For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (33 page)

Almost gently, Lisette brought the beautifully sculpted human to a satisfactory release. Then she simply stroked and admired him, from head to toe, for the work of art he was, as the carriage bounced and jostled over cobbled streets.

“She took the bait,” Dathan said, rubbing his hands together in triumph and delight, when Maeve and Valerian joined him in that splendidly spooky old manse under its blanket of ivy and various vines. “Even as we speak, Lisette is playing her vampire games with our own beguiling ‘George.’ ”

Maeve’s attention was wandering; she was preoccupied with Calder, who had chosen to remain in the twentieth century, where they had made such tempestuous love. He was a new vampire, she reminded herself fitfully; he needed time to explore his powers.

Valerian nudged her. “He’s fine, your fledgling lover,” he said as directly as he would have if Dathan hadn’t been there, listening intently. “Stop worrying.”

Maeve glared at him for a moment to let him know she didn’t appreciate his lack of sensitivity, then turned to Dathan. The warlock stood with arms folded, smirking a little.

“I want you to teach me that fire-starting trick now,” she said.

Dathan only pretended to be taken aback by the request, but his glance at Valerian a moment later was genuinely uncertain. The towering vampire glowered at him in quelling silence.

Finally Dathan relented. “All right,” he conceded grudgingly. “I will share the incantation. There is no guarantee whatsoever that the magic will work for vampires, however.”

“We’ll take our chances,” Maeve said firmly. She’d betrayed an important bit of blood-drinker lore in letting Dathan and the others know how vampires recognized other supernatural creatures, knowledge that could be used against her kind, and she wanted something in return.

Dathan repeated the chant—the words were from some ancient language, eerie, and more like music than speech.

Maeve attempted the incantation and the simultaneous shift of consciousness a number of times before she mastered it and set a pile of old newspapers burning on the grate.

Valerian, that inveterate show-off, succeeded on the first try.

C
HAPTER 17

The soul-cries of sick children all over nineteenth- century London seemed to ride on the night breeze and rise from the pavement itself. Overcome, Calder sagged against the brick wall of an ink factory and pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the terrible din. Since he was not hearing the sound, but feeling it instead, the gesture was fruitless.

“Maeve,” Calder murmured like a man in delirium. “Valerian. Help me—show me what to do.”

There was no reply.

Calder pushed himself away from the wall, wavered, and then gathered all his inner forces. No doubt this was a private ordeal, a rite of passage.

The suffering of the children pressed upon him from

all sides, and the helpless feeling that assailed him was not unfamiliar. He had known this same frantic need to be more than he was, to be in a hundred places at once, as a mortal, moving among the wounded Rebels and Union soldiers he had attended in America.

Focus.
The word came soft and insistent, like a whisper at his shoulder, and Calder had heard it often while Valerian was introducing him to his vampire powers.

Calder started to take a deep breath, realized that his lungs were fossilized within him, having no need of air. He smiled grimly and, as passers-by began to look at him with wary curiosity, straightened his coat. The sorrow of the children was as loud as ever, but he was beginning to cope with it, just as he had coped with the screams and moans of his patients in field hospitals and government wards back home.

Focus.

Calder found a single thread in all that tangle of noisy misery and grasped it with his mind. Then he allowed it to lead him down an alleyway, past a graveyard and a park, into a tenement.

There the horrid music of death and pain was so pervasive that Calder could barely withstand it, but he pressed on, whispering Valerian’s word to himself like a litany.
Focus, focus, focus . . .

The ribbon of consciousness led Calder to an impossibly small room in the back of an enormous, dark, and filthy building. One pitiful wad of tallow lit the stinking chamber, though of course Calder did not need its light to see the pale, spindly boy lying on a dirty pallet beneath the window. A crust of molded bread lay within the child’s reach, and he watched with large, haunted eyes as a rat nibbled delicately at the last of his food.

The boy looked straight at Calder, then without a word turned his attention back to the rat. The lad’s history flooded Calder’s mind, unbidden; he knew his name was Tommy, that he’d been on the streets alone since he was five years old, surviving by picking pockets and stealing food from trash bins and occasionally from street stalls and shops. His mother, who had loved her baby very much, illegitimate though he was, had been a simple country maid, drawn to London by dreams of going on the stage. Instead she’d had to sell her favors to buy bread and milk, and one night she’d been strangled to death by a client who hadn’t wanted to pay.

Calder closed his eyes for a moment, grappling with the horrid images. When he had, he kicked at the rodent; the belligerent creature hesitated, then scampered away.

“What do you want?” the lad asked listlessly in a thick Cockney accent, his eyes narrowed. “You’re not from ’round here, now are you—not with those fine clothes of yours.”

“I’m a doctor,” Calder said thoughtfully. “What’s your name?” He asked the unnecessary question in an effort to put the lad at his ease.

“It’s Tommy,” the child said, trying to raise himself, and failing. “I ain’t got no money to pay a doctor, so you’d better just take yourself out of here.”

“I have no need of money,” Calder answered distractedly, touching the pulse point beneath Tommy’s ear. In that instant an image of the child’s anatomy exploded into Calder’s mind in rich and vibrant color, shining with clarity. Tommy was suffering from a respiratory infection; treating it would be fairly simple, by twentieth- century standards—the prescription was good food, rest, and antibiotics.

Unfortunately Calder’s bag, which contained the modem medical supplies Maeve had purloined for him, as well as a few Valerian had collected for sport, was back at the Philadelphia house.

Tommy raised himself onto his painfully thin elbows and with effort demanded, “Why are you lookin’ at me that way? You ain’t plannin’ to saw something off me, are you?”

Calder chuckled and then lifted the child gently into his arms. He could not carry Tommy through time, but space was another matter. He would take him back to Philadelphia and treat his illness. Calder knew a woman there, a widow robbed of three sons by that monstrous war, who would gladly look after the lad.

“No,” the doctor answered belatedly, though Tommy had already guessed that he was safe, for he rested lightly in Calder’s arms without struggling. “I’m going to take you on a little journey. Hold on tightly now and don’t be frightened.”

Tommy’s eyes widened even farther. “My gawd, governor,” he whispered, “you ain’t an angel, are you? Tell me I ain’t dyin’!”

Calder smiled sadly. “I’m no angel,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and thought of that gloomy house in Philadelphia, where there had been so much pain and trouble and treachery.

The place was dark when Calder and Tommy arrived, moments later. The stair railing was draped in black bunting, and there were mourning wreaths everywhere.

Tommy was in a state of shock; nothing in his brief and difficult life had prepared him for traveling halfway around the world in the embrace of a vampire.

“Shhh!” Calder said when the child would have cried out in amazement. He didn’t want to encounter Prudence or any of the other servants; they would be terrified.

Obediently Tommy nestled close against Calder’s coat. He was weak, after all, and very sick, and he soon lost consciousness.

Calder treated him with an injection of penicillin, wrapped the wraithlike body in woolen blankets, and fixed his mind on the presence of Ellen Cartwright, the middle-aged widow he’d met in the hallway of the army hospital.

Mrs. Cartwright was downstairs in the parlor of her small but sturdy house when Calder arrived. He settled the sleeping Tommy in a warm bed, summoned the good-hearted widow upstairs with a thought, and stepped back into the shadows.

The lady appeared within moments. Her face filled with mingled joy and concern when she saw the fragile child resting in the bed of her youngest, Albie, who’d fallen at Vicksburg.

“My gracious!” Mrs. Cartwright cried, taking Tommy’s hand, blissfully unaware of the vampire looking on. “Where did you come from? Who are your people? My heavens, look at you—you’re nothing but skin and bones!”

Smiling, Calder allowed himself to fade. He would return, of course, to give Tommy doses of the medicine he’d need to recover. Mrs. Cartwright could be counted upon to do the rest.

This one was not nearly as smart as Aidan Tremayne had been, Lisette observed to herself as she studied the beautiful, exhausted mortal sleeping in the tangled sheets of her bed. They’d had little opportunity for conversation, of course, but a quick scan of George’s brain had revealed a distressing degree of mediocrity.

He had none of Aidan’s talent for art, for one thing, nor did he possess his predecessor’s poetic spirit and capacity for all ranges of emotion.

Lisette smiled. As far as she was concerned, all these factors were to George’s credit—she had no need of another rebellious, troublesome lover, but an obedient companion, one fair of face and countenance, would be another matter entirely. And this one was certainly able to give her the pleasure she craved; he had a seemingly limitless ability to satisfy her.

It might be a comfort to have someone like George at her side, loyal and pretty and stupid, all of a piece. She could pretend he was Aidan if she wanted—she’d done exactly that while they were engaged in passion—and train him to be the perfect consort.

George stirred in the silken sheets, and Lisette smiled fondly and then glanced toward the window. Dawn was still hours away; there was time to enjoy her new toy thoroughly before submitting to the vampire sleep. The slumber would claim her this day, she knew, for although she was often able to evade it, the effort sapped her powers.

She slipped back into bed beside him, began to stroke his belly, muscled even in slumber, and tease his lovely staff back to life.

Yes, Lisette thought as George awakened, gripping her bare, slender hips and moving her so that she was astraddle of him, this one would do quite nicely. She would make him a vampire, of course, because watching him age was a prospect too dismal to consider, and after she’d destroyed the rebels, they would create other, more tractable blood-drinkers to serve as their court, and reign over the new dominion.

Together.

George plunged into Lisette, and she threw her head back and uttered a sound like the cry of a panther, deliberately forgetting, in her need and her ardor, that part of what had attracted her to this insatiable mortal was a sense of danger.

“It isn’t wise,” Valerian protested as he and Maeve moved along the dark river, deep beneath the ground, that led to the secret chamber of the Brotherhood of the Vampyre, “arriving uninvited and unannounced like this.”

Maeve made a soft sound of exasperation. “Since when have you troubled yourself with such trivia? These are the oldest, most powerful vampires on earth. They were present when Lisette was transformed from a woman to an immortal. We’ve got to convince them to help us, or at least tell us if she has any weak spots.”

Valerian’s irritation clearly hadn’t waned. He was uncomfortable in that dank, hidden place, Maeve knew, but not because he was afraid of ghosts and goblins, or even the Brotherhood itself. No, the cave unnerved him because it hadn’t been his idea to venture there, and because he had kept a helpless vigil in that very place, in the earliest and probably most horrifying stages of Aidan’s transformation from vampire to mortal man. “Do you really believe they’re going to point out Lisette’s Achilles’ heel, if indeed she has one? After all, she is
one of them.
In telling you how to destroy the mad queen, they’ll also be giving you the prescription for their own destruction!”

They were deep inside the cave now, but no sentinel barred their way, as Tobias had the last time they visited. No illusion of sunlight formed a barrier to protect the inner sanctum.

Maeve’s spine prickled with an eerie premonition;

some shock awaited them, and she tried to prepare herself.

They proceeded into the great chamber where the Brotherhood had held court since Atlantis itself had crumbled into the sea, both silent, both tense.

“Great Zeus,” Valerian whispered when they spotted the remains of those ancient vampires, macabre shapes, part charred flesh and bone, part collapsed into naught but pale gray cinders. Obviously the members of the Brotherhood had submitted willingly to their fate, for they lay in a precise row, most with their horrible ashen parodies of arms crossed over their chests.

Maeve recalled Tobias and the others speaking of the old ones’ desire to be at rest, once and for all. She had not really believed him; the idea of wanting death, of seeking it out, was so foreign to her that she’d had no frame of reference.