The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  “What price have you paid?” I whispered, but I knew the answer already, and it filled me with fathomless grief.

  Challes, my teacher, my only friend, was to be destroyed.

  Because of me.

  I whispered an exclamation that might have qualified as a prayer, had I been anything other than the abomination I was, and wept my first tears as a vampire.

  Would that they had been my last.

  48

  Daisy

  Las Vegas, 1995

  The thing that surprised Daisy most about Valerian’s story—and it was an incredible tale, spanning some six hundred years—was that she was very much inclined to believe it. She guessed she’d had some glimmer of the truth that first night, in the showroom at the Venetian Hotel, when she’d watched him raise a coach and a team of horses off the stage floor and send them sailing out over the audience members’ heads. And while she still didn’t consciously remember being those other women he spoke of with such passion and love—Brenna Afton St. Claire, Elisabeth Saxon, Jenny Wade—the mere mention of their names had struck a resonant chord within her. Perhaps the dreams she’d had all her life had not been dreams at all, but memories of those other lifetimes.

  “I’ve looked exactly the same, in every incarnation?” she asked. “Is that how you recognized me?”

  “Yes,” Valerian said, his eyes glowing with affection. “You are always your same beautiful self, at least when I’ve known you—only the costumes and the hairstyles change. Still, I think I would know you even if your looks changed significantly. I felt your presence in the audience at the Venetian long before I actually saw you.” She nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve read about reincarnation,” she said, “like almost everyone else. But I thought people came back in different bodies, sometimes as men, sometimes as women.”

  “They do normally,” Valerian affirmed. “You are an exception, and you needn’t ask me why, for I confess I do not know. I can tell you that souls tend to return to the flesh in the company of others they’ve known and loved or hated in the past.”

  “You’ve told me that you can travel through time—back to the point of your own death as a mortal. If that’s so, am I in all those other places, as all those other selves, simultaneously? Can you journey back there and see me as Jenny, for instance? Or Elisabeth?”

  The magnificent face was drawn for less than a moment with terrible grief. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some vampires can change the course of events and see and influence the ones they love. Whenever I’ve tried to find you, however, I’ve met with utter failure.”

  She considered that. “Talk about information overload,” she murmured. “If you’re really Count Dracula, Junior,” Daisy reasoned at some length, still sitting at the breakfast bar, elbows on the counter, fingers buried in her hair, “why haven’t you tried to bite my neck? And why should I believe you when you say you didn’t commit the Fairfield and Cantrell murders? That was a vampire’s M.O. if I’ve ever seen one.”

  Valerian smiled, and there was just a hint of condescension in it. “Have you?” he inquired. “Seen a vampire at work, I mean?”

  Daisy sighed and sat up straight on the stool. “It was just a figure of speech,” she said impatiently. “Answer my questions, please.”

  “I haven’t ‘tried to bite your neck,’ as you so crassly put it, because I adore you—in whatever lifetime I happen to stumble across you. That is my curse. As for why you should believe I’m innocent of these killings—” He paused and shrugged aristocratically. “Because I have told you so. I have done murder in my time, make no mistake, but these poor little creatures? No. I cared for them.”

  Daisy pondered him skeptically, chin in hand, and said nothing. He had just confessed to the worst crime a person can commit, but she could not picture him taking a life and therefore did not really believe that he had.

  “All right,” Valerian snapped, waving his arms in a gesture of wild impatience. “Don’t believe me. Lock me up in one of your silly jails. But I warn you”—he was shaking his finger now—“that any attempt to detain me is an exercise in futility. If you try, I shall evaporate like so much smoke!”

  Daisy looked down at her empty cup and frowned. Her head was still fogged, and it was late. Maybe that was why she believed everything Valerian said; because she was tired and her defenses were down. Or perhaps he’d drugged her. “I’ll keep that in mind. Did you put something in my tea?”

  Valerian drew himself up, annoyed to a truly imperial degree. “Of course not. I have no need of such silly contrivances—I am a vampire!”

  Daisy sighed. “Have I missed something? Did Halloween sneak up on me this year?”

  He leaned across the counter and bared his teeth with a theatrical hiss.

  She bounded off the stool, wide-eyed, her heartbeat making a one-second leap to warp speed. Valerian’s incisors, while beautiful like their dazzling counterparts, were longer, and they came to distinct points, sharp as a wolf’s fangs.

  “Shit!” she blurted, before regaining her courage, easing back to the counter, and raising herself onto the stool again.

  “Trick or treat,” he said.

  Daisy flushed, embarrassed that she’d shown fear. “You could have had that done,” she reasoned hastily. “This town is full of people with custom-made teeth. Some of them are probably even crazy enough to think they’re vampires!”

  Valerian subsided a little, leaning back against the counter opposite the breakfast bar, his hands on his hips, and regarded her wearily. “What do you want, Daisy? How do I prove to you that I’m telling the truth?”

  She leaned forward again, studying him for a long time. She was mystified by this maniac, or this vampire, whichever he was. But, oddly, she wasn’t afraid of him; underlying all her misgivings was a strange sense of familiarity and the sure knowledge that she was safe in his presence. “I did not say I didn’t believe you,” she reminded him. “Something weird is definitely going on here. I just need to work through it for myself, that’s all.” She paused, remembering her impromptu visit to the year 1457, via the supermarket, and how vivid the experience had been. There could be no denying that the episode was more than a dream or a hallucination. “I saw you,” she said. “In my—vision, I mean. But you were wearing different clothes. If you were really there, how did you make such a quick change?”

  Valerian made a sound that might have been a sigh, but was somehow different. “I merely projected myself into the scene,” he said patiently, “complete with costume. You saw me because I wanted you to see me.”

  Daisy ran her tongue over her teeth, something she often did when she was pondering an enigma. Her headache was starting to come back, and if she didn’t get some sleep, she’d be a zombie all the next day. “Earlier, when you were telling me the story of your life, you said you could travel back in time, as far as the point of your own death as a mortal.”

  He sighed again. “Yes.”

  “What’s to prevent you from meeting yourself somewhere between now and then?”

  “Nothing. Occasionally it happens. It’s a paradox, like time travel itself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not surprised. I don’t understand, either. I suspect that no one does—at least, not completely. It’s a universe of specialties—vampires are vampires, roses are roses, jellyfish are jellyfish. Which of us can grasp the whole of reality, in all its multifaceted complexity?”

  Daisy didn’t have an answer.

  Valerian came around the counter and very gently touched her face, his thumb tracing the outline of her cheekbone. “My poor love,” he said. “You’ve always been this way, you know—wanting answers to impossible questions, tilting at windmills, chasing rainbows. Just as you always have copper-colored hair, green eyes, and a smattering of freckles across your nose.”

  A shiver of mingled delight and passion moved through Daisy, and strange erotic images stirred in her memory. She did not recoil, although Valerian was stil
l a stranger, and probably a dangerous one at that. Instead, she wanted him to make love to her, she who had slept with exactly three men in her entire life.

  The pad of that same thumb strayed sensuously across her mouth. “Soon,” he said, apparently reading her mind again. A thoughtful expression darkened his eyes. “But perhaps a small reminder of what we’ve shared together over the centuries would not be amiss.”

  He was a hell of an actor, Daisy thought. There were so many things happening in her body, so many sensations bouncing from one part of her insides to another, like laser beams running amuck, that she didn’t have the energy to speak.

  Valerian smiled ever so slightly, bent his head, and kissed her.

  It was only a brief contact, a mere brushing of his lips against hers, but it rocked Daisy to her core. The earth seemed to spin away beneath her feet and shoot off into space, leaving her dangling in a throbbing void. There was no oxygen, and her heart swelled painfully against her rib cage.

  She gasped and stared up into Valerian’s wise eyes—she could well believe that he was six hundred years old in that moment, for she saw so many emotions reflected there, in that fathomless blue, myriad things that could not have been garnered in a normal lifetime.

  “Why aren’t I afraid?” she whispered.

  He smoothed her hair, and even that innocent motion sent new fissures streaking through her few remaining defenses, caused the last walls to crumble and the innermost doors to swing open. “Because you know, in the essence of yourself, that I would brave hell itself for you.” He glanced at the window above the sink. “It will be dawn soon. I must go.”

  Daisy was disappointed. Hadn’t he promised to stay?

  He’d read her thoughts again. “I promised a small reminder of what we had together,” he clarified with a smile. “And now for one of my more impressive tricks.”

  With no more preamble than that, he vanished. In the space of an instant—with no drumrolls, no smoke, no mirrors—he was simply gone.

  Daisy swore and leaped off the stool, as if to pursue the magician into thin air. She thought she heard, far in the distance, the faintest echo of a chuckle.

  She stood there for a few moments, open-mouthed, convinced she was certifiable, before her basically pragmatic nature took over. After washing her face, brushing her teeth, and gulping down two aspirin, Daisy fell into bed and slept like a dead woman.

  She did not dream.

  With the morning and full consciousness came vivid memories of the night before—her “spontaneous regression” to the fifteenth century, Valerian’s wild, and undeniably fascinating, tale of living six centuries as a vampire, that soul-shattering kiss, and, finally, his spectacular disappearance.

  He was a magician, she reminded herself. But that single fact didn’t explain all the things she’d seen and felt. There was more to it—much more.

  All right, then, Daisy’s highly developed left brain argued, he was a hypnotist as well as a stage wizard. He’d said straight out that he could project his own image into her mind at will, hadn’t he? That, supposedly, was how he had joined her in the Horse and Horn, when she was Elisabeth Saxon, erstwhile tavern wench.

  Somehow, logical as it was, that explanation didn’t work, either.

  Daisy tossed back her covers and got up. She was probably getting an ulcer from trying to figure this out—better to let it simmer in her subconscious for a while and think of other things with the everyday brain cells. She’d gotten to the crux of more than one case that way—using what O’Halloran called her woman’s intuition.

  She smiled. He’d never claimed to be original.

  After going to the bathroom, Daisy opened her front door and picked up the newspaper lying on the mat. The headline wiped the smile from her face.

  POLICE DUB RECENT CRIMES ‘VAMPIRE MURDERS.’

  “What police?” Daisy grumbled, pushing the door shut with her foot and scanning the article as she crossed the apartment to the kitchenette. “Nobody asked me about the case.”

  The piece was peppered with quotes from one Detective John P. O’Halloran, who was, according to the reporter, “in charge of the investigation.” Daisy might have been his golf caddie, for all the mention she got, but she didn’t care about that. What bothered her, and she knew it was a waste of time to worry about it, was the way the press seemed to glamorize what had happened.

  Whoever the killer was, he was sure to get off on the attention and notoriety.

  When the telephone rang, she was already reaching for the receiver to call the office. She almost hoped it would be the screwball who’d harassed her after Jillie Fairfield’s murder; there was a thing or two she wanted to say to him.

  Alas, the voice that replied to her brisk “Hello, this is Chandler” was O’Halloran’s.

  “It’s your partner,” he said, master of understatement that he was.

  Daisy dragged over one of the stools from the breakfast bar and perched on it. “Oh, yes—the dimpled darling of the Fourth Estate. Tell me, O’Halloran, did you have to stay up all night to make the world safe for old ladies and Cub Scouts, or did you just take care of it on your break?”

  “Smart-ass,” O’Halloran said fondly.

  “Have you got something new to tell me about the case, or are we going to go on exchanging sloppy sentiments all morning?”

  He cleared his throat, then took a noisy slurp of what was probably coffee. He was stalling, and that was a bad sign.

  “O’Halloran,” Daisy pressed.

  “All right, all right,” her partner blurted. “The chief saw the EMT’s report on your collapse at the supermarket last night. He wants you to take a few days’ leave and get a checkup.”

  “Are you telling me that I’m suspended?”

  “I’m telling you that you have to rest a few days and see a doctor. Don’t come unwrapped on me now, Chandler, because this wasn’t my idea. It came down from the brass.”

  “Shit,” Daisy muttered, chewing one fingernail.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that. It ain’t becoming.” Daisy struggled to regain her self-control before going on. There was no sense digging herself in deeper. “What the devil did Charlie tell those people?”

  “That you passed out.”

  “And?”

  O’Halloran let out a long-suffering sigh. “And the head office got a call from the checkout lady late last night—Marvella somebody. She was worried—said you were talking gibberish while you were out.”

  Daisy closed her eyes. “They want me to take a drug test, don’t they, O’Halloran?”

  “Look, it’s routine—you know that. Any one of us could be asked to pee in a cup at any time.”

  She sighed. “I’m not popping pills or shooting up,” she said, suddenly feeling as if she could crawl back into bed and sleep for two weeks. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Hell, yes,” O’Halloran answered gruffly. “Of course I know that. Look, partner, don’t try to buck the system, okay? Just catch up on your sleep, get the checkup, and come back to work. If you stay out too long, somebody might get the idea that you’re the real supercop and I’m just the sidekick. I’ve got to think about my image, you know.”

  Daisy laughed, even though there were tears gathering along her lashes. “Don’t worry, fella—your reputation is safe with me.”

  She hung up the receiver and moved around the apartment in a sort of stupor, showering, brushing her hair and teeth, dressing in jeans and a lightweight sweater, making toast and a poached egg for breakfast. When she’d done those things, she got into her car and drove downtown.

  After a thorough examination and a lot of questions, the official department physician announced that Daisy was suffering from exhaustion and recommended that she take two weeks’ leave. Her first instinct was to resist, but then she reconsidered. She had all the signs of a classic case of burnout, and if she kept pushing herself, she might just wake up one morning to find that she was an ex-cop, with her law enforcement career
behind her forever.

  With that specter staring her in the face, Daisy filled out the necessary papers, called O’Halloran with the news, and then went back home. For now, she told herself, it was enough that there would be no question that she’d been abusing drugs.

  She stayed in her apartment just long enough to pack and call her sister, Nadine, who reported that she was getting labor pains. Within half an hour Daisy was on her way to Telluride, tape deck blaring. The screaming ghosts of all her fears and doubts followed along, staying just inside the outermost edge of her awareness.

  Valerian

  Las Vegas, 1995

  I knew Daisy was gone when I arose that evening, rested and ready to feed, and then to resume the hunt for my enemy. Her absence gave me a bereft, hollow sensation, in that dry and atrophied thing that had been my heart, but I thought it better that she was far away. The greater her distance from me, the safer she would be.

  I fastened my cuff links, smiling to myself. I had chosen a special pair that night for luck, antique gold ones that had been a gift from a cherished friend, George Bernard Shaw. But it wasn’t the jewelry that gave me pleasure, it was the idea of keeping a certain promise to Daisy.

  Tonight she would know my magic in a new way, and I hoped it would cause her to remember all we had been to each other over the centuries. She had been a will-o’- the-wisp, flitting from one identity to the next, having the same face and body but a different name in each generation, and having no conscious memory of me whatsoever.

  I, on the other hand, had always been Valerian. Endlessly, eternally myself.

  I confess that I grow weary of my own company on occasion, fascinating though I am. One gets to know one’s self, over the course of centuries, and the utter absence of surprise can grind at the spirit.