Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) by Linda Lael Miller Read Free Book Online

reached the last and most cramped of them all. A rat scuttled out of the gloom before she could work the lock. It stopped at her feet to rise onto its haunches and whirl about in a macabre little dance, before falling dead on its side.
    A chill trickled down Brenna’s spine, and she crossed herself hastily and offered a prayer to the Virgin. Then she stepped over the small, furry corpse and into the cell where Valerian lay.
    He was a shadow, curled in the fetid straw. The dank walls dripped with water, and the faint, panicky twitter of other rats reached Brenna’s ears.
    “Valerian,” she whispered urgently.
    He stirred. “Milady?” Valerian moaned the word, then sat up, blinking, one arm clutching his wounded middle. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” he marveled on a long breath. “Leave me—now—before they find you here!”
    Brenna set down the cloth and tallow on a crude bench and knelt beside him in the straw, giving him water from a cup and the morsel of cheese. “This is where I intend to pass the night,” she answered. “Here, with you.”
    He managed to eat just a little, and Brenna went back for the basin. Then, kneeling beside Valerian in the fowl straw again, she began to bathe the blood and dirt from his flesh. Even in the dim glow of that one candle, she saw the tears shimmering in his eyes.
    “Oh, God, Brenna,” he whispered. “How did we get ourselves to this place?”
    “Shhh,” she said and went on washing him. Her own hunger and weakness floated somewhere above her, suspended.
    Presently the loving task had been done as well as it could be, given the circumstances. The tallow guttered out, and Brenna laid herself beside Valerian on the cell floor, and gathered him close with one arm. With the other hand she undid the laces at her bosom and, baring her breasts, offered him the only intimate comfort she knew about.
    He was half dead of his wounds, but the blood in his veins was youthful, like the sap in a fierce young tree, and he drank hungrily from her breasts, and kissed her, and spoke pretty, disjointed words while he nibbled at her earlobe. Finally he raised her skirts and took her, with a hard, greedy thrust.
    Brenna felt searing pain, followed swiftly by a treacherous pleasure, and she gave herself up to her forbidden lover with all the passion pent up in her innocent soul.

CHAPTER 3
    Daisy
    Las Vegas, 1995
    The victim was a showgirl, no more than twenty years old, and she lay sprawled on the living room floor of her cramped apartment, wearing nothing but a short sea- green robe. Her shoulder-length blond hair spilled over the cheap carpeting and partially covered her face.
    She was impossibly pale, even for a corpse. Daisy thought of Snow White waiting for her prince, and shuddered. There was no blood anywhere.
    Daisy had been promoted to detective six months before, after the requisite four years on the street, and she had seen her share of murders. No matter how many she investigated, the bile still rushed into the back of her throat, and sometimes she had to run to the nearest bush or bathroom to throw up. On other occasions, especially when the victim was a child, she wept.
    This time she felt an ugly sort of shock take hold, deep inside her. Even before her partner, O’Halloran, started filling her in on the details, she knew they were dealing with some kind of monster.
    “Look at this,” O’Halloran said, crouching beside the body, which had already been outlined and photographed. In fact, the coroner’s people were hovering, ready to do their grisly duties. He brushed back a tendril of the dead woman’s glossy blond hair with remarkably gentle fingers to reveal a pair of neat puncture wounds, set about two inches apart, in the victim’s neck. “If I didn’t know better, Chandler, I’d say this was the work of one of them vampires. You know, like in the movies.” Daisy felt a chill trip down her spine. “I know what vampires are,” she snapped.
    O’Halloran, a wiry,