For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (6 page)

“You needn’t go back, you know.” The voice came from the broad archway behind Calder, die doorway leading into the main part of die house, and, though it was unexpected, it did not startle him.

He did not turn to face his father, but instead closed his fingers tightly around the strange, simple pendant His inner organs seemed to stiffen as he bolstered himself against this quiet, ruthless man who had sired him.

“Do not suggest buying my way out of the Army again,” he warned. “I volunteered and I will serve my time.”

Calder could imagine Bernard Holbrook’s rage, as fathomless and cold as a well lined in slippery stones. “When will I understand you?” Bernard asked, and the clink of crystal meeting crystal echoed in die muggy, ponderous room as he poured a drink of his own.

Calder sighed but did not turn his attention from the lush roses, which seemed to frolic even in the still air, like trollops in gaudy dresses. “Perhaps never,” he replied. “We are too different from each other.”

“Nonsense,” blustered Bernard, who preferred not to entertain realities that weren’t to his liking. William, Bernard’s elder son and Calder’s half brother, looked and thought like their father and was a fawning sycophant in the bargain, but that apparently did not satisfy the old man. “Nonsense,” Bernard said again. “You are flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. We are more alike than you want to believe.”

Suppressing a shudder at such a prospect, Calder dropped the pendant into the pocket of his starched linen shirt—he had long since tossed aside his suit coat—and summoned up a somewhat brittle smile. “Think what you wish, Father—as you always do.”

Bernard was a portly man, with a wealth of white hair, a ruddy complexion, and shrewd blue eyes that were often narrowed to slits in concentration. Whatever his other faults, and they were many, his mental powers were formidable, and he could discern much that would escape a lesser mind.

“Surely you won’t try to convince me that you—even you, with your curious ideas of mercy—actually
want
to go back to another of those damnable field hospitals. Good God, Calder, the places have got to be horrible beyond comprehension.”

Calder’s broad shoulders sagged slightly. “They are,” he confessed in a tone that betrayed more than he would have revealed by choice. He rubbed his temples with a thumb and forefinger, remembering the incessant screaming, the sound of saws gnawing at bone, the vile, smothering stenches.

Bernard took a pensive sip of his brandy, looking out at his late wife’s roses as though in fascination. Calder knew the expression was deceptive; he would have wagered the last decade of his life that the older man didn’t even see the blossoms. Finally, when he was damn good and ready, he spoke again.

“Why, then, do you insist on going back?” he asked, and for a moment the question seemed reasonable to Calder, and he did not know how to answer. “Well?” Bernard prompted when an interval had passed. “Is it because you want so badly to spite me?”

Calder sprang from his chair, invigorated by a sudden rush of fury, and turned his back on the man who had sired him to gaze up at the woman in the portrait displayed above the mantelpiece. “Damn it, Father,” he bit out after several seconds when he did not trust himself to speak, “when are you going to realize that the sun and the planets do not revolve around you?” “When,” Bernard countered quietly, “are you going to realize that in throwing your life away like this you injure yourself far more grievously than you could ever hurt me?”

Slowly Calder turned to face the other man. “I am not ‘throwing my life away,’” he said coldly in measured tones. “I am a
doctor,
Father. Is there a more logical place for me to be than in the midst of suffering and pain?”

“Yes,” Bernard said with a patient sigh. “You could be a society doctor, like many of your schoolmates, and treat rich ladies with the vapors.”

Again Calder felt such contempt that he dared not speak. Instead he moved close enough to the place where he’d been sitting to retrieve his half-finished brandy. He tossed back the contents of his snifter and felt the fire spread through his veins, the sudden, almost painful slackening of the muscles in his neck and shoulders.

“Calder,” Bernard went ruthlessly on, his voice level and sensible like that of a snake charmer. “Listen to reason. I have friends who can arrange an honorable discharge. You can spend the rest of the war in Europe if that’s what you want, learning those new surgical techniques you’re forever yammering about.”

Calder closed his eyes, shaken and shamed. A part of him wanted to do as his father urged, to flee the carnage plaguing his own continent and lose himself in the knowledge he craved, to pretend there was no unnecessary pain in the world, no savagery.

“No one would blame you,” Bernard pressed, probably sensing his advantage.

Calder came back to himself in a flash of conviction and hurled his empty snifter against the polished black marble of the fireplace. The crystal shattered into thousands of glittering shards, and he wondered if that was not how God must see His creation: as broken, shining bits of something originally meant to be beautiful. “/ would blame me,” he said softly.

Bernard sighed again. “Would that your sainted mother, God rest her soul, had taken her stubbornness to the grave with her,” he said, “rather than leaving it in your keeping.”

Calder said nothing. He was, in fact, already looking toward the doorway, yearning to be away.

As had ever been, Bernard did not seem to know when to quit. “If you will not put the war behind you for your own sake,” he said, “then do so for mine. I need you here, under this roof.”

“You have William,” Calder replied, unmoved. Bernard offered no comment on that statement; he could not fault his elder son without faulting himself, for they shared the same thoughts and feelings and opinions. “Why in the name of heaven do you hate me so much?” he asked. “You have never been abused, and you have lacked for nothing. I saw that you had the finest possible education, even when you insisted on wasting that marvelous mind of yours on ordinary medicine. Tell me—I think I deserve to know—why is it that you have chafed and strained against me from the time you learned to grip the rail of your baby bed and hold yourself upright?”

Calder raised his eyes to the lovely, guileless face in the portrait over the mantel, the face of his mother. Somewhere deep in his mind her sweet voice echoed, shaping the words of some silly lullaby.

Finally he turned to Bernard. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “I cannot spare the energy hatred demands.”

“But you do not love me, either. You never have.”

“Wrong,” Calder said in a low, insolent voice. “She loved you once”—he gestured toward the painting that dominated the room—“and so did I. Until I saw that you were destroying her with your polite cruelties and gentle betrayals.”

Bernard threw up his hands, then let them slap to his sides in frustration. His face was redder than usual, and the white line edging his mouth gave evidence that he was shocked as well as infuriated.

“Great Scot,” he whispered. “After all this time, are you telling me that you have scorned my every effort to be a father to you because of a few fancy women?”

“She thought you loved her,” Calder said, looking up at his mother’s face, feeling again the terrible helplessness and despair he’d known as a small child. She’d wept over her errant husband, the beautiful, naive Marie Calder Holbrook, until Calder had thought his own heart would break. And in the end her abiding grief had caused her death.

“Marie was weak,” came a third voice from the inner doorway.

Calder’s gaze shot to his half brother, who was fifteen years his senior. William might have been a comfort to Marie, even a friend, for he’d been quite near her own age; instead, he had tormented her for taking his dead mother’s place in that yawning tomb of a house.

A charge moved in the room, a silent crackling, nearly visible for its sheer strength.

“Do not tempt me to do you harm, brother,” Calder said to William. “The pleasure of the prospect is very nearly more than I can resist.”

William, who would look exactly like Bernard in another thirty years, started to speak and then wisely restrained himself.

Calder pushed past him to enter the wide hallway just beyond.

Bernard shouted his name, but Calder did not turn back. Instead he kept walking, his strides long, until he was far from the great house and the others who lived beneath its heavy slate roof.

Benecia and Canaan Havermail were having one of their ludicrous tea parties when Maeve appeared in the ancient graveyard behind their family castle.

Benecia, a gold-haired wisp of a girl, and Canaan, her younger sister, who was dark of coloring, appeared at first glance to be children. They were in fact vampires, with some four centuries of grisly escapades behind them, and all the more terrible for their doll-like beauty.

Seeing Maeve, Canaan clapped her tiny, porcelain- white hands. Her nails were delicate pink ovals, microscopic in size and smooth as the interior of a sea shell.

“You’ve come to have tea with us!” she cried in childish delight.

Maeve felt a pang, looking upon this exquisite monstrosity, and wondered again if she hadn’t been right, during her last encounter with Valerian, when she’d suggested that it might be better to let all vampires perish.

“Sit down,” Benecia trilled, drawing back a dusty chair. Her golden sausage curls bounced in her eagerness to welcome the unexpected guest.

Maeve took in the scene without speaking or moving. The tea table was a dusty monument, smudged with moss and draped with the weavings of spiders, but it was the other guests that gave her pause.

The sisters had disinterred two corpses and a skeleton, no doubt from graves in other parts of the cemetery, and arranged them around the tombstone-table in a hideous parody of a favorite human tradition. One body, mummified by some strange subterranean process to a hard brown thing, mouth open wide as if to scream, had been neatly broken at the waist so that it would sit like a proper guest. The other was a gray, dirty thing, with rags hanging from its frame, its bony, long-dead fingers curled around a pretty china cup. The skeleton was perhaps the least ludicrous of the party, for it was clean of grave-dust, and no atrophied muscles clung to its ivory smoothness.

Maeve shook her head, marveling, not bothering to decline the invitation to join in the festivities. Before she could speak, a fourth creature lumbered into view, and she gave a little cry of amazement when she recognized what it was.

The grayish corpse, only recently dead, had been changed, like the poor creature Maeve had destroyed in the hospital morgue, into a low-grade vampire.

“Where did you find this beast?” Maeve demanded of the ancient children as the blood-drinker went from one horrible guest to another. It bared its long fangs as it wrenched one after the other to its mouth, then tossed each aside in blind frustration when there was no blood to drink.

Benecia, the elder of the two most terrifying fiends in the lot, batted her enormous china blue eyes in feigned innocence. “We stumbled across him when we were out feeding,” she said in a sweet voice underlaid with vicious determination. “He’s perfectly dreadful, isn’t he?”

Canaan had plagued the wretched thing into chasing her, and she giggled with all the merriment of a human child frolicking with a kitten. In that moment Maeve understood her brother Aidan’s revulsion for the ways of vampires as she never had before.

“We’ve named him Charlie,” Benecia said cheerfully. Maeve tried again. “Where did you find him?” A suspicion dawned in her mind, ugly and totally feasible. “Or did you make this abomination yourselves?” Canaan stopped her happy dance to stare at Maeve, and Benecia was still as well.

‘Tell me,” Maeve ordered.

Hatred flashed in Benecia’s cornflower-blue eyes, with their thick, fringelike lashes. She answered in a respectful tone, though her words were flip.

“Of course we didn’t make him ourselves, Auntie Maeve,” she said with acid goodwill. “We only
drink
from mortals, we don’t change them.”

The corpse had stopped scrambling after Canaan to stare at Maeve, round-eyed and slavering. She suppressed a shudder.

“Then where did he come from?” she insisted.

“We told you,” wailed Canaan, stamping one impossibly small, velvet-slippered foot. “We
found
him. He was wandering outside All Souls’ Cathedral in London.” “Were there others like him?” Maeve asked distractedly. With the formidable power of her mind, she reached into the skull of the pitiful creature before her and found no consciousness there, no vestige of a mortal soul.

Benecia shrugged, then bustled to put the tattered fragments of humanity Charlie had disturbed back into their chairs.
“If there
are more, we didn’t see them.” Canaan was glaring at Maeve, her small arms folded.

across the ruffled bodice of her pink taffeta dress. “Mummy’s still hunting, if you wished to see her.”

“Get me a sharp stick,” Maeve ordered, drawing the hapless, unresisting creature toward her by the strength of her thoughts.

“You’re going to stake him?” Benecia and Canaan cried in eerie unison, their voices ringing with mingled horror and eager anticipation.