Had he still had need of his lungs, or of air, Calder would have drawn a deep breath at that moment. As it was, he simply watched Maeve, struck dumb by her terrifying beauty, and by the depth of his love for her.
She kept her distance, watching him with those magical eyes, too far away to touch him, and yet he began to feel the lightest of caresses. It seemed to him that fingertips brushed the sensitive place beneath one of his ears, made circles around his nipples, whisked ever so slightly across his mouth.
He moaned and moved to reach for Maeve, but she kept herself just out of reach. In the next instant he began to feel her touch in more intimate places, across his belly, the small of his back, along the insides of his thighs.
Calder gasped with pleasure, but Maeve silenced him with a soft “Shhh” and proceeded to tease the length of his staff. He was completely in her power then, as effectively restrained by his own desire as he might have been by iron manacles.
His clothes were not physically removed—they seemed to melt away like thin ice under a spring sun—and not only was Calder’s body bared to Maeve’s attentions, but his soul as well.
He whispered an exclamation, a plea, and then felt her touching him everywhere, inside and out, even though physically she was still well beyond his reach. Her mouth drew at his nipples, not one, but both, warm and wet and greedy. At the same time, impossible though it was, her tongue traveled the length of his shaft and teased the tip until he cried out in a ragged, glorious, despairing voice.
Maeve showed Calder no quarter that magical night, as she initiated him into yet another vampire mystery. She was a gentle but relentless conqueror, having him thoroughly, again and again, until it all culminated in one cataclysmic, soul-rendering release.
He lay trembling on the cool, hard floor when she’d finished with him, depleted and yet more fantastically alive than ever before. When his emotions would allow him to speak, he whispered, “It’s a good thing you didn’t do that when I was mortal, love. I might have died of the pleasure.”
She laughed softly and came to lie with him, her own body naked and sleek and glowing in the moonlight pouring in through the tall windows. She took him into her arms and kissed the hollow at the base of his throat. “There are more terrible ways to die,” she observed, nestling close.
He stroked her breast, in the human way, and draped one of his legs across hers in a possessive gesture. “Why are you tarrying here with me, Maeve?” he asked, his tone gruff with his love for her, and the sudden knowledge that even eternity can be a fleeting thing. “Has the war been won already?”
Maeve raised herself onto one elbow, her hair a silken mantle in the moonlight, and gazed sadly into his face, as if to memorize every feature. “No, my darling,” she said, tracing his mouth with the tip of one index finger. “The war hasn’t been won.”
Calder asked no more questions, sensing that, for Maeve, this was a time out of time, a place of refuge and restoration. “I think I like the human way better,” he said.
She looked puzzled. “Of making war?”
He gave a raspy chuckle and held her close against him, his chin resting on the top of her head. “No, sweet—of making love.”
Maeve drew back to study his face. “Why?” she asked, sounding stricken. “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel pleasure, Calder Holbrook, because I know—”
Calder smoothed her tousled hair. “I felt more than pleasure,” he assured her gruffly, “more than ecstasy. But when mortals make love, they touch, they become one being, if only for a little while. I want that for us.”
Her bewildered expression gave way to one of mischievous delight. “Before I decide that one is better than the other,” she purred, “I would want you to take me the way you would take a human woman.”
He turned her gently onto her back, this beautiful, complex fiend, and gripped her wrists, pressing her hands gently to the floor, just above her head. Then he mounted her, and she parted her silken thighs slightly, her dark blue eyes glittering in the darkness.
“Observe,” he teased in a scholarly tone, and glided inside her with one long stroke. Within moments they were both wild with passion, rolling over the smooth wooden floor, first one taking command, and then the other.
The finish of their lovemaking was simultaneous, apocalyptic, a collision and a fusion.
Lisette sensed trouble, but she was intrigued rather than fearful and allowed herself to be drawn back to nineteenth-century Spain, back to her villa beside the sea.
She slept through the day, conserving her strength for battles she knew were coming, and had her carriage and horses brought around only moments after the sun had set. She would feed, of course, but for the time being she would make no more vampires, special or otherwise—to do so would be foolhardy, for her powers seemed to be waning. While she was sure the effects were temporary, she certainly didn’t want another confrontation with Maeve Tremayne at this juncture.
Just the thought of that treasonous creature filled Lisette with fury—she would destroy the rebellious vampires, all of them, and in ways so horrific that tales of them would be told for millennia—but for now she had more immediate concerns. She must coddle herself, feed well, and engage in her favorite diversion-seducing young, firm-muscled mortals, drawing badly needed strength from their unbridled passion.
The carriage rattled its way through sleepy streets and into the small seaside district, where a cluster of cantinas provided lively entertainment for visiting sailors and young noblemen alike.
One particular place drew Lisette, and while she was wary, it was not a new sensation. Over the centuries she had become expert in locating likely prospects—the scent and heat of their rich, sweet blood invariably drew her, even from great distances.
She signaled the driver to stop by tapping at the roof. Manuel was a slow-witted dolt who had—unknowingly, of course—provided Lisette with sustenance on several occasions, when it was inconvenient to hunt far afield. His saving grace was that he never asked questions, even though a great many strange things took place in the villa.
Lisette alighted without waiting for assistance and, clad in a flowing gown of blue silk and a white mantilla made of the finest lace, swept boldly into the cantina that had drawn her attention from the carriage.
Her entrance caused a gratifying hush among the celebrants—even the flamenco dancers stopped to stare—but Lisette did not offer so much as a nod of acknowledgment. Her gaze swept the crowded tavern, seeking the one who had summoned her back from her travels, however inadvertently.
Lisette uttered a small cry when she found him—
Great Scot, he was the very picture of Aidan Tremayne—studying her speculatively through narrowed blue eyes. He displaced the dancing girl from his lap, and the colorful ruffles of her petticoats swished as she flounced angrily away.
“Aidan,” Lisette whispered brokenly, even though she knew quite well that this mortal was not her lost love, but only someone who looked like him. Still, it was a very attractive quality, an unexpected and welcome bonus.
Silently she summoned him, and he rose from his chair, frowning with bewilderment, to obey. No one else in the place moved nor, it seemed to Lisette, whose senses were suddenly hyperalert, even breathed.
She laid one white hand to his face, felt the lovely rush of vibrant blood beneath his flesh, the warm firmness of the muscles. “Come with me,” she said. Then she took his hand, as though he were a child, and led him out of the cantina into the balmy, starlit splendor of a Spanish night.
“What is your name?” she asked when they were settled in the carriage and she’d smoothed the lines of bafflement from his wonderful face with a gentle hand. Even as she spoke she cupped his masculine parts through his trousers, to make the terms of the game clear, and to give him a foretaste of the ecstasies ahead.
His breathing was raspy, and a fine sheen of perspiration glimmered on his forehead and upper lip. Lisette was gratified to see and feel that he was aroused, eager for her.
&n
bsp; “Jorge,” he said in soft Spanish.
Lisette preferred English. “George,” she said, dragging her fingers along the soft, thin fabric of his breeches, from the top of his muscular thigh to his knee, then back again.
George moaned as Lisette opened the buttons of his breeches and reached inside to stroke his straining shaft with expert fingers, and she was both pleased and touched by his reaction. It had been much the same that other night, long before, when she’d found Aidan Tremayne walking alongside an English road. He, too, had been a lusty young man, welcoming Lisette’s skilled caresses, groaning softly as she attended him in various ways and showed him things he’d yet to experience with a mortal woman.
She maneuvered George so that he lay on his back, draped over her lap in delicious abandon, and then just sat admiring him for several moments, thinking what a splendid creation he was.
He writhed with pleasure, the lovely mortal, while Lisette taught him a few basics. Somewhat to her own surprise, she felt a deep tenderness toward the fragile creature, rather than the greedy lust that was usually at the root of such escapades.
Almost gently, Lisette brought the beautifully sculpted human to a satisfactory release. Then she simply stroked and admired him, from head to toe, for the work of art he was, as the carriage bounced and jostled over cobbled streets.
“She took the bait,” Dathan said, rubbing his hands together in triumph and delight, when Maeve and Valerian joined him in that splendidly spooky old manse under its blanket of ivy and various vines. “Even as we speak, Lisette is playing her vampire games with our own beguiling ‘George.’”
Maeve’s attention was wandering; she was preoccupied with Calder, who had chosen to remain in the twentieth century, where they had made such tempestuous love. He was a new vampire, she reminded herself fitfully; he needed time to explore his powers.
Valerian nudged her. “He’s fine, your fledgling lover,” he said as directly as he would have if Dathan hadn’t been there, listening intently. “Stop worrying.”
Maeve glared at him for a moment to let him know she didn’t appreciate his lack of sensitivity, then turned to Dathan. The warlock stood with arms folded, smirking a little.
“I want you to teach me that fire-starting trick now,” she said.
Dathan only pretended to be taken aback by the request, but his glance at Valerian a moment later was genuinely uncertain. The towering vampire glowered at him in quelling silence.
Finally Dathan relented. “All right,” he conceded grudgingly. “I will share the incantation. There is no guarantee whatsoever that the magic will work for vampires, however.”
“We’ll take our chances,” Maeve said firmly. She’d betrayed an important bit of blood-drinker lore in letting Dathan and the others know how vampires recognized other supernatural creatures, knowledge that could be used against her kind, and she wanted something in return.
Dathan repeated the chant—the words were from some ancient language, eerie, and more like music than speech.
Maeve attempted the incantation and the simultaneous shift of consciousness a number of times before she mastered it and set a pile of old newspapers burning on the grate.
Valerian, that inveterate show-off, succeeded on the first try.
*
CHAPTER 17
« ^ »
The soul-cries of sick children all over nineteenth-century London seemed to ride on the night breeze and rise from the pavement itself. Overcome, Calder sagged against the brick wall of an ink factory and pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the terrible din. Since he was not hearing the sound, but feeling it instead, the gesture was fruitless.
“Maeve,” Calder murmured like a man in delirium. “Valerian. Help me—show me what to do.”
There was no reply.
Calder pushed himself away from the wall, wavered, and then gathered all his inner forces. No doubt this was a private ordeal, a rite of passage.
The suffering of the children pressed upon him from all sides, and the helpless feeling that assailed him was not unfamiliar. He had known this same frantic need to be more than he was, to be in a hundred places at once, as a mortal, moving among the wounded Rebels and Union soldiers he had attended in America.
Focus. The word came soft and insistent, like a whisper at his shoulder, and Calder had heard it often while Valerian was introducing him to his vampire powers.
Calder started to take a deep breath, realized that his lungs were fossilized within him, having no need of air. He smiled grimly and, as passers-by began to look at him with wary curiosity, straightened his coat. The sorrow of the children was as loud as ever, but he was beginning to cope with it, just as he had coped with the screams and moans of his patients in field hospitals and government wards back home.
Focus.
Calder found a single thread in all that tangle of noisy misery and grasped it with his mind. Then he allowed it to lead him down an alleyway, past a graveyard and a park, into a tenement.
There the horrid music of death and pain was so pervasive that Calder could barely withstand it, but he pressed on, whispering Valerian’s word to himself like a litany. Focus, focus, focus…
The ribbon of consciousness led Calder to an impossibly small room in the back of an enormous, dark, and filthy building. One pitiful wad of tallow lit the stinking chamber, though of course Calder did not need its light to see the pale, spindly boy lying on a dirty pallet beneath the window. A crust of molded bread lay within the child’s reach, and he watched with large, haunted eyes as a rat nibbled delicately at the last of his food.
The boy looked straight at Calder, then without a word turned his attention back to the rat. The lad’s history flooded Calder’s mind, unbidden; he knew his name was Tommy, that he’d been on the streets alone since he was five years old, surviving by picking pockets and stealing food from trash bins and occasionally from street stalls and shops. His mother, who had loved her baby very much, illegitimate though he was, had been a simple country maid, drawn to London by dreams of going on the stage. Instead she’d had to sell her favors to buy bread and milk, and one night she’d been strangled to death by a client who hadn’t wanted to pay.
Calder closed his eyes for a moment, grappling with the horrid images. When he had, he kicked at the rodent; the belligerent creature hesitated, then scampered away.
“What do you want?” the lad asked listlessly in a thick Cockney accent, his eyes narrowed. “You’re not from ‘round here, now are you—not with those fine clothes of yours.”
“I’m a doctor,” Calder said thoughtfully. “What’s your name?” He asked the unnecessary question in an effort to put the lad at his ease.
“It’s Tommy,” the child said, trying to raise himself, and failing. “I ain’t got no money to pay a doctor, so you’d better just take yourself out of here.”
“I have no need of money,” Calder answered distractedly, touching the pulse point beneath Tommy’s ear. In that instant an image of the child’s anatomy exploded into Calder’s mind in rich and vibrant color, shining with clarity. Tommy was suffering from a respiratory infection; treating it would be fairly simple, by twentieth-century standards—the prescription was good food, rest, and antibiotics.
Unfortunately Calder’s bag, which contained the modern medical supplies Maeve had purloined for him, as well as a few Valerian had collected for sport, was back at the Philadelphia house.
Tommy raised himself onto his painfully thin elbows and with effort demanded, “Why are you lookin’ at me that way? You ain’t plannin’ to saw something off me, are you?”
Calder chuckled and then lifted the child gently into his arms. He could not carry Tommy through time, but space was another matter. He would take him back to Philadelphia and treat his illness. Calder knew a woman there, a widow robbed of three sons by that monstrous War, who would gladly look after the lad.
“No,” the doctor answered belatedly, though Tommy had already guessed that he was safe, for he
rested lightly in Calder’s arms without struggling. “I’m going to take you on a little journey. Hold on tightly now and don’t be frightened.”
Tommy’s eyes widened even farther. “My gawd, governor,” he whispered, “you ain’t an angel, are you? Tell me I ain’t dyin’!”
Calder smiled sadly. “I’m no angel,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and thought of that gloomy house in Philadelphia, where there had been so much pain and trouble and treachery.
The place was dark when Calder and Tommy arrived, moments later. The stair railing was draped in black bunting, and there were mourning wreaths everywhere.
Tommy was in a state of shock; nothing in his brief and difficult life had prepared him for traveling halfway around the world in the embrace of a vampire.
“Shhh!” Calder said when the child would have cried out in amazement. He didn’t want to encounter Prudence or any of the other servants; they would be terrified.
Obediently Tommy nestled close against Calder’s coat. He was weak, after all, and very sick, and he soon lost consciousness.
Calder treated him with an injection of penicillin, wrapped the wraithlike body in woolen blankets, and fixed his mind on the presence of Ellen Cartwright, the middle-aged widow he’d met in the hallway of the army hospital.
Mrs. Cartwright was downstairs in the parlor of her small but sturdy house when Calder arrived. He settled the sleeping Tommy in a warm bed, summoned the good-hearted widow upstairs with a thought, and stepped back into the shadows.
The lady appeared within moments. Her face filled with mingled joy and concern when she saw the fragile child resting in the bed of her youngest, Albie, who’d fallen at Vicksburg.
“My gracious!” Mrs. Cartwright cried, taking Tommy’s hand, blissfully unaware of the vampire looking on. “Where did you come from? Who are your people? My heavens, look at you—you’re nothing but skin and bones!”
Smiling, Calder allowed himself to fade. He would return, of course, to give Tommy doses of the medicine he’d need to recover. Mrs. Cartwright could be counted upon to do the rest.
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