Time Without End

by Miller, Linda Lael

  Would that I could have known how prophetic those rashly spoken words really were. But then, I do not believe anything short of Brenna's return from the dead would have changed my course.

  Timothy looked pained; tears filled his kindly eyes, and he spread his hands in a gesture of pleading. "Valerian—"

  I was unmoved by the monk's sorrow and held up a hand to silence him. In the next moment I looked ruefully down at my borrowed robe. "Have you no breeches in this dreary place? No tunics or belts or boots?"

  He drew an audible breath. "We keep a store of such garments, yes," he admitted slowly. "Each of us arrived here as an ordinary man, after all. Our possessions are part of our sacrifice, and as a rule they are either sold for the benefit of the order or given to the poor."

  "No one," I said, laying my hands on my chest and looking at Timothy with gentle impudence, "is poorer than I am."

  Timothy nodded sadly and left my cell, returning minutes later with a stack of colorless, somewhat ragged garments, neatly laundered and folded. He said nothing as he held them out to me, and I confess that I snatched them from his hands.

  I was eager to be gone from that place and those people.

  I left the following day, wearing the ill-fitting tatters Timothy had brought to my cell. I also had two coins, of very modest value, that he had provided.

  Thus began seventeen years of searching, not for Brenna now, but for that vanished part of myself that had enabled me to love, to laugh, to weep, to mourn.

  All hope of that soon perished, and I sought only to meet a merciful death. I was, like the Prodigal, a libertine, a liar, a heretic, and a thief. I wandered, and I committed every sin I could think of without compunction, and a few that were suggested to me. I consumed what wine I could beg or steal, and awakened in pigsties and gaols and the beds of strangers. I cared for nothing and for no one, least of all myself.

  Then one momentous gloomy night, when I was five and thirty, and the most devout of derelicts, my old tutor, Challes, quite literally stumbled across me where I lay sprawled, stuporous with drink, upon the filthy floor of a stable.

  It was soon after that the dark miracle occurred, and I was forever changed.

  Daisy

  Las Vegas, 1995

  Daisy was not the whimsical type, but it seemed to her that a faint echo of magic lingered in the silence of that empty auditorium. When Jerry Grover flipped on some of the interior lights, the multicolored tinsel curtain threw off a blinding dazzle, and Daisy winced.

  Grover smiled, obviously pleased by her discomfort. "You won't find Valerian here," he said with a combination of indulgence and condescension in his tone. "As I told you, he never appears during the daylight hours." He paused to smirk, then added, "Perhaps he's a vampire."

  Daisy thought of Jillie Fairfield and her bloodless body and felt a quiver of fear. She quickly squelched it. "No doubt," she answered dryly, widening her eyes, "he's tucked up in a coffin somewhere, fast asleep."

  Grover sighed. "Where Valerian is concerned," he said, "nothing would surprise me." He paused to consult his watch, a sporty Rolex, and Daisy didn't miss the point of the gesture.

  She folded her arms. "I won't keep you—I can find the dressing rooms on my own," she told him. "In the meantime, I suggest you take another look at your computer files. For a start, I'd like to know where you send this guy's paychecks."

  Color seeped up Graver's tanned neck, and he spoke with exaggerated slowness, as though addressing an idiot. "That's easy, Officer Chandler. Like most performers, Valerian has an agent. There are contracts."

  "That's Detective Chandler," Daisy said, undaunted. "What's this agent's name?"

  A pulse pounded in Grover's temple. "I haven't the vaguest idea."

  "Then I'd suggest you find out," she answered, turning to start down the nearest aisle. "I'll stop by your office for the information before I leave."

  Grover spared her a slight nod, whirled on the heel of one Italian loafer, and strode away.

  Daisy lingered for a moment, recalling the events of the night before. She'd never seen a trick that even remotely rivaled the carriage bit, and the mystery of it both intrigued and frustrated her. And there was something else, she admitted to herself, walking toward the door at the right of the stage.

  Valerian had touched her, not with his hands, but with his mind. She'd been downright mesmerized by him, and the realization was profoundly irritating. If for no other reason, she wanted to face the magician again and prove to herself, as well as to him, that he had no power over her.

  Very little light reached backstage, and the ornate carriage Valerian used in his act loomed in the shadows, ghostly and somehow ominous.

  "Hello?" Daisy called out. "Anybody here?"

  No answer.

  She left the wings and proceeded into the area behind the stage. She immediately encountered a ponytailed young man in jeans and a T-shirt, pushing a rack of costumes along the hallway.

  "Hi," she said, pulling her badge from her purse and offering a glimpse before stowing it again.

  "Hi," he replied, looking uncertain and slightly flustered. "Can I help you?"

  "I hope so," Daisy replied, smiling in an effort to put him at ease. "What's your name?"

  He flushed, perhaps with relief. "Joe Fitch. Is—is something wrong?"

  Joe hadn't heard about Jillie Fairfield's murder, then. Daisy wished she didn't have to be the one to break the news.

  Joe went pale as he took in Daisy's words. "Oh, my God," he whispered when she'd finished, clasping the clothes rack with both hands to steady himself.

  Daisy put a hand on his arm. "Would you like to sit down?" she asked.

  "I'm okay, really," Joe said, but he fell into a folding chair next to the wall all the same. "Oh, God," he murmured again. "Oh, God—I don't believe it."

  Dragging up another chair, Daisy sat down facing Joe. Between the two of them and the clothes rack, they blocked the hallway. "Did you know Ms. Fairfield well?" Daisy asked.

  To Daisy's disappointment, Joe shook his head. He looked sick, and he was trembling. "Not really. Neither of us have been here very long. You know how Vegas is—people move around."

  Daisy nodded. There was a watercooler a few feet away, with a stack of paper cups on top. She rose to fill one and bring it to Joe. "How about Valerian? What's he like?"

  Joe took the cup in both hands and drained it before answering. "He keeps to himself."

  "How about the other women in the show? Were any of them friendly with Ms. Fairfield?"

  "I think I'm going to puke," Joe confided. Then he bolted, overturning his chair with a metallic clatter, one hand clasped over his mouth.

  Daisy followed him to the door of the men's rest room and waited, leaning against the wall until he came out. His skin, starkly white before, had turned to a greenish shade of gray.

  She let her folded arms fall back to her sides and straightened, then reached into her purse for a dog-eared business card. "Here," she said. "Give me a call if something comes to you."

  Joe took the card and stared at it like a foreigner trying to read a strange language. "Okay," he agreed. Then he turned and fled back into the men's room.

  Daisy heard him retching as she turned away. It was a good thing Joe had gotten the bad news secondhand, she reflected. If he'd actually seen the body, he would have hocked up his socks.

  She rapped at Valerian's dressing room door and, when there was no answer, tried the knob. To her surprise, the lock wasn't engaged. She stepped over the threshold and turned on the lights, frowning.

  What did you expect, Chandler? she chided herself. An open casket? Maybe some cobwebs and a pair of six-foot candelabras?

  "Vampires, indeed," she scoffed aloud, recalling Grover's smart-ass remark and what O'Halloran had said that morning at the crime scene. She backed into the hallway, even though she didn't believe in monsters, and her pace was a little faster than usual as she made her way toward a rear exit.

  Valerian<
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  Las Vegas, 1995

  I awakened promptly at sunset, as usual, after a troubled sleep. I'd been tormented by dreams of Brenna—now called Daisy Chandler—throughout the daylight hours, and the terrible images followed me into full consciousness.

  I sat up and took in my immediate surroundings, and I was oddly surprised to find myself in my desert lair, even though I distinctly remembered retreating to it just before dawn.

  My subterranean palace had been built by a paranoid billionaire with a bizzare imagination and a taste for luxury. I had always found it ironic that the survivalist had not survived, but had succumbed to some relatively minor ailment. I had purchased the place from his widow, who evidenced no desire to live in a rabbit's burrow, however splendid.

  The soft strains of Mozart poured into the master suite as I rose from my silk-covered bed. My beloved had returned to me, and I could not help rejoicing in the knowledge, but I felt terror, too. Through the centuries since Brenna's drowning in the treacherous waters off the coast of Cornwall, we had found each other no fewer than five times.

  On each occasion, in each new incarnation, Brenna had succeeded in winning my heart, no matter how I resisted. Oh, and I did resist, with all the might I possessed, for there was a curse upon milady and me, and it followed us mercilessly, relentlessly, down through the years.

  Always, in every lifetime, Brenna's soul remembered our bond, but consciously I was always a stranger to her, a wayfarer who could only come to her in the night. I invariably fell in love with her all over again, and more deeply then ever before, and she returned my affections—for the most part. What bliss it was to hold her, to look upon her face, and what hell to know that she would soon be gone.

  It mattered not what efforts I made to protect my darling; my powers were useless against this hex, whatever it was. We were doomed, Brenna and I, to relive the torment of parting, over and over. I could only conclude that it was divine punishment, meted out to me because I had accepted Challes's evil gift all those years before, and used it to the fullest, without the slightest hesitation.

  But what sin had Brenna committed, to deserve such a fate? The question angered me, as it had always done.

  I went into my glittering bathroom and groomed myself, then selected a starched shirt and a perfectly tailored suit from my wardrobe. A smile, faint and fleeting, touched my mouth. It puzzled the mortals of my acquaintance that I never suffered from the desert heat, no matter how formally I dressed, and I enjoyed their consternation.

  Usually.

  I affixed my cufflinks and wandered into the vast living room, where the stereo system spilled soft, vibrant notes of music into the air. I silenced the machine with a sort of mental nod and by the same means caused another contraption, an enormous television screen, to fold down from its hiding place in the ceiling.

  The set flared with light, and a scene took shape. The images I saw were not being broadcast by any station or network, however. I knew well enough that they sprang from the secret realms of my own mind.

  I saw a corpse lying on a matted carpet. The body was that of a woman, and I knew what had killed her even before I focused on the tiny puncture marks on her throat, knew there wasn't a drop of blood left in her veins.

  Jillie Fairfield. One of the delectable young creatures who had added so much to my act.

  Suddenly weak, I sat down in a soft chair and stared at the horrific vision. This was no ordinary murder, no crime of vengeance or passion. It had been committed by one of my own kind—a vampire. And because of Jillie's connection with me, I could be certain the gesture had been meant as a challenge.

  I closed my eyes and willed myself to the scene, materializing in Jillie's small apartment only moments later. The place was dark, a fact that was of no consequence whatever to me, and the body, of course, had been removed.

  The corpse had been emptied of blood, but there were traces of that precious stuff everywhere, glittering in the gloom like tiny points of blue light. The scent of it, stale now, and wasted, filled my nostrils.

  "Who are you?" I demanded aloud. "Show yourself!"

  There was no sound besides the ordinary doings of nearby mortals, which came to me through the walls and the floor as a low murmuring. And yet there was something beneath it, a deeper silence, and not an empty one.

  I tried to go back to the moment of the murder—vampires travel through time as easily as men and women pass from one room to another—but my way was blocked. I heard poor little Jillie's muted scream, I felt her terror and then the unholy ecstasy that is a hallmark of a blood-drinker's fatal kiss, but I could not see her killer, and I was unable to help her.

  I was swamped by despair, then fury.

  The woman's death was the work of another night-walker, a powerful fiend. But who was this monster? I knew of many other vampires, of course, but of all those, only Maeve was stronger than I. She was a regal creature and did not feed on harmless chorus girls—her prey fell into two distinct categories: those who took pleasure in evil, and those who were already on the brink of death. Lisette, the former queen, would have done just such a murder, sparing no thought for the victim's youth and relative innocence, but she had been destroyed long ago. Dingdong, the witch was dead—but something else, something equally pitiless, was very much alive.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  « ^ »

  Valerian

  England, 1363

  Forceful hands gripped the front of my tunic, and I was wrenched, half insensible, out of the stinking straw where I'd collapsed earlier, and onto my feet. I recognized Challes, my former tutor, in spite of my wine-sodden state.

  "By the gods, it is you!" he rasped. "What in the name of heaven—?"

  I swayed, and he steadied me. I felt a rush of drunken sentimentality, followed by an emotion I had not acknowledged in a long while—hot, searing humiliation. I had liked my teacher and sought his approval, and I found that I wanted it still. My normally quick tongue failed me, and I could say nothing at all.

  Challes cursed and released me with such force that I struck the stable wall behind me. The shock cleared my head a little.

  "You were the brightest pupil I've ever had," he said furiously, waving with both hands, so that somehow the gesture took in both my disheveled person and my disordered soul. "Now look at you—dissolute, filthy, wasted! Why have you allowed yourself to fall into this shameful state?"

  I swallowed, clinging to the last rotted shreds of my pride. "I want nothing but to die," I said in an undertone that was both truthful and defiant.

  He stunned me again by slapping me hard across the face. "Weakling!" he whispered vehemently, and when I tried to sidestep him, he grasped my shoulders and thrust me back against the wall once more. "Every day and every night brave men and women beg whatever gods are listening to let them live. And you, you sniveling, pettish little whelp, dare to throw away your powers and your gifts like so much rubbish! Well, I won't have it, do you hear me? By God, I will not allow you destroy to yourself!"

  Tears burned in my eyes, shaming me anew, and I looked away in a vain effort to hide them. "It is too late," I said in a bare whisper. "Too late."

  For a moment I thought Challes would strike me again. Instead he tightened his grasp on my shoulders just briefly, then spoke in a gentle, broken voice. "When was the last time you had a decent meal or a real bed to sleep in?"

  I had been stealing food, sleeping in ditches and horse stalls, and begging coin for wine for so long that I could barely recall any other life. My childhood in the village of Dunnett's Head seemed unreal, and my brief happiness with Brenna was naught but a pretty tale.

  I spread my filthy hands. "When I was with the brothers, I suppose. They took me in after milady died." I didn't remember the old woman and her rough ministrations until much later, and therefore failed to mention her in my hazy account of those wretched days.

  "And you've wandered ever since, like some savage lost from his tribe?"

&
nbsp; The answer came hoarse from my throat. "Yes." Only then did I notice that Challes was finely dressed—much too finely for a poor tutor. His tailored garments and exquisite opera cape would have been more suited to a London theater or a gentleman's club; to say he looked out of place in the stable of a disreputable country inn would constitute an understatement of gross proportions. Odder still, he had not aged in the years since I had seen him last; there was a subtle vitality about him, and yes, he'd acquired an attractive air of quiet menace that made me think of wolves prowling stark and snowy downs.

  Challes laid a hand to my shoulder. "Come," he said. "I have a splendid gift to offer you, my misguided friend, but first you must be made ready to receive it."

  The strangeness of the remark did not penetrate the dense muddle drunkenness had made of my mind. I believed he was offering food and shelter, perhaps wine, too, and I wanted all of those things. Especially, I am ashamed to admit, the latter.

  Challes led me to a carriage, waiting axle-deep in mud on the road. The moon rose around it like a huge and silvery halo, and I felt a shiver at the sight, one more akin to excitement than to fear. A footman opened the door for us, and I sensed the look that passed between him and my tutor rather than saw it.

  "How did you know where to find me?" I asked, once settled in the sumptuous leather seat across from Challes.

  He sighed. "I will explain that at a later time. For now, it is enough to see that you are fed, scrubbed clean, and rested."

  I was already beginning to feel thirsty, and hoped the impressive improvement of Challes's circumstances meant he kept a good stock of wine. Even though I was not particularly alert at that point, I know I didn't give voice to the thought, for I'd guessed that it would not be well received.

  Challes heard it all the same, for he responded as if I'd spoken aloud. "Foolish knave. You will crave another nectar soon, but the questionable pleasure of drunkenness is behind you."