Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (13 page)

I could not have known, back then, that one day I would cherish another in just that way, that I would understand completely how Challes felt.

I knew nothing of anything. I craved some blessing from Challes, some unnamed and joyous communion, with an intensity greater even than the wanting of wine.

In the end he dismissed me, to my wretched disappointment, and sent me off to my chamber as if I were a child. Certainly he had power over me, even then, but my obedience was grudging.

Challes came to my room perhaps an hour before dawn—I lay wakeful in my bed, watching the moon through the window and listening to the wolves’ song— and suddenly he was simply there. I knew he had not entered by any ordinary means, but I was beyond questioning that. I simply looked at him, silently imploring him for I knew not what, knowing I would perish of grief if he denied me.

Challes knelt beside my bed, smoothed my hair, murmured words I did not comprehend, and bent his head to my throat. The experience was profoundly sensual, but again it was more a thing of the mind and spirit than of the body.

I, who had never knowingly been intimate with a man—I confess there were instances during the dark years after Brenna’s death, however, when I was too drunk to know whose pallet I’d shared—was ready to surrender my very soul.

I started when I felt two sharp points penetrate the skin of my neck, and perhaps managed a whimper of fearful protest, but in the next instant, as my very life’s blood flowed in Challes’s fangs, ecstacy crashed down upon me like a giant wave. I moaned as he drank, only vaguely aware that he wasn’t touching me at all, except where his mouth was pressed to the pulsing vein at the base of my throat. It was as though every erotic point, within and without, was being stimulated at once.

It was dark and sweet and violent, my first communion with Challes, like the pleasure I had known when Brenna wooed my seed from me, except that this release encompassed the whole of my being and went on and on, endlessly. At long last I swooned, the exertion and the joy so great that I could not endure them, and when I awakened with the morning sun I believed at first that I’d dreamed the entire episode.

When I touched my throat and felt the two tiny, rapidly healing puncture wounds, however, I knew all that Challes had said was true, that all I remembered was real. And I was filled with a delight, and a terror, of truly infinite proportions.

I did not see Challes that day, and I grieved until darkness fell. It was just after sunset when he returned, and began molding me, ever so artfully, into a fiend’s fiend.

Daisy

Las Vegas, 1995

“Why the hell didn’t you call me?” O’Halloran demanded the next morning when Daisy had told him about the threatening telephone message. They were riding in his car, on their way to the home of Jillie Fairfield’s next of kin, her divorced mother. Daisy was up to her ankles in empty soda bottles, misfolded maps, and crumpled candy wrappers.

“What would you have done?” she countered irritably. “Hauled yourself over there and sat on my couch all night, holding a .357 in your lap?”

It wasn’t the crank call or O’Halloran’s gruffly solicitous attitude that was bugging her, she admitted to herself. Mrs. Fairfield resided in a trailer park where Daisy and Nadine had spent six happy months when they were in elementary school, in the care of their paternal grandmother. Inevitably their mother, Jeanine, had returned, rumpled and a little drunk and smelling sour from the bus ride that had brought her back to Vegas from wherever she’d been. She’d reclaimed her daughters, over Gran’s fierce but helpless protests, and headed straight for the nearest social worker. A couple of kids made it a whole lot easier to collect welfare, after all, and once Jeanine had dumped or been dumped by her latest boyfriend, a biker with a slipped disk that entitled him to state compensation, she’d suddenly developed all manner of maternal instincts.

“Relax, Chandler,” O’Halloran said. “I’m not trying to step on your goddamned feminine rights or anything like that. I just want to make sure this sicko doesn’t get too close, okay?”

Daisy wanted to reassure her partner, but she was still distracted by her dread of returning to the trailer park. She and Nadine had never been allowed to go back, even to visit, and after a couple of years the old woman had passed away. Jeanine’s boyfriend at the time—Daisy couldn’t remember his name and didn’t care if she ever did—had shown her the obituary in the newspaper and said maybe they’d get a mobile home out of the deal, “now that Granny has kicked off.”

“Chandler?” O’Halloran prompted. They turned a comer on a yellow light, and the door of the glove compartment fell open, slamming against Daisy’s knees and spilling a variety of cassette tapes, empty cookie packages, expired registration slips, and unpaid parking tickets into her lap.

She stuffed the whole mess back where it came from and closed the little door with a crash. “What?” she snapped.

“You suffering from a year-round case of PMS, or what?”

Daisy sighed and shoved a hand through her hair. “Why is it that men always think any change in a woman’s mood has to be connected with her hormone levels?”

O’Halloran shrugged, running another yellow light, bald tires squealing, and the driver of a tour bus blasted his horn and displayed a specific finger behind the broad tinted window. “After ten or twenty thousand years the evidence starts to stack up,” he said. “The thing is, we got this weird case to solve—you know what the medical examiner said—and it’s gonna take our undivided attention to work the snarls outta this one. You gotta get all your body chemicals in sync, Chandler, ’cause I need your help.”

Daisy tossed him a mock salute. “No problem, Officer Friendly. My mood has nothing to do with chemistry. And slow it down, will you? You take one more comer on two wheels, and I’ll have to write you up for driving under the influence of sugar and preservatives.”

He grinned, but in the next moment his expression was solemn again. “I don’t like this, Chandler,” he confided. “This Fairfield thing, I mean. By the time we got to that girl, she didn’t have enough blood left in her veins to reach a gnat’s ankle. What the sonnabitchen hell
happened
in that place? What about those marks on her neck?”

Daisy shifted in the seat as the entrance to the trailer park came into view. She took a pair of sunglasses from her purse and put them on, telling herself it was because of the glare. “Forensics found blood on the scene when they went over it after the body was removed,” she pointed out. “It just wasn’t visible to the naked eye, that’s all.”

“Okay, so there was a little blood. There sure as shit wasn’t enough. What happened to the rest of it?”

She shivered, somewhere down deep, and knew her reaction didn’t show on the outside. Jillie’s corpse, the crank call, the dream, and the magician all sprang out of her subconscious at once to haunt her. “I don’t know,

O’Halloran,” Daisy replied finally in a somewhat testy tone. “Maybe you were right in the first place. Maybe we’ve got a vampire running loose.”

O’Halloran flung her a mildly contemptuous glance and slowed to enter the Lucky Dollar Trailer Park, passing beneath the burned-out neon sign and bouncing down the rutted gravel road between battered mobile homes. “You wish,” he said, making a cranking motion with his left arm as he rolled down the window. The air-conditioning had petered out years ago, with the second or third motor. “Better the real thing, for my money, than some psycho who believes with all his diseased little brain that taking a drop of human blood now and then will make him live forever.”

Daisy didn’t answer. Her thoughts lingered on Valerian. She was comparing the way he looked in real life with the younger, less polished version she’d seen in her dream, wondering if he was gay, straight, or in between, and where he’d learned to do magic. Something told her he was accomplished in the subtler forms of wizardry as well as the spectacular ones he employed onstage.

“Chandler?” O’Halloran barked. “Pay attention, damn it.”

Daisy switched mental gears and forced herself to concentrate. “I’m with you, buddy. Let’s go make the world safe for humankind.”

After asking directions from a gray-haired man mowing a lawn, they found the Fairfield trailer. It was a rundown, two-tone double-wide with a sagging step and a yard made up of crushed gravel and cigarette butts.

Mrs. Fairfield came out onto the dilapidated porch when they drove up, a petite blonde with a leathery tan, wearing white short-shorts and a skimpy red top. She wore high-heeled sandals, her toenails were painted, and her makeup gave rise to speculation concerning the way she earned her living.

“You the cops?” she asked, raising a lipstick-stained cigarette to her mouth.

Just two of them, Daisy thought, flashing her badge, but she didn’t say the words out loud because after all, this woman’s daughter had just been murdered. Just to the left and a little behind her, O’Halloran flipped out his wallet.

“I’m Detective Chandler,” said Daisy, “and this is Detective O’Halloran. We’re investigating your daughter’s death, and we need to ask you some questions.” ‘Took you long enough to come around,” Mrs. Fairfield replied, giving no sign that she intended to invite them inside.

Daisy was relieved. The place probably reeked of smoke, and worse, it might look too much like Gran’s trailer. There might be a loosely crocheted afghan draped over the recliner in the living room, pictures in dime- store frames on top of the television set, cheap shag carpeting with a worn spot in front of the door— O’Halloran consulted his ever-present notebook, and out of the comer of her eye Daisy saw a short grocery list scrawled on the first page. “According to my log here, I called you myself from the station, about an hour after we left the—er—scene.”

Mrs. Fairfield sat down on the top step, crossed her still-shapely legs, and tapped the ashes from her cigarette into a clay pot containing a dead plant. She sounded bored when she spoke again. “If you’re going to ask me who Jillie was dating, or who her friends were, I couldn’t tell you. She and I didn’t get along too well. I do know that she worked for that magician, Valerian something- or-other, in the showroom at the Venetian Hotel. That’s some kind of place, isn’t it?”

Daisy felt a swift, dizzying fury. Someone was dead, and this woman, the victim’s
mother,
for God’s sake, was talking about the latest addition to Glitter Gulch. She opened her mouth to comment, but O’Halloran, who could be amazingly perceptive when he tried, silenced her with a touch to her forearm.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s something, that hotel. You ever go down there and take in your daughter’s show?”

Mrs. Fairfield laughed. The sound was low and throaty, but there was more despair in it than humor. “At the price those places charge for a ticket? Not on what I make serving drinks in a fourth-rate casino. And Jillie sure as hell never found it in her heart to get me comped in. I hear it’s a great act, though. HBO wanted to do a special a few months back, according to the papers, but this Valerian character won’t let any kind of camera through the door.” She tapped more ashes into the planter. “It’s all a lot of hype, if you ask me—that stuff about how he’s never seen in the daytime and everything. There’s nothing like an attitude to generate publicity. You gotta know how to sell yourself in this town, and that guy’s a master at it.”

Daisy wondered if Mrs. Fairfield was really as crass and unfeeling as she seemed. People handled grief in a lot of different ways, some putting on fronts, some breaking down right away. Daisy had heard more than a few talk all around the subject of their loved one’s death, too, just the way this woman was doing. “We need to know if your daughter had any enemies, Mrs. Fairfield,” she said, grateful to O’Halloran for running interference until she could get her emotions under control. “In an incident like this, the killer is often someone the victim knew.”

The aging cocktail waitress raised a carefully plucked eyebrow. There was something faintly mocking in the motion, and some of Daisy’s sympathy ebbed away.

“Is that right? How long you been a cop, sweetie?” Daisy took a breath, let it out slowly. “We’re not here to talk about me, Mrs. Fairfield. Please—tell us whatever you can about your daughter.”

“I told you, we didn’t get along,” came the distracted, slightly hoarse reply. “We didn’t speak at all for the last two years.”

“Why not?” O’Halloran asked with quiet compassion.

Mrs. Fairfield’s eyes were luminous with tears when she raised them to meet his gaze. “It was a stupid thing, really—she was dating a married man, and I told her he’d never leave his wife for her, ’cause they never do, you know—and Jillie and me, we had too much to drink one night, and we got into it good. We tore into each other, right here in front of this piss-ant trailer, and it was a catfight like you never seen before.” She paused and smiled faintly at the memory, as though proud that she and her daughter were scrappers. “The cops came, too. Look in your computers if you don’t believe me. Jillie and me, we was both too stiff-necked to say we were sorry afterwards. We thought we had forever to make things right, you know?”

At this last, her face crumbled, and Mrs. Fairfield gave a small, raw sob that wrenched hard at Daisy’s insides.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

Mrs. Fairfield rose gracefully to her feet and tossed her cigarette butt into the gravel. Then she wiped her mascara-streaked cheek with the back of one manicured hand. “Yeah, sure you are, honey. Sure you are.”