The Black Rose Chronicles

by Linda Lael Miller

  Daisy interlaced her fingers and sighed. She wasn’t wearing her baseball cap, but otherwise she was dressed in the usual casual-camp way. “Nobody ever said it was easy being human,” she pointed out. “Especially being a female human.” She reached for the brown bag with the pharmacy logo printed on its side and tossed it to Kristina. “Here—you’ll have to figure these out for yourself.”

  Kristina looked inside, saw a box of tampons, and groaned again, flinging herself back onto her pillows. Twenty minutes later the pills had worked, and the tampons were in their place on a bathroom shelf. Daisy returned from downstairs where she’d prepared a pot of herbal tea and toasted a couple of English muffins.

  “Feeling better?”

  Kristina nodded sheepishly. This was an experience most mortal women endured month in and month out, and she’d carried on as though she were having an appendectomy with no anesthetic. She had a new respect for the female of the human species. “Thanks, Daisy.”

  Daisy grinned. “After you’ve knocked back some of the tea and wolfed down a muffin, you should get up and move around as much as you can. Get dressed and take Barabbas out for a walk or something.”

  “I should go down to the shop.”

  “Why? Isn’t there a construction crew there, fixing the door and replacing the glass in the jewelry counter?”

  “Yes,” Kristina said. “And I want to make sure things are going okay.”

  “You’ve heard, of course, that it was Benecia who took the brass monkey?”

  Kristina hadn’t heard exactly, though Dathan had presented the theory, the night of the robbery, when both he and Valerian were squared off in her living room. They’d all but bared their fangs.

  She wondered why the warlock had not come to her with the trophy, the ugly doorstop, as soon as he’d retrieved the thing. It wasn’t like Dathan to miss an opportunity to score a point, especially when there was something he wanted in return. “I hadn’t heard,” she said softly. “Who told you?” The question was a formality, escaping her lips before she’d thought.

  “Valerian, of course. Dathan couldn’t resist letting him know that a warlock had succeeded where a vampire could not.”

  Kristina’s heart, now all too mortal, was hammering against the base of her throat. “Where is it—he—the monkey, I mean?”

  Daisy’s gaze was solemn. “Benecia refused to tell. She means to use it against you, if she can.”

  Kristina set her tea tray on the bedside table and leaned back against her pillows. “How did Dathan respond to that?”

  “He was enraged, of course, but he dared not destroy the little demon because the knowledge of the doorstop’s whereabouts would go with her. I suspect he found their lairs, Benecia and Canaan’s, I mean, and gave them a sample of warlock blood. According to Valerian, everyone in the vampire world heard their wails of fury when they awakened, deathly ill. They had probably been fed just enough to serve as a warning of Dathan’s vengeance. Let’s hope they are wise enough to heed it.”

  Although she still felt a little dizzy, Kristina’s pain was mostly gone. She got out of bed, somewhat shakily. She would take a shower, get dressed, and concentrate as hard as she could on summoning the warlock. Max and his children were in more danger than ever before, now that Kristina, too, was mortal and had no magical means to protect them.

  Daisy touched her arm. “I’ll check on you later. Right now I’ve got to see how Esteban is making out, then make a run downtown to the agency.”

  “Thanks for everything,” Kristina said, mildly embarrassed that, at her age, she’d had to have the basics of menstruation explained to her.

  When she’d showered and dressed, again in jeans, with sneakers and a blue cable-knit sweater to complete the outfit, Kristina hurried downstairs. The bottle of pills Daisy had brought were clasped in her right hand; if the pain came back, she wanted to be ready.

  She had barely sat down at the family room table and set herself to concentrating on Dathan’s arrival when he appeared. Kristina realized, with a touch of sadness, that it was his magic that had alerted him to her need, and not her own. Hers was gone, and she was going to miss it, even though she’d wished it away for as long as she could remember.

  He was dressed like a gentleman who has just attended the opera, most likely one in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. He sported a short cape, a gleaming black top hat, and very elaborate shoes, with ornate buckles and square heels. Like vampires, warlocks were facile at time travel.

  Dathan approached Kristina, hardly sparing a glance for Barabbas, who gave a low, throaty growl but did not rise from his resting place on the hearth rug. Taking her hand and sweeping off his top hat in the same grand gesture, Dathan placed a warlock’s kiss on her knuckles. She withdrew rather abruptly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, instead of Valerian, what you had found out about Benecia Havermail?”

  “Because I could not present you with a fait accompli, my dear,” Dathan said, looking and sounding surprised that anyone would question his judgment. “A situation is not resolved until it is—well—resolved.”

  Kristina lowered her head, thinking of Max, of the way he laughed, the way his eyes told her so much of what was in his mind, the way he made love to her. As though she were a goddess, powerful and worthy of worship, and yet fragile, too. She must give him up and make her way alone, as she had always done.

  Dathan curved a finger under her chin and raised her face to look deep into her eyes. “You are so troubled, beloved,” he said with inexpressible tenderness. “Why? I will protect your Max, as I promised to do, even though it breaks my heart to know how you love him.”

  She was surprised again; Dathan, for all his intuitive powers, hadn’t discerned that she’d changed and become as mortal as her lost Uncle Aidan. When she told him the truth, he would no longer want her for his bride and queen—a fact that came as something of a relief.

  “Yes,” Kristina said. “I do love Max, very much.”

  “But someday—”

  “No,” she interrupted, shaking her head. “Dathan, I have no powers. I am mortal.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “It’s true. It’s part of the reason I’ve bungled so many spells lately. My magic is gone. I am a woman, and nothing more.”

  The warlock’s face was not crestfallen at this news, as Kristina had expected, but translucent with some inner joy. “Even better! The mating of a warlock and a mortal—”

  “Cannot be that unusual,” Kristina said, losing patience. While she didn’t relish the prospect of spending the rest of her life, whatever was left of it, alone, she wasn’t about to settle for a mate she didn’t love, just to have someone to call her own.

  Not that any woman could ever call a warlock her own. Like vampires, they were fickle creatures—Valerian and her parents were the only nightwalkers of her acquaintance who remained faithful to their romantic companions. Though when Daisy was between lifetimes, Valerian had certainly been known to engage in a variety of affairs of the heart.

  “I think,” Dathan said, “that I should take my leave now, and return when you are in a better mood.”

  “That,” Kristina responded, “would be wise. Only don’t bother to come back if you’re going to hound me about marrying you, because I won’t.”

  Dathan sighed forlornly, spread his elegant cape like black wings, and was gone.

  Kristina walked Barabbas around the block—there was a scent of snow in the air again—and then took him back to the house and shut him up inside. A few minutes later she was in her Mercedes, driving downtown to her shop.

  The door had been replaced, and Max’s friend and two of his helpers were just finishing the repairs to the jewelry counter. The floor had been swept, and as Kristina moved among the familiar antiques, she told herself she could open for business that afternoon, or in the morning at the latest.

  She wondered how long it would be, though, before Benecia and her sister returned to wreak more havoc. And w
here was the brass doorstop? Would he turn up one night, standing over Kristina’s bed, a knife in his hand?

  She shivered. Barabbas was there to protect her, of course, but she couldn’t depend on a wolf forever. Besides, the animal belonged to Daisy and Valerian; its rightful home was with them.

  Maybe, Kristina thought sorrowfully, it was time to close down her shop and go traveling again. She could simply wander from place to place, the way she’d done after Michael’s death. The world had changed a great deal since the days of steamer trunks and great ocean liners; countries had new borders and new names.

  There were other differences, too. She was deeply in love, and on this journey she would not have unlimited time. Every moment, every heartbeat and breath, was now infinitely precious.

  Max telephoned that night, and he didn’t suggest getting together. That was fine with Kristina, because she wasn’t ready to tell him about her mortality. He might see the change in Kristina as a reason to rejoice, but she knew it was a very mixed blessing.

  “You’re okay, right?” he asked. She heard cupboard doors opening and closing, pans clanking. The man was decent to the core, a wonderful lover, and he could cook in the bargain. Amazing. “No creepy stuff has been happening?”

  Kristina bit her tongue. It was all in how you defined “creepy stuff,” and she didn’t want to enlighten him. She needed more of those anti-cramp pills, a warm bath, and a good night’s sleep. “Barabbas makes a pretty good bodyguard,” she said after a few moments.

  “You’ll call if you need me?”

  “Yes,” Kristina promised. She was beginning to wonder, though, if Max had decided she was too much trouble, with all her weird relatives and White Fang for a pet. It would be easier all around if he dumped her, right then, but she found herself braced against his rejection all the same. “I’ll call.”

  He destroyed her theory in the next sentence. “Thursday is Thanksgiving,” he said. “My mother is putting on her usual feast, and she’s asked me to invite you. Not that I didn’t want to, of course.” More pan clattering, a brief aside to one of the children, something about fishing somebody named Barbie out of the aquarium. “Will you come with us, Kristina?”

  “I’d be happy to,” she said, then closed her eyes against a rush of tears. Why, why had she agreed, when she knew it was a terrible, even dangerous, mistake to draw the situation out any further? She had already let things go too far.

  “It’s a long weekend,” Max continued, making matters worse. “The kids usually stay with my folks, and you and I do have that reservation at the lodge up in the mountains.”

  Kristina had completely forgotten that, with all that had happened since. “Maybe you shouldn’t be away from Bree and Eliette, over the holidays, at least. I know it sounds silly, but I didn’t realize Thanksgiving was coming up so soon.”

  No pot clanging, no muttered instructions to the kids.

  “Don’t say no, Kristina,” he said. “My daughters aren’t being neglected—they always spend that weekend with my parents.”

  Heaven help her, she didn’t want to refuse. She yearned to be alone with Max, making love, talking in front of a fire, playing in the snow. The way things stood, that might be the last true joy she ever experienced.

  “All right, I’ll go,” she promised very softly. She would give herself, and Max, that one glorious interlude together, and then she’d do what she should have done long before and put an end to the relationship. She’d tell Max she was selling the store, leaving Seattle and never coming back, and she fully intended to keep her word.

  “Pick you up at noon on Thursday?” There was a smile in Max’s voice; it warmed Kristina and eased the ache in her heart just a little.

  “I’ll be ready,” she said, silently calling herself every sort of fool.

  Then, after taking two more of Daisy’s pills, she ate an early dinner, took a brief bath, and crawled into bed with the stack of letters she and Max had been working their way through together. She supposed she should have waited, but that night, it seemed, nothing had the power to distract Kristina from the gloomy future but the past. The days of yesteryear, while grim in their own right, had one advantage on the years to come—they were over.

  …Michael was inconsolable after his father’s death; he blamed himself for both his parents’ passing, I think, though he never admitted as much to me. He would have said even less to Gilbert, who represented everything Michael himself was not and could never be—he was good, strong, steady. Even handsome, though in a less fragile way than Michael.

  Late that summer Gilbert brought me a strange and magnificent gift, a little baby swaddled in rough blankets. He explained that the poor little mite was a foundling, that his mother had given birth to him beside one of the roads passing through the estate, and had perished there.

  I was filled with yearning, for while I had put my own powers firmly out of mind, I was certain that I could not bear an infant of my own. Yes, of course, my mother, a vampire, had brought me forth in quite a normal fashion, but I was an oddity and I knew it. Here was a helpless, needy child that I could love, dote upon, educate.

  I felt as though I had been drowning and someone had flung out a rope, that I might catch hold and be saved.

  I recall that Gilbert looked at me, and at the child, with the most moving tenderness glowing in his eyes. “I wish things had been different, Kristina,” he said, and that was all.

  But I knew what he meant. That we might have been together, as husband and wife, and produced babes of our own. He did not know the truth about me, though Michael did, by then, and had reviled me for it often.

  I might have known how my husband would react to the introduction of a foundling into the household, although it was rightfully Gilbert’s estate, and not his own. He called the infant a bastard—true no doubt, but surely not the fault of the child and very probably not even the fault of its mother—and ordered me to send him away.

  I refused, and Michael tormented me day and night. Then one morning, when Gilbert was away in London, my husband confronted me yet again, in a drunken rage. We were standing at the top of the main stairway leading down into the great hall of Cheltingham Castle—great Zeus, Phillie, why did I challenge him then? And why there?

  I had named the baby Joseph and engaged a nurse for him, and I already loved him as much as if I’d given birth to him myself. And so, in a moment of temper, I told my husband I would sooner give him up than the child.

  He backhanded me then, did Michael, and I went sailing down the stairs, end over end. Had I not been what I was, I would surely have perished, and even so I suffered incapacitating injury. When I awakened, Joseph had been taken from the house, and my searching, however frantic, was fruitless.

  I can write no more just now. I know you understand.

  76

  The next of the many letters Kristina had written to Miss Eudocia Phillips, her former governess, was dated nearly six months after the one in which Michael had engineered the disappearance of Kristina’s adopted child. Even after all this time, remembering made Kristina’s heart ache, for no amount of searching had turned up even a trace of the baby boy, Joseph.

  Not then, at least.

  …Your letters have brought me so much comfort, Phillie. You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if you found the story too burdensome, too full of sorrow, and could not bear the telling?

  When last I wrote, I told you how Michael had taken my son from me, and struck me when I confronted him for what must have been the thousandth time. The wounds I suffered when I fell down the stairs were insignificant compared to what that final treachery did to my spirit. I was destroyed and could no longer endure living under the same roof with Michael Bradford.

  Still, I had cracked several ribs in my fall and could not travel, so I had no choice but to remain at Cheltingham, at least until I’d recovered. Michael, in the way I have since learned is typical of such men, was immediately contrite, as solicitous as any husband might have be
en in the circumstances—rushing down the stairs, shouting that a doctor must be sent for, soothing me and stroking my hand as we waited. I lay there at the base of the stairs, beyond anguish, with servants hovering about, for Michael had decreed that I must not be moved until the village physician had examined me.

  How ludicrous it seems that Michael should be my caretaker, my constant companion, when he had been the one to do me hurt in the first place. I despised him and wanted him to go from my sight, not just then but forever, but he would not leave me; even after I was carried to a downstairs bedchamber, where my ribs were bound and I was given laudanum to ease my pain. In some ways, Phillie, that was the greater torture, his continued and doting presence. The drug numbed my flesh but could not reach the anguish in my soul.

  Michael held my hand. He stroked my hair. He said he was sorry and swore he had never meant to do me any harm. I believe he meant what he said, as he was saying it, but I hated him as I have never hated anything or anyone before.

  “Tell me where Joseph is,” I said. I thought one good thing might come out of Michael’s remorse, at least—that I might learn the whereabouts of my foster child. When I had sufficiently recovered, I meant to fetch the boy from wherever he was being kept, and then put Cheltingham behind me forever. I would miss no one there, except for Gilbert.

  I hoped that my parents and Valerian would come to me at last, once I had truly separated myself from Michael. I felt an almost inexpressible yearning to see them again, but I confess I was embittered too—quietly furious that they had refused to step in when I needed them so much. Knowing that they had good reasons, and that the decision was a difficult one for them, was of no consolation then.

  Michael hesitated a long time before answering my question about Joseph’s whereabouts. Then, the very picture of compassion, he said, “You must cease your fretting over the brat, Kristina darling. We shall make our own babies.”