The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Before tea that afternoon, Adela read to Jenny from a volume of classic Greek poetry, perhaps as a gesture of peace. Dinner was served at eight, and when it was over, Jenny pleaded fatigue and retired to her room, unaccompanied because it was Peach’s night to visit her sister.

  Jenny had not lied when she’d claimed to be tired, but beneath her weariness flowed a wild, anticipatory emotion she could not define, an elemental, unfettered something, careening along like a river, under no command but its own. Jenny could no more have stopped the rushing torrent than altered the course of the Thames, so she sat down in the chair by the hearth in her room and waited.

  The house settled slowly around her—servants shuffled sleepily in the halls, doors opened and closed, floors creaked. She heard Martin’s voice, and Adela’s, as they said their good-nights and parted in the passage to enter their separate rooms.

  Jenny had led a sheltered life, but she was not ignorant of the ways of men and women, thanks to Peach’s frankness and the scandalous gossip she sometimes overheard the maids exchanging when they thought no one else was about. It puzzled her that Martin and Adela did not share a bed, and had never done so within her memory. Perhaps, she speculated, they did not wish to have children, like other couples of their age and means.

  Guilt washed through Jenny in the wake of the great flood of indefinable excitement that had nearly drowned her moments before. Other couples did not have a blind and indigent relation to look after, she thought with chagrin.

  The summons from her angel, when it came, was a trill of silent music, a burst of harp strings too subtle for the ear to catch, but something felt instead, like a feather passed closet to the skin but not quite touching. Jenny moved quietly and competently toward it, unhampered by the darkness that slowed others’ steps, responding to the piper’s call.

  There could be no doubt that she was awake this time, she reflected with a sense of soaring joy, when she entered the misty, fragrant garden and knew that he was there waiting.

  “Valerian,” she said softly, and he drew her, by some faculty of mind, or perhaps by the shimmering thread of her most private desires, along the brick walk and into his arms.

  It was the first of many such visits. Sometimes Valerian told wonderful tales, and on other nights they danced together in the garden, and it was as though Jenny’s feet skimmed above the flat stones surrounding the fountain.

  Nearly a year passed before they became lovers.

  On that eve of sweet surrender Valerian wrapped her in something silken and whispering—a cloak, she thought. Jenny clung to him when they were caught up by the wind and became part of it, and of each other, and were carried away to another place.

  “What are you that you can work such tricks?” she asked when Valerian laid her on a soft couch in a room she couldn’t see, and she knew by sound and motion that he knelt beside her. At last, after all the courting, all the subtle preparation, she would give herself to her phantom.

  It would not have mattered what reply he made to her question—be he devil or fairy prince, Jenny thought, he was the answer to all her longings. She had been waiting for him since before her first memory.

  “A fallen angel,” Valerian said with tenderness and sorrow mingling in his wonderful voice. He hadn’t made the music that had drawn her to the garden so many nights, she realized then—he was that music. “Don’t trouble yourself with who I am, sweet. It is enough, isn’t it, that we’ve found each other again at long last?”

  Jenny raised trembling fingers to the bodice of her gown, guided by the same inner instinct that made her heart pound and caused a heavy, aching warmth to settle over her. She undid the ribbon ties of her camisole and parted the fabric to reveal her plump breasts, because she knew that he wanted to see and touch them, because she longed to nurture him somehow.

  He groaned, and the sound bore her high on fragile wings, and she soared upon it, triumphant, and murmured his beautiful name—Valerian. The utterance itself was a caress, echoing back to her, lodging in deep, forbidden places.

  She felt his lips on her nipple, hungry and wet, and cried out, not in fear or in horror, but in that singular, innocent lust at which only virgins can be truly proficient. Her fingers found their way into his thick, silken hair, and she pressed him closer, whimpering, urging him on in his gentle greed.

  The pleasure was unspeakable, not to be borne, exceeding even the fitful and licentious fantasies that had caused Jenny to toss restlessly in her bed when she first reached womanhood. She had never even guessed that the mating process could be so fiercely delightful.

  Jenny wanted to give herself up to Valerian, wanted it more than the return of her eyesight, more than a husband or a child or a house where she was mistress, and not Adela. These last were, after all, impossible dreams, but this other pleasure was within her grasp. The joy of it would sustain her, even if he should abandon her, through all the bleak years of spinsterhood that might lay ahead.

  She could barely speak, so intense was the ecstasy he offered and withdrew and then offered again, with his light, musician’s fingers and his seeking mouth. “Valerian—where have we known each other before? I do not—remember—” She paused to give a shuddering sigh as he raised her far enough off the couch to remove her clothes.

  To be naked to his gaze was as heady as a surfeit of summer wine. For the first time ever, Jenny felt lushly beautiful and womanly—and whole.

  Valerian was nibbling at the delicate flesh on her neck. “Your heart remembers,” he said softly. “Look into your heart.”

  “I can’t—think,” she protested with a throaty laugh.

  He gathered her breasts in his strong, gentle hands, chafing the taut peaks with his thumbs, and she wondered distractedly why she did not feel his breath upon her flesh, for his face was very near to hers. “How like a woman to want to think at such a time,” he teased. “The heart does not have thoughts, beloved—only feelings. Search there, among them, and I promise you will find recollection, some shadow, of what we have been to each other.”

  Such a search could not be made, Jenny knew, while her blood was thundering through her veins and her breathing was racing out of control. Still, she sensed that Valerian was right—they were not strangers, but companions of old; each belonging to the other in some elemental and enigmatic way.

  To lie with Valerian was to return home after a long and difficult journey, to be safe after a spell of unrelenting danger.

  “Please,” she said. “Make love to me.”

  “Yes,” he replied, and after parting her legs tenderly, to either side of the couch, he mounted her. “There may be pain—”

  Jenny’s slim, supple form arched like a bow, taut and humming. “I don’t care,” she said, and it was true. Nothing mattered but their joining, the reunion of their bodies and souls.

  Valerian lunged into her, and she cried out, in a virgin’s distress, yes, but also in profound welcome. She was exultant, alive with sensation. At last, at last, she was truly herself.

  In the meantime, Valerian murmured endearments to her, and half-formed prayers of adoration, his magnificent body flexing powerfully, reaching deep inside Jenny, causing her to sob softly even as her spirit took fire and burned.

  It ended, finally, as must all joys and all sorrows, and they lay together, entwined, exhausted, reunited after a separation so long that Jenny could not remember their parting. Later, when she’d gathered her scattered wits, she would examine her heart, as Valerian had said she must, and surely she would find him there….

  Daisy

  Las Vegas, 1995

  “Chandler!” The voice was snappish, insistent. “Damn it, Daisy, you gotta come out of it!”

  She stirred. Daisy? Who the hell was Daisy?

  “Open your eyes, Chandler,” her tormentor commanded.

  She ached all over, yet a sweet languor possessed her, as though she had just made love, and been thoroughly, skillfully satisfied. She did not want to surface, to leave the sen
sation behind.

  “I ain’t got all night, Chandler!”

  Was this the man who had been her lover, who had carried her to heights she only faintly remembered?

  It couldn’t be, she thought. Reluctantly she opened her eyes.

  Seeing O’Halloran looming over her brought everything back with all the subtly of a train plunging off a high trestle. He had cookie crumbs on his chin, what hair he had left was standing on end, and there was a rumpled air about him, as if he hadn’t changed clothes since the Carter administration.

  She sighed and closed her eyes again, just for a moment. At least that much was normal—her partner was the same sweet slob he’d always been.

  “Daisy, don’t veg out on me now,” O’Halloran rasped. “You looked right at me a second ago. I saw you.”

  “Super-cop,” she said, trying on the name he’d called her by—Daisy—in her muddled mind and finding that it fit comfortably, like a favorite T-shirt or a roomy pair of sweat pants. “Nothing gets by you, does it, O’Halloran?” She paused, wanting to cry but too proud to give in to the urge. “Damn it, this is a hospital, isn’t it?”

  “University Medical Center,” O’Halloran confirmed. “But don’t get your panties in a wad, Chandler—it ain’t the psycho ward. You collapsed on the sidewalk, that’s all, and somebody called an ambulance.”

  Daisy’s temples were throbbing, and she thought she might stick her head over the side of the bed and heave all over O’Halloran’s shoes. Chances were, nobody would notice if she did.

  “Am I hurt?”

  “Nope,” O’Halloran said proudly, as though he’d participated in her salvation or even engineered it single- handedly. “But you were definitely out of it. Talked about some guy named Martin and twitched a lot.”

  She raised a hand to her forehead, to push back her hair, and noticed for the first time she was on IV. “What the—?” she said, starting to sit up.

  O’Halloran pushed her back onto the pillows. “Take a breath, Chandler,” he said. “It’s just sugar water. No big deal. And don’t even think about getting up, because you ain’t going noplace, not tonight.”

  A tear escaped, despite Daisy’s determination, and zigzagged down her cheek. “They think I’m crazy or on drugs, don’t they? The brass, I mean.”

  Her partner smiled, produced a chocolate cookie from somewhere, and bit into it with relish. The crumbs dropped onto Daisy’s bedsheet.

  “Nobody thinks you’re using,” he said. “You’ve already had the necessary blood and urine tests. And you’re probably only mildly deranged, which puts you in the normal category.”

  “I’m not having a breakdown,” Daisy said. But she was remembering so many things—being blind, living in her brother and sister-in-law’s house in eighteenth- century London, Valerian carrying her away by magic and making love to her, and wondering if she’d imagined all of it. She wouldn’t be the first cop to crumble under stress, though that didn’t make the idea any easier to deal with.

  O’Halloran found her other hand, the one without the needle and tube protruding from the large vein, and gathered it awkwardly between his own. “If you say your head’s on straight. Chandler, I believe you,” he told her. “You just need to rest for a while, that’s all.”

  “They’ve suspended me.”

  “You’re on medical leave,” O’Halloran corrected. Daisy took a few moments to gather her composure. “Permanently?”

  The other cop hesitated just a moment too long. “Until further notice,” he said finally, still holding her hand. “You’ll have to have some counseling and some tests, and then you’ll go up before a review board. Happens all the time.”

  “Not to me, it doesn’t.”

  O’Halloran shrugged in an effort to appear nonchalant, but she saw the concern in his eyes. “Okay, Chandler, so you got stepped on. Things ain’t too cool just now. That’s reality, and you gotta deal with it. You have sick leave, and some savings, maybe?”

  Life with—or without—Jeanine had made Daisy pragmatic at a very young age. She had sick leave, vacation time, and a year’s wages tucked away in the bank. “Don’t sweat it, O’Halloran,” she said. “I won’t have to move in with you.”

  He laughed. “You’re still a smartass. That’s got to be a good sign.”

  “How’s the case going, hotshot? And before you come back with, ‘what case?’, let me just say you know damn well which one I’m talking about.”

  “The vampire thing.”

  “That’s the one.”

  O’Halloran sighed. “We ain’t made a whole hell of a lot of progress with that one, Chandler.” A nurse appeared on the other side of Daisy’s bed and gave the veteran cop a meaningful look. “Tell you what, Ace. I’ll stop by in the morning and fill you in, okay?”

  Daisy had neither the strength nor the will to argue. It was late, and she felt as if she’d been trampled by a herd of tap-dancing burros. Besides, once O’Halloran and the nurse had gone and the lights were out, she’d be able to cry in private.

  Her partner left, and the nurse, whose nametag read, ‘Betty,’ gave Daisy a pill to make her sleep, checked the flow of glucose through the tube, switched off the light, and went out.

  Daisy lay perfectly still, staring up at the ceiling, trying to make sense of all that had been happening to her since that first fateful night, when she’d shelled out big bucks to watch a magic show at the Venetian Hotel. Everything had gone to hell as soon as she’d met Valerian.

  He was a regular sort of guy, if you were willing to overlook the fangs and the fact that he was six hundred years old. Far be it from her to fall in love with a normal human being, somebody with a last name, at least. Oh, no. She had to lose her heart to a vampire.

  She was, for a time, so caught up in her private lament that she did not notice the elegant form leaning against the metal rail at the foot of her bed. When she did, her heart spiraled into the back of her throat, blocking the cry of alarm that would have escaped a moment later.

  “It’s only me,” Valerian said.

  Daisy’s relief was so intense that it seemed to melt her bones and muscles like sunshine on snow. She squinted as he came to stand beside her, his handsome face clearly visible even in the darkness, because of its pale translucence.

  “For a moment, I thought—”

  “That I was Krispin, come to kill you at last?”

  She could only nod.

  He touched her face, and she was reminded of his lovemaking, as she’d experienced it in this lifetime, and as Jenny Wade, the blind girl. “My precious love,” he said in a ragged whisper and bent to kiss her almost fitfully on the forehead. “I’ve come to bid you farewell.”

  Once or twice, since the vampire odyssey had begun, Daisy had wished she could have her old, comparatively uncomplicated life back. Now, faced with the prospect of losing Valerian forever, she discovered she was willing to risk almost anything to continue the relationship, weird as it was.

  Maybe she had gone over the edge, and the department had been right to pull her badge.

  “No,” she said, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Daisy,” he whispered, and there was anguish in the way he said her name. “This is the only way I can protect you, and it’s difficult enough—”

  “What is the only way? What are you talking about?” Valerian deflected the questions with a statement. “Krispin won’t bother you again.”

  “Damn it, Valerian, I have to know what you mean. I love you—that alone probably qualifies me for megatherapy—but there it is. You can’t just walk out of here, or turn into a bat and fly away, or dissolve into a mist and seep through the wall—by God, you owe me more than that!”

  He regarded her silently for a time, and she saw his pain clearly in those moments, though the room was as dark as ever, and felt the weight of his sorrow descend on her own heart. When he spoke, his voice was only a raspy murmur.

  “All right,” Valerian said t
onelessly. “I’ve made a bargain with Krispin. We will both perish, together, and the curse will be broken. You’ll be free.”

  Daisy wanted to blurt out a protest, but she stopped the words in her throat and swallowed them. Then she waited until she could trust herself to speak in a rational manner. “How?” She waved her good hand, precluding interruptions. “I’m not asking about the curse. I want to know how you intend to ‘perish,’ as you put it. What tragic elegance that word has!”

  His eyes glistened as though he might be weeping, as she certainly was, but there was no tremor in his voice. “We’ll be burned.”

  Such horror engulfed Daisy that she nearly fainted. She sat up at last and groped for the small stainless-steel pan on the bedside table, certain her stomach would fling up its contents. “Burned? Good God, Valerian, you can’t be serious!”

  He managed a brief, crooked smile, full of grief. “It’s hardly a suitable subject for a joke,” he pointed out.

  “I won’t let you!” Daisy cried and tried to scramble out of bed.

  Valerian pinned her to the pillows, as surely as if he’d grasped her shoulders, though he was not physically touching her. “You can’t stop this, Daisy,” he said reasonably, gently. “And you wouldn’t try if you really understood the situation.”

  Daisy’s face was wet with tears, and they kept coming, as if there were no end to them, and she didn’t give a damn. “That’s bull, and you know it,” she argued furiously. “I do understand the god-damned situation. What I don’t get is how you could be such an idiot! Can’t you see that this is a trick—that Krispin has no intention of going up in smoke with you?”

  In a graceful motion that was at once firm and heartbreakingly tender, Valerian gathered Daisy into his arms and held her close against his chest. “Shhhh,” he said, stroking her hair with one hand as she gave way to great, silent, shuddering sobs. For a long time he rocked her gently in his embrace, and when the worst of the storm had passed, he crooked a finger under her quivering chin and made her look at him. “Why are you here, Daisy?”