The Black Rose Chronicles Page 20

  Nemesis, Aidan recalled foggily, was the Warrior Angel so feared by lesser supernatural beings. “I, too, am a vampire,” he reasoned. “If I were to go to Nemesis, it would surely be the end for me.” He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “Or worse yet, the beginning.”

  “The elders are worried that you might sacrifice yourself in some fit of heroism or despondency. You must admit, Aidan, that you are a very reckless vampire at times.” Aidan sighed, then gave a half-hearted grin. “All right,” he said wryly. “I’ll go peaceably.”

  Tobias spread his hands. “You don’t have much choice, it seems to me.” He ran his gaze over Aidan’s stolen Nazi uniform. “You’d better change first, though. Some things are too disgusting even for vampires.”

  Aidan blinked, and when he opened his eyes, he was standing in the cold bedroom of his great house, the room where Neely had once slept, so warm and womanly. Tobias was right beside him and sat down in the window seat with a sigh.

  “I do want one assurance before I submit to questioning,” Aidan said, taking jeans and a heavy sweater from his bureau. He strolled into the adjoining bathroom to change.

  “And what is that?” Tobias inquired companionably, as if he didn’t already have the upper hand.

  “I’m concerned about my sister, Maeve. And Valerian. They have no part in my discontent with vampirism, and I don’t want the Brotherhood bothering them.”

  Tobias rose from his seat with another sigh, this one philosophical and slightly martyred. “The elders have no quarrel with them, for the time being at least.”

  “But you know exactly where they are at all times,” Aidan deduced.

  “Of course we do,” Tobias answered. “Maeve has taken to her loom and hunts only enough to keep up her strength. As for Valerian, well, he’s curled up in the wall of an old abbey, whimpering over his wounds.”

  Aidan felt a stab; he didn’t need to ask what injury Valerian had suffered, because he knew only too well. “He’s strong,” he murmured. “He’ll recover.”

  “I have no doubt of that,” Tobias answered, “but it may be a hundred years or so before Valerian is truly himself again. Vampires can lie dormant, except for an occasional feeding, for centuries—but of course, you know that.”

  “Yes,” Aidan answered distractedly, thinking of Lisette and feeling a chill grasp his psyche. “I know. But Valerian is different. He’ll sulk awhile, but once he realizes that the world is going right on without him, he’ll come back. He won’t be able to bear the thought that he might be missing something.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Tobias said, without evident conviction one way or the other. “Let us go now, Aidan. The tribunal awaits.”

  Aidan remembered the cell he hadn’t been able to escape on his own, the hunger, the filthy rats he’d been given as sustenance. A part of him wanted to feel the upcoming confrontation, but he accompanied Tobias without struggle.

  Although Ben and Danny were ecstatic at Neely’s return, the hole her leaving had left had already knitted itself closed again. Ben was in love with Doris, as were half the regular customers at the cafe, evidently, and business was thriving.

  “All that trouble,” Ben had asked, the night Neely arrived in Aidan’s sports car. “It’s over?”

  Neely had nodded. “I can’t explain it, Ben, but my part in the Hargrove thing is history. I wouldn’t have come back here if I didn’t know it was settled.”

  Ben had taken her into his arms then and hugged her.

  At first Neely had slept a lot, and taken a great many hot baths, and helped out by cleaning motel rooms and occasionally waiting tables with Doris. She yearned for Aidan even as she tried to forget he’d ever existed, but there was no putting him out of her mind. Waking and sleeping, he haunted her.

  She took to breaking and entering, letting herself into Aidan’s house through a window off the mud room, and spent night after night reading the chronicles he’d written. In truth, of course, she was waiting for him to return—but he didn’t.

  His sister did appear, however, two nights after Christmas, when Neely was sitting by Aidan’s hearth and gazing at the flames.

  Her heart wedged itself into her throat and hammered there, for Neely knew from the drawings in the first journal that this was the legendary Maeve. Aidan’s twin was stunningly beautiful, with her rich ebony hair and dark blue eyes, and she was also a vampire. An accomplished one, if Aidan’s written accounts meant anything.

  This is it, Neely thought with a strange sense of calm resignation. She’s going to drink my blood and leave me flat as an old tube of toothpaste.

  Maeve laughed, obviously sharing her brother’s ability to read minds.

  “Are all vampires telepathic?” Neely heard herself ask.

  “More or less,” Maeve answered. She went to the desk, picked up the music box, and listened thoughtfully as it played its quaint familiar tune.

  The ditty left Neely stricken with love and longing for Aidan. She had not been able to bring herself to lift the lid of the small box and wind the key, for fear she would fall apart.

  “Do you know where Aidan is?” Maeve asked, quite cordially. She was dressed in a simple muslin gown, and she sat down on a nearby settee, folding her arms and regarding Neely pensively.

  Neely gulped, then shook her head. “No,” she replied honestly. “I wish I did.”

  Maeve fiddled with the brocade upholstery on the arm of the settee, not looking at Neely. “He’s been taken before the elders of the Brotherhood,” she mused, revealing none of what she was feeling. Her blue gaze rose, linked with Neely’s. “They may destroy him.”

  Neely sank back in her chair and closed her eyes. She’d never felt so helpless before, not even when she’d been tied up in the back of Vinnie and Sally’s van and slated for a mob-style execution. Somehow she’d known she would survive.

  This was different; Neely couldn’t return the favor and rescue Aidan, as he had done for her. She had none of his powers.

  “I sec you’re wondering how you might be of help to my brother,” Maeve went on. “There is a way, Neely.”

  Neely leaned forward, still afraid, but curious, too. It wasn’t every day, after all, that one sat and chatted with a lady vampire. “What?”

  “You could become one of us,” Maeve said bluntly. “Then perhaps Aidan could forget this nonsense about being human again.”

  Maeve’s pronouncement brought about an emotional earthquake, and almost a minute must have passed before Neely was able to reply.

  She shook her head. “Not that,” she said. “I love Aidan more than I’ve ever loved anybody, but I won’t sell my soul even for him. And he wouldn’t ask it of me.”

  “You’re right,” Maeve said coolly. “He would be furious at first, but he loves you desperately. Can you honestly say it holds no appeal for you, the immortality of being a vampire? The power?”

  Again Neely shook her head. “All I want to be is a woman, a plain, ordinary woman.” She paused, waited a heartbeat, then dared to ask, “Aidan really wants to be human again?”

  “He’d do anything to accomplish it,” Maeve answered in a rush of confounded annoyance. She arched one eyebrow, studying Neely, paying a little too much attention to the pulse point at the base of her throat. “I don’t have to give you a choice, you know. I can make you into a vampire without your consent.”

  Neely thought of the early entries in Aidan’s journals, the despair and anger he’d felt. “That was what was done to your brother,” she answered evenly, fingering the golden rosebud on the pendant Aidan had given her. “He despises the one who changed him, and he would be outraged if it happened to me as well. Do you want Aidan to hate you, Maeve?”

  The impossibly blue eyes widened at the sight of the pendant, then were averted. “I adore him,” she said brokenly. “I became a vampire so that Aidan and I would not be separated. Now he wants to change back.”

  Neely folded her hands in her lap and spent a few seconds gathering her cour
age, which, it seemed to her, was mostly bluster. Since that was all she had to work with, she proceeded. “Is that possible, for a vampire to be turned back into a human being?”

  Maeve stared into space for a long time, then shrugged. ‘To my knowledge, no one has ever done it. But there are secrets and rituals only the elders know.”

  Neely bit her lower lip and offered a silent prayer, not for her safety, but for Aidan’s redemption.

  Abruptly Maeve rose from her seat and stood glaring down at Neely, her expression imperious and completely chilling. “You cannot stay here,” she announced. “If I found you, so might the others.”

  Neely shivered as horrible images from books and movies flooded her mind. “What quarrel do any of you have with me?” she dared, setting aside the last volume of Aidan’s journal, the one that mentioned his love for her, and getting shakily to her feet.

  “You are a threat to all of us,” Maeve answered. “Vampires and humans do not normally mix, beyond the obvious feedings and an occasional brushing of shoulders.”

  “But what could I possibly do to you?” Neely pressed. “You have already done it,” Maeve said, and her words rang with an infinite and eternal sorrow. “You have taken Aidan’s heart and made him into a weak link. He might betray us all, not intentionally, of course, but simply because he’s lost a large part of his reason.”

  Neely put a chair between herself and Aidan’s twin, although she knew only too well that no such puny effort would save her if Maeve decided to follow through on her original idea and make this troublesome human into a vampire.

  “My crime, then,” she whispered, “is that I love your brother with my whole heart. As you do, Maeve.” Neely watched as the majestic creature of the night turned her straight, slender back, apparently struggling to contain some emotion. “We aren’t enemies, you and I. We’re on the same side.”

  When Maeve turned to face Neely again, there were tears glittering in her sapphire eyes. “What will become of him?” she murmured. “Of all of us?”

  Neely actually wanted to touch Maeve, to comfort her, but of course she didn’t dare make any such move. To do so would be like petting a wild tigress. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “But there is one thing you can count on. I truly love Aidan, and I will never purposely hurt him.”

  Maeve assessed Neely in silence for a long time, probably weighing her words. In the end she evidently found them true. “I have promised not to interfere in this other madness of Aidan’s, this transformation he so foolishly seeks. But there is one thing I can do, and that is protect the woman he loves more than his own soul.”

  Neely waited, having no idea how to respond. For all she knew, making her, Neely, into some immortal, blood-drinking monster was Maeve’s idea of protecting her. Or perhaps the beautiful vampire would simply kill her, angering Aidan but at the same time saving him and a lot of the mysterious “others” mentioned earlier.

  As it happened, Maeve stepped back to the desk, found a pen and paper, and scribbled something. “Come to this address, in London, as soon as you can. It is perhaps your only hope, to be under my protection.”

  Neely swallowed. “London?” she echoed.

  “Yes,” Maeve snapped, shoving the scrap of paper at her. “And be quick about it. The housekeeper will let you in. You do have money?”

  Neely nodded. Dallas Hargrove had given her a healthy sum in cash, and so had Aidan. She’d spent very little. “Is that where Aidan is? In London?”

  “Would that he were,” Maeve said with a bitter sigh. Having so spoken, she raised both her arms, as Neely had seen both Aidan and Valerian do, and vanished.

  “London?” Neely muttered to the empty room.

  The next day, after saying good-bye to Danny and Ben and Doris, who had begun to assemble themselves into a tight family unit, Neely got into Aidan’s car and drove to New York City. She carried only her passport, a toothbrush, and her wad of cash; she was getting very good at traveling light.

  Another day passed, and then Neely flew out of JFK Airport, aboard a 747 bound for Heathrow. She sagged numbly in her seat, now sleeping, now staring out the window at the clouds blanketing the Atlantic. She held one shimmering, fragile hope close to her heart: that she would see Aidan again soon.

  The flight was interminable, and when the plane finally landed, there was still Customs to be gotten through. Neely managed the task, practically dead on her feet. Outside, in the gray, slushy twilight of an English winter, she found a cab right away.

  Neely gave the driver the address Maeve had written for her and ignored the gregarious cabbie’s whistle of exclamation.

  “Pretty fancy real estate, that,” he said.

  Neely wasn’t up to chatting, but as it turned out, that hadn’t been a problem. The driver had talked nonstop from Heathrow to the quiet, elegant neighborhood that was her destination.

  He brought the old cab to a lurching stop in front of one of the most impressive mansions Neely had ever seen, Washington and New York included. The place was three stories high, made of gray stone, and surrounded by a high iron fence.

  Even as Neely sat still in that tattered backseat, wondering how she was ever going to get inside the place and what she would do when she got there, a figure came hurrying out to open the gate.

  Neely paid the driver, stepped out onto the sidewalk, and was immediately grateful for the bracing bite of the wind. The cab sped away, leaving its former passenger to stand there with her hands in her pockets, gaping.

  “Miss Wallace?” the figure asked, clattering a key in a great lock and then swinging open the gate.

  Neely blinked. She’d been expecting Frankenstein’s monster, but Maeve’s housekeeper was instead a plump, genial woman with rosy cheeks and bright, mischievous brown eyes.

  “Yes,” Neely answered.

  The housekeeper beckoned. “Well, come along then,” she prompted, with good-natured impatience. “No sense in our standing out here, freezing our bums off, now is there?”

  In spite of herself, Neely laughed, drawn by the woman’s ordinary kindness.

  “No sense at all,” she agreed.

  Neely made little note of the inside of the house that first night, for she was too tired and too distracted. She simply followed the housekeeper, whose name, to Neely’s delight, was Mrs. Fullywub.

  “Call me Mrs. F.,” the woman ordered benignly, depositing Neely in a guest suite on the second floor. “I’ll bring up some tea and scones shortly. There’s a robe and nightgown, folded all neat and tidy on the bench in the water closet—through that door.” She pointed a pudgy finger. “A hot bath can resurrect the dead, I always say.”

  Neely made no answer, since none seemed to be needed. She took off her peacoat, looking around at the unbelievably sumptuous room in a state of mild shock. There was a fireplace, with glistening brass andirons, and a bed that probably dated from the reign of Elizabeth I. The couches and chairs were upholstered in mint-green silk, to match the spread and pillow shams, and there was a Chippendale desk in one corner.

  It was like stepping into a layout in a high-tone decorating magazine, but Neely was too far gone to appreciate her surroundings. She soaked in the guest bath, which was roughly the size of a Scottish loch, then put on the waiting nightgown and robe. She brushed her teeth, stumbled back into the bedroom, and collapsed.

  Mrs. F. brought tea and scones, which Neely ignored, and built a fire on the pristine hearth. Soon shadows danced on the high, molded ceiling, taking the shapes of vampires and angels.

  14

  In the morning Mrs. F. brought Neely breakfast in bed—orange juice, oatmeal, buttered wheat toast, and a slice of melon. Tucked under the housekeeper’s right arm were two newspapers, which turned out to be the London Times and yesterday’s USA Today. Neely might have enjoyed the small irony, not to mention the luxury, under other circumstances.

  “Thank you very much,” she said after forcing herself to take a sip of the orange juice, for her fearful yearnin
g for Aidan was a shrill, relentless thing that left no room for food. “But you needn’t wait on me after this. I can look after myself.”

  Mrs. F. beamed, looking bright-eyed and matronly with her salt-and-pepper hair arranged in a loose but tidy bun. She wore a flowered dress, along with a pristine white cobbler’s apron. Neely wondered if Mrs. F. knew that the lady of the house was a vampire.

  “Nonsense,” said the good woman, in her brisk and lively accent. “You’ve great dark circles under your eyes, you have, and if you don’t mind my saying so, miss, it’s apparent that you could do with a little seeing to. Besides, there’s the jet lag to consider. You’ll enjoy your visit more if you give your mind and body time to adjust to the changes.” For a moment Neely wanted to weep. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had treated her with such tenderness, except for Aidan, of course, and that made the experience bittersweet.

  She blinked back tears of terror that Aidan would be hurt or destroyed by forces she couldn’t begin to understand, let alone combat, but there was an element of self-pity in her sorrow as well. She was exhausted, not to mention confused, scared, and more than a little heart-sore, and she could use some time to heal, gather her scattered thoughts, and make plans for the future.

  After a few moments of inner struggle, she managed to compose herself.

  Neely pretended to nibble at her toast as Mrs. F. toddled over to the hearth and stirred a cheery fire from ashes and embers. “Have you been working for—?” She stopped. How was she supposed to refer to Mrs. F.’s employer—as Maeve? Miss Tremayne? That woman with the fangs? She redirected. “Have you been here long?”

  “A few years,” Mrs. F. replied. “Madam isn’t around much, so it’s quite an easy job, really. Which is good, since my knees aren’t what they used to be. The heavy cleaning is done by a service, once every fortnight, regular as teatime. I putter, for the most part—dusting, answering the telephone, the like of all that. Once in a while, the Madam decides on a party, and then there’s a flurry, I don’t mind saying.” Neely smiled, though she still felt as if she’d been broken to bits and glued back together with some of the pieces missing. This gregarious, talkative woman knew nothing of Maeve’s other life, and wouldn’t believe the truth in any case. Who could blame her?