Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (38 page)

“And move between dimensions.”

He feigned a sigh and straightened, hands in the pockets of his impeccably tailored tuxedo slacks. There was a look of the 1920s about him, a certain dissolute elegance. With his slicked-back blond hair and lithe figure, he resembled a character from one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels.

“Yes,” he said, “I can move between dimensions. Even a mortal can do that, albeit usually by accident. Many of your so-called missing persons have merely slipped over onto our side.” Krispin paused to smile indulgently, reminding me of a fond uncle recalling an outing with a precocious niece or nephew. ‘Their reactions are interesting—oft-times they don’t realize they’ve made a transition and try to return home as if nothing had happened. They make odd little discoveries along the way. Their house is suddenly to be found on the opposite side of the street from where it was before, that sort of thing. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the shock of opening the front door and encountering their equally bewildered double on the other side.”

I was fascinated, in spite of myself. I was also vigilant, expecting treachery at any moment and, I admit, watching for any opportunity to execute a trick of my own. “Interesting,” I said. “When someone dies in this dimension, does his counterpart in the other world perish as well?”

“Not necessarily. The two planes are quite separate, even though they seem to reflect each other. If that weren’t the case, then a person who disappears here would immediately vanish there, too.”

“Do immortals have counterparts, as humans do?” Again Krispin smiled. He kicked the carriage wheel lightly with the toe of one gleaming shoe, as if testing a tire. “Not exactly. Your reflection died some five hundred and sixty-eight years ago, as well he should have, being mere flesh and blood. You might be interested to know that he lived quite a saintly life, for his time. He was all you might have been, without your greed and arrogance.”

I felt an empathy with that long-gone Valerian Lazarus, a soft but poignant wrenching sensation, as if we had shared a soul, he and I. The two of us, I knew, had been one being, even though we had never guessed at the other’s existence, and it gave me a certain comfort to know he had been a force for good in his world. Perhaps some mercy would be extended to me, when I presented myself to Lucifer for punishment, on account of that other Valerian’s fruitful life.

“And your counterpart?” I inquired.

Another sigh. “I’m afraid he died as a small child. His elder brother—your other self, if you will—was strong and smart and very healthy, like you. And like you, he left his mother with little or nothing for the children who came after him.” Krispin stiffened, and his eyes glinted with a hatred he took no trouble to disguise. “You took it all, Valerian. You sapped the very marrow of Mother’s bones. You had her complete devotion—by the gods, it was unholy the way she cared for you!”

“Stop,” I warned quietly, “before you say too much.” He swayed slightly, as though buffeted from within by the sheer force of his emotions, and covered his eyes for a moment. When he looked at me again, however, he seemed strong again and utterly defiant, thriving on some poison of the soul even as it consumed his sanity. “If she could have rid herself of our father and me, and lived only with and for you, she would have done it.”

Disgust raised a scalding gorge to the back of my throat. “Enough,” I reiterated. “There can be no profit in such talk.”

“No profit?” Krispin came nearer, moving as silently and sinuously as a cat. When he was within my reach, he stopped and gave a hoarse, harrowing cry of laughter. “May Apollo and Zeus and all the old gods of Olympus forbid! No profit, indeed!”

“You are mad.” I could not keep the contempt from my tone. Among our kind, madness is a choice, not a sentence conferred by a random fate or an illness, as it is with humankind. This particular aberration requires careful, vigilant nurturing, for our wounds, be they emotional or physical, are quick to heal. Barring blood-starvation,

sunlight, fire, or the point of a stake, wooden or otherwise, driven through its heart, a vampire cannot be killed.

Krispin reached out to straighten my lapel, as any brother might do, and his hand lingered lightly on my chest. I felt the hard chill of it even through my clothes. “Alas,” he said, “I have not been able to put the grief of Seraphina’s negligence behind me. Do you realize that she never kissed me good night, or ruffled my hair as she passed, or told me she loved me? Not even once?”

I recalled many instances when our mother had shown me those simple affections, and I knew that Krispin did, too. In a way, I understood his obsession with that deluded woman—fiend or mortal, we always long for that which is withheld from us.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. I regretted all he had suffered, on my account and on that of our mother. “If I could change things, Krispin, so that you were the favored one, the beloved, I would. But even we cannot go back that far, as you know. It is done. Over.”

For the merest flicker of a moment I saw Krispin’s true self in his pale blue eyes and knew the cosmic extent of his loneliness and his yearning for a time and a love that would unknot the ancient, ever-tightening ache inside him. ‘That’s the worst irony of all, you know,” he said in a voice so soft it might have been a breath or the faintest of sighs. “For all Seraphina’s adoration of you, you never loved her at all. I think, in fact, that she amused you, with her foolish fascination and never-ending attempts to please you.”

Krispin’s words were close enough to the truth to wound me a little, but he was not entirely correct in his assumptions. “I did love our mother,” I said quietly, and it was true. “But she expected too much of me. I was her son, not her husband or her lover. Her fixation with me was tantamount to emotional incest!”

Although my brother had implied this very thing himself, he clearly could not bear to hear the words spoken aloud. He drew back one of those slim, ethereal hands and struck me a blow that sent pain trammeling through me.

I did not move to retaliate; indeed, I did not move at all. Nor did I speak. I felt a grinding pity for Krispin, but it was not sympathy that motivated me then. I knew my brother’s weakness lay in his volatile emotions, and I sought, God forgive me, to undermine him further.

The offending fist knotted at his side now, Krispin gazed up at me, weeping silently and without shame, porcelain flesh aflame with color. Like me, he had fed well in preparation for this skirmish, and the blush beneath his skin was not truly his own, but that of his most recent victims.

“It wasn’t enough,” he went on after a long time, “that Mother worshiped you. You had to have Brenna, too.”

My voice, when I spoke, was hoarse with disuse and with sorrow. “Yes,” I agreed. “Of all creatures, on earth or in hell or heaven, I love Brenna best. It has ever been so.”

“You would die for her, in fact.”

I smiled, though there was no mirth in me. It was a reflex, I think, a grimace masquerading as a grin. “Dying would be a merciful end, in comparison to what I would—and will—do for milady.”

“Daisy,” Krispin mused distractedly. “She’s called Daisy now.”

I did not reply, knowing as I did that Krispin was not communicating, but simply thinking aloud.

“I’m going to kill her, you know,” he announced presently in a conversational tone. We might have been discussing the prospect of snow or the price of a good cigar for all the animation he displayed in those moments.

I shook my head. “I won’t allow it, Krispin,” I said. And then I put my right hand to his throat, at first caressing, regretting what I must do. My fingers tightened, however, when I thought of Daisy dying by his whim, and of those other women—Jillie, Janet, and Susan. Their only crime had been working for and with me.

Again Krispin gave that ghastly shriek of mingled pleasure and pain, seeming to enjoy the punishment I meted out. I felt his throat crumple like papier-mâché beneath the pressure of my fingers, and yet he did not collapse, or even struggle. His mad, glistening eyes were fixed upon my face as I crushed his windpipe, at once adoring and despising me.

I let him go, shaken and revolted, and he sank, coughing, onto the floor, there to kneel like some forlorn supplicant.

“You forget,” he said after several seconds had passed, “that we are not mortal. I cannot be killed by strangling.”

Violence surged up within me; I yearned to kick Krispin, to stab and tear and pummel him. I suppressed my rage, but it quaked and burned within me, like lava roiling deep in the bowels and belly of a mountain, and I knew it would rise soon and spew out of me, destroying everything in its path.

My brother half reclined on the floor now, supported by one elbow, his mouth bleeding, his right cheekbone bruised purple, watching me.

“You’re right,” I said at last. “As much as I enjoyed the exercise, any attempt to choke you is, of course, futile.” I crossed to a chest standing in the shadows, raised the lid, and took out the jeweled sword I used in the performance of one of my favorite illusions. The blade made a whispering sound as I pulled it from its scabbard and went back to stand over Krispin.

Even in my state of agitation I found his calm attitude remarkable. It wasn’t like him simply to lie there, like a concubine on a sultan’s couch, awaiting his fate. Which meant, of course, that he was up to something.

I raised the sword, clasping the handle in both hands.

so that the point was suspended an inch or so above Krispin’s chest.

“Go ahead,” he chided softly. “Kill me.”

I cannot explain my hesitation even now. By that time, all filial sentiment had been exorcised from me; I neither loved nor hated Krispin. I was as coldly indifferent as if he’d been a snake, writhing beneath the tip of my blade.

He laughed suddenly, and then to my amazement the sword turned to silvery flames in my hands. I gasped at the pain, and the flames became sparks, showering the floor. My weapon was gone.

Krispin was on his feet in an instant. “Does it hurt, Big Brother?” he crooned. “Oh, I do hope it does.”

The injury had been excruciating, but it is the nature of vampire flesh to heal rapidly, as I have already recorded, and the wounds were little more than memories by then. Likewise, Krispin’s throat, crushed in my hands only minutes before, was whole again. Neither was he bleeding any longer, and the bruise that had marred his perfect face was gone as well.

“No, Krispin,” I said quietly. “The flames did me no lasting harm. It is your hatred that hurts most.”

He laid splayed fingers to his bosom in a theatrical gesture of chagrin, truly meant, of course, as mockery. “And yet you would take me to hell with you, if you could, and endure that loathing, along with the unceasing torment, for eternity? And all to save your ladylove?” “Yes,” I answered.

He laughed again. “So noble,” he said. “And so vain a notion. You
will
go to hell, Valerian, but alone. That will be part of your punishment, won’t it? Knowing that I’m with your beloved—bedding her and finally dispensing just punishment for her betrayals?” Krispin paused to reflect. “Who knows? Perhaps your Daisy-Brenna has been a bad girl and will end up burning beside you. It’s a romantic picture, isn’t it?”

I might have been ill, had I been mortal, so vile was the image of Daisy suffering that way. I had earned my damnation, even before the bargain with Nemesis, but she was an innocent and deserved none of what I had brought upon her.

“Your jealousy has made you ugly, Krispin,” I said moderately. “You’ve wasted your life, your looks, your power, everything. You could have known such pleasures, and yet you threw it all away in order to spin your petty plots and schemes of vengeance.”

Krispin’s fine features contorted for a moment, and I knew that I’d been right. Even in that shining other world, the one where Challes expected to find salvation for us both, my brother had nursed his grievances and counted the injustices he’d suffered. Thus he had squandered six centuries that might have been given over to adventure, to beauty, to laughter, to love.

“Damn you,” he rasped. “Do not presume to pity me!” “I cannot help it. You are the most wretched of beings.” I took the lapels of his fine coat in my hands and raised him slightly. “We shall both spend eternity in hell,” I told my brother in a furious whisper, “but I, at least, will have the comfort of knowing that I have
lived!
I have loved, sometimes unwisely, but always with verve and passion. I have explored the world, known angels and warlocks, felt agony and ecstasy and everything in between. I
used
the gifts that were given me. I drank the wine.”

When I released him, Krispin straightened his clothes and produced a crooked, cocky grin. “As I shall do, when you have gone to reap the harvest you have sown. But never fear, cherished brother—I will send pretty Daisy along to you, probably somewhat the worse for wear, when I am through with her.”

I moved to advance upon him again, but before I could cross even the small distance between us, he raised both hands, palms out. The words he said rendered me as stiff and still as a mastodon surprised by the first Ice Age.

“Before you make another of your hasty and awkward attempts, Valerian,” he said, “allow me to tell you that I have already visited Daisy, during the night just past. She was released from the hospital in the afternoon, you know. Unfortunately our lady of the badge has, as they say, taken a turn for the worse.”