The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  She moaned and arched her back, offering herself, and he took her eagerly, gratefully, running his hands down her sides and then lifting them to her breasts again.

  When he claimed her for the second time, Elisabeth exploded immediately, a fiery spiral unfurling within her, the circles ever-widening, flinging light with every revolution, warming the parts of her soul she’d kept secret even from herself.

  Valerian loved her over and over that night, satisfying every desire, meeting every need. Sometime just before dawn, he let her sleep at last, and when she opened her eyes at midmorning, he was gone.

  She got up, washed, donned a clean gown and overskirt, and silently dared Kate Crown, who brought her breakfast on a tray, to speak so much as a word.

  Kate did not take the challenge, but the fine ring on Elisabeth’s finger caught her eye, and there would be talk about it in the kitchen for sure. The maid left the food on the table next to the bed with its tangled covers and left the room again.

  Elisabeth ate fruit and brown bread and some cold meat, then used her knife to pry up the loose floorboard. She took out the hoard of gold, which was tightly bundled in a bit of cloth pinched from the kitchen, and marveled at how heavy it was.

  There was enough there, she guessed, to keep her for years, if she was careful, and she wouldn’t have to go back to the Horse and Horn, either, or to any place like it. The night just past had changed her, in some way she didn’t fully understand. She knew now that she would never lay with another man in the whole of her life. She had made a serious mistake in wooing the master to her bed, for she had fallen in love with him in the course of their time together, but she knew he couldn’t return her regard.

  Valerian cared for a woman named Brenna, and Elisabeth, wise in the ways of men, knew it was an eternal bond. There was no room in the master’s heart, generous as it was, for the likes of Betsey Saxon.

  A tear fell onto the back of Elisabeth’s hand as she replaced the board in the floor. She could have stayed, if only she’d left well enough alone and contented herself with what she had. She might not have discovered what love was, might not have learned to need and want the impossible.

  Everything was different now.

  The servants were busy, and it was easy to creep out of the house into the shifting morning fog, with the bundle of gold coins rattling beneath her skirts and bumping against her thigh as she walked.

  She didn’t know which way to go, and it didn’t really matter, as long as she got away.

  Elisabeth wandered all that day, growing more frightened and confused with every passing moment, and finally took a room above a seedy, dockside tavern. She lay curled on the filthy bed, the gold clutched to her middle like an unborn child, and watched the eerie dance of the fog outside the high, narrow window.

  She slipped into a strange reverie, and a fever followed, with terrible cramps in her bowels.

  Valerian found her that night, just after sunset, and brought her home, holding her even in the carriage, and she felt his tears on her face and in her hair.

  He bathed her himself, tenderly, and sent for a physician, but Elisabeth was dying. She knew it, and so did Valerian.

  He asked her about the ring once when she was lucid, but she could not recall where it came from, and said she was sorry if she’d pinched it from one of his lady friends. He wept silently at her words and did not speak of the ruby again until the following night when he was feeding her spoonfuls of broth.

  “Kate said a gentleman brought it, the evening before you ran away,” Valerian said gently. “That would have been a fortnight ago, as of tomorrow. Do you remember a caller, Elisabeth?”

  She sensed that the ring had meaning, as well as value, that it was terribly important in some way, but she couldn’t recall any man. She wished she did, for that would mean she didn’t have to die a thief, with the fires of hell licking at her toes.

  “No,” she replied, her eyes filling with tears, and she saw by Valerian’s expression that he believed her.

  Just before dawn Elisabeth awakened to see an angel of death standing over her. He was very beautiful, and a tear left a glittering streak on his cheek.

  Despite her weakness, she became aware of a probing sensation, and felt his mind searching hers, reaching past the fever, the confusion, the pain, into that place where her spirit lived.

  “We can be together for all time,” he said. “Let me give you the gift—”

  Elisabeth had risen out of her body, and she could see so clearly now that her physical eyes had closed. She knew what Valerian was, knew he was damned, as surely as Lucifer and his fallen angels. She loved him without reservation and without regret, but the price of that love, her very soul, was too dear.

  She came back to herself briefly and with an agonizing effort. “No,” she said. “I cannot.”

  Valerian held her tightly, and she rested her head against his shoulder, inexpressibly weary. She felt his grief and wished she could console him or simply say good-bye, but her consciousness was fading, stretching and spreading itself thin like smoke, until finally it became part of the fog stroking the window glass with white, shifting fingers.

  Dying, it turned out, was easy. A simple matter of letting go….

  52

  Valerian

  Las Vegas, 1995

  I was remembering Elisabeth Saxon when I returned to Daisy at sunset of the following day, having taken my fitful rest in a burrow far beneath the ruins of the baron’s keep. Remembering, with punishing clarity, that I had not watched her closely enough, not protected her. Perhaps I had even cursed her with my lovemaking. I suffered greatly over her passing, certain that she would not have fallen ill and perished after much suffering if I had left her alone, instead of dragging her away from that wretched tavern to live in a city where disease flourished. I forgot about the mysterious ring in my frenzy of bereavement and did not notice that it was gone until the undertaker and his helper had come to take her away.

  Elisabeth’s death had been my doing, of that I was certain. And now Daisy was doomed as well, if Krispin had his way.

  Beneath that terrible certainty was another brier, caught in the tenderest part of my psyche and festering there—my fragile, cherubic brother, whom I had loved, despised me and wished me harm. That pup, who had frolicked at my heels, who had emulated my every word and move and aided me in all forms and fashions of mischief, had somehow become a ravening wolf, bent on tearing out my heart.

  Thus distracted, I failed to concentrate and bungled into Daisy’s apartment with an ungraceful crash, finding myself in the shower stall.

  The running water instantly drenched my hair and the dusty suit and cloak I was wearing, and I roared in surprise and dismay, reaching for the plastic curtain and shoving it aside. There was a simultaneous scream from beyond.

  Daisy stood on the cheap pink-fluff rug, dressed in a pair of oversize pajamas, with mayhem in her eyes and a baseball bat poised at shoulder level, ready to do serious damage.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she spat, “it’s only you.” For a moment I thought she was going to take a swing at my head anyway, and although it would not have done me any lasting injury, I was still relieved when she lowered the bat.

  Belatedly, I confess, I turned off the shower spray and stepped out of the stall, snatching a towel from a nearby rack and sponging gingerly at my sodden, mud-streaked cloak.

  “Who were you expecting?” I demanded somewhat impatiently. “Norman Bates?”

  Some of the air seemed to go out of Daisy, and I thought I discerned the faintest glimmer of tears pooling along her lower lashes.

  She recovered quickly, as she had always done, for among the many sterling qualities she tended to carry from lifetime to lifetime was a perfectly astounding capacity for resilience. There had been many occasions when, in my opinion, cowardice would have served her better. When she rode into the sea as Brenna, for one example, and she fled my house in London as Elisabeth, for another.

&n
bsp; A corner of Daisy’s mouth tipped upward in a cocky little grin. “Are you losing your touch?” she asked, looking me over with a slow impudence I wouldn’t have suffered from anyone else. “Frankly, I’d come to expect a little more subtlety and grace from you.”

  I don’t doubt that the sheer heat of my annoyance could have dried my sodden garments, but I chose instead to construct another suit of clothes entirely, by means of my will. In the figurative blink of an eye, the tails and cloak and trousers were gone, and in their place were tailored slacks and a cashmere turtleneck sweater, both black. On my feet, instead of the former water- spotted spats, were a pair of the sleek boots I have made in a certain elite shop in Milan.

  I must admit I enjoyed Daisy’s round-eyed reaction to the transformation, which had been virtually instantaneous.

  “I’m not even going to ask how you did that,” she informed me after closing her gaping mouth and swallowing a few times. “I don’t suppose it’s a trick we poor, bumbling mortals can learn?”

  I touched the tip of her nose, with its faint golden trail of freckles, and smiled. “Sorry, love—I believe that particular feat will require a few more millennia of evolution. Don’t feel badly, though—the ability is there, slumbering away in a rather gelatinous portion of your brain.”

  Daisy gave me a spook-house smile, purposely grim and humorless. “Thanks so much for setting me straight,” she said with mild irony, then turned on one bare heel to march out of the bathroom. “Every once in a while I lose touch with the fact that I’m Only Human.”

  I had no choice but to trail after her, and I don’t mind saying that it galled me. It has always been my habit, and my distinct preference, to lead, not follow.

  “Is that about poor Janet?” I demanded, hastening along that shoddy little hallway behind Daisy. “Is that why you’re so peevish tonight?”

  She turned so quickly that I nearly collided with her at the entrance to her uninspired living room. “I’m not peevish!” she insisted, folding her arms. “I’m scared, damn it! I’m scared shitless!”

  I hated it when she, or any woman, talked like that. Call me a male chauvinist vampire, but I miss the old-fashioned female virtues, gracious speech among them. Sometime, I vowed to myself, I will tell her about her incarnation as Jenny Wade, when she’d been so sweet-tempered and ladylike.

  But this was not the time for lectures. I put my hands on Daisy’s shoulders to steady her and was struck anew by the fragility of her tender flesh and delicate bones. Ashes to ashes, I thought with a stab of sorrow, and dust to dust.

  “I cannot endure this again,” I muttered, speaking more to myself than to her. Even then, of course, I knew I had no choice but to endure, to suffer, to pass through the very fires of hell, and, worst of all, to survive it.

  Daisy reached up and touched my mouth with the fingertips of her right hand. “What do you mean by that?” she asked in tones so gentle that they splintered my dry and hollow heart. “You left out some things the other night when you told me about our past lives together, didn’t you?”

  “Not ‘our past lives,’ darling,” I replied, closing my hand around hers, because I couldn’t resist, and brushing her knuckles across my lower lip. “Yours. I have been who I am—Valerian Lazarus, the bootmaker’s son—since my birth in the fourteenth century.”

  “What is it that you haven’t told me?” she persisted. She might have been Elisabeth then, or Brenna, or any of the other saucy, dauntless minxes she’d been through the endless and dreary march of years that lay between our first encounter and this one. In each successive encounter I have loved her more deeply than before. “Speak up, please.”

  I had not told her about the curse, of course. Or about the ruby ring that always heralded the end of another bittersweet episode between us. And I would not burden her with those things now, for there was nothing she could do to change the future.

  “Do not ask,” I said, and the words came hoarse from my throat. “I cannot and will not answer.”

  For a long moment Daisy simply stared up at me, working some old and potent magic of her own. She looked incredibly small and breakable in those blasted pajamas, and yet I sensed in her some mysterious power that I would never understand or possess.

  “He was here,” she said. “The killer.”

  I could not have been more horrified or taken aback if Daisy’s bat, which she’d left in the bathroom, had suddenly materialized in her hands and slammed into my middle. How could I have failed to sense such a threat? How?

  “When?” I rasped, grasping her shoulders again. Daisy turned beneath my hands and walked away, into the kitchen. She took some modem horror from the freezer and slid it into the microwave before deigning to meet my gaze and answer my anguished question.

  She shrugged, leaning against the counter while the oven whirred behind her. “While I was visiting—make that not visiting—my sister in Telluride. I came home and found a life-size doll hanging from the showerhead, with an improvised noose around its neck. There were two red marks on the throat—for dramatic effect, I suppose. It was overkill, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

  I stopped myself just as I would have smashed one fist through the cheap plasterboard of her living room wall. “Here? Krispin was here?”

  The bell on the oven chimed, and Daisy opened the door and took out something evidently intended to pass for a pizza. “Ah, so Super-fiend has a name now. How interesting.”

  I was still struggling to regain my inner—and outer—equilibrium. The scent of the wretched thing she’d cooked and was now preparing to eat—oh, yes, vampires have the sense of smell in abundance, and all the others, too—nearly gagged me.

  “I discovered the truth only last night,” I said, curling my lip and trying to distance myself from the culinary travesty, which Daisy was now balancing atop a folded paper towel and raising to her lips. “My brother, Krispin, lives.”

  Daisy took a bite and had the effrontery to chew as she answered. “So does my sister, Nadine.”

  I went to stand on the other side of the living room and opened a window to the still desert air. “The difference,” I said coldly, “is that Krispin, like me, was born in the fourteenth century. He is a vampire.”

  “I take it the two of you haven’t kept in touch,” Daisy observed.

  I thrust a hand through my hair in exasperation. “I believed him dead all these years, and he never troubled himself to disabuse me of the notion.”

  She shrugged again, raising just one shoulder, and gazed at me over the expanse of the half-eaten pizza.

  “Maybe he didn’t know about you, either,” she suggested.

  I glowered at her. “He veiled himself from me. He could have no honorable reason for doing that. We were brothers, after all, dragged, bloody, from the same womb.”

  Daisy made a face and dropped what remained of her food into the trash. “Maybe he—what was his name again?—Krispin, that’s it. Maybe Krispin simply doesn’t like you? Did you ever consider that possibility?”

  She started to lick her fingers—a habit I cannot abide—but stopped when I fixed my gaze on her and projected my disapproval.

  “Clearly, to say that Krispin ‘doesn’t like me’ is an understatement of truly enormous proportions. I believed, however foolishly, that he cared for me while he lived, as I did for him.”

  Daisy raised an eyebrow and, to my relief, wiped her hands clean on a dishtowel hanging from the refrigerator handle. “It couldn’t have been easy to be your brother,” she said. “You’ve got to admit you can be a bit overwhelming. A hard act to follow, in more ways than one.

  “Be that as it may,” I said, struggling again to control my impatience, “I believe Krispin is the killer. I must find him.”

  She paled slightly and came a step nearer. “And then?”

  Such sorrow welled up within me that I could barely withstand it. “And then I shall destroy him.”

  Daisy drew closer still and laid a hand on my arm. I hoped she did no
t feel the involuntary tremor that spilled through what passes, in a vampire, as flesh and muscle.

  “How?”

  I saw my brother in my mind’s eye, as a small, coltish boy, with sunlight gleaming in his bright yellow hair and mischief shining in his eyes. I heard him running after me, imploring me to slow my strides so that he might keep pace.

  The memories caused me pain the like of which I have known only a handful of times—always in connection with this woman—and the images of what the future might hold for me and for Krispin were so horrible that I could not hold them in my mind.

  I said nothing, because I was incapable of speaking at that moment.

  “Is it like in books and movies?” Daisy asked with a tenderness that made me long to lose myself in her arms for a little while, to nestle in her warm heart like a dream and hide from all that was mine to do. “Do you have to drive a stake through his heart?”

  “Something like that,” I managed to say. “I would almost rather destroy myself than Krispin. Great Zeus, Daisy, if you could have seen him as a child, as a youth—he was beautiful.”

  “Like you,” she said. “But smaller, I think, and perhaps not as quick, or as bright, or as bold.”

  I looked into her eyes, surprised by her insight. “My father used to say I took the best of my mother’s nurturing—that my craven hungers made my brother weak and robbed the children who came after him of the very marrow of their bones and the potency of their blood.”

  “Father of the Year,” Daisy said with gentle sarcasm, putting her hands on my shoulders.

  I wanted to melt beneath her warm, soft palms and supple fingers, but there was, regrettably, no time to waste on such sweet indulgences.

  “You are not safe, Daisy,” I began.

  “Tell me about it,” she interrupted before I could go on. “I’m a cop, remember? And we’ve had this conversation before. There is no safe place, Valerian—maybe not for any of us.”