The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Do you think you could work that little trick again? This time without the package and all the groping around?”

  She nodded, and Max was instantly outlined with a fresh condom.

  “Pretty fancy,” he said, grinning.

  “Stop talking,” Kristina replied, putting her arms around his neck. “And let’s skip the foreplay.”

  Max wouldn’t hear of it; he worked Kristina into another fit of longing, and by the time she was in the throes of her second climax, a pleasure even keener and more strenuous than the first, she was glistening with perspiration and completely incoherent.

  Much later, when Max was dozing, Kristina got out of bed, took another shower, and put on jeans and a T-shirt. Her earlier exhaustion was gone; making love with Max had restored her, it seemed.

  She was in the kitchen, humming and filling the teapot at the sink, when Valerian appeared at her elbow, unheralded as usual. Kristina was so startled that she nearly dropped the kettle.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she snapped.

  Valerian folded his arms and glowered at her. “Wish away,” he replied.

  Kristina sighed. There was no reasoning with him when he was in one of his moods, and she could only guess at what was bugging this most temperamental of vampires. Her controversial arrangement with Dathan or her blossoming affair with Max? Or perhaps Valerian was finding parenthood to be less than wonderful.

  “Okay, I give up,” she said. “What is it now?” She moved around him to set the teakettle on the stove and switch on the burner.

  “If you wanted to polish your magic, you might have come to me. I do know a thing or two about the craft, as it happens!”

  Kristina hid a smile. She’d injured Valerian’s formidable pride, without meaning to, of course. “You’ve been busy,” she said reasonably. “With Daisy and your magic act in Las Vegas and now Esteban. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “So you took up with a warlock!”

  “You sound just like Mother,” Kristina answered, no longer smiling. She was an adult by anyone’s definition of the word, and she was getting tired of being scolded about the company she kept. “I didn’t ‘take up’ with Dathan. We have a bargain, that’s all.”

  “What sort of bargain?” Valerian’s magnificent face was thunderous, and his cloak and tailored tuxedo made him resemble some great, beautiful bird of prey.

  Kristina sighed, hoping Max wouldn’t awaken and come downstairs. He’d already met a warlock; it was too soon to introduce him to a vampire. “You know damn well what sort of bargain,” she retorted. “He’s tutoring me in magic, and I’m—I’m going to help him find a bride.”

  Valerian loomed, in that singular way he had. Kristina drew herself up to her full if unspectacular height, trying not to seem intimidated.

  “Great Zeus, is he still harping on that?” the vampire demanded. “I thought I’d cured him of the obsession by setting Roxanne Havermail on his trail.”

  “Dathan is as stubborn as you are. He won’t rest until he has what he wants.”

  “You realize, of course, how dangerous he is—that he is the leader of all warlocks everywhere? That his mate will share in that power?”

  Kristina knew only too well that Valerian could read minds when he tried; she hoped he was too annoyed and distracted to focus on hers and learn that Dathan had proposed an unholy marriage. “He has been an ally in the past,” she said to deflect the vampire’s attention. “It seems to me that you welcomed his help at one time.”

  “That was an armed truce,” Valerian snapped. “There was never any question that we would be enemies again, once the common threat had been eliminated.”

  The common threat, of course, had been the vampire Lisette, who had reigned over the nightwalkers before Maeve. “That’s silly. If vampires and warlocks made peace once, they can do it again.”

  Surprisingly Valerian subsided a little, and Kristina had a sudden insight. It wasn’t just her relationship with Dathan that was troubling him, but something deeper and much closer to home. His home.

  “Things aren’t going well with Esteban, are they?” she said softly, touching his arm. She had been so occupied with her own concerns that she had not had the time to visit Daisy or Valerian.

  The vampire, so imposing, so fearsome, suddenly appeared vulnerable. “He sleeps on the floor like an animal,” he said. “He hides food in his room and won’t acknowledge anyone except Barabbas.”

  Kristina considered the environment from which the little boy had been rescued. “Things like this take time,” she said.

  Valerian was downright crestfallen. “I wanted to give Daisy a child,” he whispered, staring off into some realm Kristina couldn’t see. “She’s so beautiful, so smart and so good. She deserves a normal life.”

  Kristina felt a wrench far down in her heart. Whatever his faults, and they were many, Valerian adored Daisy. He had sought her out through lifetime after lifetime, only to lose her again and again. Clearly he feared that history would repeat itself. “Daisy loves you,” she reminded him gently.

  “Yes,” he said, his tone dark with misery. “She loves a fiend, a monster, an inhuman ghoul who dares not sire a child for fear of creating something far worse than himself.”

  Kristina bit her lip. “I was conceived by a vampire and a mortal,” she pointed out, “and I didn’t turn out so badly, did I?”

  Valerian touched her cheek, not as a lover would, but in the way of a devoted uncle or a godfather. His smile was beautiful, and full of sorrow, and Kristina began to fear for him. He had been known, in his long history, to succumb to terrible fits of melancholia, during which he could lie dormant for decades. One of the oldest vampires, Tobias, had gone underground long ago and never resurfaced.

  “No,” Valerian said. “You are a miracle, Kristina. But your splendid mother and honorable father are far better creatures than I have ever been.”

  Kristina willed Max not to come downstairs, but she sensed that he was stirring in his sleep, soon to awaken. Although he had seen Valerian at the Halloween party, meeting the legendary vampire up close and personal was something else again. An experience for which any human being would have to be carefully prepared.

  She couldn’t help thinking of her private theory that some vampires must grow weary of their existence, of watching mortal loved ones live and die. Though they were predators, blood-drinkers were fascinated by human beings and often became enamored of them, appointing themselves as their guardians or wooing them as lovers. Perhaps Valerian, who had been born as a mortal in the fourteenth century, secretly yearned to rest in peace.

  “Do you ever wish you’d never become a vampire?” she asked. The kettle was whistling insistently on the stove, but they both ignored the noise.

  “Yes,” Valerian answered. “Each time I’ve found Daisy in a new incarnation and loved her, only to lose her again.” For a moment a haunted expression clouded his fathomless sapphire eyes. “It is always with me, Kristina. The knowledge that she will grow old and die, and that I will live on, alone, and wait for her, search for her yet again—”

  Kristina thought with sorrow of all the people she’d cared about throughout the years she’d lived—a very short time in comparison to Valerian—her beloved governess, Miss Phillips, for instance. Gilbert Bradford, her husband’s brother, and certain mortal friends she’d made along the way. She’d seen all of them age and finally leave her behind. It would happen with Max, too, if they managed to make a life together, and the dread of that pierced her heart like a shard of ice.

  “I would gladly surrender my immortality, if indeed that’s what I have,” she confessed, taking the kettle off the burner at last, pouring hot water over loose tea leaves she’d spooned into a crockery pot earlier. “To me, it’s a curse.”

  Valerian closed his eyes for a moment, as though she’d struck him. “And yet you would suggest that I sire a child by Daisy,” he said, meeting her gaze again.

  “I would not presu
me to advise you one way or the other,” Kristina answered, “except to say that I think you should forget your Las Vegas show for a while and concentrate on Daisy and Esteban. You yourself said that human life is fleeting—why spend so much time away from them? You certainly don’t need the money or the notoriety.”

  “You’re right,” he conceded, though somewhat ungraciously. Valerian preferred to play the mentor and guide, not the pupil. In the next moment he assumed a stem expression. “Remember my warning. Warlocks are not to be misted.”

  Upstairs, the shower was running. Max was out of bed; he would be downstairs within a matter of minutes.

  Valerian arched an eyebrow. “The mortal?”

  “Yes,” Kristina said with a hint of defiance.

  “Is it for him that you are willing to risk so much?”

  Kristina knew Valerian was referring to her contract with Dathan. She nodded. “Do you dare to chastise me for that—you who have pursued one woman, one human being, down so many crooked corridors of history?”

  “No,” Valerian said softly, almost tenderly. “But I sympathize. It would almost be better, I think, if you took a warlock for a mate. At least then you’d be spared the terrible grief, the vulnerability.”

  “But that would mean giving up the joy as well,” Kristina pointed out.

  At last he smiled, and when Valerian did that, he was as much a work of art as Michelangelo’s David. “Wise words,” he said. He kissed her forehead and vanished.

  There lingered a faint draft in the room, from the vampire’s passing, when Max came down the rear stairs and into the kitchen, fully dressed, his hair still damp from the shower. In that moment of simplicity and silence, Kristina knew for certain not only that she loved Max Kilcarragh, but that he had been chosen as her beloved long, long ago, in a time before time, and a place neither of them remembered.

  He approached, laying a hand to either side of her waist. He smelled pleasantly of soap, shampoo, and toothpaste as he bent to kiss her lightly on the mouth.

  “Hungry?” Kristina asked.

  Max drew her against him, gently but firmly enough that she could not doubt his attraction to her. He slid a second, featherlight kiss from the bridge of her nose to the tip. “Yeah,” he answered, eyes twinkling, “but I’ll settle for food.”

  Kristina laughed softly and turned in the direction of the refrigerator. Max caught her hand and pulled her back. “Sit down,” he said. “I’ll cook.”

  She was amazed again; so much about this man surprised her. In her adult life, especially during her marriage to Michael Bradford, Kristina had never been taken care of by a man. She had essentially looked out for herself, with occasional interference from her mother or Valerian.

  Kristina allowed Max to seat her at the breakfast bar. The tea had finished brewing by then, and he brought her a cup before opening the refrigerator door and taking out the ingredients for an omelette—onions, peppers, mushrooms, fat-free cheese, and a carton containing an egg substitute.

  “Is it possible for you to develop high cholesterol?” he asked, frowning at the collection of healthy foods.

  Kristina flushed a little, embarrassed at this small, harmless reminder of just how different she was from Max himself and virtually everyone else on earth. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s all part of the act.”

  Max’s expression was thoughtful as he explored the cupboards, finally producing a nonstick skillet. “The act being your need to be—how shall I put it—ordinary?”

  She nodded. Her cheeks still felt warm, and she was just a touch defensive. “I’ve wanted that all my life,” she said.

  He set the skillet on the stove, turned on the appropriate burner, and began mixing and chopping with a deftness that indicated long practice. There was a twinkly smile in his brown eyes when, at last, he looked at Kristina. “You’ve been overlooking one very important fact,” he told her. “You, Kristina Holbrook, could never be ordinary, in any sense of the word. Even if you were mortal, you would still be utterly unique.”

  Kristina looked away for a moment, wanting to believe he meant what he said, but skeptical. He was trying to be kind, to spare her feelings. “I know what I am, Max,” she said a little impatiently.

  But it wasn’t true, of course. She wasn’t a witch, woman, angel, or vampire. What did that leave? Were there creatures on other planets like her? In alternate universes and parallel dimensions?

  He poured the omelette concoction into the pan and added pepper and salt from the shakers on the back of the stove. He didn’t reply to her statement, which made her uneasy.

  “What do you think I am?” she asked, trying to hide the vulnerability she felt. When Michael, her husband, had learned of her powers, he had said she was unnatural, a bestial freak. Even after more than a century, the memory had the power to wound her.

  “Beautiful,” Max replied without hesitation, managing the omelette while at the same time meeting her gaze directly. “Intelligent. Generous. Responsive. Shall I go on?” Tears gathered along her lower lashes; she blinked them back quickly. Her reaction was contradictory—on the one hand, she was relieved, but Max hadn’t really had time to absorb and assimilate the various realities of the situation. It was too soon, even for a man as bright as Max, to comprehend what it meant to be involved with her.

  Again he nodded, smiling a little now, dashing at her eyes with the back of one hand. “Yes,” she said in a raspy whisper. “Tell me more.”

  “You have the elegance of a goddess and the mind of a philosopher. Making love to you was like being taken apart, cell by cell, and then put back together, but better than before. Stronger.”

  Kristina sniffled and then gave a soft laugh. Her hand trembled a little as she reached out for her teacup. “You either have a poetic soul or one hell of a line,” she said.

  Max found plates, divided the omelette, and slid the halves expertly out of the pan. “And you have a trust problem,” he answered without rancor. “I guess that’s pretty common these days, with both sexes.”

  She didn’t point out that she didn’t really qualify for the analogy; there was no sense in harping on the fact that, for all practical intents and purposes, she was some kind of mutant. “How about you, Max? Do you have a trust problem?”

  He set the plates on the breakfast bar, found forks, and joined her, taking the stool next to hers. “No,” he said after a few moments of thoughtful silence, during which he surveyed his half of the omelette as though he thought it might offer some sort of input. “I was raised in one of the few functional families in America. Nobody drank, gambled, or hit anybody else. We all went to church every Sunday, yet neither Mom nor Dad could be described as fanatical in any way. I was still in college when I fell in love with Sandy, and she happened to be an emotionally healthy individual, too. The toughest thing that ever happened to me—to all of us, really—was her death.”

  Kristina took up her fork, more because Max had gone to the trouble to cook for her than because she was hungry. It was a terrible injustice that someone talented and beautiful, with a loving husband and two precious children, could be taken in her youth, while jaded vampires yearned for the solace of death and were denied it.

  “I’d like to know more about your life with Michael,” Max said in that straightforward way he had that so often caught Kristina off guard. “What happened after the duel?”

  Kristina started to rise from the stool, her food forgotten.

  She wanted, even needed, to share the remaining letters, and the story they contained, with an objective person. If indeed Max could be described as objective, after the way he’d made love to her.

  “I’ll get the letters,” she said.

  Max stopped her, taking her wrist in a gentle grasp. “Not now, love,” he said. “After breakfast.”

  Kristina realized that she was hungry, and returned to the omelette. “You’re a good cook,” she said with some surprise after she’d taken a few bites.

  Max grinned
. “I’m a nineties kinda guy,” he said. “I also do laundry, clean bathrooms, and scrub floors. Once I even mended a tutu fifteen minutes before Eliette was due to perform in a dance recital. Naturally I wouldn’t want the guys on my team to find out about that last part.”

  She smiled at the image of this large, powerfully built man stitching a little girl’s ballet costume. The thought stirred a poignant sweetness in the bottom of her heart. “You’re a good man, Max Kilcarragh,” she said.

  He sighed. “Don’t give me too much credit. I didn’t say I liked sewing and cleaning. It was just that somebody had to do it.”

  Because Sandy was gone, she thought sadly. It was almost as if Max’s late wife were there in the room with them, and only then did Kristina fully realize that even if she herself were a normal mortal woman, there would still be an obstacle to overcome. Max had loved Sandy with a rare intensity. Perhaps he did not have the emotional resources to care so deeply again.

  “Was—was Sandy that sort of wife?” she asked in a cautious tone. It wasn’t really any of her business, she knew, but she still wanted to know what Sandy Kilcarragh had been like. She, who had always had servants, traveled the world, and, in recent decades, concentrated almost completely on building a business that was international in scope. “The domestic type, I mean?”

  Max didn’t take offense to the inquiry, didn’t seem to mind it at all. He took his plate and Kristina’s, seeing that she was finished eating, to the sink. “We shared the housework in the beginning,” he said, “but once Eliette was born, Sandy decided to take a few years off from her teaching career and stay home. She did more than her share after that, but I helped with the kids as much as I could.”

  Kristina got off the stool, ready to go upstairs for the other letters. Her throat felt tight, painfully so, for she would probably never be a mother. She and Michael had never conceived a child, and besides, like Valerian, she was afraid of producing a monster of some sort.

  “I—I don’t think I can have children,” she said very softly. She had very good reason to believe as she did.