The Black Rose Chronicles Page 39

  “Rest easy,” she said gently, taking his upper arms in her hands. “And when you awaken, please seek us out.” Tobias nodded, looking out of his young face with ancient eyes, and then he disappeared.

  “Who would have thought they’d abandon us like this?” Valerian demanded when they were alone. “Great Zeus, Maeve—where do we begin?”

  Again Maeve thought of Calder, and of Aidan and Neely, and her beloved housekeeper, Mrs. Fullywub. All their lives depended upon her, and upon Valerian, and Maeve would perish herself before she let any harm come to them.

  “At the beginning, of course,” she said with a bright carelessness she most certainly did not feel. “We must find Lisette and confront her.”

  Valerian was pacing back and forth in a patch of moonlit heather. He had been the instigator of the campaign against the queen, and now he was plainly terrified.

  Which only went to prove that he was as smart as Maeve had always believed him to be.

  “I last saw her the night before Aidan and Neely were married,” he said.

  Maeve was stunned; Valerian had not mentioned that encounter with Aidan, let alone with Lisette. “What?”

  He stopped his pacing and tilted his magnificent head back, silhouetted against the bright, enormous moon. “I wanted to see Aidan once more, to say good-bye to him, so to speak, though of course he didn’t know I was there. He was sleeping.” Valerian’s voice became choked and raspy. “He was so beautiful, and I loved him so much. And then she appeared—Lisette, I mean. She planned to make Aidan into a vampire all over again.”

  Maeve hugged herself, seeing the horrible vision in her mind’s eye. Such an occurrence would have utterly destroyed Aidan—he would almost certainly have laid himself down in some open place and waited for the sun to rise and devour him.

  “Lisette was strong,” Valerian went on, his voice still sounding strangled, when Maeve didn’t speak. “I tried to fight her, but she overcame me easily.”

  “What happened?” Maeve managed to ask after a long silence had stretched between them.

  Valerian was weeping quietly at the memory, and Maeve wanted to touch him, to offer some small comfort, but she restrained herself. “She was about to change Aidan, Lisette was. I cannot describe the agony I felt watching that, unable to help him.

  “Go on,” Maeve urged.

  “It seems that all mortals do indeed have an angel assigned to them,” he finally said, after regaining his composure, “though I must say I wondered where the creature was when Lisette met Aidan the first time and changed him against his will.”

  “You saw an angel?”

  Valerian nodded. “Yes—it was a spectacular being, full of light and power. Lisette fled in terror.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Maeve demanded, though her tone was still quiet and even.

  “You were upset about Aidan’s transformation as it was. Since the knowledge wouldn’t have done you any good, I decided to make the accounting another time, when you were stronger.”

  Maeve turned her back to Valerian, arms folded, and stood regarding the gigantic moon for some minutes, dealing with a riot of conflicting thoughts and emotions. Finally she faced him again. “Aidan is gone from me,” she said. “And the important thing is that he is safe, for the time being at least, and happy. The only point that should concern you and me is that Lisette has regained her strength, and is perhaps more powerful than ever because of her madness.”

  “Together,” Valerian said, with a brazen confidence that was typical of him, “we have the power to destroy Lisette.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Maeve reflected. Lisette’s age made her a formidable enemy, for with the passing of centuries came unpredictable abilities, traits that were not common to all vampires, but often wholly unique. It was rumored that one member of the Brotherhood, for instance, could walk freely in the light of day, and Maeve had heard of vampires who did not need to drink blood, and even of some who could travel between dimensions as well as centuries. The possibilities were disturbingly infinite.

  Valerian was in full control of his dignity again. “What choice do we have,” he reasoned, “but to try?”

  “None,” Maeve answered. “Do you know where Lisette is?”

  He shook his head. “Others have told me that she strikes at random, and that she is able to veil herself from ordinary vampires.”

  “But we are not ordinary vampires,” Maeve reminded him.

  Valerian smiled. “No, my darling, we are not.” He paused, and his countenance darkened again. “Still, we have expended considerable energy this night. In my opinion, it would be unwise to face Lisette now, though we might certainly seek her out.”

  Maeve nodded in agreement. “We will concentrate on her majesty, then,” she said with quiet sarcasm, “and see where our thoughts take us.”

  “Yes,” Valerian said. “But remember—be cautious. This is no time to show off.”

  Maeve gave the other vampire a wry look even as she raised her hands high and interlocked her fingers. “You’re a fine one to lecture me about showing off,” she said, but as she vanished, she was glad to know Valerian was with her.

  26

  Valerian assembled himself a split second before Maeve managed the same feat, and he immediately uttered a curse.

  Maeve looked around anxiously, getting her bearings. They were in the common room of an elite boy’s school, she soon realized, tucked away in the quiet of the English countryside. One of the instructors, recently human but now a walking corpse, with bluish-gray skin and protruding eyes, came snarling from the shadows.

  Flanking him were two smaller vampires, with fangs bared. Before their making, they had been ordinary schoolboys.

  “Children,” Maeve whispered in stunned despair. “Valerian, she’s changed mere children.”

  “Have a care. Lisette may still be here somewhere,” Valerian replied in a taut voice, “and there could well be other creatures like these prowling about.” He stopped, strengthening his resolve, and then went on. “We’ll have to destroy them, Maeve.”

  “I know that,” she murmured as the erstwhile teacher and his now-vicious pupils encircled them.

  “Great Zeus,” Valerian muttered, “they’re too stupid to know they’re no match for us. Look at them—circling like sharks around a shipwreck.”

  Maeve shuddered. She had not anticipated having to kill child-vampires, and the prospect filled her with grief and fury. When she could, she would settle this grim debt with Lisette, but in the meantime there could be no question of her duty.

  The schoolmaster lunged at Valerian with an earsplitting, unearthly shriek, and Valerian’s responding shout of anger was far more terrifying.

  “Bloody wretch!” he cried, after flinging the lesser creature hard against the nearest wall.

  The two boys were staring hungrily at Maeve and making dreadful, slavering sounds. She felt no pity for these monsters, for they were beyond such tender emotions now, but she did despair for the parents and siblings who had loved them. They would never know, of course, what had really happened on this horrible night.

  Valerian had, by this time, overcome his attacker and forced him down onto the cluttered surface of an antique mahogany desk, one hand clamped around the beast’s throat. With another swearword, this one only murmured, he raised a sterling letter opener and plunged it into the other vampire’s heart.

  “Handy item, that,” Valerian remarked, jerking the blade out of the creature’s chest wall again and staring at it. It was bloody. “Do you suppose it’s the equivalent of a silver bullet?”

  Maeve had her hands full, what with two agile boy-fiends hurling themselves at her, and she snapped, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Valerian, will you stop babbling about the letter opener and help me?”

  “Since heaven does nothing for my sake,” Valerian replied, catching one of Maeve’s assailants by the back of his collar and curving one arm around to stab him, all in a single swift motion, �
�I will do nothing for heaven’s.” Maeve was distracted, though only for a moment, but in that time the other creature was upon her, biting and clawing, fierce as a winter-starved wolf. She flung him off and, since Valerian did not offer the sleek blade he’d used on the others, grabbed a decorative sword from its place on the wall and pinioned her mindless enemy in one ferocious thrust.

  The corpse was now truly dead. Maeve withdrew the sword and watched as the thing’s knees folded, and it toppled to the floor.

  “We’d better see if there are others,” Valerian said gently, putting an arm around her shoulders and turning her away from the scene. As they left the common room, he warned, “Remember—be on your guard, my friend. Lisette may still be about, veiling herself from our awareness.”

  There were no more victims, as it happened. Apparently the carnage of that night had been meant as a message—perhaps even a challenge.

  Maeve and Valerian proceeded carefully through the school, room by room. They found a great many sleeping boys, warm and blessedly human, and several teachers, also unharmed. There was no sign of Lisette, but that meant nothing; she was the most treacherous of creatures and might loom up before them at any moment.

  Eventually they returned to the common room where they collected the bodies of the vampires they’d destroyed earlier. The things were already shriveling, their flesh crumbling to dry, gray dust; the morning sun would reduce them to fine grains that would blow away in the first brisk wind.

  “How will their disappearances be explained?” Maeve asked when she and Valerian had laid the unholy and now harmless trio out on the green grass bordering a rose garden.

  Valerian shrugged. “Who cares?” he asked. “Let them broadcast the horror on every television and radio station in the world. Let the local police wonder. Such things make no difference to us.”

  “I care,” Maeve insisted, nodding toward the school buildings. “One of those children is bound to stumble across these things and be marked forever by the discovery.”

  The great vampire lifted one eyebrow. “There it is again,” he said in a tone of playful warning, “that Aidan-like tendency to worry too much about the affairs of mortals.”

  “Valerian, these are children we’re discussing here. Surely even you have some shred of compassion for them.”

  He affected one of his sighs. “Very well—if we bum them, there’ll be no trace of their bodies or clothes by sunrise. Wait here.”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere,” Maeve said peevishly. It had been a hellish night for her, and she wanted only to find a safe lair somewhere near Calder and sleep.

  Valerian entered the nearest building through a pair of French doors, returning momentarily with lighter fluid and matches. With uncanny calm, he doused the horrid evidence of Lisette’s rampage and lit the dead creatures afire.

  Within seconds there was nothing left of the vampires themselves or of their clothes, except for a few curling ashes. Neither the police nor the teaching staff nor the children would be able to discern that bodies had been burned here.

  Maeve turned away, scanning the star-spangled sky, trying to take comfort from its constancy and beauty but instead feeling weary, and sick at heart over the events of that night. At last Maeve spoke aloud, but she was not addressing Valerian. “Where are you, Lisette?” she whispered, her voice taut with rage. “Show yourself.” There was a great rustling sound, like the wings of many enormous birds, and a sudden, high wind scattered the last few ashes over the grass and the flower beds.

  “You might have consulted me,” Valerian hissed angrily through the din, “before you issued a challenge!” Lisette was at first a swirling blackness before them, an unreasoning hurricane of fury, bending the rosebushes close to the ground with her force. Then she solidified into a dark angel, at once breathtakingly beautiful and horribly unnatural. Her long auburn hair moved softly, as the furious wind died down, and she looked at Maeve with glittering, curious eyes.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, holding herself with all the regality befitting her position as the oldest and most powerful female vampire on earth. “You resemble Aidan Tremayne.”

  What Maeve felt was not fear, exactly, but an excited sort of awareness. She was an equal to this creature, she sensed that, but at the same time she must be alert to every nuance, every shift of Lisette’s body and mind.

  “I am—or was—his twin sister,” Maeve allowed. She took a step toward Lisette, and Valerian grasped her arm, tried in vain to pull her back.

  Lisette laughed, and the sound was high and musical and utterly chilling. “Do you imagine that you can protect her from me, Valerian?” she demanded. “When last we met, at Aidan’s bedside, I dealt with you as easily as one of these schoolboys.” She gestured toward the still-dark and silent buildings. “Or have you acquired an angel to guard you, like Aidan?”

  Maeve interceded before Valerian could reply, certain that he would have chosen brash and foolish words to do so. “I don’t need Valerian or anyone else to look after me,” she said. She narrowed her eyes, studying the vampire queen’s perfect features and cloud-white skin. “I think I know the answer to this question, Lisette,” she said, “but I’m going to ask it anyway. Did you change this schoolmaster and the two students?”

  Lisette laughed again, and the sound must have soured the sweet dreams of a hundred boys, turning them to nightmares. “Yes,” she said defiantly after a brief interval of studying Maeve, sizing her up. “I made the others, too.”

  “Why?” Maeve wanted to know. “It makes no sense.” Suddenly a storm raged around Lisette again, a tempest of her own making. “Do not try my patience!” she shouted. “I am the queen of all blood-drinkers, and I answer to no one, mortal or immortal!”

  Maeve took another step forward. “You must stop this,” she said, even though she knew there was no hope of persuading this most daunting of all vampires to show mercy. “The warlocks have threatened open warfare on all of the dark kingdom if you persist in creating these unreasoning creatures, and it is said that Nemesis will unleash his armies of angels at any moment.”

  For the merest flicker of an instant, Lisette looked uncertain, even afraid. Then she drew herself up and lifted her arms from her sides, and the breeze caught her voluminous black sleeves and made them look like wings.

  “Stop me if you can,” she said. She looked Maeve up and down with mad, beautiful eyes. “I look forward to the challenge.”

  With that, the legendary Lisette glanced toward the lightening sky, laughed again, and vanished into nothingness.

  Valerian spat an exclamation, gripped Maeve by the arms, and turned her to face him. “Do you know how lucky you are that she didn’t bind you to the ground and leave you to broil in the light of tomorrow’s sun?” he rasped. “How could you be so stupid, so rash?”

  Maeve drew back out of the other vampire’s grasp, straightening her sleeves. “She tried,” she said. “She tried to overcome me—I felt it—and I resisted her.” For a long moment Valerian searched Maeve’s face, his own expression solemn. Then, finally, he smiled and said, “I was right. You are fated to be the new queen.” Maeve was in no mood for Valerian’s self-congratulations and I-told-you-so’s. She knew the full extent of the ordeal she faced now, for she had felt the first tentative tugs of Lisette’s power, and she was afraid.

  “I must go—I will need to feed and fortify myself before I do battle with the likes of Lisette,” she said.

  Valerian clasped her hands and looked deeply into her eyes. “We’re all depending on you, Maeve,” he said hoarsely. “And there is little time to lose.”

  Maeve only nodded. Then, after one last sad glance at the school buildings, she interlocked her fingers over her head and vanished.

  She gathered herself into solid form briefly in London’s Fleet Street, just long enough to purloin three newly published medical textbooks and a selection of drug samples from a surgeon’s office.

  She ended her journey in the wine cellar beneath Ca
lder’s family home in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, with the booty held close in her arms. After a few minutes of searching, she found a long-forgotten hidden passageway that probably dated back to the American Revolution and took refuge there.

  The place was cold and dank, populated by spiders and skittering mice, but it would shelter Maeve from the coming sunrise and the bumbling discoveries of mortals, and it was close to Calder. Close enough, in fact, that she could feel the strong, steady beat of his heart in her own spirit. She set her treasures on top of an old whisky barrel and stretched out on the floor to let the vampire sleep overtake her.

  At sunset Maeve awakened immediately, and she knew Calder was there, somewhere in the reaches of the great house towering above her, but she did not go to him straight away. First, she went to one of the scores of field hospitals near a battleground and fed, taking nourishment from dying soldiers and giving comfort and ecstasy in return.

  She stopped to reclaim the medical books and drug samples before centering her thoughts on Calder and transporting herself to his presence.

  He was standing at one of the windows in his spacious bedroom, the lace curtains billowing on either side of him as a rain-scented breeze blew in. While Maeve watched him, marveling at the perfection and strength of his strong arms, his powerful legs, and broad shoulders, she felt again that most treacherous of emotions—unconditional, unreasoning love.

  “Calder.” Even his name was sweet on her tongue, like the chocolates her father’s solicitor had often brought when visiting her, as a human child, in that faraway convent.

  He turned, his expression bleak, and silently held his arms out to her. It was an entreaty, as well as an offer of comfort, of sanctuary.

  She thrust the things she carried into a leather chair and moved into Calder’s embrace.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “I had pushed my emotions away,” Calder answered, his breath brushing her temple, “into the farthest recesses of my soul, and you made me face them again. You brought them back, Maeve, and some of them hurt like hell.”