Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) Read Online Free Page B

antiquity, and precisely a fortnight later I had been bereaved again. And always, try though I did to discover who had sent that glittering jewel, and with it the curse, the thing vanished while I was caught up in my mourning. The tragic puzzle was no closer to solution that night, when I found Brenna once more, than it had ever been.
    I used my powers to hold her in her seat, there in that large and otherwise anonymous audience, sensing her desire to bolt as well as her fascination with my legerdemain, but even after the carriage trick had been completed and all the others had straggled out, I lingered backstage.
    I remember wishing I could simply walk away—each time I found her, I entertained that same futile notion, of course—but I am neither fine nor noble enough to make such a sacrifice. I was starved for the sight and sound and feel of her, just as I had always been. It would have been easier to forgo the taking of blood than to turn my back on that particular woman.
    So it was that I stood in the wings as the silence lengthened in that great room, watching her fidget at her table, seeing the shadows play in her coppery hair, for some fifteen minutes before one of the dancing girls appeared at my side. Her name was Jillie, and she was still wearing her delectably inadequate costume.
    I do enjoy the many and varied facets of my work.
    “Someone you know?” she asked with a slight edge of envy to her voice. Jillie was more than passing-curious about me, and I suspect she saw me as a romantic challenge. Being older, to say the least, and infinitely wiser, I didn’t encourage her; she could have no way of guessing she was flirting with a bona fide monster.
    “An old friend,” I said softly, never taking my eyes from the woman sitting alone in the auditorium. She had finished her drink and begun chewing ice cubes, and the crunching sound made me wince.
    Jillie lingered a moment, cast a venomous glance toward the object of my attention, and swept off toward the dressing room she shared with the other women in the act.
    I allowed myself a fraction of a smile. I’d done Jillie a favor she could not begin to comprehend or appreciate by spuming her naive affections. Would that I could be so gracious with my Lady Brenna.
    I had shed the cumbersome cape as soon as the show ended, but I was still wearing my tuxedo when I finally forced myself down the steps at the side of the stage and along the aisle.
    If I’d had a living, beating heart instead of an atrophied vestige of one, that organ would have twisted at the sight of her watching me approach. She was helpless, like an animal dazzled by light; I knew that and used it to my advantage.
    Fate is cruel, in my experience—except for the modem haircut and clothes, she looked just as she had in each of the previous lifetimes in which our paths had crossed. Her hair was a coppery-gold color, thick and lush, and her eyes were green. Even her face, with its delicate bone structure and impertinent little chin, was the same, right down to the faint smattering of freckles across her nose.
    I closed my eyes for a moment, caught up in a spindrift of emotions, and when I looked again, she was staring up at me. Her throat worked, as if she’d attempted to speak and failed, and she offered me her hand. She seemed bewildered, afraid, and perhaps just a bit enchanted.
    Her introduction was woven of pure bravado. “Daisy Chandler,” she said, offering me her hand. “I’m a homicide detective with the Las Vegas Police Department.”
    I was taken aback by this flood of information, and arched one eyebrow as I enclosed her hand in my own. I wondered if she felt the chill in my flesh, and puzzled over it. Although I can usually read a mortal mind with embarrassing ease, hers has always been veiled from me, except for a few shifting flickers of discernment here and there—perhaps because I care so much. Creation can be perverse in that way, so often withholding from us the very insights