Valerian - Forever And The Night Part 1

FOREVER AND THE NIGHT.

LINDA LAEL MILLER.

I wrote this book for myself; it was a gift from me, to me.

For that reason, and many others, I dedicate it to the best of whoI am and to all that I hope to become.

Special acknowledgments are in order for Alex Kamaroff, who saw the vision more clearly than I did and helped me to bring it into focus; to Irene Goodman, who was a light in the darkness when things seemed hopeless; to Debbie Macomber, whose confidence in me seemed unwavering; and to Pamela Lael, who fearlessly marked errors of logic and spelling and raved in all the right places. Last but not least, I wish to thank my editor, Judith Stern, for her tireless efforts to make the book shine.

" 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and h.e.l.l itself breathes out Contagion to the world: now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look upon."

-Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii

Chapter 1.

That year, on the afternoon of Halloween, great glistening snowflakes began tumbling from a glowering sky, catching the maples and oaks by surprise in their gold and crimson housecoats, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g fences and lampposts, roofs and windowsill, in shimmering, exquisite lace.

Aidan Tremayne awakened at sunset, as he'd done every day for more than two centuries, and felt a strange quickening in his spirit as he left the secret place in the woods.

He allowed himself a wistful smile as he surveyed the snowy landscape, for he sensed the excitement of the town's children; it was like silent laughter, riding the wind.

All Hallow's Eve, he thought. How fitting.

He shook off the bittersweet sadness that had possessed him from the moment he'd opened his eyes and walked on toward the great stone house hidden in the stillness of its surroundings. There were birch trees among the others, gray-white sketches against the pristine snow, and a young deer watched him warily from the far side of a small mill pond.

Aidan paused, his eyes adjusting to the dusk, all his senses fluttering to life within him, and still the little doe returned his gaze, as though caught in the glow of headlights on some dark and forgotten road. He had only to summon the creature, and she would come to him.

He was hungry, having gone three days without feeding, but he had no taste for the blood of innocents, be they animal or human. Besides, the life force of lesser creatures provided substandard nourishment. Go, he told the deer, in the silent language he had become so proficient at over the years. This is no place for you, no time to be abroad in the night.

The deer listened with that intentness so typical of wild creatures, white ears perked as fat flakes of snow continued to fall, as if to hide all traces of evil beneath a mantle of perfect white. Then the creature turned and scampered into the woods.Aidan allowed himself another smile-it was Halloween, after all, and he supposed the occasion ought to have some celebratory meaning to a vampire-and walked on toward the house. Beyond, at the end of a long gravel driveway, lay Route 7, the first hint of civilization.

The small Connecticut town of Bright River nestled four and a half miles to the north.

It was the kind of place where church bells rang on Sunday mornings. Local political issues were hotly debated, and freight trains came through late at night, the mournful cry of the engineer's whistle filling the valley. The children at the elementary school made decorations colored in crayon, pumpkins or Pilgrims or Santa Clauses, depending on the season, and taped them to the windows of their cla.s.srooms.

Aidan still smiled as he mounted the slippery steps at the back of the house and entered the mudroom. He stomped the snow from his booted feet just as a mortal man might have done, but he did not reach for the light switch as he entered the kitchen. His vision was keenest in the dark, and his ears were so sharp that neither cacophony nor silence could veil the essence of reality from him.

Usually.

He paused just over the threshold, focusing his awareness, and knew in the s.p.a.ce of a moment that he was indeed alone in the gracious, shadowy house. This realization was both a relief-for he had powerful and very treacherous enemies-and a painful reminder that he was condemned to an eternity of seclusion. That was the worst part of being the monster he was, the wild, howling loneliness, the rootless wandering over the face of the earth, like a modern-day Cain.

Except for the brief, horrified comprehension of his victims, flaring in the moment before their final heartbeat, Aidan knew no human contact, for he consorted only with other vampires. He took little comfort from the company of his fellows-except for Maeve, his twin, whom he loved without reservation-for they were abominations, like himself. As a rule, vampires were amoral beings, untroubled by conscience or a need for the fellowship of others.

Aidan sighed as he pa.s.sed silently through the house, shoving splayed fingers into dark, unruly hair. The yearning to live and love as an ordinary man had never left him, even though older and wiser vampires had promised it would. Some remnant of humanity lingered to give unrelenting torment.

He had not known peace of mind or spirit since the night she-Lisette-had changed him forever. Indeed, he supposed his unrest had begun even before that, when their gullible and superst.i.tious mortal mother had taken him and Maeve to a gypsy camp, as very small children, to have their fortunes told.

The old woman-even after more than two hundred years, Aidan still remembered the horror of looking into her wrinkled and shrewd face-had taken his hand and Maeve's into her own. She'd held them close together, palms upward, peering deep, as if she could see through the tender flesh and muscle to some great mystery beneath. Then, just as suddenly, she'd drawn back, as though seared.

"Cursed," she'd whispered. "Cursed for all of eternity, and beyond."

The crone had turned ageless eyes-how strange they'd seemed, in that wizened visage- on Aidan, though her words had been addressed to his now-tearful mother. "A woman will come to him-do not seek her out, for she is not yet born-and she will be his salvation or his d.a.m.nation, according to the choices they make."

The ancient one had given each of the twins a golden pendant on a chain, supposedly to ward off evil, but it had been plain, even to a child, that she had little faith in talismans.

The chiming of the doorbell wrenched Aidan forward from that vanished time, and he found himself in mid-pace.

He became a shadow among shadows, there in the yawning parlor. Cold sickness clasped at his insides, even though they had long since turned to stone. Someone had ventured within his range, and he had not sensed the person's approach.

The bell sounded again. Aidan dragged one sleeve across his forehead. His skin was dry, but the sweat he'd imagined had seemed as real as that of a mortal man.

"Maybe n.o.body lives here," a woman's voice said.

Aidan had regained his composure somewhat, and he moved to the front window with no more effort than a thought. He might have come as easily from his hiding place to the house, except that he liked to pretend he had human limitations sometimes, and remember how it felt to have breath and a heartbeat.

He made no effort to hide himself behind the lace curtain, for the woman and child standing on the porch would not see him-not consciously, that is. Their deeper minds would register his presence and probably produce a few spooky dreams in an effort to a.s.similate him.

The child, a boy no older than six or seven, was wearing a flowing black cape and wax fangs, and he gripped a plastic pumpkin in one hand. His companion, clad in blue jeans, a sweater, and a worn-out cloth coat, was gamine-like, with short brown hair and large, dark eyes. Their conversation went on, ordinary and sweet as music, and Aidan took the words inside himself, to be played over and over again later, like a phonograph record.

Perhaps the other side of him, the beast, willed solidity and substance to his body and made him open the door.

"Trick or treat," the small vampire said, holding up the grinning pumpkin. In his other hand he held a flashlight.

The woman and child glowed like angels in the wintry darkness, beautiful in their bright innocence, but Aidan was aware of the heat and warmth pulsing through them, too. The need for blood made him sway slightly and lean against the doorjamb.

That was when the woman touched him, and parts of her past flashed through his mind like a movie. He saw that she liked to wear woolen socks to bed, that she was hiding from someone she both cared for and feared, that despite her close relationship with the child, she was as lonely as Aidan himself.

All in all, she was delightfully mortal, a tangle of good and not-so-good traits, someone who had known the full range of sadness and joy in her relatively brief existence.

Aidan felt a wicked wrench, in the darkest reaches of his accursed soul, a sensation he had not known before, in life or in death. It was both pain and pleasure, that feeling, and the possible significance of it dizzied him.

Why had he recalled the words of the gypsy, spoken so long ago, words tucked away in a child's mind and forgotten five minutes after they were offered, now, on this night?

A woman will come to him... she will be his salvation or his d.a.m.nation...

No, he decided firmly. Even given all he knew of the world, and of creation, it was too fanciful a theory to accept. This was not the one who would save or d.a.m.n him; such a creature probably did not even exist.

Still, the gypsy's prediction had been otherwise correct. He and Maeve had both been cursed, as surely as the rebellious angels had been, those banished from heaven so many eons before, following the legendary battle between Lucifer and the archangel, Michael.

"Are you all right?" the woman asked, pulling him sharply back from his musings. "You look a little pale."

Aidan might have laughed, so ludicrously accurate was her remark, but he didn't dare risk losing control. He was ravenous, and the woman and child standing before him could have no way of knowing what sort of monster they were facing all alone, there in those whispering >woods.

Their blood would be the sweetest of nectars, made vital by its very purity, and to take it from them would be a bliss so profound as to sustain him for many, many nights...

The soft concern in the visitor's manner was nearly Aidan's undoing, for he could not even recall the last time a woman had spoken to him with tenderness. He drew in a deep breath, even though he had no need for air, and let it out slowly, holding the inward demons in check with his last straining shreds of strength. "Yes," he said, somewhat tersely. "I've been-ill."

"If you don't have any candy, it's okay," the child put in with quick charity. "Aunt Neely won't let me eat anything I get from strangers anyhow."

Aidan was almost deafened by a rushing sound stemming from some wounded and heretofore abandoned place in his spirit. Neely. He made note of the woman's name-it was a detail that had seemed unimportant, in the face of the devastating affect she'd had upon him-and it played in his soul like music. His control was weakening with every pa.s.sing moment; he had to flee the pair before he broke his own all-but-inviable rule and ravaged them both.

Still, he was so shaken, so captivated by this unexpected mortal woman, that movement was temporarily beyond his power.

"I have something better than candy," he heard himself say, after a desperate inner struggle. He made himself move, took a coin from the ancient cherry-wood box on the hallway table and dropped it into the plastic pumpkin the little boy held out to him. "Happy Halloween."

Neely's brown eyes linked with Aidan's, and she smiled.

He watched the pulse throb at the base of her right ear, imagined the vitality he could draw from her, the sheer, glorious life. The mere thought of it made him want to weep.

He did not risk speaking again.

"Thank you," she said, turning to start down the porch steps.

The small vampire lingered on the doormat. "My name's Danny. We're practically your neighbors," he said. "We live at the Lakeview Trailer Court and Motel, on Route Seven. My dad is the caretaker there, and Aunt Neely cleans rooms and waits tables in the truck stop."

The blush that rose in the woman's cheeks only made Aidan's deadly hunger more intense. Just when he would have lunged at her, he thrust the door closed and willed himself away quickly-far away, to another time and another place, where he could stalk without compunction.

Aidan chose one of his favorite hunting grounds, a miserable section of nineteenth- century London known as Whitechapel. There, in the dark, narrow, stinking streets, he might select his prey not from the prost.i.tutes, or the pickpockets and burglars, but from procurers, white slavers, and men who made their living in the opium trade. Occasionally he indulged a taste for a mean drunk, a wife-beater, or a rapist; circ.u.mstances determined whether his victims saw his face and read their fate there or simply perished between one breath and the next. He did not actually kill the majority of his victims, however, and he had never made vampires of his prey, even though he knew the trick of it only too well. It was all a matter of degree.

He kept a room over a back-alley tavern, and that was where he materialized on that particular night. Quickly he exchanged his plain clothes for an elegant evening suit and a beaver top hat. To this ensemble he added a black silk cape lined with red, as a private joke.

A cloying, yellow-white fog enveloped the city, swirling about the lampposts and softening the sounds of cartwheels jostling over cobblestones, of revelry in the taverns and whoring in the alleys. Somewhere a woman screamed, a high-pitched, keening sound, but Aidan paid no attention, and neither did any of the other shadowy creatures who haunted the night.

He'd walked only a short way when he came upon a fancy carriage stopped at the curb. A small man, clad in a bundle of rags and filthy beyond all bearing, was pressing a half-starved child toward the vehicle's open door.

Inside, Aidan glimpsed a younger man, outfitted in clothes even more finely tailored than his own, counting out coins into a white, uncalloused palm.

"I won't do it, do you "ear me!" the little one cried, with unusual spirit for such a time and place. Although Aidan sensed that the small ent.i.ty was female, there was nothing about her scrawny frame to indicate the fact. She couldn't have been older than eight or ten. "I won't let some b.a.s.t.a.r.d from Knightsbridge b.u.g.g.e.r me for a shilling!"

Aidan closed his eyes for a moment, filled with disgust, vividly recalling the human sensation of bile bubbling into the back of his throat in a scalding rush. After all the time that had pa.s.sed since his making, it still came as a shock to him to realize that vampires and werewolves and warlocks weren't the only fiends abroad in the world.

"Get'n the carriage and tend to your business!" shouted the rag-man, cuffing the child hard between her thin shoulders. "I'll not stand "ere and argue with the likes of you all night, Shallie Biffle!"

Aidan stepped forward, deliberately opening himself to their awareness. Closing one hand over the back of the ragman's neck, instantly paralyzing the wretched little rodent, he spoke politely to the urchin still standing on the sidewalk.

"This man"-he nodded toward his bug-eyed, apoplectic captive-"is he your father?"

" "ell, no," spat Shallie. " 'e's just a dirty flesh-peddler, that's all. I ain't got no father or mother-if I did, would I be "ere?"

Aidan produced a five-pound note, using that special vampire sleight of hand too rapid for the human eye to catch. "There is a woman in the West End who'll look after you," he said. "Go to her now."

He put the street name and number into the child's mind without speaking again, and she scrambled off into the shifting murk, clutching the note she'd s.n.a.t.c.hed from his fingers a second after its appearance.

The horses pulling the carriage grew restless, but the dandy and his driver sat obediently, bemused, as helpless in their own way as the rag-man.

Aidan lifted the sc.r.a.p of filth by the scruff of his neck and allowed him to see his fierce vampire teeth. It would have been the purest pleasure to tear open that particular jugular vein, to drain the blood and toss away the husk like a handful of nutsh.e.l.ls, but he had settled on even viler prey- the wealthy pervert who had ventured into Whitechapel to buy the virtue of a child.

He flung the procurer aside, heard the flesh-m.u.f.fled sound of a skeleton splintering against the soot-stained wall of a brick building. Fancy that, Aidan thought to himself with a regretful smile.

He climbed easily into the leather-upholstered interior of the carriage, and there he settled himself across from his intended victim. With a thought, he broke the wicked enchantment that had held both the driver and his master in stricken silence.

"Tell the man to take you home," Aidan said companionably enough, examining his gloves to make sure he hadn't smudged them while handling the rag-man's dirty person.

The carriage was dark, but Aidan's vision was noonday perfect, and he saw the young n.o.bleman swallow convulsively before he reached up with a shaking hand and knocked three times on the vehicle's roof. The lad loosened his ascot as he stared at Aidan in confounded fear, his pulse plainly visible between the folds of silk.

Yes, Aidan thought with quiet l.u.s.t, eyeing the man's throat. Soon, very soon, the terrible hunger would be satisfied, at least for the time being.

"Wh-Who are you?" the n.o.bleman finally managed to stammer out.

Aidan smiled cordially and took off his hat, setting it carefully on the leather seat beside him. "No one, really. You might say that you're having a remarkably authentic nightmare- Bucky."

The young man paled at Aidan's easy use of his nickname, which, of course, he hadn't given. Bucky swallowed again, gulped really, and a fine sheen of perspiration broke out on his upper lip. "If it's about the child-well, I was only looking for a little harmless diversion, that's all-"

"You are a man of peculiar tastes," Aidan said without expression. "Does your family know how you amuse yourself of an evening?"

Bucky squirmed in the seat. On some level, Aidan supposed, the specimen's mind was developed enough to discern that the curtain was about to come down on the last act. "If this is about blackmail-"

Aidan interrupted with a tsk-tsk sound. "For shame. Not all of us are willing to stoop to such depths as you do, my friend. Blackmail is far beneath me."

A flush flowed into Bucky's pasty face, sharpening Aidan's desire to feed to something very like frenzy. He would wait, however, allowing the prospect to grow sweeter, in much the same way he had let fine wine breathe before indulging in it, back in those glorious days when the only blood he'd needed was that which coursed through his own veins.

"What do you want then, if not money?" Bucky sputtered.

Aidan smiled, revealing his fangs, and watched in quiet, merciless resolution as a silent scream moved up and down Bucky's neck but failed to escape his constricted throat. He looked frantically, helplessly, toward the carriage door.

"There is no escape," Aidan told him pleasantly.

Bucky's eyes were huge. "No more-no more children- I swear it-"

Aidan shrugged eloquently. "I quite believe you," he conceded. "You will never again have the chance, you see."

The carriage rattled on through the foggy London night, and the trip must have seemed endless to Bucky. Indeed, for him it was surely an eternity. Finally, when Aidan knew time was growing short, that dawn would come soon, he decided he'd savored the salty, vital wine long enough.

Slowly he put his hands on Bucky's velvet-clad shoulders, drew him close, even snarled a little, as a media vampire might, to give the moment a touch more drama. Then he sank his teeth into the tender flesh of Bucky's neck, and the blood flowed, liquid energy, not over Aidan's tongue but through his fangs.

As much as he hated everything he was, feeding brought the usual ecstasy. Aidan drank until his ferocious thirst had been quelled, then snapped Bucky's neck between his fingers and flung him to the floor of the carriage.

Aidan rarely fed in Bucky's circles, and he frowned as he imagined the furor the finding of a dandy's blood-drained hulk would arouse in the newspapers. He felt some regret, too, for the confusion that would reign among the diligent, well-meaning souls at Scotland Yard when they tried to make sense of the incident.