Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (32 page)

The sense of displacement grew as the hours passed; it was as if she were not entirely real, for all the solidity and substance of her surroundings. Jenny herself might have been a shadow, or a reflection.

Was she the dreamer—or the dream?

The doctor came at nine and was shown to her room by Adela.

Jenny did not confide in the aging physician, but endured his fumbling examinations in silence. She was, by that time, convinced that she was fading, like a figure in an old and weathered portrait, and would soon vanish entirely.

Valerian

Colefield Hall, 1995

I had almost freed myself from the unseen shackles my tutor had used to restrain me. In the meantime, while I continued the struggle I hoped was imperceptible, I spoke moderately to Challes. “Paradise,” I murmured in a thoughtful tone while he loomed over me in an avid and singularly unnerving fashion. “The place where there are many mansions.”

“Yes,” he whispered, his face translucent with some maniacal ecstacy.

“I would not dare to cross the threshold of any one of them,” I told him, and while I lent the words a regretful note, the unflattering truth was that I had no desire to be anything other than what I was—not angel or devil, specter or saint, and certainly not a mortal man.

Challes looked as though I’d struck him, and recoiled.

I had broken my bonds and bolted upright on the slab, but before Challes could react or I could get to my feet, the chamber trembled as if the very walls would give way. There was a strange, implosive feeling all around, as if the air had been replaced by a vacuum, and then he was there.

My brother.

Krispin gripped Challes from behind and flung him cruelly aside. “Fool!” he rasped.

I studied him, my head tilted slightly to one side. Krispin was not a large fiend, neither broad through the shoulders nor long of leg, like me; he had, instead, the lithe agility of a trapeze artist or a dancer. His hair was fair as moonlight, his eyes a soft, deceptively fragile blue, his skin so flawless that he appeared to have no pores.

“Enough,” I said quietly when Krispin moved to stove in Challes’s ribs with one booted foot. Granted, a mortal could not have done a vampire injury by such a blow, but Krispin, of course, was not human. He was plainly much stronger than the blood-drinker who had spawned us both.

Krispin listened—evidently there was still enough of the flesh-and-blood boy in him that his first instinct was to respond to an elder brother’s command—and Challes crawled, crablike, into a comer, there to whimper and mewl in a manner that made me want to kick him myself.

Still seated on the slab, I spread my hands. “Here I am, Krispin,” I said mildly, belying my true feelings, which were myriad and complicated, bittersweet and excruciatingly painful. “Destroy me if you can.”

For a long interval Krispin simply stared at me in silence, and I watched a kaleidoscope of emotions flash across his Dresden face. I saw hatred, along with the ghostly and shimmering reflection of an adoration it shamed him to recall, and finally, a sort of terrified triumph.

He shook his seraphic head. “No, my brother,” he said with the vaguest of smiles. “Your death will be neither quick nor merciful. You have much to suffer before the gates of hell swing wide to grant you entrance.”

What I felt was more revulsion than fear, more sorrow than hatred. How I despised Challes in those moments for taking that naive, mischievous child Krispin had been and turning him into this monster! Had I not been occupied, perforce, with my brother’s presence, I believe I would have carried Challes to a churchyard, laid him at the feet of a holy statue, and driven a stake through his heart.

“Do you think there will be a welcoming parade?” I asked with no trace of guile. “When I finally meet with damnation, I mean?”

Krispin might have flushed, had he been mortal. I saw the anger flood his face, although it did not alter the pristine white of his flesh, but instead rendered it more transparent still, like cloth woven of spun moonlight. “You are in grave trouble, brother,” he said quietly. “Pray, do not make light of it.”

“You would prefer pathos? Pleading, perhaps, with copious tears? Sorry.” I paused for the length of a heartbeat. “I won’t be humbling myself in any significant fashion, Krispin. Pride is my curse, as well as your own. We are, after all, begotten of the same dam and sire, God rest their misguided souls.”

Krispin flinched, though not, I thought, from the mention of the Supreme Being. No, I believed it was my reference to our mother, however generically, that disturbed him—and his response confirmed my suspicions.

“Do not speak her name,” he warned. “Your lips, your tongue, would defile those revered syllables merely by shaping them!”

I rolled my eyes. “Great Zeus,” I said on what would have been a long breath, had I been human. “You are fixated—perhaps that good woman kept you too long on the breast. Or, mayhap, not long enough—”

“Be silent!”

I stood at last and crossed the few feet that separated us with an easy, unhurried gait. “Why?” I asked, knowing he saw only the insolence and disdain I willed him to see, and not the heartbreak and confusion churning behind the facade I presented. “Why did you murder those poor women, instead of bringing your rancor straight to me in the first place?”

His lips curled slightly, and I was struck by the realization that any female, mortal or otherwise, would find him vastly appealing. He could seem ingenuous if he so wished, and even virtuous. Perhaps he had not simply killed his victims, but gotten to know them first, methodically seducing their minds. . . .

“I told you before,” Krispin said with elegant contempt, “I would not make this easy for you. I want you to pay.”

I rested my hands on my hips, realizing only after the fact that it was an old gesture, from our days as corporeal youths, a posture of superior power for me, but a subtly daunting one for him. “Even considering my multitude of sins, mortal and otherwise,” I began, “your loathing of me is somewhat disproportionate to reality, don’t you think?”

Challes had risen to his feet, and he was no longer making pitiful noises, but he cowered against the wall of the vault, watching Krispin as though he were the Devil incarnate or, far worse from a vampire’s perspective,

Nemesis, the angel of sublime vengeance. I began to speculate that my teacher had not been trying to usher me into Paradise at all, but merely to hide me from my brother’s madness, which appeared to be even greater and more virulent than his own.

I was touched, and decided not to stake Challes after all. Not immediately, at least.

“It is more than Seraphina’s betrayal,” Krispin said, and I felt the searing cold of his agony flicker across my spirit, like shadows cast by flames of ice. “You have taken my mate. Over and over again, you have stolen her.”

All sympathy deserted me in that moment, for it enraged me that Krispin dared to regard himself as a rival for Daisy’s affections. We had been created to live side by side, she and I, through all the ages; had it not been for my transformation from man to vampire, we would have been incarnated together, again and again, until we stepped over the farthest boundary of time.

“Your mate?” I shaped the words softly, insolently, on my tongue. “You were never anything more than an interloper, Krispin. She is mine—now and forever, time without end, amen and amen.”

He raised one finely shaped eyebrow, and his mocking expression made me want to close my hands around his polished marble throat and choke him. “Is she?” Krispin paused to feign a luxurious sigh. “Ah, yes—our lady of many names. How lovely she is. You call her Daisy now, but you have known her as Brenna, as Elisabeth—poor whoring little wretch—and as sweet Jenny. Unfortunate how quickly she took sick and died, wasn’t it?” Another sigh, still theatrical, if almost inaudible. “And there were other lifetimes, of course—she was the fetching woman who ran the boardinghouse in that little western town, wasn’t she?”

Harmony Beaucheau. I closed my eyes against the memory of that particular incarnation—for it remained acutely painful, even after more than a century—and opened them again only out of an instinct for self- preservation. “What is the point of this?” I whispered. “Are you leading up to telling me that Daisy cared for you once, when her name was Maddie Goodtree and the two of you made love in a gravedigger’s cottage, with the Great Fire of London licking at your—heels?”

“So she told you,” Krispin said with a self-satisfied and somewhat distant little smile. “I hoped she would, once I’d revived the memory for her.”

I felt sick, just to think of Krispin’s hands on Daisy’s flesh, in this lifetime or any other, but I did not allow the aversion to show. I had no way of reckoning the extent of my brother’s powers, but I sensed that they were formidable, and quite different from my own. Whether his abilities were greater or lesser than mine, I could not guess, but they were unquestionably heightened by my ignorance of their nature.

“You could not have her, except by trickery,” I said. “So you murdered her, over and over again.”

The cherubic mouth twitched with barely contained amusement. “Not the first time, when she was Brenna,” he disclaimed blithely. “That happened quite on its own. But I admit to helping justice along a little, now and again, in this or that lifetime. Elisabeth’s fever, for example. It’s easy, you know, to plant the germ of an illness in mortal flesh. They’re so fragile. So vulnerable to any passing malady.”

I flung myself upon my brother, knowing all the while it was what he wanted, what he’d goaded me to do, but unable to restrain the poisonous fury swelling within me. I made a sound that was at once a guttural growl and a shriek as I throttled him; I was as frenzied as a wolf in a trap, and as dangerous.

Krispin screamed, but it was a cry of hideous pleasure, even of ecstasy, like some hell-beast in climax. Even the hurt I caused him gave him joy, however heinous; he had surely dreamed of this moment, planned and schemed for it, for nearly the whole of his existence.

He melted in my hands like vapor, and vanished, but we had renewed our brotherly bond, malevolent as it was, and I sensed his destination and pursued him, leaving a disconsolate Challes behind to weep into his palms.

Krispin took me to a high plain, somewhere on the coast of Cornwall, and the sea was within our hearing if not our sight. There were standing stones, garish in the frigid, silvery glow, casting their lengthy shadows toward the moon, instead of away, in an eerie juxtaposition of nature.

His laughter was the keening of a mad creature, and he ran between the stones, his cape trailing absurdly behind him, as if he expected to take wing and fly. I would not have been surprised if he had.

I waited until he had expended some of his demented energy, watching him spin and cavort, now perched crowlike atop the highest of the ancient stones, now pirouetting in the center of the circle, arms outstretched, head tilted back, beautiful face bathed in moonlight.

The pagan revels continued for some time. Then, at long last, Krispin was still, smiling and beckoning for me to join him inside the stones.

I did not hesitate, though I was certain a trap was about to spring. I would have followed him into the very heart of hell, anywhere, because as long as I was with him, watching him, Daisy would be safe. When the time was right, when I had discovered my brother’s greatest vulnerability, I meant to destroy him.

“There were countless sacrifices on this spot,” he told me when I stood beside him. “So much passion, so much terror—the place reverberates with it even after all this time. Can’t you feel it?”

I kept my repugnance to myself. Temporarily. “I have terror and passion enough of my own,” I said. “I do not require that of others.”

Krispin smiled at me and seemed, for a moment, almost like his old self. That facet of the experience stood out in sharp relief, wholly separate and more frightening somehow than anything that had gone before. “You were always damnably self-reliant, a law unto yourself—Valerian, the archangel made flesh, the saint with fangs.”

I ignored the jibe. I would not allow him to glory in my attack again until I was ready to drive a pointed stick through his crumbling, rotted little heart. He could take all the perverted pleasure he wished in that. “You want my life,” I said quietly, “and I will give it to you.”

He stared at me, plainly baffled, and I was relieved to know he could not read my mind the way some fiends could. “On what condition?” he asked, suspicious.

“That we face our end together,” I said in all sincerity. It was, I saw, the only way to put a finish to the curse that had pursued Daisy and me for so long. If I perished, and Krispin with me, the cycle would be broken at long last. Never again would I find Daisy, fall in love with her, hold her in my arms as she gave up the ghost yet another time. She would be left to live out this life, and any others that lay ahead, in relative peace.

Krispin studied me in silence for a long time. I could feel dawn hovering beyond the hills, ready to spill over the horizon and consume us. I wanted that death, although I knew it would be agonizing, and only a prelude to the suffering waiting beyond the veil.

“Suppose there is no judgment and no hell,” Krispin reflected. “Would you welcome death? Would you yearn to rest, at long last, in the dark arms of oblivion?”