For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (16 page)

Calder nodded, full of a misery that was at once ancient and brand-new, and even though he suspected that Maeve knew all about Amalie, despite her question, he answered readily. “She was five.”

Maeve sat down on the bed beside him and gathered him close in her arms. He realized in that moment of bittersweet tenderness that she was everything to him— goddess and lover and comforter—and the weight of the love he bore her was terrifying.

“What happened?” she asked, although she knew all the secrets of his heart, and although dawn, her most vicious enemy, was already tingeing the darkness with the first faint strains of apricot and crimson. Calder was well aware that Maeve had tendered the question only because she knew he needed to answer it, and he loved her all the more for her charity of spirit.

“My wife, Theresa, fell in love with an old friend of mine and left Amalie and me behind. Secretly I blessed the bastard for stealing the woman before she drove me mad with her sniveling and her petty concerns, but Amalie was a child, hardly more than a baby, and she missed her mother.” A memory came back to haunt Calder then; he saw Amalie standing at one of the windows on either side of the door of the town house they’d rented in Philadelphia, her face pressed to the glass, waiting for Theresa to come back. “She was listless, Amalie was, as though her spirit was dying. She fell sick about the time of the first snow, and by Christmas she was consumed by fever. She developed spinal meningitis, and when the new year came, she was gone.”

Maeve pressed her dry cheek against his damp, beard- roughened one. She didn’t speak—indeed, there was no need for that, for Calder knew her feelings as though they were his own.

He put his hands on either side of her smooth and unbearably beautiful face. “Go now,” he said. “The sun will be up soon.”

She turned her head slightly, kissed the palm of his right hand, and nodded. Then, without another word, she rose and left the room, her movements graceful and unhurried, and when she was gone, Calder believed for a few moments that she wasn’t real at all, that he had only dreamed her.

Valerian lay in bed beside Isabella, a saucy mortal who was one of his favorite companions, and marveled.

It was morning.
All his instincts told him this was so, even though the light could not reach into that hidden place, tucked away beneath the oldest part of Madrid.

He waited for the trancelike sleep to suck him under, just as it had at dawn every morning for nearly six hundred years, but nothing happened. He was wide awake, full of energy and ideas and questions.

Could he stand daylight, for instance? He considered testing the theory, then decided not to push his luck. This was no time for impulsive moves.

Wait until Maeve heard about this, he thought, settling back against the pillows with a self-satisfied smile. Even she, with all her power, had never managed such a feat.

Isabella stirred, rustling the sheets, and opened one of her lovely dark eyes to peer up at him. She knew Valerian was not made of flesh and blood as she was, though he had never, in the course of their long association, explained the exact specifics. They had met often, always at night and always in places where the rays of the sun could not reach. In the past, however, Valerian had invariably awakened her well before dawn and escorted her back to the world she knew.

She reached out and made a twirling motion on his belly with the lip of one index finger. “It is morning,” she observed in soft Spanish. “And you have not sent me away.”

Valerian wanted to shout with joy, but at the same time he was frustrated because he couldn’t tell another vampire about the miracle. Not until nightfall, at least, for all but a select few were asleep in their lairs.

“Si,”
Valerian responded with a smug smile. “It is morning, and you are still here.” When night came, he would stand with Maeve against the warlocks and the unpredictable Lisette, but for now he would remain where he was—safe in the bowels of the great Spanish city, under layers of brick cobblestones, dirt, and rocks.

She smiled mischievously. “You do not wish me to hurry away?”

“No,” he said, turning onto his side to look deeply into her eyes. He could almost hear her warm, rich, vital blood coursing beneath the flawless surface of her flesh, and he felt a wounding thirst. He bent his head, kissing her throat, and she gave a crooning whimper, never guessing how she tempted him. Her pulse throbbed beneath his lips, a sweet torment, and Valerian relished it, as he always relished the forbidden.

Perhaps just a taste . . .

“Valerian.” The feminine voice jolted him; he whirled to see Lisette standing at the foot of the rumpled bed. She looked like a beautiful witch, fresh from the pages of a storybook, in her high-necked satin gown, with her rich auburn hair tumbling almost to her waist. “Did you think you were the only vampire who could be abroad while the sun was up?”

“Go,” Valerian whispered to Isabella in a hoarse voice, all but shoving her from the bed.

Lisette watched with amusement as the naked woman scrambled for her clothes, trembling and casting quick, frightened glances in Valerian’s direction.

Miraculously Lisette allowed Isabella to escape, but when she turned her attention on Valerian again, he saw the hatred in her eyes and remembered the last time he’d seen the other vampire.

They had stood face to face on either side of Aidan Tremayne’s bed, while he slept, unknowing and vulnerable, between them. At that time Aidan had been newly human—he had risked everything, even his immortal soul, to be changed back into a man—and Lisette had meant to transform him again, to rob Aidan of his hard-won humanity. The idea had been all the more ironic for the fact that she had been the one to condemn Aidan to a life he hated in the first place.

Valerian had moved to defend Aidan, one of only two mortals he had ever loved with honor and purity of heart, but Lisette had been much stronger and rendered him virtually powerless. Had it not been for the intercession of another, she would have succeeded in making Aidan into a vampire again.

It was the ease with which she’d overcome him that Valerian recalled most vividly at that moment. He was indeed afraid, but he wasn’t foolish enough to show that. He would deal with Lisette in the same way an old snake charmer in India had taught his students to deal with cobras—by keeping calm and making no sudden moves.

“We meet again,” he said, rising slowly from the bed, making no effort to hide his nakedness. He reached for his clothes—doeskin breeches and a loose silk shirt with no buttons—and donned the trousers unhurriedly.

Lisette was watching him with a troubled, curious expression. “I will not destroy you immediately,” she mused aloud. “I have uses for you, as it happens.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” Valerian responded in the most cordial of tones, pulling the shirt on over his head. “Did you know there may be a war because of you and those damned brainless creatures you’ve been making?” “War? With whom?”

Valerian pretended to sigh. “None other than Nemesis himself, I’m afraid. Then there are the warlocks—”

“I don’t care about angels or warlocks!” Lisette interrupted, spitting like a cat.

“That’s because you’re quite mad,” Valerian answered as pleasantly as if he’d been chatting with a pretty prospect in some elegant vampire’s drawing room. He ran the fingers of both hands through his love-mussed hair and smiled indulgently. “You really ought to put yourself out of all this misery, poor darling. I’d be happy to oblige by driving a stake through your shriveled little heart.”

Lisette glowered at him for a long, tense moment, then erupted in a burst of musical laughter. It was not a melodious sound, of course, but something better equated with a funeral dirge. “Great Zeus,” she said. “You’ve never lacked for balls, Valerian, I’ll say that for you, even if you
are
the most self-indulgent, arrogant, and impulsive vampire on the face of the earth.”

He executed a mocking half-bow. “At your service,” he said. Then, in the desperate hope that his other powers had gotten stronger when the mysterious change had occurred that made him able to function during the daylight hours, he fixed his thoughts and energies on a place far away.

It was rather like flinging himself at a rock wall with all his strength, he discovered in the next instant, when the impact of Lisette’s opposing wishes slammed into him from every direction.

Valerian slipped to one knee, dazed by the intangible blow she’d struck, but soon raised himself back to his feet.

“No more of your foolish tricks,” Lisette scolded coyly, almost crooning the words. She came to stand before Valerian and wound a lock of his hair around one index finger. “You are a splendid creature. How sad I will be to destroy you.” Her whole countenance darkened as her mood and expression changed. “Make no mistake, Valerian. This time no one will save your miserable hide. This time you will perish, as you should have months ago, when I bound you to the earth in that old cemetery behind that beloved abbey of yours to await the sunrise.”

Valerian did not allow himself the shudder that threatened as he entertained
that
memory. Lisette had caught him in a state of great weakness, and staked him out in a neglected graveyard. Aidan, still a vampire then, had been her real prey; Valerian had been little more than bait. Had it not been for Maeve’s timely arrival, and that of Tobias, both he and Aidan would have been roasted like pigs at Easter.

“If you think you can draw Maeve into a trap by holding me prisoner,” he said in tones of contemptuous reason, “you are misguided as well as mad. She has no great love for me, and even if she bore me the utmost tenderness, she is entirely too cunning to fall for such a silly trick.”

Lisette looked and sounded disturbingly sane, which was, no doubt, only another indication that her mind was as diseased as her spirit. “You are right—Maeve Tremayne loves another, a mortal, and most devotedly, too. She came to help you after your little episode with the warlocks, however, and she will appear again.”

For once Valerian was not thinking of his own difficult position, but of the singular vulnerability of Maeve’s cherished mortal. He still didn’t really care what happened to Dr. Calder Holbrook, late of Philadelphia and Gettysburg, but Maeve’s happiness mattered to him. In fact, it mattered far more than he would ever have guessed.

‘Tread carefully, Lisette,” he warned in his soft, smooth snake-charmer’s voice. “Maeve is no ordinary vampire.” He smiled in his most irritating fashion. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, darling. Your day is over. You’re out of your league with her.”

“Enough,” Lisette snarled, raising her arms from her sides. In the next instant Valerian lost all conscious awareness.

“Damn that vampire,” Maeve murmured, tapping one foot. “Where is he?” She’d tried focusing her mind on Valerian, a technique that had always worked before, but this time no image came into her head, no whispered warning or cry for help.

“Aren’t all vampires damned?” Calder asked dryly. They were in Maeve’s front parlor, where gaslights flickered and popped, and night was thick at the windows.

“That isn’t funny,” Maeve snapped, pacing now.

Calder leaned against the huge mahogany desk that served Maeve in that century and the succeeding one as well, his arms folded across his chest. He needed a shave, and his dark hair was rumpled from repeated combings with his fingers.

“Twenty-four hours have passed, my love,” he said with gentle solemnity. “As delightful as I find your company—and rare though it is—I still want to go home.”

Maeve looked at him and ached. “I’m sorry, that’s impossible.”

What he said next rocked her to the center of her being. “Then make me a vampire, Maeve,” he suggested quietly. “Give me the powers you enjoy, and the immortality.”

She stood still, staring at him, stunned and brimming with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, she wanted to make Calder a blood-drinker, like herself, and keep him at her side forever. On the other, she recollected only too well how Aidan had hated Lisette for changing him. In Calder’s case, after all, the alteration would be irrevocable.

“I couldn’t bear it if you despised me,” she whispered.

Calder approached her, looking honestly puzzled, and laid his hands lightly on her shoulders. “I could never do that,” he said. He sounded sincere, but he didn’t really understand what he was facing.

“Before, when you said all vampires were damned,” she began miserably, “you were very close to the truth. Becoming an immortal means wagering your soul against an eternity in a fiery hell, Calder. It means that you can never walk in the sunlight again, and that many years would pass before you could get through even a single night without taking blood. In fact, my darling, being a vampire means living forever—and forever is a very long time.”

He bent his head and touched his mouth to hers. “Would you watch me get old and die instead?” he asked, after giving her a kiss so gentle that it nearly broke her heart. “Damn it, I don’t care how long eternity is—and I don’t mind the other things, either—not if I can be with you.”

She studied him uncertainly, weighing his words in her mind. She had never changed a human into a vampire before, and the decision was not one she could make easily—especially when someone she loved so desperately was involved.