The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  He drew her head back, very gently, and kissed her with a heartrending tenderness. “Do you love me, my Jenny?” he whispered.

  “Y-Yes,” she replied. Her strength had drained away, and she felt as though she might swoon, and that was quite unlike her. Jenny prided herself on her vigor and resilience; she was not given to spells of fainting and weeping, like so many females of her acquaintance. “Of course I love you. Valerian. How can you say—how can you even think—?”

  “Then why did you do it? Why did you lie with another?”

  Jenny’s heart was racing, though not in the pleasant way it usually did when her lover held her close, and she was wildly dizzy. “I did no such thing,” she managed to say.

  “You did.” His voice was so quiet, so calm, the same one she knew so well, and yet so terrifyingly different. “You’re carrying someone’s child. And it isn’t mine.” She wanted to thrust herself away from him, for she was angry, but although she had the will to do it, she did not have the strength. Instead, to her horror, she found herself clutching his coat to keep from sinking to the floor. “That’s reprehensible,” Jenny said. “Leave me, please. And don’t ever come back.”

  He did not release her. “You don’t mean that.”

  Jenny was trembling, and the despised tears were threatening. It was not in her nature to love a man who was cruel to her, but she mourned the beautiful feelings she’d once had for him, the dreams she’d cherished…. All her hopes for a home and children and simple happiness lay in pieces at her feet, like shards of stained glass from a church window.

  “I do mean it,” she insisted, struggling now to pull away from him. “I don’t need you, nor does our child. Go away now, before I call my brother in to give you a thrashing and hand you over to the police.”

  He laughed. “Call for him, it will do you no good. This night, at least, your dear Martin is as deaf as the fabled post, and so are Peach and that irritating sister-in-law of yours. We have business to settle, Jenny-love, and we will not be interrupted.”

  She began to be terribly afraid. She was barely conscious, such was her mental state, and yet she found a scream within her brave heart and released it. Her lover was amused by the effort, and as he’d predicted, it brought no one rushing to her aid.

  He swept her up into his arms, and though his embrace felt like the one she knew so well, she had a curious feeling that the perception was not her own, that it had been suggested to her somehow.

  “Such a pity, a beautiful, intelligent young woman like yourself, hurling herself from an upstairs window,” he said calmly. “Of course, everyone will be sorely grieved, and the gossips will say it’s no wonder, is it, considering the shame and scandal the poor girl was facing.”

  Jenny stiffened and tried again to free herself, but it was no use. He was too strong.

  “Don’t do this,” she whispered, barely conscious, wanting desperately to stay alive, to protect the unborn child nestled within her. “Please—”

  She heard the window creak on its hinges, felt the cool night air touch her.

  “Don’t beg, my sweet. It’s demeaning, and altogether futile in the bargain.”

  Jenny felt her nightgown brush the window ledge, felt the yawning space beneath her, and uttered a sob, clutching at his coat. He kissed her once, very lightly, and then, with considerable reluctance, flung her from him.

  She fell, flailing her arms and legs, and struck the cobblestones in the courtyard below with an impact that shattered her bones. Her death was instantaneous, but she perished with a name quivering in her heart like an arrow.

  Valerian.

  Her lover. Her murderer.

  It was Peach who found the body lying broken and bloody on the stones of the courtyard, early the next morning when she went out for the master’s newspaper. Her screams were heard all over the neighborhood, shrill as fire-bells, and brought a passing constable through the front gate on a run.

  Martin was the next to arrive on the scene, followed by a pale Adela. She stayed back a little distance, one bony hand pressed to her throat, while Martin let out a low, plaintive groan of sorrow and dropped to his knees beside Jenny. He gripped her shoulders in both hands, as if he expected to awaken her.

  The constable looked up and saw the second-story window, still open. He’d seen such things often enough in his line of work, and he had an idea or two about what might drive the daughter of a wealthy household to take her own life. Probably she’d had a dalliance with a groom or a footman, and nature had taken its course.

  Poor girl.

  “It’s a shame, that’s what it is,” he said, for he was not without compassion, nor was he a man inclined toward the judgment of others.

  Peach continued to shriek and wail and blubber, while Martin, seemingly aware of nothing and no one else, gathered his dead sister into his arms and, holding her close against his breast, carried her into the house without a word to anyone.

  The funeral was held two days later, and the church was brimming with mourners, for Jenny had been a kindly, cheerful girl, well-liked by those who knew her.

  Rain fell hard all that morning, and well into the afternoon, too, and Mistress Peach said it was only fitting that the very heavens should weep when an angel was put into the ground to molder away to nothing. Adela stayed at home, taking to her bed with a violent headache, but Martin went doggedly from home to the church to the cemetery, heedless of the downpour, and would not leave his sister, even when the coffin had been lowered into the earth on ropes.

  Several concerned gentlemen from his club had to lead him away in the end, so that the gravediggers might finish their labors.

  They shoveled hastily, these unwashed and unsavory men, for they were superstitious, and despite their vocation, they had no wish to be found among the dead, recently passed-on and otherwise, when darkness fell. They’d heard so many stories, and made up a few to give their friends a turn, that they no longer knew which were fable and which might possibly be true.

  It was just as well, for their sakes and for his own, that the vampire did not arrive until they’d gone, to grieve in solitude for the woman he had loved and lost, again.

  Through discreet inquiries over the coming nights, he learned that Jenny Wade had disgraced herself by taking a lover. He’d given her a fine ruby ring, so he must have been a man of means, but it had disappeared before the poor girl was even buried.

  59

  Valerian

  Las Vegas, 1995

  I hurried to Daisy the instant the last feeble rays of sunlight had faded into darkness, and found her sprawled, unconscious, on the floor of her bedroom. Kristina’s pendant, intended as a talisman of protection, lay coiled on the carpet beside her, offering mute testimony that my brother would not be thwarted by such fragile magic.

  Krispin’s ring was upon her finger; I removed it and cast it aside.

  “Daisy, sweetheart—” I gathered her up and held her close, breathing in the scent of her. She was alive, but pale as wax and deeply unconscious. It would require more than a kiss of a prince to awaken my sleeping beauty, for Krispin had taken blood from her, as vampires do before transformation. He had only to infuse Daisy with that same fluid, which had surely undergone the mysterious change while flowing through his veins, to make her a fiend.

  I stroked her hair back from her gray-white face with a gentle motion of one hand. He planned to turn her into one of us, thus consigning her to the eternal damnation that awaited all our race. Perhaps, I concluded in my despondency, we vampires were in reality no less fragile than humans, but merely a little better at staving off the inevitable.

  Carefully I lifted my beloved into my arms and stood. She was clad only in an oversize shirt, and fearing that she might catch a chill, I wrapped her in my cloak and pressed her close against my chest. How I wished in those moments that I had a mortal’s warmth to offer her, but my flesh was as cold and ungiving as that of a statue.

  Closing my eyes, I took myself, and Daisy, t
o the only vampire I knew who might be able to help. Calder Holbrook.

  His laboratory was empty when I reached it, for this was modern-day London, and Calder, of course, favored the nineteenth-century. I would not have risked taking Daisy back through time, for mortals have yet to evolve the ability to make such journeys in safety, and I might have lost her somewhere along the way.

  I laid her tenderly on the examination table, still cossetted in my cloak, and began rummaging for blankets.

  Calder sensed my presence in his domain, as I had hoped he would, and appeared posthaste, wearing a scowl that would surely have intimidated a lesser vampire than myself. “What the—?”

  “I’ve brought you a patient,” I interrupted, finding a covering that looked like a relic from the American Civil War and giving it a shake before draping it over Daisy’s motionless form. “I’d like you to save her.”

  The good doctor flung an irritated glance in my direction, but his attention was soon centered on the slender nymph lying, near death, on his table. I saw what I had hoped for in his face—a physician’s compassion. “What happened?” Calder asked, though he must have guessed some of the tale, for he had already laid gentle fingers to the marks of Krispin’s fangs defiling her throat.

  I told him what my brother had done, and why, sparing no detail.

  Calder worked on Daisy as he listened, examining her for other injuries, listening to her heart through a stethoscope, taking her blood pressure. This laboratory, unlike its counterpart in the last century, of course, was equipped with a number of modem medical implements.

  While I watched, in vigilant silence, Calder took plasma from a refrigerator in the corner and administered the initial transfusion. For the first time since I had found her, Daisy made a sound and stirred slightly.

  My eyes blurred with tears, for I knew it was pain that had moved her, and finding myself powerless to spare her this suffering, however subliminal, was agony.

  I tried to mask my emotions with words, for I was not at ease in Calder’s company, nor he in mine. I could not wail and sob in despair, as I needed to do, as I might have done in Maeve’s presence, or even Kristina’s. “Human plasma,” I observed as the precious liquid dripped slowly through a tube and into Daisy’s veins. “Do you keep it around for those nights when you just don’t feel like hunting?”

  Calder did not look at me; he had produced a small penlight from his pocket and was peering into one of Daisy’s glazed and sightless eyes. “Hardly,” he replied with quiet disdain. “I have a supply on hand because I am a doctor, and because the occasional hapless human being finds his or her way here and has need of it.”

  “How did you know her blood type?”

  Now he did meet my eyes. With a scathing glare. “Being a vampire, I am an expert on the stuff,” he said pointedly and with intolerance. “If you must blather to distract yourself from your worries, Valerian, at least find something worthwhile to say.”

  I swallowed a cry of grief and fear and fury. “Will she die?” I asked when I felt I could speak coherently.

  “Perhaps,” Calder said, going back to the refrigerator and rummaging through a number of clear plastic pouches filled with blood. “We know the alternative—allowing your brother to finish the process he began—and somehow I don’t think that’s what you want for her. Or what she would wish for herself.” He turned to look at me curiously. “Could it be, Valerian, that for once in your debauched and utterly self-serving life, you are actually putting the desires of another before your own?”

  I did not refute his assessment of my character; it was, after all, accurate. “Daisy has never wanted to become a vampire,” I said, defeated. The multiple feedings I have taken in New York were beginning to wear off, and my strength was flagging. “And while I would like nothing better than to have her at my side forever, as you have your glorious Maeve, and show her all the wonders we are heir to, I won’t change Daisy against her will.” Calder made a sigh-like sound. “Suppose that is your only choice? Would she prefer a mortal’s death to the everlasting life of a vampire?”

  I found a stool and perched upon it, lowering my face to one hand. “Yes,” I said. “I have offered her the gift before, in other incarnations. I cannot think her wishes have changed. Daisy’s is a pure and noble spirit, unwilling to be counted among the damned.”

  The doctor said nothing, but simply stood beside the table, watching his patient with a solemn and thoughtful expression. I would have given all the considerable wealth I had accrued over the centuries to know what he believed Daisy’s true prognosis to be.

  We kept our vigil in silence after that, with Calder giving Daisy more blood at intervals. Slowly her color began to improve, and she stirred more often beneath her blanket, and made soft, disconsolate sounds that wounded me as nothing else could have done.

  I had to feed, for Calder’s store of plasma, while life-giving for Daisy, was but thin gruel in relation to my hunger. With the greatest reluctance I left her in the doctor’s care and went out to hunt.

  As before in New York, I was gluttonous, prowling the dark streets of London and filling myself, like a leech, until my tissues were swollen with the stuff.

  When I returned to Calder’s laboratory to resume my watch at Daisy’s side, I found her virtually restored and sleeping soundly. The doctor had gone, probably to take his rest in some dark vault in the bowels of that very house, as dawn would soon be upon us, but Kristina was there, the talisman pendant clutched in one hand.

  The last time I’d fed so copiously, I had not succumbed to the vampire slumber, but this occasion was different. I felt myself fading, losing my grip on consciousness. Stubbornly I lay down on the table beside Daisy and drew her into my arms, flinging Kristina a glance that dared her to protest.

  “Sleep, Valerian,” Maeve’s child said quietly. “I will keep watch for you.”

  I struggled to remain awake those few extra moments, nodding toward the pendant Kristina grasped. “A fat lot of help that was,” I complained. “Why didn’t you just make her a necklace of garlic?”

  “Don’t be tiresome,” Kristina said. “The pendant would have protected Daisy if she’d been wearing it.”

  It was then that Daisy opened her wonderful, fathomless eyes and looked straight into my hell-bound soul.

  “You,” she said in an odd voice. “You killed me.”

  I had no chance to reply before the darkness overtook me.

  Daisy

  Seattle, 1995

  The room where Daisy awakened was filled with light and color. She did not know where she was, nor did she have any idea how she’d gotten there.

  She sat up in the strange bed, with its linen sheets and exquisite lace spread, and looked around in amazement. There were six floor-to-ceiling windows opposite, affording a stunning view of dark blue waters and snow- draped mountains, and the furniture was light, lacquered stuff, painted with flowers. Italian antiques, probably, and beyond expensive.

  Before Daisy could toss back the covers and rise, Kristina appeared in the doorway. She was wearing jeans and a loose white shirt with flowing sleeves and a cut-work collar.

  “Welcome to Seattle,” she said with a smile.

  “How did I—what—?”

  “I brought you here, from my father’s lab in London. How are you feeling?”

  Daisy settled back against the pillows, reassured by the presence of her friend and the normality of her surroundings. “Confused, light-headed, and hungry.” Kristina laughed. “I can’t do much about the confusion and the dizziness, I’m afraid. But food I’ve got. Sit tight, and I’ll bring you a tray.”

  “You’re not going to zap it up out of nowhere?” Daisy asked, a little disappointed.

  Her hostess sighed. “I only do that in emergencies. I like to cook, and besides, I try to live as normal a life as my predicament allows.” She nodded toward another door. “The guest bath is that way.”

  Fifteen minutes later, when Daisy had used the facilities,
washed her face and hands, and made her somewhat shaky way back to bed, Kristina returned with the promised food.

  The dishes were heavy squares of brightly colored pottery, painted with whimsical flowers and checks and stripes. There was a tiny pot of steaming tea, along with pasta, warm bread, and green salad.

  While Daisy ate, Kristina pulled up a large blue hassock, imprinted with smiling golden suns sporting pointed rays, and sat down.

  “Papa and I discussed the situation and decided you would be better off here, in a more familiar environment.”

  Daisy poured tea with a somewhat unsteady hand and raised the cup to her lips. The brew was strong and sweet, laced with milk. Just the way she liked it. “He can still get to me here, you know,” she said after several bracing sips. “Krispin, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Kristina answered. “I’m sure he can. But he won’t find you alone and defenseless, like before.”

  “No,” Daisy said with a mild note of irony. “This time he’ll be able to attack you, as well as me.” She shuddered, remembering Krispin’s assault in her apartment. She’d honestly thought, in those moments of violence just before losing consciousness, that she was about to die.

  Seeing that Daisy didn’t intend to eat any more of her meal, Kristina rose from her perch on the hassock, took the tray, and carried it out of the room. She returned almost immediately, this time taking a seat on the edge of Daisy’s bed.

  “I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe,” she promised.

  “Why? Why would you put yourself in so much danger?”

  “Because I care about Valerian, and about you, Daisy. Do you realize you’re the only friend I have who knows who and what I am? How do you think my neighbors and business associates would react if I suddenly announced that my parents are vampires, for instance? Imagine me confiding, say at a chamber of commerce luncheon, that I’m well into my second century.” She paused to smile sadly. “You’re not going to bail out on me now, are you, Daisy? Just when I’ve started to think I might have run across somebody I can really talk to?”