For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (26 page)

In the distance he heard a creaking sound and the terrified blathering of a mortal.

Valerian closed his eyes and at the same time tried to shut the sound out of his ears, repulsed and shaken by it, but his efforts were futile. Until that night, he’d been sustained by animal blood, inferior stuff that barely kept him conscious. Now, plainly, Lisette or one of her several lieutenants had apparently decided to serve up a feast.

No doubt he, Valerian, was being fattened up for the kill.

A vampire called Shaleen, a dark-haired minx of a creature Valerian had never encountered before his imprisonment, appeared in the arched doorway of his cell, gripping a half-starved, flea-ridden mortal by one arm.

The boy was dressed in rags, all bones and filthy in the bargain, and he blinked in the darkness, all the more terrified because he could not see the fate that awaited him.

Shaleen, who was beautiful and eminently sane, unlike most of the ludicrous creatures Lisette surrounded herself with, curled her lip contemptuously and flung the unfortunate, blubbering human down at Valerian’s feet.

“Here,” said the other vampire, quite uncharitably. “Your dinner.”

Valerian ignored the pitiful creature groveling in the rancid straw, at least for the moment, and fixed his attention on Shaleen. “Did Lisette make you into a blood-drinker?”

She studied him with insolent brown eyes. Her hair, a lovely caramel color, tumbled to her waist, unbrushed, with a thistle entangled here and there. “No,” she answered. “Did she make you?”

Valerian’s making was a memory he cherished, and he had never shared the experience with another being, not even Aidan or Maeve. “No,” he replied shortly as the mortal clutched at his clothes, begging in incoherent phrases for mercies that were not forthcoming. “Why do you stay here? Why do you help her?”

Shaleen smiled, “I’m a new vampire. Lisette is teaching me her magic—I’m going to help her rule, after she destroys Maeve Tremayne once and for all.”

Valerian laid a hand on the mortal’s head, stroking him in consolation, the way he might have done with a whining dog. Using the oldest magic he knew, he numbed the poor wretch’s mind, thus calming him. “Surely you’re not foolish enough to believe it will be easy to stop Maeve? Her powers are as great as Lisette’s—perhaps greater, because she isn’t mad. Furthermore, Maeve has fate on her side—she is the blood-drinker of legend, the one who will overthrow Lisette.”

Shaleen’s lovely face hardened, only for a moment and almost imperceptibly, and yet in that time Valerian discerned that she had fancied
herself
to be that vampire. In her heart of hearts, she was plotting against Lisette, planning to supplant her.

Valerian smiled. “You are very ambitious indeed,” he said. He let the smile fade, for he had not lived so many centuries without learning a few things about dramatic effect. “You are also foolhardy. Lisette will recognize your duplicity, and when that happens, the worst sinner in hell will be better off than you.”

She raised her chin in defiance, did the beautiful and treacherous Shaleen, but there was no hiding her fear, not from Valerian.

“Help me get out of here,” he said softly in his most persuasive voice, one that had lured many a mortal and not a few vampires into his web. “Your plan cannot succeed, little one. Lisette is too suspicious, and much too powerful, to fall for such bumbling deceptions as yours.”

He saw her waver, sensed her indecision, but then she withdrew into the doorway.

“Lisette warned me about you,” she said accusingly. “She said you were a better liar than the devil himself, and twice as charming, and she was right. Enjoy your supper, Valerian.”

With that, Shaleen went out, shutting the great door behind her, and Valerian looked down at the whimpering, half-conscious, pathetic excuse for a human clinging to his leg. Gently he bent, grasped the lad by his painfully thin shoulders, and drew him to his feet.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said in the tenderest of tones as he gazed deeply into the terrified blue eyes of his next victim. “I promise you will feel only the keenest pleasure, and no pain at all.”

Valerian bared the fragile throat, found the warm, sweet place where a full vein pulsed just beneath the skin, and sank his fangs in deep. Bliss flooded him as he drank, and he felt the specimen tremble in his hands and beneath his lips, not with pain but, just as Valerian had promised him, with an almost unbearable ecstasy.

Maeve was a little distracted; her thoughts kept straying to Calder. She was tom between guilt—she had tricked him, after all—and the hope that, by making him believe she’d been with him earlier in the night, by projecting an image of herself into his mind, she had afforded him a measure of comfort. . . .

She strained to catch hold of what Dathan was saying and pulled herself back into the conversation.

. . as far as we have been able to discern, the time of his captivity is the middle of the seventeenth century. . .

“The seventeenth century?” Maeve echoed, roundeyed, seeing that one of Dathan’s warlock spies had brought in a scroll. Closer examination proved that Lisette herself had penned a description of Valerian’s exact whereabouts on the crumbling parchment. The message itself, of course, was intended to taunt Maeve, to challenge her. “That’s before my birth as a human— and I can go back no farther than my death.”

Dathan arched an eyebrow. “Are you so certain? After all, you thought you couldn’t escape the vampire sleep, either, but you did exactly that when we traveled to China.”

Maeve nodded thoughtfully. More than ever, she wished Valerian was here—he knew about these things. Once, in fact, in an effort to help Aidan find the secret of transforming himself from vampire to mortal, Valerian had actually ventured back beyond his own mortal lifetime. The trouble was, the effort had nearly destroyed him, and he’d been incapacitated by the resultant weakness. Time was running out, and Maeve couldn’t afford the long recuperation her friend and mentor had needed.

On the other hand, the war with Lisette was going to be much more difficult, if not impossible, without Valerian’s counsel and moral support. Furthermore, if he perished in the skirmish ahead, then any victory, however sweet, would be tarnished by the loss of him.

Dathan paced. “Surely,” he snapped, “you are not thinking of gallivanting off into some other century simply to rescue that worthless Valerian!”

“Your opinion of my friend does not concern me,” Maeve said coldly.

“Perhaps it will,” Dathan retorted, “if I tell you that we are watching your beloved Calder Holbrook, far away as he is. We can and will take him hostage, Maeve, if you do not listen to reason!”

Maeve trembled with both shock and fury. Stupidly perhaps, she had not expected a threat to Calder to come from this quarter but instead from Lisette. “Here and now,” she said, and the even meter of her own voice surprised her, “I make this vow. If you lay a hand on Calder, I will flay you alive and serve you to the devil on a dozen different platters.”

Dathan drew back slightly and raised both hands, palms out, in a jaunty gesture of conciliation. “That’s a very colorful threat,” he said. “And I assure you, I’ll keep it in mind.”

Maeve narrowed her eyes and leaned toward him. “See that you do. Warlock,” she replied. “And keep this in mind as well: I make
promises,
not threats.”

Although his eyes snapped with rage, Dathan did not press the matter further. Maeve, for her part, was not in the least reassured, for if she should be felled, as had nearly happened in China, Calder would be left completely unprotected.

Rising from the couch where she’d reclined and then sat, Maeve straightened her gown and ran splayed fingers through her long, loose tresses. “I will send Dimity to check on Valerian,” she said quietly, and no nuance of the preceding argument showed in her countenance. “She is medieval, like him, and may be able to reach that time in history without danger to herself.”

“Fine,” Dathan said, his eyes still glittering with controlled fury. “That will free the two of us to seek out Lisette and make yet another attempt to finish her.”

Maeve nodded distractedly. She was not thinking of Lisette, or even of Valerian, but of Calder, far away in Philadelphia. She should make another trip back in time, she knew that to the night when he’d first seen her, in that grisly churchyard at Gettysburg, where the dead and maimed had been laid out in endless rows. Once there, she would blind Calder to her presence, as she should have done in the first place, and in that moment his attachment to her would be undone.

Knowing what needed doing and actually tackling the task were two different things, however, and Maeve was not anxious to destroy Calder’s memory of her. Selfish as it was, she needed the certainty that he loved her, that he wanted her, that he would recognize her if she came to him.

None of those things would be true from the instant she changed history and, for all practical intents and purposes, she’d be alone in eternity once again.

She left Dathan, in his underground hiding place somewhere in the French countryside, and sought out the vampire Dimity.

Maeve found the other blood-drinker haunting London’s seedy dockside area, as usual, and they fed together on a pair of deserving louts before retiring to Dimity’s graciously furnished cellar to confer.

There, seated in comfortable chairs and cheered by the light of a lively fire in the grate, Maeve told Dimity that Dathan’s warlocks had learned where Lisette was keeping Valerian. Dimity nodded when the explanation was through and said she’d attempt a visit to his cell. If possible, she promised, she would find a way to release him.

“I could not ask for more,” Maeve said, rising. After offering a quiet thanks, she took herself away and met Dathan in another part of London, one where sleek carriages rolled past through the fog, carrying passengers who would never have believed that such creatures as vampires even existed.

“I’m certain Lisette is in China,” Dathan said without preamble, falling into step with Maeve as she passed a street lamp glowing with sickly blue-gold light.

Maeve took her time answering. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “It’s possible, you know, that she’s found herself another, safer lair. She has to be aware that we’ll look for her in that same area.”

“She is reckless,” Dathan argued, and it was a statement Maeve could not refute. Lisette
was
reckless, making dramatic appearances, taking captives, spawning those dreadful creatures in defiance of the entire supernatural world.

“We’ll try again,” she agreed with dignity.

Dathan nodded, satisfied that he’d swayed Maeve to his way of thinking. “Shall we meet just before dawn, then, at the circle of stones?”

“1 will be there,” Maeve said, and in the next instant she realized that the warlock was no longer beside her. In fact, he was nowhere in sight.

She shrugged and set out to feed a second time. In the hours to come, she would need all the strength she could muster.

Dathan idled the rest of the night away in a backstreet tavern, nursing a mug of bitter ale, and watched in detachment as a variety of monsters came and went.

Oh, yes, there were vampires among the revelers, mostly new ones, heedless of the dangers of prowling places they did not know, and one or two warlocks came in as well. Still, it was among the human beings that Dathan found the greatest number of fiends.

He marveled to himself that mortals frightened their children, and each other, with tales of witches and warlocks, vampires and werewolves, while some of the vilest things in all of Creation lived next door to them, or up the street, or just down the road in the next village. And those beasts were not supernatural at all, but other humans, with beating hearts, brains throbbing with mysterious electrical impulses, and, supposedly, souls.

He sighed, lifted the copper mug to his mouth, and drained its contents in one final swallow. Then, suddenly sensing something different in his surroundings, he rose from his bench at one of the trestle tables, tossed a coin down to pay for his refreshment, and went outside into the summer night.

In the street, which was muddy and fouled with spittle and manure, Dathan stopped, sensing rather than hearing the strange, rhythmic chatter of several beings. He smiled, raising the hood of his cape so that his face was hidden in shadow, as well as his hair.

He was being stalked.

Dathan meandered into the nearest alley, drawn there by the vibration in his senses. They awaited him in that dark place, six drooling fiends, newly dead and starved for blood. Any blood.

Lisette’s friends were too stupid and too greedy to know of the ancient enmity between their own kind and the warlock.

He pushed back his hood and bared his sleek, white neck to them, and they stumbled toward him, making that odd and frantic murmuring sound he had heard before. He waited, and pretended to flinch when the first one fastened on him.

Infusing a vampire with the venom that flowed through his veins was a ferocious pleasure to Dathan, to all warlocks, and he felt a sweet tightening in his groin as a second monster pushed aside the first to drink.

Dathan allowed that, but ecstasy left him weak and distracted, and those were indulgences he couldn’t afford. The poison took effect, and the first two vampires dropped, writhing, to the filth-strewn ground. He killed the other four by a more flamboyant method, one he had not yet exhibited to his reluctant comrade, Maeve Tremayne.