Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (25 page)

She recovered quickly, as she had always done, for among the many sterling qualities she tended to carry from lifetime to lifetime was a perfectly astounding capacity for resilience. There had been many occasions when, in my opinion, cowardice would have served her better. When she rode into the sea as Brenna, for one example, and she fled my house in London as Elisabeth, for another.

A comer of Daisy’s mouth tipped upward in a cocky little grin. “Are you losing your touch?” she asked, looking me over with a slow impudence I wouldn’t have suffered from anyone else. “Frankly, I’d come to expect a little more subtlety and grace from you.”

I don’t doubt that the sheer heat of my annoyance could have dried my sodden garments, but I chose instead to construct another suit of clothes entirely, by means of my will. In the figurative blink of an eye, the tails and cloak and trousers were gone, and in their place were tailored slacks and a cashmere turtleneck sweater, both black. On my feet, instead of the former water- spotted spats, were a pair of the sleek boots I have made in a certain elite shop in Milan.

I must admit I enjoyed Daisy’s round-eyed reaction to the transformation, which had been virtually instantaneous.

“I’m not even going to
ask
how you did that,” she informed me after closing her gaping mouth and swallowing a few times. “I don’t suppose it’s a trick we poor, bumbling mortals can learn?”

I touched the tip of her nose, with its faint golden trail of freckles, and smiled. “Sorry, love—I believe that particular feat will require a few more millennia of evolution. Don’t feel badly, though—the ability
is
there, slumbering away in a rather gelatinous portion of your brain.”

Daisy gave me a spook-house smile, purposely grim and humorless. “Thanks so much for setting me straight,” she said with mild irony, then turned on one bare heel to march out of the bathroom. “Every once in a while I lose touch with the fact that I’m Only Human.”

I had no choice but to trail after her, and I don’t mind saying that it galled me. It has always been my habit, and my distinct preference, to lead, not follow.

“Is that about poor Janet?” I demanded, hastening along that shoddy little hallway behind Daisy. “Is that why you’re so peevish tonight?”

She turned so quickly that I nearly collided with her at the entrance to her uninspired living room. “I’m not peevish!” she insisted, folding her arms. “I’m
scared,
damn it! I’m scared shitless!”

I hated it when she, or any woman, talked like that. Call me a male chauvinist vampire, but I miss the old-fashioned female virtues, gracious speech among them. Sometime, I vowed to myself, I will tell her about her incarnation as Jenny Wade, when she’d been so sweet-tempered and ladylike.

But this was not the time for lectures. I put my hands on Daisy’s shoulders to steady her and was struck anew by the fragility of her tender flesh and delicate bones.
Ashes to ashes,
I thought with a stab of sorrow,
and dust to dust.

“I cannot endure this again,” I muttered, speaking more to myself than to her. Even then, of course, I knew I had no choice but to endure, to suffer, to pass through the very fires of hell, and, worst of all, to survive it.

Daisy reached up and touched my mouth with the fingertips of her right hand. “What do you mean by that?” she asked in tones so gentle that they splintered my dry and hollow heart. “You left out some things the other night when you told me about our past lives together, didn’t you?”

“Not ‘our past lives,’ darling,” I replied, closing my hand around hers, because I couldn’t resist, and brushing her knuckles across my lower lip. “Yours. I have been who I am—Valerian Lazarus, the bootmaker’s son— since my birth in the fourteenth century.”

“What is it that you haven’t told me?” she persisted. She might have been Elisabeth then, or Brenna, or any of the other saucy, dauntless minxes she’d been through the endless and dreary march of years that lay between our first encounter and this one. In each successive encounter I have loved her more deeply than before. “Speak up, please.”

I had not told her about the curse, of course. Or about the ruby ring that always heralded the end of another bittersweet episode between us. And I would not burden her with those things now, for there was nothing she could do to change the future.

“Do not ask,” I said, and the words came hoarse from my throat. “I cannot and will not answer.”

For a long moment Daisy simply stared up at me, working some old and potent magic of her own. She looked incredibly small and breakable in those blasted pajamas, and yet I sensed in her some mysterious power that I would never understand or possess.

“He was here,” she said. “The killer.”

I could not have been more horrified or taken aback if Daisy’s bat, which she’d left in the bathroom, had suddenly materialized in her hands and slammed into my middle. How could I have failed to sense such a threat?
How?

“When?” I rasped, grasping her shoulders again. Daisy turned beneath my hands and walked away, into the kitchen. She took some modem horror from the freezer and slid it into the microwave before deigning to meet my gaze and answer my anguished question.

She shrugged, leaning against the counter while the oven whirred behind her. “While I was visiting—make that
not visiting
—my sister in Telluride. I came home and found a life-size doll hanging from the showerhead, with an improvised noose around its neck. There were two red marks on the throat—for dramatic effect, I suppose. It was overkill, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

I stopped myself just as I would have smashed one fist through the cheap plasterboard of her living room wall. “Here? Krispin was
here?”

The bell on the oven chimed, and Daisy opened the door and took out something evidently intended to pass for a pizza. “Ah, so Super-fiend has a name now. How interesting.”

I was still struggling to regain my inner—and outer— equilibrium. The scent of the wretched thing she’d cooked and was now preparing to eat—oh, yes, vampires have the sense of smell in abundance, and all the others, too—nearly gagged me.

“I discovered the truth only last night,” I said, curling my lip and trying to distance myself from the culinary travesty, which Daisy was now balancing atop a folded paper towel and raising to her lips. “My brother, Krispin, lives.”

Daisy took a bite and had the effrontery to chew as she answered. “So does my sister, Nadine.”

I went to stand on the other side of the living room and opened a window to the still desert air. “The difference,” I said coldly, “is that Krispin, like me, was born in the fourteenth century. He is a vampire.”

“I take it the two of you haven’t kept in touch,” Daisy observed.

I thrust a hand through my hair in exasperation. “I believed him dead all these years, and he never troubled himself to disabuse me of the notion.”

She shrugged again, raising just one shoulder, and gazed at me over the expanse of the half-eaten pizza.

“Maybe he didn’t know about you, either,” she suggested.

I glowered at her. “He veiled himself from me. He could have no honorable reason for doing that. We were brothers, after all, dragged, bloody, from the same womb.”

Daisy made a face and dropped what remained of her food into the trash. “Maybe he—what was his name again?—Krispin, that’s it. Maybe
Krispin
simply doesn’t like you? Did you ever consider that possibility?”

She started to lick her fingers—a habit I cannot abide—but stopped when I fixed my gaze on her and projected my disapproval.

“Clearly, to say that Krispin ‘doesn’t like me’ is an understatement of truly enormous proportions. I believed, however foolishly, that he cared for me while he lived, as I did for him.”

Daisy raised an eyebrow and, to my relief, wiped her hands clean on a dishtowel hanging from the refrigerator handle. “It couldn’t have been easy to be your brother,” she said. “You’ve got to admit you can be a bit overwhelming. A hard act to follow, in more ways than one.

“Be that as it may,” I said, struggling again to control my impatience, “I believe Krispin is the killer. I must find him.”

She paled slightly and came a step nearer. “And then?”

Such sorrow welled up within me that I could barely withstand it. “And then I shall destroy him.”

Daisy drew closer still and laid a hand on my arm. I hoped she did not feel the involuntary tremor that spilled through what passes, in a vampire, as flesh and muscle.

“How?”

I saw my brother in my mind’s eye, as a small, coltish boy, with sunlight gleaming in his bright yellow hair and mischief shining in his eyes. I heard him running after me, imploring me to slow my strides so that he might keep pace.

The memories caused me pain the like of which I have known only a handful of times—always in connection with this woman—and the images of what the future might hold for me and for Krispin were so horrible that I could not hold them in my mind.

I said nothing, because I was incapable of speaking at that moment.

“Is it like in books and movies?” Daisy asked with a tenderness that made me long to lose myself in her arms for a little while, to nestle in her warm heart like a dream and hide from all that was mine to do. “Do you have to drive a stake through his heart?”

“Something like that,” I managed to say. “I would almost rather destroy myself than Krispin. Great Zeus, Daisy, if you could have seen him as a child, as a youth—he was beautiful.”

“Like you,” she said. “But smaller, I think, and perhaps not as quick, or as bright, or as bold.”

I looked into her eyes, surprised by her insight. “My father used to say I took the best of my mother’s nurturing—that my craven hungers made my brother weak and robbed the children who came after him of the very marrow of their bones and the potency of their blood.”

“Father of the Year,” Daisy said with gentle sarcasm, putting her hands on my shoulders.

I wanted to melt beneath her warm, soft palms and supple fingers, but there was, regrettably, no time to waste on such sweet indulgences.

“You are not safe, Daisy,” I began.

‘Tell me about it,” she interrupted before I could go on. “I’m a cop, remember? And we’ve had this conversation before. There is no safe place, Valerian—maybe not for any of us.”

“My brother will come for you in earnest. The thing you found in your shower was only his calling card.” She lowered her lashes briefly, then looked up at me again. I saw in her eyes the shimmering courage that was woven into the very fiber of her spirit long, long ago, at some celestial loom. “Where shall I hide, Valerian? Name the place that you, or creatures like you, cannot enter.”

I could not answer her challenge, for besides heaven itself, there was nothing that could keep me out, no place I could not go if I so wished. The same, of course, applied to Krispin.

I was forlorn in those moments, filled with hopeless despair, but then a stray thought caught in my mind. “This mannequin he left for you—where is it?”

She drew back a little way. “O’Halloran—my partner— took it in for evidence. He thinks we’re dealing with an ordinary human being, you see, so he wanted the thing dusted for fingerprints, after Forensics looked it over, of course.”

I would get the dummy if I had to—I needed to lay my hands to something Krispin had touched—but I preferred to avoid dealings with the police for as long as possible. Now that Janet had been killed, they were almost certain to lay the crimes at my door, and it would be awkward to vanish from their midst when they attempted to detain me.

‘The tie to your robe,” I said. “The one that was used as a noose. Did your partner take that, too?”

She frowned and shook her head. “No. I was afraid I wouldn’t get it back.”

I might have laughed, had the circumstances been different, for I admit to a certain macabre amusement at her reluctance to separate a bathrobe from its matching belt. And never mind that the thing had been used like a hangman’s rope.

“Where is it?” I demanded, but I did not wait for her reply. No, I was already homing in on her bedroom, and the closet within it, and the brass hook on its inside wall.

I snatched the robe from its peg and pulled the terrycloth belt through the loops, holding it in my two hands as I might have held a tame snake. Instantly I had a strong impression of Krispin, and I knew, with both elation and despair, that my theories were correct.

I felt his hatred for me in that bit of cloth, I felt his jealousy, his madness, his fury.

I was more afraid for Daisy than ever before, previous lifetimes included. My brother would not hesitate to kill her—indeed, he
relished
the prospect. He was saving that act for last, the way a child hoards a favorite sweet.

“Why?” I whispered, in case he had linked his mind to mine and could discern my words. “Why?”

Krispin did not choose to answer.

Not then, at least.

I was compelled to hunt, for I had not fed the night before, due to my visit to Dunnett’s Head. But I could not bear to leave Daisy alone in that apartment, like bait in a trap, tempting Krispin to punish me with her death.