The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

Max, who had been running water over the breakfast dishes, left the sink to cross the room and take her shoulders tenderly in his big hands. “That hurts you, doesn’t it?” he asked. And then, without waiting for her answer, which was probably visible in her eyes, he drew her close and held her tightly for a moment.

  Kristina was starved for tenderness; she did not trust her judgment or her perceptions, so great was her need. She was intoxicated by Max’s caring, it affected her like opium. She allowed herself to cling to him, just for a few seconds, then pulled away and went upstairs.

  She found the letters where she had left them, hesitating only briefly before going back down to the kitchen again. Max was in the family room, sipping from a mug of steaming coffee, probably brewed in the microwave, and gazing out the window, watching a ferry head out of Elliott Bay, lights blazing.

  With a smile, Max put down his coffee, went over to the fireplace, and built a crackling fire. It was still dark; dawn was at least an hour away, and there was a certain trenchant intimacy in being together when much of the city was still sleeping. A silent resonance echoed between them, too—a lingering sense-memory of their lovemaking, as though their passion had imprinted itself forever, in the very cells of their flesh.

  Kristina stood still, watching Max, allowing herself the fantasy that there could be a thousand other mornings like this one. A lifetime of days and nights.

  Max rose to his feet, dusting his hands together, and turned to face Kristina. He ignored the packet of letters in her hand. “Did you ever have one of those moments that you wished could last forever?”

  “I think I’m having one right now,” Kristina replied. Neither of them moved.

  “It scares me,” Max confessed.

  “What?”

  “Caring so damn much. Kristina, I don’t know if I can let myself feel what I’m starting to feel. I don’t know if I can risk it.”

  She understood, or thought she did. “You don’t have to be afraid of—of warlocks and vampires. I’ll find a way to protect you—”

  Max shook his head, and she fell silent. “That isn’t what I meant.”

  Kristina swallowed hard. “Oh.”

  “I think I’d lose my mind if I loved a woman the way I believe I could love you and then lost her. I’ve been down that road before, and if I hadn’t had Bree and Eliette to live for, I’m not sure I would have made it.”

  Kristina didn’t remind Max that she was already a hundred and thirty years old, that she would probably be the one to grieve, not him. That would have been self-pity, even martyrdom, and those were states of mind she tried hard to avoid, though it wasn’t always easy.

  She might have said that there were no guarantees, that everyone takes chances, that caring is worth the risks involved, but all those things were too easy, too glib. Max’s concerns were valid, and so were her own.

  There were so many questions, and so few clear answers.

  73

  My beloved Phillie, the next letter began. Max had settled comfortably on the overstuffed leather sofa to read, with Kristina beside him, her eyes following the lines she herself had penned so long before. For her the experience was almost equivalent to reliving those dreadful times, and yet she knew she had to do it, in order to put that most disturbing part of her past to rest…

  I had intended to write sooner, my patient friend, but it is not so easy remembering those dark days, even now, when considerable time has passed.

  When last I put pen to paper, Michael had killed his own cousin, Justin Winterheath, in a pointless duel, whilst doing terrible damage to his own person as well. My husband’s knee was shattered, never to heal properly, always to cause him inexorable pain. His drinking, already a problem even before we were married—I had seen that in him and yet refused to accept it as truth—became much worse. He now had the excuse of his injuries.

  Phillie, you can imagine the gossip that followed the tragedy at Cheltingham, but I wonder if even you, clever as you are, can anticipate what a web of suffering Michael wove that early morning in the fog.

  It was said that Michael was a murderer and should be tried and hanged for his crime. Lady Cheltingham, my mother-in-law, was a fragile wisp of a woman in the first place, and after the tragedy she went into swift decline. Her consumption of laudanum increased by increments, it was said, until she wasn’t even bothering to get out of bed. Her husband, the once-blustering Lord Cheltingham, had never been an attentive spouse—I believe some of Michael’s more pronounced character flaws came from him—but after Justin was buried, the duke gave up his gaming clubs, his hounds and horses, even his mistress. He shut himself away in his library, not to read, a pursuit which might have done much to mend his spirit, but simply to sit, or so the servants whispered, staring morosely out the windows.

  Only Gilbert and I remained strong—Gilbert, because that was his nature, I because Michael needed me. (I was so foolish, Phillie, thinking I could save him, if only I loved him enough!)

  Michael became more impossible with every passing day.

  He tried over and over again to ride—that had ever been his passion, and love for me had never supplanted it—but his stiff knee made the pursuit wholly impossible. He was thrown on each attempt, and then there was more pain, followed by more drinking, and then more railing and cursing.

  In those days when I might still have been a bride, had I wed myself to a more suitable man, I became instead a reminder of all Michael had lost. By that time, he saw himself as the victim of Winterheath’s ungovernable temper, and although he must have known what venomous things were being said about him, he never showed a moment’s shame or remorse. He hated me, it seemed, as if I’d brought the whole catastrophe down upon us all, and would often mutter the most vile curses at me, or shout. He even accused me of being faithless, Phillie—of betraying him with his own brother.

  I don’t doubt that you are wondering why I stayed. I am not sure I can answer that question, even now, when I have gained a modicum of perspective. I can only say that I loved Michael completely; my error, no doubt, was in cherishing the man he might have been, instead of the man he was.

  At night I slept in a room adjoining Michael’s—I did not want him to touch me in a drunken and hateful state. But he came often to my bed and claimed me roughly, and I grew to hate that aspect of marriage that I had so enjoyed at first. I didn’t need my magic to disassociate myself from what Michael was doing to me—and I had almost forgotten that I possessed any powers at all.

  One spring morning Lady Cheltingham’s serving woman woke the household with a shrill scream. The duchess had died in her sleep and lay shrunken and staring in her lacy nightcap and high-necked gown. The ever-present bottle of laudanum stood upon her bedside table within easy reach.

  A pall of gloom seemed to settle over the whole of the estate after that, even though the hillsides of Cheltingham were green with sweet grass and the ewes were lambing. Trout stirred in the streams and ponds, and the sky was that fragile eggshell blue that I have only seen in the English countryside. I wanted to be happy, but I could not.

  Within a month of Lady Cheltingham’s funeral, her husband went into the family chapel in the middle of the afternoon, put the barrel of his favorite hunting rifle into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The small, ancient church where countless children had been baptized, where eulogies had been said and vows exchanged, was thus fouled by the literal and figurative carnage of Lord Cheltingham’s furious despair.

  Demons seemed to pursue Michael as never before, to stare out of his eyes, to torment him from both sides of his skin. Gilbert tried but could not reason with his brother at all. Michael was beyond both our reaches.

  He disappeared for days on end, commandeering one of the carriages and leaving Cheltingham Castle, and me, in temporary peace. During those intervals, Phillie, I prayed that he would never come back. God forgive me, I hoped that he would die. But he always returned, angrier, uglier than before, full of terrible accusations.

&n
bsp; By then Gilbert was the Duke of Cheltingham. Though grief-stricken, and bitterly furious with Michael, he was determined to make the estates prosper, to be a good steward. He had long loved one Susan Christopher, a young woman of excellent social standing, and they had planned, since childhood, to marry.

  In the wake of the “Cheltingham Scandals,” however, Susan’s family withdrew their support of the marriage, and Susan herself offered no protest and wed herself to another. She was not steadfast like Gilbert, but I assign her no blame. Although I believe that my own father, as a mortal, was such a man, I have not known another like my brother-in-law.

  If you are guessing that I at last knew the worst truth of all, that I had joined myself, under the laws of heaven, to the wrong brother, you are right. I came to love Gilbert, and I believe he bore me some tender sentiment, though of course something within him was broken with the loss of Susan.

  Gilbert and I might have taken some comfort from each other, and perhaps not been blamed too much by a merciful heaven, but we did not. Gilbert was far too honorable, though he often looked at me with the same yearning I felt, but it was no such noble notion as honor that stayed me from sin. I might have seduced my husband’s brother, so much did I want him, if the act wouldn’t have given weight to Michael’s constant and otherwise unfounded reproaches.

  During this period, Mother, Papa, and Valerian kept their distance. They might have been figures from a mythical tale, for all I knew, and I resented their absence completely, and often summoned them, aloud and in tears. Later, of course, I came to understand that they had stayed away in part because these were battles I had to fight for myself, but there was another reason as well. All of them feared that they would render Michael some unholy punishment, in a moment of uncontrollable fury, and earn my undying hatred in the process.

  And so I was alone, except for Gilbert….

  The shrill ringing of the telephone jolted both Kristina and Max out of the paper world of the letter, Max leaned his head back on the sofa and closed his eyes, while Kristina went to answer.

  “Ms. Holbrook?” an unfamiliar voice asked.

  Kristina was watching Max, wondering what he thought of her now, how the information in the letters had affected him. “Yes,” she said into the receiver.

  The caller gave his name and identified himself as a dispatcher for the alarm company that monitored her shop. “We’ve had a signal from your place of business, ma’am, and we’ve sent the police to that address. We’re calling to notify you that there may have been a break-in.”

  Kristina sighed, thanked the man, and hung up. Max was looking at her with raised eyebrows.

  “That was somebody from the electronic security firm I deal with,” she said. “They’ve sent the police to my shop. It’s probably just a false alarm, but I’ve got to go down there anyway.”

  Max laid the unfinished letter carefully on the coffee table and got to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Kristina luxuriated in the knowledge that Max wanted to go with her, even though she knew it didn’t necessarily mean anything. He was a nice guy, raised to be polite and considerate. Silently she blessed his parents—what fine people they must be.

  “You don’t seem very worried,” he commented when, after helping her into her coat and donning his own, he opened the front door. It was tacitly agreed that they would take his Blazer, which was parked in the driveway beside her Mercedes. “About the shop, I mean.”

  Something was tugging at the edge of her mind, but she couldn’t quite identify it. “Like I said, it’s probably just a false alarm. And even if somebody did break in, everything is insured.”

  Max raised the collar of his coat. An icy breeze was blowing in from Puget Sound, and the promise of a rare Seattle snowfall darkened the eastern sky. “Money doesn’t matter much to you, does it?” he asked, opening the Blazer’s passenger door for her. There was no surprise in the question, and no criticism. Apparently he was just making conversation.

  Kristina waited until he was behind the wheel before answering. “I’ve always had more than enough,” she said.

  “And what you wanted, you could conjure,” he replied, backing carefully into the street.

  “But I didn’t,” Kristina confessed. “Even in the early days, I wanted so much to be—well—normal.”

  Max shook his head and smiled. “A lot of us would have taken advantage of that kind of power,” he said. “Weren’t you ever tempted to strike back at Michael when he treated you so badly?”

  Kristina considered for several moments, not weighing the answer because she knew that immediately, but deciding whether or not to make such a confession. “I imagined a thousand sorts of vengeance,” she said. “Frankly, I’ve never been sure it wasn’t my anger that finally finished him.”

  Max glanced at her. A few fat flakes of snow wafted down from the burdened sky. “Are you going to tell me about that?”

  She bit her lip. “You’ll come to it in the letters,” she said.

  “Fair enough,” Max answered.

  They reached Western Avenue and the shop within a few minutes. There were two police cars parked out front, and Max tucked the Blazer neatly between them.

  Kristina’s uneasiness, barely the fragment of a shadow before, rose a notch or two and would not be denied. She got out of the car without waiting for Max to open the door and approached the front door of the shop, which was broken. Huge, jagged shards of glass littered the steps and the sidewalk.

  There went the false alarm theory.

  “I’m Kristina Holbrook,” Kristina told the uniformed officer guarding the door. “This is my store.”

  He asked for ID, and she fumbled in her purse, found her driver’s license.

  The officer nodded, and both Max and Kristina entered the shop. There was almost no glass on the floor, and a quick sweep of the room revealed that very little had been disturbed. The cash register, an antique in its own right, had been slammed through the top of the jewelry counter, probably when the robbers discovered that it was empty.

  A plainclothes detective approached, flashing his badge. “Ms. Holbrook? Detective Walters.”

  Kristina nodded in acknowledgment. Max said nothing, but he stood very close to Kristina, and she was grateful.

  “We’ve got an odd case here, Ms. Holbrook,” Detective Graham said. He was a clean-cut sort of guy, nice-looking and neatly dressed. “Looks like it was an inside job. You have any employees? Somebody who might have a key?” Kristina thought of the glass on the sidewalk. Of course. The door had been broken from the inside. Her uneasiness grew, though she still couldn’t pinpoint its cause, and bile burned the back of her throat. “No,” she said. “I’ve always run the shop by myself.”

  “Any chance somebody could have hidden in here somewhere, when you closed up last night?”

  “I wasn’t here then,” Kristina said, blushing a little. She didn’t want to have to explain that she’d been with Max; that was precious and private.

  Detective Walters didn’t press. After all, one of the advantages of owning a business lies in setting one’s own hours. “You having any financial problems, Ms. Holbrook?” he asked instead, in an almost bored tone of voice.

  Kristina felt Max stiffen, willed him not to defend her. And at the same time relished the fact that he wanted to protest the implications of the policeman’s question.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t need the insurance money.” Walters had the good grace to look mildly embarrassed. “Have to ask, Ms. Holbrook. Fact is, it’s an easy thing to check out anyway. Matter of a few strokes to a computer keyboard.”

  That didn’t come as any surprise to Kristina. Her best friend, Valerian’s Daisy, was a private detective, and Daisy had long since filled her in on just how easy it was to invade a person’s privacy, with or without their knowledge. “I’d like to look around, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  The detective produced a small notebook and a pencil stub from the pocket of his sk
i jacket. He was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and sneakers, in lieu of the trench coat Kristina would have expected. “Here,” he replied. “Make a list of everything that’s missing, if you would.”

  It finally came to her then, what she had been fretting about ever since the telephone call from the security people had alerted her to the possibility of a robbery.

  She headed directly for the back room, where she’d set the doorstop, the ugly brass monkey.

  It was gone.

  Kristina’s knees sagged beneath her; Max caught her elbow in one hand and steered her to the little table nearby, where she took tea breaks in the mornings and afternoons. She sank into one of the cold folding chairs and laid her head on her arms, trembling.

  Max touched her shoulder, then crouched beside her chair. “Sweetheart,” he said softly. “What is it?”

  “The brass monkey,” she whispered miserably, turning her head to look into his concerned eyes. “Oh, God, Max—the doorstop is gone!”

  “Did this piece have some special sentimental value?” Detective Walters asked, from the doorway. Kristina resented the intrusion, though she did not dislike the man himself.

  How could she explain that one night, nearly a year before, a young man had entered the store, bent on rape and robbery, and she’d changed him into a brass doorstop? Obviously she couldn’t—not until she and Max were alone, of course.

  “Yes,” she lied, making herself sit up straight, still dizzy. She knew she was wretchedly pale, and thought she might actually throw up. She hadn’t known she was quite human enough to do that. “It wasn’t valuable but I—I liked it.” She turned imploring eyes to Max, who was still on his haunches beside her chair, watching her closely. “Would you please call my friend and ask her to come down here as soon as she can? Her name is Daisy Chandler.” She gave Max the number.

  “I’m afraid the perpetrator broke the telephones,” Detective Walters said.

  Of course. The thief—she’d never troubled herself to learn his name—would have been filled with rage when the spell wore off. It was a wonder he hadn’t trashed the whole shop, or even come to Kristina’s house to avenge himself. Her home address was printed on the personal cards she kept in her desk, among other places.