Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles)

by Miller, Linda Lael

  “Bless you.” Kristina beamed. Then she leaned forward to confide in a cheerful whisper, “Lincoln was President when I was born.”

  “No,” Daisy said, but the fall-away sensation in the pit of her stomach told her it was true.

  “Yes,” Kristina insisted. Then she sighed sadly. “It’s hard, when your friends get old and you stay just the same, year after year, decade after decade. Naturally they wonder why.”

  “Naturally,” Daisy croaked, at a loss for anything sensible to say.

  “I take it you’re completely mortal?”

  “Completely,” Daisy said.

  “I envy you. I’d trade all my magic, you see, for a real home and a family of my own. How lovely to marry and grow old with a man you cherish and respect—”

  Daisy pushed away her food. “Don’t envy me,” she whispered, and then she made the unthinkable confession. “I’m in love with a vampire. And that isn’t the worst of it. It would seem we’ve been together in other lifetimes—”

  “Oh, no!” Kristina interrupted, covering her mouth with one hand and widening her already huge gray eyes. “You’re Valerian’s ladylove—the one he keeps finding and losing, finding and losing!”

  Daisy nodded glumly. “I think so, yes.”

  Tears of sympathy glistened in Kristina’s dark lashes. “It’s true, then—there is some sort of curse.”

  Valerian had told her about their star-crossed encounters in various centuries, and she was beginning to remember the odd detail, but he hadn’t said anything about a curse.

  ‘Tell me what you know,” she pleaded.

  Kristina shook her head. “You’ll have to ask Valerian, Daisy. This is a personal matter, and I have no business interfering. Besides, the plain truth is I don’t know much about it. I’ve heard whispers through the years, that’s all.”

  Daisy supposed she should have been afraid of Kristina Holbrook, but instead she liked and trusted her. She wanted her for a friend, though it seemed unlikely that they’d have much in common.

  “Okay, I can respect that,” Daisy said. “Thanks for the food, anyway, and the jumpsuit.”

  Kristina got off the stool and started toward the kitchen door, and Daisy followed her into the living room. The dark-haired woman went to stand beside the couch and touched Valerian’s forehead with such tenderness that Daisy felt an involuntary stab of jealousy.

  “Is he all right?” Daisy asked, because it was plain that Kristina knew.

  “Valerian is very strong and not a little stubborn,” she replied, but there was a small, worried crease between her eyebrows. “We must all be tried and tested in the crucible, mortal or immortal, and it would seem that his time has come.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Daisy could barely get the words out, she was so stricken by the grisly array of possibilities invading her imagination.

  Kristina withdrew her hand from Valerian’s opalescent flesh, but did not look away from his face. Her expression was full of sorrow and hope, trust and fear. “Everything changes. Perhaps the curse has finally run its course—perhaps everything can be resolved, one way or the other.”

  Daisy thought about Krispin, and the murdered women, about the horrible dummy she’d found hanging in her shower, and the scene played out on Valerian’s television screen. She’d watched those strange images and, at the same time, been a part of them.

  Yes, she reflected, Kristina was right. Events were building toward some sort of crescendo, and she was caught up in it all, not only because of her past lives, but through her growing love for Valerian.

  She stayed silent, because there was nothing to say.

  Kristina bent again and kissed Valerian’s forehead, then straightened and turned to Daisy. “Here,” she said, taking a pendant from around her neck and putting it around Daisy’s. It was an exquisite golden rosebud suspended from a priceless chain. “This has been in our family since my mother and her twin brother, Aidan, were mortal children. Over the centuries, it has gained power from the love of those who wore it against their hearts. You’ll need all your wits, all your love, all your faith to fight the battles ahead, but this talisman will lend you strength.”

  The necklace felt warm beneath Daisy’s fingertips. “Thank you,” she said. She was aware that, in giving away the pendant, Kristina was making a sacrifice. Whether that sacrifice was large or small, Daisy could not guess.

  Kristina smiled somewhat sadly. Or so it seemed to Daisy. Almost as an afterthought, as she was preparing to leave, the pixie-witch asked, “Do you want to leave here? Or is your vigil a willing one?”

  “I want to stay,” Daisy said.

  Kristina nodded. “Please tell Valerian when he wakes that I was here to look in on him.” At Daisy’s smile of acquiescence, Kristina raised both hands over her head and vanished with a showy little puff of smoke.

  “Wow,” Daisy couldn’t help remarking. Then she stretched out beside Valerian’s still form, there on that roomy leather sofa, cuddled up close, closed her eyes, and drifted into a fairy-tale sleep.

  She dreamed she rested in a crumbling castle, its walls obscured by thistles and thorns, its parapets and baileys and courtyards overgrown with vines.

  Only the kiss of a certain prince could awaken her.

  Valerian

  The Vampire’s Lair, 1995

  I opened my eyes at dusk to find Daisy sleeping beside me. My strength was flagging, despite the rest I’d taken and last night’s hasty feeding outside one of my favorite haunts, the Last Ditch Tavern, but I could not leave her. Not yet.

  I shifted slightly and brushed her lips with a tender kiss, and her eyes opened, wide and startled and so green that the sight of them made my heart clench like a fist within me.

  Then she smiled and put her arms around my neck. She did not need to speak; the invitation reverberated through her supple, warm little body and pierced me like lightning.

  “You don’t understand,” I began. My vampire senses, a thousand times more acute than those of an ordinary man, were leaping to life, pulsing beneath my skin, promising agony if I denied them, ecstasy if I gave in.

  I have ever cherished my pleasures.

  I made one last attempt, however. “Daisy—” I began, my voice no more than a raspy whisper.

  She touched my lips with a fingertip and wriggled beneath me. “I want you,” she murmured. “I don’t care what comes after that.”

  I groaned and fell into her kiss, willing to bum in hell for her, to offer myself as a living sacrifice—anything, so long as I could taste again the joy I had mourned these many decades since I had seen her last. And I wanted the joining of our two souls even more, for I was only whole when her spirit and mine were fused by the fire of our lovemaking.

  Daisy whimpered beneath my mouth as I opened the front of her garment—a curious thing it was, trousers and a blouse fastened together—and took gentle sustenance at her full breasts, one after the other. Her fingers, buried in my hair, pressed me closer, and I felt her hips arch under mine, wooing and tempting me in the age-old way, tormenting me with the promise of pleasure so intense a mortal could not have endured it, setting my bedazzled senses ablaze.

  ‘Take me,” she pleaded, and hers was not one but a chorus of sweet voices—her own, of course, and Brenna’s, and Elisabeth’s, and Jenny’s. And more.

  I refused to grant her such easy gratification, sliding down from her quivering, well-suckled breasts, over her smooth belly, damp beneath my lips. There was much I wanted to remind Daisy of, before our joining, and much I wanted to teach her.

  CHAPTER 14

  Daisy

  The Vampire’s Lair, 1995

  Daisy thrashed beneath Valerian, in a delirium of need, but he withheld satisfaction long after she had begun to plead. He tongued the peaks of her breasts until she felt her heartbeat throbbing in that taut flesh, and kissed her stomach and her hipbones, the insides of her thighs, the backs of her knees. She might have been a goddess, so thoroughly did he worship her
, with tenderness and fire for his offerings.

  She uttered a primitive, groaning sound when he burrowed through the veil of moist silk to take the hidden nubbin of flesh between his lips and begin to draw upon it, ever so gently. While he teased and nibbled and savored, at his leisure, Daisy writhed, soaked with perspiration, her hair clinging, in wild strands of copper, to her temples, her cheeks, her shoulders, and the upper swell of her breasts.

  In desperation, she tore open Valerian’s shirt, as brazen and untamed as a she-wolf in her season, and spread her hands over his marble chest. It was as if Michelangelo’s David had come to life and was making love to her, so splendid was he, so soul-wrenchingly beautiful.

  Mankind, she thought frantically, had never been meant to look as Valerian looked, or feel as he felt. Such magnificence could not be imprisoned in mortal flesh any more than lightning could be confined to a teacup or the music of a symphony to a single seashell.

  Valerian groaned at her touch, and she slid her arms around him and stroked his perfectly sculpted back with warm palms. At the same time she murmured to him— softly, insensibly, for she was not capable of reason— and knew that her love was balm to his spirit as well as his body.

  His clothes vanished with a mere blink of his hooded, sapphire eyes, and then Daisy’s were gone, too.

  “May the Fates forgive me,” Valerian whispered, and then he found the entrance to her body and took her in a single deep, swift stroke.

  Daisy’s arousal, already ferocious, convulsed her whole being in cataclysmic release, and she screamed, not from pain, but out of a pleasure that went beyond any conceivable agony or delight. Each time she reached a new peak, she was sent spiraling upward, toward another, until the last measure of response had been wrung from her. Throughout that sweet odyssey, Valerian whispered to her, stroked her face and her breasts, smoothed her hair.

  When at last, with a faint whimper, she sank back to the sofa in exhaustion, he gave her a few moments to catch her breath. Then, at long last, Valerian was overwhelmed by his own passions. He reached beneath her to grasp her buttocks in powerful hands and raise her like a sheath to the sword.

  Valerian’s strokes were long and slow and smooth; he plucked at Daisy’s senses, tuned them, like the strings of an exquisite violin, and soon she was playing a fevered rhapsody for him. They reached the crescendo simultaneously, with hoarse shouts of beleaguered triumph, and collapsed into the stillness that lay beneath their passion.

  A long time had passed when Valerian broke the mystic silence with a low chuckle. “I didn’t plan for us to make love on the living room couch like a pair of teenagers,” he said. “Frankly, I had something a little more romantic in mind.”

  Daisy nuzzled his neck, putting off the moment when she would have to tell him about her message from Krispin and the lifetime as Maddie Goodtree. “Don’t give it another thought. If that had been any better, I would have gone up like a campfire doused with kerosene.”

  He laughed. “It was good, then?”

  “It was better than good. It would be an improvement on ‘perfect,’ in fact.”

  Valerian kissed her, but lightly, mischievously. He knew, without being told, that she had given him everything she had to give, and that she would need time to recover before they made love again.

  “And what secrets are you keeping from me?” he asked.

  Deep within Daisy, small muscles continued to contract as the last and strongest orgasm ebbed away, and she tucked her face into his shoulder. “I’m still coming,” she whispered.

  “I knew that,” Valerian said with a smile in his voice. “We are yet joined, in case you’ve forgotten, and I can

  feel you tightening around me. What exquisite torture it

  is.”

  Daisy whimpered and then gave a little sigh as the resonance grew softer, and more distant. “There aren’t any other—secrets.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Daisy.” Valerian groaned and shifted his weight slightly, but made no move to withdraw from her. He was still hard, and she was exulted to sense a new tension rising quietly and steadily within him. This time she would be in control.

  She taunted him with an almost imperceptible motion of her hips, and he threw back his head, the muscles of his neck corded with the effort of holding back.

  “You will pay for that impertinence,” he vowed.

  Daisy drew him deeper, and his majestic body flexed once, twice upon hers. He moaned, as if in pain, and spilled himself into her a second time.

  “You will pay,” he repeated, but he was kissing her as he spoke, tasting her eyelids, searching out her mouth with his own.

  Daisy toppled back into sleep, so sated was she; her muscles were limp, and it seemed her very bones had melted. When she awakened, she was lying in Valerian’s bed in the master suite, and he was standing at its foot, clad in his magician’s garb and just donning his cape. He looked gaunt somehow, and she wondered if it was her lovemaking that had sapped his strength, or some experience he’d had the night before.

  “Why didn’t you dress by magic?” she asked, putting off the moment when she would have to tell him about Krispin.

  His smile was slight, distracted. “I sometimes enjoy the mechanics of simple tasks.”

  She sighed. Now or never, she thought.

  “I need to tell you something before you go,” Daisy said bluntly, sitting up and drawing the linen bedsheets up to cover her breasts.

  Valerian crossed to the bed and uncovered them again, and a shock of fresh desire sizzled through Daisy’s system as he looked at her with an expression of wry appreciation. “Your body is far too lovely to hide,” he said. “Besides, it’s a little late for modesty, don’t you think?”

  Daisy clung to her resolve, but decided to start small. She would save the news about Krispin for last.

  “Kristina was here, while you were sleeping today. She gave me this.” She held out the antique pendant for him to see.

  “I noticed that, as it happens,” Valerian said.

  Daisy blushed. He’d been up close and personal—of course he’d noticed. “She’s worried about you. Kristina, I mean. So is her mother.”

  He was straightening his elegant string tie. “She has always been a perceptive child,” he replied evenly. “Likewise, Maeve.”

  Daisy dropped the bomb, blurting out the words in a rush. “There’s something else. Krispin’s been tampering with your television set. He played a few stirring scenes from what I assume was one of my past lives and said I belonged to him then and I would again.”

  Valerian’s hands fell to his sides, and he stood utterly still. His expression was cold, and his eyes seemed to pierce Daisy’s very soul. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked evenly, and with ominous softness.

  “We were busy,” she reminded him, refusing to be cowed.

  ‘Tell me what you saw.”

  “Myself, running away from what was probably the London Fire—1666, I think it was. My name was Maddie Goodtree, and I didn’t look anything like I do now.”

  Valerian frowned ever so slightly. “Maddie Goodtree?’

  It was as Daisy had feared; Valerian had not known about that particular lifetime. He might even hate her when he learned the truth, and believe she’d betrayed him by loving Krispin.

  “I don’t know much about her,” Daisy said bravely, “except that she was involved with your brother.”

  There followed a towering silence, much more intimidating to Daisy than any that had gone before it. “She was what?”

  Daisy gulped. “In love with Krispin,” she said miserably.

  He turned away, but his rage was like a swell of heat, filling the room, pushing at the walls and the ceiling, glimmering and undulating all around him, mirage-like.

  “There was a message on my machine when I called home, too,” Daisy went on, wanting to finish, to get it all out in the open so they could go on from there. “He—Krispin—said he would kill again if I didn’t come to hi
m.” A decision she had not consciously made rose to the surface of her thoughts. “I can’t let that happen, Valerian—I can’t let someone else die when it’s me he wants.”

  Valerian turned to her again, and his face, though as beautiful as ever, was terrible to see. “You will not go to him, ” he decreed in a furious undertone.

  “It’s my job,” Daisy insisted, equally angry. “And blink me up some clothes, will you please? I’m tired of running around naked, like some sultan’s personal plaything.”

  A black formal materialized on her body, fitted, with a pleated flair at the bottom and diamond clasps holding the bodice together.

  “Very funny,” Daisy said. “I want jeans, damn it, and a T-shirt.”

  Valerian complied, but grudgingly. The gown disappeared, replaced by Levi’s that were two sizes too big and a lime green T-shirt with the name of a fertilizer company emblazoned across the front.

  She folded her arms. “You can do better.”

  Scowling, he made the jeans fit and changed the shirt to a plain red one, tucked in at the waist.

  “Thank you,” Daisy said wearily, rising at last from the bed and looking down at her magic clothes. “I could have used your help when I was in high school. It took me forever to dress, and I was late for everything.” Valerian was seething, and he glared down at Daisy as she moved close to him and laid her hands lightly on his chest.

  “Listen to reason,” she pleaded quietly. “I’m a cop. Before I made detective and was assigned to the Homicide Division, I worked Bunko and Vice, and I was the bait in every kind of sting. I was damn good at what I did, too.”

  Valerian’s frown deepened, and Daisy felt his fury and his fear coursing beneath her hands. “Do you honestly think you—or any other mortal—could prevail against a monster such as my brother surely is?”

  “Not by myself,” Daisy conceded. “I was counting on you to help.”

  Reluctantly, with a sound like a sigh, but deeper, and seeming to rise from his soul instead of his lungs, he put his arms around her. “I shall deal with Krispin alone, Daisy, and in my own way. With no interference from you. It is hard enough to concentrate now, when you are in such danger. I could not bear to take the risk you are suggesting.”