For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (36 page)

The potion not only met that objective, but also lent the experimenters incredible powers. They could travel vast distances, even to other continents, on the strength of a thought They could read the minds of others and veil themselves from the notice of ordinary people and, sometimes, even from each other.

The magic had a dark side, but it wasn’t discovered until weeks after the members had imbibed the wonderful medicine that made them as strong and intelligent as gods. They developed a penchant for human blood—and soon learned, to their unending horror, that they required the mysterious vitality of the stuff to function. What began as a mere aversion to the light of the sun became a violent and extremely painful reaction. Finally the blood-drinkers found themselves succumbing to a deep, comalike sleep during the day.

They had become fiends, and they named themselves
vampyres
for a terrifying winged creature that existed only in the heart of the continent’s southern jungles.

All the other members were alarmed, having foreseen none of these complications despite years of calculation and experimentation—except for Cassandra. She gloried in her newfound powers, honed them, and enjoyed the unspeakable bliss that always swept over her when she consumed the wine of the gods, the ambrosia that was blood.

She and Zarek, happy newlyweds only a few months before, began to argue violently. An antidote to the original potion was concocted, and Essian, the founder of the society, volunteered to sample it.

In return for his bravery, Essian received a horrible death. He aged while his colleagues looked on in fear and revulsion, wrinkling, caving in upon himself, his flesh drying out until it crumbled like dust. Still, he lived, a rotted corpse, as vile as something dug up from a grave, his eyes peering out of a skull, his screams of terror shrill and echoing.

After witnessing such an atrocity, volunteers for other experiments were not forthcoming. The Brotherhood of the Vampyre was formed, and Cassandra, who had taken to ranging over the whole of that hemisphere in search of victims and playmates, was tolerated but not, as the name of the fellowship indicated, really included.

She was not on Atlantis the night the accident happened, but in a village that would become Athens, battling with Zarek, who wanted to live quietly as a scholar, instead of wandering the earth with her, while the two of them explored their magnificent powers.

While these vampires argued their cases, the land of their birth trembled on the brink of disaster.

A power station had been built over a fault line, the vampire Tobias reported later. When the first explosion occurred, it set off a chain reaction of other blasts, violent enough to shift vast geological plates far beneath the surface of the land. There were quakes, and great fissures formed, snaking out in every direction. Tidal waves lashed the continent from every side, and volcanoes, long believed extinct, erupted all over the once beautiful land. In a matter of days Atlantis had cracked like an eggshell and literally fallen to pieces.

The people and the visible continent were gone, swallowed. The earthquakes continued for weeks, however, and great walls of sea water struck lands thousands of miles away, wiping out other civilizations as well.

Zarek and the others had been grief-stricken, holing up in a cave with primitive paintings of animals and birds on the walls, lying dormant for centuries. Cassandra, unwilling to waste a moment mourning a time and place that no longer existed and would never exist again, except in fairy tales, changed her name to Lisette and set about forgetting all that had gone before.

Now, lying prone and dreaming in her villa on the coast of Spain, the ancient vampire wept—for Zarek and the others, for Atlantis, and, most of all, for herself. Only now, when it was too late to stop the Brotherhood from choosing death, did Lisette realize that they’d all been interconnected in some mystical, inexplicable way. With the passing of her colleagues, Lisette had been diminished and perhaps had even died a little herself.

Far away, in a different land and century, in a vault beneath a forgotten grave, another ancient one lay slumbering. His was a deeper trance than Lisette’s, dark and rich and vital, meant to last for months or even years.

Tobias also dreamed and remembered and grieved for his lost brothers. There were times when he regretted his decision to choose the healing sleep instead of death, but there were still too many mysteries on this plane of existence, troubled as it was, too many puzzles and possibilities he could not bring himself to abandon.

One night, in five years, or fifty, or three hundred—he was so old that he no longer needed blood to survive— he would stir, leave his burrow beneath the moldering bones of some English dowager, and venture abroad. When that time came, he hoped to encounter the magnificent Maeve Tremayne again, and Dimity, the enigmatic blood-drinker who consorted with angels, and even that most exasperating of vampires, Valerian.

Ah, Valerian. Fascinating creature, even if he
was
irritating. Tobias knew much more about him than anyone else did, including, perhaps, Valerian himself. Yes, indeed, that vampire’s story was rich and complex, crying to be told.

Tobias settled himself deeper into his private enchantment and turned his thoughts to his own happy mortal youth, spent long ago and far away, in a verdant land overlooking a sapphire sea.

Maeve found Calder in the late twentieth century, a time she despised for its busyness and crass, materialistic orientation, just an hour before dawn. She was weary from warfare, for Lisette’s creatures were spawning others like themselves, helter-skelter, and for every ten she and Dathan and Valerian and the others managed to destroy, it seemed a hundred others cropped up. Although there had been no further communication with Nemesis’s forces, the deadline was mere days away, and the Warrior Angel, seeing the mindless vampires multiply, absorbing innocent mortals into their ranks, was surely straining to fight.

For a few minutes Maeve just stood there in the shadows of the famous medical college’s library, watching as Calder took volume after volume from the shelves, absorbing the material as quickly as he could flip through the pages. He was greedy for knowledge, the way most vampires were greedy for blood, and that troubled Maeve.

Despite Calder’s declarations of love, and his heroic sharing of strength when she’d needed it so badly, Maeve still had her doubts about his motives. She wasn’t sure, in fact, that Calder himself truly understood them.

At last he sensed her presence and turned to smile at her in the comforting darkness, at its richest now that dawn approached. He slid the volume he’d just scanned back into its place and came toward her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking her hands, bending slightly to kiss her cheek. “I was supposed to meet you in the circle of stones—”

Maeve smiled and touched his face tenderly, wanting to memorize it with the tips of her fingers as well as her eyes. “But you became so engrossed in your studies that you forgot,” she finished for him in tender exasperation. “Did you even remember to feed?”

Calder kissed her lightly on the mouth, and Maeve felt the same pleasant shock she always did. “Oh, yes,” he answered finally. “I am at the height of my powers, fledgling though I am. Would you like me to show you?” She nodded, almost shyly, and, by tacit agreement, they took themselves to their new secret lair, the wine cellar of the now rundown Holbrook mansion in Philadelphia. There they made love in the vampire way, with Calder putting Maeve through the same demanding paces she had so often required of him, and again in the mortal fashion. This time Maeve was the aggressor, kneeling astride Calder’s hips, riding him hard, taking him deep inside her and holding him there until he cried out and arched beneath her.

At last they slept, limbs entangled, on the old, scratched trestle table that was their vampire bed.

“I want to give you a new name, my darling,” Lisette purred to her mortal lover only minutes after sunset.

They were on the terrace of her villa, overlooking the warm, star-splashed Spanish sea.

George enjoyed a hearty dinner of roast pheasant and new potatoes, among other delicacies, while Lisette perched on the stone rail, letting the soft breeze dance in her hair and in the delicate folds of her gown.

“I like my own name,” George said, licking his fingers.

Lisette felt a surge of temper, but brought it quickly under control. There was no need to worry about this one; he wasn’t clever enough to give more than the occasional amusing ripple of trouble.

“It doesn’t suit you,” she told him moderately, reaching out to touch his lovely ebony hair. Like silk it was, fine and glossy, sliding smoothly between her fingers.

He looked up at her with impudent blue eyes, Aidan’s eyes, and Lisette’s heart tumbled a few times before catching itself. “What would suit me?” he asked in Spanish, chewing as he spoke.

His manners were atrocious, Lisette reflected, but she didn’t care about that, either. He would suit her purposes just fine, poor manners and vacuous brain notwithstanding.

She gazed upon him thoughtfully for a few moments, a finger to her chin, even though she’d long since decided that he would be called Nikos. “Have you noticed anything—well
—different
about me, darling?”

Nikos, formerly George, settled back, draining a glass of the finest Madeira in Europe before answering, “You are always gone when I awaken in the morning.”

Lisette smiled to herself. “Is there nothing else?”

Nikos frowned beguilingly. “You are unusually strong for a woman, and your skin is like iridescent stone when the moonlight strikes you.”

She leaned to trace the underside of his jawline with one fingertip, then slid it slowly down the length of his throat and into the dense, dark hair matting his chest. It was pleasant and diverting to watch him squirm in his chair, already wanting her.

“Would you like to live forever?” she asked, unbuttoning his silk shirt to the waist.

Nikos made a throaty sound of surrender as she worked his belt buckle easily and opened his trousers. “Yes,” he rasped.

Using her mind and not her hands, she began to stroke and tease Nikos, until he was bucking in his chair and, at the same time, groping for her.

She withheld herself, although she wanted to be ravished by the eager young brigand as much as he wanted to ravish her, at the same time intensifying his arousal with ruthless skill. “Would you like to be just as you are tonight—young and hard and full of fire—for the rest of eternity?” she whispered close to his ear.

He groaned, and Lisette knew what he was feeling because she was inducing those sensations that made him so feverish and fretful. “Yes
—damn
you, Lisette—what are you doing to me? I feel your hands cupping me—I feel your lips, your teeth, and it’s as if I’m about to be swallowed—” His words fell away as he gave an involuntary cry of savage need. “By the saints, I beg of you, give me mercy—”

But Lisette was not inclined toward mercy. She compounded the battery of sensations, toying with his nipples, laying a wreath of kisses on his hard belly, squeezing his powerful buttocks and lifting him, driving him deeper and deeper into his own senses.

The one thing she denied him was satisfaction.

Finally she pushed him to the point of madness; he rose from his chair and overpowered her—or at least, she let him think that was what he’d done. He tore her clothes away, cleared the table with a sweep of one arm, and hurled her down onto the surface, taking her with deep, angry thrusts.

Lisette’s release was instantaneous and violent. She pitched beneath Nikos’s plunging hips, arching her back and crying out in animal ecstasy as he punished her for her teasing.

He was not satisfied with once, however—that was one of the things Lisette loved about Aidan—no, she must remember, this was
Nikos
—he was insatiable, just as she was. Thus, he turned her on the table, so that her buttocks touched his groin, and put himself only a little way inside her, just far enough to drive her wild with wanting him.

He fondled her breasts as she begged, denying her in a low, murmuring voice, telling her that she was his and his alone, that he would have her when he was ready, and no sooner than that. He told her that she was a beautiful whore, pinching her nipples lightly and giving her another inch of his staff when she pleaded, and said what she needed was a proper hiding, and he had a good mind to give it to her.

Lisette moaned, desperate, despairing, delighted. It was this explosive pleasure that gave her such tremendous power.

“What do you want, little whore?” Nikos whispered, caressing her breasts, weighing them in his palms, chafing the nipples with his thumbs. ‘Tell me what you want.”

She gripped the edge of the table. “You,” she wept. “I want all of you—oh, please—I want it all . . .”

Nikos teased her some more, venturing a little farther inside her—but only a little—then withdrawing until he had almost left her completely. While he subjected her to this sweet torment, he pretended to ponder her request.

Lisette was certain she would perish, she wanted him so badly, and when he suddenly thrust deep inside her, she shouted with avaricious lust.

Nikos told her what a brazen wench she was, behaving in such a way, actually begging to be taken, making her whimper and whine, grasping her hips and holding her when she would have increased the tempo by thrusting herself against him. Finally, however, he lost control of his own need and pounded against her with greater and greater urgency, greater and greater violence, until they were fused by the heat of their fury, completely joined, each jerking against the other in instinctive surrender.