For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (28 page)

“I want you to teach me the incantation that enables you to start fires,” she said finally.

Dathan looked at her over one shoulder. “I would be a fool to do that. You could teach it to your vampires, and they’d use it against us.”

“I would share it with a select few,” Maeve countered. “And you have my word that it would be used against your kind only in self-defense.”

“Your word,” Dathan mocked, slamming the lid of the chest he’d been looting. “The word of a vampire is hardly something I hold in esteem.”

Maeve could feel her strength fading. She sat down on the edge of the ivory pyre where Lisette had probably passed many days. “I have told you one of our secrets. I have trusted you with my very life—you’ve had numerous opportunities to drive a stake through my heart while I slept. If I can trust you that much, then you can surely give me the same consideration in return and teach me one small incantation!”

Dathan crossed the room and lifted Maeve into his arms. “No sleeping here, princess,” he said with grudging affection. “Our intent is to surprise Lisette, not be surprised by her. Think of someplace in England, someplace dark, and I’ll be with you at sunset.”

Maeve was exhausted, her head lolling against Dathan’s shoulder, but it wasn’t England she fixed in her mind, but America. In fact, she focused on Pennsylvania and the dark cellar beneath Calder’s house.

Reaching that place, she crouched behind stacks of dusty boxes and crates and closed her eyes.

Only then, when she was helpless, did images of Calder dying come to her mind. She saw him bandaged, lying unconscious in his bed upstairs, his skin bluish from the loss of blood, but there was nothing she could do. She was trapped, mired, in the deepest, darkest part of her own mind.

All during the coming day, immersed in the vampire sleep, vivid pictures came to her, like scenes from a dream, and she heard him calling her name. Calling it over and over again, the voice growing fainter with every passing moment, and more hopeless.

The rain went on throughout the night and the morning, casting an added pall over the circuslike ceremony at Bernard Holbrook’s graveside. Word of the shooting in the Holbrook mansion had gotten out fast, and folks had come from every comer of the city, whether they’d known the dear departed or not, to stare and speculate.

God knew, the undertaker thought disgustedly, it would be years before folks stopped chattering about how one brother had shot the other one in his bed, while their dead father lay downstairs in his coffin, and how William Holbrook had been brought to the funeral in handcuffs.

It was a damn pity, all of it, though there was
one
redeeming element in that ugly situation. Poor Bernard was at peace, and he’d never have to know that he’d spawned a murderer.

Not that Calder Holbrook was the kind of son a man relished having, either. He’d been stubborn his whole life through, that boy, tormented by things inside him that no one else could see, and he’d broken his father’s heart on more than one occasion with his cussedness.

The undertaker sighed. Well, Calder was barely clinging to life; that was a fact, for he’d been to the house and seen the young man lying in his bed, unconscious, with half the blood in his body drained away.

Like as not, there’d be another funeral in a few days, and when they hanged William Holbrook, still another.

It made a man wonder, that it did. Bernard Holbrook had worked hard all his life, and if he hadn’t always been completely ethical, well, a fellow did what he had to do to make his way. And now it was all gone, blown apart like a house built of matchsticks struck by a high wind.

When sunset came, Maeve bolted upright.

All thoughts of Lisette and the impending disaster of war with the angels were barred from her mind. She cared for nothing and no one but Calder, and she transported herself to his room immediately.

He was indeed dying, just as she had seen in the awful visions while she slept, and his soul had already left his body, bobbing at the far end of the long silver cord that attaches the two, ready to break free. When that happened, Calder would be truly dead, for once the cord is severed, there is no returning.

A heavy woman in simple calico sat next to the bed, weeping quietly, but she did not look up when Maeve approached on the opposite side because she could not see or hear her.

Maeve looked with despair upon her lover and found in the murky shallows of his brain the events that had brought him to such an end. William Holbrook had crept into the room with a dueling pistol, stood at the foot of the bed, and shot his only brother, intending to kill him.

She would go back, she decided, to the night before, when this travesty had taken place, and undo it. She would kill William if she had to, to prevent this from happening.

When Maeve tried to transport herself, however, her efforts were blocked. In a fury of urgency and despair, she tried twice more, and twice more she failed.

She needed no explanation for what had happened, for Valerian had explained such matters to her long since. Sometimes, for unknown reasons, time travel simply wasn’t possible.

Maeve gave up on the attempt to change recent history and instead concentrated on turning herself into a mist, pervading Calder’s being, lending him strength. For a while she was truly a part of him, as close as the breath in his lungs and the thready beat of his heart. Then, suddenly, the shimmering silver cord contracted, wrenching his spirit back into its prison of flesh and blood. The sheer force of the event drove Maeve outside of him again.

The housekeeper, probably sensing that something

was going on in that room that she couldn’t see or hear, grew restless, folded her hands, and began to pray under her breath. Her words were like liquid fire, pouring over Maeve in waves, but Maeve did not flee.

No matter what she had to suffer, she wasn’t going to leave Calder.

She huddled in a comer of the room, in the shadows, and presently the housekeeper yawned and went away.

Maeve made herself solid again, and hurried to Calder’s side, taking one unresponsive hand into both her own. His spirit had retreated again, straining at the invisible tether, trying to escape the pain.

The best and most unselfish thing to do was let Calder go, let him return to his Maker and be received in that place where she could never venture, and she loved him enough to do just that.

She raised her hand to her lips and brushed the knuckles with a kiss as light as the pass of a feather. “Good-bye, my darling,” she whispered. Then she rose and turned away, and would have departed forever, except that he spoke to her.

Not with his lips, but with his mind.

Maeve.
The name was an entreaty.

She whirled to stare at him, waiting, her whole being suspended. Her soul cried out silently to his, begging him to stay.

Help me.

Maeve was in agony.
I am helping you, darling. Look for the Light, and follow it.

You are the light.

No! Don’t you see? I am the darkness.

Don’t leave me, Maeve. Don’t let me die.

She took a step closer to Calder, standing at his

bedside. Without another word, she lay down beside him, covered him in her cloak, and thought of London.

If there was a way under heaven to save Calder, besides turning him into a fiend, like herself, into a being who would one day hate her for her trouble, Maeve vowed she would find it.

Dimity was out of practice when it came to time travel, and she made several abortive efforts before she landed herself in the middle of Valerian’s cell.

The place was rank, and a half dozen frail-boned, ragged humans slept in a pile in the comer, like puppies huddling on a cold night. All of them were alive, but they would need to consume a great deal of calves’ liver before their blood could truly serve them again.

“Valerian?” Dimity said, annoyed, placing her hands on her hips. “Show yourself!”

He appeared suddenly, directly in front of her, and made her jump backward with a little cry of fright.

“What the—?”

Valerian’s grin was a bit wan, but just as audacious as ever. “Sorry,” he said, though he plainly wasn’t. “It gets boring, being stuck away in a rat’s nest like this one, so I’ve taken to practicing my magic.”

Dimity looked around the gloomy cell. “Well, it’s no palace, of course, but it could be worse.” She nodded toward the pile of rags and flesh in the comer. “At least Lisette’s kept you well fed, and you don’t look as if you’ve been abused—only neglected.”

Valerian drew himself up to his full and haughty height at that point and glared down his patrician nose. “She’s been fattening me up like a Christmas goose,” he said, “and I’ll thank you not to minimize my sufferings until you’ve been through a similar ordeal yourself.”

She affected a sigh. “All right,” she conceded. “If you want my sympathy, you have it. Now, are you through with your travail, or would you like to enjoy it a little while longer? If you’re quite satisfied that you’ve undergone sufficient agony, then let’s discuss getting you out of here.”

Valerian flushed, a sign of recent feeding more than anger, and narrowed his eyes at her. “You are a most caustic individual, for one who avails herself to the favors of angels.”

Dimity glared. “And you are a hardheaded, arrogant idiot,” she retorted, standing her ground. She was not acquainted with Valerian, although she’d often heard of his exploits, but she had encountered plenty of creatures just like him, both human and immortal. She knew only too well that if she allowed it, he’d run roughshod over her. “Do you wish me to rescue you, or leave you here to rot?”

The legendary vampire was plainly furious, and no doubt his pride was injured as well. After all, he’d been captured by a vampire of the feminine gender, and now his only hope of salvation was in the hands of yet another female.

Dimity smiled. A little humility was good for the soul. “Well?” she prompted.

“All right,” the great Valerian snarled.
“Yes,
of course I want to get out of here—I feel like a mouse shut up in a shoe box! But how do you propose to achieve this magnificent feat? Have you grown more powerful than Lisette and failed to mention the fact heretofore?”

Dimity rolled her eyes. “Lisette grows careless. There are weaknesses in the mental barrier she’s put up around you, or I wouldn’t have been able to get in.” She crossed the room to the heavy iron door and fixed her gaze on the ancient, cumbersome lock.

“There’s no point in attempting
that
old trick,” Valerian said. “I’ve tried to move that lock a hundred times, and it won’t give.”

A smile came to Dimity’s lips as the works splintered inside the lock under the force of her thoughts. “I guess you just didn’t try hard enough,” she said sweetly. “Who’s guarding you?”

Valerian’s exasperation was plain, but so was his relief. “A conniving, back-stabbing little chit named Shaleen,” he said. “I like her.”

Dimity swung open the door and stepped into the stone passageway beyond. “You would,” she replied. “Come along. I’ve found this whole experience a little enervating, frankly, and I’d like to get back to London and my beloved nineteenth century in time for an extra feeding.”

“‘I’ve found this whole experience a little enervating,’ ” Valerian mimicked sourly, following her along the hall. Dimity imagined it would be quite some time before he got over his pique at being saved by a lesser vampire. “You haven’t saved me yet,” he said aloud, reminding her that he was an old blood-drinker, like herself, and a skilled one.

“You’re right,” she replied diplomatically. “Let’s try to be civil to each other, shall we? After all, we’re both up to our necks—if you’ll forgive the expression—in trouble.”

As if on cue, a shape rose up ahead of them in the corridor, with a soul-splintering shriek.

“Please,” Valerian said contemptuously.

For one terrible moment Dimity thought the creature confronting them was Lisette itself, and that Valerian had further sealed their doom by mocking her, but a closer inspection revealed the little spitfire Valerian had mentioned before, the fledgling called Shaleen.

“Step aside,” Dimity ordered quietly. “You must know, naive as you are, that you haven’t the strength to prevail over two mature vampires.”

Shaleen seemed to wilt, until she looked like what she’d been before her making, a scrap of a girl who’d never had enough love or food, enough of anything, in the whole brief span of her mortal life. “I want to go with you,” she said. “The queen will stake me out in the courtyard to burn in the daylight if she comes back and finds that her prize captive has escaped.”

Valerian nudged Dimity from behind. “She’ll make a handy soldier in our present trouble, with that fiery spirit of hers.”

“I suppose you want to be her tutor,” Dimity said dryly. “I don’t think you’re going to have the time, though. Maeve seems to think she needs your help to prevail against Lisette.”

There was a scrabbling sound behind them, and Dimity whirled, as did Valerian, to see the pale boys creeping out of the cell and groping their way along the wall in the other direction.