Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles)

by Miller, Linda Lael

  “Your mate?” I shaped the words softly, insolently, on my tongue. “You were never anything more than an interloper, Krispin. She is mine—now and forever, time without end, amen and amen.”

  He raised one finely shaped eyebrow, and his mocking expression made me want to close my hands around his polished marble throat and choke him. “Is she?” Krispin paused to feign a luxurious sigh. “Ah, yes—our lady of many names. How lovely she is. You call her Daisy now, but you have known her as Brenna, as Elisabeth—poor whoring little wretch—and as sweet Jenny. Unfortunate how quickly she took sick and died, wasn’t it?” Another sigh, still theatrical, if almost inaudible. “And there were other lifetimes, of course—she was the fetching woman who ran the boardinghouse in that little western town, wasn’t she?”

  Harmony Beaucheau. I closed my eyes against the memory of that particular incarnation—for it remained acutely painful, even after more than a century—and opened them again only out of an instinct for self- preservation. “What is the point of this?” I whispered. “Are you leading up to telling me that Daisy cared for you once, when her name was Maddie Goodtree and the two of you made love in a gravedigger’s cottage, with the Great Fire of London licking at your—heels?”

  “So she told you,” Krispin said with a self-satisfied and somewhat distant little smile. “I hoped she would, once I’d revived the memory for her.”

  I felt sick, just to think of Krispin’s hands on Daisy’s flesh, in this lifetime or any other, but I did not allow the aversion to show. I had no way of reckoning the extent of my brother’s powers, but I sensed that they were formidable, and quite different from my own. Whether his abilities were greater or lesser than mine, I could not guess, but they were unquestionably heightened by my ignorance of their nature.

  “You could not have her, except by trickery,” I said. “So you murdered her, over and over again.”

  The cherubic mouth twitched with barely contained amusement. “Not the first time, when she was Brenna,” he disclaimed blithely. “That happened quite on its own. But I admit to helping justice along a little, now and again, in this or that lifetime. Elisabeth’s fever, for example. It’s easy, you know, to plant the germ of an illness in mortal flesh. They’re so fragile. So vulnerable to any passing malady.”

  I flung myself upon my brother, knowing all the while it was what he wanted, what he’d goaded me to do, but unable to restrain the poisonous fury swelling within me. I made a sound that was at once a guttural growl and a shriek as I throttled him; I was as frenzied as a wolf in a trap, and as dangerous.

  Krispin screamed, but it was a cry of hideous pleasure, even of ecstasy, like some hell-beast in climax. Even the hurt I caused him gave him joy, however heinous; he had surely dreamed of this moment, planned and schemed for it, for nearly the whole of his existence.

  He melted in my hands like vapor, and vanished, but we had renewed our brotherly bond, malevolent as it was, and I sensed his destination and pursued him, leaving a disconsolate Challes behind to weep into his palms.

  Krispin took me to a high plain, somewhere on the coast of Cornwall, and the sea was within our hearing if not our sight. There were standing stones, garish in the frigid, silvery glow, casting their lengthy shadows toward the moon, instead of away, in an eerie juxtaposition of nature.

  His laughter was the keening of a mad creature, and he ran between the stones, his cape trailing absurdly behind him, as if he expected to take wing and fly. I would not have been surprised if he had.

  I waited until he had expended some of his demented energy, watching him spin and cavort, now perched crowlike atop the highest of the ancient stones, now pirouetting in the center of the circle, arms outstretched, head tilted back, beautiful face bathed in moonlight.

  The pagan revels continued for some time. Then, at long last, Krispin was still, smiling and beckoning for me to join him inside the stones.

  I did not hesitate, though I was certain a trap was about to spring. I would have followed him into the very heart of hell, anywhere, because as long as I was with him, watching him, Daisy would be safe. When the time was right, when I had discovered my brother’s greatest vulnerability, I meant to destroy him.

  “There were countless sacrifices on this spot,” he told me when I stood beside him. “So much passion, so much terror—the place reverberates with it even after all this time. Can’t you feel it?”

  I kept my repugnance to myself. Temporarily. “I have terror and passion enough of my own,” I said. “I do not require that of others.”

  Krispin smiled at me and seemed, for a moment, almost like his old self. That facet of the experience stood out in sharp relief, wholly separate and more frightening somehow than anything that had gone before. “You were always damnably self-reliant, a law unto yourself—Valerian, the archangel made flesh, the saint with fangs.”

  I ignored the jibe. I would not allow him to glory in my attack again until I was ready to drive a pointed stick through his crumbling, rotted little heart. He could take all the perverted pleasure he wished in that. “You want my life,” I said quietly, “and I will give it to you.”

  He stared at me, plainly baffled, and I was relieved to know he could not read my mind the way some fiends could. “On what condition?” he asked, suspicious.

  “That we face our end together,” I said in all sincerity. It was, I saw, the only way to put a finish to the curse that had pursued Daisy and me for so long. If I perished, and Krispin with me, the cycle would be broken at long last. Never again would I find Daisy, fall in love with her, hold her in my arms as she gave up the ghost yet another time. She would be left to live out this life, and any others that lay ahead, in relative peace.

  Krispin studied me in silence for a long time. I could feel dawn hovering beyond the hills, ready to spill over the horizon and consume us. I wanted that death, although I knew it would be agonizing, and only a prelude to the suffering waiting beyond the veil.

  “Suppose there is no judgment and no hell,” Krispin reflected. “Would you welcome death? Would you yearn to rest, at long last, in the dark arms of oblivion?”

  I felt the sting of impending morning on my cool flesh and wondered if I would die bravely, or in a screaming, writhing frenzy of anguish. I had never seen a vampire burned to cinders by the sun, but I had witnessed other demises—all of them ghastly.

  I shivered.

  “Oblivion would certainly be preferable to eternal suffering in the flames of Hades,” I confessed, “but I have no particular wish to rest forever, either.”

  “You care for her so much, the lovely Daisy, that you would submit yourself to any fate?” Krispin paused to smile. Then, before I could offer a reply, he went on. “How noble you are. Imagine it—Valerian Lazarus, the bootmaker’s whelp, willing to sacrifice his glorious self to save a woman. Why, it’s almost Arthurian!”

  I hadn’t been callow enough to hope that Krispin would fail to guess why I wanted him to die with me. An idiot could have figured it out. Nor had I taken any great risk in letting him see how very great my love for Daisy truly was—he had known all along. He had tormented me with it, without my ever guessing, for hundreds of years.

  I glanced uneasily toward the eastern horizon. It was still dark, and yet there was enough light hidden in the gloom to sear my sensitive eyes. For the first time, it occurred to me that one of the differences between Krispin’s powers and mine could be the ability to withstand sunlight. “You have made your point,” I said irascibly. “I know that you hate me, that you hold me in utter contempt. And I grow weary of your self-pity. Great Scot, to grieve and wail all these centuries over the slights of a vain, selfish, and utterly ignorant woman like Seraphina—to cry over spilt mother’s milk—it’s madness, Krispin. It’s obscene!”

  The light was coming closer, getting stronger, burning. Burning.

  Krispin glared at me and gave that harrowing animal shriek of rage again, but then he turned to smoke, like a movie vampire, and seeped into t
he ground, there in the center of the circle, which yawned around us like the jaws of some great beast.

  I did the same, and found myself, along with my brother, in a pit of tangled bones covered by the hard, windswept earth. These, no doubt, were the remains of those poor scapegoats who had been sacrificed to ancient, greedy gods. I felt their emotions, especially their fear, and heard the silent, protesting cacophony of their voices.

  Krispin burrowed in among them, curled into the same position I’d seen him take as a small child, and, with a beatific smile curving his lips, tumbled abruptly into the vampire sleep. I would have killed him then, despite multitudinous compunctions, using one of the martyr’s bones for a stake and another for a mallet, but my own nature betrayed me—I succumbed to the dark waters swamping my mind and slipped down and down, into the valley of the shadow.

  CHAPTER 16

  Jenny Wade

  London, 1722

  In her dreams Jenny could see as clearly as she had before her illness, and the images flashing through her mind were alive with clamor and bright, vibrant colors, pulsing and infused with light.

  Everything moved at impossible speeds, and she was surrounded by purposeful people clad in odd, abbreviated clothing. They were strangers, and yet, conversely, she felt she knew and understood them, in a general way at least.

  When she awakened, with a violent jerk, the scenes and the actors who had played them out vanished into the part of her brain where unremembered things were hidden. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, and she sank back against her pillows, willing herself to be calm. When she had achieved that, she focused her sharpened senses and discerned, by the coolness of the air against the flesh on her arms and by the deep, settled stillness of the house, that it was not yet morning.

  She ached with a sudden, terrible loneliness, worse than anything she’d felt before, and was too distraught even to weep. She was young, she was blind, and she would never have a home of her own, or a loving husband to laugh with, or children to tug at her skirts and plead for sweets and stories.

  Jenny waited patiently for the familiar sounds that meant die others were awake. Then she rose and washed, and was seated at her vanity table, brushing and plaiting her waist-length hair, when there came a rapid knock at her bedroom door. Before she could call out in answer, Adela swept in, her scent and the essence of her nature going before her like unseen heralds.

  “Good morning, Jenny,” she said without warmth. Jenny felt a stirring of pity for her sister-in-law, for there was no poetry in her, no sunshine or humor. “Good morning,” she replied and went on weaving her hair into a single thick braid.

  Adela came to stand just behind her. “Martin tells me you suffered an episode yesterday.”

  A small muscle, hidden somewhere deep in Jenny’s heart, seized with the renewed fear of being sent away to some awful place, where madwomen would be her only companions. “It was nothing,” she said, hoping she sounded sane, as well as cheerful. “I was just thinking of other things, that’s all.”

  Her sister-in-law was rigidly silent.

  Jenny imagined that she could see her reflection in the vanity mirror, but the only image she could recall was that of a scrawny, red-haired girl with green eyes dominating a freckled face. She did not know how she looked now, though she often plagued Peach to describe her, and begged to know if she was beautiful.

  Dear, loyal Peach always answered that she was lovely enough to capture and break the heart of any gentleman alive.

  “What have I done, Adela?” Jenny asked in a soft voice, “to make you despise me so much? This is a large house—a palace by anyone’s standards, and yet I invariably feel as though I’m in the way.”

  Adela did not answer—perhaps she did not know what to say, or refrained out of kindness—and left the room.

  Jenny finished dressing, descended the broad staircase, and made her way into the parlor. There she sat down at the harpsichord and made music while a gentle rain pattered upon the windowpanes, making itself part of the song.

  There were callers after luncheon, and Martin came home early from his offices and sat in the parlor with Jenny, reading aloud from a new French novel. It was during that pleasant interlude that the simple truth came to her—Adela was jealous of Martin’s affection for his young sister, and no doubt wished for more attention from him.

  A great sorrow filled Jenny, and when Martin had finished reading, she ventured a suggestion. “Perhaps you should take Adela to the seaside. It would be romantic, just the two of you.”

  “And what would become of you?”

  Jenny was mildly incensed. “I have Peach to look after me, Martin,” she said in a moderate tone. “And don’t say you must concentrate on your work, because I know it isn’t true. You could manage your business in your sleep—I’ve heard you complain of it before.”

  Martin chuckled, but there was an undercurrent of sadness in his mirth. “I must stop buying these damned sentimental novels,” he said. ‘They give you unseemly ideas.”

  “Adela needs you,” Jenny insisted gently. “You neglect her.”

  “Leave it alone, Jenny,” Martin said, and his tone was sharp enough to sting. He set the book aside with a telling thump, got out of his chair, and strode out of the room.

  Jenny had dinner alone that evening beside the fire, for Martin had gone off to his club, and Adela had taken to her bed with yet another headache. And still the rain fell, though it wasn’t singing now, as before. It was dreary, and Jenny’s loneliness was such that she wondered how she could bear a lifetime of such feelings.

  After her meal she returned to the harpsichord, closing the great doors behind her to muffle the sound, and sat down to play.

  It was that night, in the soft swirling center of her music, that Jenny heard the angel’s voice for the first time.

  “Jenny,” it said softly, almost reverently, from just behind her right shoulder. Whether born of heaven or of hell, the visitor was male. To a disturbing degree.

  Jenny was not afraid, but she did wonder if she was having another spell. She craved comfort and reassurance; mayhap her active imagination had conjured a being to meet that need. She knew, because her blindness had made her introspective, and she’d spent a great deal of time exploring the fascinating and mysterious comers, closets, and crevices of her own inner world, learning that the mind was capable of all sorts of trickery, pleasant and otherwise.

  She did not move from the little bench, or speak, but simply stopped playing and held out one hand.

  “I have found you,” said the visitor, and she heard weeping in his voice, as well as joy. Felt the air stir as he bent to kiss her lightly on top of the head.

  An exquisite passion swept through her, and she felt herself flush. “You’re not real,” she said. “You were born of my longing and my need.”

  His hands rested gently on her shoulders; his grasp was gentle, but not warm as Martin’s would have been, or Peach’s. His flesh felt as cool and smooth as a polished gem, even through the fabric of her gown, and she reasoned that heaven must of course be a temperate place, the logical opposite of hell.

  “No, precious,” he said. “I’m not an illusion.”

  “Are you an angel then?” Jenny managed to ask.

  His laugh was low and richly masculine, but contained none of the mockery or mild contempt she sometimes detected in Martin’s mirth. His lips brushed the side of her neck, and they were cool, too, and soft like the petals of some exotic flower. “Perish the thought,” he said. “But I am not a demon, either, so please do not fear me.” Jenny was convinced now that she must be having a waking dream—she could not hope for such tender attentions in reality, given her affliction—and the realization was a keen stab of sorrow, piercing the heart.

  “I can’t bear to think I’ve imagined you,” she said wretchedly.

  “I’m all too real, my Jenny. And I have loved you for longer than you can imagine.”

  Something leaped within her, something
primitive and treacherous and wildly improper. She wanted to believe, wanted desperately for this phantom lover to be genuine, formed of flesh and blood, loving her, needing her, despite her flaw. A name, she thought, would give him substance, so she asked for his in a quiet, hopeful tone.

  “Valerian,” he answered somewhat hoarsely, and he squeezed her shoulders with his long fingers, and once again Jenny felt a deep and unholy pleasure slamming through her veins and muscles. At last, after finding its

  way into every part of her, the sensation shaped itself into a fiery coil and spun, tightening with every turn, just beneath her stomach.

  “I’ve been so lonely,” Jenny confessed. It was all right, because she was surely dreaming, and because it wouldn’t have done to confide such a stark truth to Martin, or Adela, or Peach. They would have thought it untoward for an innocent young woman to desire an intimacy deeper than the brisk, blithe affection they themselves displayed for her.

  “As have I,” Valerian replied. In her mind she could picture him—he was tall, as stately and handsome as a prince from a storybook. She imagined his eyes to be blue, intensely so, and his hair to be the warm and rich color of chestnuts—and she was quite sure of these things, though she did not know how she could have discerned them.

  Jenny reached up and interlocked her fingers with his. “Will you stay with me?”

  He chuckled, though the sound was like a sob, too, and raised her from the seat before the harpsichord to kiss her ever so softly on the mouth. At this contact, an entirely new experience for Jenny, the wicked flame in her depths, only then dwindling, flared once more into a brilliant, consuming blaze.

  “I must go,” Valerian told her while she was still swaying in his arms, giddy from the kiss. “But I’ll return soon, lovely Jenny. I promise.”

  She put her arms around his neck, perhaps a little desperately. “Stay,” she pleaded, unashamed.

  He rested a fingertip on her still-tingling, slightly swollen lips. “It is almost morning, beloved—I cannot stay.”