The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Did we interrupt a costume party?” Valerian inquired archly.

  Dathan was not amused. He dismissed the vampire with a sniff and turned to Kristina. “Have you come to your senses, my beloved?” he asked, taking one of her hands and brushing the knuckles with the lightest pass of his lips. “What a splendid pair we should make.”

  Valerian made a sound that rather resembled a snort. Another affectation, of course, for his lungs had not drawn breath since the Middle Ages. “How I hate to dash your hopes,” he said with a complete lack of conviction, “but you’re too late. Alas, our Kristina loves a mortal. I fear it’s one of those eternal things, rather like my alliance with Daisy.”

  Dathan turned at last and leveled a look at his old adversary. Barabbas, who had been watching the warlock intently ever since his appearance, lifted his magnificent head and growled, making it abundantly clear whose side he would take if hostilities escalated.

  “I hardly think you invited me here to tell me about Max Kilcarragh,” Dathan told Valerian coldly, ignoring the wolf. “I know all about him, as it happens.” Here the warlock paused and looked down at Kristina. “He’s buried his heart with his dead wife, your Max. He might want very much to love you, but he is incapable of it. Contrary to the stage magician’s assessment of the matter, Mr. Kilcarragh’s soul mate was—and is—the mother of his children.” Kristina couldn’t help remembering that she’d told Max that she loved him that very afternoon, in a most intimate moment, and that he hadn’t answered in kind. Max was too honest to offer false vows. “Maybe you’re right,” she conceded. “In any case, I have other business with you. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with our bargain.”

  Dathan ran his gaze over her slender form. She was wearing a simple silk caftan of the palest ivory. “Why are you lying there like an invalid? Are you ill?”

  Kristina sighed. She’d tried several of the spells she’d found in her mother’s books over the course of the afternoon, hoping one of them would work on the escaped doorstop, and the effort had weakened her. The worst part, of course, was not knowing whether or not she’d succeeded. “No,” she said. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  A charged silence ensued. Valerian was clearly holding his tongue, though his eyes glittered with malicious amusement, and Dathan actually flushed. No one needed to explain to Kristina that both of them knew what had happened between her and Max.

  Kristina gathered the parchment pages of the ancient volume and set them carefully aside. Her relationship with Max was her own damned business, and she resented both the vampire and the warlock for daring to have any opinion at all on the matter. Quietly, evenly, she explained about the intruder to her shop, telling Dathan how she’d transformed the miscreant into an inanimate object, intending to deal with him later. When the tale ended, Valerian spoke.

  “Tell the truth,” he said to the warlock, “if that’s possible for you. Is any of this your doing?”

  Dathan flung out his hands in a gesture of supreme exasperation. Again the wolf growled. “What would I have to gain by such a stunt?”

  Valerian had a reply at the ready, as usual. “You could ‘save’ Kristina, thus painting yourself as a hero, perhaps hoping to win her heart. Brave warlock rescues fair damsel, etcetera, etcetera.”

  “You forget yourself, vampire,” Dathan accused, glowering at Valerian. He was not afraid of Barabbas, probably because he could have broken the beast’s neck with a simple motion of his hands. “You are the one who delights in high drama, not I.”

  “Do not provoke me,” Valerian warned in a quiet voice that would have spawned abject fear in almost any other creature. “Kristina is in danger. Were it not for the possibility that you can be of assistance, I would just as soon see you bound in barbed wire and thrown into hell as look at you.”

  Kristina closed her eyes again. The room fairly crackled with animosity, and the tension was smothering.

  “This is not helping,” she said.

  Valerian turned his back to Dathan and leaned against the fireplace mantel. The mirror above it did not show his reflection. The warlock drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, in an obvious bid for patience.

  “I’m sorry, Kristina,” Dathan said, putting just the mildest emphasis on her name, so that there would be no mistake, no suggestion that he was apologizing to the vampire. “Naturally, I will do whatever I can to help. And let me assure you—I’ve had nothing to do with any of this.” Kristina believed him; Dathan, though he could be devious when he chose, was also arrogant. He seldom questioned his own intentions and thus felt no need to disguise them. He was used to power; among warlocks, his word was law. “Can you find him?” she asked.

  “I shall certainly try,” he promised.

  Valerian spoke again, in a more moderate tone than before, but with no greater affection. “Look among your own ranks,” he said.

  “I would offer you the same advice,” Dathan replied. “Beginning with Benecia and Canaan Havermail.” Kristina felt a chill and exchanged glances with Valerian. Dathan had struck upon a possibility she had not considered. Perhaps the doorstop had not come back to life at all. Perhaps, instead, the little fiends had found out about the spell somehow and taken the brass monkey to use against Kristina, or simply to spite her. Benecia, after all, had been furious at Kristina’s refusal to consider her as a bride for Dathan.

  “I must feed,” Valerian said. His magnificent face was utterly impassive; he would not allow the warlock the satisfaction of being right. “Then I shall find the demon babies and make them tell me what they know.”

  He crossed the room, ignoring Dathan as thoroughly as though the warlock had not been there at all, and bent to kiss Kristina’s forehead. “Stay here,” he commanded, and then he vanished.

  Barabbas merely blinked; he was used to his master’s comings and goings. But his fierce eyes followed Dathan closely as the visitor sank into a chair near Kristina’s chaise.

  “I am calling off our bargain,” Dathan announced. “I want only one bride—you, Kristina.”

  “I don’t love you.”

  The warlock closed his beautiful eyes for a moment, as though she’d struck him a physical blow. “I shall teach you to care for me, and make you queen of all my kind, male and female.”

  “I do not think witches would take kindly to a queen,” Kristina said with a soft smile. “You yourself have told me that they are independent creatures. Besides, I have no wish to reign over anyone.”

  Dathan leaned forward, sitting now on the edge of his chair, his hands clasped together, his expression so earnest that it caused Kristina pain to look upon his face. “If I swore to keep your Max and his children safe, every moment of every day, until the natural end of their lives, would you agree?”

  Kristina started to refuse, but as the implications of Dathan’s words sank in, she held her tongue. This was no idle promise; Dathan surely had the power to do exactly that. As matters stood, she could offer them nothing but danger.

  “It would be a sacrifice,” Dathan said very softly. “I know that. But think of it, Kristina. Consider what it means.”

  She did not need to think, she knew. Just by coming into Max and the girls’ lives, she had put them in mortal peril. By leaving them forever, and taking Dathan for a mate, she could undo that.

  “I need some time,” Kristina said. Her heart was already breaking.

  Dathan nodded and rose. “I will make you happy,” he vowed.

  Kristina didn’t respond. Her eyes were brimming with tears, and when she’d blinked them away, telling herself to be strong, Dathan was gone.

  Valerian found Benecia and Canaan in a forgotten cemetery, overgrown with weeds, behind the ruins of a church in a Nevada ghost town. They were conducting one of their bizarre moonlight tea parties. They had conjured an elegant table, set with fine china and a gleaming silver service, and arranged four chairs around it.

  Each of them occupied one, of course, their tiny feet dangling high off the grou
nd in patent leather Mary Janes. They wore starched dresses, rife with ruffles, and their hair, as always, was done in gleaming ringlets. Their guests were a mummified miner and a teenage hitchhiker, freshly drained of her life’s blood and staring mutely into eternity.

  The relationship between Benecia and Valerian was not particularly cordial, although Canaan appeared to bear him neither rancor nor affection. Canaan was a self-absorbed creature, concerned, in true vampire fashion, only with her own pleasures. No doubt the hitchhiker had been her evening’s kill. Benecia had probably fed elsewhere, since the miner was nothing more than a husk, having been dead for at least seventy years.

  Benecia smiled sweetly, all the more horrible for her resemblance to an exquisitely made porcelain doll. “Valerian,” she said.

  Canaan looked at the newcomer with indifference and returned to her one-sided conversation with the hitchhiker.

  Valerian overturned the table without moving, scattering the silver coffeepot, the sugar bowl and creamer, the costly china cups and platters. The miner toppled off his chair, and what was left of his head crumbled to dust. The hitchhiker teetered, but did not fall.

  Canaan vanished in an instant, clearly a vampire who believed that discretion was the better part of valor, but Benecia drew back her perfect upper lip and snarled like the vicious aberration she was. “How dare you?” she spat.

  “I would dare considerably more, and you know it,” Valerian replied, unruffled. Benecia was nearly as old as he, but he did not fear her. Not for himself, at least. “Do not try my patience, little beast—if there is one penance in all the universe that might keep me from the flames of hell, it is driving a stake through your brittle heart.”

  The demon-child’s cornflower blue eyes glinted with hatred, but she did not advance upon him. “What do you want?”

  “An explanation,” Valerian replied. “What were you doing in Kristina Holbrook’s shop last night?”

  She stared at him in silence for a long time, her expression unreadable. Finally she laughed. “There was something I wanted.”

  “The brass doorstop,” Valerian said.

  Benecia smiled coyly. “Yes.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I shall never tell you that,” she replied cheerfully, “no matter what you do to me.”

  Valerian knew she was telling the truth; the fact that she longed for the peace of death was at once her strength and her weakness. Driving a stake through her heart would be a favor at this juncture, and he was in no mood to be merciful.

  “What do you want?” he asked, speaking as calmly as he could.

  Benecia folded small, alabaster white arms. Her shell-like fingernails were tiny and pink, and she wore a frilly white pinafore over her beruffled dress. Valerian recalled an incident far in the past, when she and Canaan had placed all their dolls in little wooden coffins and buried them in a long-abandoned garden, like corpses.

  Inwardly he shuddered, he who hunted human prey with the rise of every moon. The difference was that he rarely killed his quarry, but simply left them in a swoonlike state.

  “But you know what I want,” she taunted. “So why trouble to ask?”

  “Answer me, damn you.”

  “I want to change the past,” she said with a touch of defiance and—Valerian could hardly believe it—sorrow. “I want to grow up as a mortal, become a woman, marry, and have children. Give me that, vampire, and you shall have your ugly brass monkey.”

  Valerian did not speak. What she asked was impossible; vampires could travel no further back in time than the moment of their transformation from human to nightwalker.

  “Those are my terms,” Benecia said. And then she dissipated like thin fog, as her sister had done, leaving the ruins of her tea party behind her.

  Valerian buried the hitchhiker and the miner and returned to Seattle, where he found Daisy seated in a rocking chair in the nursery, Esteban snuggled in her arms. They were both sleeping, and he did not awaken them.

  Instead he stood silently in the shadows, understanding only too well what Kristina must be feeling, now that she had fallen so thoroughly in love with her mortal, Max Kilcarragh. Centuries of wandering, in an incessant cycle of finding his beloved and then losing her again, had marked Valerian’s soul with loneliness so deep that the scars would probably never heal. Now he had found her, managed to break the curse that had tom them asunder so many times before, and he was truly happy.

  With that joy, however, came a vulnerability unlike any he had ever experienced. Loving took so much courage, so much sacrifice. Always the knowledge was with him that one day, being mortal, Daisy would die. He, on the other hand, would look much as he did at that moment; he had not changed significantly in nearly six hundred years.

  She opened her eyes, sensing his presence. Esteban stirred but did not awaken. “Hello, handsome,” she said. “What accounts for the frown?”

  “I was thinking that I love you.”

  “Odd. Thoughts like that make most people smile.”

  “Most people grow old at the same pace. Daisy, I don’t want to lose you—not now and not fifty years from now.” Esteban whimpered in his sleep, and Daisy began to rock the chair gently, one hand patting the boy’s thin little back. “You’re torturing yourself,” she accused softly. “Eventually I’ll die. Then I’ll be born again as somebody else, and you’ll find me, the way you always do. We’re meant to be together.”

  “Suppose I don’t find you?”

  “Vampires are so neurotic,” she teased. “Of course you will.” Daisy’s expression turned serious, and she studied her beloved mate closely. “Did you manage to track down Kristina’s brass monkey?”

  “Yes and no,” Valerian replied, pacing, too restless to sit. He would have to go out again, for he had yet to feed, and his powers were at a low ebb. “Benecia Havermail was behind the robbery, and she’s holding the thing hostage.”

  “Out of spite?”

  “She wants to be mortal again.”

  “That’s impossible, isn’t it?” Daisy asked, frowning. Valerian spread his hands. “Aidan Tremayne, Maeve’s twin brother, was a vampire for well over two hundred years. Today he is flesh and blood again, with a wife, four children, and no memory whatsoever of his former existence.”

  Daisy nodded. “I remember now.” She had heard the story long before; there were no secrets between the two of them. “If Aidan could be transformed, why not Benecia?”

  “Aidan was basically good, and he had been made a vampire against his will. Benecia, on the other hand, begged for the privilege and has been unabashedly evil ever since she became a blood-drinker.”

  “And as a human being, she would still be evil?”

  “Unspeakably so,” Valerian agreed.

  Daisy rose, carrying the little boy out into the entryway. At the base of the stairs Valerian took the child gently from her arms, and together they climbed to the second floor. Esteban’s nursery was next to their own room; Valerian laid his adopted son gently in his crib. By morning, they both knew, the baby would have climbed over the rail and curled up on the rug in the center of the floor.

  Daisy took her mate’s hand and led him out of the nursery. The new nanny would arrive the next day; perhaps she could get through to Esteban, explain to him that he was safe now, that he need not fear being abused and neglected anymore.

  “Go and feed,” she said in the hallway.

  Valerian nodded, resigned, and kissed her tenderly before taking his leave.

  The sun had been up no more than five minutes when Dathan made his way down the circular stone steps to the crypts beneath the desecrated chapel on the Havermail’s English estate. The parents of the two beautiful demons were nowhere about—Avery and Roxanne had gone their separate ways long before—but Benecia and Canaan lay side by side upon their beds of stone, immersed in the vampire sleep.

  It would be so easy to destroy them, the warlock thought, and he had no compunction about taking their lives. Despite their i
nnocent appearance, these were not sweet mortal children, but fiends of the worst order. A stake, an infusion of his own blood, or simply carrying them up the stairs to lie in the sunny courtyard, any one of those methods would suffice.

  Only one thing stopped Dathan from killing them both, and that was the brass monkey. As he had suspected, and Valerian had later confirmed, Benecia knew where the thing was hidden, and she had probably confided in her sister.

  He drew a steel dagger with a jeweled handle from the scabbard on his belt and for a few moments enjoyed the fantasy of plunging it through those callous little hearts, first one, and then the other. Granted, the doorstop would still be at large, but at the same time, one of Kristina’s greatest fears would be allayed: the Kilcarragh mortals would be safe from this pair of monsters.

  No chance of Kristina becoming his mate if that happened.

  Dathan wasn’t prepared to be quite that noble.

  He smiled. He could, however, let both Benecia and Canaan know that they were not invulnerable, despite their highly developed vampire powers.

  Using the point of the dagger, Dathan pricked his finger and let a drop of blood fall first upon Benecia’s barely parted lips, then upon Canaan’s. It was not enough to finish them, more’s the pity, but when they awakened at nightfall, they would know they had been visited by a powerful enemy. The message could not have been clearer: Beware, for I, the warlock, have found you.

  Reluctantly Dathan then resheathed his blade and left the tomb.

  Within moments of awakening that night, Calder Holbrook went out to feed. He was back in his laboratory, going over the results of Kristina’s blood test for perhaps the hundredth time, before an hour had passed.

  Hunting, a delightful sport to many vampires, was a troublesome task to him, to be attended to and forgotten as soon as possible. Maeve relished her powers, her adventures, her singular challenges as queen of the nightwalkers. Calder, on the other hand, got all the excitement he needed just loving Maeve and working on his experiments.