She smiled down at him when she'd completed her work, her arms folded. "Aidan will sense your despair and come to save you like the fool he is. And when he does, I will destroy him."
Valerian moaned, blocking Aidan's image from his mind with the last shreds of his strength. If he didn't cry out to Aidan, didn't think of him, the other vampire might not be drawn into the trap.
Lisette knew Valerian's efforts and laughed, flinging her head back in a fit of mirth.
"You're all idiots," she said after the terrible, shrill sound of her amusement had faded away into the night. "Since when do vampires behave like besotted humans, rescuing each other, pretending to honor and chivalry? Where is your white charger, Valerian?"
Valerian didn't reply. He was losing consciousness; he could feel his spirit seeping into the cold ground, curling like smoke around the bones of the long-dead and eternally unforgiven.
As terrible as the experience was, he knew he would long to be as insensate as those corpses when morning came and the sun found him. The hot rays would consume his flesh like a rain of acid, but slowly. Long after his physical body was nothing but a smoldering shell, he would still be imprisoned inside himself, and he would feel agony until his thoughts were snuffed out like the flame of a candle.
And after that he might find himself in Dante's version of Hell, on the threshold of an eternity of suffering.
He groaned aloud at the prospect, and Lisette laughed again, then shrieked into the night sky, "Let all vampires see, and remember, what it means to betray me!"
In the next moment a soft, cool snow began to fall. Flakes covered Valerian's closed eyes, the hollows in his gaunt face and body, and suddenly, vividly, he recalled being a human boy, no older than eight. He remembered the drawing of breath and the steady thump of his heartbeat; he heard his own laughter, felt it in his throat, felt the warm, pliant muscles in his legs as he ran, in just such a snowfall as this.
For the merest fragment of time, Valerian was innocent again. He was free and whole, and the greatest powers of heaven looked upon him with benevolence.
Just before he swooned, a smile touched his mouth.
Aidan awakened in Maeve's cellar, well-rested from a day of slumber and determined to avoid Neely for as long as he possibly could. He knew the Brotherhood was keeping an account of his whereabouts and his actions, allowing him an illusion of freedom while the members decided his fate among themselves, and the last thing he wanted was to draw their attention to the woman he loved.
His soul still hummed with the joy Neely had brought him by offering herself in passion and in trust.
In a blink he transported himself to his room on the second floor of the mansion. He seldom used the chamber, but there were fresh clothes in the wardrobe, and he felt like sprucing himself up. He would hunt in nineteenth-century London, perhaps among the riffraff along the waterfront, and then look in on Valerian. Surely the other vampire would be over his sulk by now, and they could talk. Aidan was eager to tell his friend that it was possible to be mortal again; he wondered if other vampires would step forward and ask to be changed, if he succeeded in making the transformation.
Aidan whistled as he put on his most elegant evening clothes-black trousers with a glistening silk stripe down either leg, a cutaway coat with tails, a ruffled white shirt of the finest linen, a narrow string tie, and a top hat. He wore spats over shiny shoes and completed his ensemble with a long cape lined in gold.
He looked down at himself, decided he looked like a proper vampire, raised his arms above his head, and disintegrated into a wispy vapor.
I'm going to miss doing that, Aidan admitted silently when he reassembled himself in a filthy, rat-infested alleyway behind a combination brothel and opium den within a stone's throw of London's waterfront.
Snatches of fog curled around him, around empty crates and whiskey barrels and piles of garbage, like dancers in a spectral ballet troupe. Aidan sighed and waited; there was a corpse sitting upright, just a few doors down, crouched against a brick wall with its head resting on its updrawn knees.
He shuddered in distaste and tried to ignore the thing, but that was difficult. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the ghost rise from the body, heard it wail in despairing protest.
Suddenly it flew at Aidan, a bluish-gray blob of wavering light, keening and shrieking.
The creature was-or had been until about half an hour before-a seagoing lad, barely fifteen years of age. He'd been robbed of the few pence he possessed, then stabbed under the ribs with a fisherman's knife.
"Go on," Aidan told it, speaking kindly but in a tone that would brook no argument.
"There is nothing for you here. Look around you for the Light, and follow where it leads."
He was no more certain that there was an afterlife than the shade itself was, he supposed.
He said the words because he had heard his mother say them to a dying man when he, Aidan, was a small boy. The unlucky fellow had gotten in the way of a runaway coach, and his legs, pelvis, and rib cage had been crushed beneath the horses' hooves and the wheels, but he'd taken comfort from a tavern maid's pretty assurances and passed on peacefully.
Aidan was just about to move along when a great, loud hoyden of a woman burst through a rear doorway, dragging a gawky, half-starved child along with her. Gripping the young girl's hair-she was twelve, Aidan saw, by glancing briefly into her mind-the drunken harridan flung her victim hard against the brick wall.
The child sobbed, almost hysterical, as helpless as an animal with one limb in a trap.
She'd stolen from the kitchen, a piece of bread, a crumbling morsel of moldy cheese, and the woman had caught her.
"Now I'll box your ears for you!" the drudge shrilled. "See if you dare steal from Dorcus Moody again, you workhouse brat!"
Aidan stepped out of the shadows, resplendent in his gentleman's clothes, and both the old witch and the child stared at him, obviously confounded.
"What is your name?" he asked the girl gently.
Mistress Moody did not move, for Aidan had frozen her in place.
"Effie," came the whispered response. "You took the cheese and bread for your mother," Aidan said, having already discerned the fact.
Effie nodded.
"She's sick."
The child nodded again. "We got throwed out of the workhouse-my brother made trouble when one of the blokes as looked out for us there tried to put his hand down me dress."
Aidan gestured for Effie to wait, slipped inside the tavern's gloomy kitchen, and gathered up two loaves of bread, a block of cheese, and a joint of venison. After dropping the loot into a cloth sack, he brought it outside and silently offered it to the girl.
Dorcus Moody was still facing the wall with one meaty hand raised to slap, eyes staring, muscles as rigid as if rigor mortis had set in.
Effie snatched the bag of food, turned on her bare feet, which were blue with cold and encrusted with the filth of the street, and ran, without giving Aidan, Mistress Moody, or the sailor's corpse a second look.
Aidan walked around Dorcus Moody's hulking frame and smiled into her senseless face.
She had a wart beside her nose, and a thin trail of spittle trickled down her chin.
"May I have this dance?" Aidan asked with a slight bow. He put his hands on her, as if for a waltz, then bent his head to her jugular vein and drank.
He left her beside the dead sailor, staring witlessly into space, her pulse thready but regular. She was a vile creature, was Mistress Moody, Aidan observed to himself as he walked away, but her blood was as potent as a fine Madeira.
He turned, there in the gloom of the alley, and took his hat off to her. "May you live to nourish another vampire, Gentle Dorcus," he said.
She made a soft, whimpering sound, low in her throat.
The image struck Aidan from out of nowhere as he left the alley; he saw Valerian, staked to the ground in some snowy cemetery, awaiting the dawn.
Aidan muttered a curse, then focused all his powers into one single thought. Valerian!
The reply was faint, but it formed instantly in Aidan's mind. Stay away. I beg you, stay away!
Aidan was on the point of ignoring the injunction and seeking Valerian out in the same way he would have sought Maeve, or Neely, when someone on the fringe of a passing mob of drunken swabs bumped into him, hard.
"I wouldn't if I were you," Tobias said good-naturedly. "You could never save Valerian alone."
Tobias was right, but Aidan could not turn his back, even though the scale was balanced between himself and Valerian, and all debts had been canceled. Yes, the other vampire had cared for him when he was ill, nourished him, even brought Neely to his side, but Aidan had saved Valerian once, too, after the attempt to travel too far back in time.
"I can't leave him to burn," Aidan answered.
"Suppose I told you that you have one chance to become a man again, and that you must take that opportunity now, this moment, or lose it for all of eternity?" Tobias asked in a reasonable tone. He, too, wore evening clothes, and the two of them strolled down the street together, an odd sight indeed in that grim, desolate part of London.
Aidan thought of Neely, of all his dreams. He wanted to come to her as a man, not a monster. He wanted to lie beside her in a real bed, make love to her as often as possible, and work in the sunlight every day, until his skin glistened with sweat and his muscles ached. He wanted to vote and attend PTA meetings and drink beer on the beach and complain about taxes.
For all of that, he still could not desert Valerian. Aidan knew only too well that, if their positions were reversed, the older vampire would try to help him.
"I guess I'd say I have rotten luck, and you and the Brotherhood have lousy timing,"
Aidan finally replied. "So long, Tobias."
With that, he did his vanishing number, and almost immediately found himself standing on the ruined wall of an old abbey. His cape floated in the wind, in true vampire tradition, and Aidan felt a certain bitter amusement. Damned if Valerian hadn't found a way to screw up his plans after all, even if it had been an inadvertent move.
Aidan focused his powers into a single invisible beam and found Valerian almost immediately. He was on the hillside, well beyond the outermost wall of the abbey, and he was helpless.
"Damn," Aidan said. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and found Valerian spread- eagle at his feet.
The other vampire seemed delirious, drifting in and out of consciousness, and when he saw Aidan crouched beside him, he moaned. "I told you," he rasped, "to stay away. She's- she's here-waiting."
"Lisette," Aidan said. "Yes, I figured as much."
Just then, a weird, shrill music filled the cold night air, and Aidan raised his eyes from his stricken friend to see Lisette pirouetting gracefully atop a crude stone slab.
Valerian began to weep. "Why, Aidan-why did you come? I could have borne anything but what she will do to you-"
"Stop whining," Aidan instructed him lightly. He discerned the mental bonds that held his friend, tried them with his mind, and found them strong. "If there's one thing I truly despise, it's a sniveling vampire."
Lisette ceased her hideous dance and held out her arms to Aidan. She seemed to waver in her white, shroudlike robe, a specter with substance.
"Come waltz with me, my precious."
Aidan approached her. He supposed he should have been scared, but he was well beyond that, well beyond cold terror and even outright panic. A strange calm possessed him. If he was never to be a man again, never to hold Neely in his arms, then he wanted to perish.
"Release Valerian. You have no quarrel with him."
Lisette pouted prettily, and Aidan recalled an innocent time when he had believed her to be a flesh-and-blood woman and had taken unabashed pleasure in her embrace. "I do have a quarrel with him," she insisted. "He plotted to be your companion for all of eternity!"
"He's since found me uncooperative. Let him go, Lisette."
She pirouetted again on top of the gravestone, her auburn tresses blackened by the gloom, moving like living strands woven of the night itself. She laughed, and the sound was silvery, sparkling, and brimming with madness.
"Foolish boy," she scolded. "Valerian is going to die screaming with the sunrise, and so are you, my sweet darling."
It was not an idle threat, but Aidan was still calm. If his existence was to end this way, then so be it. No doubt, from a cosmic point of view, his fate was a just one. "I thought you wanted to dance with me," he said evenly.
Lisette descended to stand facing Aidan in the snow. There was a mischievous glint in her cool blue eyes. "Do you imagine for a moment, Aidan Tremayne, that I don't know when I'm being patronized?"
He simply held out his arms as he had long ago, when they had danced on summer grass, under bright stars, and he had not yet guessed what horror he courted.
She batted her thick eyelashes coquettishly, then drifted into Aidan's embrace. He began to turn around and around, and her shroudlike gown billowed out around them, as did his cape, and after a while Lisette began to hum softly.
He thought, once or twice, of the spectacle they all made-he and Lisette, a pair of monsters, waltzing in a moonlit graveyard, Valerian staked out on the ground like some hapless character in an old Western. Aidan might have laughed, had he dared, but dawn was already approaching, a faint grayish glow shimmered along the horizon.
"You were such a delightful creature in the beginning," Lisette fretted, running the tip of an index finger from Aidan's throat to the top of his cummerbund. "I should never have changed you, though. That was my fatal mistake."
Privately Aidan agreed, although he was glad he'd stayed alive long enough to know Neely. That wouldn't have happened, of course, if he'd lived out his normal span of years.
"Did you create others?" he asked on a sudden hunch. "Valerian, for instance?"
She sighed and tossed a disparaging glance in the other vampire's direction. "That insufferable pest? I should say not. I don't know how he was made, much less why, and I don't care if he screams in hell from now until the end of eternity."
"Why do you hate him so much?"
"Because he dared to love you."
"Do you hate yourself as well, then?"
Lisette stopped cold and stared up at Aidan, her face rigid. "I do not love you."
"I think you do."
She was silent for a time, utterly motionless, her expression unreadable. "It changes nothing!" she screamed in sudden, wild fury. At the same moment a border of golden light formed between earth and sky.
It was almost morning.
Chapter 16.
An unearthly shriek rent the air, and Aidan didn't know if Lisette had made the sound, or Valerian, or even he himself. Full sunrise was minutes, perhaps only moments, away, and already he felt as though a miniature fire blazed in every pore. Pain seared his eyes, and he stumbled slightly, blinded.
Neely, he thought, involuntarily unleashing all the power of his love for her, of the dreams he'd cherished, and the hopes. The soul-cry was not offered in an effort to save himself-it was surely too late for that-but because he could not bear to leave her.
Whatever his intentions, the name sent him plummeting through time and space, and he landed with a hard thump on a carpeted floor.
He rolled, still unable to see, as the morning sunlight licked at him like the very flames of hell.
"Aidan!" Neely cried, and he was aware that she'd dropped to her knees beside him.
"Aidan, what is it?"
"The light," he managed; it was all he could do to speak without screaming.