Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (39 page)

I could not speak.

Krispin smiled, pleased by my paralysis, temporary though it was. Hands clasped behind his back, he rocked on his heels and watched me like a mischievous child who has just played an exceedingly clever prank.

We passed several moments thus, before I found my voice.

“What have you done?” I demanded.

“Do you recall the fable about the sleeping princess?” he countered. “Daisy is—asleep. In her apartment, I mean. The doctors, of course, will think she’s in a coma.”

I whirled away from him, ready to will myself to Daisy’s quaint little home, realizing only at the last instant that I could not take the risk. After all, the sun could reach me there, and a shrieking vampire, wreathed in flames, would hardly improve matters.

I have rarely felt more desperate.

Alas, when I remembered my brother’s presence and turned again to confront him, he had vanished.

Daisy

Las Vegas, 1995

Daisy had known him, of course, when he entered her apartment with no more fanfare than a summer breeze ruffling the curtains. He had come to kill her at last.

She waited, expecting to hear herself scream, oddly detached from the situation, and found that she wasn’t even especially afraid. She did, however, reach for her thirty-eight, which was lying loaded on the bedside table.

Krispin chuckled, folding his arms. Moonlight glimmered in his hair and flashed from his strange, pale eyes as if they were mirrors. “That won’t do anything but alarm the neighbors,” he said, nodding toward the pistol wavering in Daisy’s hands.

“Get out of here. Right now.”

He stood still in the middle of her bedroom floor, smiling. “What a splendidly audacious thing you are. No wonder my brother finds you so endlessly fascinating.” “I’ve been wanting to speak with you anyway,” she said, as if Krispin hadn’t spoken, amazed by the steadiness of her voice. “I guess now’s as good a time as any.” “How interesting,” Krispin responded smoothly, taking something small from the pocket of his vest and tossing it once, triumphantly, before tucking it away again. “I do hope you aren’t trying to trick me, though. There’s no forestalling the inevitable. I shall have to put you out of commission, just temporarily, while I settle things with Valerian.”

Daisy lowered the pistol to her lap. “You want me, don’t you?” she asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Oh, yes,” Krispin admitted. Although Daisy had not actually seen him move, he was no longer standing, but sitting on the foot of her bed.

“Then why don’t you take me away with you—to your den or lair or whatever it is?”

There was a barely discernible but very frightening change in Krispin’s face; too late, Daisy realized she’d made a mistake. In the next instant he lunged at her, and she managed nothing more than a single hoarse gasp before he was upon her.

“Whore!” he growled, hurting her everywhere, crushing her beneath him. “You would sacrifice anything to save my wretch of a brother!”

Daisy struggled fiercely, and she was strong, but her efforts to fling the vampire off were in vain. Her last conscious emotion was fury, the final physical sensation that of sharp teeth puncturing her throat. . . .

Daisy sank down and down, deeper and deeper into herself, and found shelter and sanction in the memories tucked away there, like keepsakes. . . .

She was that other woman again, standing at a window, gazing out on a vista her blind eyes could not see. She had the ruby ring he’d sent her a fortnight before; surely it meant he would return. . . .

Jenny Wade

London, 1722

Jenny had no more than formed the thought when she heard his voice, heard him whisper her name.

Joy surged through her. Her angel had returned to her, her Valerian. She did not need her eyes to recognize him, or any of her other senses, either, for her heart knew him as its own. She turned to face him, unconcerned by his sudden arrival in her room. He had always come and gone like a ghost.

Jenny had almost succumbed to despair in days past, but now that he was here, everything would surely be all right. He would take her away with him, marry her, give their child a name.

There need be no scandal now, as Martin and Adela feared.

She turned to face her beloved, realizing only as he took her into his arms that something was very different. Instead of discerning him by her own senses, as she usually did, it seemed that impressions were being forced upon her mind.

“You’ve been unfaithful,” he murmured, stroking her hair. “That was very foolish indeed. What possessed you to betray me the way you did?”

Jenny trembled, too stricken by the accusations to speak. It didn’t occur to her to call for help, for a part of her still believed that this was her beloved, the mate of her soul. He would never do her harm.

He drew her head back, very gently, and kissed her with a heartrending tenderness. “Do you love me, my Jenny?” he whispered.

“Y-Yes,” she replied. Her strength had drained away, and she felt as though she might swoon, and that was quite unlike her. Jenny prided herself on her vigor and resilience; she was not given to spells of fainting and weeping, like so many females of her acquaintance. “Of course I love you. Valerian. How can you say—how can you even think—?”

“Then why did you do it? Why did you lie with another?”

Jenny’s heart was racing, though not in the pleasant way it usually did when her lover held her close, and she was wildly dizzy. “I did no such thing,” she managed to say.

“You did.” His voice was so quiet, so calm, the same one she knew so well, and yet so terrifyingly different. “You’re carrying someone’s child. And it isn’t mine.” She wanted to thrust herself away from him, for she was angry, but although she had the will to do it, she did not have the strength. Instead, to her horror, she found herself clutching his coat to keep from sinking to the floor. “That’s reprehensible,” Jenny said. “Leave me, please. And don’t ever come back.”

He did not release her. “You don’t mean that.”

Jenny was trembling, and the despised tears were threatening. It was not in her nature to love a man who was cruel to her, but she mourned the beautiful feelings she’d once had for him, the dreams she’d cherished. . . . All her hopes for a home and children and simple happiness lay in pieces at her feet, like shards of stained glass from a church window.

“I do mean it,” she insisted, struggling now to pull away from him. “I don’t need you, nor does our child. Go away now, before I call my brother in to give you a thrashing and hand you over to the police.”

He laughed. “Call for him, it will do you no good. This night, at least, your dear Martin is as deaf as the fabled post, and so are Peach and that irritating sister-in-law of yours. We have business to settle, Jenny-love, and we will not be interrupted.”

She began to be terribly afraid. She was barely conscious, such was her mental state, and yet she found a scream within her brave heart and released it. Her lover was amused by the effort, and as he’d predicted, it brought no one rushing to her aid.

He swept her up into his arms, and though his embrace felt like the one she knew so well, she had a curious feeling that the perception was not her own, that it had been suggested to her somehow.

“Such a pity, a beautiful, intelligent young woman like yourself, hurling herself from an upstairs window,” he said calmly. “Of course, everyone will be sorely grieved, and the gossips will say it’s no wonder, is it, considering the shame and scandal the poor girl was facing.”

Jenny stiffened and tried again to free herself, but it was no use. He was too strong.

“Don’t do this,” she whispered, barely conscious, wanting desperately to stay alive, to protect the unborn child nestled within her. “Please—”

She heard the window creak on its hinges, felt the cool night air touch her.

“Don’t beg, my sweet. It’s demeaning, and altogether futile in the bargain.”

Jenny felt her nightgown brush the window ledge, felt the yawning space beneath her, and uttered a sob, clutching at his coat. He kissed her once, very lightly, and then, with considerable reluctance, flung her from him.

She fell, flailing her arms and legs, and struck the cobblestones in the courtyard below with an impact that shattered her bones. Her death was instantaneous, but she perished with a name quivering in her heart like an arrow.

Valerian.

Her lover. Her murderer.

It was Peach who found the body lying broken and bloody on the stones of the courtyard, early the next morning when she went out for the master’s newspaper. Her screams were heard all over the neighborhood, shrill as fire-bells, and brought a passing constable through the front gate on a run.

Martin was the next to arrive on the scene, followed by a pale Adela. She stayed back a little distance, one bony hand pressed to her throat, while Martin let out a low, plaintive groan of sorrow and dropped to his knees beside Jenny. He gripped her shoulders in both hands, as if he expected to awaken her.

The constable looked up and saw the second-story window, still open. He’d seen such things often enough in his line of work, and he had an idea or two about what might drive the daughter of a wealthy household to take her own life. Probably she’d had a dalliance with a groom or a footman, and nature had taken its course.

Poor girl.

“It’s a shame, that’s what it is,” he said, for he was not without compassion, nor was he a man inclined toward the judgment of others.

Peach continued to shriek and wail and blubber, while Martin, seemingly aware of nothing and no one else, gathered his dead sister into his arms and, holding her close against his breast, carried her into the house without a word to anyone.

The funeral was held two days later, and the church was brimming with mourners, for Jenny had been a kindly, cheerful girl, well liked by those who knew her.

Rain fell hard all that morning, and well into the afternoon, too, and Mistress Peach said it was only fitting that the very heavens should weep when an angel was put into the ground to molder away to nothing. Adela stayed at home, taking to her bed with a violent headache, but Martin went doggedly from home to the church to the cemetery, heedless of the downpour, and would not leave his sister, even when the coffin had been lowered into the earth on ropes.

Several concerned gentlemen from his club had to lead him away in the end, so that the gravediggers might finish their labors.

They shoveled hastily, these unwashed and unsavory men, for they were superstitious, and despite their vocation, they had no wish to be found among the dead, recently passed-on and otherwise, when darkness fell. They’d heard so many stories, and made up a few to give their friends a turn, that they no longer knew which were fable and which might possibly be true.

It was just as well, for their sakes and for his own, that the vampire did not arrive until they’d gone, to grieve in solitude for the woman he had loved and lost, again.

Through discreet inquiries over the coming nights, he learned that Jenny Wade had disgraced herself by taking a lover. He’d given her a fine ruby ring, so he must have been a man of means, but it had disappeared before the poor girl was even buried.

CHAPTER
19

Valerian

Las Vegas, 1995

I hurried to Daisy the instant the last feeble rays of sunlight had faded into darkness, and found her sprawled, unconscious, on the floor of her bedroom. Kristina’s pendant, intended as a talisman of protection, lay coiled on the carpet beside her, offering mute testimony that my brother would not be thwarted by such fragile magic.

Krispin’s ring was upon her finger; I removed it and cast it aside.

“Daisy, sweetheart—” I gathered her up and held her close, breathing in the scent of her. She was alive, but pale as wax and deeply unconscious. It would require more than a kiss of a prince to awaken my sleeping beauty, for Krispin had taken blood from her, as vampires do before transformation. He had only to infuse Daisy with that same fluid, which had surely undergone the mysterious change while flowing through his veins, to make her a fiend.

I stroked her hair back from her gray-white face with a gentle motion of one hand. He planned to turn her into one of us, thus consigning her to the eternal damnation that awaited all our race. Perhaps, I concluded in my despondency, we vampires were in reality no less fragile than humans, but merely a little better at staving off the inevitable.

Carefully I lifted my beloved into my arms and stood. She was clad only in an oversize shirt, and fearing that she might catch a chill, I wrapped her in my cloak and pressed her close against my chest. How I wished in those moments that I had a mortal’s warmth to offer her, but my flesh was as cold and ungiving as that of a statue.

Closing my eyes, I took myself, and Daisy, to the only vampire I knew who might be able to help. Calder Holbrook.

His laboratory was empty when I reached it, for this was modern-day London, and Calder, of course, favored the nineteenth-century. I would not have risked taking Daisy back through time, for mortals have yet to evolve the ability to make such journeys in safety, and I might have lost her somewhere along the way.