Time Without End

by Miller, Linda Lael

  I did not see Challes that day, and I grieved until darkness fell. It was just after sunset when he returned, and began molding me, ever so artfully, into a fiend's fiend.

  Daisy

  Las Vegas, 1995

  "Why the hell didn't you call me?" O'Halloran demanded the next morning when Daisy had told him about the threatening telephone message. They were riding in his car, on their way to the home of Jillie Fairfield's next of kin, her divorced mother. Daisy was up to her ankles in empty soda bottles, misfolded maps, and crumpled candy wrappers.

  "What would you have done?" she countered irritably. "Hauled yourself over there and sat on my couch all night, holding a .357 in your lap?"

  It wasn't the crank call or O'Halloran's gruffly solicitous attitude that was bugging her, she admitted to herself. Mrs. Fairfield resided in a trailer park where Daisy and Nadine had spent six happy months when they were in elementary school, in the care of their paternal grandmother. Inevitably their mother, Jeanine, had returned, rumpled and a little drunk and smelling sour from the bus ride that had brought her back to Vegas from wherever she'd been. She'd reclaimed her daughters, over Gran's fierce but helpless protests, and headed straight for the nearest social worker. A couple of kids made it a whole lot easier to collect welfare, after all, and once Jeanine had dumped or been dumped by her latest boyfriend, a biker with a slipped disk that entitled him to state compensation, she'd suddenly developed all manner of maternal instincts.

  "Relax, Chandler," O'Halloran said. "I'm not trying to step on your goddamned feminine rights or anything like that. I just want to make sure this sicko doesn't get too close, okay?"

  Daisy wanted to reassure her partner, but she was still distracted by her dread of returning to the trailer park. She and Nadine had never been allowed to go back, even to visit, and after a couple of years the old woman had passed away. Jeanine's boyfriend at the time—Daisy couldn't remember his name and didn't care if she ever did—had shown her the obituary in the newspaper and said maybe they'd get a mobile home out of the deal, "now that Granny has kicked off."

  "Chandler?" O'Halloran prompted. They turned a corner on a yellow light, and the door of the glove compartment fell open, slamming against Daisy's knees and spilling a variety of cassette tapes, empty cookie packages, expired registration slips, and unpaid parking tickets into her lap.

  She stuffed the whole mess back where it came from and closed the little door with a crash. "What?" she snapped.

  "You suffering from a year-round case of PMS, or what?"

  Daisy sighed and shoved a hand through her hair. "Why is it that men always think any change in a woman's mood has to be connected with her hormone levels?"

  O'Halloran shrugged, running another yellow light, bald tires squealing, and the driver of a tour bus blasted his horn and displayed a specific finger behind the broad tinted window. "After ten or twenty thousand years the evidence starts to stack up," he said. "The thing is, we got this weird case to solve—you know what the medical examiner said—and it's gonna take our undivided attention to work the snarls outta this one. You gotta get all your body chemicals in sync, Chandler, 'cause I need your help."

  Daisy tossed him a mock salute. "No problem, Officer Friendly. My mood has nothing to do with chemistry. And slow it down, will you? You take one more corner on two wheels, and I'll have to write you up for driving under the influence of sugar and preservatives."

  He grinned, but in the next moment his expression was solemn again. "I don't like this, Chandler," he confided. "This Fairfield thing, I mean. By the time we got to that girl, she didn't have enough blood left in her veins to reach a gnat's ankle. What the sonnabitchen hell happened in that place? What about those marks on her neck?"

  Daisy shifted in the seat as the entrance to the trailer park came into view. She took a pair of sunglasses from her purse and put them on, telling herself it was because of the glare. "Forensics found blood on the scene when they went over it after the body was removed," she pointed out. "It just wasn't visible to the naked eye, that's all."

  "Okay, so there was a little blood. There sure as shit wasn't enough. What happened to the rest of it?"

  She shivered, somewhere down deep, and knew her reaction didn't show on the outside. Jillie's corpse, the crank call, the dream, and the magician all sprang out of her subconscious at once to haunt her. "I don't know, O'Halloran," Daisy replied finally in a somewhat testy tone. "Maybe you were right in the first place. Maybe we've got a vampire running loose."

  O'Halloran flung her a mildly contemptuous glance and slowed to enter the Lucky Dollar Trailer Park, passing beneath the burned-out neon sign and bouncing down the rutted gravel road between battered mobile homes. "You wish," he said, making a cranking motion with his left arm as he rolled down the window. The air-conditioning had petered out years ago, with the second or third motor. "Better the real thing, for my money, than some psycho who believes with all his diseased little brain that taking a drop of human blood now and then will make him live forever."

  Daisy didn't answer. Her thoughts lingered on Valerian. She was comparing the way he looked in real life with the younger, less polished version she'd seen in her dream, wondering if he was gay, straight, or in between, and where he'd learned to do magic. Something told her he was accomplished in the subtler forms of wizardry as well as the spectacular ones he employed onstage.

  "Chandler?" O'Halloran barked. "Pay attention, damn it."

  Daisy switched mental gears and forced herself to concentrate. "I'm with you, buddy. Let's go make the world safe for humankind."

  After asking directions from a gray-haired man mowing^ a lawn, they found the Fairfield trailer. It was a rundown, two-tone double-wide with a sagging step and a yard made up of crushed gravel and cigarette butts.

  Mrs. Fairfield came out onto the dilapidated porch when they drove up, a petite blonde with a leathery tan, wearing white short-shorts and a skimpy red top. She wore high-heeled sandals, her toenails were painted, and her makeup gave rise to speculation concerning the way she earned her living.

  "You the cops?" she asked, raising a lipstick-stained cigarette to her mouth.

  Just two of them, Daisy thought, flashing her badge, but she didn't say the words out loud because after all, this woman's daughter had just been murdered. Just to the left and a little behind her, O'Halloran flipped out his wallet.

  "I'm Detective Chandler," said Daisy, "and this is Detective O'Halloran. We're investigating your daughter's death, and we need to ask you some questions."

  "Took you long enough to come around," Mrs. Fairfield replied, giving no sign that she intended to invite them inside.

  Daisy was relieved. The place probably reeked of smoke, and worse, it might look too much like Gran's trailer. There might be a loosely crocheted afghan draped over the recliner in the living room, pictures in dime-store frames on top of the television set, cheap shag carpeting with a worn spot in front of the door—

  O'Halloran consulted his ever-present notebook, and out of the corner of her eye Daisy saw a short grocery list scrawled on the first page. "According to my log here, I called you myself from the station, about an hour after we left the—er—scene."

  Mrs. Fairfield sat down on the top step, crossed her still-shapely legs, and tapped the ashes from her cigarette into a clay pot containing a dead plant. She sounded bored when she spoke again. "If you're going to ask me who Jillie was dating, or who her friends were, I couldn't tell you. She and I didn't get along too well. I do know that she worked for that magician, Valerian something-or-other, in the showroom at the Venetian Hotel. That's some kind of place, isn't it?"

  Daisy felt a swift, dizzying fury. Someone was dead, and this woman, the victim's mother, for God's sake, was talking about the latest addition to Glitter Gulch. She opened her mouth to comment, but O'Halloran, who could be amazingly perceptive when he tried, silenced her with a touch to her forearm.

  "Yeah," he said. "It's something, that hotel. You ever go dow
n there and take in your daughter's show?"

  Mrs. Fairfield laughed. The sound was low and throaty, but there was more despair in it than humor. "At the price those places charge for a ticket? Not on what I make serving drinks in a fourth-rate casino. And Jillie sure as hell never found it in her heart to get me comped in. I hear it's a great act, though. HBO wanted to do a special a few months back, according to the papers, but this Valerian character won't let any kind of camera through the door." She tapped more ashes into the planter. "It's all a lot of hype, if you ask me—that stuff about how he's never seen in the daytime and everything. There's nothing like an attitude to generate publicity. You gotta know how to sell yourself in this town, and that guy's a master at it."

  Daisy wondered if Mrs. Fairfield was really as crass and unfeeling as she seemed. People handled grief in a lot of different ways, some putting on fronts, some breaking down right away. Daisy had heard more than a few talk all around the subject of their loved one's death, too, just the way this woman was doing. "We need to know if your daughter had any enemies, Mrs. Fairfield," she said, grateful to O'Halloran for running interference until she could get her emotions under control. "In an incident like this, the killer is often someone the victim knew." —

  The aging cocktail waitress raised a carefully plucked eyebrow. There was something faintly mocking in the motion, and some of Daisy's sympathy ebbed away.

  "Is that right? How long you been a cop, sweetie?"

  Daisy took a breath, let it out slowly. "We're not here to talk about me, Mrs. Fairfield. Please—tell us whatever you can about your daughter."

  "I told you, we didn't get along," came the distracted, slightly hoarse reply. "We didn't speak at all for the last two years."

  "Why not?" O'Halloran asked with quiet compassion.

  Mrs. Fairfield's eyes were luminous with tears when she raised them to meet his gaze. "It was a stupid thing, really—she was dating a married man, and I told her he'd never leave his wife for her, 'cause they never do, you know—and Jillie and me, we had too much to drink one night, and we got into it good. We tore into each other, right here in front of this piss-ant trailer, and it was a catfight like you never seen before." She paused and smiled faintly at the memory, as though proud that she and her daughter were scrappers. "The cops came, too. Look in your computers if you don't believe me. Jillie and me, we was both too stiff-necked to say we were sorry afterwards. We thought we had forever to make things right, you know?"

  At this last, her face crumbled, and Mrs. Fairfield gave a small, raw sob that wrenched hard at Daisy's insides.

  "I'm so sorry," she said.

  Mrs. Fairfield rose gracefully to her feet and tossed her cigarette butt into the gravel. Then she wiped her mascara-streaked cheek with the back of one manicured hand. '"Yeah, sure you are, honey. Sure you are."

  With that, Jillie's mother turned and went into the trailer, closing the door firmly behind her.

  "Back to square one," Daisy said.

  "Families just ain't close anymore," O'Halloran philosophized in response as they walked back toward his car.

  Later that afternoon a woman ran over her ex-husband in the parking lot of a convenience store, and a fifteen-year-old gang member was knifed to death by his older brother, who had been out of prison just over two weeks. It all seemed to underscore O'Halloran's theory about families, and Daisy was thoroughly depressed when she went off duty at six-thirty that night, got into her convertible, and drove back to her apartment.

  There were no messages on the answering machine. That was something, at least.

  The blues invariably made Daisy restless, so she dragged her rowing machine out from under her bed—she'd ordered it eighteen months before, inspired to a frenzy of ambition by a late-night infomercial—and into the living room. Usually she worked out in a health club a couple of miles from her building, but that night she just didn't feel like dealing with a lot of people.

  She put on her shorts and a T-shirt, switched on the TV, warmed up with a few brisk calesthetics, and rowed up a sweat. The effort relaxed her, as she had known it would, and Daisy showered and put on her chenille robe. She had just put some low-fat fish sticks into the microwave for her dinner when the telephone rang.

  Daisy didn't hesitate to answer. Maybe Nadine had picked up on her intent to call and beaten her to the punch.

  "Chandler," she said, just in case.

  "We got another one," O'Halloran told her wearily.

  The bottom dropped out of Daisy's stomach. No matter how many homicides she investigated, she never got over the shock of learning that one human being had killed another. Again.

  "What do you mean, 'another one'?" she snapped, though she knew. Damn it to hell, she knew.

  "Her name was Susan Cantrell," O'Halloran said. "Miss Cantrell's roommate came back from a long weekend this afternoon and found her dead in the bathtub. No blood, Chandler. And she had those funny little marks on her neck, just like the Fairfield woman did, and the M.E.'s office thinks it happened last night sometime. God, but I hate this job."

  "What else?" Daisy prodded, knowing there was more because she could read O'Halloran so well. She didn't argue that he shouldn't hate his job, because he always did when there was a murder. So did she.

  O'Halloran gave a deep, sorrowful sigh, and Daisy could just see him running a stubby hand through what was left of his hair. "She worked for that magician, too. The one that's been packing them in down at the Venetian since the hotel opened—" Daisy heard papers rustling. "Let's see here," her partner went on. "His name's—"

  "Valerian," Daisy said, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes as tightly as she could.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  « ^ »

  Valerian

  Las Vegas, 1995

  For the second time in as many nights, I regained consciousness at sunset to find that there had been another murder. I saw poor Susan's death plainly before I ever opened my eyes—the horrible images were imprinted on the insides of my lids—and I glimpsed the vampire who had done the killing as well. I could not recognize the fiend, for its face was shadowed by a hooded cloak, but I intuited that the creature was male, and for a reason I could not grasp, I felt that I should have known him.

  I wept with grief and helpless frustration, although I had not been well acquainted with Miss Cantrell, as I rose from my luxurious pallet and began to dress. This night there would be no performance at the Venetian Hotel—how could there be? No, tonight I would hunt, traverse centuries and continents if necessary, to run this monster to earth and put a finish to him by whatever means that might seem prudent at the moment.

  Before destroying this vampire, however, I would extract much in payment for the suffering of my friends. I was furious that the thing had not confronted me directly, for I was obviously the true object of its hatred. The creature was cowardly, however, as well as implacably vicious; it clearly knew that, save Maeve Tremayne, who had not been weakened by her marriage to a fledgling named Calder Holbrook, I was the most powerful blood-drinker on this plane of existence. Better, then, to torment me through those helpless beings close to me, those I valued and, in my way, loved.

  I had to find it before another innocent died.

  Before it turned to Brenna—now Daisy Chandler—the love of my eternal life.

  Before the ruby ring arrived.

  I was drawn to the living room of my hideaway, and the television set descended from the ceiling as I entered. I had not willed this to happen, and I felt a mental chill as I watched light flicker in the center of the screen and then spread into an image. My lair had heretofore been sacrosanct, but now it seemed that some other creature dared to work magic within its walls.

  Perhaps, I thought, I would not have to search out my enemy after all. Perhaps he had come to me.

  The televised picture solidified into an image of Brenna, riding boldly into the surf, laughing, never dreaming that her death was imminent. Before my eyes t
he scene shifted; Brenna was gone, and the raging sea had vanished to become a shoddy fifteenth-century tavern called the Horse and Horn. Brenna appeared instantly, immediately recognizable for her green eyes and coppery hair, but now her name was Elisabeth Saxon. She was a bold and fiery wench, her cheap dress showing too much of her bosom, flirting shamelessly with the ruffians she served, permitting them to touch her. Driving me half mad with jealousy and frustration. She faded away, and then I saw Jenny Wade, my lovely Jenny, another incarnation of Brenna, though she wore the lush, red-blond hair in a tidy chignon and her green eyes were sightless. I had cherished her especially, because she loved me so completely and so selflessly without ever seeing my face.

  Jenny and I were together in the late sixteenth century, for far too short a time.

  I heard that gentle angel whisper my name, and when the screen went blank, I was startled to find myself standing in front of the set with both hands pressed to the glass.

  "No more," I whispered, for I could not bear to see the other incarnations my beloved had donned, like pretty frocks, over the centuries. It was enough to be reminded of Brenna and Elisabeth and Jenny, of how completely and how hopelessly I had loved them, all different facets of the same glorious, intrepid spirit.

  Suddenly another picture spilled across the surface, and I drew back, appalled. The leading lady in this new tableau was Daisy Chandler—the latest incarnation of Lady Brenna Afton-St. Claire. I saw that she lived in one of those bland and anonymous apartments that are so prevalent in the twentieth century, with no more variance between the units than between the cells in a honeycomb.

  "Daisy," I muttered, but of course she could not hear me. She was only an image, but a modem version of Brenna nonetheless, projected from the dark depths of my mind—or, more likely, the mind of my enemy, whoever and whatever it was.

  I watched as Daisy moved about her small kitchen, preparing a frozen dinner—a peculiarity of the modern age that makes me glad vampires do not require the same sort of sustenance mortals do—and I heard the nerve-jangling ring of her telephone. When she answered, "Chandler," I was touched by the note of bravado in her voice.