The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Abelard brought me one of the precious books that afternoon, and I read hungrily of ancient Greek adventures, hardly noticing when twilight came and the candles were lighted. I was so absorbed that I did not hear Challes enter the room where I sat, my stool drawn up close to the fire.

  “This,” he said with gruff fondness, “is the Valerian I remember.”

  “Tell me,” I demanded quietly, closing the manuscript with great care. “Tell me why you sought me out, why you brought me here. Now.”

  He smiled. “I have told you, my friend. I have an astounding gift to offer you. If you accept my tribute, you will have powers you cannot begin to imagine now.”

  I was intrigued. “What is this great and mysterious treasure?” I asked.

  Challes reached out to touch my shoulder. There was love in the contact, and reverence. His eyes glowed with affection as he looked down at my face. “Life upon life,” he said. “Endless, fathomless, unbounded life. Drink from the cup I hold out to you, Valerian—arrogant Valerian, as beautiful as Lucifer in his days of perfect favor—and you will never die.”

  46

  The light of the drawing room fire flickered over Challes’s features as he sat beside me on that momentous night, staring fixedly into the grate. Beyond the windows, on the moonlit moors, I heard the wolves calling sorrowfully to each other like souls just waking to find themselves in hell, and I shuddered.

  Nearly imperceptible though the motion must have been, it somehow drew my tutor’s notice. He turned his head toward me and smiled, and I remember thinking how remarkably white and even his teeth were. I was more conscious than ever, in that moment, of the dangers that filled the world.

  “The time has come, Valerian,” Challes began moderately, “to discuss the gift in depth. Preparations must be made, of course, before it can be given. Still, I wish to tell you all that this entails, for you will be called upon to make a choice never presented to most mortals.”

  I could barely contain my eagerness and curiosity; indeed, I had been in a state of quiet frenzy since he’d made the astonishing claim, a short while before, that I need never die. I find my excitement ironic now, in light of the fact that I had been trying for fifteen years at that point, albeit in a cowardly and indirect fashion, to murder myself.

  “Tell me,” I pleaded on a scant breath and came near to clasping his arm like a supplicant begging blessings from a saint.

  “Be patient, beautiful one,” he said fondly. “Once you shed your mortal limitations, you will have all eternity to celebrate what you are.”

  I waited and held my tongue, but it was the most difficult thing I had undertaken since my failed attempt to rescue Brenna from the merciless surf. I trembled with my need to understand what Challes was offering me, to snatch it from his grasp and hide it in my heart.

  He settled back in his great chair, draped now in shadows, now in dancing light, and watched the blaze again. Just when I truly believed I would not be able to restrain myself from lunging like a fevered beast, to somehow wrench the secret from him, Challes began to unburden himself.

  “I went to sea after I left Dunnett’s Head,” he told me, still gazing into the fire. “I know not how I kept myself apart from this cursed plague—it was, and is, everywhere. I saw so many perish, so horribly. I wandered, as you have done, and finally settled on the Continent, in Florence. There I encountered artists, bards, philosophers, and men of science—” He paused and smiled again, not at me certainly, but at some memory he must have glimpsed in the snapping flames of that cheery fire.

  “Whores and dancing girls, too. Gypsies and princes, and vagabonds, like myself. Those who were drunkards”—he had the charity, bless him, not to look at me when he made this last statement—“those who were saints, and those who were a curious and fascinating combination of the two. I cannot possibly describe the richness and pleasure of my life in that gracious city—and yet I was not truly happy. At times I knew unutterable loneliness.” I bit my lip, feeling no compunction to interrupt now, listening with all my powers of attention. I, too, had known such a separation from others—it was that, more than any other factor, which had spawned my eternal need for strong drink.

  “I encountered a magnificent being one night when I was brooding in one of the small piazzas that abound in Florence. We became friends, and then something more than that. Lovers, of a sort, though our consummation was spiritual, rather than physical. Many wondrous nights passed before Christoph told me what he was. What he is and will always be—” Challes hesitated again and studied my face with a troubled expression in his eyes, and I thought I would burst with waiting before he went on at last. “Christoph is a fiend, Valerian, as am I. He is a vampyre.”

  My heart seemed to stop and, just as quickly, start itself pumping again. I drew back a little, I think, though the response was not a conscious one. “A vampyre? You mean, a drinker of blood?”

  “Yes,” Challes answered with a sound that resembled a sigh, but was not.

  I bolted to my feet, overturning the stool with a crash, suddenly far more frightened of my old friend and tutor than I’d ever been of the wolves waiting outside in the darkness.

  “Wait,” Challes ordered calmly, even gently, rising unhurriedly from his chair. I would not have obeyed the command, but there was something in his eyes, something that held me spellbound and stricken, overriding my weak will. “I will do you no hurt, cherished one. There is only pleasure in what I would give to you, only joy.” He was silent for a moment, gazing at me, and when he spoke again, it was briskly, in the schoolmaster’s tone from days of old. “Sit down, pray, and listen.”

  Though I was terrified, I righted my stool and slumped onto it, speechless and void of grace, my limbs full of trembling. I made the sign of the cross, and to my horrified amazement, Challes did not recoil. Did not so much as flinch. No, there was only the brief hint of a smile, falling across his lips like a passing shadow, and a deep, pitying sorrow in his eyes.

  “Such gestures have their power,” he told me, “when there is true faith behind them. But you have none of that, do you?”

  I tried to speak, stammered insensibly, and began again. “I believe there’s a God—I believe in the Holy Mother, and the Son, and all the saints and angels—”

  Challes laughed outright, and the sound echoed, raucous, off the high ceiling of the keep. “Such a hasty and convenient creed!” he exclaimed finally with grim humor. “Even the demons grant the existence of God, Valerian—oh, especially them. Do you think you can fool me—I, who know you so well? You believe now, in this moment, it’s true, but only because you perceive your sinful hide to be threatened. Tell me, lovely one, were you so devout when the good brothers bade you stay there to take up the cross and become one of their number?” He shook his head, as if in response to something I’d said, although I spoke not a syllable, for I was too shaken to refute his words. “Let go of what is past, you spectacular idiot, and enter into the glorious future that awaits you.”

  I could not move or make a sound. I heard the wolves, nearer now, and wished that I might be their prey, alone and unprotected on the moors—that I could be anywhere but in that warm, comfortably furnished drawing room in the company of a devil.

  Challes began to speak, his tones the low and measured ones of a father lulling a fretful child to sleep. He told me what it meant to be a vampire—told me of the powers he possessed, the powers I would command should I raise the figurative chalice to my lips and drink. I would be able to will myself from one place to another and, eventually, from one century to another. I would become a shape-changer, of sorts, able to present myself to mortals in an endless variety of forms. I should not need food or water, nor would I lack any desirable thing—gold, castles, fine horses, and exquisite garments could be mine by means of simple trickery. And there were much greater gifts and abilities that would come to me over time, with the practice of my art.

  “But I must drink blood?” I asked with a slight shiver when C
halles had finished painting his grand, glorious images in my mind.

  His smile was tender now. “Not in the way you think,” he said. And he proceeded to explain that, too—how the blood was drawn in through the fangs, how the victim could be made to feel ecstasy instead of fear and pain if the vampire wished it so, how the innocents need never be touched, because there was such a thriving abundance of truly evil mortals.

  I was intrigued, despite my terror. I wanted the terrible magic of which Challes spoke, as he had always known I would. I wanted to fly, to learn, to explore. I wanted to wear rich clothing, always, to hear the music of a thousand minstrels, to traverse the wide seas and continents, to know secrets forbidden to ordinary men.

  “Will you accept this gift?” he asked, although he knew what the answer would be. We both did.

  I flushed. “Yes,” I heard myself say. My old life was untenable now; I truly would surrender myself to the wolves before returning to the beggar’s existence I had known only the day before. “Now. Tonight.”

  Challes laughed again and shook his head. “Dear, precious fool! If I changed you now, you would be forever as you are at this moment—gaunt and ill-mannered and totally void of the graces. No, Valerian—you must be groomed and prepared for the transformation, as I said before.”

  I was alarmed—now that I knew what it meant to be an immortal, I could not bear the idea that my tutor might change his mind, might deny me what he had already offered. “How long will it take, this preparation?”

  “A month, perhaps two,” Challes said. “I will bring you along slowly, lovingly, just as my dark angel Christoph did for me. That way, when you enter in, it will be willingly, and with full knowledge of what you undertake. Anything less would be a travesty before hell as well as heaven.”

  “I must have it now,” I muttered, covering my face with my hands. “I cannot bear to wait!” The marvelous gift would be withdrawn, snatched from my fingers for all time—I knew it would. I would suffer that worst of all fates, and remain ordinary.

  Challes laid his hand on top of my shaggy, unbrushed hair. “Do not fret,” he scolded with gruff affection. “I cannot hurry this process, for it is too important. But I shall show you some of the joy that awaits you, if you’re willing.”

  I raised my eyes to meet his gaze. And I nodded.

  Not even Brenna or my poor, ill-fated mother had ever looked upon me with the kind of love I saw that night in Challes’s translucent face. It was not a lascivious regard he bore me—even in my ignorance and self-centered naïveté I knew that—but something much deeper and far more complex. The emotion transcended gender, made a mockery of human gropings, and I was in awe.

  I could not have known, back then, that one day I would cherish another in just that way, that I would understand completely how Challes felt.

  I knew nothing of anything. I craved some blessing from Challes, some unnamed and joyous communion, with an intensity greater even than the wanting of wine.

  In the end he dismissed me, to my wretched disappointment, and sent me off to my chamber as if I were a child. Certainly he had power over me, even then, but my obedience was grudging.

  Challes came to my room perhaps an hour before dawn—I lay wakeful in my bed, watching the moon through the window and listening to the wolves’ song—and suddenly he was simply there. I knew he had not entered by any ordinary means, but I was beyond questioning that. I simply looked at him, silently imploring him for I knew not what, knowing I would perish of grief if he denied me.

  Challes knelt beside my bed, smoothed my hair, murmured words I did not comprehend, and bent his head to my throat. The experience was profoundly sensual, but again it was more a thing of the mind and spirit than of the body.

  I, who had never knowingly been intimate with a man—I confess there were instances during the dark years after Brenna’s death, however, when I was too drunk to know whose pallet I’d shared—was ready to surrender my very soul.

  I started when I felt two sharp points penetrate the skin of my neck, and perhaps managed a whimper of fearful protest, but in the next instant, as my very life’s blood flowed in Challes’s fangs, ecstasy crashed down upon me like a giant wave. I moaned as he drank, only vaguely aware that he wasn’t touching me at all, except where his mouth was pressed to the pulsing vein at the base of my throat. It was as though every erotic point, within and without, was being stimulated at once.

  It was dark and sweet and violent, my first communion with Challes, like the pleasure I had known when Brenna wooed my seed from me, except that this release encompassed the whole of my being and went on and on, endlessly. At long last I swooned, the exertion and the joy so great that I could not endure them, and when I awakened with the morning sun I believed at first that I’d dreamed the entire episode.

  When I touched my throat and felt the two tiny, rapidly healing puncture wounds, however, I knew all that Challes had said was true, that all I remembered was real. And I was filled with a delight, and a terror, of truly infinite proportions.

  I did not see Challes that day, and I grieved until darkness fell. It was just after sunset when he returned, and began molding me, ever so artfully, into a fiend’s fiend.

  Daisy

  Las Vegas, 1995

  “Why the hell didn’t you call me?” O’Halloran demanded the next morning when Daisy had told him about the threatening telephone message. They were riding in his car, on their way to the home of Jillie Fairfield’s next of kin, her divorced mother. Daisy was up to her ankles in empty soda bottles, misfolded maps, and crumpled candy wrappers.

  “What would you have done?” she countered irritably. “Hauled yourself over there and sat on my couch all night, holding a .357 in your lap?”

  It wasn’t the crank call or O’Halloran’s gruffly solicitous attitude that was bugging her, she admitted to herself. Mrs. Fairfield resided in a trailer park where Daisy and Nadine had spent six happy months when they were in elementary school, in the care of their paternal grandmother. Inevitably their mother, Jeanine, had returned, rumpled and a little drunk and smelling sour from the bus ride that had brought her back to Vegas from wherever she’d been. She’d reclaimed her daughters, over Gran’s fierce but helpless protests, and headed straight for the nearest social worker. A couple of kids made it a whole lot easier to collect welfare, after all, and once Jeanine had dumped or been dumped by her latest boyfriend, a biker with a slipped disk that entitled him to state compensation, she’d suddenly developed all manner of maternal instincts.

  “Relax, Chandler,” O’Halloran said. “I’m not trying to step on your goddamned feminine rights or anything like that. I just want to make sure this sicko doesn’t get too close, okay?”

  Daisy wanted to reassure her partner, but she was still distracted by her dread of returning to the trailer park. She and Nadine had never been allowed to go back, even to visit, and after a couple of years the old woman had passed away. Jeanine’s boyfriend at the time—Daisy couldn’t remember his name and didn’t care if she ever did—had shown her the obituary in the newspaper and said maybe they’d get a mobile home out of the deal, “now that Granny has kicked off.”

  “Chandler?” O’Halloran prompted. They turned a corner on a yellow light, and the door of the glove compartment fell open, slamming against Daisy’s knees and spilling a variety of cassette tapes, empty cookie packages, expired registration slips, and unpaid parking tickets into her lap.

  She stuffed the whole mess back where it came from and closed the little door with a crash. “What?” she snapped.

  “You suffering from a year-round case of PMS, or what?”

  Daisy sighed and shoved a hand through her hair. “Why is it that men always think any change in a woman’s mood has to be connected with her hormone levels?”

  O’Halloran shrugged, running another yellow light, bald tires squealing, and the driver of a tour bus blasted his horn and displayed a specific finger behind the broad tinted window. “After ten or twenty
thousand years the evidence starts to stack up,” he said. “The thing is, we got this weird case to solve—you know what the medical examiner said—and it’s gonna take our undivided attention to work the snarls outta this one. You gotta get all your body chemicals in sync, Chandler, ’cause I need your help.”

  Daisy tossed him a mock salute. “No problem, Officer Friendly. My mood has nothing to do with chemistry. And slow it down, will you? You take one more corner on two wheels, and I’ll have to write you up for driving under the influence of sugar and preservatives.”

  He grinned, but in the next moment his expression was solemn again. “I don’t like this, Chandler,” he confided. “This Fairfield thing, I mean. By the time we got to that girl, she didn’t have enough blood left in her veins to reach a gnat’s ankle. What the sonnabitchen hell happened in that place? What about those marks on her neck?”

  Daisy shifted in the seat as the entrance to the trailer park came into view. She took a pair of sunglasses from her purse and put them on, telling herself it was because of the glare. “Forensics found blood on the scene when they went over it after the body was removed,” she pointed out. “It just wasn’t visible to the naked eye, that’s all.”

  “Okay, so there was a little blood. There sure as shit wasn’t enough. What happened to the rest of it?”

  She shivered, somewhere down deep, and knew her reaction didn’t show on the outside. Jillie’s corpse, the crank call, the dream, and the magician all sprang out of her subconscious at once to haunt her. “I don’t know, O’Halloran,” Daisy replied finally in a somewhat testy tone. “Maybe you were right in the first place. Maybe we’ve got a vampire running loose.”

  O’Halloran flung her a mildly contemptuous glance and slowed to enter the Lucky Dollar Trailer Park, passing beneath the burned-out neon sign and bouncing down the rutted gravel road between battered mobile homes. “You wish,” he said, making a cranking motion with his left arm as he rolled down the window. The air-conditioning had petered out years ago, with the second or third motor. “Better the real thing, for my money, than some psycho who believes with all his diseased little brain that taking a drop of human blood now and then will make him live forever.”