The Black Rose Chronicles Read online

  Aidan’s dark blue eyes sparkled more brightly than anything in the firmaments of heaven possibly could have. “Yes,” he agreed. “You, on the other hand, are quite scantily clad.”

  Neely sighed. One nice thing about the imagination—a person could dance on the night wind in an oversize T-shirt without getting cold and give in to a scandalous attraction knowing that, come morning, it would no longer be real.

  “This is wonderful,” she said. “A girl can go her whole life without ever having a dream like this.”

  Aidan said nothing; instead, he drew her closer and bent his mouth to kiss her, and set her very soul to spinning within her like a skater on ice.

  The kiss mended some parts of her that she had not guessed were broken, but shattered others, and Neely wept because she knew she loved Aidan Tremayne, that she would always love him, that this love was hopeless outside of her dream.

  They waltzed along the treetops, up a staircase of stars, all around the moon. There was beautiful music, of course, for this was a celestial production number. The tune was unique, rife with a bittersweet poignancy, and it was still running through Neely’s mind when she awoke with a thumping start, sitting up in the middle of her bed.

  She was gasping for breath, feeling as though she’d been dropped from a great height. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  Neely hugged herself and rocked back and forth on her knees, possessed by a sudden and terrible sense of loss. The miraculous fantasy was evaporating, so she scrambled in the darkness for a pencil and a piece of paper in order to record it. She started to write, but the last of the memory faded, like a final heartbeat.

  She switched on the light, trembling with this new grief, and read what she’d written on the back of her telephone bill. All that was left of her magnificent vision was a single, hastily scrawled word.

  Aidan.

  4

  Aidan slept profoundly all the following day, beyond the reach of dreams and nightmares that trouble mortals. He awakened only a few minutes after sunset and was still assembling his wits when Maeve appeared, resplendent in a flowing white toga.

  She looked around the dark mine shaft, noting its lacery of cobwebs with mild but still obvious disdain. “Your capacity for self-punishment never ceases to amaze me,” she remarked.

  Methodically Aidan dusted the sleeves of his evening coat. He arched one eyebrow as he regarded his sister. Maeve was dressed for some kind of Roman celebration, but not the authentic article; like most vampires, she was forbidden to venture back prior beyond the instant of her death as a human being. He made a tsk-tsk sound and shook his head.

  “On your way to one of those debauched Victorian parties?” he inquired, taking off his coat to shake out the dust, then putting it on again.

  “It isn’t ‘debauched,’” Maeve snapped, her blue eyes fiery. “The Havermails are perfectly nice—”

  “People?” Aidan teased.

  Maeve looked away for a moment. “Vampires,” she said distractedly. “They’re vampires, of course.” Her temper flared anew. “Stop trying to change the subject. You left the ball early last night, Aidan. Where were you?”

  Aidan had a yearning for fresh air, even though he could not actually breathe the wonderful stuff. He pictured himself standing on the snowy ground overhead, and as quickly as that, he was there. Only a moment later Maeve was beside him.

  The woods were quiet, except for the far-off hooting of an owl and the vague murmur of tires passing through slush on Route 7. Clouds hid the moon, and a sort of pale darkness had spread itself over the land.

  “Where were you, Aidan?” Maeve persisted.

  He started toward the house. He would change clothes and feed early that night, he decided, and then play his favorite, futile game by pretending to be a man again. “Assuming that’s any of your business, which it isn’t,” he retorted without stopping, “why in hell do you care?” Maeve stepped in front of him and glared up into his eyes. “You endanger all of us when you consort with humans, Aidan, you know that! If you truly want to throw away your own existence, I guess I’ll just have to endure it, but you have no right to bring risk on the rest of us!”

  Aidan winced, for her words stung. “All right,” he said, feeling exasperated and weary, so unbelievably weary. He was like a guilty husband, hastening to explain a gap in his schedule, and he resented the comparison bitterly. “I left the ball, I came back here, and I settled in my lair to hibernate, like any good beast.”

  Maeve subsided a little and allowed Aidan to pass, rushing to keep up just as she had when they were children. “Valerian said you were dancing with—with that Neely creature.”

  “It was only a mental exercise, a shared fantasy,” Aidan responded. He hated explaining even that much, but it was true that others might be threatened by his fascination with Neely. Too much association with mortals, for purposes other than feeding, of course, served to dilute a vampire’s powers and dull his perceptions. Other fiends, such as Lisette, were frenzied by weakness, like sharks in bloody waters. “You don’t think I’d dare to actually dance with her, do you, to hold her in my arms? A human woman?” They reached the rear of the towering stone house and entered through the mudroom. In the kitchen, which contained almost nothing in the way of food, Maeve stopped her brother again, this time by reaching out and catching hold of his sleeve.

  “Couldn’t you simply put her out of your mind? Surely it isn’t too late!”

  Aidan gazed into his sister’s face for a long time before answering hoarsely, “It was too late at the beginning of time,” he responded. “Leave it alone, Maeve. There is no changing this.”

  “Put her out of your mind,” Maeve pleaded, sounding frantic. “If you must play at romance, choose an immortal!” Tears glimmered in her eyes, and Aidan was touched; he was surprised that she’d retained the ability to weep.

  He gripped Maeve’s upper arms and squeezed gently. “I don’t know what this is,” he told her. “I don’t pretend to understand what’s happening to me. But I know this much—it can’t be avoided. You, Valerian, the others—you must all stay away from me until it’s resolved, one way or the other.”

  “No,” Maeve said. “I cannot abandon you, Aidan—”

  “You must!”

  “I won’t.”

  He hissed a swear word.

  After a long interval of struggle, plainly visible in her expressive eyes, Maeve lifted one hand to touch his face. “Very well. I will do my best to keep my distance for as long as I can,” she promised in a despairing whisper. “But hear this, Aidan, and remember it well: I will be guarding and nurturing my powers from this moment on. He—or she—who does you injury will feel the full force of my vengeance, and I will not trouble myself with mercy.” Aidan felt a mental chill. While his twin fed only on those humans whose souls were already damned, as he did, she did not share his aversion to the life of a vampire. To Maeve, the compulsion to consume human blood was a small price to pay for immortality, the capacity to travel through time and space at will, the heightening of the senses, and the fathomless physical energy.

  “Stay away from Neely,” he warned.

  Maeve drew herself up, seeming to blaze with white fire. “If she brings about your destruction, she will die.”

  Before Aidan could respond, his sister vanished. He was alone in his shell of a kitchen, with its empty cupboards. He leaned against a counter, arms folded, full of despondency and yearning for ordinary pleasures, like the sound and scent of bacon sizzling in a skillet and the embrace of a woman, still warm from sleep.

  What cruel irony it was, he reflected, that mortals never seemed to understand what a glorious gift it was, just to be human. If only they knew how they’d been blessed….

  Washington, D.C.

  Senator Dallas Hargrove left his Georgetown house by a side door, wearing battered jeans, a T-shirt rescued from a bag of rags in the laundry room, sneakers, and a jacket so old that the leather had cracked in places. He pulled the colla
r up around his face and whistled tunelessly as he walked.

  He was good at avoiding the press and other pests, and that night his luck held. He walked until he was some distance from the gracious room where his lovely, fragile wife slept, then hailed a cab.

  The driver didn’t recognize him—Washington was crawling with government types, after all—and drove him to a park at the edge of the city without question.

  “Wait here,” Dallas said. The snow was coming down harder, and not only was the wind picking up speed, but it also had a bite to it.

  The man in the cab shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “This ain’t the best neighborhood in D.C.” Dallas handed over the fare, then flashed a fifty-dollar bill and a vote-getting smile. “Five minutes?”

  The cabbie sighed, snapped up the fifty. “Five minutes,” he agreed. “But that’s all, and I mean it, man.” He rested one arm in the open window of the battered, smoke-belching old cab and tapped the face of his watch with an index finger. “Once that sweep second hand has made five swings past the numbers, I’m out of here.” Dallas nodded, turned, and sprinted away into the park. There were a few derelicts sleeping on and under benches, but the wandering bands of thugs who usually frequented the place had apparently stayed in out of the cold. He walked quickly to the statue of a minor Civil War general mounted on a horse and stood in its long shadow.

  His contact spoke up right away, though as usual Dallas didn’t see more than a vague form. It gave him the creeps; the guy was like a ghost, moving without noise, materializing where he chose.

  “It’s time the Wallace woman was disposed of.”

  Dallas felt a twinge of guilt, even though logic told him Neely deserved whatever she got. She’d violated his trust, after all, sneaking around, going through his files and papers the way she had. Still, she was a pretty, vibrant thing and killing her would be like crushing an exquisite rose just opening to the sunlight. “Look,” he said reasonably, “my friend at the FBI forestalled any problems we might have had. And Ms. Wallace hasn’t made a move since or even tried to hide. She’s living in Connecticut, for God’s sake, helping her brother run a truck stop and motel. I say we leave her alone.”

  “She set out to bring us all down, Senator—you included. Who’s to say she won’t try again?”

  Dallas ground his teeth, caught himself, and forcibly relaxed. He didn’t want to see Neely die, despite the way she’d betrayed him, but he couldn’t stand against these people. If he was foolish enough to try, he would be killed or crippled for his trouble, and then what would happen to Elaine? Who would take care of her if not him?

  Once his beautiful wife had been vital and active, a successful journalist. Now she was confined to a wheelchair, suffering from a progressive muscular disease. Elaine’s prognosis was grim, and he could not abandon her.

  “You know where to find her,” Hargrove said, rubbing his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He had to think about his family, his backers, his constituents. What was one woman compared with so many others?

  Almost five minutes had passed by that time, and Dallas was painfully conscious of the taxi driver’s promise to leave when that small amount of time had elapsed. He handed over a packet of documents, and the man in the shadows reciprocated with a thick envelope.

  It was all for Elaine, the senator told himself as he turned and hurried toward the curb. The cab was already moving when he landed inside.

  Aidan washed, groomed his hair, and put on jeans and an Irish cable-knit sweater. He would hunt early, get the abominable task out of the way, and spend the evening next to the fire, working on his journal.

  He guarded his thoughts carefully, for to think of Neely too intensely would be to summon her to his side. That would be embarrassing for him because he would have to come up with an explanation, and for Neely because she would suddenly find herself in his home with no memory of traveling there.

  It was, he found, a little like that old schoolyard routine “Don’t think of blue elephants.” Fortunately the hunger was keen enough that night to provide sufficient distraction.

  Aidan took a computer printout from a file cabinet against the wall, laid it on his desk, and ran his finger down the list of names. These men subscribed to the very basest of pornographic magazines, the kind even the most flagrant liberal would happily consign to the bonfire.

  He selected a victim in the next county, closed his eyes, and vanished.

  Only minutes later he was back.

  Neely certainly didn’t make a habit of walking alone along Route 7 at eleven-thirty at night, but she was too restless to stay inside her trailer. God knew, the place wasn’t spacious, and that evening it seemed even smaller than usual. She’d felt like a grasshopper trapped in a pint jar.

  As she walked, keeping to the far edge of the shoulder in an effort to avoid the headlights of passing cars, fat flakes of iridescent snow tumbled from the sky. She often found such weather peaceful, even festive, but just then it seemed eerie.

  How ridiculous, Neely decided, to be so upset over a dream she could hardly remember. Aidan Tremayne had been part of it, she knew that much, and a wisp of weirdly beautiful music echoed in her mind.

  As if all that wasn’t enough, she had a sense that someone was stalking her, closing in slowly, watching and waiting.

  She shivered and walked faster, stopping only when she reached the head of the Tremayne driveway.

  “You’re crazy,” she told herself as a mud-splattered Blazer passed on the other side of Route 7, then slowed.

  Neely’s heart seemed to slide over an expanse of sheer ice, leaving her breathless. She bolted into the woods, stumbling in the deep snow. From the highway she heard the slam of a car door.

  “Hey, lady, come back!” a man’s voice called.

  Neely ran on, tripped over a fallen birch limb, scraped her shin, scrambled to her feet again, and flung herself headlong toward Aidan’s house. She could see the light on his front porch through the trees.

  Behind her, the man from the Blazer crashed along in pursuit.

  Neely looked back, half blind with unreasoning terror, and collided hard with something. At first she thought it was a tree, but then a pair of strong hands steadied her, and she looked up into the classically handsome face of Aidan Tremayne. She was too breathless to speak.

  “You’re all right now,” he said in a low voice. For the first time she noticed a hint of a brogue in the way he framed his words. “No one’s going to hurt you.” He glared into the woods with a chilling intentness for a long moment, then shifted his gaze back to Neely again.

  He smiled, and some of the starch went out of her knees.

  Vaguely she heard running footsteps, the crash of a car door closing, the squeal of tires on wet pavement.

  “What you need is a cup of tea,” Aidan said, as though it were perfectly normal for the two of them to be standing out there in the woods at that hour. He wasn’t even wearing a coat, just jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. “Come along now.”

  Neely allowed him to escort her through the woods; he politely cupped her elbow in one hand.

  “Do you always go out walking at such odd times?” he asked. There was no irritation in the question, only a companionable kind of curiosity.

  “No,” Neely answered, somewhat weakly. “No, I don’t. It’s just that I’ve been feeling very restless lately—”

  “Any idea who the rascal in the woods might have been?”

  Neely shook her head, embarrassed. She was making one hell of an impression. “I ran into the trees when he stopped and turned around, and he followed. He was probably harmless, but—”

  “But you don’t think so?” he asked. They had gained the edge of Aidan’s sloping lawn.

  Again she shook her head. “I have some formidable enemies,” she said.

  “So do I,” he replied. They mounted the steps to the porch, and he held the door open for her, waiting politely while she passed over the threshold.

>   He led her into a parlor, where oil lamps burned cozily and a fire blazed on the hearth. “Here,” he said, depositing her in a large leather chair. “Have a seat and catch your breath. I’ll get that tea. Or would you rather have brandy?”

  “Brandy,” Neely said without hesitation.

  Aidan smiled, went to a sideboard, and poured amber liquid into an etched glass snifter. He brought Neely the drink but stood well away from her chair while she sipped.

  “I know I’ve already disrupted your evening,” she began when her limbs had stopped quivering and her heart had slowed to its normal pace, “but I wonder if you’d mind driving me home. I’m afraid to walk, under the circumstances.”

  He was near the fireplace, arms folded, his back braced against the mantelpiece. The first two times Neely had encountered him, she’d been struck by the unusual fairness of his complexion, but that night his face looked quite normal, almost ruddy. “I’ll bring the car around in a few minutes,” he said in that refined voice of his.

  Neely stared at him over the rim of her glass, wanting to blurt out that she’d dreamed about him, that she wondered why. But she only nodded.

  “These ‘powerful enemies’ of yours,” he said, watching her in a way that made her feel like some unparalleled work of art. “Can you tell me who they are?”

  She sighed and sank back in the chair, slouching, running one index finger around the rim of the snifter. “It might not be wise to do that,” she mused after a long time. “It’s dangerous to know too much.”

  One moment he was halfway across the room, the next, Aidan was crouching beside her chair.

  “It’s often more dangerous not knowing enough, don’t you think?”

  Neely felt a purely elemental pull toward him and turned her head slightly in order to protect herself. She sighed. “I used to work for a United States senator,” she said. “He was involved in some very crooked deals, and I gathered enough proof to put him, and the creeps he was dealing with, out of business. Or so I thought.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he was looking at the base of her throat, and she felt a sudden and inexplicable desire to surrender to the dark magic she saw in his eyes. “Now it appears that they’ve decided to make sure I can’t cause any more trouble,” she finished shakily in a distracted tone.