The Black Rose Chronicles Read online

  He saw her love for him in her wonderful eyes and knew it for an emotion as elemental as his own. Such joy, such beauty—what an irony that it might well be doomed.

  “Maeve invited me here,” she explained in an uncertain voice. “In case you’re wondering, I came by plane. Look Ma, no magic.”

  Aidan chuckled, and the sound held both marvel and despair. At no time had he ever yearned more desperately to be a man again than he did in those moments. If he had been he would have taken off his clothes, climbed into that big bathtub, and made love to Neely until there was nothing left for either of them to give to the other, but he was not a man. He was a fiend, and he was afraid that if she saw his body, pale and statuelike in its hardness, she would be repulsed.

  He leaned against the framework of the bathroom door with an indolent impudence that was wholly feigned, his arms folded, one eyebrow slightly elevated. “I didn’t know you and Maeve were acquainted.”

  “We’re not, really,” Neely answered, making nervous waves under the water by flapping her hands back and forth. “She claimed this would be a safe place for me to stay—I guess it’s the old trick of hiding in the open—lest any of your vampire friends decide they want me instead of a V-8. There is, of course, a glaring possibility that she just wants to kill me personally, so she knows the job has been done right.”

  Aidan shoved splayed fingers through his hair. “Maeve won’t do you any harm,” he said with quiet certainty.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Neely responded, and very quickly, too. “She worships the ground you walk on, and she also thinks I’m the worst thing that could have happened, not only to you, but to the whole vampire community.” She drew a deep breath and let it out again, sending more soapsuds tumbling, and looked at Aidan warily out of the side of her eye as she reached for a sponge on the tiled shelf bordering the tub. “Did you ever like being a vampire, Aidan? Even for a moment?”

  He sat down on the lid of the commode, resting his forearms on his knees and leaning toward Neely. She was watching him now, with a fragile hope in her eyes. “There was never a time when I didn’t want to be a man, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “I did enjoy making love to you, and I will always cherish the memory of the night we danced on a carpet of stars.”

  Tears glimmered along her dense lashes. “Can you—can you make love to me again—this time in the regular way?”

  Aidan felt his heart splinter and fall into assorted pieces. “It’s possible—mechanically, if you’ll excuse the expression—but—”

  “But what?” She sounded impatient. Irritated. “You said yourself that you’re not afraid of—of biting my neck anymore, and we almost made love once, if you’ll remember. Is it that you don’t want me, Aidan? Is it because I don’t look and feel like a vampire?”

  “No,” he said, his voice gravelly with the frustration of wanting her so much and, at the same time, struggling to keep himself from indulging. “It’s because I do look and feel like a vampire.”

  She stared at him, her gamine eyes even rounder than usual. “I don’t care,” she said. She raised one toe out of the water and poked at the spigot with it. “What if I said the whole idea turns me on a little? Hell, call me kinky, it turns me on a lot!”

  He averted his gaze, for although he knew this woman thoroughly, her frankness still surprised him. His last experience with love had happened in the eighteenth century, after all, when young ladies of Neely’s quality and station would have burned at the stake before admitting to such an attraction.

  “Neely,” he reasoned finally, making himself meet her eyes again. “Even though I would never willingly hurt you, I am much stronger than you are, and I want you in a way that is almost frenzied. In my passion I might not be gentle.”

  “What if I say I’m willing to risk it?” she asked in a tremulous tone.

  Aidan felt conflicting urges to laugh and cry. “Then I would reply that you are a damnably stubborn, if very beautiful, woman.”

  Neely just looked at him, full of defiance, silently daring him to take her.

  In spite of himself, in spite of the ordeal he faced and all his misgivings, Aidan laughed. An instant later he had composed his features into a solemn expression.

  Then he simply held out one hand to her.

  She blushed furiously, and the very splendor of her made his soul ache within him. She rose, dripping soapsuds and water, and their fingers intertwined.

  In order to lighten the moment a little, Aidan glanced at the tub and mentally pulled the plug. A gurgling sound ensued, but Neely wouldn’t be distracted by showmanship; she wanted, plainly and simply, to be taken to bed.

  Even the prospect filled Aidan with ecstasy, but now that he had made the decision to express his love to Neely in the most intimate way possible, he would not be hurried.

  He stepped back to allow her to pass into the bedroom before him, and she did so regally, with all the haughty dignity of some beautiful pagan queen. Her skin was still wet and shiny from her bath; it would be slippery to the touch.

  Once Neely was standing beside the bed, however, she lost some of her aplomb. She was, for all her bluster, a virtual innocent where such matters were concerned—even if she’d been with a thousand men, she would have been pure, for her spirit was the sterling sort, rare as golden pearls—and Aidan thought his adoration for her would be his undoing, so intense was it.

  He went to her instead of touching her mentally from across the room, as he might have done had he not been so thoroughly bewitched. And when he stood face to face with her, so close that he could literally feel the beat of her heart in his own senses, she reached out and began lifting his heavy fisherman’s sweater up, revealing his midsection, then his chest. Finally she pulled the garment off over his head and tossed it aside.

  Aidan braced himself for her horror when she saw the alabaster whiteness of his chest, but it never came. Instead there was a sort of reverent tenderness in her eyes as she touched him, spreading her soft palms over musculature as hard as the finest marble.

  She looked up at him in loving surprise. “Oh, Aidan,” she whispered. “You’re so beautiful—it’s like touching one of Michelangelo’s sculptures.”

  He was unbearably moved by her acceptance—he was the Beast being transformed by the Beauty’s tenderness—and he feared for a moment that he would break down and weep. But then Neely opened his trousers and boldly stroked him. Aidan’s senses, all of them, were infinitely keener than any mortal’s, and he groaned in ecstatic misery as she grew even more brazen and closed her strong fingers around his staff. When she teased the tip with the pad of her thumb, he thought he would go wild with the need of her, but he took care to remember that she was flesh and blood, that the bones and tissue beneath her moist, supple skin were fragile. He drew her close against him and kissed her, softening his lips by a trick of the mind, and knew a stunning joy when she whimpered in pleasure and fell onto the bed, pulling him with her, as eager and wild as a female panther in her season.

  Aidan kissed her deeply, once, twice, a third time, but his control was tenuous indeed, for he felt as though he’d dreamed of this woman, yearned for her, since the foundation of the world.

  He tasted her breasts, frantically, and delighted in her cries of pleasure as he nipped at their hard, sweet little peaks.

  “Take me,” Neely pleaded finally. “Oh, Aidan, take me, or I’ll die—”

  He found the musky, warm entrance to her body and prodded gently with his rod, as much to warn her of its size and its hardness as to tease her into wanting him even more.

  “Now, then,” Aidan said gruffly as he glided slowly, carefully into Neely’s tight depths, “we can’t have you passing on for want of something I would so willingly give you—”

  She clutched at his shoulders, spread her fingers over his chest, stroked his buttocks in fevered urging. “Aidan,” she whimpered. “Do it to me—really do it to me—”

  He began to move upon her, and her magic enc
ompassed him, and her sweet sorcery tormented him, and he was a man again, not a fiend. His tears—tears born of a joy so fierce he feared he could not contain it—fell softly on her cheekbones and sparkled like diamonds in her hair.

  Neely arched beneath him, pleading, in stark Anglo-Saxon terms, for what he and he alone could give her. And when she came, Aidan climaxed as well, and lost his mind in a maelstrom of light and sound and pleasure so intense that it seemed, for a few moments at least, that he had been pardoned and admitted to Heaven after all.

  “I love you,” she whispered breathlessly when their love-making was over and they lay still, their limbs entangled.

  Aidan kissed her forehead, wanting to hold the truth at bay as long as he could. “And I love you,” he answered. “Whatever happens, Neely, I want you to remember that.”

  Her fingers traced a pattern on his chest, and she gave a combination sigh and moan, since they were still joined and he was still steely. The tip of his staff rested against that very sensitive place deep within her, the one scientists had only just given a name to, though lovers had known of it forever.

  “Can I—can you—?” Neely paused, and gave an involuntary shiver of rising pleasure. “Can we make a baby together, Aidan? Is that possible?”

  Aidan felt a grief as expansive as his earlier jubilation. “No,” he said raggedly, grateful that he could not plant an abomination such as himself in the receptive, nurturing flesh of a mortal woman.

  She stirred again, her body deliciously soft under his, and spoke shyly, breathlessly. “I—I think I need you again—” He rotated his hips, and she gasped and clutched at his shoulders. Soon the maiden had turned into a demanding little wench once more, and Aidan marveled at the way she abandoned herself to pleasure and at the same time gave it with such generosity.

  Aidan loved Neely again and again that night, until she was exhausted, her lush body flexing with climaxes even in sleep. He withdrew from her gently, kissed both her plump, well-suckled breasts, and rose from the bed. For a time he stood there in the moonlight, admiring her, worshiping her, lusting after her even though she had satisfied him over and over.

  He sat in a chair near the bed and watched over Neely, a guardian angel from the wrong side of the universe. Aidan did not leave Neely’s side until just before dawn, when he took himself off to the dark chamber in Maeve’s cellar.

  There he crouched against the wall, lowered his head, and slept.

  Far away in his lair, within the crumbling ruins of the abbey, Valerian stirred uneasily in his own comalike slumber. She had found him, he could feel her presence stretching over his prone form like a smothering fog.

  Lisette, he thought, despairing.

  Valerian heard her laughter. So you remember me, do you? she trilled, her voice seeming to come from within his skull. Isn’t that touching.

  Having been dormant for several weeks, swallowed whole by his despair, Valerian was feeble. His strength was gone; he had no means of self-defense.

  What do you want with me? he asked. We were never lovers. Never friends.

  You poisoned Aidan’s mind against me, Lisette’s voice answered, burrowing deeper into Valerian’s head like some hard-shelled parasite. You loved him. Deny it if you dare!

  Valerian’s sigh was not physical; it came from the very depths of his spirit. I deny nothing, least of all my affection for Aidan. I would have died for him.

  How very dramatic. As it happens, my darling, you shall both die. Horribly.

  Do what you will to me, Valerian responded, but leave Aidan be. You’ve already robbed him of the one thing he held most dear, his humanity. How can you ask more?

  The whole of the supernatural world seemed to quake with the ferocity of Lisette’s fury. Her final words reverberated through Valerian’s wasted soul. I ask. And I will not be denied.

  15

  Neely awakened bemused, hardly daring to believe that Aidan had truly visited her the night before, fearing that she might have dreamed the entire encounter. Whether real or strictly fantasy, however, the experience had left her with a vibrant sense of well-being, and she was already up when Mrs. F. knocked at the door of the suite and entered with a tray.

  The housekeeper took in the princess’s skirt and the soft blue sweater Neely wore with it, and smiled. “Very nice,” she confirmed. “Are you going out again today, then?”

  Neely nodded. She wanted to visit at least one museum before her lunch date with Wendy Browning and Wendy’s boyfriend, Jason.

  Mrs. F. set down the tray and glanced toward the windows, where a gray mist was shifting and flowing, a cloud come to earth. “Well, it’s typical London weather we’re having, and that’s for certain. Have a care that you dress warmly, miss, because an English wind will go straight to your marrow and take hold there, if you let it.”

  “I’ll be very careful,” Neely promised, feeling at once mellow and energetic. She knew a fresh, fragile new hope that things would be all right, though she couldn’t imagine how.

  By the time Neely left the house for a waiting cab, having fortified herself with one of Mrs. F.’s substantial breakfasts, the wind was mixed with icy slush, and the charcoal skies promised snow. The trip into the heart of the city was harrowing because of the narrow, perilously slick roads, and Neely felt lucky to be alive when she finally stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of a famous art museum.

  She paid the driver hastily, rushed up salted stone steps, and, inside the building, paused to rub her reddened ears with her palms in an attempt to restore circulation.

  “Good morning,” a gracious gray-haired woman said from behind a podium. “We ask all our visitors to sign our guest book.”

  Neely nodded, handed over the price of admittance, and signed with a flourish. When she stepped into the museum itself, she was stricken by a kind of delighted reverence. It had been a long while since Neely had visited such a place.

  She viewed sculpture and paintings of various sorts, along with furniture from the medieval period and pottery from the time of the Romans. Neely indulged herself that day, reading every sign and studying each piece closely, and before she knew it the morning was gone.

  She had about twenty minutes to find Willy-Nilly’s, the club where she and Wendy and Jason were to meet for lunch, but even so, Neely didn’t rush. There were still some tapestries she wanted to see.

  The first three were pretty prosaic—plump, cherry cheeked maidens with flowing hair and crowns of flowers, frolicking with unicorns, angels, or fairies—but the fourth creation all but wrenched Neely forward onto the balls of her feet.

  She stared up at the eight-by-twelve-foot hand-loomed tapestry in amazed fascination. It showed a beautiful, dark haired woman—plainly Maeve Tremayne—enfolded in the flowing cape of a handsome vampire—plainly Valerian. There was a castle or an old monastery in the background, along with an oak forest so realistically wrought that delicate veins were visible in the leaves on the trees.

  Neely raised one hand to her mouth, both fascinated and repulsed. She studied Maeve’s face, creamy white with the merest hint of pink in her cheeks, and saw joy in the wide blue eyes, as well as a touch of fear.

  The tapestry was a cruel reminder that there was much to be resolved before Aidan and Neely could hope to share a life; it left her stricken and supplanted her lingering satisfaction with the old, familiar terror.

  “Isn’t it magnificent?” asked a woman standing beside Neely, startling her anew. Neely was flustered and would have babbled if she could have spoken at all, which she couldn’t She bit her lower lip and nodded instead.

  The woman, wearing a severe brown dress, pearls, and a name tag that identified her as Mrs. Baxter, an employee of the museum, smiled, showing large grayish teeth that arched high into mauve-colored gums. “This tapestry is close to two centuries old, you know. We’ve taken great pains to preserve it.”

  Neely finally found a fragment of her voice. “It’s—it’s—”

  “It’s quite horrible,”
said Mrs. Baxter cheerfully. “But the weaving itself reveals an almost supernatural talent, don’t you think?” She paused, studying the ominous work of art solemnly. “One would almost believe in vampires, when looking upon such a piece.”

  “Almost,” Neely agreed, shaken. She knew from Aidan’s journals that it had been Valerian who had transformed Maeve from a woman to a vampire, and that Maeve had wanted to be changed. Still, it was jarring to see a near-perfect rendering of the actual event, as if the moment were frozen in time, existing, always, as an unutterably tragic truth.

  It was knowing that the art depicted a very real event—that the travesty had happened before and would happen again, no doubt—that nearly crushed Neely’s spirit on the spot.

  She made her way out into the museum lobby, fearing she would either vomit or faint, her program rolled tightly in one sweaty hand, and found a fountain. After several sips of tepid water, she felt a little better and, by means of grim resolve, set out to find Willy-Nilly’s.

  She had to keep functioning, stay in touch with the ordinary world, give herself time to assimilate facts she had been taught since infancy to regard as fables.

  A blizzard greeted her at the threshold of the museum’s outer door, and Neely was actually grateful for its biting chill. She drew the shocking cold into her lungs and was a bit less light-headed.

  There were no cabs, but fortunately the combination club and restaurant she sought was only a few blocks away. By the time Neely rushed down a set of stone steps to a basement establishment swelling with music, she was numb.

  Wendy was there, however, smiling her brilliant smile, her long auburn hair gleaming under the fluorescent lights. Wearing a funky black chiffon dress, a flowered vest, and high-top shoes from some thrift store, she looked delightfully theatrical.

  They embraced, and Wendy’s dark blue eyes shone as she introduced her tall, handsome actor-student-bartender boyfriend, Jason Wilkins.