She stood perfectly still for a moment, listening, but she heard nothing. She drew a deep breath and walked on at a brisk pace, making her way past the two-story motel and into the trailer court. Reaching the door of her tiny mobile home, which was parked next to Ben’s larger one, she looked back over her shoulder again, almost expecting to see Tremayne standing behind her.
“Weird,” Neely said to herself as she turned the key in the lock.
The trailer wobbled, as usual, when Neely stepped inside. She flipped on the light switch and peeled off her coat in an almost simultaneous motion. Then, as an afterthought, she turned the lock on her door and put the chain-bolt in place.
Her utilitarian telephone, a plain black model with an old-fashioned dial, startled her with an immediate jangle. She grabbed up the receiver, oddly exasperated.
“Damn it, Neely,” her brother said, “I told you to call me when you were through closing up the café so I could come over and walk you home. Don’t you read the newspapers? It isn’t safe for a woman to be out alone so late at night.”
Neely calmed down by reminding herself that Ben truly cared about her; except for Danny and her best friend, Wendy Browning, he was probably the only person in the world who did. She put away her coat, sat down on her hide-a-bed sofa with a sigh, and quickly kicked off her snow boots.
“I’m sorry, Ben,” she responded, rubbing one sore foot. She frowned, spotting a run in her pantyhose. Even hairspray or nail polish wouldn’t stop this one. “Yes, it’s late, and that’s exactly why I didn’t call. I knew Danny would be in bed, and I didn’t want you to have to leave him alone.” She paused, drew a deep breath, and plunged. “Ben, what do you know about Aidan Tremayne, that guy who lives in the mansion down the road?”
Ben sounded tired. “Just that. His name is Aidan Tremayne, and he lives in the mansion down the road. Why?”
Neely was unaccountably disappointed; she’d wanted some tidbit of information to mull over while she was brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. “I was just wondering, that’s all. Danny and I went there on Halloween night. He struck me as sort of—different.”
“I guess you could say he’s a recluse,” Ben said, barely disguising his indifference. “Listen, sweetheart, I’m beat. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Emotion swelled in Neely’s throat. She and Ben had more in common than their late parents. He’d lost his wife, Shannon, to cancer a few years before, along with his job in a Pittsburgh steel mill, and he’d been struggling to rebuild his life and Danny’s ever since. Neely had been forced to give up an entire way of life—her work, her apartment, her friends—because she knew too much about certain very powerful people.
“Good night,” she said.
Neely’s trailer consisted of one room, essentially, with the fold-out bed at one end and a kitchenette at the other. The bathroom was quite literally the size of the hall closet in her old apartment.
Resolving to dwell on what she had—her life, her health, Danny and Ben—instead of what she’d lost, Neely took off her pink uniform and hung it carefully from a curtain rod.
After showering, she put on an old flannel nightshirt and dried her hair. Then she heated a serving of vegetable soup on a doll-size stove and sat in the middle of her lumpy fold-out bed, eating and watching a late-night talk show on the small TV that had once occupied a comer of the kitchen counter of her spacious apartment in Washington.
Neely didn’t laugh at the host’s monologue that night, though she usually enjoyed it. She kept thinking of Aidan Tremayne, wondering who he was and why he’d stirred her the way he had. He was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met, and inwardly she was still reeling from the impact of encountering him unexpectedly as she’d left the cafe.
Not to mention the way he’d vanished in the time it took to blink.
She walked to the edge of the bed on her knees, balancing her empty soup bowl with all the skill of a good waitress, then got up and crossed to the sink. After rinsing out her dish, she returned to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. The thing to do was sleep; she would think about Mr. Tremayne another time, when fatigue did not make her overly fanciful.
Aidan was especially ravenous that night, but he did not feed. The hunger lent a crystalline sharpness to his thought processes, and as he sat alone in his sumptuous study, with no light but that of the fire on the hearth, he allowed himself to remember a time, a glorious time, when he’d been a man instead of a monster.
He closed his eyes and tilted his head back against the high leather chair in which he sat, recalling. Like most mortals, Aidan had not realized what it really meant to have a strong, steady heartbeat, supple lungs that craved air, skin that sweated, and muscles that took orders from a living brain. He had thought with his manhood in those simple days, not his mind.
Now he was a husk, an aberration of nature. Thanks to his own impetuous nature and unceasing pursuit of a good time, thanks to Lisette, he was a fiend, able to exist only by the ingestion of human blood. He longed for the peace of death but feared the possibilities of an afterlife too much to perish willingly.
Aidan could travel freely in time and its dimensions, but the Power that pulsed at the heart of the universe was veiled to him. He knew only that it existed, and that its agents were among his most dangerous enemies.
He could not bear to consider the fate that might await him should he succumb to the mystery of true death; he’d had enough religious training in his early years at school to sustain a pure and unremitting terror. Nor did Aidan choose to think of Neely Wallace, for to do that in his present mood would be to transport himself instantly into her presence.
He engaged in a sad smile, letting decades unfold in his mind, and then centuries. He’d been twenty-two when the unthinkable had happened. The year had been 1782, the place an upstairs room in a seedy English tavern, not far from Oxford….
Lisette’s waist-length auburn hair was spread across Aidan’s torso like a silken veil, and her ice-blue eyes were limpid as she gazed at him. “Lovely boy,” she crooned, stroking his chest, his belly, and then his member. “I can’t bear to give you up.”
Aidan groaned. They’d been together all night and, as always, as the dawn approached, she grew sentimental and greedy. He was amazed to feel himself turn hard, for he’d thought she’d drained him of all ability to respond.
Lisette was older than Aidan by a score of years, and her experience in intimate matters was vast, but other than those things, he knew little about her. One night a few weeks before, when Aidan had been out walking alone, a splendid carriage drawn by six matched horses had stopped beside him in the road. Lisette, a pale and gloriously beautiful creature, had summoned him inside with a smile and a crook of her finger. They’d been meeting regularly ever since.
Now she laughed at his reluctance to surrender even as his young body betrayed him.
She set the pace as the aggressor and the seducer. She took him, extracted yet another exquisite response from him, and left him half-conscious in the tangled bedclothes immediately afterward.
Aidan watched his lover through a haze as she paced the crude plank-board floor, once again clad in her gauzy, flowing gown, her hair trailing down her back in a profusion of coppery curls. He was glad it was nearly sunrise, that she would leave him then as always, because he knew that one more turn in her arms would kill him.
“See that you don’t go dallying with a wench while I’m away,” she flared. “I won’t have it!”
He hauled himself up onto his elbows, but that was all he could manage. “You don’t own me, Lisette,” he said. “Don’t be telling me what you’ll have and what you won’t.”
She whirled on him then, and he saw something terrible in her face, even though there was no light but that of a thin winter moon fading into an approaching dawn. “Do not speak to me in that disrespectful way again!” she raged.
Aidan was a bold sort—indeed, his father’s solicitor swore the trait would be his undoing—but even he
did not dare challenge Lisette further. She was no ordinary woman, he’d guessed that long since, and she was capable of far more than ordinary mischief. He guessed that had been her appeal, along with her insatiable appetites and the envy her attentions generated among his peers.
Lisette cast a sullen glance toward the window, then glared at Aidan again, her eyes seeming to glitter in the gloom. They looked hard, like jewels, and they flashed with an icy fire. She made a strangled sound, a mingling of desire and grief, and then she was upon him again.
He tried to throw her off, for the sudden ferocity of her attack had unnerved him, but to his annoyance he discovered that she was far stronger than he was.
“Soon,” she kept murmuring, over and over, like a mother comforting a fitful child, “soon, darling, all the earth will belong to us—”
Aidan felt her teeth puncture his neck, and his heart raced with fresh horror. He fought to free himself, but Lisette was like a marble statue, crushing him, breaking his bones. At that point he began to recede into unconsciousness; he was going to die, never see Maeve again, never laugh or paint or drink wine and ale with his friends.
He renewed his efforts, struggling to return to full awareness, even though there was pain and fear, mortal fear so intense that his very soul throbbed with it.
“Now, now,” Lisette whispered, lifting her head to look into his eyes. “Your friends will think you’re dead, poor fools, but you will only be sleeping. I will return for you, my darling, before they bury you.”
Aidan was appalled and wildly confused. He felt strange; his body was weak to the point of death, and he could barely keep his eyes open, yet his soul seemed to soar on the wings of some dark euphoria. “Oh, God,” he whispered, “what’s happening to me?”
Lisette rose from the bed, but it made no difference that she’d finally freed him, for Aidan could not move so much as a muscle.
“You’ll see, my darling,” she said, “but don’t trouble yourself by calling out to God. He turns a deaf ear to our sort.”
Aidan fought desperately to raise himself, but he still had no strength. He could only watch in terrified disbelief as
Lisette’s form disintegrated into a swirling, sparkling mist. She was gone, and even though Aidan was conscious, he knew full well that she had murdered him.
He could not speak, could not move. His heart had stopped beating, he wasn’t breathing, and as the room filled with sunlight, his sight faded. His flesh burned as surely as if he’d been laid out on a funeral pyre, and yet Aidan knew the pain wasn’t physical. He was dead, as Lisette had said, yet only too aware of all that happened around him.
A wench, probably come to fill the water jug and tidy the bed, found him later that morning. Her shrieks stabbed his mind; he tried to move, to speak, to show her he was conscious, but it was all for naught. Aidan was a living soul trapped inside a corpse.
He was aware of the others, when they came, for it was as though the conscious part of him had risen to a comer of the ceiling to look down on the lot of them. There were two men, the tavern owner and his burly, stupid son, but a priest soon arrived as well.
The boy took the door from its hinges, and they laid Aidan’s helpless body out on that wooden panel. He could do nothing to resist them.
“Poor soul,” said the priest, grasping the large crucifix he wore around his neck on a plain cord and making the sign of the cross over Aidan’s mortal remains. “What do you suppose happened to him?”
“He died a happy man,” the idiot-boy replied, leering. It didn’t seem to bother him that he was addressing a man of God. “That’s if the lady I saw him with and the sounds I heard comin’ from this here room meant anything!”
Aidan returned to his wasted body from his vantage point near the ceiling, struggled to move something, anything— an ear, an eyelash, one of the tiny muscles at the comers of his mouth. Nothing. Blackness covered him, swallowed him up, mind and soul, and he was no one, nowhere.
When Aidan wakened, he still could not move. He knew, with that peculiar extra sense he’d acquired soon after Lisette’s attack, that he was in the back of the undertaker’s shop, laid out on a slab, with coins on his eyes. At first light he’d be closed up in a coffin and probably sent home to Ireland in the back of a wagon, no longer a troublesome responsibility to his prosperous English father. His mother, a dark-haired tavern maid, a woman of light laughter and even lighter skirts, would mourn him for a while, but Maeve would suffer the sorest grief. Maeve, his twin sister, his childhood companion, the counterpart of his personality.
Hope stirred in Aidan’s being when he felt a cool hand come to rest on his forehead; his hope died when he heard his murderess’s voice. “There now, I told you I’d come back for you,” she said, placing a frigid kiss where her fingers had been. “Sweet darling, have you been afraid? Perhaps you’ll remember, after this, what it means to defy me.”
Aidan knew a pure anguish of emotion, but he could say nothing. He cried out inwardly when she bent over him again, when he felt her teeth puncture the skin of his throat like pointed quills thrust through dry parchment. In the next instant, liquid ecstacy seemed to flow into every part of him; he could see clearly again and hear with crystal clarity, even though he still had no breath or heartbeat. An unearthly and wholly incredible power was spawning inside him, growing, grumbling, surging upward like lava thrusting at the inside of a mountain.
His muscles were flexible again; he sat bolt upright on the slab and thrust Lisette aside with a motion of his arm.
“What have you done?” he rasped, for the joy that seemed to crush him from the inside was the sort denied to mere men. It was dark and rich and evil, and he yearned to throw it off even as he embraced it. “In the name of God, Lisette, what manner of creature are you and what have you done to me?”
Lisette thrust her arms up, as if he’d attempted to strike her again. “Do not speak of the Holy One again—it is forbidden!”
‘Tell me!” Aidan bellowed.
There was a clamor beyond the door of the morgue, the sounds of rushing feet and muffled voices.
Lisette came to Aidan’s side. Her mind filled the room, swirled around his like an invisible storm, swallowed it whole. When his awareness returned, when he knew that he was a separate entity, they were hiding together in a damp place with cold stone walls.
He was lying down once again, this time on an altar of sorts. In the flickering light of a half dozen candles, he saw Lisette, looming at his feet like some horrible angel of darkness.
“Please,” he said, his voice a raw whisper. ‘Tell me what I am.”
She smiled and came to stand beside him, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. He wasn’t bound, as far as he could tell, and yet she must have been restraining him somehow, for he was utterly powerless once more.
“Don’t be so anxious, my darling,” Lisette scolded. “You are a most wonderful creature now, with powers others only dream of. You are a vampire.”
“No,” he protested. “No! It’s impossible—such things do not happen!”
“Shhh,” said Lisette, laying an index finger to her lovely, lethal mouth. “Soon you will adjust to the change, my darling. Once you’ve felt the true scope of your talents, you’ll thank me for what I’ve done.”
“Thank you?” Aidan trembled, so great was his effort to rise and confront her, and so fruitless. “If what you say is true—and I cannot credit that it is—then I shall curse you. But I will never, never thank you!”
Lisette’s beautiful face became a mask of controlled rage. “Ingrate! You don’t know what you’re saying. If I thought you did, I would toss you out into the sunlight to bum in the sort of agony only a vampire can know! Count yourself fortunate, Aidan Tremayne, that I am mercifully inclined toward you!” She stopped, seemed to gather herself in from all directions, then favored Aidan with a smile made brutal by its sweet sacrilege. “Sleep now, darling. Rest. When darkness comes again, I will show you places and things you’ve neve
r imagined…
In the nights to come, Lisette had kept her promise.
She had taught Aidan to hunt, and despise it though he did, he had learned his lessons well. She had shown him how to move as easily between eras and continents as a mortal travels from room to room. From Lisette, Aidan learned to find a safe lair and to veil his presence from the awareness of human beings.
From Lisette, Aidan learned pure, enduring, singular hatred, and all of it was directed at her.
He pitied his victims and often starved himself to the point of collapse to avoid taking blood. Then, one foggy winter night not so long after Lisette had changed him from a man into a beast, while sitting alone in a country tavern, pretending to drink ale, he’d been approached by another vampire … Valerian.
“Reminiscing about me? How touching.”
Aidan started in his chair by the fire in his Connecticut house and muttered a curse. His unannounced and quite unquestionably arrogant caller leaned against the mantel, indolently regal in creased trousers and tails. He was even wearing the signature gold medallion, which meant he was in a mischievous mood.
Like Aidan, Valerian held the stereotypical media vampire in unwavering contempt.
“This is the second time in as many nights that I’ve taken you unawares,” Valerian scolded, tugging at his immaculate white gloves. “You’ve become careless, my friend. Tell me, have you fed so well that your senses are dulled?”
Aidan raised himself from the chair and faced his visitor squarely. Valerian was ancient, by vampire standards, having been changed sometime in the fourteenth century. He was a magnificent monster, given to sweeping displays of power, but only the stupid showed fear in his presence.
When Valerian sensed cowardice, he turned dangerously playful, like a cat with a mouse between its paws.
“I am allowed some introspection,” Aidan said, pouring a snifter of brandy and raising it to Valerian in an impudent toast even though he could not drink. “I was remembering how I came to join the ranks of demons, if you must know.”
Valerian chuckled, took the glass from Aidan’s hand, and flung the contents into the fire. A furious roar preceded his reply. “ ‘The ranks of demons,’ is it? Do you hate us so much as that, Aidan?”
Forever and the Night (The Black Rose Chronicles) Page 3
