The Black Rose Chronicles Read online

  “Tell me,” Maeve ordered.

  Hatred flashed in Benecia’s cornflower-blue eyes, with their thick, fringelike lashes. She answered in a respectful tone, though her words were flip.

  “Of course we didn’t make him ourselves, Auntie Maeve,” she said with acid goodwill. “We only drink from mortals, we don’t change them.”

  The corpse had stopped scrambling after Canaan to stare at Maeve, round-eyed and slavering. She suppressed a shudder.

  “Then where did he come from?” she insisted.

  “We told you,” wailed Canaan, stamping one impossibly small, velvet-slippered foot. “We found him. He was wandering outside All Souls’ Cathedral in London.”

  “Were there others like him?” Maeve asked distractedly. With the formidable power of her mind, she reached into the skull of the pitiful creature before her and found no consciousness there, no vestige of a mortal soul.

  Benecia shrugged, then bustled to put the tattered fragments of humanity Charlie had disturbed back into their chairs. “If there are more, we didn’t see them.”

  Canaan was glaring at Maeve, her small arms folded across the ruffled bodice of her pink taffeta dress. “Mummy’s still hunting, if you wished to see her.”

  “Get me a sharp stick,” Maeve ordered, drawing the hapless, unresisting creature toward her by the strength of her thoughts.

  “You’re going to stake him?” Benecia and Canaan cried in eerie unison, their voices ringing with mingled horror and eager anticipation.

  “Just do as I tell you,” Maeve snapped, mentally pressing poor Charlie to the rocky ground.

  Canaan brought a piece of half-rotted wood that had probably served as a marker for one of the graves, in some long-ago time.

  Maeve centered the stake over the beast’s cold chest with one hand and took up a rock with the other. Destroying the other creature had been relatively easy, if horrible, but this instance proved more difficult. When she pounded the wooden point past skin and tissue and bone, however atrophied, the thing shrieked in rage and pain. Maeve felt sick as she struck wood and stone together, over and over, until the screaming ceased and the monster was truly dead.

  When she looked up from her task, Benecia and Canaan were looking on, faces white as moonglow, eyes gleaming with pleasure. They reminded Maeve of wolves held at bay by firelight, yearning to spring, to tear and plunder with sharp teeth.

  “Be gone!” Maeve cried in disgust, trembling slightly as she rose to her feet. She did not wish to be other than what she was, a practicing vampire, even after what she had just experienced, but she did long for a confidante, a mate, a kindred spirit who would lessen the horror.

  Yet again, her thoughts strayed to Calder Holbrook, the American doctor. There was something in him, some combination of talents and foibles, that grasped at her heart and would not let go.

  Instead of seeking him, however, Maeve focused her attention on Valerian, leaving Charlie’s still body to the ravenous hunger of the dawn.

  She found her erstwhile mentor in a harem, clad only in a loincloth and a blue silk turban trimmed in pearls and sporting a magnificent emerald for a clasp. The scantily clad dancing girls surrounding Valerian scattered with little cries when Maeve took shape in their midst.

  “I might have known you’d be someplace like this,” Maeve huffed, looking around her in contempt while Valerian raised himself gracefully to his feet and dismissed the dancers with a clap of his hands and a few indulgent, smoky words.

  Valerian chuckled, folding his beautifully sculpted arms over an equally well-shaped chest, and arched one eyebrow. “Are you jealous?” he drawled.

  The very suggestion made Maeve dizzy with fury. “Most certainly not,” she snapped.

  Valerian removed his turban and set it carefully aside, then, with a sweeping gesture of his hands, magically clothed himself in his usual formal garb, cape included. He’d been on a Dracula kick for some time now, and Maeve wished he’d get over it.

  He smiled at her thoughts. “If you’d like,” he said, “I could dress as a sultan. I rather like the way I look in that jeweled turban.”

  Maeve sighed. “You would,” she muttered. “Listen to me, Valerian—I encountered another of those creatures tonight. Benecia and Canaan found it wandering around All Souls’ and brought it to one of their infernal tea parties.”

  Valerian winced. “What reprehensible creatures they are.” A mischievous look shimmered in his eyes. “Have you ever noticed what a tacky lot vampires can be?”

  “I wouldn’t talk if I were you,” Maeve replied, tossing a telling glance toward the discarded turban. She put her hands on her hips to let Valerian know she would countenance no more nonsense. “We must do something,” she said.

  The other vampire spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I seem to remember telling you exactly that,” he said, as if saddened that modern manners had degenerated to a pitiable state.

  “You might well have been wrong in suspecting Lisette,” Maeve insisted. “All the same, the situation bears looking into. Where do you suggest we start?”

  “We?” Valerian echoed, giving the word a rich and resonant tone.

  “Damn you, Valerian, do not try my patience. It has already reached the breaking point!”

  He swept his cloak around her in a patronizing gesture and crooned his answer into her ear. “Relax, darling,” he said. “Valerian will protect you.”

  Maeve was still kicking and struggling when the two of them landed in a tumbling heap on the stone sidewalk outside London’s All Souls’ Cathedral. Maeve quickly discerned that it was the late twentieth century, and her fury at Valerian was tempered with a great sadness rooted in the fact that, in this time and place at least, Calder Holbrook did not exist. Except, perhaps, as a pile of moldering remains as ugly as the guests at Benecia and Canaan’s tea party.

  Valerian got to his feet first and offered a hand to Maeve. She slapped it away and stood under her own power, ignoring the curious glances of the few passers-by abroad at that hour.

  Valerian started after one of the stragglers, in fact, and Maeve was forced to pull him back by his cloak.

  “I haven’t fed,” he complained. It was a wonder to Maeve how he could look and sound imperious even when he whined.

  “You should have thought of that before you squandered half the night playing sultan,” Maeve snapped, dusting off her long dress and hooded velvet cape. She needed sustenance herself, but she could delay it for a while.

  “Come,” Valerian said, suddenly serious, taking her hand. “Let us see what other fiends wander the earth besides ourselves.”

  24

  Maeve was rapidly becoming an obsession.

  Calder thought of her constantly, the woman he knew only by her given name. He wondered who and where and, indeed, what she was, and agonized over the distinct possibility that he would never see her again. Despite years of scientific training and a purely practical turn of mind, he felt certain she was not a mortal woman.

  He fingered the pendant she’d left in his keeping; he wore it around his neck now, as faithfully as small children and elderly women wore religious medals. No, the mysterious Maeve was not an ordinary human, but she had not been born in Calder’s imagination, either, as he had once feared. She was quite real, as real as this talisman she’d given him.

  He stretched in his hammock, which he’d suspended between two birch trees behind the summerhouse on his father’s estate, out of sight of the great house. Hands cupped behind his head, Calder reflected that it would be a mercy if he could just return to his work—the local hospitals were overflowing with wounded soldiers and victims of the current typhoid epidemic—but he had already pushed his normally sturdy body beyond its considerable limits. If he did not rest, he risked physical collapse, a state that would put him completely at his father’s mercy.

  Despite the leaden heat of that summer afternoon, Calder shivered. He would get through his confinement, and that horrific war awaiting
him just beyond the gates of the magnificent house like a sleek and violent beast, simply by living from one moment to the next.

  And perhaps, if he’d done anything right in his life, anything deserving of reward, he would see Maeve again and begin to learn her secrets.

  Maeve looked up at the shadowy spires of the great cathedral with trepidation. It would be morning soon, she had not fed, and just being in that place brought all her fears of divine punishment surging to the fore.

  “Where do we begin?” she asked in an unusually small voice.

  Valerian was silent for a moment, thinking, then replied, “Lisette has to have some place to hide these revolting creations of hers during daylight. Surely they can’t tolerate the sun any more than we can. If I were her, I would keep them in the old tombs beneath the cathedral—there’s a nice irony in that, if she hasn’t gone too mad to notice it.”

  Maeve glanced nervously toward the sky. She’d had a brush with the dawn herself once and wasn’t anxious to repeat the experience. “Let’s hurry,” she said, tugging Valerian toward the nearest entrance to the great church.

  Valerian balked, suddenly tense. “Not so fast,” he rasped. “I sense something. Lisette may be lying in wait for us.”

  Deliberately Maeve calmed herself. Valerian might be right; it would be like Lisette to bait them. Narrowing the blazing light of her consciousness to a pinpoint of concentration, she assessed the general atmosphere; yes, there was danger, but the vampire queen was nowhere about.

  “Something else,” Maeve said thoughtfully. “It’s waiting for us in the tombs.”

  Valerian nodded. “Forewarned is forearmed,” he said and proceeded toward the entrance.

  With a trick of his facile mind, he sprung the lock on the heavy wooden door, shaped from oak trees that had probably towered in some dark northern forest well before his human birth. They entered, hesitated in the shadows, sensing the lurking danger.

  Together the vampires proceeded through passageways and corridors until they found the inner door leading down filthy stone steps to the catacombs. The lock was forged of iron, rusted through, and the key had been lost so long that even the oldest priest would have no recollection of it.

  Again, Valerian maneuvered the mechanism by his own brand of sorcery, but the task was more difficult this time. He was clearly tiring; like Maeve, he had not fed, and as the dawn neared, the deep sleep of all vampires surely tugged at the underside of his consciousness. For all that, he was insufferably bold.

  “Do you think we don’t know you’re there?” he called irritably, his voice echoing through the dark, dank chamber where only the moldering dead and the scurrying rats belonged.

  Maeve braced herself as the door swung open on hinges that shrieked in protest. This was not just one thing lying in wait for them, but many, and the danger was immense. Still, she felt angry challenge, rather than fear, and made ready for any sort of battle.

  “Come,” Valerian snapped. “Show yourselves.”

  Although the enormous chamber was utterly void of light, Maeve saw clearly and knew Valerian did as well, for vampires functioned best in darkness. There was nothing to see, except for crypts and tombs and marble monuments of the sort Benecia and Canaan used for tables at their infamous tea parties.

  The cavernous, dusty place, with its great curtains of spiderwebs, seemed suddenly to echo with tension, and Maeve focused all her being on the powers she’d honed since the night of her making.

  A humming silence throbbed and rushed throughout the chamber, encircling Maeve and Valerian like invisible floodwaters, and in the next instant the attack began.

  Their assailants were not the lumbering, corpselike vampires they’d encountered before, but great, raucous creatures, ravenlike beasts the size of humans.

  Valerian had set himself to fight and began to flail against the things, when Maeve reached out to stop him, touching her fingers lightly to his forearm.

  “Illusions,” she said.

  In that instant the fluttering, noisy onslaught ceased.

  “Of course,” Valerian confirmed in a rather sheepish tone. “Warlocks. How many?”

  Maeve considered briefly. “Ten or twelve.”

  Valerian sighed. “Damn.” He turned away from Maeve, and she pressed her own back to his, preparing for the true battle. “If we end up in hell together,” he went on, “please accept my apology for getting you admitted.”

  A soft, mocking laugh escaped Maeve. “Your apology,” she marveled. “A rare gift indeed. And what a comfort it will be during an eternity of suffering.”

  The warlocks came at them then, from behind tombs and out of crypts, shrieking and clawing and assaulting both Maeve and Valerian with their greatest weapons, their minds.

  Back to back, the two vampires fought for their lives, both well aware that if the warlocks overcame them, they would not leave them to recover on the cool stone floor of the mausoleum. No, if they lost the battle, Valerian and Maeve would be taken to some very public place and left there to smolder in the sun, as a gruesome warning to all other vampires.

  Once, Valerian slipped to his knees—Maeve felt him slide gracefully down the length of her back and thighs—but he fought just as valiantly as a knight defending his queen.

  “We should have fed first!” he sputtered.

  Like her friend, Maeve fought on two fronts; she flailed her arms and kicked mightily, at the same time forming a mental shield to protect her mind from the assault of many others.

  “Yes, yes,” she answered Valerian impatiently. “I know. You told me so!”

  It had been a mistake, shifting even a small part of her concentration from the warlocks to Valerian. One of the enemy got through at that precise moment; Maeve felt a tear in her consciousness, followed by a dizzying sickness.

  In the next instant blunt teeth sank themselves into the side of her neck, and agony flashed from the wound into every part of Maeve’s body.

  “Be ye cursed, Vampire!” one of the would-be slayers shrilled.

  Maeve had not experienced physical pain of this magnitude before, even while mortal, and the force of it stunned her, weakened her knees. She swayed, but felt Valerian surge upward to stand back to back with her again, to virtually support her with his own strength.

  Hold on, he told her mentally.

  In the next moment the attack suddenly ceased, and the abruptness of it was somehow like an added blow. Valerian whirled and took Maeve into his arms, holding her up.

  One of the warlocks came slowly toward them, pushing back the hood of his black cloak to reveal the handsome, ingenuous face that was so typical of his breed.

  “It grows late,” he said with a smile. Neither he nor his companions were human practitioners of the old religion; they, like the vampires, had been born of some ancient curse, some misbegotten magic, and they too were immortal. “Soon the dawn will come.”

  “What is your business with us?” Valerian demanded, his embrace tightening around Maeve.

  The warlock’s dazzling smile intensified, and he spread his arms, in their drapery of black, wide of his body. “We wanted only to get your attention, Vampire—obviously, we could have destroyed you both if we’d wished it so.” He paused, splaying his fingers and touching the tips together in a prayerlike fashion. All in all, he made a disturbing caricature of a holy man, with his reverent stance and flowing robes. “Hold your arguments,” he told Valerian, thus proving that he was perceptive as well as theatrical. “There is no time. Carry our message to the Brotherhood of the Vampyre.” Maeve felt adrift in a deeper darkness than she’d ever known before; she could barely comprehend the warlock’s words and would have fallen if Valerian hadn’t been supporting her.

  “There is a renegade among you,” the creature went on calmly, “the female, Lisette. She makes vampires indiscriminately; mindless, bumbling ghouls who wander the earth murdering children.”

  Maeve could not be sure whether she actually heard Valerian’s reply or only sens
ed it. Dawn was close; the need to sleep was pulling her downward, as was the injury.

  “Since when do you mourn slaughtered humans, Warlock, be they children or the oldest of the old?”

  “Your assessment is quite right—we don’t give the proverbial damn about mortals, except for the amusement they provide. But the Warrior Angel cherishes them, as does his Master. Even now, Nemesis implores the highest courts of heaven to let him wage war on all unnatural creatures, not only vampires, but werewolves and witches and faeries and warlocks—all of us. He’s been waiting centuries—nay, eons—for an excuse to wipe the earth clean of all immortals except his own angels, and your Lisette may well have given it to him!” Valerian was weary, too; Maeve heard it in his voice, felt it in his large frame. “What do you want of us?” he asked.

  “That is simple,” the warlock replied. “Stop the female, Lisette, immediately. If you do not, then our kind will declare war upon yours, in the hope that by destroying every last one of you, we can win mercy from Nemesis. Do not forget, Vampire, that we have an advantage over you—we can venture out into the daylight.”

  A vision entered Maeve’s fevered mind; she saw black-cloaked figures moving through sunshine from one vampire lair to another, while the blood-drinkers lay helpless, systematically driving stakes through their hearts.

  Valerian was undaunted, or at least he appeared so to Maeve. “Do not threaten us,” he retorted. “We are not without superior powers of our own, and if you are wise you will remember that.”

  There was a general rustling, and Maeve fought the darkness even as she saw the first faint tinge of dawn shining beneath the ancient oaken door.

  “They’re gone.” These two words, spoken by Valerian, were the last things Maeve heard before she sank into utter oblivion.

  The warlocks vanished as quickly as they had appeared, for, although their leader had boasted of their ability to move about in the light of day, they were essentially creatures of darkness, like vampires.