For a long moment Valerian searched Maeve’s face, his own expression solemn. Then, finally, he smiled and said, “I was right. You are fated to be the new queen.”
Maeve was in no mood for Valerian’s self-congratulations and I-told-you-so’s. She knew the full extent of the ordeal she faced now, for she had felt the first tentative tugs of Lisette’s power, and she was afraid.
“I must go—I will need to feed and fortify myself before I do battle with the likes of Lisette,” she said.
Valerian clasped her hands and looked deeply into her eyes. “We’re all depending on you, Maeve,” he said hoarsely. “And there is little time to lose.”
Maeve only nodded. Then, after one last sad glance at the school buildings, she interlocked her fingers over her head and vanished.
She gathered herself into solid form briefly in London’s Fleet Street, just long enough to purloin three newly published medical textbooks and a selection of drug samples from a surgeon’s office.
She ended her journey in the wine cellar beneath Calder’s family home in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, with the booty held close in her arms. After a few minutes of searching, she found a long-forgotten hidden passageway that probably dated back to the American Revolution and took refuge there.
The place was cold and dank, populated by spiders and skittering mice, but it would shelter Maeve from the coming sunrise and the bumbling discoveries of mortals, and it was close to Calder. Close enough, in fact, that she could feel the strong, steady beat of his heart in her own spirit. She set her treasures on top of an old whisky barrel and stretched out on the floor to let the vampire sleep overtake her.
At sunset Maeve awakened immediately, and she knew Calder was there, somewhere in the reaches of the great house towering above her, but she did not go to him straight away. First, she went to one of the scores of field hospitals near a battleground and fed, taking nourishment from dying soldiers and giving comfort and ecstasy in return.
She stopped to reclaim the medical books and drug samples before centering her thoughts on Calder and transporting herself to his presence.
He was standing at one of the windows in his spacious bedroom, the lace curtains billowing on either side of him as a rain-scented breeze blew in. While Maeve watched him, marveling at the perfection and strength of his strong arms, his powerful legs, and broad shoulders, she felt again that most treacherous of emotions—unconditional, unreasoning love.
“Calder.” Even his name was sweet on her tongue, like the chocolates her father’s solicitor had often brought when visiting her, as a human child, in that faraway convent.
He turned, his expression bleak, and silently held his arms out to her. It was an entreaty, as well as an offer of comfort, of sanctuary.
She thrust the things she carried into a leather chair and moved into Calder’s embrace.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“I had pushed my emotions away,” Calder answered, his breath brushing her temple, “into the farthest recesses of my soul, and you made me face them again. You brought them back, Maeve, and some of them hurt like hell.”
She drew back a little way and looked up into his wonderful eyes. “So, then,” she said softly, “you too were only pretending to live. Inside, where no one could see, you were really dead.”
He nodded, pulled her close again very gently, and kissed her forehead, her temple, the hollow beneath her ear. “It’s rather like freezing a hand or a foot—the numbness masks the pain for a time, but the healing process is agonizing.”
Maeve felt a rising excitement as Calder held and caressed her, and that surprised her, even though she’d had tender feelings toward him from the first. As a rule, vampires mated only with other vampires, and then it was always a detached, mental sort of intercourse.
Now, to her amazement, Maeve wanted a different kind of loving. She wanted to lie naked in Calder’s bed while he touched and kissed her everywhere, and then give herself to him just as a mortal woman would.
She was instantly terrified, for, although such things had happened before—Lisette, for instance, had made love with Aidan while he was still a mortal—it was wildly dangerous. Other vampires Maeve had heard of, male and female alike, had become frenzied in lovemaking with humans, and had quite literally torn their lovers apart. She moved to pull away, but Calder did not release her.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked huskily. “Tell me.”
“Myself,” Maeve whispered, lowering her eyes. “I’m afraid of myself and—and of the revulsion you might feel if you touch me. I’m—I’m not like the women you’ve known, Calder—”
He curved a finger under her chin and lifted it so that she had to look at him. “I’m feeling a lot of things toward you right now, God help me, and revulsion isn’t one of them.” He bent his head slightly and touched his lips to hers. In the next moment, instead of withdrawing in disgust as she’d feared he might, he intensified the kiss, deepened it until Maeve’s entire body was throbbing with sensation.
Nothing, not even her wild exploits with Valerian in the early years following her transformation, had prepared her for this onslaught of passion and pounding, relentless pleasure. As a vampire, Maeve felt everything a human woman would have, multiplied a hundred-fold.
It was terrifying.
Again she pushed away from Calder. He waited without speaking, letting his eyes ask the questions.
Maeve hugged herself. “Suppose I’m not—suppose I can’t make love the way you expect? I’m not a woman, Calder, I’m a vampire.”
He smiled that heartbreakingly gentle smile of his. “I have no expectations, Maeve, and I’m not about to make judgments. Have you ever been intimate with a man before?”
She shook her head. “I was a virgin when Valerian changed me into an immortal.” She looked away again, then forced herself to meet Calder’s tender but steady gaze. “Vampires mate—even physically sometimes—but most often their lovemaking is mental. For all I know, I won’t be able to respond the way a woman would.”
Calder reached out and traced the outline of her jaw with one curved finger. “If that kiss was anything to go by, my love, you’ll have no trouble responding. Tell me the truth—you’re afraid of hurting me, aren’t you?”
She felt the unvampirelike tears spring to her eyes even before they blurred her vision. “Yes—Calder, I’m far stronger than you are, simply because of what I am. I could lose control.”
“You love me, don’t you? As I love you?”
Maeve couldn’t speak; she merely nodded. No man had ever told her he loved her before, and no vampire, either—except, of course, for Aidan. That was a different sort of love, since he was her brother.
Calder stroked her dark, silken hair with his hands, and she felt his gentleness seep into her, through her skin, where it melted the last of her resolve. “You would never do me harm,” he said. “Never.”
She went into his arms again and gripped the front of his fine linen shirt in her fingers, just to hold him close. “Kiss me again,” she whispered, and he did.
This contact was even more electrifying than the first, and Maeve was dazed by the extent of her yearning—it was a primitive and elemental thing, older than Stardust. To prevent an intrusion by Valerian, or any other immortal, she cast a mental shield around that quiet room. After that, Maeve and Calder might as well have been alone on the planet.
When Maeve was bedazzled by kisses, and certain she could bear no more of the ecstasy they gave her, he withdrew gently and began removing her clothes. As those garments fell away, so did all Maeve’s private heartaches and horrors. Nothing else existed except for the two of them, that room, and the passion they felt for each other.
By the time Maeve stood naked before Calder, and his clothes had joined hers, she had forgotten that she wasn’t a flesh-and-blood woman, but an immortal.
Calder arranged her in the center of his bed and then lay beside her, admiring her, caressing her, murmuring soft
words that made her long to be joined to him.
She knew a moment of fear when Calder bent his head to her breast, but as he tongued her nipple and took it into his mouth to suckle, all her self-doubts were lost in a pleasure so fierce, so keen, that it was nearly painful.
For a long while Calder simply loved Maeve, introducing her to a new universe of sensation. Then, when she was clearly ready, indeed nearly delirious with the wanting of him, he parted her legs with a gentle motion of one hand and mounted her.
Again she was afraid and was certain she would die if she could not take this man inside her in the same way a mortal woman would do.
He touched an index finger to her full lips to quiet her and whispered, “Shhh. It’s all right.” Then, slowly, cautiously, Calder entered Maeve’s body in a single, gliding stroke.
There was no problem in receiving him, only in restraining her passion, which escalated to a feverish pitch as he began to move upon her. She cried out and clutched at his shoulders with her hands, and then, fearing to cause him pain, spread her fingers over his back.
“Move with me, Maeve,” Calder said in a tender rasp. “It will be even better for both of us if you do.”
She was breathless, even though she had had no need of her lungs in more than two hundred years, and she felt certain that if she’d had an actual, living heart, it would have burst in her chest. Obediently, with all the trust she had to offer, she began to return his thrusts.
The ecstasy was intolerable, consuming, and she shouted with it, aware even in her fever that it was an animal sound, wild, untempered by any constraint of humanity, but she could not keep herself silent. The noises she made, the small groans and whimpers and pleas, as well as the lusty cries, were all part of what was happening, interwoven with the loving itself.
Nor was Calder silent, as he approached some soul-sundering completion of his own. He moaned Maeve’s name and, just when her body and indeed her soul exploded in a burst of glorious, brutal passion, he stiffened upon her and rasped some senseless plea to heaven.
Maeve continued to react helplessly beneath him for some time, her body seemingly independent of her mind, trembling and flexing in a downward spiral of pure joy. Even while this was happening, however, she watched Calder’s face and feared that she’d killed him, for his eyes rolled back, and he was still and rigid as his warm seed emptied into her.
He finally collapsed beside Maeve, his head resting on her bosom, and she wept with relief because he was breathing, and she could feel his heartbeat through her own flesh.
She wound a finger in his soft, glossy hair as he slept. At last she understood why her brother had been willing to risk the very fires of hell to be with the woman he loved, to exchange his immortality for a short span of human years.
It wasn’t just the physical joining—it was the vast universe of emotion that underlaid that need to be of one body, of one flesh, with the man she loved.
Dawn was beginning to light the sky when Maeve gently removed herself from beneath the weight of Calder’s sprawling arms and legs and climbed out of bed. She dressed without waking him, knowing he would find the books and medicines she had brought for him, and bent over him to lay a kiss as soft as a fairy’s whisper on his forehead.
Then, regretting the necessity of leaving as she had never regretted anything, Maeve took herself to her favorite lair, the one beneath the London house, and stretched out on the stone slab that awaited her there.
She had only moments to think, before the day-sleep of all blood-drinkers captured her and dragged her under, but it was long enough. She had done something irrevocable this night, something that might bring doom, but she had no remorse.
If she perished that very night and spent the rest of eternity among the damned, the glories Calder had fostered in her spirit, the joys he had taught her in his bed, would sustain her throughout.
Calder awakened slowly, groping toward the surface of consciousness, fairly drowning in the deep sense of well-being his lovemaking with Maeve had engendered in him. In the next instant he wondered if he’d imagined the entire encounter.
“You have a woman in here last night?” Prudence boomed, sending the door crashing inward with a motion of one large hip. She was carrying a breakfast tray, and her round face was full of wary disapproval. “I heard plenty of carryin’ on, and me way down on the second floor, too. It’s a wonder your daddy didn’t march right in here with a horsewhip!”
Calder raised himself to a sitting position, the sheets covering him to the waist, and grinned groggily at the beloved housekeeper. “You’ve been in this house a lot of years, Pru,” he teased. “You must know by now that my daddy is no moral giant himself. Any crusade he might mount on the side of virtue would probably collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.”
Prudence set the tray down in Calder’s lap with unnecessary force. “I don’t see why you can’t talk in plain and simple words like anybody else!” she fussed.
He chuckled as he lifted the silver lid of a serving plate and saw his favorite fried potatoes and onions beneath it, along with several strips of bacon and some toasted bread. “And here I thought you were my greatest admirer.”
The housekeeper stopped herself from smiling, but just barely. “Go on with you,” she huffed, waving a scornful hand at Calder. She lingered a few moments, perhaps hoping he would say more about his night visitor, but, of course, he did not. At long last Prudence heaved a great and martyrly sigh and left the room.
Calder’s banter with the housekeeper had been mostly superficial; inwardly he was reliving the events of the night, pondering them in his heart, wondering if he wasn’t insane.
He might have believed that if Maeve’s pendant didn’t still rest against his bare chest.
Just as he was finishing his breakfast—for the first time in weeks he ate ravenously—Calder noticed a stack of books and other, less recognizable items in a nearby chair. Excitement possessed him—Maeve had remembered her promise to bring medical texts back from the latter part of the next century.
He nearly sent his tray flying in his eagerness to bound out of the bed and cross the room. Reaching the chair, he simply stood there, naked and transfixed by the books and by the strange medicines. They were pressed into tablets, these drugs, and packaged with stiff paper on one side and some hard, clear substance he didn’t recognize on the other.
Calder felt wonder as he studied those strange packets and no small amount of frustration with his own lack of knowledge. In the end he was able to identify only one of the compounds—morphine, the painkiller that was in such tragically short supply on the warfront.
Reverently he picked up one of the books and opened it to the copyright page. The publisher was William B. Finley and Sons, and the publication date was 1993.
1993.
Even though he knew the volume was real—it had weight and substance in his hands—Calder was still shaken. It had been—would be?—printed one hundred and thirty years in the future. He dressed, never taking his eyes off the book for more than a few moments, and kept it open on the washstand while he shaved. Unable to restrain his curiosity and his desire to learn, Calder stopped now and then to read a sentence or two.
By the time he was through grooming himself, he’d cut his chin and right cheek with the razor, but he didn’t care, for he was in a state of quiet ecstasy. Maeve had brought him not just one medical book, but several, along with some of the miraculous concoctions of twentieth-century chemists, and he was greedy for their wisdom.
Bending close to his mirror, Calder touched one of the spots where he’d nicked himself, then stared curiously at the bead of blood on his fingertip. As he did so, he thought of Maeve, and of her wonderful powers, and began to speculate…
*
CHAPTER 7
« ^ »
Maeve ached to go to Calder, to warm herself by the gentle fire burning in his soul, but her practical instincts warned her to be wary. It would be only too easy to bring
him to the attention of other fiends—most notably, Lisette, though Maeve was by no means certain she could trust even Valerian.
Instead she fed in the seamiest part of London, near the docks, and tried to content herself with the fact that she and Calder were at least in the same century. Because she was building her strength and attempting to hone her skills, she took blood often. As always, Maeve was careful to prey only upon the deliberately evil, not on the merely misguided.
On her third night among seagoing rats, of both the two-legged and four-legged varieties, Maeve encountered another vampire—one she had only heard of before, but never actually met.
The female was from the fourteenth century, like Valerian, and that made her old. She was, despite her great age, as beautiful as an angel, with waist-length blond hair, enormous eyes the color of spring violets, and a sweet, heart-shaped mouth.
She took shape at the end of an alleyway as Maeve was leaving another victim to sleep off his blood loss, and she was a vision in a blue velvet gown trimmed in exquisite handmade lace.
“You are Maeve Tremayne,” she said in a voice like the merest brush of fingers over the strings of a harp.
Maeve gave a cordial, if guarded, nod, for she recognized Dimity from Valerian’s description, and she recalled that the beautiful vampire was rumored to consort with angels. In some quarters of the dark realm, this was considered mildly suspicious behavior; in others, it was outright treason.
“Dimity,” she said by way of acknowledgment and greeting.
The other nightwalker tilted gracefully to one side, in order to peer around Maeve and have a look at the victim. “You chose well,” Dimity said thoughtfully. “This one is so foul-natured that even the devil would not wish to keep him company.”
Again Maeve nodded. She had, of course, assessed the man before feeding from the vein in his throat. “Do you have some business with me?”
Dimity smiled, clasped the rich velvet of her skirts in both hands, and executed a half-curtsy. “Yes, indeed, my queen,” she said, and though she was plainly teasing, there was a note of awe in her voice as well.
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