The Black Rose Chronicles Read online

  Valerian had no time to consider them further, however, for dawn was imminent and he could already feel its molten fingers groping for him and for Maeve. He swept her up into his arms and hastened into the blackest regions of the crypt, found a chamber with a door, and dodged inside.

  The sleep took him before he could set Maeve down, or even assess their surroundings—all Valerian knew, as he lost consciousness, was that he had found a place where the light would not penetrate.

  Maeve awakened on a cold stone floor scattered with bones and crumbling mortar from the ancient walls, her head in Valerian’s lap. The wound to her neck, inflicted by a warlock during the battle the preceding night, had already begun to heal, but she was weak with the need for blood.

  Valerian woke up just as she was raising herself from his thighs. “So,” he said and shrugged. “We shall live to hunt another night. Frankly I wasn’t entirely sure the warlocks wouldn’t come back while we were sleeping, armed with stakes and mallets.”

  Maeve’s head spun; she wondered if she had the strength to hunt. “Think, Valerian,” she said, somewhat peevish in her discomfort. “They want us to carry the message to the Brotherhood. Destroying us now would have defeated their purpose.”

  The magnificent vampire thrust himself to his feet and pulled a shaky Maeve after him. “We are not the only blood-drinkers who could spread the word,” he pointed out with weary reason. “Come, let’s find nourishment before we perish.”

  Fortunately for both Maeve and Valerian, All Souls’ Cathedral was in an area of London that had degenerated into crowded squalor, teeming with small-time hoods, drug dealers, and pimps.

  Spotting a smarmy-looking man in a cheap striped suit, leaning against a lamppost, Maeve raised the collar of her cloak higher, in order to hide the mark on her neck, and elbowed Valerian aside.

  “You’re on your own,” she said. “This one is mine.” Valerian shuddered. “Yuck,” he said.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Maeve retorted and sashayed toward the pimp. She saw, in the recesses of the man’s mind, that he made a habit of picking up scared runaways in bus and subway stations, winning their confidence and then introducing them to prostitution.

  As she approached, she felt an inexplicable need to see Calder Holbrook again; he was proof that decency and honor still existed in the world.

  For now, however, Maeve had to play a part, for if she did not feed, she would perish.

  She formed her mouth into a saucy smile, and the pimp straightened and looked her over with a practiced eye.

  “You ain’t no workin’ girl,” he said in a thick cockney accent.

  Maeve laid her hands on his shoulders—he was wearing a worn drum major’s coat, burgundy velvet with gold piping—and looked deeply into his eyes, his mind, his spirit. By the mental equivalent of flipping a switch, she shut down his brain.

  He followed her mutely into the nearest alleyway, and there Maeve drank. For the first time since her making, she was tempted to take her victim beyond the point of death, and the realization worried her. While she felt none of her brother Aidan’s sentimentality toward humankind—indeed, she was contemptuous of such attitudes—Maeve was not vicious; she took blood only to sustain her powers and remain immortal.

  Restored and strengthened, Maeve left the procurer sitting in the alleyway, vacant and staring, with the seed of a moral awakening sprouting in his brain. Come the bright light of morning, this particular deviant would forsake the life of sin, move in with his poor mother in Manchester, and spend the rest of his days clerking in a series of small shops.

  Valerian was waiting impatiently on the sidewalk when she reached it, pacing back and forth, his cape flowing behind him. His color was high, which meant that he, too, had fed.

  “It’s about time you came back,” he snapped, stopping in the center of the walk, arms folded, glaring down at Maeve. He was, typically, completely unaware of what a spectacle he made, with his imposing size, his cape, and his haughty manner. Nor did he seem aware of the flow of pedestrian traffic moving around him.

  “You shouldn’t have waited,” Maeve said, refusing to be intimidated. Valerian might be able to dominate other vampires, but she was different.

  “We have to speak to the Brotherhood,” he told her huffily. “Or has it slipped your mind that the warlocks are threatening to make war on all of us?”

  “Of course it hasn’t,” Maeve replied pleasantly but in a firm tone. “It’s just that there is something else I want to do first.” She glanced at the starry sky with its tracings of clouds, for this was the vampire’s way of measuring time. “I’ll meet you at the stone monument where Aidan disappeared—two hours before sunrise.”

  “Maeve—” Valerian protested.

  She did not give him time to finish speaking before she interlocked her fingers above her head and vanished, for there was a sort of sustenance her spirit needed as badly as her body needed the blood of mortals.

  Maeve returned to the nineteenth century, her favorite for all its trials and shortcomings, and found herself on the steps of a summerhouse behind the Holbrook mansion in Philadelphia. There was a soft, warm rain falling, and Calder was standing with his back to her, his hands gripping the rail that encompassed the open structure.

  He sensed her presence immediately, although Maeve had not made even the intimation of a sound, and whirled to face her.

  He said her name as though it were holy, and in that moment Maeve did what she had sworn she would never do. She lost her heart to a mortal.

  The realization left her stricken, for, even now, in the face of a love she knew was unceasing and eternal, she did not want to become human again, as Aidan had done for his beloved Neely.

  For Maeve, then, this grandest and most powerful of all emotions was a sentence to loneliness without end. Overcome, she turned, there on the steps that glimmered with rain, and would have vanished if Calder had not grasped her shoulders from behind.

  “Don’t go,” he pleaded hoarsely. “Please—stay. Just for a few minutes—just long enough to tell me who you are.”

  She faced him then, for she hadn’t the heart to disappear from his embrace, and looked up at him, knowing that all her suffering was visible in her eyes. “Who do you think I am, Calder Holbrook?” she asked gently.

  He had stepped out from under the summerhouse roof, and the rain wet his dark hair and turned his fine linen shirt transparent against his skin. “An illusion? An angel? Or perhaps a beautiful devil?” he mused gruffly. “I don’t know, God help me. Nothing in my medical training, or in all my life before that, could have prepared me for this. All I know is that I think of you, and nothing and no one else, through every day and every night.” He paused, pushed back his dripping hair in a gesture that was touchingly boyish, and then whispered, “Tell me what is happening here, before I go mad. I beg of you—help me understand.”

  She wanted to weep. The truth was a crushing burden, and she knew he would not believe her. As a doctor, a man of science, Calder would find even the existence of blood-drinkers impossible to accept.

  Nevertheless, she could not deny him an answer, or anything else for that matter, because he was too precious to her. “I am a vampire,” she said, her voice soft but matter-of-fact.

  Calder stared at her, and she saw that the color had drained from his strong face. “A drinker of blood?” he marveled, and the words were hardly more than bursts of breath.

  Maeve nodded, while parts of her spirit trembled and collapsed beneath the weight of Calder’s horror. “Vampires are immortal,” she explained, all the while wishing she’d never let herself begin to care for a human being. “Without blood, however, we would perish in a way far more terrible than even you, with all your knowledge of battlefields, could ever imagine. We must avoid daylight at all costs, and we have special powers—the ability to travel through time, for instance.”

  Calder seemed unaware of the rain, which was coming down much harder now. “What do you mean, yo
u can travel through time?”

  She felt a stirring of hope because Calder had not bolted in revulsion or terror, but she was far too wise to let herself think he believed her. He was probably humoring her, as he might a mad person.

  Only then did it strike Maeve that Calder’s mind was closed to her; she could not divine his thoughts or feelings.

  “I just came from the late twentieth century,” she said, amazed, prodding gently with her thoughts and meeting with an impenetrable block.

  To her surprise, Calder clasped her hand, led her into the summerhouse, and sat her down on a wrought-iron bench tucked into the cool folds of shadows. “Tell me—what sort of world exists—in that other place and time, I mean? Do they still make war? What advances have been made in medicine?”

  For a long moment Maeve was too taken aback by his ready belief to speak. Then she whispered, “You don’t think I’m insane or a liar?”

  “You are not a mortal woman,” Calder answered. “That much was clear from the moment I first saw you.” He was wearing the pendant she’d given him during their last encounter, and he held it out for her to see. “It was only this medal, solid proof of your existence, that kept me from having myself admitted to the nearest asylum,” he said. “Now—please—tell me about medicine and warfare in your century.”

  Maeve checked the sky, only too aware of her commitment to meet Valerian at the stone monument in the English countryside. When she gazed into Calder’s eyes again, however, she wondered if she would ever be able to look away. “There have been tremendous advances in medicine—they can cure or control a lot of diseases that are fatal in your time. It is possible to immunize children against measles and diphtheria and many of the other illnesses that almost always end in death here. Surgeons are performing successful organ transplants there, and the infant mortality rate is a fraction of yours.

  “War is very much a part of the modern world unfortunately. There are weapons capable of destroying the earth, and while the largest and most powerful nations are trying hard to get along, there are a number of small, fanatical factions that are not so willing to cooperate.”

  Calder absorbed her words for a long interval, one of his hands clasping hers. “Can you take me there?” he asked, finally, catching Maeve off guard with the last question she would have expected him to ask.

  She shook her head regretfully. “Mortals cannot travel through time as yet, though you do have the propensity for it locked away somewhere in your brain. It is an ability that must evolve over many, many generations.” He looked so disappointed that Maeve’s heart ached, but a moment later his countenance brightened again. “Can you bring me things from the future, Maeve—like medicine, or books about surgery and diagnosis?” Maeve considered, knowing she should leave this man’s side, once and for all, and never return and, at the same time, feeling infinitely grateful for an excuse to see him again. “I suppose there would be no harm in that. There’s just one thing, however—it isn’t wise to change the course of history, because one can never predict all the ramifications of even the simplest act. You could use the things you discover in twentieth-century books, but you must not teach them to others.” She stood, unable to ignore the hour any longer, and Calder rose with her. She put her hands on the warm, supple flesh of his face. “I cannot stay any longer—there are matters that must be attended to.”

  “Will you be back?”

  Maeve felt a pang, for she could not discern whether he wanted to see her again because he cared for her just a little, or because he wanted the books and wonder drugs she could bring from the future. “Yes,” she said. “If I can return, I will.”

  Calder bent his head then and touched Maeve’s lips with his own, and as brief and innocent as it was, the contact rocked her to the very center of her being.

  Her gaze flew to his, searching for the revulsion she so dreaded, seeking Calder’s horrified reaction to kissing a cold mouth. Instead of those things, however, she saw a certain reverence, unmasked affection, and, yes, a disturbing sort of curiosity—that of a scientist studying a unique specimen.

  Filled with sadness and bliss, she reached up and touched his lips with three fingers.

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  One moment Maeve was there, standing before him, pale and ethereally beautiful in the darkness, and the next she was gone.

  Calder felt a bleakness unequaled in his memory; he wanted to be with Maeve, now and forever, but that was clearly impossible. He would wait, he told himself, as patiently as he could, and one night soon she would return to him.

  He stood in the rain for a long time, remembering. Then he dropped the pendant down inside his wet shirt, to hide it from the curious gazes of his father and half brother in the same way he had always hidden his heart from the world.

  Until Maeve.

  The pattering shower turned to a downpour, but still Calder remained where he was, marveling, telling himself that Maeve could not exist, could not be what he knew she was. An immortal.

  Finally Calder broke his stunned inertia and strode toward the house, where he was met by Prudence, the family’s longtime housekeeper.

  “Lord have mercy,” that good woman fussed, seeing Calder’s wet clothes and distracted expression. “I thought you had better sense than to be runnin’ around in a cold rain! You want to die of the pneumonia, you foolish chile?”

  Calder paid no attention to Prudence’s ire, for the affection between them was old and deep. “Send Perkins around for the carriage,” he said, entering the big kitchen and heading straight for the rear stairway. “Tell him we’re going to the Army hospital on Union Street.” Prudence followed her erstwhile charge as far as the newel post, her sizable body quivering with disapproval. The glow of the gaslights flickered over her beautiful coffee-colored skin, and her jaw was set at a stubborn angle. “You ain’t goin’ to no hospital at this hour,” she ranted. “I swear this war of Mr. Lincoln’s done somethin’ to your brain….”

  The war had “done something” to Calder’s brain, all right, and it had nearly broken his spirit and his physical strength in the bargain. Now, however, knowing there was a future, a time when miracles would occur in the realm of medical science, gave him new hope.

  “Tell Perkins to bring along a slicker,” he called back over one shoulder as he gained the upper hallway. “It might be a long night, and this rain isn’t likely to let up.”

  “Mr. Calder!” Prudence bellowed after him. “You get back here—you hear me? You ain’t well!”

  Calder opened the door to his room, already stripping off his wet shirt when he crossed the threshold, thinking to himself that, contrary to Prudence’s assessment, he was feeling better than he had in years.

  25

  Maeve passed the following day not in her favorite lair beneath the London house, as usual, but in a dusty crevice behind the foundation of the Union Hospital. She’d known Calder was going there after their meeting in the summerhouse, and she had wanted to be near him.

  Normally Maeve’s slumber was untroubled by dreams, be they pleasant or unpleasant, but that time was different. The wards and even the passages of the old hospital were filled with the wounded and the dying. They were only boys, these soldiers, most of them so young that they’d never been away from home at all before marching off to battle.

  Maeve did not hear their screams of physical pain, for suffering, however intense, is a temporal thing, meaning little in the face of eternity. No, it was their soul-cries Maeve discerned, the agonized protests of their spirits.

  When she awakened at sunset, she was instantly aware of her mistake in coming to that particular place. With so many mortals in torment, it was only logical that the premises would be crawling with angels.

  A surge of terror moved through Maeve as she raised herself, dusted off her clothes, and pressed her back against the wall of the foundation. What had possessed her to make such a dangerous error in judgment?

  She listened, and waited. Now, with all
her senses on the alert, she could feel the presences of companion angels, hundreds of them. Fortunately—and this fact, she thought, might well save her from certain destruction—they were not warriors, these winged messengers from heaven, but comforters. Their full attention was fixed on their charges.

  For all of that, Maeve was trembling when she closed her eyes and willed herself away from that hospital and far into the future, where other challenges awaited her.

  She fed on a mean drunk, who’d been on his way home from the pub with every intention of beating his wife for his own sins, as well as a bevy of imagined infidelities, and left him whimpering on a heap of trash.

  Maeve found Valerian at the circle of stones, sitting patiently on a fallen pillar and blowing a haunting, airy tune on a small pipe.

  “Well, then,” the great vampire said with good-natured sarcasm, “you have at last decided to honor me with an appearance.” He bowed deeply. “Welcome.”

  Maeve was still agitated by the foolish carelessness she had exhibited back in Calder’s Pennsylvania. She’d never made such a mistake before, since the night of her making.

  Valerian climbed gracefully down from his perch and approached. For the first time since her arrival, Maeve noticed that he was dressed as a seventeenth-century gentleman. He wore a waistcoat of the finest silk, along with kid-skin breeches, leggings, and buckle-shoes. His hair was tied back with a dark ribbon and lightly powdered.

  “Going to a costume party?” Maeve asked with the merest hint of disdain in her voice.

  Valerian smiled indulgently, using only one side of his sensual mouth, and dropped the musical pipe into a pocket of his coat. “I was indeed attending a festivity, of sorts, but since this is the way the French aristocracy always dressed during those glorious pre-Revolutionary days, I did not stand out from the other guests.”