She must choose something less pedestrian and more suitable—Raoul, perhaps, or Julian, or Nikos…
It wasn’t unusual for blood-drinkers to eschew their former identities completely, of course. She herself had done just that, shedding her mortal name, Cassandra, and abandoning her profession. Like the other old ones, she had been a doctor and a scientist.
Those ancient memories tugged at her now, pulled her back toward that time lost in mist, like the currents of some vast, unseen river. She reasoned that she was prone to reverie because Zarek and the others were gone, and she was virtually alone in the firmament. In any case, she made no effort to resist but instead allowed herself to drift slowly back, and back, and back…
Atlantis.
The doomed continent was real to Lisette, not the nebulous legend it had become in modern times, a green place with gently rolling hills and a curving mountain range edging its northernmost coasts. There were many lakes and rivers on the great island, and animals peculiar to it, curious and beautiful creatures that were lost in the great cataclysm.
Standing mentally on the stony shore of her homeland, Lisette put aside the certain knowledge that everything she looked upon was mere illusion, every stone and stick of wood, every grave and temple. All of it had fallen into the sea so long ago that there was no one to remember, save herself and possibly one other now-dormant vampire, the untrustworthy Tobias.
Lisette gave herself up to the joy of homecoming and climbed a grassy slope to look out over the impossibly blue seas. A fine, cool mist touched her skin and awakened that winsome mortal girl, the forgotten one who’d lain hidden within her all these thousands of years.
Lisette was no longer Lisette, but Cassandra, or Cassie, as she was called by those who loved her. She was young and beautiful, mortal and free, blessed with one of the finest minds in all Atlantis.
Cassie sat in the fragrant grass, drawing up her slim, strong legs and wrapping her arms around them. She did not fit the classical image of the Atlantean, she knew—she wore no toga or sandals, no wreath of leaves upon her head.
No, Cassie wore cutoff blue jeans and a skim
py summer top. She listened to rock music and lived in a split-level house, and her government was experimenting with weapons of terrifying power—bombs and missiles detonated by a process of turning atoms in upon themselves.
Cassie lay back on the grass, gazing up at the azure sky, her long auburn hair spread out around her. She tried not to worry about the tests her father and his colleagues, all top scientists, were conducting, but she knew too much for comfort.
Looking upon her younger self and at the same time gazing outward through that child’s eyes, Lisette felt a terrible grief. Cassie was as lost as if she’d gone under the sea with the rest of Atlantis’s population, including her father and mother and sisters and brothers.
Despite the pain of bereavement, Lisette was wont to leave this vision of her doomed homeland. She lingered, watching as Cassie grew into Cassandra and married Zarek, her handsome lover. They had joined the secret society, a group of renegade scientists, young and old, who had stumbled on a formula they believed would slow the aging process.
The potion not only met that objective, but also lent the experimenters incredible powers. They could travel vast distances, even to other continents, on the strength of a thought. They could read the minds of others and veil themselves from the notice of ordinary people and, sometimes, even from each other.
The magic had a dark side, but it wasn’t discovered until weeks after the members had imbibed the wonderful medicine that made them as strong and intelligent as gods. They developed a penchant for human blood—and soon learned, to their unending horror, that they required the mysterious vitality of the stuff to function. What began as a mere aversion to the light of the sun became a violent and extremely painful reaction. Finally the blood-drinkers found themselves succumbing to a deep, comalike sleep during the day.
They had become fiends, and they named themselves vampyres for a terrifying winged creature that existed only in the heart of the continent’s southern jungles.
All the other members were alarmed, having foreseen none of these complications despite years of calculation and experimentation—except for Cassandra. She gloried in her newfound powers, honed them, and enjoyed the unspeakable bliss that always swept over her when she consumed the wine of the gods, the ambrosia that was blood.
She and Zarek, happy newlyweds only a few months before, began to argue violently. An antidote to the original potion was concocted, and Essian, the founder of the society, volunteered to sample it.
In return for his bravery, Essian received a horrible death. He aged while his colleagues looked on in fear and revulsion, wrinkling, caving in upon himself, his flesh drying out until it crumbled like dust. Still, he lived, a rotted corpse, as vile as something dug up from a grave, his eyes peering out of a skull, his screams of terror shrill and echoing.
After witnessing such an atrocity, volunteers for other experiments were not forthcoming. The Brotherhood of the Vampyre was formed, and Cassandra, who had taken to ranging over the whole of that hemisphere in search of victims and playmates, was tolerated but not, as the name of the fellowship indicated, really included.
She was not on Atlantis the night the accident happened, but in a village that would become Athens, battling with Zarek, who wanted to live quietly as a scholar, instead of wandering the earth with her, while the two of them explored their magnificent powers.
While these vampires argued their cases, the land of their birth trembled on the brink of disaster.
A power station had been built over a fault line, the vampire Tobias reported later. When the first explosion occurred, it set off a chain reaction of other blasts, violent enough to shift vast geological plates far beneath the surface of the land. There were quakes, and great fissures formed, snaking out in every direction. Tidal waves lashed the continent from every side, and volcanoes, long believed extinct, erupted all over the once beautiful land. In a matter of days Atlantis had cracked like an eggshell and literally fallen to pieces.
The people and the visible continent were gone, swallowed. The earthquakes continued for weeks, however, and great walls of sea water struck lands thousands of miles away, wiping out other civilizations as well.
Zarek and the others had been grief-stricken, holing up in a cave with primitive paintings of animals and birds on the walls, lying dormant for centuries. Cassandra, unwilling to waste a moment mourning a time and place that no longer existed and would never exist again, except in fairy tales, changed her name to Lisette and set about forgetting all that had gone before.
Now, lying prone and dreaming in her villa on the coast of Spain, the ancient vampire wept—for Zarek and the others, for Atlantis, and, most of all, for herself. Only now, when it was too late to stop the Brotherhood from choosing death, did Lisette realize that they’d all been interconnected in some mystical, inexplicable way. With the passing of her colleagues, Lisette had been diminished and perhaps had even died a little herself.
Far away, in a different land and century, in a vault beneath a forgotten grave, another ancient one lay slumbering. His was a deeper trance than Lisette’s, dark and rich and vital, meant to last for months or even years.
Tobias also dreamed and remembered and grieved for his lost brothers. There were times when he regretted his decision to choose the healing sleep instead of death, but there were still too many mysteries on this plane of existence, troubled as it was, too many puzzles and possibilities he could not bring himself to abandon.
One night, in five years, or fifty, or three hundred—he was so old that he no longer needed blood to survive—he would stir, leave his burrow beneath the moldering bones of some English dowager, and venture abroad. When that time came, he hoped to encounter the magnificent Maeve Tremayne again, and Dimity, the enigmatic blood-drinker who consorted with angels, and even that most exasperating of vampires, Valerian.
Ah, Valerian. Fascinating creature, even if he was irritating. Tobias knew much more about him than anyone else did, including, perhaps, Valerian himself. Yes, indeed, that vampire’s story was rich and complex, crying to be told.
Tobias settled himself deeper into his private enchantment and turned his thoughts to his own happy mortal youth, spent long ago and far away, in a verdant land overlooking a sapphire sea.
Maeve found Calder in the late twentieth century, a time she despised for its busyness and crass, materialistic orientation, just an hour before dawn. She was weary from warfare, for Lisette’s creatures were spawning others like themselves, helter-skelter, and for every ten she and Dathan and Valerian and the others managed to destroy, it seemed a hundred others cropped up. Although there had been no further communication with Nemesis’s forces, the deadline was mere days away, and the Warrior Angel, seeing the mindless vampires multiply, absorbing innocent mortals into their ranks, was surely straining to fight.
For a few minutes Maeve just stood there in the shadows of the famous medical college’s library, watching as Calder took volume after volume from the shelves, absorbing the material as quickly as he could flip through the pages. He was greedy for knowledge, the way most vampires were greedy for blood, and that troubled Maeve.
Despite Calder’s declarations of love, and his heroic sharing of strength when she’d needed it so badly, Maeve still had her doubts about his motives. She wasn’t sure, in fact, that Calder himself truly understood them.
At last he sensed her presence and turned to smile at her in the comforting darkness, at its richest now that dawn approached. He slid the volume he’d just scanned back into its place and came toward her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking her hands, bending slightly to kiss her cheek. “I was supposed to meet you in the circle of stones—”
Maeve smiled and touched his face tenderly, wanting to memorize it with the tips of her fingers as well as her eyes. “But you became so engrossed in your studies that you forgot,” she finished for him in tender exasperation. “Did you even remember to feed?”
Calder kissed her lightly on the mouth, an
d Maeve felt the same pleasant shock she always did. “Oh, yes,” he answered finally. “I am at the height of my powers, fledgling though I am. Would you like me to show you?” She nodded, almost shyly, and, by tacit agreement, they took themselves to their new secret lair, the wine cellar of the now rundown Holbrook mansion in Philadelphia. There they made love in the vampire way, with Calder putting Maeve through the same demanding paces she had so often required of him, and again in the mortal fashion. This time Maeve was the aggressor, kneeling astride Calder’s hips, riding him hard, taking him deep inside her and holding him there until he cried out and arched beneath her.
At last they slept, limbs entangled, on the old, scratched trestle table that was their vampire bed.
“I want to give you a new name, my darling,” Lisette purred to her mortal lover only minutes after sunset.
They were on the terrace of her villa, overlooking the warm, star-splashed Spanish sea.
George enjoyed a hearty dinner of roast pheasant and new potatoes, among other delicacies, while Lisette perched on the stone rail, letting the soft breeze dance in her hair and in the delicate folds of her gown.
“I like my own name,” George said, licking his fingers.
Lisette felt a surge of temper, but brought it quickly under control. There was no need to worry about this one; he wasn’t clever enough to give more than the occasional amusing ripple of trouble.
“It doesn’t suit you,” she told him moderately, reaching out to touch his lovely ebony hair. Like silk it was, fine and glossy, sliding smoothly between her fingers.
He looked up at her with impudent blue eyes, Aidan’s eyes, and Lisette’s heart tumbled a few times before catching itself. “What would suit me?” he asked in Spanish, chewing as he spoke.
His manners were atrocious, Lisette reflected, but she didn’t care about that, either. He would suit her purposes just fine, poor manners and vacuous brain notwithstanding.
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