Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (36 page)

A shiver cartwheeled down Daisy’s spine, and the words she spoke were born of pure bravado. “Can you take me to him?”

“Oh, that’s a brilliant idea,” Kristina muttered, ignoring the nurse who came to see if Daisy was eating her breakfast. “If this
thing
didn’t kill us both for our trouble, my mother well might. Or Valerian himself.” She shoved a hand through her hair, and it immediately fell back into perfect array, a soft cascade of ebony spun to silk.

In her next life Daisy wanted hair like that.

She settled against her pillow, an unwilling patient, dolefully spooning stewed peaches into her mouth. A nurse had taken the IV needle from her hand; that was some progress, at least. And O’Halloran hadn’t been in with any further news flashes on the dismal state of her career. A person had to focus on the positive whenever possible. “Okay. Then just tell me how to find the creep,” she said between bites of spongy fruit, “and I’ll go by myself.”

“Absolutely not,” Kristina said. “I’m taking you to my place in Seattle. You can stay there until all this is settled, one way or another.”

Daisy couldn’t bear the thought of sitting by passively and leaving everything to fate. She had too much to lose—and besides, there was really no place to hide. Krispin would close in for the kill when he wanted to—up until now, he’d only been toying with Daisy, using her to torment Valerian.

“Hiding out is no solution, Kristina, and you know it,” she replied with as much firmness as she could muster under the circumstances. “Some things can’t be avoided, and this is one of them. There has to be a confrontation.” “Between Valerian and Krispin, yes,” Kristina insisted. “But you should stay out of it. You can’t begin to understand what you’re dealing with here.”

“Would
you
turn away and pretend nothing was happening? If you were in love with a man—excuse me, a vampire—could you hide out somewhere until it was all over?”

Daisy thought she saw a shadow of sadness move in Kristina’s eyes, but the expression was so fleeting that she told herself she’d imagined it.

“Daisy, the important thing here is for you to stay alive. The relationship isn’t going to work anyway, because in case you’ve forgotten, you’re a mortal woman and Valerian is a vampire. How could the two of you ever hope to have anything even remotely resembling a normal life? You’ll get old and die, for instance, but Valerian, if he survives, will look the same a thousand years from now as he does today.” She paused to walk over and close the door on the hustle and bustle of the hospital corridor before continuing. “He wouldn’t change back into a mortal, Daisy, even if such a thing were possible. Valerian
revels
in what he is. Would you be willing to become a vampire?”

Daisy shrank back, repelled by the idea and more than a little stricken because Kristina’s points were valid ones. “Of course not,” she said.

Kristina spread her hands wide as if to say, “Well, then?”

“I love Valerian,” Daisy insisted in a fragile tone. “And I don’t care if everybody thinks I’m his mother someday—or if I don’t see him in the daytime, or any of that. It would be enough just to be with him.”

The other woman raised one delicate eyebrow. Her eyes were an intense shade of silvery gray and so expressive that few words were needed. “Of all vampires, Daisy, Valerian is the most fickle, the most outrageous, the most flamboyant. His passions have a range you cannot begin to appreciate.”

Daisy closed her eyes, just briefly, against the keenest ache she had ever felt. “If you are saying he has loved others—”

“He has,” Kristina said, though not unkindly.

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” Daisy demanded, regretting that she’d turned to this woman—if indeed she
was
a woman and not some kind of spook—for help in saving Valerian from himself as well as from his brother.

“Your side, Daisy,” Kristina answered sadly. “And Valerian’s. Just now my only aim is to keep you both alive. Still, if you’re smart, you’ll take my advice, forget our splendid friend and find a nice, ordinary mortal to love.”

Daisy pushed away her food and folded her arms stubbornly. “I’m afraid knowing Valerian has spoiled me for ‘nice, ordinary mortals,’ ” she said. “Besides, there’s something bigger than all of us going on here. It’s as if we’ve come to the crux of it all, the
X
on the map, after centuries of blunders and near misses. The situation has to be resolved—I feel sure of it. There is something we’re supposed to do to make things right.”

“No wonder you keep reincarnating as Valerian’s lover, over and over again,” Kristina remarked with some irritation. “You haven’t the
sense
to learn your lesson.”

“Which is?” Daisy asked tartly, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and testing a privately held theory that she could stand on her own if she tried, despite the bone-melting weakness that still afflicted her.

“That you must let go of Valerian, once and for all. And the same goes for him. The two of you are obsessed, following each other from continent to continent and century to century, as if you could thwart karma by mule-headed persistence!”

Daisy stood, wavered, clutched the bed, indulging in a few deep, steadying breaths before replying. “Maybe it’s just that we know we belong together,” she said. “Damn it, aren’t we entitled to one lifetime of happiness, after all we’ve been through?”

“None of us is entitled to anything,” Kristina countered, folding her arms. “We’re here on sufferance. Mortal and monster, saint and sinner—we could all be obliterated at the whim of heaven.”

“How nice that you came to visit,” Daisy said with acid sweetness. “To think I was actually depressed before!”

Kristina smiled tentatively and approached Daisy’s bedside. “Sorry—I tend to be a little overrealistic sometimes,” she said and laughed a little. “I get that from my father, I think. He’s pragmatic to a fault.”

Daisy, steadier on her feet now, began to make her way slowly around the bed, with a goal of reaching the closet. She didn’t ask Kristina to blink her up an outfit, like before at Valerian’s house; it had occurred to her since that the clothes might have been woven of fancy and little else, like those of the fabled emperor. There was also a possibility that the garments could vanish, being magical, like so much smoke, leaving her standing in some public place clad only in her good intentions.

“Nothing wrong with taking a sensible approach to things,” she said, because she liked Kristina and because she, being a cop, albeit a suspended one, was inclined toward a practical view herself. Her knuckles whitened where she gripped the steel rail at the foot of the mattress as she inched along. “Are you an only child?” she inquired, sensing that Kristina was about to order her back into bed and anxious to deflect any concern, however well meant, that might be coming her way.

‘To say the least,” Kristina answered, folding her arms and watching Daisy’s slow progress with her head tilted slightly to one side. The expression on her exquisite face was at once pitying and wry. “As far as I know, my mother was the first vampire to give birth in the human fashion. Nightwalkers generally create their ‘children’ by transforming favorite mortals.”

Daisy stopped, trembling with weakness, grasping the footrails as if to keep from dropping over a precipice. She laughed, but the sound was one of pain, not merriment. “I thought I’d heard everything, until I fell in with your crowd. The confessions of serial killers and street hoods pale by comparison.”

Kristina moved silently to her side, as lithe and graceful as a cat, and put a strong arm around her. “Back into bed, Daisy,” she said with kind insistence. “You’re not ready to ride to the rescue quite yet.”

Daisy wanted to resist, but there was a hypnotic quality to Kristina’s touch, as well as her voice, and besides, she was tired. So unbelievably tired. “Can’t just—give up—” she protested, amazed to find that she was already lying down again. Kristina was covering her gently with the sheet and thin blanket.

“I can’t imagine you doing that,” Kristina said with amusement and a touch of sorrow, too. “In fact, I don’t believe you know how to quit—even when it would be the smartest thing to do.”

Daisy felt the bed spinning beneath her, felt herself spiraling down and down, like Alice tumbling into the rabbit hole, to land, bouncing, on a dream. . . .

Valerian

London, 1875

I awakened from my enforced rest to find myself sprawled ingloriously on the floor of Holbrook’s laboratory, with the good doctor gone. I was not alone, however—Kristina, child of my soul, was sitting nearby, slender legs elegantly crossed and arms folded, awaiting my return to consciousness.

“Bloody hell,” I rasped, sitting up and shaking my head. I felt rather like a pugilist felled by a stronger opponent.

Kristina smiled sweetly. “Hello, Lazybones.”

I stood shakily, grasping the examination table with one arm to steady myself during the process. “Where the devil is that no-account father of yours?” I demanded.

She sighed. “When I turned a hundred and thirty, I stopped keeping track.”

“He didn’t sleep,” I marveled.

“What?”

“Calder. Your father—he didn’t sleep.”

“I know Calder is my father,” Kristina said patiently, leaning forward in her chair but not rising, as a more mannerly and respectful child might do. “And how do you know what happened after you dropped off? Papa could have willed himself to some other lair the moment you closed your eyes.”

My practiced instincts, coupled with the memory of a wide-wake, completely alert Dr. Holbrook, argued against Kristina’s theory. “He’s found a way to circumvent the vampire sleep—by all the old gods, he’s done it!” Fury scorched through me, consuming the last wisps of insensibility lingering in my brain. “And
damn him,
Calder means to keep the secret to himself!”

Kristina folded back the slim, tapered fingers of one hand and gazed thoughtfully at her nails. “You aren’t being fair,” she accused mildly. “Papa does not number among your more ardent admirers—we both know that. But he would never withhold any knowledge that could be used to accomplish something good.”

I began to pace, muttering to myself as I moved. Although I had awakened refreshed, my thoughts were again jumbled and fragmentary, and I quite literally did not know which way to turn.

The woman who would, in any other society except our own, be called my goddaughter, rose at last from her chair. “I’ve seen Daisy,” she said, stopping me in midstride. “There’s a crazy scheme cooking in the back of that mortal brain, Valerian—she figures she can save you, your Daisy, if she surrenders herself to Krispin before your heroic sacrifice can be made.”

The mere idea chilled me. I grasped Kristina’s shoulders and hauled her onto her toes, giving her a little shake in the process. “You talked her out of it, of course,” I said.

Fire kindled in Kristina’s pewter-colored eyes, but she did not use her singular magic to punish me for the effort. “I tried,” was her response. “Right now Daisy is too frail to try anything very dramatic, but there can be no question that she’s determined. I expect she’ll do something stupid the moment she’s worked up the necessary stamina. Now, let me go before I turn you into a garden slug and bury you in salt.”

I released her, wincing at the image, and at the same time smiling a little. “Not very imaginative,” I scolded, bending forward to plant a soft kiss on her forehead. “Help me, Kristina. Please. If you know anything about Calder’s experiments, I beg of you, tell me now.”

She looked at me with a sheen of tears glimmering in her eyes. “You’re asking me to betray my father’s trust.” I shook my head. “I’m asking you to save Daisy, and others probably, from Krispin’s madness. If I can find the passageway between this world and his, I can find
him.”

Kristina was silent for a time, obviously tom, but then she turned and crossed the room to a wall lined with neatly arranged volumes on sturdy shelves. She ran an index finger over the spines with affection and finally selected one particular book and took it reverently from its place among the others.

She held the tome against her chest for a moment, then extended it to me.

It was a diary of sorts, a complex record of Calder’s most recent explorations of science. In it were all his theories concerning parallel dimensions, and I absorbed the words greedily by running my right hand down every page.

When I was finished, I had a very good idea where to find my brother.

The solution, in fact, was almost ludicrously simple. I might have thought of it myself, or at least asked a certain friend who writes screenplays for horror films to suggest possibilities, if I had been in a calm frame of mind rather than a mild state of hysteria.

“Thank you,” I said to Kristina and pressed the volume back into her hands.

I went from there to my favorite part of nineteenth- century London for a hasty feeding, leaving my victim anemic but otherwise ecstatic. Then I proceeded to a certain burial mound not far from modern-day Dunnett’s Head, a place where Challes had taken Krispin, Brenna, and me long ago while in the throes of a scholarly passion for antiquities. We were all fascinated by the area, for the bones secreted beneath that manmade hillock of stone and rubble and grass had been ancient even in our medieval time. According to our tutor, the occupants of that underground chamber had lived and died before the Romans came to Britain.