For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (8 page)

“It grows late,” he said with a smile. Neither he nor his companions were human practitioners of the old religion; they, like the vampires, had been born of some ancient curse, some misbegotten magic, and they too were immortal. “Soon the dawn will come.”

“What is your business with us?” Valerian demanded, his embrace tightening around Maeve.

The warlock’s dazzling smile intensified, and he spread his arms, in their drapery of black, wide of his body. “We wanted only to get your attention, Vampire— obviously, we could have destroyed you both if we’d wished it so.” He paused, splaying his fingers and touching the tips together in a prayerlike fashion. All in all, he made a disturbing caricature of a holy man, with his reverent stance and flowing robes. “Hold your arguments,” he told Valerian, thus proving that he was perceptive as well as theatrical. “There is no time. Carry our message to the Brotherhood of the Vampyre.” Maeve felt adrift in a deeper darkness than she’d ever known before; she could barely comprehend the warlock’s words and would have fallen if Valerian hadn’t been supporting her.

“There is a renegade among you,” the creature went on calmly, “the female, Lisette. She makes vampires indiscriminately; mindless, bumbling ghouls who wander the earth murdering children.”

Maeve could not be sure whether she actually heard Valerian’s reply or only sensed it. Dawn was close; the need to sleep was pulling her downward, as was the injury.

“Since when do you mourn slaughtered humans, Warlock, be they children or the oldest of the old?” “Your assessment is quite right—we don’t give the proverbial damn about mortals, except for the amusement they provide. But the Warrior Angel cherishes them, as does his Master. Even now, Nemesis implores the highest courts of heaven to let him wage war on
all
unnatural creatures, not only vampires, but werewolves and witches and faeries and warlocks—all of us. He’s been waiting centuries—nay, eons—for an excuse to wipe the earth clean of all immortals except his own angels, and your Lisette may well have given it to him!” Valerian was weary, too; Maeve heard it in his voice, felt it in his large frame. “What do you want of us?” he asked.

“That is simple,” the warlock replied. “Stop the female, Lisette, immediately. If you do not, then our kind will declare war upon yours, in the hope that by destroying every last one of you, we can win mercy from Nemesis. Do not forget, Vampire, that we have an advantage over you—we can venture out into the daylight.”

A vision entered Maeve’s fevered mind; she saw black-cloaked figures moving through sunshine from one vampire lair to another, while the blood-drinkers lay helpless, systematically driving stakes through their hearts.

Valerian was undaunted, or at least he appeared so to Maeve. “Do not threaten us,” he retorted. “We are not without superior powers of our own, and if you are wise you will remember that.”

There was a general rustling, and Maeve fought the darkness even as she saw the first faint tinge of dawn shining beneath the ancient oaken door.

“They’re gone.” These two words, spoken by Valerian, were the last things Maeve heard before she sank into utter oblivion.

The warlocks vanished as quickly as they had appeared, for, although their leader had boasted of their ability to move about in the light of day, they were essentially creatures of darkness, like vampires.

Valerian had no time to consider them further, however, for dawn was imminent and he could already feel its molten fingers groping for him and for Maeve. He swept her up into his arms and hastened into the blackest regions of the crypt, found a chamber with a door, and dodged inside.

The sleep took him before he could set Maeve down, or even assess their surroundings—all Valerian knew, as he lost consciousness, was that he had found a place where the light would not penetrate.

Maeve awakened on a cold stone floor scattered with bones and crumbling mortar from the ancient walls, her head in Valerian’s lap. The wound to her neck, inflicted by a warlock during the battle the preceding night, had already begun to heal, but she was weak with the need for blood.

Valerian woke up just as she was raising herself from his thighs. “So,” he said and shrugged. “We shall live to hunt another night. Frankly I wasn’t entirely sure the warlocks wouldn’t come back while we were sleeping, armed with stakes and mallets.”

Maeve’s head spun; she wondered if she had the strength to hunt. “Think, Valerian,” she said, somewhat peevish in her discomfort. “They want us to carry the message to the Brotherhood. Destroying us now would have defeated their purpose.”

The magnificent vampire thrust himself to his feet and pulled a shaky Maeve after him. “We are not the only blood-drinkers who could spread the word,” he pointed out with weary reason. “Come, let’s find nourishment before we perish.”

Fortunately for both Maeve and Valerian, All Souls’ Cathedral was in an area of London that had degenerated into crowded squalor, teeming with small-time hoods, drug dealers, and pimps.

Spotting a smarmy-looking man in a cheap striped suit, leaning against a lamppost, Maeve raised the collar of her cloak higher, in order to hide the mark on her neck, and elbowed Valerian aside.

“You’re on your own,” she said. “This one is mine.” Valerian shuddered. “Yuk,” he said.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Maeve retorted and sashayed toward the pimp. She saw, in the recesses of the man’s mind, that he made a habit of picking up scared runaways in bus and subway stations, winning their confidence and then introducing them to prostitution.

As she approached, she felt an inexplicable need to see Calder Holbrook again; he was proof that decency and honor still existed in the world.

For now, however, Maeve had to play a part, for if she did not feed, she would perish.

She formed her mouth into a saucy smile, and the pimp straightened and looked her over with a practiced eye.

“You ain’t no workin’ girl,” he said in a thick cockney accent.

Maeve laid her hands on his shoulders—he was wearing a worn drum major’s coat, burgundy velvet with gold piping—and looked deeply into his eyes, his mind, his spirit. By the mental equivalent of flipping a switch, she shut down his brain.

He followed her mutely into the nearest alleyway, and there Maeve drank. For the first time since her making, she was tempted to take her victim beyond the point of death, and the realization worried her. While she felt none of her brother Aidan’s sentimentality toward humankind—indeed, she was contemptuous of such attitudes—Maeve was not vicious; she took blood only to sustain her powers and remain immortal.

Restored and strengthened, Maeve left the procurer sitting in the alleyway, vacant and staring, with the seed of a moral awakening sprouting in his brain. Come the bright light of morning, this particular deviant would forsake the life of sin, move in with his poor mother in Manchester, and spend the rest of his days clerking in a series of small shops.

Valerian was waiting impatiently on the sidewalk when she reached it, pacing back and forth, his cape flowing behind him. His color was high, which meant that he, too, had fed.

“It’s about time you came back,” he snapped, stopping in the center of the walk, arms folded, glaring down at Maeve. He was, typically, completely unaware of what a spectacle he made, with his imposing size, his cape, and his haughty manner. Nor did he seem aware of the flow of pedestrian traffic moving around him.

“You shouldn’t have waited,” Maeve said, refusing to be intimidated. Valerian might be able to dominate other vampires, but she was different.

“We have to speak to the Brotherhood,” he told her huffily. “Or has it slipped your mind that the warlocks are threatening to make war on all of us?”

“Of course it hasn’t,” Maeve replied pleasantly but in a firm tone. “It’s just that there is something else I want to do first.” She glanced at the starry sky with its tracings of clouds, for this was the vampire’s way of measuring time. “I’ll meet you at the stone monument where Aidan disappeared—two hours before sunrise.”

“Maeve—” Valerian protested.

She did not give him time to finish speaking before she interlocked her fingers above her head and vanished, for there was a sort of sustenance her spirit needed as badly as her body needed the blood of mortals.

Maeve returned to the nineteenth century, her favorite for all its trials and shortcomings, and found herself on the steps of a summerhouse behind the Holbrook mansion in Philadelphia. There was a soft, warm rain falling, and Calder was standing with his back to her, his hands gripping the rail that encompassed the open structure.

He sensed her presence immediately, although Maeve had not made even the intimation of a sound, and whirled to face her.

He said her name as though it were holy, and in that moment Maeve did what she had sworn she would never do. She lost her heart to a mortal.

The realization left her stricken, for, even now, in the face of a love she knew was unceasing and eternal, she did not want to become human again, as Aidan had done for his beloved Neely.

For Maeve, then, this grandest and most powerful of all emotions was a sentence to loneliness without end. Overcome, she turned, there on the steps that glimmered with rain, and would have vanished if Calder had not grasped her shoulders from behind.

“Don’t go,” he pleaded hoarsely. “Please—stay. Just for a few minutes—just long enough to tell me who you are.”

She faced him then, for she hadn’t the heart to disappear from his embrace, and looked up at him, knowing that all her suffering was visible in her eyes. “Who do you think I am, Calder Holbrook?” she asked gently.

He had stepped out from under the summerhouse roof, and the rain wet his dark hair and turned his fine linen shirt transparent against his skin. “An illusion? An angel? Or perhaps a beautiful devil?” he mused gruffly. “I don’t know, God help me. Nothing in my medical training, or in all my life before that, could have prepared me for this. All I know is that I think of you, and nothing and no one else, through every day and every night.” He paused, pushed back his dripping hair in a gesture that was touchingly boyish, and then whispered, ‘Tell me what is happening here, before I go mad. I beg of you
—help me understand.”

She wanted to weep. The truth was a crushing burden, and she knew he would not believe her. As a doctor, a man of science, Calder would find even the existence of blood-drinkers impossible to accept.

Nevertheless, she could not deny him an answer, or anything else for that matter, because he was too precious to her. “I am a vampire,” she said, her voice soft but matter-of-fact.

Calder stared at her, and she saw that the color had drained from his strong face. “A drinker of blood?” he marveled, and the words were hardly more than bursts of breath.

Maeve nodded, while parts of her spirit trembled and collapsed beneath the weight of Calder’s horror. “Vampires are immortal,” she explained, all the while wishing she’d never let herself begin to care for a human being. “Without blood, however, we would perish in a way far more terrible than even you, with all your knowledge of battlefields, could ever imagine. We must avoid daylight at all costs, and we have special powers—the ability to travel through time, for instance.”

Calder seemed unaware of the rain, which was coming down much harder now. “What do you mean, you can travel through time?”

She felt a stirring of hope because Calder had not bolted in revulsion or terror, but she was far too wise to let herself think he believed her. He was probably humoring her, as he might a mad person.

Only then did it strike Maeve that Calder’s mind was closed to her; she could not divine his thoughts or feelings.

“I just came from the late twentieth century,” she said, amazed, prodding gently with her thoughts and meeting with an impenetrable block.

To her surprise, Calder clasped her hand, led her into the summerhouse, and sat her down on a wrought-iron bench tucked into the cool folds of shadows. “Tell me—what sort of world exists—in that other place and time, I mean? Do they still make war? What advances have been made in medicine?”

For a long moment Maeve was too taken aback by his ready belief to speak. Then she whispered, “You don’t think I’m insane or a liar?”

“You are not a mortal woman,” Calder answered. “That much was clear from the moment I first saw you.” He was wearing the pendant she’d given him during their last encounter, and he held it out for her to see. “It was only this medal, solid proof of your existence, that kept me from having myself admitted to the nearest asylum,” he said. “Now—please—tell me about medicine and warfare in your century.”

Maeve checked the sky, only too aware of her commitment to meet Valerian at the stone monument in the English countryside. When she gazed into Calder’s eyes again, however, she wondered if she would ever be able to look away. “There have been tremendous advances in medicine—they can cure or control a lot of diseases that are fatal in your time. It is possible to immunize children against measles and diphtheria and many of the other illnesses that almost always end in death here. Surgeons are performing successful organ transplants there, and the infant mortality rate is a fraction of yours.

“War is very much a part of the modem world unfortunately. There are weapons capable of destroying the earth, and while the largest and most powerful nations are trying hard to get along, there are a number of small, fanatical factions that are not so willing to cooperate.”