The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Daisy sagged against the nearest wall, the brick cold against her back, closed her eyes, and tried to slow her runaway heartbeat and rapid breathing by sheer force of will. It didn’t help, knowing this wasn’t real, that it was only another “spontaneous regression,” as Valerian would say.

  Normal, healthy people did not have experiences like this.

  When she was sure she wouldn’t hyperventilate, or faint dead away, Daisy opened her eyes, cherishing even then the vain hope that she would find herself back in Las Vegas where she belonged.

  Nothing had changed—except to become more intense.

  The stench of the gutter at her feet swelled and then broke over her in a nauseating wave, and the passersby, clad in rags like fugitives from the cast of Les Misérables, were still more aromatic.

  Daisy swallowed a scalding rush of bile and murmured an incoherent sound, meant to be a cry for help, but Valerian did not appear as he had the last time, when she’d found herself waiting tables in a fifteenth-century tavern.

  It seemed the noxious fog was seeping through her skin, penetrating her skull, settling heavily into her mind and finally causing her memory to dissipate like steam. She was forgetting things, and remembering others that had never happened.

  She clung desperately to the last shredded recollections of the person she’d been only moments before… her name had been Daisy once, in a fever or a dream, but she had no idea who she was now. Or where she was.

  It was getting darker and colder by the moment.

  She reached out and caught at an old woman’s tattered sleeve. “Excuse me—what is this place?” she asked. “Where am I, please?”

  The crone jerked free with a fierce and fearful motion and bustled on without answering, grumbling as she went.

  “It’s London Town, miss,” said a small voice at her side. She looked down to see a child gazing up at her, an impossibly thin boy wearing tom clothing and a filthy cap. “You lost?”

  She clung to the last memory, the name, repeating it to herself… Daisy, Daisy… though even that was struggling to escape her, squirming in her mind like a greased pig.

  “Do you know me?” she whispered, terrified. “Can you tell me who I am?”

  The boy shook his head. His enormous gray eyes were at once pitying and shrewd as he regarded her from beneath a fringe of dark, shaggy hair. “The peelers’ll take you away that quick,” he warned with a snap of his grubby fingers, “if they hear you talkin’ such ways as that. You got fine clothes on, so you must be a lady. Here—let me have a look inside that bag you’re carryin’—maybe we’ll find your name inside.”

  She extended the bag—a frilly black drawstring affair with fringe and jet beads—but before the street urchin could take it from her, an elegantly gloved hand interceded. She caught a glimpse of a dark waistcoat, a silken vest, the merest impression of pale blue eyes, and then her vision faded completely. Rather than a cruel surprise, this state of blindness seemed somehow a return to the norm, and in its way it was comforting, even empowering, in its very familiarity.

  “Away with you, you thieving little wastrel, or I’ll drag you off to Newgate myself,” the man said in a tone that was at once refined and mildly savage, and she heard the boy’s quick steps on the stones as he fled. There was a gentle reprimand in that cultured voice when he went on, and she felt his strong arm slip around her waist. “Jenny,” he scolded, and with the name came a torrent of remembrances, almost too many to sort through, and all sense of disorientation left her. “How many times must I warn you not to wander off by yourself?” He paused to emit an elegant sigh. When he went on, there was an edge to his voice. “Perhaps Adela is right in her assertion that you would be better off in an institution of some sort, where allowances could be made for your affliction.”

  The reference to a hospital sent a little chill skittering along her spine, and she distracted herself by aligning all the things she suddenly knew about herself and the man beside her.

  This was Martin, her elder brother and guardian, holding her arm so firmly, ushering her into a waiting carriage. He was a prominent man of business who kept offices in High Street. Her name was Jenny Wade, and she lived with Martin and his wife, Adela, in a spacious town house only a few streets away. She was nineteen years old and a spinster, much to her grievous disappointment, for her greatest ambition was to marry and bear children. Her “affliction,” as Martin called it, had come upon her in the course of an illness suffered when she was seven. Their parents were both dead, and the year was 1722.

  Jenny heard Martin rap at the wall of the coach, and the sleek and costly vehicle jostled into motion, creaking and smelling of rich leather. “You won’t send me to an asylum, so don’t threaten,” she said cheerfully, acutely aware of so many things—the varied texture of her gown, her gloves, her cloak among them. Over the years Jenny had learned to let her other senses compensate for the loss of her eyesight, and she could determine much from touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting.

  She sensed her brother’s smile, knew it contained reluctance as well as affection. “No,” he confessed, “I wouldn’t. But you’re a scamp all the same, and I can’t think why I put up with you.”

  “That’s easy—it’s because you love me,” Jenny said. She was not spoiled by her brother, she reflected, but still he often indulged her. Out of affection, it was to be hoped, and not pity.

  Martin laughed, but there was sorrow in the sound, and worry. Several moments passed before he spoke, and when he did, his tone was serious. “Why were you handing your bag over to that little street rat back there?” Jenny squirmed, uneasy. She’d suffered some kind of spell, she supposed, forgetting who she was and where she lived, and behind that realization were other memories, nebulous ones she couldn’t quite grasp, so fantastic that they would surely come up in her dreams.

  “I was a bit confused, that’s all,” she said. Jenny seldom lied to Martin, for he was far more perceptive than most sighted people, and he had an almost unerring knack for recognizing an untruth. Deception by omission was another matter, however, and she often employed it. “You were too hard on the child. He only wanted to look in my bag for a name of someone who might come to my aid.”

  “Piffle. Do you think the little wretch can read? If you’d handed him the bag, he would have run off with it,” Martin said with smooth conviction. “The world is a treacherous and deviant place, Jenny. You must be more cautious in future.”

  “Why?” Jenny teased as the carriage rounded a corner. The swaying sensation was unique to this particular turn in the road, and she knew they’d entered their own street. “Are these coppers all that stand between us and penury?” She gave the handbag a little shake, causing the coins inside to rattle.

  Martin’s reply was snappish, impatient, but Jenny was not deceived by the show of anger. She’d frightened her brother, and the thought filled her with remorse.

  “Don’t be silly. Do you think I give a damn about a handful of pocket change? You were in danger, Jenny. And now you’re telling me you were ‘confused.’ I’m summoning the doctor as soon as Mistress Peach has given you supper and put you to bed.”

  Jenny’s regret was swept aside by a rush of impotent fury, though she harbored an abiding affection for Mistress Peach, who had once served as her nanny and was now referred to as her companion. “I’m not a child, Martin, to be tucked up with a dolly, and no one has to ‘give’ me my supper. I can feed myself!”

  Martin’s only answer was an exasperated sigh. The carriage stopped, and cold air buffeted Jenny’s cheeks when the door was opened from the outside. She descended without waiting for help from her brother, pushing aside the coach driver’s hand, and strode toward the house with the certainty of long practice.

  She was greatly troubled, though she wouldn’t have admitted as much to Martin and certainly not to Adela, who was bound to nag, or Mistress Peach, who would fret herself into a sick headache. Jenny had been blind for twelve years, and yet she’d seen th
e fog and the boy and even Martin, though only for a moment. Furthermore, there were things she should remember, things she desperately needed to remember, about the moments prior to her fit of forgetfulness, important matters struggling behind a heavy veil at the back of her mind.

  Jenny’s devoted companion met her in the foyer, muttering, bundling her briskly in a knitted coverlet, while Adela stood by, silent except for the slight, familiar wheezing sound she made when she was irritated.

  “Where did you find her?” she demanded sharply of Martin. Adela was a fine woman and good wife to Jenny’s brother, considering her somewhat intractable and obstreperous nature, but she collected disappointments, slights, and minor injustices the way some people garnered seashells or buttons or bits of bright ribbon. The habit rendered her tiresome indeed, and pettish.

  Jenny stiffened inside the coverlet. “Kindly do not speak as if I were deaf, Adela, as well as blind. If you have a question, then ask it directly!”

  “That will be enough, both of you,” Martin said wearily, and Jenny’s ears caught the faint whisper of kidskin brushing flesh as he removed his gloves—more an impression than a sound, really. She felt a draft as he removed his waistcoat with a habitual flourish that was uniquely his own. “Jenny became distracted while I was doing business with the tailor, that’s all. I’m sure she merely stepped out of the carriage to get a breath of air and did not realize how far she’d strayed.”

  Jenny’s face flamed with heat—Martin was as bad as Adela, in his way, making excuses for her behavior as though she were a slow-witted child—but it would be futile to argue. Besides, she was exhausted, and vaguely unwell in the bargain, wanting only to sit by the fire in her room and sip strong tea.

  She endured Mistress Peach’s seemingly interminable fussing, and when that good woman finally left her alone, Jenny’s gratitude was profound. She felt oddly insubstantial, like a character in an oft-told tale, and she was deeply frightened. Pictures flashed inside her head, shifting, jewel-like images of a strange and faraway place that pulsed with activity and with unaccountable noises. How, she wondered, could such things have found their way into the mind of a sheltered blind woman?

  The sense of displacement grew as the hours passed; it was as if she were not entirely real, for all the solidity and substance of her surroundings. Jenny herself might have been a shadow, or a reflection.

  Was she the dreamer—or the dream?

  The doctor came at nine and was shown to her room by Adela.

  Jenny did not confide in the aging physician, but endured his fumbling examinations in silence. She was, by that time, convinced that she was fading, like a figure in an old and weathered portrait, and would soon vanish entirely.

  Valerian

  Colefield Hall, 1995

  I had almost freed myself from the unseen shackles my tutor had used to restrain me. In the meantime, while I continued the struggle I hoped was imperceptible, I spoke moderately to Challes. “Paradise,” I murmured in a thoughtful tone while he loomed over me in an avid and singularly unnerving fashion. “The place where there are many mansions.”

  “Yes,” he whispered, his face translucent with some maniacal ecstasy.

  “I would not dare to cross the threshold of any one of them,” I told him, and while I lent the words a regretful note, the unflattering truth was that I had no desire to be anything other than what I was—not angel or devil, specter or saint, and certainly not a mortal man.

  Challes looked as though I’d struck him, and recoiled.

  I had broken my bonds and bolted upright on the slab, but before Challes could react or I could get to my feet, the chamber trembled as if the very walls would give way. There was a strange, implosive feeling all around, as if the air had been replaced by a vacuum, and then he was there.

  My brother.

  Krispin gripped Challes from behind and flung him cruelly aside. “Fool!” he rasped.

  I studied him, my head tilted slightly to one side. Krispin was not a large fiend, neither broad through the shoulders nor long of leg, like me; he had, instead, the lithe agility of a trapeze artist or a dancer. His hair was fair as moonlight, his eyes a soft, deceptively fragile blue, his skin so flawless that he appeared to have no pores.

  “Enough,” I said quietly when Krispin moved to stove in Challes’s ribs with one booted foot. Granted, a mortal could not have done a vampire injury by such a blow, but Krispin, of course, was not human. He was plainly much stronger than the blood-drinker who had spawned us both.

  Krispin listened—evidently there was still enough of the flesh-and-blood boy in him that his first instinct was to respond to an elder brother’s command—and Challes crawled, crablike, into a corner, there to whimper and mewl in a manner that made me want to kick him myself.

  Still seated on the slab, I spread my hands. “Here I am, Krispin,” I said mildly, belying my true feelings, which were myriad and complicated, bittersweet and excruciatingly painful. “Destroy me if you can.”

  For a long interval Krispin simply stared at me in silence, and I watched a kaleidoscope of emotions flash across his Dresden face. I saw hatred, along with the ghostly and shimmering reflection of an adoration it shamed him to recall, and finally, a sort of terrified triumph.

  He shook his seraphic head. “No, my brother,” he said with the vaguest of smiles. “Your death will be neither quick nor merciful. You have much to suffer before the gates of hell swing wide to grant you entrance.”

  What I felt was more revulsion than fear, more sorrow than hatred. How I despised Challes in those moments for taking that naive, mischievous child Krispin had been and turning him into this monster! Had I not been occupied, perforce, with my brother’s presence, I believe I would have carried Challes to a churchyard, laid him at the feet of a holy statue, and driven a stake through his heart.

  “Do you think there will be a welcoming parade?” I asked with no trace of guile. “When I finally meet with damnation, I mean?”

  Krispin might have flushed, had he been mortal. I saw the anger flood his face, although it did not alter the pristine white of his flesh, but instead rendered it more transparent still, like cloth woven of spun moonlight. “You are in grave trouble, brother,” he said quietly. “Pray, do not make light of it.”

  “You would prefer pathos? Pleading, perhaps, with copious tears? Sorry.” I paused for the length of a heartbeat. “I won’t be humbling myself in any significant fashion, Krispin. Pride is my curse, as well as your own. We are, after all, begotten of the same dam and sire, God rest their misguided souls.”

  Krispin flinched, though not, I thought, from the mention of the Supreme Being. No, I believed it was my reference to our mother, however generically, that disturbed him—and his response confirmed my suspicions.

  “Do not speak her name,” he warned. “Your lips, your tongue, would defile those revered syllables merely by shaping them!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Great Zeus,” I said on what would have been a long breath, had I been human. “You are fixated—perhaps that good woman kept you too long on the breast. Or, mayhap, not long enough—”

  “Be silent!”

  I stood at last and crossed the few feet that separated us with an easy, unhurried gait. “Why?” I asked, knowing he saw only the insolence and disdain I willed him to see, and not the heartbreak and confusion churning behind the facade I presented. “Why did you murder those poor women, instead of bringing your rancor straight to me in the first place?”

  His lips curled slightly, and I was struck by the realization that any female, mortal or otherwise, would find him vastly appealing. He could seem ingenuous if he so wished, and even virtuous. Perhaps he had not simply killed his victims, but gotten to know them first, methodically seducing their minds….

  “I told you before,” Krispin said with elegant contempt, “I would not make this easy for you. I want you to pay.”

  I rested my hands on my hips, realizing only after the fact that it was an old gesture, f
rom our days as corporeal youths, a posture of superior power for me, but a subtly daunting one for him. “Even considering my multitude of sins, mortal and otherwise,” I began, “your loathing of me is somewhat disproportionate to reality, don’t you think?”

  Challes had risen to his feet, and he was no longer making pitiful noises, but he cowered against the wall of the vault, watching Krispin as though he were the Devil incarnate or, far worse from a vampire’s perspective, Nemesis, the angel of sublime vengeance. I began to speculate that my teacher had not been trying to usher me into Paradise at all, but merely to hide me from my brother’s madness, which appeared to be even greater and more virulent than his own.

  I was touched, and decided not to stake Challes after all. Not immediately, at least.

  “It is more than Seraphina’s betrayal,” Krispin said, and I felt the searing cold of his agony flicker across my spirit, like shadows cast by flames of ice. “You have taken my mate. Over and over again, you have stolen her.”

  All sympathy deserted me in that moment, for it enraged me that Krispin dared to regard himself as a rival for Daisy’s affections. We had been created to live side by side, she and I, through all the ages; had it not been for my transformation from man to vampire, we would have been incarnated together, again and again, until we stepped over the farthest boundary of time.

  “Your mate?” I shaped the words softly, insolently, on my tongue. “You were never anything more than an interloper, Krispin. She is mine—now and forever, time without end, amen and amen.”

  He raised one finely shaped eyebrow, and his mocking expression made me want to close my hands around his polished marble throat and choke him. “Is she?” Krispin paused to feign a luxurious sigh. “Ah, yes—our lady of many names. How lovely she is. You call her Daisy now, but you have known her as Brenna, as Elisabeth—poor whoring little wretch—and as sweet Jenny. Unfortunate how quickly she took sick and died, wasn’t it?” Another sigh, still theatrical, if almost inaudible. “And there were other lifetimes, of course—she was the fetching woman who ran the boardinghouse in that little western town, wasn’t she?”