Tonight and Always

by Linda Lael Miller

  Dathan released a long sigh. Unlike Valerian's sighs, which were always feigned, for vampires do not breathe, Dathan's was quite genuine. Warlocks, unlike their blood-drinking counterparts, had beating hearts and functioning lungs, among other humanlike appurtenances.

  "I wish to find a mate," he said.

  Kristina recalled that Dathan had once made some unholy bargain with Valerian, to that end. The warlock did not wish a union with another witch, or even a mortal; he sought a vampire. Part of the antipathy between the two was based in the indisputable fact that Valerian had tricked Dathan.

  She felt herself softening a little toward the warlock, for she certainly understood what it was to be lonely, to yearn for love. "I don't know how you think I can help," she said, after mulling Dathan's announcement over for a few more moments. "It may have escaped your notice, but I don't exactly have a wide circle of friends—or even acquaintances—in the world of nightwalkers. And I'd prefer to keep it that way."

  "You are your mother's daughter," Dathan insisted with a quiet earnestness Kristina did not think was a pretense. "As such, there are doors open to you that would be closed to me."

  Kristina turned away, went to the table where she and Max had been reading the letters she had written so long before about her marriage to Michael Bradford, and began gathering them together. She felt a need to be busy.

  "Why don't you take a witch for a mate?"

  "Witches are notoriously independent," Dathan answered in a vaguely defensive tone. "They tend to regard intimate relationships as bothersome."

  Kristina barely suppressed an urge to roll her eyes. She was not without sympathy—toward the viewpoint of the female of the species, that is. If Dathan was a representation of the average warlock, they could be obnoxious creatures.

  But then, so could vampires. And men.

  "What can you teach me?" she asked.

  "Virtually everything, with the probable exception of time travel. That is quite tricky—requiring either a great age or a conversion from mortal to blood-drinker, as in the case of your parents, for example."

  Kristina raised one eyebrow slightly and indulged in a crooked smile. "I'm a hundred and thirty," she said. "Isn't that a great age?''

  "Not in this crowd," Dathan replied, folding his arms. His cloak lay over the back of the family room couch in a familiar way, as though he'd tossed it there a thousand times. Which, of course, he hadn't. "Put an end to my suspense, Kristina. Do we have an agreement or not?"

  "With reservations," she answered, standing still now, the gathered letters in her hands, watching him. "I run an antiques shop, not a preternatural dating service. I'll do my best to help you out, but I can't promise miracles."

  Dathan snatched up his cloak in a practiced motion of one hand. "I hardly think it should be that difficult," he said. "I am not, after all, ugly or otherwise objectionable."

  "You are definitely not ugly," Kristina agreed, sensing that, at least temporarily, she had the upper hand. "Whether or not you could be described as objectionable is certainly open to debate. But if finding a mate were not difficult, you would have done it yourself by now, wouldn't you?"

  The warlock donned the cape in a theatrical swirling motion reminiscent of Valerian, although Kristina judiciously refrained from pointing out the similarity. "As you know," he said coolly, "vampires and warlocks do not commonly interact."

  "Perhaps because the blood of warlocks is poisonous to nightwalkers, and so many have been tricked into partaking," Kristina commented. "Why are you set on attaining this? Vampires are among your oldest and most ardent enemies."

  "It does not have to be so," Dathan replied with faint umbrage rather than acquiescence. "Between us we could create a new race of beings." There was a hint of the crusader in the warlock's bearing, putting Kristina in mind of her father, who spent practically every spare moment in his laboratory, searching for a way to enhance the positive side of vampirism while eliminating the negative aspects.

  "I'm not sure I want to participate," Kristina said.

  "Consider my proposition well," Dathan advised. "I will return for your answer tomorrow."

  Kristina inclined her head in silent agreement, and Dathan vanished within the instant.

  She went slowly up the stairs, carrying the letters, tucking all but one away in the drawer of the night table beside her bed. She wanted very much to consult with her mother, but it was eight hours later in London, which meant that Maeve had taken refuge in her lair.

  Leaving the letter that took up where the account of the duel, Michael's terrible injuries, and poor Justin's death, had left off, Kristina went into her bathroom to indulge in a long, soothing shower.

  The flow of warm water calmed her, helped her to think more clearly. She faced a paradox in considering Dathan's bargain; on the one hand, she would be better able to protect Max and his children, not to mention herself, if she took instruction from the warlock. On the other hand, that same crucial training would inevitably lead her deeper into the very world she found so threatening and so abhorrent.

  She might have asked her mother for help, of course, or even Valerian, but Kristina had lived thirteen decades, not thirteen years. She had loved and lost, she had traveled the world, she had built a highly respected and lucrative business. Always, always, Kristina had steered her own ship, albeit with more success at some times than others. Now she found that she did not relish the prospect of asking either vampire to lead her through the elementary steps of magic like a preadolescent stumbling through a lesson in ballroom dance.

  As she stepped out of the shower, toweled her body and her hair dry, Kristina allowed herself the indulgence of thinking about Max again. He could not have guessed what it meant to her, his readiness to believe in her, to share her memories by reading the letters. While he had certainly been shocked by her revelations—who wouldn't be?—he had also gone to remarkable lengths to understand. Even more important, he hadn't shown disgust, or any sort of judgment.

  Nothing had really rattled Max, she reflected, until Dathan had materialized. At that point, Max had been ready to protect her, a noble if highly imprudent act.

  While the memory definitely troubled her—the range of horrible things Dathan might have done in response was almost unlimited—Kristina couldn't help feeling a little pleased by Max's gallantry. She did not recall another instance, in all her adult life, when she'd been the object of such reckless chivalry.

  She pulled on her white terry-cloth robe and ran a comb through her cap of sleek, dark hair, which was already drying nicely. She was smiling as she went through her bedroom and into the hallway, intending to brew a cup of herbal tea.

  Her amusement faded as she passed the room where she had taken Max and Bree and Eliette, to show them the toys from her childhood. She heard two chilling, little-girl voices through the door.

  Kristina froze in the hall, almost too startled to think, let alone act. Then, summoning all her paltry powers, she reached for the knob.

  The lock clicked before her hand closed on the brass handle and the heavy wooden panel swung silently open. An eerie wash of moonlight lit the otherwise darkened room, but Kristina could see only too clearly.

  She stood on the threshold, torn between fury and terror, unable, for the moment, even to speak.

  Benecia Havermail, demon-child, all blond, blue-eyed perfection, with her ringlets and ruffled dress, was perched on the cushioned window seat, holding the very baby doll Bree had so favored during her visit. She smiled, showing tiny, perfect white teeth. Teeth capable of tearing the throat out of a rhinoceros.

  "Hello, Kristina," she chimed.

  Canaan, the younger of the two monsters, was dark-haired and smaller than her sister, though just as exquisitely beautiful. And just as deadly. She was seated cross-legged on the floor, in front of the toy theater, while the puppets whirled in a ludicrous, drunken dance. This, like Benecia's attentions to the baby doll, was a subtle but effective parody of the Kilcarragh childre
n's visit, for Eliette had been fascinated by the little stage, with its colorful, inanimate players.

  "What are you doing here?" Kristina managed to croak. She knew it was unwise to show fear—and fear wasn't precisely what she felt—but hiding her emotions from these two ancient blood-drinkers was more than she could manage at the moment. "How dare you?"

  Benecia smiled sweetly, but did not stir herself from the window seat. She might have been a mannequin, a model of Alice in Wonderland come to life, Kristina thought with an involuntary shiver. So flawless were her features. "You mustn't be rude," Benecia scolded in that musical voice. She glanced toward the array of priceless porcelain dolls Kristina had collected, displayed in a cabinet on one wall, behind glass doors.

  Silently the doors opened. The dolls climbed daintily down from their shelves, murmuring among themselves.

  "Stop it!" Kristina gasped.

  The treasured dolls joined hands and made a circle, going round and round in a stiff-jointed caricature of some schoolyard game. Their voices were a singsong, chantlike sound that made the hairs on Kristina's nape stand upright.

  "Stop!" she said again. "Now!"

  Canaan only laughed, but Benecia gave a somewhat petulant sigh, and, at some mental command from her, the dolls returned to their cases, closing the doors behind them, striking their familiar poses. Their small voices, however, seemed to echo in the room for a long time.

  "We didn't mean to frighten you," Benecia said.

  "The hell you didn't," Kristina shot back. "I want you out of my house—now. And don't ever come back!"

  "What will you do—complain to Valerian? Or to your mother? Or perhaps to your father, the mad scientist?"

  Kristina ignored the jibe at Calder Holbrook's fascination with mysterious experiments, but she was incensed by the idea that she needed Valerian or Maeve to protect her. Even though that was, in essence, the truth of the matter. "Valerian is just looking for an excuse to drive a stake through your rotten little hearts, and as for my mother—"

  Canaan got to her feet. "Valerian won't have time for you now that he has Daisy, and that filthy, awful little street urchin he's brought home from Brazil," she said. "And Maeve happens to be quite busy, if you haven't noticed. There is another political problem, you see, between vampires and angels, and Her Majesty"—she gave these last two words a note of mockery—"spends every waking moment trying to resolve it."

  Kristina felt a stab of guilt, as well as trepidation. Relations between the realms of darkness and light were always dubious, of course, but a conflagration, if serious enough, might well bring on the cataclysm mortals referred to as Armageddon. Kristina had not even suspected that her mother was facing another such crisis. "Why did you come here?" she asked. If she could not keep the panic out of her psyche, perhaps she could at least sound normal. "What do you want?''

  As usual, Benecia, being the eldest, was the spokesperson for the dreadful duo. "We have heard that the warlock, Dathan, desires a vampire wife."

  Kristina's stomach rolled. Surely even such fiends, such ghouls as these two, would not. could not, suggest…

  "I should like to offer myself," Benecia said.

  Kristina barely kept her dinner down. "You have the body of a child," she pointed out in what she hoped was an even, reasonable tone.

  "I am nearly as old as Valerian," argued the ancient woman imprisoned forever in the size and form of a little girl.

  "No," Kristina said, retreating a step.

  "Do you know what it is like, Kristina?" Benecia demanded bitterly, advancing with a delicate tread. "Can you even guess what it means to be trapped for all of time? If I had been left alone, I would have grown to womanhood, married, lived, and died, and then been born again, through a procession of lives. Instead I must spend eternity just as I am!"

  Kristina stopped retreating; this was her house, damn it. But before she could say anything, Canaan entered the conversation, addressing her sister. It was well known among immortals and their consorts that the two, though invariably together, were not always in accord.

  "Do stop being so dramatic about it, Benecia," Canaan said without a trace of tenderness or sympathy. "It's not as though you were made a vampire against your will, like poor Aidan Tremayne. You begged Papa until he changed you, and you knew full well what you were doing!"

  Kristina stood her ground, frantically trying to figure out a way to use the sisters' antipathy toward each other in order to defend herself. "I have no desire to listen to an account of the Havermail family history," she said with bravado. "You will both leave this house immediately and stay away."

  Benecia and Canaan looked at each other and laughed. The sound was like crystal chimes, dancing in a soft breeze, and it raised a cold sweat on Kristina's skin.

  "If you don't do as I say," Benecia said sweetly, patiently, as though explaining something elemental to a slavering idiot, "Canaan and I shall simply have to strike up a friendship with—what were their names again?—oh, yes. Bree and Eliette. I'm sure we could convince them we were angels—mortals are such gullible creatures, and we've made good use of that trick in the past."

  Kristina was outraged. She was also more convinced than ever that she needed to bring her magic skills up to speed ASAP. "Dathan is a warlock," she said when she could trust herself to speak without shrieking in uncontrollable fury, "but he is not a deviate. If I suggested such a vile thing to him, he would be as revolted as I am."

  Benecia had evidently fed copiously earlier in the evening, for a blush rose beneath her nearly transparent ivory skin. "I have told you. I am not a child, I am an adult!"

  "Then go find someone else whose development was arrested in a similar fashion," Kristina replied. She did not know where she got the audacity, for here was a creature who could burn her to cinders with a mere glance. And that would be one of her more merciful punishments.

  "We could transform a small boy," Canaan said thoughtfully.

  "Fool," Benecia spat. "I have the mind of a woman. I desire a mature mate, not a child! Besides, the making of vampires is forbidden, by Maeve's order."

  Kristina was silent, hoping the argument would escalate, carrying the Havermail sisters away—far away—on a swell of indignation or at least sibling rivalry.

  "I thought you weren't afraid of Maeve," Canaan taunted.

  So far, so good, Kristina thought.

  "You know, Canaan, sometimes I wish I'd been an only child."

  Unfortunately the phrase only child turned their attention back to Kristina. They assessed her with glittering, gemlike eyes.

  "I am not going to forget this, Kristina Holbrook," Benecia said. "You have made an enemy by insulting me."

  Kristina refrained from saying that she had been an enemy for a very long time. She simply gestured toward the door, tendering a silent invitation to leave.

  Benecia and Canaan disappeared in a blink.

  Kristina, for her part, gave up all hope of getting a good night's sleep. She dressed in dark jeans and a matching cashmere turtleneck, then added a long, buttonless cardigan in the same ebony color. After only a moment's hesitation, she willed herself to Max's house.

  Invisibility, being a fairly simple trick compared to some others, was still part of Kristina's repertoire. The dark clothes were a safeguard, in case she had overestimated her talents.

  Her reasons for paying this late-night, uninvited visit were altruistic—she meant to watch over little Eliette and Bree until dawn, when the Havermails would be forced into their lairs by the light of the sun—but she still felt like a trespasser, a sort of inverse Peeping Tom.

  Perhaps it was not an accident, on an unconscious level at least, that Kristina first projected herself into Max's room. He lay sprawled across the large bed, sound asleep, his naked athletic body only partially covered by a sheet. She admired him for a long time, hoping his dreams were sweet but suspecting otherwise by his restlessness, and then sought and found the room his daughters shared.

  It was a s
pacious chamber, nearly as large as Max's own quarters, furnished with two canopied beds in the pseudo-French Provencal style so popular with little girls, matching dressers, a desk, and a miniature vanity. On Bree's side of the room was a toy chest, overflowing with vinyl dolls in various states of undress, a scattering of clothes, a coloring book, still open, with crayons in the seam like logs in a flume.

  Eliette's territory, on the other hand, was almost painfully neat. The desk and vanity were tidy, and even in sleep the little girl looked as though she were bracing herself, expecting tragedy. Kristina knew that this child had felt the loss of her mother more deeply than anyone suspected, including her very caring father.

  Kristina's heart ached; she almost made herself solid again, so strong was her desire to smooth Eliette's little brow with her fingertips, to kiss her and tell her that everything was all right, that she was safe now.

  But that promise could not be made, in honesty, to any mortal on earth, no matter how beloved, for inherent in the glorious miracle of life, of course, was the certainty of death.

  Kristina moved to stand beside Bree's bed and saw with an inner smile that the younger child was utterly relaxed in sleep, still trusting and vulnerable. She had only deep-seated, almost instinctual memories of her lost mother and did not yet suspect that love could be treacherous.

  In those moments a new sort of love was born in the very center of Kristina's being, one she had never known before. The fathomless devotion a mother feels for her children.

  It was silly. Even preposterous. But there it was. She cared so much for these little girls that she would have laid down her own life for them.

  It was no great leap, from that conclusion, to the realization that she loved Max, as well. Truly and completely, in an adult fashion that bore no resemblance at all to the reckless, superficial and somewhat fatuous fondness she had felt toward Michael.

  Kristina settled in to keep her vigil, reflecting upon these revelations while she waited for the dawn.