The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Daisy got into her car and locked both doors with a flick of a button on her armrest. Ironic as it was, she suspected O’Halloran was right about her eating habits. She hadn’t had real, unrefined food in days, and she felt like an old beater in need of an oil change.

  She went back to her office for an hour, going over reports and statements on the Fairfield and Cantrell cases, looking for something—anything—she might have missed.

  Later, on the way home, she stopped at a supermarket in her neighborhood, arriving just after dark, and started wheeling a cart down the aisles. A well-nourished, healthy cop, she reasoned, is a smart and insightful cop. She bought fresh vegetables and fruit, chicken and fish, bread and cereal, and some skim milk. She was standing in the checkout line, reading a tabloid article about space aliens having affairs with members of Congress, when her personal reality splintered.

  Suddenly she wasn’t Daisy anymore, and at the same time she was, and she was no longer standing in a busy supermarket in one of Las Vegas’s more ordinary neighborhoods.

  Her name was Elisabeth Saxon, the year was 1457, and she was serving ale in a tavern with the picturesque name of the Horse and Horn. Everything around her seemed real, although she knew it was an illusion, that she was finally cracking—everything from the spit- slickened board floors to the impossibly grubby men seated at tables all around her. They were singing bawdy songs, in a version of English she could barely understand, and swilling ale between choruses.

  One of them reached out and pinched her hard on the backside, and she was still Daisy enough to be outraged. She spun around on the heel of her soft leather shoe and clouted the culprit over the head with a pewter trencher.

  A trencher? She thought frantically, looking down at the weapon in her hands even as her victim swayed beneath the blow. Since when did she refer to platters as “trenchers”?

  A raucous cheer rose from the crowd of unwashed revelers, and Daisy—that was her real name, wasn’t it?—glanced wildly about for an escape route. There was a door open to a starry night, and she dashed toward it, her customers grabbing at her apron and her skirts as she passed.

  She collided with a hard form in the doorway, felt strong hands close over her shoulders.

  “It’s all right,” a familiar voice told her gently, and she looked up into the dark blue eyes of the magician, Valerian. “You’re safe. I’ll take you home.”

  His clothes were strange—he wore a tabard, belted at the waist, and his silk shirt was puffed at the shoulders and then fitted to his wrists. Woven hose accentuated his muscular legs, and high boots, with cuffs folded down from the top, covered his feet.

  All the same, this was the man she knew from her dreams—and from the Venetian Hotel in that faraway world she was already starting to forget.

  She fainted, and he caught her up in his arms. When Daisy came around, she was back in the supermarket, and Valerian, incredibly, was there, too. He was holding her.

  Daisy stared at him and saw understanding in his eyes, along with sorrow. She was struck in that instant with the dizzying realization that he knew exactly what had just happened to her, that he had indeed shared the experience.

  “Put me down,” she said, embarrassed by the gathered crowd and the revolving lights in the parking lot. Obviously the paramedics had been called. “I’m fine, damn it.”

  Valerian set her on her feet without a word, but there was a wry twist to his mouth. She stole a sidelong glance at him, half expecting to see that he was wearing a tabard and boots, but his clothes, though obviously expensive, were quite ordinary, quite suited to the twentieth century. Black slacks, a gray silk skirt, Italian shoes.

  The paramedics burst through the doors, and Daisy’s embarrassment intensified. She knew the majority of these people—worked with them practically every day of her life. The very last thing she needed was for them to think she was losing her grip.

  “What happened?” Charlie Cook, the senior EMT, asked Daisy, looking around for the patient.

  “Nothing,” Daisy said without looking at Valerian, pushing her hair back from her forehead as she spoke.

  “Nothing?” demanded a middle-aged checkout clerk with the name Marvella stitched onto her red smock. “This young woman fainted dead away, right here in my line. Went down like a ton of bricks. And look at her—she’s pale as milk.”

  Charlie looked stem, and his co-worker, a rookie Daisy wasn’t acquainted with, studied her with a critical eye.

  “We’d better check you over, Chandler. After all, it isn’t normal to pass out in the supermarket when they haven’t even rung up your total yet.”

  Daisy grinned, though she felt shaky and sick and wanted nothing so much as to be alone with Valerian, so she could ask him what the hell had just happened to her. She was certain that he knew. “Okay,” she said, pushing back her hair again. “But just let me pay for this stuff first. I don’t want to lose my place in line.”

  “Funny,” Charlie said, and then he glanced at Valerian. The magician nodded and spoke for the first time. “I’ll look after her,” he said.

  Charlie was apparently satisfied; he cocked a thumb toward the parking lot and told Daisy, “We’ll be waiting outside. Follow the flashing red lights.”

  Daisy paid for her purchases, Valerian standing silently beside her the whole time, and then started to push the cart out of the store. He edged her aside and took over the small task.

  “Did you cast some kind of spell over me back there?” she whispered. “Or am I losing my mind?”

  “Neither,” he answered, with that half smile that tugged at something deep inside her. “What happened to you is called spontaneous regression. You just visited one of your past lives.”

  “Oh, right,” Daisy retorted. She had a headache—stress-related, to be sure.

  “Your name was Elisabeth Saxon,” Valerian said. “You lived in the mid-fifteenth century. You were a serving wench, and something of a lightskirt, at the Horse and Horn, a tavern on the London road.”

  Daisy stared up at him as the supermarket doors swished open and they went outside into the dry warmth of the night. “How did you—?”

  “I was there, remember?”

  He had been.

  “I’m having a nervous breakdown,” Daisy announced. Valerian raised one majestic eyebrow. In the glow of stars, streetlights, and the not-too-distant Strip, his skin had a translucent quality. “Are you?” he countered, pushing the cart toward her car without being told which one it was. “If that’s the case, then how do you explain my presence there? I was on the threshold of that inn, Daisy, when you hurtled into my chest like a rabbit fleeing a pack of foxes.”

  Daisy murmured an exclamation. “What is this? Some kind of hypnosis?”

  “I’ll explain it later,” he said, glancing down at the trunk of her car. It sprung open, though neither he nor Daisy had touched the latch, and Valerian began putting the grocery bags inside, that curious little smile playing on his mouth again. “You’d better let your friend listen to your heart, test your reflexes, and look into your ears,” he added, nodding toward the ambulance parked only a few spaces away. “He’ll follow you home if you don’t.”

  “You’ll wait?” Daisy asked. She should have been afraid of this man, she supposed, but she wasn’t. Instead she was full of questions she knew only he could answer. “I’ll be right here,” he said.

  Daisy started to turn away, then frowned down at the trunk of her car, now tightly closed again. “How did you open that without a key?”

  Valerian shrugged. “I’m a magician, remember?”

  Daisy left him, shaking her head.

  She endured the exam, which was perfunctory, knowing all the while that Charlie probably thought she’d fainted because she was pregnant. By this time tomorrow, she figured, the word would be out that Detective Chandler had passed out in the supermarket with a cheap tabloid in her hands. She’d be called into the chief’s office, no doubt, and probably taken off the Fairfield/Ca
ntrell case if she didn’t talk fast. Her boss was more likely to attribute the fainting spell to stress than pregnancy, and to decide that Daisy needed a break from homicide.

  Maybe she did. God knew, she didn’t love it.

  Valerian waited, as he’d promised, and he insisted on taking the wheel.

  Daisy looked around the lot. “Where’s your car?”

  “I don’t own one,” he said and offered no further explanation.

  Daisy gave him the keys because on that one night she needed to lean on somebody. The fact that he was a stranger, for all practical intents and purposes, and up to his eyeballs in murdered chorus girls, didn’t seem to make a difference.

  “Where do you live?” he asked, once they were inside the car, though Daisy guessed from his tone that he already knew her address. For some reason, he was going through the motions.

  “Are you the nutcase who’s been calling me?” she inquired after rattling off directions to her apartment complex.

  “No,” he said, starting the engine and driving with an easy confidence that made Daisy wonder why he didn’t have a car of his own. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford one, that was for sure—headliners like him brought home the big bucks.

  Maybe he’d lost his license, she speculated to avoid scarier concerns for a little while longer.

  “I didn’t have a license to lose,” he said, as if Daisy had spoken aloud. “And I don’t own a car because I have no need for one. Furthermore, the phrase big bucks, tacky as it is, doesn’t begin to describe my salary. Now, could we talk about the real issue here?”

  Daisy sagged back in the passenger seat, knocked breathless by his words. “I wish you’d teach me that trick,” she said after a few moments of tumultuous silence, her voice squeaky with bravado. “Mind reading would come in handy when I’m interrogating suspects.” He gave her a sidelong look, then turned his attention back to the road. “Come back in a thousand years or so. By that time the ability will have evolved to the point where ordinary mortals can use it.”

  The term ordinary mortals nettled Daisy, and, besides, it sounded weird, as if Valerian considered himself to be outside the category. “Gee, thanks,” she snapped, to hide the fact that she was seriously spooked. “Of course, most of my cases will probably be solved by then, though God knows the paperwork won’t be caught up. On the other hand—what will I care? I’ll be somebody else.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Why should I?”

  He smiled. “Why, indeed?” he replied, signaling to turn onto the side street that ran behind her building. “Perhaps our little talk will change your mind—if the incident in the supermarket truly wasn’t enough.”

  “I want to ask you some questions while we’re chatting,” Daisy said as he brought the car to a stop in her assigned space. Which, of course, was unmarked. She got out of the car and closed the door with a bang. “Like how come the women in your act are being murdered?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered with a weariness on a scale with Daisy’s own and perhaps even greater. “Maybe you and I can figure that out together, after you know the truth.” He handed her the keys and then opened the trunk, again with no outward motion, and took out both grocery bags.

  Daisy led the way up the outside stairs to her apartment.

  Inside, Valerian carried the bags to the kitchen and set them on the counter. “Sit down,” he said when Daisy started putting things away. “You’re still in shock.” With that, he took a head of lettuce and a bag of tomatoes from Daisy’s hands and proceeded to put them in the refrigerator. Daisy sat on one of the two stools at the breakfast bar and cupped her chin in one hand. “Evidently,” she said, “your wish is my command.” He grinned at her, and again she felt a wrenching, so far within herself, so far back in her memory, that momentary tears burned behind her eyes. He took a half-eaten entrée, still in its box, and carried it disdainfully from the refrigerator to the trash bin. “Wretched stuff,” he muttered.

  Daisy was defensive. “I suppose you eat nothing but gourmet fare?”

  He laughed and returned to the task of emptying the grocery bags. “Au contraire,” he said. “I subsist on a very simple liquid diet. It’s the secret of my great longevity, along with a certain talent for evading the consequences of my own actions.”

  Daisy ran her eyes over Valerian’s magnificent physique and discounted most of what he’d just said. Nobody looked like that living on fruit juice or vitamin shakes. “I believe that last part—about your evading the consequences of your own actions, I mean,” she conceded. “But I’m warning you right now—if you killed those women, I’ll get you.”

  “I believe you would,” he answered thoughtfully, having finished putting the food away. “You’re very good at what you do, I think.”

  “So are you,” Daisy said, remembering his magic act at the Venetian Hotel, the way he’d opened the trunk of her car, that knack he had of appearing in her dreams. That night he’d even managed to be a part of a psychotic episode.

  Impressive.

  He brewed tea for her—her favorite English brand, purchased in London in the food stalls at Harrods by a friend who worked for an airline. Not surprisingly, he didn’t ask where it was, where the cups were, or if she wanted tea at all. He simply made it and set it in front of her.

  She took a sip, and some of her strength returned. “Am I going crazy?” she asked, addressing herself as much as Valerian.

  He leaned against the breakfast bar from the other side, arms folded on the countertop. “No,” he said easily, “but there is much I must tell you. You have, to paraphrase one of your better poets, ‘miles to go before you sleep.”

  “Talk,” Daisy said.

  Valerian

  Colefield Hall, 1365

  “You are ready at last,” Challes announced one winter night, some three months after he’d found me unconscious in a horse stall. We’d accomplished a great deal in the time that had passed since, but I was young and impatient for the gift to be given, and it seemed then that my tutor had deliberately withheld the joys he’d promised. That he wanted to taunt and torment me.

  He had brought me along so slowly, making sure I ate robustly, so that my frame filled out, teaching me to fence, that I might be graceful, pouring the most exquisite music into my ears and inundating me with poetry and numbers, philosophy and science, languages and etiquette.

  I was an apt student, perhaps because of my eagerness to be what Challes was, to do what he did, and I was handsome in my fine new clothes, with my trimmed hair and clean-shaven face. I possessed an almost boundless vitality, even surpassing the energies of my early youth, except during the blissfully languid interval following Challes’s nocturnal visits to my bedside.

  “Tonight, then?” I cried, nearly oversetting my chair by the drawing room fire, where I had learned so many lessons, as I bolted to my feet.

  “Tonight,” Challes confirmed with tenderness and sorrow in his voice.

  I wondered at his sadness, but I was too self-absorbed, too eager to make the change, to ask why he was troubled.

  There was a Roman couch beneath the window, with its glittering frosting of ice, and my tutor led me to that and bade me to lie down.

  I would have done almost anything he commanded, for by that time I loved him completely. My adoration for Challes was a thing of purity and grace, transcending genders, a joining of spirits rather than bodies. There are those who would call me deviant; instead, I am simply whole.

  I did as Challes asked, closing my eyes while he opened the collar of my shirt, listening to the thin, far-off cries of the wolves. I felt their starvation in my own gut, and at the same time my whole being, flesh and soul, hummed with the anticipation of ecstasy.

  My joy was terrifying, beyond anything I’d felt before, surpassing every happiness except what I had known in the arms of Brenna Afton-St. Claire. Nothing, before or since, on earth or in heaven, could rival the mere touch of her hand. Still, the pleasure Cha
lles gave me was keen-edged and beautiful.

  He had told me that I would die as a man, during this, the greatest of our communions, but when I felt my mortal life ebbing away, I panicked and tried to cry out. By then I was too weak to make a sound, and certainly I could not struggle, but Challes murmured words of comfort and soothed me with gentle whispers. I sank quietly into my death, and all consciousness was obliterated, swallowed up in darkness.

  When I awakened, I realized I was in a crypt-like vault, under the earth. I lay on a slab of cold stone, and Challes slumbered an arm’s length away on another pallet of rock. I heard rats scrabbling in the corners and shuddered.

  A low chuckle sounded, and I turned my head to see that Challes had awakened and lay with his weight braced on one forearm.

  “No need to be afraid, Beautiful One,” he said. “The rats cannot hurt you. Nothing can, except sunlight or the point of a wooden stake. If you do as I have taught you, you will live forever.”

  I had wanted this, yearned and pleaded for it, and yet the magnitude of eternity was only then coming home to me. Never to die? To never lay down my burdens and rest?

  “Now you must learn to hunt,” Challes told me, rising from his slab and dusting off his leggings and tunic. “Once that is done, I shall be gone.”

  I sat bolt upright. He had never spoken of leaving. Did he truly mean to abandon me now, when there was still so much I did not understand?

  As he had done so many times before, my tutor laid his hands to my shoulders. “It was worth incurring Nemesis’s ire to create such a splendid fiend as you,” he said.

  I knew, from our studies together, that Nemesis was a warrior angel, greatly feared in the dark realms. “You’ve had dealings with—” I could barely speak the name, it inspired such terror in me. “With Nemesis?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Challes replied without flinching. “I have made too many blood-drinkers for his liking, and he is a powerful angel. He vowed revenge, with or without the permission of higher angels, should I make even one more.” He feigned a sigh. “Alas, you are so beautiful and so bright—even in your drunkenness, you were magnificent. I could not resist making you immortal, for you were wasted as a mere man. To think of you here a moment, then gone—it was too painful to endure.”