The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Except maybe a vampire magician in a tux and a flowing cape, she reflected, starting the ignition, signaling, and pulling back out onto the freeway.

  Trooper Wilson chivalrously escorted her all the way to the Las Vegas city limits.

  She sighed when he took an exit and headed back in the other direction. So much for the police escort.

  At first Daisy’s apartment seemed to be just the way she’d left it. She called Nadine right away, ignoring the blinking light on her answering machine, and heard her sister’s cheerful “Hello?”

  Daisy closed her eyes. Would Nadine remember her visit, or had Valerian wiped it out of her mind, and Freddy’s, as he’d claimed? “Hi, sis,” she said in a rush of breath. “How are you?”

  “Daze! Hi! Freddy and I were just talking about you this morning—it’s the darnedest thing. We both dreamed you showed up late last night and slept on our hide-abed! Isn’t that wild—the two of us having the same dream?”

  “Wild,” Daisy agreed, feeling a bit sad and very disoriented. By now she half believed she’d dreamed her part of the experience, too. “When’s that baby planning to be born? When interest rates go down? When there’s another Republican in the White House?”

  Nadine laughed. “I’d ask her, but I think she’s busy doing aerobics. This kid never sleeps.”

  Daisy felt bruised inside. It was, and would always be, a sharp disappointment that she couldn’t be there for Nadine at this important time. “Have you and Freddy managed to agree on a name yet?”

  “No,” Nadine admitted. “He wants to call her Carmen Miranda. Trust me, Daisy, no child of mine is going to go around with half the produce department piled on top of her head.”

  Now it was Daisy who laughed. “What do you want to call her?” she asked when she’d recovered.

  “Whitney,” Nadine replied in a wistful voice. “It’s such a classy name, don’t you think? But Freddy says it’s pretentious.”

  “I’m sure the two of you will come up with something suitable.”

  There was a short silence. “When are you coming over to see us?” Nadine finally asked.

  Daisy’s eyes burned. When we’ve found this Thing, this murdering fiend, and driven a stake through its heart. Or shot it with a silver bullet.

  “Soon,” she said aloud, after what she hoped was an inaudible sniffle.

  “Are you catching cold?”

  It was Daisy’s day for telling lies, among other things. “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take a few days off to drink chicken broth and watch soap operas.”

  “Good plan.”

  “You’ll call? When it’s time, I mean?”

  “You bet,” Nadine said gently. “You’re destined to be Carmen Miranda’s favorite aunt. Besides, I’m expecting a really good baby present from you.”

  Daisy smiled. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “I’ve been poring over catalogs and prowling through malls for weeks. I’m going to send something that will make Miss Whitney Donaldson the envy of the disposable diaper crowd.”

  “Why don’t you bring the gift in person?” Nadine asked.

  Daisy’s smile faded. “I can’t get away just now, sweetie,” she said. “Trust me when I tell you that some very big things are going down around here right now.” Nadine let out a long, martyred sigh. Evidently she figured it was her turn to be the mother hen of the pair. “I worry about you, Daze. You take too many risks. And it seems like every time I watch one of those reality shows on television, some police officer gets killed.”

  “Nadine? There’s an easy solution to that—stop watching reality shows.”

  “Promise me you’ll be careful. God knows where Mom is—we’re probably happier not knowing. But you’re all I’ve got, Daisy, and I can’t bear to lose you.” A tear slipped down Daisy’s right cheek, and she dashed it away with the back of her free hand. “I’m not all you have,” she reminded her sister. “You’ve got Freddy and that little one doing a high-impact workout under your rib cage.” Images of Jillie and Susan’s bloodless bodies filled her mind and made her stomach pitch. She’d try her damnedest, she vowed silently, not to end up like them. “Look, just focus on the business at hand, okay? I’ll be fine.”

  Nadine didn’t sound reassured, but they said their goodbyes and hung up. Daisy immediately called O’Halloran on his cell phone, guessing that he wouldn’t be in his office if he could help it.

  She was right.

  “O’Halloran,” he barked. “Don’t tell me there’s been another murder,” he rushed on before Daisy could even identify herself, “because I don’t want to hear it!”

  “Has there been another murder?” she demanded. “Shit,” O’Halloran snapped. “This is Chandler, ain’t it? You’re already back in town.”

  There are moments when I’m not sure I ever left in the first place, Daisy thought, with a sort of fatalistic whimsy. “It’s your winning personality and your movie- star body, O’Halloran,” she said. “You drive me mad with passion. How could I stay away?”

  He swore again, more creatively than before and with considerably more venom. “You’re on leave, damn it!” he growled once he’d finished reciting the long list of colorful epithets and expletives he’d learned in nearly three decades of public service.

  Daisy smiled into the telephone receiver. “Don’t talk like that,” she said sweetly. “It ain’t becoming.” O’Halloran sighed heavily. It wasn’t easy, the sound seemed to say, single-handedly thwarting evil and holding back the tide of crime.

  “All right,” he said. “You’ll read it in the papers or see it on the tube anyhow. Somebody else was killed last night.”

  Daisy leaned against the wall, her eyes closed. “Who?”

  “It wasn’t another one of that magician’s showgirls, if that’s what you’re thinking,” O’Halloran said, his voice gruff with suppressed emotion. “But the M.O. was the same. Lady named Janet Hurly.”

  Daisy knew her partner well. “There is a connection, though, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, damn it, for all the concern it is of yours right now, with your badge in limbo. You stay out of this, Chandler, or I swear to God I’ll go to the chief myself and tell him you think you’ve been to Mars twice on an alien spaceship. And he’ll believe me, too, after the way you went T.U. in the supermarket.”

  “O’Halloran.”

  “She was this Valerian guy’s agent and business manager,” he finally admitted. “The victim, I mean.” Daisy muttered a favorite swearword of her own, rubbing her right temple with two fingers. “Getting information out of you is like getting a congressman to admit he wears lacy underwear. I feel like I’ve just dragged Lake Tahoe with a hairnet!”

  “Why should I make it easy? This one’s my problem.”

  “That’s what you think, O’Halloran.”

  He hung up.

  “O’Halloran!” Daisy screamed into the mouthpiece. Then she disconnected with a belated bang, knowing it was useless to try to reason with the man. He thought he was protecting her.

  Instantly the phone rang again, and Daisy snatched it off the hook.

  “What?” she demanded, thinking it was O’Halloran calling back with another reason why she shouldn’t try to do her job. He might fancy himself her knight in shining armor, but she’d be damned if she’d let him trample her career beneath the hooves of his trusty charger.

  “Dai-sy.” The voice was the same mechanical, androgynous drone she’d heard before. “Time—to—die—soon—”

  “Why did you kill Janet Hurly?” Daisy interrupted acidly. She was too furious to be afraid; that would come later, she supposed, when she’d had time to think. “I thought I was supposed to be next.” She drew out the last words, mimicking the caller’s tinny monotone.

  “I left—a—message—for you,” the thing said. There was no soul behind the voice, no emotion. “I’ll be sending—a special gift—very soon.”

  Daisy felt a familiar chill. “Gee, thanks,” she replied, revealing none
of the cloying, elemental fear that was climbing her backbone, vertebra by vertebra. “I was beginning to think it was over between us.”

  “Goodbye, Dai-sy/Bren-na/Elis-a-beth/Jen-ny. See—you—soon.”

  Daisy hung up and dashed into the bathroom as bile surged into the back of her throat. She was bending over the toilet, shivering and retching convulsively, when out of the corner of one eye she caught a glimpse of a still form behind the shower curtain.

  With a cry Daisy whirled, automatically reaching for her service revolver—which was tucked away under the front seat of her car. There was a baseball bat in the towel cupboard—she’d never really recovered from seeing Psycho on the late-late show—and Daisy grabbed it and prepared to swing.

  The shape behind the shower curtain didn’t move or speak.

  Bravado was all she had, besides the baseball bat. Reason and experience told her that if she tried to ran, the intruder would be on her before she got to the front door. If he happened to be bigger or stronger, she’d be in deep sewage.

  “If you have a weapon,” she said forcefully, “drop it. Now.”

  Nothing.

  Daisy took a deep breath, let it out, and then, on one of those rash impulses that sometimes earn cops their own segment on the local news, reached out and wrenched the plastic curtain to one side.

  A life-size blowup doll, the kind that can be purchased in any sleazy novelty shop, dangled from the shower head by a noose fashioned from the belt of Daisy’s bathrobe. For a dramatic touch, two small red marks had been drawn onto the neck.

  Daisy turned back to the toilet and threw up in earnest.

  When the heaving stopped at last, she rinsed her mouth, washed her face, and called O’Halloran on his car phone again. “Get over here,” she said calmly. “Now.”

  She hung up and went down to her car for the thirty-eight. While she waited for her partner to arrive, Daisy inspected the rest of the apartment. None of the windows had been forced, and she remembered clearly that the front door was locked when she’d arrived home from a trip she probably hadn’t gone on in the first place.

  Daisy sat down on the couch in her living room, the revolver in her lap, and heard the echo of the caller’s robotic voice in her brain.

  I left a message for you….

  O’Halloran didn’t bother to knock. He just walked right in. Daisy thought numbly that she should be grateful he hadn’t kicked the door open, movie-cop style, weapon drawn. She might have shot him if he had.

  “What’s going on, Chandler?” To his credit, O’Halloran looked genuinely concerned. “You space out again or something?”

  “Just go and look in my shower,” she said.

  I left a message….

  O’Halloran did so and bellowed an exclamation. When he got back to the living room, his face was heart-attack gray, and sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip.

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” he rasped, shoving one hand through his sparse hair. “That’s just plain ugly.”

  Daisy knew there was more. Maybe she was psychic. “And?”

  O’Halloran sank into a chair, pulling his cell phone out of his jacket pocket in almost the same motion. “Janet Hurly’s body was found hanging from a showerhead,” he said as he dialed headquarters. “The killer used what looked like the belt of a bathrobe for a rope. What we got here, Chandler, is a real reasonable facsimile.”

  51

  Valerian

  Outside Las Vegas, 1995

  The taillights of Daisy’s car, glowing red as the eyes of a demon in a bad painting, dissolved into the predawn gloom. I worked a mental trick that would cause the journey to pass quickly for her and withstood the temptation to set my beloved on a path leading anywhere except back to Las Vegas.

  How I yearned to lock her away in some enchanted tower—if such a place existed—or hide her like a treasure in my desert lair. The ruby ring, the harbinger of her death, would arrive soon, I knew, and I was full of terror.

  I dared not attempt to shield her, though, however noble my intentions, for Daisy cherished her freedom in this life, as she had in all the others before it. I had learned from bitter experience that she would despise me for imprisoning her.

  I was, by that time, utterly desperate. I had searched for my ruthless enemy, along with Maeve, and all to no avail. I think I realized, even then, that if I found the fiend I sought, I would also find the one who had stalked my beloved and me, down through the centuries, making a deadly gift of the bloodred gemstone I had come to hate and fear.

  As I saw it, I had no choice but to awaken Tobias, the slumbering one, who had been among the first vampires created. The rest of that strange fellowship had perished by their own choice, in the womb of the earth, except of course for Lisette, the first queen. She’d died by Maeve’s hand, and rightfully so, far away on a moonswept moor.

  But those are other tales, for other vampires to tell.

  I willed myself to Tobias’s lair, barely reaching that grave-like pit ahead of the consuming sunlight, and sprawled beside my elder. Before I could even attempt to rouse him, by word or touch, the consuming sleep bore me down and down, into darkness.

  I was trapped inside my dreams, where I saw Janet Hurly, my mortal manager and something akin to a friend, savagely murdered in her apartment. I was unable to come to her aid, mired as I was in the vampire sleep, and it was perfect torment to look on helplessly. When it was over at last, when he’d strangled Janet, this creature I couldn’t quite recognize, and then left her body hanging from the showerhead by a strip of cloth, it seemed her staring eyes were fixed on me.

  Accusing. Asking why.

  I flailed mentally, trying to regain consciousness and thus escape the smothering weight of the nightmare, but it was no use. Sometimes I was wakeful during the daylight hours, though I could never tolerate the sun, but it was not a feat I could perform at will. The phenomenon happened on its own, generally after I had been feeding with uncommon appetite for a long period of time.

  At last, at last, the blessed caress of twilight reached me, stretching fingers of shadow down through the soil, and I was again in command of my body and mind. I sat up in Tobias’s cramped coffin of a lair, pebbles and the bones of some hapless mortal scrabbling beneath me as I moved.

  “Tobias!” I shook his slender shoulder. He resembled a lad, having been made while still a youth, but in fact he was, as far as I knew, the oldest vampire in existence.

  He mumbled and stirred slightly, making a groping motion with one hand, to dismiss me.

  I straddled him and grasped both his shoulders now, and the rotted fabric of his tunic crumbled in my hands, fragile as curls of ash on a cold hearth.

  “Damn you, Tobias, wake! I need your help!”

  Even in a stupor he was powerful, and with no physical effort at all, with nothing more than a half-formed thought, he cast me from him. I slammed against the side of our joint tomb with a jarring impact, mentally revising my earlier supposition that only Maeve Tremayne was stronger than I.

  “Go—away,” Tobias muttered.

  For Daisy’s sake, I would brave Tobias’s rare but formidable wrath. I would plead, bargain, lie.

  Anything to keep Daisy from the unknown monster.

  I knelt at his side. “Please, Old One, hear me. There is a fiend, a vampire, I think, but perhaps a warlock—”

  Tobias interrupted in the expressionless tones of one entranced. “Return to Dunnett’s Head,” he said slowly without opening his eyes. “The answer is there—and not there. That is the riddle.”

  With that, he settled deeper into his nest of death, looking for all the world like a child curling up on the nursery couch for his afternoon nap. I knew I would get no more from him no matter how long or how forcefully I persisted.

  Dunnett’s Head. My ancient home.

  I sat back on my haunches. I had not been near that accursed place since the day Brenna and I left it, while I was yet mortal. Crouched there in Tobias’s grave, I doubted that
even a trace of the village itself had survived the passing centuries, though there might well be ruins of Baron Afton-St. Claire’s austere keep.

  I covered my face with both hands for a moment, hating even the thought of returning to the scene of so much tragedy and pain, knowing at the same time that I must go immediately. Tobias had said its name clearly.

  Dunnett’s Head

  I dared not even take the time to hunt and feed, for any delay might rob me of my determination to find my foe before he completed his plan of revenge. I did not need to be told that his designs included Daisy.

  Daisy. She would have been doomed anyway, like Brenna and Elisabeth and Jenny and the others before her. There was no escaping the curse, no matter what I did or said or thought, but my desperate delusion was also a part of the mysterious evil that had tormented us both for six hundred years. Each time I stumbled across my beloved, in each new incarnation, I believed I could save her. I had to cling to that vain fancy, or go stark, screaming mad at the prospect of losing her again.

  I turned the powers of my mind upon Dunnett’s Head, and in the length of a mortal’s heartbeat, I was there, standing among the moonlit stones that had once formed the baron’s keep. I shivered in the night wind that surged upward from the sea, although a vampire does not feel that kind of chill, and turned slowly to look around me.

  In a few paces I stood where the courtyard had been, in the exact spot where Brenna’s father had bested me in swordplay. I bear the scar of that conflict still, a tidy line across my middle.

  Soon I found the remnants of the great hall and the chapel, and there was still a ditch, though so shallow now that it was hardly discernible, where the moat had been.

  Memories assailed me, striking my spirit like stones hard-flung, and I found I could not bear to stand in this place where Brenna had been and was no more.

  I walked down the hillside to the site of the village, traversing the short distance as a mortal man would have done, instead of willing myself to my destination, for I was in no hurry to arrive.