For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (5 page)

“Whatever it is,” a voice intruded, “you’d better put a stop to it before you end up mortal, living in a motor- home and making babies.”

Valerian. For once Maeve was glad to see him. “Thank you for announcing yourself,” she said coldly. “And for rifling through my thoughts like a pile of rummage in a market stall!”

Her visitor was dressed in unusually ordinary clothes, for him. He wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of a wolf on the front.

“Tsk-tsk,” he scolded. “You have much greater problems than my abrupt entrances. Lisette is prowling, Maeve. It is happening.”

The news wrenched Maeve out of her self-absorption without delay. “What do you mean, she’s ‘prowling’?” “Just that. Lisette is not merely taking blood, as the rest of us do, she’s creating new vampires. Indiscriminately. And they are ugly, mindless creatures, with no more discretion than army ants.”

Maeve abandoned all pretense of working at her weaving, and slipped off her stool to approach Valerian. “Does the Brotherhood know of this?”

Valerian’s expression conveyed both amusement and well-controlled fury. “They chose to ignore it.”

Maeve recalled her visit from Tobias. “Then perhaps you should follow their lead, Valerian. I’ve already been instructed not to interfere with Lisette.”

For a moment it seemed that Valerian would explode with frustration. “Don’t you see what will happen if she isn’t stopped?” he demanded when he’d composed himself again. “The world will be overrun with these monsters, and if that’s allowed to continue, there will soon be no humans to sustain us.” He gripped Maeve’s shoulders in strong hands and looked deep into her eyes. “But it will never come to that, Maeve,” he went on, “because Nemesis will be forced to step in. He will mobilize armies of angels and destroy not just Lisette, but every vampire on earth. He’s been itching to do just that for centuries, and this may be all the excuse he needs. Remember—as a warrior, it is his charge to protect the mortals his Master so cherishes!”

Maeve felt cold. “Surely the Brotherhood has considered—”

“Please!” Valerian scoffed furiously. “What has happened to your brain, Maeve—are you thinking with only a tiny portion as mortals do? The Brotherhood is a group of doddering old fools who have long since lost touch with the true state of affairs.”

Maeve raised the fingertips of her right hand to her mouth, taken aback. Valerian’s words had been bold, even for him. “Be careful,” she warned after a moment of recovery. “It may not be Lisette our Brothers rise against, but you. As it is, they think you’re rash and hot-headed, and they’ve warned me not to listen to your wild ideas.” Valerian’s brow furrowed as he frowned. “Since when does anyone—the Brotherhood included—tell the illustrious Maeve Tremayne what to think and whose words to heed?”

She did not reply, for Valerian’s question had struck its mark. Maeve valued her right to choose her own path and make decisions for herself above everything but her singular vampire powers.

The older blood-drinker smiled now and cupped his hands on either side of her face. “All I ask,” he said quietly, “is that you look at what Lisette is doing. Once you’ve seen, you can make your own judgment.”

Maeve started to argue, but the words stopped in her throat. Instead she simply nodded.

Valerian wrapped his arms around her, and the embrace became a nebula, spinning faster and faster. Maeve clung to the front of his shirt with both hands and devoutly hoped he knew what he was doing.

When the whirling stopped and they were still, Maeve was ruffled, and she pushed herself out of Valerian’s arms with slightly more force than necessary.

“Why do you always have to be such a show-off?” she demanded. “Why can’t you just will yourself from one place to another, the way the rest of us do?”

Valerian’s eyes laughed, though his mouth was solemn. He raised a long finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he whispered.

Maeve looked about and realized they were in a hospital, and judging by the high-tech equipment, she determined the time was the late twentieth century.

A nurse rounded the comer and stopped cold in the dimly lit corridor, clutching a medical chart to her chest. She was staring at Valerian and Maeve with her mouth open.

“You don’t see us,” Valerian said cordially, approaching the poor startled creature, who was now as immobile as a small animal blinded by a bright light. He rested the back of one hand against her forehead and repeated his words, this time gently, like a parent comforting a distraught child.

The young nurse stiffened for a moment, as if a charge had gone through her slender form, then proceeded down the hall, her conscious mind clear of impossible creatures knitted of shadows.

Valerian watched her go, a sort of affectionate concentration evident in his handsome face, and then gestured for Maeve to follow him. She did and found herself in a cold, sterile room with metal cabinets lining the walls. There was a human in attendance, but Valerian rendered him unconscious with a touch to the nape of the neck.

Barely a moment later a metal drawer slid open, seemingly of its own power. Maeve watched in disbelief as a bluish-gray corpse sat up and swung down from its storage place as nimbly as an athlete, though the body was that of a very old man.

The sight made Maeve shudder, though she’d seen many macabre things in her time; the thing was a vampire, and yet it seemed unaware of itself, unaware that two other blood-drinkers were nearby. It crept slowly toward the sleeping mortal, fangs glinting horribly in the fluorescent night.

“Do something,” Maeve whispered, for the moment too repulsed to move.

Valerian stood still, his arms folded, his manner thoughtful and unhurried. “There—a specimen of Lisette’s work,” he said. “And this is only the beginning of the nightmare.”

C
HAPTER 3

The hospital morgue was utterly still.

Maeve started as the living corpse reached the mortal attendant, who was catatonic with terror, and closed waxen fingers over his shoulders.

After casting a contemptuous glance at Valerian, who was watching the process with a mixture of clinical interest and smugness, Maeve finally shook off her own morbid fascination and stepped forward.

She had never, since the night of her making, consumed the blood of an innocent, and she would not stand by and watch while another vampire did so.

“Stop,” she said clearly, her voice charged with warning.

The freak looked at her stupidly, clearly confounded,

but its hold on the mortal did not slacken. Its face was all the more hideous, it seemed to Maeve, for the ragged vestiges of humanity that still showed in its features.

Maeve knew that reasoning would not reach the creature, nor would the threat of greater powers, for it was conscious of nothing but its own mindless, unceasing hunger. Feeling a strange, disconsolate pity even as she moved to destroy, she reached out and closed her fingers over the creature’s clammy throat.

“Be careful,” Valerian coached dispassionately, sounding a little like a university professor overseeing a flock of mediocre students. “Its bite may be venomous. We don’t know much about these aberrations, you know.”

“Thank you so much for your input,” Maeve replied, her gaze never shifting from her prey. She gave the ghoul a hard shake, and its grasp on the human, now blathering, was broken. The mortal scrambled to safety, making a low and wholly pitiful whimpering sound as he went.

Maeve did not pause to watch the attendant’s flight, but instead concentrated on forcing the lesser vampire onto a shining steel autopsy table. She hissed an order, and Valerian finally troubled himself to stir, handing her a pair of scissors.

Maeve subdued the demon when it struggled, dared to murmur a prayer for its true soul, and drove the long, narrow blades of the scissors through the beast’s chest wall and straight into a heart that had long since stopped beating.

The monster would not rise again.

A clamor stirred in the outer hallway; clearly the terrified attendant had been carrying tales about the strange and fearful goings-on in that eerie way station for the dead.

Valerian sighed. “We’d best get out of here,” he said.

“In a few seconds a horde of panicky mortals will come bursting through the doorway, and I would rather not deal with the poor wretches at the moment.”

Maeve glared at him, even as she raised her hands over her head for a swift departure.

To Maeve’s frustration, when she reassembled herself in the center of an ancient stone formation in the English countryside, the place where rumor had it that Aidan had been found, months before, Valerian was already there.

“Well,” he began, in that imperious tone that came so naturally to him, “do you believe me now?”

Maeve was still shaken and not a little disgruntled, for she had felt a potential strength stirring in the being she had destroyed, a primitive agility that would be terrible if it were even properly channeled.

Still, she did not want Valerian to be right.

About anything.

“Any vampire could have made that—that thing,” she said. “We have no proof that Lisette was responsible.” Valerian gave a raspy, tormented cry, full of profound exasperation. “Very well,” he snapped. “Let us suppose, for a moment, that Lisette is not the culprit. The fact would remain that we are dealing with a renegade of some sort—one that must be stopped.”

Maeve felt a chill, even though the night was warm, and a painful sense of desolation settled behind her heart, leeching her strength. She missed Aidan more sorely in those moments than she ever had, and yearned for his counsel.

She spoke patiently. “It could have been a random episode, an act of passion or revenge. We have no reason to believe it will be repeated.”

Valerian gazed deeply into her eyes. “You are fooling yourself,” he told her, touching a deep, well-hidden nerve with his words. He knew her so well and often taught her things about herself that she would rather have ignored. “This is no time to bury your head in die sand, Maeve— the existence of all vampires may depend on the choices you make.”

She turned from him, let her forehead rest against one of the cool, towering stones that had witnessed her brother’s transformation from blood-drinker to mortal. Weariness swept over her, and for the first time in over two hundred years she wanted to retreat, as Valerian and others had done through the centuries, to lie dormant in some hidden tomb until the challenges facing her now had passed.

“Perhaps,” she finally said after a long while, still not looking at Valerian, “vampires should not be saved. It could be that our time has ended—”

Valerian gripped her shoulders and wrenched her around to face him. “You cannot stand back and allow this to happen,” he growled, showing his fine white teeth, including the sharp incisors that were only slightly longer than their counterparts. “The rest of us have sacrificed much—indeed, our very souls—for our immortality and our singular powers. Do you think that would be the end, if we all perished, that we would lie peacefully in our graves, oblivious to the universe around us? You must know that we would be sent into the pit, multitudes of us, to suffer agony for all eternity. Will you condemn us to such a fate, Maeve? We who have been your friends—your lovers?”

Maeve felt a stab of conscience, a certain annoyance, and no small amount of fear. “I have had only one lover,” she was compelled to point out, even though the fact had no relevancy to the dilemma she faced.

Valerian narrowed his magnificent, mesmerizing eyes.

“Vampires are not creatures of conscience or charity,” he admitted softly, “but we are living beings who feel sadness and pain, as well as pleasure—and far more keenly than mortals do. Will you not fight for us? Will you not defend us, your sisters and brothers?”

“Why me?” Maeve cried in an agony almost as great as the one she’d endured when Aidan abandoned her. “Why not you? Or Tobias?”

The vampire laid his hands on either side of her face. “Deep inside, in the center of your mind and heart, you know the answer, Maeve,” he said, his voice soft and grave. “Some unconscious consensus of the species has appointed you to take up the sword in our behalf.” Maeve was silent for a time, considering. She hesitated so long, in fact, that the first pinkish-gold light of dawn was tracing the horizon before she replied. “I will find out what is happening, but that is all I am willing to promise.”

Valerian, to her weary annoyance, was smiling as she locked her hands together high over her head and vanished.

Calder Holbrook sat glumly in his father’s august study, an overfull snifter of brandy close at hand, gazing out one of the windows overlooking the formal rose garden that had been his mother’s pride. In one hand he fingered the necklace the Lady had given him, as though it were a rosary instead of a simple pendant on a chain.

Only a few feet away, in the carefully cultivated soil of the garden, the roses conducted a silent riot of color, their reds and pinks and yellows gaudy and rich in the afternoon sunlight. It seemed ironic to Calder that such shameless beauty could exist in a world where young boys played soldier, blowing each other to shreds at the behest of politicians and merchants and bankers.