The Black Rose Chronicles Read online

“No,” Aidan answered. “Your kind of caring is perversion to me. There is a bond between us, because of the blood communion, but I cannot give you anything more than loyalty and friendship. The sooner you accept that, Valerian, the sooner we can go on to other things.”

  The elder vampire did not reply but instead turned his back to Aidan without a word and made himself into a shifting wisp of smoke.

  Aidan sat down in a leather chair near the fire, closed his eyes, and mentally followed Neely’s progress through the town of Bright River and northward, toward New Hampshire and, beyond that, Maine.

  Neely stopped at an all-night café just before dawn and put a call through to her brother. She had not been watching television or even reading newspapers, but she knew her disappearance from that tacky motel room several days before had probably drawn some media attention. Although she’d finally written a note, which Aidan had delivered by some means she hadn’t asked him to explain, she wanted to reassure Ben and Danny that she was still alive and well.

  “Hello,” her brother said, sounding alert even at that unholy hour of the morning. He was an ambitious sort and had probably been up long enough to shower and make coffee.

  “Ben,” Neely whispered, hunching close to the pay phone, which was situated in a narrow hallway, next to the café’s rest rooms. “It’s me. I can’t talk long, in case someone traces the call, but I wanted to tell you that I’m okay, and that I love you and Danny—”

  “Neely.” Ben sighed the name; it resonated with sadness and relief. “Thank God. I thought maybe they’d gotten you, those bastards from the Capitol.”

  “Not yet,” Neely said. She smiled grimly, glad her brother didn’t know what else might be stalking her. “Look, don’t worry about me, Ben, because I’ve got at least one very powerful friend. Gotta go now.”

  “I love you,” Ben said in parting, understanding as always. ‘Take care.”

  With that, Neely hung up. Tears stung her eyes as she turned around and nearly collided with a smiling truck driver, who was waiting to use the phone. He was tall and good-looking, and the name ‘Trent” was stitched on the pocket of his shirt in red thread.

  Neely was hungry, but she was afraid to linger too long in one spot, just in case Senator Hargrove’s henchmen were following her. She found a McDonald’s, bought a breakfast sandwich and some orange juice at the drive-through window, and headed back out onto the freeway.

  Spain

  Lisette was feeling stronger with every fall of twilight, every fevered feeding. Her favorite victims were innocents; their blood gave her the most energy and the greatest euphoria, and she always pressed them as close to death as she dared.

  She slept in a hidden crypt by day, a safe nook tucked away in the cellar of the villa she’d bought generations ago. Every fifty years or so, she’d willed the place to herself, along with the fortune that had been hers ever since she’d arrived in Europe, many centuries before, and married a very rich mortal. She was feared and revered by all but a few very foolish vampires; she had everything.

  Almost.

  Seated on the stone railing of the terrace outside her bedchamber, gazing out at the star-dappled water, Lisette thought of the one scalawag in all her long history who had managed to break her heart.

  Aidan Tremayne.

  She smiled a fragile smile, remembering. She’d given him immortality, the ungrateful wretch, and taught him to stalk and kill, to navigate through time and space, to protect himself from other immortals and veil his presence from humans and lesser vampires. In return for her kindness, he had betrayed her.

  Lisette sighed and tossed her head, so that her rich dark hair tumbled back over one alabaster-smooth shoulder. She wore a Grecian dress, strictly for the sake of drama. Her mistake, she reflected, had been in making Aidan into the splendid fiend he was. Instead she should have used him until he bored her, like the multitude of handsome young mortals who had preceded him, and then consumed his life force and discarded him.

  “Fool,” she said to herself in a bitter whisper. A soft breeze carried the word out over a warm Spanish sea.

  Lisette stepped up onto the terrace railing and stood there, her arms spread wide, her white gown flowing and billowing wonderfully around her slender figure. For a century and a half she had lain dormant in her hidden tomb, rising only when she knew she would perish if she did not feed, languishing in her despondency, too distraught to function.

  Then, during one of her brief, slightly frantic forays into the world of humans, she’d caught a glimpse of another female vampire, Maeve Tremayne. Maeve was Aidan’s twin, and her resemblance to him had stirred some sudden and harsh violence deep in Lisette’s being.

  From that night onward, Lisette had forced herself to rise and feed. She had been practicing her powers and regaining her former strength for months. Soon she would be immune to the light of the sun as she had once been, able to track errant vampires to their lairs.

  She was still queen of the blood-drinkers, among the oldest on earth, and she intended to show them all that she had no intention of abdicating. After that she would deal vengeance to her enemies, one by one.

  Valerian would be first, that despicable traitor. After him, Maeve, who, Lisette was convinced, secretly aspired to reign over the nightwalkers herself. And when Maeve and Valerian were nothing but smoldering piles of ash, shifting in the sunlight, Lisette vowed, she would turn her full attention on Aidan.

  By the time she was through meting out her myriad punishments, the very fires of hell would look good to him.

  “Lisette.”

  The voices came from behind her, speaking in chorus and startling her so that she nearly toppled off the high terrace onto the rocky shore below. The fall would not have done her bodily injury, of course, but her dignity might have been hopelessly wounded.

  She turned slowly and looked down into the white, upturned faces of her visitors.

  Canaan and Benecia Havermail stood before her, wearing identical dresses of yellow satin. Lisette was glad they would never grow to adult size, for their natures were at least as vicious as her own, and she would not relish the competition.

  “What do you want?” she snapped, irritated.

  Again the child-fiends spoke in eerily perfect unison, their fangs glinting in the starlight as they chattered. “We’ve come about Mr. Tremayne. He’s been to Havermail Castle, you know, inquiring about the Brotherhood.”

  Lisette floated down from the railing to stand before the horrid little pair. “What does Aidan want with the Brotherhood?” She raised a hand when they both started to talk again. “Only one of you need answer.”

  Benecia, after a triumphant glance at her younger sister, went on alone. “He desires to be mortal again,” she said. At this oddity she giggled, and so did Canaan.

  Lisette, however, was not amused. She turned away from her visitors and grasped the terrace railing in both hands. No vampire, to her knowledge, had ever made such a transition, but Aidan was just brazen enough, just fanciful enough, to try.

  Perhaps she would be forced to resolve the matter sooner than she’d planned.

  10

  Neely drove until midafternoon, when she simply could go no farther. She rented a room somewhere in New Hampshire, this time choosing one of the large chain motels, and secured all the locks carefully before collapsing onto the bed. After an hour or so she awakened just long enough to remove her coat and kick off her shoes, then sank back into an exhausted sleep.

  When she opened her eyes, feeling as if she’d just risen from the depths of a coma, there was no light except for the red numerals on the clock radio on the lamp table.

  3:47 a.m.

  Neely would have been glad to sleep another twelve hours, at least, but she didn’t dare linger in one place for too long. Although she was fairly certain no one was following her, she couldn’t afford to depend on luck.

  She stumbled into the bathroom, showered, and put yesterday’s clothes back on. Later, she promised herse
lf, she would buy jeans, sweaters, underwear, and the like. For now she was traveling light.

  At 4:14, Neely left the motel room. She was starved, but the fast-food places weren’t open yet, and the idea of wandering into a big, well-lit truck stop for oatmeal and toast made her feel too vulnerable. In the end she stopped at a convenience store for high-octane coffee and a sweet roll.

  As she had the day before, Neely drove until she was blind with fatigue. Then she stopped at a shopping mall, entered a crowded discount store, and bought the clothing she needed, along with a hot dog and a bag of popcorn. That afternoon she checked into a motor court beside a frozen lake. She propped a chair under the doorknob, since the locks didn’t look all that secure. After devouring her scanty supper, she bathed and toppled into bed.

  Sleep didn’t come as readily this time, even though Neely was every bit as tired as she had been the night before. She switched on the television set, turned to one of the cable networks, and settled in to watch a tabloid program.

  “This is Melody Ling,” a sharply dressed reporter was saying, “reporting from Washington, D.C., where Mrs. Elaine Hargrove, wife of the prominent senator, is allegedly recovering satisfactorily from emergency surgery.”

  Neely sat bolt upright against the musty pillows at her back, staring at the screen, willing Ling to say more. Unfortunately the piece was over.

  She grabbed up the remote, then sought and found the twenty-four-hour news channel. She’d had the car radio on all day while she traveled, but she’d heard nothing about the Hargroves.

  Neely watched three segments—a scandal concerning the sale of arms to some hormonal Third-World country, a piece on distraught dairy farmers, and the latest tidbit out of Buckingham Palace. Then, finally, Senator Dallas Hargrove appeared on the screen, striding out of a well-known Washington hospital, looking harried and impatient.

  Although Hargrove was definitely a skunk and a moral lightweight, Neely thought, it was impossible not to feel sorry for him just then. Reporters barred his way, the portable lights deepened the lines and shadows in his face, and microphones stabbed at him like drawn lances.

  “Senator Hargrove, can you tell us anything about Mrs. Hargrove’s accident?”

  “Is she resting comfortably?”

  “Will she recover?”

  “Was she driving when the accident occurred?”

  The senator stopped and held up both hands in a bid for order. “Elaine—Mrs. Hargrove—is conscious,” he said tersely. “We have every hope that she will survive. And no, my wife suffers from a chronic illness and does not drive. She was riding with our chauffeur when the limousine was forced off the road by a reckless driver.”

  “Has an arrest been made?” a reporter called out, but Hargrove was plainly finished with the interview. He forced his way through a throng of newspeople and got into the backseat of a waiting car.

  The camera switched to an anchorwoman in the network newsroom, where the scanty details of Elaine Hargrove’s accident were reviewed. She had been on her way to a luncheon, where she was to be presented with an award of some sort, when, according to the chauffeur, another car had come up behind them and crashed hard into the bumper. The driver, already traveling at a fairly high speed, had been startled and lost control of the wheel. The limo had sideswiped a concrete abutment and then swerved into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

  No one else had been injured besides Elaine Hargrove. Chilled, Neely hobbled in and took another bath, soaking in the hottest water she could stand. When she got out of the tub, however, and wrapped herself in a rough towel, she was still as cold as ever.

  Obviously the senator had run afoul of his drug-dealing friends, and they’d made a cruel example out of Elaine. Hargrove would be desperate to appease the mob now, which meant he would make no further efforts to protect Neely.

  All thoughts of sleep deserted her, even though she was half sick with weariness. She was on her own, and if she wanted to stay alive, she’d better move fast.

  She tore the tags from her new clothes and wrenched on panties and a bra, stiff jeans, and a starchy sweatshirt. Then she groped for the telephone and dialed New York information.

  Ten frustrating minutes later, Neely was speaking to someone in Melody Ling’s department at the television network. Ms. Ling was still out on assignment, and it would probably be impossible to reach her before morning.

  Neely slammed down the receiver, snatched up her few belongings, and rushed out to the car.

  She tried twice more to get through to Ling, the following morning and the one after that, and was unsuccessful both times. Finally, in the midst of a blizzard, she reached Timber Cove, a tiny town on the winter-bleak coast of Maine. Wendy Browning’s summer cottage was five miles north, and after buying a few supplies in a small grocery store, Neely took refuge there.

  The front door key was under one of the legs of the picnic table out on the snow-mounded deck, as always. Neely had been a guest in the cottage many times, and before flying off to London, Wendy had told her she was welcome to use the place whenever she wished.

  She let herself in, turned up the gas heater, and lifted the telephone receiver to her ear. There was a dial tone.

  Neely carried in her bags of clothing and her groceries, set a pot of coffee to brewing, and stood at the glass doors leading to the deck, looking out at the rocky, snow-streaked shore.

  When she had had a cup of coffee to warm herself, she put on her coat and trekked outside, through the grayness of late morning on a stormy day, to the woodshed. There she knelt in a corner and raised a loose floorboard with both hands.

  Underneath lay a fat manila envelope, wrapped in plastic, just exactly where Neely had left it.

  She carried the packet back to the house, opened it, and saw that all the documents and recordings were still there. Trembling slightly, Neely returned to the telephone and dialed Melody Ling’s number.

  This time she got lucky.

  Aidan found Maeve easily, for once. She was at her house in London, in her beloved nineteenth century, entertaining a drawing room full of guests. A string quartet played Mozart in one corner, while elegantly dressed visitors mingled, some sipping champagne and nibbling clam puffs, others only pretending.

  It was an interesting mix of vampires and humans, jaded writers and artists who probably knew full well that they were socializing with fiends. In Aidan’s experience the right-brain types found such things stimulating.

  “Darling.” Maeve swept toward him, her crisp satin dress rustling as she moved, both hands extended. Her dark blue eyes were alight with surprise and pleasure, both swiftly displaced by worry. “What a lovely—surprise. Aidan—?”

  He kissed her cheek and smiled wanly, but that was the extent of his effort to appear normal. He had not fed for three days, he’d been so grieved over the parting with Neely, and he was faint with the lack of nourishment.

  Maeve frowned, still holding his hands, and he felt some of her abundant strength flow into him. She pulled him through the strange crowd and out onto a stone terrace with high iron railings.

  The wind was bitingly cold, but it did little to revive Aidan.

  “What’s happened?” Maeve demanded. “Honestly, Aidan, if this has something to do with that wretched woman—”

  He looked directly into his sister’s angry eyes. “It has everything to do with Neely,” he said. “I love her. I’d rather perish than lose her, and I would sell my soul, if indeed I have one at all, to live with her as a man.” Maeve’s face tightened, and for a moment her fury pulsed between them, but then she let her forehead fall against his shoulder and wept disconsolately.

  Aidan held her in a gentle embrace. “I’m sorry,” he whispered raggedly.

  She looked up at him, after a long time, her beautiful eyes glimmering with tears. Aidan was heartbroken to see his sister in such a state.

  “There is no turning you aside from this course, is there?” Maeve asked, lifting her chin. “You’ll either suc
ceed in your foolish enterprise or perish in the attempt.”

  Aidan laid his hand gently against her cheek. “Anything is better than being what I am, darling,” he said. “Even eternal damnation.”

  Her alabaster skin grew even paler, and she clutched at the satin lapels of his dinner jacket. “Don’t say that!” she pleaded in an agonized whisper. ‘To think of you burning forever and ever—oh, Aidan, I can’t bear it!”

  “Shhh,” Aidan said, laying his hands on her glowing shoulders and giving her just the slightest shake. “Then don’t think of that.”

  “How will I know what’s happened to you?” Maeve pleaded. “How will I know whether you’re alive or—or dead?”

  He kissed her forehead. “Wait until you hear the first rumors,” he told her with a sad smile. “Then visit my house in Connecticut. If I’ve managed to make the transition, I’ll leave a bouquet of white roses on that round table in the entryway, as a sort of signal.”

  Maeve studied his face for a long moment, then nodded. “You haven’t fed. Surely you know you cannot hope even to survive if you do not guard your strength.”

  Aidan let his hands fall to his sides, though he still studied his sister with affection. He wanted to remember her always, whether he writhed in hell or was allowed to live out his allotted number of years as a man.

  “The hunger makes it possible to think more clearly, Maeve,” he said. “You know that.”

  She touched his cheek, and her lips moved, but no sound came from her.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  Valerian crashed Maeve’s party half an hour after Aidan left, looking distracted and a little frantic. He grabbed her hand and pulled her out onto the same terrace where she’d stood with her brother, her heart broken at her feet.

  “Have you seen that idiot sibling of yours?” Valerian demanded.

  Maeve bridled, but not because Valerian had called Aidan an idiot—she quite agreed, just now, that the description suited. “Who do you think you are, dragging me away from my guests like this and speaking so familiarly?”