“Damn!” Calder bellowed, bolting from his chair and startling Dimity, who jumped and then turned to look at him over one beautifully shaped shoulder. “No one, not even Maeve, will rob me of my personal liberties—I will not endure it!”
“It seems to me,” Dimity observed diplomatically, smoothing her brown silk skirts, “that you haven’t much choice in the matter, at least for the moment.”
Calder went to the warped, filthy mantel, which had once shimmered and smelled pleasantly of the oil Prudence used to polish it, and gripped it with both hands. His head was lowered, and his pride, like the exquisitely expensive mirror that had once hung over that fireplace, was in shards at his feet.
“You’re right,” he said hoarsely after a long pause. “I have no choice—now. But tomorrow night, or the next one, or the one after that, I will be free. And love Maeve though I do, with every grain and fiber, with everything that makes me who I am, I will not sacrifice my freedom of choice to her whims.” Calder turned, knowing his bleak decision lay naked in his eyes, unable to hide the torment he felt. “I’m going to leave her, Dimity, if we survive this present trouble. I’m going to venture out on my own and learn the things I need to know, and work out just what sort of a vampire I mean to be.”
Dimity’s lovely face reflected both misery and understanding. “It will kill Maeve to lose you,” she said softly. “She does love you, you know. Her passion is a part of her, as much so as her powers, even her soul.”
“I feel exactly the same way about her,” Calder replied grimly, “but that isn’t enough. I need my right of choice, and Maeve’s trust, as well, and she needs those same things from me.” He paused, shoving a hand through his rumpled hair. “I don’t think either of us is capable of giving them—not willing.”
Slowly, gracefully. Dimity rose from the harpsichord bench and came toward him. “Maeve would give you anything,” she whispered. “Anything.”
“Except the holy right of deciding my own fate for myself,” Calder replied. He escorted Dimity to a round table where his father and William had once played games of chess, the winning of which had been inordinately important to both of them, and drew back a chair for her.
When she was seated, Calder sat across from her and folded his hands on the rain-warped, dirt-covered tabletop.
“Since we apparently have considerable time at our disposal,” he said, “tell me about yourself. How were you made, and when? Were you changed against your will, or did you give your consent?”
Dimity laughed good-naturedly. “I see you haven’t studied vampire etiquette yet,” she said. “It is very rude to ask a blood-drinker about her making—the topic is a sore spot with so many of us.”
Calder was undaunted. He had never worried much about protocol in his human life, and he didn’t plan on doing so as an immortal. “Is it a sore spot with you?”
Dimity shook her head, as if amazed and a little scandalized by the bluntness of the question, but there was a mischievous light in her blue eyes. “No, actually—it isn’t. I became a vampire by my own choosing, in the late fourteenth century…”
It was silly, Lisette decided, as she watched Nikos parading back and forth in front of her, showing off his expensive new velvet coat and doeskin breeches, to deny herself the pleasure of creating a prince consort for even one more night.
She thought of the process of changing a mortal into a blood-drinker and felt a rush of dark desire, almost as compelling as the passion Nikos could so easily stir in her. With him, she would bring the full extent of her powers to bear, and the experience would be exquisite for both of them—no more of those clammy corpses, quickly made and left to their own devices.
Lisette shuddered and then put the vile creatures out of her mind.
Oh, yes, she would take her time with Nikos. She would give him the powers and the prowess of a pagan god and teach the little scoundrel all—make that some—of the glorious skills and tricks she’d acquired throughout century upon century of adventuring.
She rose a little unsteadily, for she’d been feeling a strange sensation since the Brotherhood had perished, as if she were being pulled down and down into some black morass of the spirit.
“Come, darling,” she said, holding out one alabaster-white hand. “It is time to give you the gift.”
Nikos arched an eyebrow, but he understood the word gift only too well and was plainly intrigued by it. He came to her, in his lovely tight breeches and his fitted coat, and it was all Lisette could do not to gobble the delicious creature up the way some mortal women did chocolate.
She told herself there would be time for that later—all of eternity, in fact—and raised her hands to his sturdy shoulders.
“Do you trust me?” she asked softly.
He laughed, a delightful scamp of a lad, so hard and warm and beautiful, and for the briefest moment Lisette doubted her own plans.
“Of course I do not trust you,” Nikos replied, grinning, so engaging and sweet that Lisette’s heart threatened to crumble within her. “You are like me—you think only of your own wishes, your own pleasures. When you find another lover that you like better, you will abandon me.”
Lisette smoothed his hair and spoke softly, hypnotically. “Oh, but that is not true, Nikos,” she said. “I will never leave you, and you will never leave me. Not ever.”
He looked puzzled; his grin faltered a little, and a shadow of bewilderment moved in his Aidan-blue eyes. “How is this possible?” he asked. “We are flesh and blood. We must grow old, we must die.”
She took enormous delight in contradicting him, in heightening that delectable confusion in his eyes. She shook her head and murmured, “We can live forever.”
He seemed troubled now and moved to step back from her, but she took his shoulders in a grip calculated to be inescapable but also without pain, and would not let him go.
“What madness is this?” he whispered, and the flush of emotion under his warm, pliant skin made Lisette half wild with hunger and blood-lust. “No one lives forever!”
She calmed herself, made soothing, murmuring sounds, as a mortal mother might do for a child, pushed Nikos into a chair, and perched lightly on his lap. “Vampires do,” she said, inwardly tensed for his reaction.
Instead of flying into a temper, Nikos laughed. He was scoffing at her, and that was worse, in some ways, than a storm of petulance would have been. “Vampires!” he mocked.
Lisette showed her fangs, both delighted in his recoil and despaired because of it.
He tried to throw her off then and escape her, but Lisette, by her own reckoning at least, had indulged him long enough. She took his head in her hands, as she had done so often before, but this time she was not gentle. No, this time a slight, quick motion of her wrists would have broken his neck.
“Do not resist me,” she said in a crooning voice. “I will destroy you if you do.”
The sound of Nikos’s heartbeat seemed to fill the whole room with a pounding, steady thumpety-thump, thumpety-thump, and his beautiful eyes were wide with horror and, even then, disbelief.
The rushing of his blood, audible now, drove Lisette into madness. Her control was gone, and she bared Nikos’s delicate throat and sunk her fangs into the vein, drawing on him greedily, nearly swooning with the ecstasy of their intimate communion.
Nikos cried out when she took him, stiffened slightly, then went utterly limp beneath her.
Lisette was moaning inwardly as his blood flooded her own empty veins, and she began to rock against Nikos, the pleasure so savage she almost couldn’t bear it. She nearly forgot that if Nikos died in her arms, she would not be able to complete the transformation. Should that happen, he would be lost to her forever.
It was actually painful to draw back from that continuous, buckling euphoria. She expected Nikos to be waxen—she’d so nearly drained him—and certainly unconscious. Instead he was gazing at her with eyes too old and too wise for the face of a lad of some twenty years…
At
that moment the suffering began. It was as though there were small, vicious fish inside her, tearing at her vampire flesh, at the atrophied organs that should not have been sensitive to pain.
Lisette shrieked in rage at Nikos’s betrayal as well as in the agony of being poisoned; this was no mortal lad, no innocent lover and playmate, but a warlock!
Even as she screamed and clutched at her middle, she saw the knowledge of his own identity returning to him, the awareness. That was how he had fooled her, her pretty Nikos—he himself had not known who or what he was!
Now his foul blood was burning Lisette’s insides like acid; she fell to her knees, still shrieking like a wild jungle cat caught in a trap, and, clutching the rungs of a ladder-back chair, pulled herself upright again. Through a red fog of misery and the most primitive fury, she saw Manuel, her mortal carriage driver, loom uncertainly in the doorway for a moment.
She reached out to him, desperate; he crossed himself and fled.
Nikos, for his part, had risen to his feet, and he was backing away from her, not fearful, but repulsed. There was even a hint of mockery in his eyes, the blackguard. If it was the last thing she ever did, she would see him suffer for that effrontery, as well as for his efforts to murder her.
Lisette struggled to remain conscious; the sun would rise soon, and in her weakened state she knew she could not survive its rays. Then, like a distant bell pealing somewhere far off in the Spanish countryside, she heard Maeve Tremayne’s voice.
Come to me. Let us finish this.
Maeve, the enemy. The usurper. This was her doing, this betrayal, this physical and spiritual torment. A surge of hatred raced through Lisette’s system, strengthening her.
She saw Nikos, laughing at her now, taunting her, but she could not hear his voice. No, all she heard was Maeve calling to her, calling and calling.
She could not tolerate the humiliation of looking upon her betrayer another moment, and she wanted Maeve Tremayne to suffer. Oh, how she wanted that traitor, that Judas, to suffer!
Gathering all her strength, which was greater than it might have been because of her rage, Lisette closed her eyes and willed herself to Maeve’s presence.
Lisette took shape on the low rise behind the circle of stones, framed by the light of the moon, and Maeve readied herself for the battle of a lifetime. Unlike Valerian and Dathan and the others, she did not believe that the ancient one was already defeated.
“She is magnificent,” Valerian whispered, clearly awed, as they all watched Lisette raise her arms gracefully against the dark sky, a shimmering angel of hell, to summon her multitude of followers.
They began appearing, those dreadful walking corpses, a score here, a hundred there, bumbling and stupid and deadly in their unheeding obedience.
Dathan, who had been prepared for this confrontation, called to his own warriors, and they came out of the thin shadows, silent and ominous, anonymous in their hooded cloaks.
The vampires, Maeve noted with nervous irritation, were seriously underrepresented. It would serve them all right, she reflected, Benecia and Canaan and the other cowardly ones, if she left them to Nemesis without even trying to defend them.
Maeve looked up into Valerian’s eyes, seeing sorrow there, and fear, and then into Dathan’s. He smiled at her and nodded his encouragement.
“Maeve Tremayne!” Lisette called in her hollow, unholy voice. She loomed on the hillside like a living flame, her pain palpable in the cool night air.
Taking up her skirts, Maeve answered the summons, and the two of them stood facing each other on the line of the hill.
“Why have you done this to me?” Lisette rasped, more dangerous in her suffering, rather than less. Her eyes were enormous in her gaunt face, and sunken. “Why? To save a lot of ungrateful blood-drinkers from the just vengeance of heaven?”
Maeve felt a strange urge to reach out to the other vampire, even though it would be like trying to touch a she-wolf caught in a trap, and wisely resisted it. “I have not done this to you, Lisette,” she said reasonably. “It is by your own recklessness, your own treachery, that you’ve come to this end.”
Lisette swayed, but at the same time Maeve could feel power emanating from the creature, pulsing and throbbing like another entity, an ominous reflex that might function even after the wounded vampire had died.
She gave a snarling shriek and stumbled toward Maeve, who stood her ground even though she was mortally afraid.
Then she heard Valerian, just a few feet behind her, his voice as smooth and even as velvet. “You are the rightful queen, Maeve,” he reminded her.
Calder’s voice joined Valerian’s and, although Maeve dared not turn to look, she knew that he, too, had come to her somehow, and she blessed him for it, and drew strength from his presence.
“I love you,” he said gruffly, and it seemed to Maeve that there was a certain sorrow in the tone and texture of those precious words. “Be strong, beautiful Maeve.”
Dimity spoke next. “We are depending on you,” she said softly but firmly. “The weak and the strong, the good and the evil, all of us.”
Lisette screamed again and started past Maeve, delirious now, like a wild animal in the last stages of hydrophobia. Her thoughts were clear; before she collapsed, she would kill as many of the rebels as possible.
Maeve stepped in front of her then, and the mental struggle that had been brewing for centuries finally began.
There was a great, ferocious sweep of invisible fire, encompassing Maeve, smothering her with its heat, singeing her marblelike flesh. She endured, and called upon all the things she’d learned from the scrolls of the Brotherhood, and the sky itself thundered with the power of her command.
Lisette dropped to her knees, then struggled back to her feet again. At her back Maeve heard the chilling sounds of combat as the warlocks and the handful of courageous vampires engaged the sharklike beasts formed and shaped from madness itself.
Maeve did not wait for Lisette to attack again, but struck ruthlessly herself, crushing the other blood-drinker to the soft, fragrant ground, bringing the weight of all the stones in the circle to bear upon that one ill-fated creature.
Lisette wept—it was a frantic, mindless sound—and, rolling onto her back, raised herself up onto her elbows.
Again Maeve was moved toward foolish mercy, but again she resisted. Never taking her eyes from Lisette, holding the wounded one to the ground with the power of her mind, Maeve raised a hand in the agreed signal, and Valerian came forward.
He gave Maeve the stake and mallet they’d brought for this very purpose.
“You mustn’t lose your courage now,” he said, reading her mind again, seeing the pity she felt for Lisette. “And you must not turn from this task.”
Maeve hesitated for a moment, then nodded and accepted the instruments of death. She took a step toward Lisette, who made a whimpering sound and tried to crawl away.
“Do not be deceived,” Valerian warned, staying close. “She is a beast, fit only for the bowels of hell. If your positions were reversed, she would not hesitate to finish you!”
It was all true, Maeve knew that, but knowing did not make the duty before her any less distasteful. She trembled a little as she advanced on Lisette, thinking of Calder, of Valerian, of Aidan and his lovely mortal, Neely—all their fates were in her hands, and she must not falter.
Maeve dropped to one knee in the dew-laced grass, placed the point of the spike directly over Lisette’s heart, and raised the mallet. After only a moment’s hesitation she struck the first blow.
The stake pierced Lisette’s papery flesh, and she shrieked in pain and in fury, and Maeve trembled, but she raised the mallet again. And again.
Lisette screeched and struggled, and Maeve watched in horror as the dying queen’s beautiful face went gaunt, then turned to dust and crumbled. Finally only a skull remained, but with Lisette’s blue eyes peering out of the charred bone, glowing with unholy fire.
The screams echoed through the
night long after the staring eyes had turned to cinders and dissolved.
Maeve knew triumph, but she was shaken and sick as well. She knelt in the grass, still clasping the mallet, chilled to the center of her soul.
After some time had passed, Calder gripped her shoulders from behind—she would have known his touch anywhere, for it always reverberated through her like the toll of a great bell—and drew her to her feet and away.
Maeve watched, spellbound and horrified, until Lisette, half corpse and half skeleton, had disintegrated into a pile of ashes, a ludicrous parody of the human shape. The stake protruded from between those discolored ribs, and the mallet fell, forgotten, from Maeve’s fingers.
A shout of victory made her turn at last and look first into Calder’s solemn eyes, then at the battlefield beyond. When Lisette had ignited herself, in the same way the members of the Brotherhood had done in their death chamber far beneath the ground, she had also destroyed her followers.
The grassy clearing was covered with grayish-white forms, and as she watched, the wind came and spread them over the grass, and only the warlocks were left—the warlocks, and the few vampires who had been willing to stand behind Maeve in her time of greatest need.
“The dawn comes!” one vampire cried.
Calder and Valerian collected Maeve between them, sheltering her with their larger bodies, and she felt herself dissolve into particles. Moments later she was in a dark place, as cool and welcoming as a grave. When her dazed eyes adjusted, she realized they had brought her to a chamber beneath the circle of stones itself.
At one end of the small cellar was an altar, probably druid, so old that it was crumbling. Valerian stood before it and executed a truly regal bow.
“My queen,” he said.
Maeve was lying in Calder’s arms, and she was definitely grateful for that. “Get up,” she snapped. “I am nothing of the sort!”
Valerian laughed and spread the fingers of one graceful hand over his chest. “Anything you say, Your Majesty,” he replied.
Maeve closed her eyes, inexpressibly weary, and let her head rest against Calder’s shoulder. “Leave us,” she commanded, “and find a lair of your own.”
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