The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

“Kristina is a fanciful sort, given to wild imaginings. Stay out of my way and let me handle this, Daisy, or I vow I will lock you up somewhere.”

  Daisy knew he meant what he was saying. She also knew she couldn’t stand back and let more innocent people fall victim to Krispin’s madness. “Take me with you,” she begged. “At least that way you’ll be able to protect me.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “Daisy, I must feed. And the places I go are unfit for a mortal woman.”

  “Well, I won’t stay here. I don’t think I could handle another one of Krispin’s impromptu television productions, and besides, I’m not a vampire. I get hungry for real food, and even though I pull my share of late shifts, I’m not used to sleeping during the day.”

  Valerian smiled sadly. “This has ever been your flaw, Daisy—you are stubborn beyond all reason.” He drew her very close, and his black silk cape encircled her like a whisper from another world. “Close your eyes and hold on tightly.”

  She looked up into his magnificent face. “Could I fall?”

  “No,” Valerian replied. “The request was strictly lascivious.”

  Daisy laughed despite her grief, and the sound had barely left her throat when she found herself standing in Valerian’s dressing room, behind the stage of the main showroom in the Venetian Hotel. She was still safely cossetted in the magician’s cloak, but she was alone.

  “Valerian!” she yelled, letting the cape fall into a shimmering, inky pool at her feet and resting her hands on her hips. “You come back here, damn it!”

  After fifteen minutes there was still no sign of him. Muttering, Daisy let herself out of the casino by a back way into the warm night, walked around front, and boarded one of the gondolas ferrying tourists back and forth to the hotel.

  Although Valerian had eventually provided her with the requested jeans and T-shirt—he’d thoughtfully included a pair of sneakers, too—she didn’t have a quarter for the telephone, let alone cab fare back to her apartment.

  Once she’d reached the street, Daisy started walking toward home. With a little luck—if it could be called that—Krispin might make an appearance.

  Valerian

  The Last Ditch, 1995

  I grew weaker, it seemed, with every passing moment, as though a cancer had taken root inside me, sapping my strength. I felt unsteady and somewhat disoriented as I made my way through the crowd of warlocks, vampires, and other monsters who filled that wretched bar. The place was outside the normal barriers of time, an anteroom to hell itself, and I despised it for a reminder of my own damnation. I went back only because I knew that, eventually, every rumor found its way there, to circulate among the creatures who sat around the tables, lined the bars, and shuffled on the dance floor.

  Sooner or later there would surely be word of Krispin.

  I found a place in a shadowy corner and sat down to listen and to watch.

  Dathan, a warlock I particularly dislike, immediately made his way through the seedy throng to join me. I had had an impression of his presence, an instant’s knowing, but I had shoved it aside, hoping the perception was in error.

  With an insolent smile, not waiting for an invitation, he drew back a chair and slipped into it.

  He would have made a very striking vampire with his fair hair and cherubic features, I thought, but appearances were indeed deceiving. Dathan was a warlock, with poisoned blood flowing through his veins and a stock of evil tricks comparable to my own.

  “You seem sickly, my old friend—as if you’ve taken a draft of warlock’s blood,” Dathan remarked with a crooked smile.

  I made no effort to hide my contempt. While it was true that Dathan and his followers had been helpful during a recent conflict between Maeve Tremayne and the late, great vampire queen, Lisette, I for one was not prepared either to suggest a truce or to accept one.

  Not that the warlock intended to offer an olive branch.

  “I am not a fledgling,” I said coldly. “I know better than to consume so wretched a substance.”

  “Do you?” Dathan taunted in a soft voice. His eyes danced with mockery.

  I considered my lethargic state, which had subsided temporarily, borne away on a tide of annoyance. Inside of an instant my hands were gripping the lapels of the warlock’s finely tailored coat and, without leaving my chair, I had drawn him halfway across the table.

  “Have you poisoned me?” I demanded in a whisper audible only to the two of us. “Confess, warlock, or I shall sunder your liver from your chest and bum both parts while they still quiver with life!”

  Dathan, to his credit, was unruffled. He made no move to resist my grasp or to answer with a threat of his own. Instead, he sighed, for unlike vampires, warlocks have breath.

  “I am not without defenses, blood-drinker,” he said cordially. “For both our sakes, I pray you—keep that in mind.”

  I knew well that Dathan could ignite infernos by the power of his mind, and vampires can be destroyed by fire, as by sunlight and the point of a stake, but I was reckless, caring nothing about my own fate. Daisy’s future was all that mattered.

  I released Dathan with a summary unflexing of my fingers, and he sank blithely back into his chair. There was not so much as a flush of irritation pulsing on his high, fine cheekbones, or a twitch at his temple.

  Either I had not made him angry, or he was keeping his emotions veiled. I expect it was the latter, for Dathan’s affection for me was then, and remains, no greater than mine for him.

  “You have been searching for a vampire called Krispin, have you not?” he asked, as prim and proper as an English butler.

  I regarded him in silence for a few moments, pondering the fortuitousness of his appearance in that place. I had come to the Last Ditch Tavern hoping to hear even a scrap of information concerning my brother’s whereabouts, and here was someone very likely to know. Still, I mistrusted all warlocks and indeed most vampires as well. If I stumbled into a trap of some sort, Daisy would be at Krispin’s mercy.

  “Yes,” I allowed at last, offering no more.

  “There is an old one who can tell you what you need to know. A vampire called Challes.”

  I drew back slightly, feeling as if I’d been slapped. “Challes? He was destroyed centuries ago, felled by the hand of Nemesis himself.”

  Dathan raised his eyebrows. “How certain you seem. And yet you believed your brother to be dead, only to learn that you were wrong. I should think such an oversight would cause even you to think twice thereafter and avoid hasty conclusions.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  The warlock’s smile was beatific. Had I not known him for a fiend, I might have thought he was an angel. “Rest assured, vampire,” he said, laying a hand to his chest, “this heart bears you no love, but only malice, as ever. I bring you this news because I want something in return.”

  I relaxed a little, for this was a philosophy I understood and subscribed to myself, but with this more temperate mood came a new flagging of my vitality. I could have laid my head down on that scarred, ugly table, closed my eyes, and slept like an ingenuous child, but of course I resisted the compulsion. It would be safer to make my bed among vipers or plague-bearing rats. “Explain,” I said.

  “You have been careless,” he scolded in an indulgent tone, letting me know it was not my curt one-word command that had moved him to reply. He and his kindred are prideful creatures, and vain. “There were warlocks among your victims. Think, twin of Lucifer—do you not recall a faint difference in the blood you’ve taken these past few nights?”

  I did, but I wasn’t about to admit it. I simply folded my arms and waited. Dathan sought a favor from me; let him pay for it in advance, in coin of appropriate value.

  “Challes, the old one, wishes to talk with you. But he feared your anger with him would be too great, that you would be beyond his control, so he took steps to weaken you. He succeeded, probably because you were distracted by the need to find your brother.”

  “Wh
ere is he?” I demanded. My surroundings were a thunderous void by then, and I could barely keep my head up.

  “You have only to wait,” Dathan answered implacably. “He will come to you.”

  The floor seemed to shift and roll beneath me; I feared to rise from my chair, lest I lose consciousness entirely and become yet more vulnerable to my many foes.

  “Are you in league with him?”

  “No,” Dathan said. “Challes is a vampire, after all.” He paused, and I could see that he was studying me intently, even though his image seemed to recede to a pinpoint and then rush toward me, looming and huge. “Have you fed this night, blood-drinker?” he demanded.

  I had not, and I was glad. Another tainted feeding might have been the end of me—assuming I had not already taken the fatal dose.

  I managed to shake my head.

  “If I help you save your ladylove,” Dathan said, “will you repay me by doing what I ask?”

  I gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “I will do anything to break the curse,” I whispered, my eyes bedazzled by flashes of bright light inside my head. “Anything.”

  “I have your word? Heed my warning, vampire—betray me, and I will seek out your Daisy Chandler and exact vengeance even your most rabid enemies would not wish to witness.”

  “My—word—” I vowed. And then I collapsed and never felt myself strike the floor.

  Challes stood over me when I opened my eyes, and I knew we were back in the chamber beneath Colefield Hall. I lay on the slab that had been my bed in my earliest days as a vampire, stripped to the waist, my hands and feet lashed not by ropes or thongs of leather—those could not have held me—but by my tutor’s magic.

  “Why?” I asked. He had infused me with good blood while I slept; I was stronger, though still not powerful enough to break my bonds, and I felt a vague sting where his fangs had punctured my throat.

  He smiled benignly and stroked my forehead and hair with a fond hand. “I have not meant to frighten you,” he said in a near croon.

  I was very afraid, but not of anything Challes might do to me. No, my terror was for Krispin’s unguarded prey—my Daisy. “If it’s true that you mean me well,” I countered, “then set me free. Now.”

  Challes set his hands palm to palm, bringing to mind a saint or, at the least, a devout monk, and the noble sorrow in his pretended sigh told me he would refuse.

  “I cannot. I am a powerful vampire, in my way, but you are youthful and filled with the passion of rage. Your body is still, but your mind prowls like a panther—do you think I haven’t felt it circling, probing, ever seeking an opportunity to strike and rip out my throat?”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, subduing an urge to struggle wildly. “What the devil do you want with me?” He began to stroke my face and my hair again, and I could not hide my shudder of revulsion. “I have come to take you away, sweet child, into that other world where you shall see an end to your suffering. After all, it was I who laid the vampire curse upon your soul. It is my duty to lift the burden from you.”

  My interest was caught, though not by the promise of an end to pain. Was there indeed a way to change, to be redeemed, to live in the light again? I had seen a blood-drinker made mortal once, but it had been an agonizing, deadly process, and afterward the Old Ones had destroyed the means of transformation forever.

  “You are mad,” I whispered.

  Challes smiled again, briefly, indulgently, as though dealing with a spoiled but basically good-hearted child. “I shall show you.”

  “Were God to forgive me for all my six hundred years of sin,” I told him, “and that, as you know, is not going to happen, I would still refuse to set foot in Paradise without my beloved.”

  An instant after I’d spoken, I regretted mentioning Daisy, even indirectly.

  My ancient tutor raised his brows again and withdrew his hand in a quick, spasmodic motion. “Leave the wench to Krispin,” he said, and for the first time since he’d first brought me to Colefield Hall, and begun to train me for the vampire’s life, I saw profound anger in his face.

  “You made Krispin a blood-drinker,” I accused, my whisper as ragged as my hopes, “even before you found me lying in that horse stall, half dead of drink. Why didn’t you tell me then that my brother was alive? Why?”

  “He begged me not to do that,” Challes answered.

  “And I, having had an elder brother myself once upon a time, was not unsympathetic to his plight. Krispin yearned to live outside your shadow, and he knew that would be impossible if you learned of his existence.”

  I was more wounded by these words than I would ever have allowed Challes to see. Had my brother always hated me, then? Even when we were mortal boys, playing and working together? Apparently I had only imagined that Krispin had borne me the same deep affection I had harbored for him.

  In the next moment even my illusion that I had hidden my feelings from Challes was dashed.

  He leaned over, so that his face was close to mine, and spoke softly. “It was because of Seraphina—she was the reason Krispin loathed you as he did. When the baron pronounced your death sentence, you see, your sweet mother offered up your brother’s life in payment for yours. Krispin heard an account of it later from a servant.”

  “No,” I murmured, but the image of Seraphina kneeling and pleading before Brenna’s father was vivid in my mind, as if I had witnessed it myself. It might have been only moments past, instead of lying in the far and dusty reaches of long, long ago. “She couldn’t have done such a thing.”

  “Ah, but she did. And there’s more. After Seraphina collapsed, and the baron’s men carried her home, Krispin tried to comfort her. She spat at him and screamed like a madwoman, imploring her saints one after another to take him instead of you.”

  No wonder Krispin had abhorred me, I thought. No doubt the other children born of our mother, the doll-like twin girls with the transparent eyelids, the boy called Royal, would have been my enemies, too, had they survived. Oh, I remembered the little ones, the lost ones, with cruel clarity, even after so many centuries, remembered my father’s ravings, his insistence that I had robbed them. My cursed soul, Lazarus the bootmaker had snarled, reeling with mead, had been greedy, consuming my mother’s strength to weave for its pauper-self a nobleman’s body and a demon’s mind….

  I could not bear to remember.

  “Where—where has Krispin been all these centuries?” I managed to ask with difficulty. “Surely he could not have veiled himself so completely—”

  “No,” Challes said. “Nor could I. You were always quite quick—about most things, if not all. There are other dimensions, pet, other worlds, if you will. Layer upon layer of them, as a matter of fact, on and on into infinity. And passages exist between them, though of course those byways are known to very few.”

  I was reminded of a conversation I had had with Maeve, concerning experiments her mate, Calder Holbrook, had been performing. He had found evidence of such phenomena, although I had been too concerned about other matters at the time to ask questions.

  It is my curse, it would seem, to be either too curious or not curious enough.

  “Is it far away, this place where you’ve been hiding?” I spoke softly, trying to lull Challes a little so that he might relax his mental hold on me. I was regaining my normal powers, quickening inwardly on the sustenance my tutor had given me even as I ached for all the grief my mother’s misguided adoration had caused.

  Challes extended a hand. “You will know soon enough,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, as though fearing that we weren’t alone in that dank, gloomy crypt under the crumbling floors of Colefield Hall.

  “I have no wish to be mortal again,” I confessed. The statement was purest truth, I realized, and it was shattering to face. I knew without asking that Daisy would not wish to become the very thing I gloried in being—a vampire. We were doomed, she and I, even if I managed somehow to save her from Krispin’s vengeance, to be parted yet ag
ain.

  “But you would not be mere flesh and bone and blood,” Challes exulted quietly, laying a loosely knotted fist to his bosom. “Not you.”

  I was mystified. “Speak sense, vampire!” I commanded. “I have no patience for your damnable double- talk!”

  Challes laughed. “It pleases me to see that you are as arrogant as ever, Valerian Lazarus. Has it escaped your notice that you are a prisoner? It is I who govern the night, not you.” He paused and regarded me gently, as though memorizing my features. “Hush, now. Be not afraid. I have returned to fetch you home—we shall enter Paradise together.”

  55

  Daisy

  Las Vegas, 1995

  Daisy walked quickly toward home, as though pursued.

  The night was hot and dry, thrumming with sound and with silence. Las Vegas twinkled all around her, a bright, gaudy tangle of emeralds and rubies, diamonds and sapphires, tumbling over the desert sands like loot spilled from a treasure chest.

  Daisy wondered if Krispin would be waiting for her when she reached her apartment. If he meant to kill her that night, he’d have to be quick about it—dawn was less than an hour away. Loneliness and fear made a swelling ache in Daisy’s throat. If there had ever been a time in her life when she needed someone to talk to, it was then, but there was nobody to confide in really, besides the elusive Valerian. She dared not tell her sister—to do so would worry Nadine and, worse, endanger her, as well as Freddy and the baby. Nor could Daisy open up to O’Halloran. One word about vampires, except in jest, and he’d personally see that she was put on medical leave.

  Daisy couldn’t blame her partner; if someone had come to her with a wild story like her own, just a few weeks before, she would have recommended long-term therapy, if not shock treatments.

  Her apartment building was in plain sight when the shift occurred.

  In an instant reality altered itself with a sickening lurch. The sidewalk beneath Daisy’s feet turned to cobblestones, and the desert air was suddenly dank and somehow sour. Fog layered the ground, alive with shifting, wraithlike shapes, and Daisy made out old- fashioned street lamps and heard the rattle of carriage wheels and the clatter of horses’ hooves on the pavement. The vibrations rose through the soles of her feet.