Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (16 page)

‘Tonight, then?” I cried, nearly oversetting my chair by the drawing room fire, where I had learned so many lessons, as I bolted to my feet.

‘Tonight,” Challes confirmed with tenderness and sorrow in his voice.

I wondered at his sadness, but I was too self-absorbed, too eager to make the change, to ask why he was troubled.

There was a Roman couch beneath the window, with its glittering frosting of ice, and my tutor led me to that and bade me to lie down.

I would have done almost anything he commanded, for by that time I loved him completely. My adoration for Challes was a thing of purity and grace, transcending genders, a joining of spirits rather than bodies. There are those who would call me deviant; instead, I am simply whole.

I did as Challes asked, closing my eyes while he opened the collar of my shirt, listening to the thin, far-off cries of the wolves. I felt their starvation in my own gut, and at the same time my whole being, flesh and soul, hummed with the anticipation of ecstasy.

My joy was terrifying, beyond anything I’d felt before, surpassing every happiness except what I had known in the arms of Brenna Afton-St. Claire. Nothing, before or since, on earth or in heaven, could rival the mere touch of her hand. Still, the pleasure Challes gave me was keen-edged and beautiful.

He had told me that I would die as a man, during this, the greatest of our communions, but when I felt my mortal life ebbing away, I panicked and tried to cry out. By then I was too weak to make a sound, and certainly I could not struggle, but Challes murmured words of comfort and soothed me with gentle whispers. I sank quietly into my death, and all consciousness was obliterated, swallowed up in darkness.

When I awakened, I realized I was in a cryptlike vault, under the earth. I lay on a slab of cold stone, and Challes slumbered an arm’s length away on another pallet of rock. I heard rats scrabbling in the comers and shuddered.

A low chuckle sounded, and I turned my head to see that Challes had awakened and lay with his weight braced on one forearm.

“No need to be afraid, Beautiful One,” he said. ‘The rats cannot hurt you. Nothing can, except sunlight or the point of a wooden stake. If you do as I have taught you, you will live forever.”

I had wanted this, yearned and pleaded for it, and yet the magnitude of eternity was only then coming home to me.
Never
to die? To never lay down my burdens and rest?

“Now you must learn to hunt,” Challes told me, rising from his slab and dusting off his leggings and tunic. “Once that is done, I shall be gone.”

I sat bolt upright. He had never spoken of leaving. Did he truly mean to abandon me now, when there was still so much I did not understand?

As he had done so many times before, my tutor laid his hands to my shoulders. “It was worth incurring Nemesis’s ire to create such a splendid fiend as you,” he said.

I knew, from our studies together, that Nemesis was a warrior angel, greatly feared in the dark realms. “You’ve had dealings with—” I could barely speak the name, it inspired such terror in me. “With
Nemesis?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Challes replied without flinching. “I have made too many blood-drinkers for his liking, and he is a powerful angel. He vowed revenge, with or without the permission of higher angels, should I make even one more.” He feigned a sigh. “Alas, you are so beautiful and so bright—even in your drunkenness, you were magnificent. I could not resist making you immortal, for you were wasted as a mere man. To think of you here a moment, then gone—it was too painful to endure.”

“What price have you paid?” I whispered, but I knew the answer already, and it filled me with fathomless grief.

Challes, my teacher, my only friend, was to be destroyed.

Because of me.

I whispered an exclamation that might have qualified as a prayer, had I been anything other than the abomination I was, and wept my first tears as a vampire.

Would that they had been my last.

CHAPTER
8

Daisy

Las Vegas, 1995

The thing that surprised Daisy most about Valerian’s story—and it was an incredible tale, spanning some six hundred years—was that she was very much inclined to believe it. She guessed she’d had some glimmer of the truth that first night, in the showroom at the Venetian Hotel, when she’d watched him raise a coach and a team of horses off the stage floor and send them sailing out over the audience members’ heads. And while she still didn’t consciously remember being those other women he spoke of with such passion and love—Brenna Afton St. Claire, Elisabeth Saxon, Jenny Wade—the mere mention of their names had struck a resonant chord within her. Perhaps the dreams she’d had all her life had not been dreams at all, but memories of those other lifetimes.

“I’ve looked exactly the same, in every incarnation?” she asked. “Is that how you recognized me?”

“Yes,” Valerian said, his eyes glowing with affection. “You are always your same beautiful self, at least when I’ve known you—only the costumes and the hairstyles change. Still, I think I would know you even if your looks changed significantly. I felt your presence in the audience at the Venetian long before I actually saw you.” She nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve read about reincarnation,” she said, “like almost everyone else. But I thought people came back in different bodies, sometimes as men, sometimes as women.”

“They do normally,” Valerian affirmed. “You are an exception, and you needn’t ask me why, for I confess I do not know. I can tell you that souls tend to return to the flesh in the company of others they’ve known and loved or hated in the past.”

“You’ve told me that you can travel through time— back to the point of your own death as a mortal. If that’s so, am I in all those other places, as all those other selves, simultaneously? Can you journey back there and see me as Jenny, for instance? Or Elisabeth?”

The magnificent face was drawn for less than a moment with terrible grief. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some vampires can change the course of events and see and influence the ones they love. Whenever I’ve tried to find you, however, I’ve met with utter failure.”

She considered that. ‘Talk about information overload,” she murmured. “If you’re really Count Dracula, Junior,” Daisy reasoned at some length, still sitting at the breakfast bar, elbows on the counter, fingers buried in her hair, “why haven’t you tried to bite my neck? And why should I believe you when you say you didn’t commit the Fairfield and Cantrell murders? That was a vampire’s M.O. if I’ve ever seen one.”

Valerian smiled, and there was just a hint of condescension in it. “Have you?” he inquired. “Seen a vampire at work, I mean?”

Daisy sighed and sat up straight on the stool. “It was just a figure of speech,” she said impatiently. “Answer my questions, please.”

“I haven’t ‘tried to bite your neck,’ as you so crassly put it, because I adore you—in whatever lifetime I happen to stumble across you. That is my curse. As for why you should believe I’m innocent of these killings—” He paused and shrugged aristocratically. “Because I have told you so. I have done murder in my time, make no mistake, but these poor little creatures? No. I cared for them.”

Daisy pondered him skeptically, chin in hand, and said nothing. He had just confessed to the worst crime a person can commit, but she could not picture him taking a life and therefore did not really believe that he had.

“All right,” Valerian snapped, waving his arms in a gesture of wild impatience. “Don’t believe me. Lock me up in one of your silly jails. But I warn you”—he was shaking his finger now—“that any attempt to detain me is an exercise in futility. If you try, I shall evaporate like so much smoke!”

Daisy looked down at her empty cup and frowned. Her head was still fogged, and it was late. Maybe that was why she believed everything Valerian said; because she was tired and her defenses were down. Or perhaps he’d drugged her. “I’ll keep that in mind. Did you put something in my tea?”

Valerian drew himself up, annoyed to a truly imperial degree. “Of
course
not. I have no need of such silly contrivances—I am a vampire!”

Daisy sighed. “Have I missed something? Did Halloween sneak up on me this year?”

He leaned across the counter and bared his teeth with a theatrical hiss.

She bounded off the stool, wide-eyed, her heartbeat making a one-second leap to warp speed. Valerian’s incisors, while beautiful like their dazzling counterparts, were longer, and they came to distinct points, sharp as a wolf’s fangs.

“Shit!” she blurted, before regaining her courage, easing back to the counter, and raising herself onto the stool again.

‘Trick or treat,” he said.

Daisy flushed, embarrassed that she’d shown fear. “You could have had that done,” she reasoned hastily. “This town is full of people with custom-made teeth. Some of them are probably even crazy enough to think they’re vampires!”

Valerian subsided a little, leaning back against the counter opposite the breakfast bar, his hands on his hips, and regarded her wearily. “What do you want, Daisy? How do I prove to you that I’m telling the truth?”

She leaned forward again, studying him for a long time. She was mystified by this maniac, or this vampire, whichever he was. But, oddly, she wasn’t afraid of him; underlying all her misgivings was a strange sense of familiarity and the sure knowledge that she was safe in his presence. “I did not say I didn’t believe you,” she reminded him. “Something weird is definitely going on here. I just need to work through it for myself, that’s all.” She paused, remembering her impromptu visit to the year 1457, via the supermarket, and how vivid the experience had been. There could be no denying that the episode was more than a dream or a hallucination. “I saw you,” she said. “In my—vision, I mean. But you were wearing different clothes. If you were really there, how did you make such a quick change?”

Valerian made a sound that might have been a sigh, but was somehow different. “I merely projected myself into the scene,” he said patiently, “complete with costume. You saw me because I wanted you to see me.”

Daisy ran her tongue over her teeth, something she often did when she was pondering an enigma. Her headache was starting to come back, and if she didn’t get some sleep, she’d be a zombie all the next day. “Earlier, when you were telling me the story of your life, you said you could travel back in time, as far as the point of your own death as a mortal.”

He sighed again. “Yes.”

“What’s to prevent you from meeting yourself somewhere between now and then?”

“Nothing. Occasionally it happens. It’s a paradox, like time travel itself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not surprised. I don’t understand, either. I suspect that no one does—at least, not completely. It’s a universe of specialties—vampires are vampires, roses are roses, jellyfish are jellyfish. Which of us can grasp the whole of reality, in all its multifaceted complexity?”

Daisy didn’t have an answer.

Valerian came around the counter and very gently touched her face, his thumb tracing the outline of her cheekbone. “My poor love,” he said. “You’ve always been this way, you know—wanting answers to impossible questions, tilting at windmills, chasing rainbows. Just as you always have copper-colored hair, green eyes, and a smattering of freckles across your nose.”

A shiver of mingled delight and passion moved through Daisy, and strange erotic images stirred in her memory. She did not recoil, although Valerian was still a stranger, and probably a dangerous one at that. Instead, she wanted him to make love to her, she who had slept with exactly three men in her entire life.

The pad of that same thumb strayed sensuously across her mouth. “Soon,” he said, apparently reading her mind again. A thoughtful expression darkened his eyes. “But perhaps a small reminder of what we’ve shared together over the centuries would not be amiss.”

He was a hell of an actor, Daisy thought. There were so many things happening in her body, so many sensations bouncing from one part of her insides to another, like laser beams running amuck, that she didn’t have the energy to speak.

Valerian smiled ever so slightly, bent his head, and kissed her.

It was only a brief contact, a mere brushing of his lips against hers, but it rocked Daisy to her core. The earth seemed to spin away beneath her feet and shoot off into space, leaving her dangling in a throbbing void. There was no oxygen, and her heart swelled painfully against her rib cage.

She gasped and stared up into Valerian’s wise eyes— she could well believe that he was six hundred years old in that moment, for she saw so many emotions reflected there, in that fathomless blue, myriad things that could not have been garnered in a normal lifetime.

“Why aren’t I afraid?” she whispered.

He smoothed her hair, and even that innocent motion sent new fissures streaking through her few remaining defenses, caused the last walls to crumble and the innermost doors to swing open. “Because you know, in the essence of yourself, that I would brave hell itself for you.” He glanced at the window above the sink. “It will be dawn soon. I must go.”

Daisy was disappointed. Hadn’t he promised to stay?