For All Eternity

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Trust?” Valerian smiled grimly and arched one eyebrow. “Why, no one, Your Majesty—perhaps not even each other. Still, I know of a fledgling who is most anxious to endear herself to me—a thought should be sufficient summons.” With that, he closed his eyes, and an instant later a young, brown-haired snippet appeared in the room with an unceremonious crash, toppling several crates and boxes.

  “What the bloody hell?” she screeched in a voice that made Maeve want to put her hands over her ears. The new arrival focused her spritely brown gaze on Valerian, then a glorious smile spread across her smudged face. “Oh, it’s you, then!”

  Valerian shook his head. “Yes, it’s me. Where are those pretty clothes I gave you, chit? And how do you manage to stay sooty as a chimney pot even after a washing?”

  The young vampire looked chagrined and, at the same time, very pleased that Valerian had taken notice of her in any way. She would have blushed splendidly, had she been a mortal creature; instead, she simply turned to Maeve and executed an awkward curtsy.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, mum,” she said.

  “This is Shaleen,” Valerian explained with a smile in his eyes.

  Maeve smiled herself, for the first time since before Calder’s shooting. Valerian was the most ferocious of vampires and, some said, the most ruthless, and yet he loved playing the mentor. Now that she thought of it, Maeve could not remember a time when he hadn’t had some fledgling under tutelage—herself, for instance, and Aidan, and others too numerous to name.

  “How do you do?” Maeve said grandly, extending her hand to the feisty little spitfire and hoping she wasn’t making a mistake in abandoning Calder to her care.

  “Enough of the social refinements,” Valerian snapped, suddenly impatient with the whole proceeding. “There is a war on, in case you’ve both forgotten.” He gestured toward Calder. “This one has just been changed. We’ll be wanting you to look after him, stand guard, so to speak. You’ve had experience with that, now haven’t you?”

  Shaleen quailed a little under Valerian’s fierce glare, but then she made a visible effort to muster her pride and succeeded to a degree. “I’ll look after him, all right. Won’t no mortals come and stake him, I’ll see to it personal—”

  Valerian closed his eyes for a moment, a study in impatient grandeur. “We are quite convinced,” he said sternly.

  His apprentice subsided, chagrined. “Well, then,” she murmured, dragging a crate over for use as a chair and taking up her post beside Calder, “I’ll just button me lip, then, won’t I?”

  Maeve’s amusement ebbed as she thought of leaving Calder, especially in so fragile a state, but she knew she must not tarry. She went to the other side of the slab where her lover lay, opposite the bristly, determined Shaleen, and bent to kiss his mouth.

  “I’ll be back soon, darling,” she whispered. “Please don’t be afraid.”

  “Great Zeus,” Valerian snapped, gesturing wildly with one arm toward the greater world beyond that cellar, “we’re about to be overrun by legions of avenging angels! Must we dally in this dusty pit all night?”

  Maeve laid her ear to Calder’s chest, hearing no heartbeat, feeling no rise and fall of breathing, and knew an infinite sorrow, as well as joy. They would be together for eternity, if they were fortunate, rich with power and full of strength, and yet Calder’s soul had been stolen this night, and she’d been a party to the theft.

  She felt Valerian’s hands come to rest on her shoulders, gentle, elegant, and firm. He spoke quietly.

  “There can be no looking back now, Maeve. It’ll turn you into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, and rob you of all your power.”

  She turned, looked up into his dark purple eyes, and nodded. “You’re right,” she said.

  Valerian took her hands in his own, and they raised their arms high, in a graceful, simultaneous motion, and then they vanished, Shaleen’s parting words echoing in their ears.

  “Coo, mate!” she cried, no doubt elbowing Calder in the ribs at the same time. “Did you see that?”

  Lisette gave a snarling shriek of outrage when she found Valerian’s cell empty, and the new vampire, Shaleen, gone as well.

  Fools! Did they truly believe they could escape her so easily? Why, when she found those two she’d bind them to trees and burn them, like Joan of Arc at her stake, as a lesson to all vampires!

  She dropped to her knees in the fetid straw, clutching her middle, as the troublesome weakness struck her. It was that rebel Maeve Tremayne’s fault that she suffered now—Lisette had not been the same since their battle in that cave, far away in China.

  She’d been sorely tried in that confrontation, and injured, and she had had to console herself by lying in her crypt beneath the cellar of her villa on the coast of Spain for several days and nights, with two captive mortal lovers to sustain her.

  Even now, curled up in the straw of that miserable castle in the north of Scotland, a bleak spot abandoned even in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s day and naught but a ruin in modern times, Lisette smiled at the memory of the pleasures she’d taken.

  First, she’d prowled the city in her carriage, finding one luscious boy and then another. She’d taken them to her villa, gotten them drunk on wine bottled before their great-grandfathers were born, and then taught them passion, one by one.

  Finally she’d taken them, sated and senseless, to her hiding place deep beneath the floor of the cellar, and slept, waking only long enough to feed off one or the other.

  They’d been dead when she left them, both of them, for she hadn’t wanted to go to the effort of making the poor lads into vampires.

  She frowned, recollecting another experience.

  She’d selected Aidan Tremayne for her favors, one night beside a seventeenth-century road, and taught him ecstasy so keen that each of their trysts had left him dazed and drunk with pleasure. Eventually she’d given her cherished Aidan the ultimate gift, immortality, and he’d thanked her by calling her cursed, by hating and reviling her.

  Lisette raised herself, both hands braced against the filthy carpet of straw. That, she thought bitterly, was why she’d turned no more of her lovely boys into nightwalkers. They were just too thick to comprehend, those ungrateful creatures, that they’d been translated from mere clay to virtual gods.

  A strange exhaustion felled her, and she dropped to the floor again, overcome by the need to sleep. She would find Valerian and the miscreant, Shaleen, later, along with a fine-looking mortal lad to nourish her. In the meantime, though, she’d just rest a little while.

  Calder was awake, inside his hardened husk of a body, just as he’d heard Valerian assert earlier, but he could not so much as twitch a muscle or force the weakest murmur past his lips.

  He tried to piece together his shattered memories, in an effort to make sense of what was happening, but he remembered only two things at first—William firing the bullet that had in effect killed him, and the terrible, fiery elation he’d known when Valerian had drawn the very blood from his veins and then given it back again, forever changed.

  He groped forward mentally, and more came to him. Things were definitely falling into place.

  He, the late Calder Holbrook, was now a vampire, an immortal creature with the power to travel through time and space at will. Granted, he wouldn’t be able to go backward very far—Maeve had told him once that a blood-drinker could venture only so far as the instant following his own death. Since this had occurred so recently, there was no point in going back.

  Still, the future was his. As soon as he was able to move, he would go forward to the final years of the twentieth century and begin soaking up the knowledge he craved. He would soon understand all the newest surgical techniques, know how to mix chemicals into miraculous drugs. Then, then he would return to his own century, and save as many of the soldiers, as many of the suffering children, as he could.

  Calder’s thoughts returned, as he suspected they always would, to Maeve. He knew, even in his dis
tracted state, that he was somehow tethered to her, and he blessed the fact. She would be the center of his life, the sunshine he must now foreswear, the light he warmed himself by, now and forever, world without end, amen and amen.

  He tried again to move, and again found the effort to be futile.

  Valerian pervaded his mind, that imperious and arrogant vampire whom he had mistrusted and disliked from their first encounter. Like it or not, Calder reflected, with a sigh of the spirit, a bond existed between them now. In a very real sense, Valerian had sired him into the new and exciting life that lay waiting, just ahead.

  He struggled, eager to regain consciousness and begin that life, and felt a cool hand come to rest on his forehead, one so small that it might have belonged to a child.

  “There now,” a youthful, feminine voice chided, “just lie still and don’t be so impatient. You’ll be prowlin’ the night soon enough, I’ll wager, and a pretty fellow you is, too.”

  Calder felt the forces of his changing body trying to overcome him, push him under the dark, glimmering surface into oblivion. They wanted to get on with the business of transformation, those forces, and Calder hadn’t the strength or the will to counter them.

  He relaxed his roiling emotions, soothed his tempestuous mind, and went under.

  The old manse was tucked away in the English countryside, long-deserted, overgrown with vines and ivy, almost certainly purported by the locals to be haunted, and Maeve could see that Valerian loved the place on sight. It would, she supposed, appeal to his macabre sense of humor to make mysterious lights appear in the windows on occasion and send out the odd bone-chilling shriek just for the sake of drama.

  Dathan stepped out of a shadowy, cobwebbed corner, seeming to form himself from the particles of dust and darkness that made up the night. He raised his arms, causing his cloak to spread like wings, and grinned.

  “Perfect, isn’t it?” he asked cordially, though Maeve immediately sensed the chilly wariness that had sprung up between the warlock and Valerian.

  Valerian nodded, his jawline unusually taut. “All it needs is a bubbling cauldron and some cackling crones,” he said evenly.

  Dathan laughed, but the sound had a jagged edge. “Stereotypes,” he scolded. “You don’t sleep in a casket, do you, Vampire? Nor, I trust, would a necklace of garlic put you to flight.”

  Maeve interceded, worried by the growing tension. Dathan and Valerian would be no good against Lisette and her forces if they were battling each other. “Stop it,” she said, stepping between the pair and laying a calming hand to each of their chests. She gave Valerian a warning glance, then turned to look into Dathan’s unreadable eyes. “Why did you summon us here?”

  The warlock smiled indulgently, every inch the suave country host, but Maeve was not misled. Dathan was about as warm and welcoming as one of those twentieth-century knives—switchblades, she believed they were called.

  “I have something to show you—” he said, shifting his gaze to Valerian’s glowering countenance only after stretching the moment to very uncomfortable lengths. “—both.”

  Beyond the crumbling stone walls of the manse, in the luxurious, black-velvet darkness of that isolated place, something howled.

  Maeve and Valerian exchanged a quick glance as they followed Dathan deeper into the old cottage.

  No owl, that, Valerian observed in a mental undertone that somehow crept beneath Dathan’s level of awareness.

  I know you’ll protect me, Maeve teased in response.

  They had entered what had probably been a parlor at one time, and even though they could all see as clearly as cats, Dathan went through the formality of lighting the nubs of tallow spilling messily from an old candelabra.

  Maeve took in the chandelier, draped with dust, the worn organ that only the mice played now, the stained and peeling wallpaper, and imagined the ghostly forms of a dozen long-dead vicars moving about, colliding with each other.

  “A very colorful thought,” Valerian commented with quiet amusement, making no effort to keep the conversation private this time. “Rather like that attraction in Disneyland.”

  Dathan cast a scathing glance at the clearly unwelcome vampire towering beside Maeve, and then clapped his hands together with brisk authority.

  Immediately two warlocks entered the room from deeper inside the house, the dining room probably, escorting a young man between them.

  Both Valerian and Maeve cried out, in despairing shock, for this enchanted wretch was their Aidan, the one they had both loved and lost.

  Valerian found his voice first. “What have you done to him?” he rasped, springing forward as if to free the poor captive from the warlocks’ hold. He whirled on Dathan, grasped his flowing shirt in both hands, and wrenched him onto the balls of his feet. “God damn your black soul, what have you done?”

  “It’s all right, Valerian,” Maeve said gently, for after the first shock she’d realized that, however perfect the resemblance, this was not her brother. She ventured close and touched the seemingly frozen, breathtakingly handsome face tentatively. “Aidan is far away and quite safe. This is only someone who looks like him.”

  Dathan shook himself free of Valerian’s grip, his eyes glittering with a suppressed thirst for vengeance, and nodded. “Very astute, Your Majesty. This is Llewellyn, one of our own. We’ve tampered with his mind a bit, as you suggested, and when he comes out of this stupor we’ve so mercifully induced, he’ll believe with all his treacherous little heart that he’s mortal.”

  Valerian looked confused, and started to speak, but Maeve stopped him by reaching out to grasp his forearm.

  “Ingenious,” she said.

  “What is the purpose of this?” Valerian demanded, exasperated.

  Maeve walked around Llewellyn, studying him in amazement. If it hadn’t been for the connection between herself and her twin brother, she would have believed this creature, this warlock, to be Aidan—sweet, stubborn, human Aidan.

  “Smooth your feathers and think for a moment, Vampire,” Dathan said. “How do you believe Lisette would react, were she to encounter our brilliant creation?”

  Maeve sensed the quickening in Valerian as, at last, he made the connection.

  He muttered an amazed exclamation and peered into the exquisitely molded face of the warlock who would, when fully conscious again, wholeheartedly believe himself to be an ordinary man.

  “Did he look this much like Aidan Tremayne in the beginning,” Valerian wondered aloud, “or did you alter him somehow?”

  Dathan sighed, as if weary of silly questions. “There was a resemblance—rather faint really. We accentuated it, knowing of the lovely Lisette’s special fancy for Tremayne. Now the question is, how do we draw her notice to our lad here?”

  Valerian flung a testy glance at the warlock. “And I was so certain that you’d thought of everything.”

  Dathan seethed but, with visible effort, managed to control his temper. “If that were so,” he replied in a strange, purring growl, “then we’d have no need of you, would we, Vampire?”

  Valerian took a step toward Dathan, and again Maeve moved between them.

  “Once Lisette has taken the bait and poisoned herself with the blood of this lovely warlock,” she said, “the two of you may feel free to ravage each other. In the meantime, everything we hold precious is at stake, and our only hope is to work together!”

  “Take the lad to Spain,” Valerian said moments later in a hoarse, grudging whisper. He named an obscure village. “Lisette has a villa there, on the coast. Wherever she is, she’s attuned to that place, and she’ll sense his presence and come to him.”

  Maeve stared at him. “You knew of this villa, and yet you said nothing?”

  Valerian shook his head. “I had forgotten. Seeing Llewellyn here brought back memories.”

  It was plain enough that the memories in question involved Aidan, but Maeve didn’t pursue the subject because it was so obviously personal.

  “To Spain, then,�
�� Dathan said, clapping his hands again.

  After Llewellyn had been led to the entrance of an especially lively cantina, Dathan broke the spell that had rendered him catatonic, using a brief incantation.

  “Hello, George,” the warlock said, offering his hand to the lad.

  The young man blinked, and then his eyes cleared and he smiled. “Hello,” he said, shaking Dathan’s hand. “Do I know you?”

  The sight of that smile, an eerily exact duplicate of Aidan’s, wrenched Maeve on the deepest level of her being, and she suspected Valerian’s reaction was quite similar.

  “We were acquainted once,” Dathan said, stepping back. “Well, I won’t keep you—you’re obviously bent on meeting friends.”

  George nodded happily. In their clever, mysterious way the warlocks had evidently provided him not only with a new identity, but a past as well. Furthermore, they had altered the memories of several mortals to include him. “I don’t believe I got your name,” he said cheerfully.

  “Not important,” Dathan said, turning away.

  George stared after him in bafflement for a moment, and Maeve feared that the trick had not worked after all, that the youth remembered being a warlock. If that were so, Lisette would not be deceived.

  Then Maeve shifted her consciousness, the way she generally did instinctively when warlocks were around, and the signal from George’s mind came through loud and clear. He believed he was a man, and, therefore, he transmitted that belief to everyone and everything around him.

  Valerian gripped her arm and hustled her away into the darkness. “Much as we might like to hang around and watch,” he explained rather tersely, “Lisette will pick up on our presence and smell a trap if we do.”

  He was right, of course.

  Maeve turned to him when they were well away from the cantina. Dathan and his companions had already vanished, probably for the same reason Valerian had mentioned. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” Valerian said, plainly as irritated by the prospect as she was. “We wait and hope that Lisette bites into our lovely warlock’s jugular and subsequently chokes to death on his blood.”