The Black Rose Chronicles Read online

  She gulped down a mouthful of fried rice. “‘Don’t be afraid’?” she echoed, somewhat bitterly. “I’d be some sort of idiot if I weren’t.”

  He smiled at her reasoning, touched her hair briefly, then drew his hand back. In the next moment an expression of infinite sorrow filled his eyes.

  “I can’t bear it,” he whispered hoarsely, “knowing that you fear me.”

  Neely set aside the food, for even though her body still craved sustenance, her emotions had taken full control. She could not stop herself from touching Aidan, from laying her hands on either side of his face.

  For one long moment they simply gazed at each other, exchanging some silent, mystical form of comfort. Then Neely said, “How did I get here, Aidan? Did you hypnotize me or something like that?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing so ordinary, I’m afraid,” he told her. “I really am a vampire, Neely, just as I said. And you were in rather grave danger last night, I might add. It was foolish of you to set out on your own like that.”

  She looked away because she wanted him so much, wanted to become one with him right there on the hearth rug, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him stand and distance himself from her.

  “What kind of danger?” she asked, a little testily. She suspected Aidan had looked into her mind and seen her insatiable passion for him. His withdrawal struck her with the force of a blow.

  “Two blighters came round to kill you,” Aidan answered from the vicinity of his desk. He sounded distracted, like an ordinary man recounting the events of his day while flipping through the mail at the same time. “There’s no reason to worry, though—I dealt with them.”

  So that was why he had suddenly stopped and thrust himself away the night before, when he’d been about to make love to her in the normal way. He’d heard someone approaching the room.

  Neely allowed herself a slight shudder and took up her dinner again. “I’ll bet you came as something of a surprise—especially if you let them see your teeth.”

  Aidan chuckled. “Yes, I daresay they weren’t expecting to encounter me.”

  “Of course, it isn’t over,” Neely said with a sigh, reaching for one of the other cartons of Chinese food. “They’re not going to give up quite so easily.”

  “Neither am I,” Aidan remarked.

  Neely could no longer resist looking at him, and when she did, she saw that he was watching her with a mixture of bewilderment and delight.

  “What a hot-blooded little creature you are,” he reflected. Neely blushed. “What makes you say that?”

  He laughed. “A few moments ago you wanted to make love on the hearth.”

  She didn’t deny the thought; she couldn’t. “I’m not normally so—amorous,” she said.

  “I should hope not,” Aidan teased.

  Her eyes flew to his face. She felt fury first, but the tender mirth she saw in his gaze stole her momentum, and she could not be angry with him.

  “Have there been other men in your life, Neely?”

  She was at once insulted and pleased by the question. “You claim you can read minds. Why don’t you just look inside my head and find out for yourself?”

  “Because it would be an intrusion,” he said with a slight and very appealing shrug.

  Neely sighed. “Fair enough,” she replied. ‘The answer is, just one. He broke my heart, my first year in college.” She decided that turnabout was fair play. “What about you, Aidan? How many women have you taken to your bed?” His jaw tightened, and he looked exasperated. Then he murmured something that sounded like “This modern age!” A moment after that, however, he replied, “There were a number of tavern wenches in my youth—”

  “‘Tavern wenches’?” Neely interrupted, struck by this old-fashioned turn of phrase.

  Aidan was clearly growing impatient again. With quicksilver speed he changed the subject. “I will find you something more appropriate to wear,” he said in a cool and formal tone. “Maeve must have left a few things behind—” Maeve. Neely was troubled by the name, but she had enough to assimilate without pursuing yet another subject.

  By the time Aidan returned, carrying a bundle of clothing with him, Neely had finished eating and stashed the leftovers in the big, hitherto empty refrigerator humming away in the kitchen. She was perched on a window seat, knees drawn up, the tails of Aidan’s shirt tucked modestly beneath her, watching the snow fall.

  “There’s still some sweet and sour pork left….”

  He smiled. “Vampires don’t eat, Neely. Not in the same way humans do.”

  She rolled her eyes, accepting the folded cotton garment he held out to her. “Please,” she said. “You’re no ordinary guy, I’ll grant you that, but you can’t really be a vampire. Can you?”

  Aidan’s laugh seemed to burst from his throat, rich and sensual and warm.

  Neely slid out of the window seat and went to stand behind a high-back leather chair, her imagination running wild all of a sudden. “You don’t actually drink blood?” Again she saw that peculiar, fathomless look of mourning in his eyes. “Yes,” he said miserably. “I despise it—I hate everything about being a vampire—but without blood I would die, and I am not quite prepared to do that.”

  She felt conflicting desires—to take him into her arms and to run away, as far and as fast as she could. She squinted, a habit she’d acquired in college, when she was trying to work out something that both intrigued and puzzled her. “Show me your coffin,” she challenged.

  Aidan arched one dark eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?” he replied, looking and sounding genuinely bewildered.

  “If you’re a vampire,” Neely said, trying to make reason of the unreasonable, “you have to sleep in a coffin.”

  He sighed, and his expression shifted to exasperation. “I most certainly do not sleep in a casket,” he said, plainly insulted. “This is not the second feature of a drive-in movie we’re talking about here, it’s reality. I drink blood, I sleep during the day, and I can indeed be killed by having a stake thrust through my heart. And that, my darling, is the extent of my resemblance to a Hollywood vampire!”

  She frowned, trying to remember if she’d ever encountered Aidan before sunset and failing to recollect a single instance. “Calm down,” she said. She ran her tongue over her lips in a gesture of distraction rather than nervousness. “If you hate being a—a vampire so much, then why did you become one? Assuming, of course, that you really are a supernatural creature.”

  Aidan sagged into the chair behind his worktable with a great sigh, and that was when Neely noticed that he looked gaunt. There were faint smudges under his eyes, like bruises, and his skin was pale as marble. “You are impossible!” he muttered.

  Neely smiled. ‘True,” she claimed and promptly determined to show more appreciation. After all, no matter what Aidan was, or claimed to be, he had saved her from crooks who had almost certainly been ordered to assassinate her. And she still needed a place to hide.

  Thinking it was a good time to take her leave, at least temporarily, she slipped out of the study. In the downstairs bathroom she exchanged the borrowed shirt for the graceful blue caftan Aidan had found for her. When she returned, he was standing at one of the windows, staring out at the dark, snowy forest edging the yard.

  He turned to face her as she stood uncertainly in the arched doorway.

  “I must go out for a while,” he said solemnly. “Do not admit anyone to the house before I return.” While Neely stared at him, trying to assimilate the news that he meant to abandon her, he lifted a fragile necklace over his head and placed it around her neck. A delicately shaped golden rosebud dangled from the chain.

  “What is this?”

  Aidan chuckled grimly. “Not the equivalent of a silver bullet or a crucifix, if that’s what you’re thinking. My sister and the others know it belongs to me, and that you would not have it in your possession except by my favor.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, Neely thought. She should be glad Aidan was leav
ing, she supposed, but instead she had to fight an urge to drop to her knees and fling her arms around his legs to make him stay. “What—what if those men come after me again? The ones who tried to break into my motel room.”

  Aidan made a gentle move in her direction, then drew himself back with a sharp, alarming motion. “They won’t,” he said. Raising his hands over his head, he slipped into a corner of the room and dissolved into the shadows.

  Neely just stood there for a few seconds after he disappeared, staring, immobilized with shock. Then she broke her paralysis and hurtled across the room to the place where Aidan had been only a heartbeat before.

  There was no trace of him, nor was there a door or a window near enough to accommodate such a dramatic exit. Murmuring, Neely knelt and felt the wainscoting with both hands, searching for a secret panel.

  Nothing.

  With a shiver Neely got to her feet. She was going to have to ask Aidan to show her how to do that particular trick—it might come in handy if those hired thugs ever caught up to her again.

  Her glance strayed to the telephone on Aidan’s table. She wanted to call Ben and let him know that she was all right, but she didn’t dare. Dallas Hargrove’s drug-dealing associates might have her brother’s line tapped, and if they traced a call to this house, she was as good as dead.

  With a groan Neely raised moist palms to her temples and rubbed. It would have been a relief to tell someone all that was happening to her, but who’d believe it?

  Restless, Neely made a fire on the hearth and began examining Aidan’s vast collection of books. A set of thick volumes, bound in Moroccan leather, drew her attention, and she reached for the first one on the left.

  The thing was huge, and heavy, and Neely dropped into Aidan’s desk chair before lifting the cover.

  The paper was fine parchment, substantial and smooth, and the first few pages were blank. Neely flipped carefully through them until she came to one that bore an inscription in fading black ink. This being the Record and Journal of Aidan Tremayne, Vampyre. Begun March 5, 1793.

  Neely felt something tickle the inside of her spine. She stared at the writing for a long time, then moved on to the next page. Here she found a pen-and-ink drawing that practically stopped her heart; Aidan’s laughing, handsome face looked back at her from the parchment, while a beautiful young woman, his female counterpart, peered smiling over his broad shoulder. Both subjects wore clothing typical of the eighteenth century.

  For a while Neely just sat there, stunned.

  Surely the man in the drawing could not be Aidan—the sketches had obviously been done generations before—no, it had to be one of his ancestors. Still, the image reached out to her somehow, and the laughing eyes pleaded with her to believe.

  Just believe.

  Shaken, she turned her attention to the woman, one of the loveliest creatures she had ever seen. The resemblance between the two was so strong that Neely knew they were brother and sister, or perhaps cousins….

  Neely swayed and closed her eyes. Some primal instinct insisted that this laughing young man in the drawing was indeed Aidan Tremayne—her Aidan.

  Impossible.

  Believe.

  Neely took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then, with a shaking hand, she turned another page and began to decipher the neatly written but quaint script, with its antique spellings and randomly capitalized words. “I, Aidan Tremayne,” she translated, “set Down this Tale for the Sake of my own Sanity, and as a Warning to all those who come after….”

  Soon Neely was so absorbed that she was unaware of the passage of time. She devoured page after page, spellbound by the young Irishman’s account of his meeting with Lisette, the mysterious woman who had stopped for him in a carriage one evening, along a muddy road, and quickly captured his soul. Even though this other, earlier Aidan—he could not be the one she’d held, the one she loved, could he?—was a shameless hedonist, mostly concerned with sex, music, and good ale, Neely felt pangs of despair and, yes, jealousy, as she read. She did not want another female to figure into the story at all.

  When she came to the part where Lisette pounced on young Aidan and sank her fangs deep into his throat to virtually inhale his blood, Neely felt her own face go white and cold as window glass in winter. It was fiction, of course, a brilliantly conceived and quite horrible fantasy, but it seemed so real, the action so immediate and vital, that Neely almost became a part of the scenes herself.

  The account only became more incredible. The boy Aidan had died in the bed of a flea-ridden eighteenth-century inn above a tavern, and yet he had not died. The innkeeper, his son, and a local priest had declared him dead, and he’d tried desperately to communicate somehow that he was alive, but to no avail. The men had taken the body, never dreaming that a spirit still occupied it, to the undertaker’s establishment. He’d been abandoned there in that dreadful place, and forgotten.

  Tears blurred Neely’s vision as she read of Lisette’s return, and how she had raised Aidan up as a monster, a vampire, by tapping into his jugular vein again, this time giving blood instead of taking it.

  While she was fascinated and curious to a morbid degree, Neely found that she could not go on from there, not yet. She was deeply shaken, as if she’d witnessed the occurrences personally, in every gruesome detail. She felt true and abiding hatred for the heartless Lisette, along with an unholy resentment that the woman had lain with Aidan, had given him pleasure, and taken the same from him.

  For a long interval she just sat, dazed by the intensity and variety of her emotions, staring into the fire but seeing instead the nightmare images so carefully outlined in the journal. How could anyone, even a vampire, do such a terrible thing to another, to condemn him, as Lisette had condemned Aidan, to an eternal nightmare?

  “Neely?”

  She started and guiltily slammed the volume closed.

  Aidan was standing only a few feet away—she hadn’t heard him come in—and he carried her suitcase, the one she’d been forced to leave behind at the motel the night before.

  She felt such overwhelming love, just looking at him, that she could not get her breath to speak.

  “I thought you might like to have some of your own clothes,” he said innocently, sounding almost shy. His gaze dropped to the heavy book in her lap, and she saw both resignation and relief in his bearing. “You’ve found my histories, I see.”

  Looking up, Neely noticed that his skin, deathly pale before, was now healthy in color. A wild suspicion played in her mind; she chased it out and dropped her gaze to the suitcase in his hand. “Where did that come from? I thought we left it.”

  “We did. I went back.”

  Neely’s eyes shot back to his face. “You couldn’t have. It’s too far.”

  Instead of replying, Aidan simply raised one of his aristocratic eyebrows.

  She bolted out of the chair and grabbed for the case. “I have to let my brother know I’m all right,” she blurted, desperate for any distraction from the threatening truth, the reality that was becoming too complex and too pervasive to be ignored or denied. “When the police visit that room and find no sign of yours truly, Ben will hear about it on the news. He’ll be frantic. He might even think I’m dead.”

  Aidan folded his arms. “If you telephone Ben, we may soon have more of the senator’s friends to deal with. That’s all well and good, provided I’m here when they arrive, but what if you’re alone, Neely? What if I’m hunting, or asleep?”

  A chill, colder than the center of a snowman’s heart, touched her stomach and seeped into her soul. “‘Hunting or asleep’? For God’s sake, Aidan—you’re really scaring me now. This vampire game has gone far enough!”

  He took the book gently from her hands, laid it aside. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to resort to parlor tricks to convince you,” he said in a quiet and damnably reasonable tone. “That’s my story you were reading, Neely. The image in the drawing is mine, the girl is my twin sister, Maeve—”

&nb
sp; “No!” She put her hands over her ears.

  Aidan grasped her wrists, lowered them, pressed them to her sides. “You will listen,” he said in a desperate whisper. “You know it’s true—somewhere inside, you know it’s true.”

  Neely uttered a sudden, wailing sob, because he was right. As incomprehensible as it all was, as much as she wanted to turn away from the evidence, she could no longer do that. It was no dream, and no one had given her drugs or induced any kind of hypnotic trance. All the strange things that had happened since she first met Aidan had actually, truly happened.

  Aidan touched her elbows and then her shoulders, tentatively. After that, though, instead of taking her into his arms as she yearned for him to do, he retreated a few steps. “I’m sorry, Neely,” he said gruffly. “I should have left you alone—”

  “But you didn’t!” she cried. She looked up at him, wiping angrily at her wet cheeks. “I’m fascinated, I’m entranced, God help me, I think I’m in love—with someone who isn’t even human! Tell me, Aidan—where do I go from here? What do I do now?”

  He flinched, as if she’d hurled bricks at his broad back instead of words. He did not face her as he replied raggedly, “I could walk away, and you would get over what you’re feeling now. But that wouldn’t change the fact that there are more of those cretins out there, waiting for a chance to cut your throat!”

  Neely moved to face Aidan and glared up into his face. She was wild with confusion, shock, and pain, and she spoke without thinking. “You could make me into a vampire, like you.”

  Aidan seemed to loom over her, taller for his fury. “Don’t ever say that!” he cried. “You’re asking to be damned, to be a fiend who feeds on the blood of living creatures! You’re asking God Himself to turn against you, and for all eternity!” His anguish lay naked and vivid in the words, and Neely’s first real comprehension of its extent took her breath away.