The Van Alen Legacy (10 page)

“Cap,” Ted Lennox called.
“
this
little girl wants to talk to Force.”

It was the same girl who had
followed them earlier that evening. The one to whom Mimi had given the stuffed animal, which the
little girl was hugging now.

“Sweetheart, what are you
doing walking around by yourself?” Mimi asked. “You should be in bed. It’s five in the
morning.”

“Senhora.
Senhora.
You are looking for someone, yes?” she said in halting
Portuguese.

Mimi nodded. The Venators had
a cover. If anyone asked for the reason they were in the slums, they played policemen on a
missing person case.

“Yes. We are,” Mimi replied in
the girl’s native language.

“A little girl like
me.”

“How did you know?” Mimi asked
sharply. That wasn’t part of the story. The fiction was that they were looking for a thief, a
criminal, an escaped convict, a grown man. No one knew they were looking for a young girl,
because then it would cause red herrings in the dreams. If the people knew what they were looking
for, they would be sure to dream about it, and it would make the Venators’ work that much
harder.

“How did you know we were
looking for a little girl?”

“Because she told
me.”

“Who told you? Told you what?”
Mimi asked sharply.

The little girl shook her
head, looking suddenly afraid.

“Did you scan her?” Kingsley
asked with a tilt of his head.

Mimi nodded. That first night
they’d arrived, she’d scanned all the kids. There had been nothing. But had she been thorough? Or
had she been too gentle? The glom was
unpredictable,
some humans did not take well
to the invasion of their consciousness. If they woke up during a session, there was a chance it
could harm them, even drive them insane. Look what had happened to that so-called witness of
theirs.

The Venators were skilled and
meticulous, and hadn’t damaged any Red Bloods so far. But maybe Mimi hadn’t wanted to take that
chance. Not with this little girl. She had done a cursory examination and had resisted probing
the girl’s core subconscious.

Sam removed a picture from his
pocket. It was Jordan’s school picture. She looked troubled and serious in her plaid uniform.
“Have you seen her? Is she the one?”

The little girl nodded,
clutching the stuffed puppy to her chest for dear life.

“Well, what do you know?
Follow the little children, indeed,” Kingsley said.

“Shush” Mimi chided. Her heart
began to pound. Could it be possible that all along, the answer to their quest had been right in
front of their noses? Following them every step of the way? When had the kids started following
them? They had been there since the beginning, that first night.
Could they have missed it
because Mimi had been too weak, too much of a soft touch, to have scanned the girl
correctly?

“Are you sure? Are you sure
you have seen her?” Mimi wanted to shake the girl, although it was really herself she wanted to
shake. She had let her feelings for the girl get in the way of her job. And since when did
Azrael
have feelings?

The little girl nodded. “Yes.
That’s her. Sophia.” She called Jordan by her real name. Mimi felt chills up her
spine.

Ted knelt before the girl.
“How did you know her?”

“She lived over there,” the
little girl said. “
with
her grandma. We were scared of the lady.
Sophia
too.”

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. They took
her.”

“Who?”

The girl wouldn’t
say.

“
Propon
familiar,” Mimi said gently, in the coercive tones of the sacred language. Tell your friends. She
used compulsion. She didn’t want to bring any harm to the girl, but they had to know. “Nothing
will happen to you. Tell us what you remember.”

“Bad people.
A man and a woman.
They took her away,” the girl said in a flat voice.
“On
Monday.”

The Venators exchanged sharp
glances. They had arrived in Rio that day.

“And this grandmother of hers
. . . is she still here?” Mimi asked.

“No. She went away a few days
later.” The little girl looked at them with large, fearful eyes. “Sophia said there would be
people coming for her, good people and bad people. We weren’t sure what kind you were at first.
But she told us the good people would be with a beautiful lady, and you would give me a toy dog,”
the girl said haltingly.

“She told you we were coming?”
Mimi demanded.

“When the good people come,
she said to give them this.” The little girl removed an envelope from her pocket. It was grubby
and streaked with dirt. But the handwriting was beautiful calligraphy script, the kind usually
found on ivory envelopes that announced a bonding.

It was addressed to
Araquiel
.

The Angel of Judgment, Mimi
knew.
Also called the Angel with Two Faces.
The angel who carried both dark
and light within him.

Kingsley Martin.

The look on Jack’s face when
she broke the glass was a mixture of shock and pride, but Schuyler only allowed
herself
a quick glimpse. She had to stop thinking about him and concentrate on what
she was doing. She had leaped out of the room and into the sky, landing on a trellis and jumping
off the roof to the ground. She was running outdoors, in the middle of the party, a blur of pink
to the party guests.

It was past midnight and the
festivities had taken a darker turn, that moment at every unforgettable gathering when it seems
anything and everything is available to anyone and everyone. There was a raucous feeling of wild
abandon in the air, as the Bollywood stars shimmied and shook, their bellies undulating in
serpentine curves, and a hundred drummers on wooden-barrel
dhol
drums beat a steady
and seductive rhythm.

Schuyler couldn’t put a finger
on it, but there was something almost sinister about how hypnotic the music was, its attraction
bordered on menacing. Listening to it was like being tickled too hard, when the tickling stopped
being funny and became a form of torture, and the laughter unwelcome and
uncontrollable.

She burst through a line of
bhangra
dancers, cymbals clanging, and knocked down one of the costumed
stilt-walkers, barely missing a crew of torchbearers standing guard by the perimeter.

But everywhere she went, he
was right behind her.

“A
heartbeat away.
Schuyler!”

She heard his voice clearly in
her mind. Jack would use the glom on her. It wasn’t fair. If he had said her name out loud, maybe
she would forgive him, but to know that he was in her mind, that it came as easily to him as
before
,
 
unnerving
.

She ran past tiger tamers and
fire-eaters, past a group of drunken European
nobles
fat with blood, their human
familiars left to swoon by the river walls. This wasn’t a party anymore, this was something else.
Something evil and depraved . . . an orgy, a paean to monstrous indulgence, pernicious and
wicked.
And Schuyler couldn’t help but feel that there was something – someone, egging
everyone on, right to the edge of disaster. And still she could hear Jack’s footsteps, light and
quick behind her.

In a way the chase invigorated
her: running so fast, using her vampire muscles and exerting them in ways they had never been
used, by god he was fast! But I am faster, she thought. “
I can outrun you,
Jack Force. Just try; you’ll never catch me.”

“I can and I
will.”

Schuyler closed her mind to
the glom as Lawrence had taught her. That would shut him out.

There had to be somewhere she
could hide. She knew this place. Cordelia had left her here for hours when they visited, and as a
child she had explored every inch of its sprawling grounds. She knew every crevice, every secret
hiding place, she would lose him in the residential wing, there were so many camouflaged closets
and clandestine compartments,
she
ran back inside the castle through the servants’
entrance.

While she ran she sent a
message of her own through the glom.
“Oliver!”

“Oliver!”

She tried to locate his signal
“Oliver!”

But humans were not as
sensitive to the glom’s twilight communications. Oliver had never been able to read her mind, let
alone speak to it directly. And while they had tried to practice building the mental bridge that
tied a vampire to its human Conduit, they had faltered in their exercise. They were young, and a
bridge took a lifetime to build, like the one between Lawrence Van Alen and Christopher Anderson.
Maybe in fifty years they would be able to communicate telepathically, but not now.

She had to find Oliver. He was
probably sick with worry.
Probably pacing the party, ignoring the fireworks, drinking too
many cocktails to steady his nerves.
He had given up so much to be with her. Of course he
would tell her it was his duty, his very destiny to live and die by her side. But still she could
not stop feeling that she was a burden to him, that she had brought too much on him, had fated
him to live in an endless chase. He had given her everything, his friendship, his fortune, his
life, and all she could give in return was her heart.
Her fickle, foolish, guilty,
unreliable heart.
She hated herself.

A terrible thought struck her:
What if they had gotten to Oliver first? They wouldn’t hurt him, she thought. Just let them try .
. . If anything had happened to him . . . She did not want to think about it.

As she ran through the
hallway, everything suddenly went black. Someone had turned off all the lights in the palace. She
had a feeling she knew who that someone was.

Fine, but like you, Jack, I
can see in the dark. She found the door that led to a secret staircase that led down to the
basement, past the kitchens, and into the lower dungeons, a relic from an earlier century. Not
many knew that the H’tel Lambert had been built on the ruins of a medieval castle, and that the
castle’s foundation hid layers of secrets.

Oh god, please don’t let that
have been a skeleton I just stepped over, Schuyler thought as her sandaled foot landed on
something that crunched in a disturbing way.

She could see the outlines of
the steps, ruined and steep, down,
down,
she had to go down . . . She had to get
away.

“Oliver!”

Nothing.

She would have to send for him
later somehow.

Because she was there at
last.
In the very lowest depths of the dungeon, in the solitary prison cell that had
housed who knows how many prisoners, who
knows
how many miserable souls behind its
iron bars. He’ll never find me here.

She felt dizzy and
light-headed, and her whole body was trembling uncontrollably as she stepped inside.

And fell straight into the
arms of her former love and current pursuer. Jack Force.

His grip was like a vise. His
voice was colder than the air around them.

“I told you, Schuyler, you’re
not the only one who knows the secrets of the H’tel Lambert.”

The good thing about fashion
people is that they were usually oblivious to other people’s reactions. So Henri never noticed
Bliss’s agitation as he chatted about the latest gossip back in New York. Most of the news was so
gloomy: what magazines had folded, what designers were out of business.

“It’s awful right now, just
awful.” Henri shook his head. “But you know, life goes on . . . and our motto is
Never
surrender. There’s still work out there,” he said with a well-meaning glance.
“I mean, I know it’s a lot to ask of you, and I completely understand if you’re not ready . . .
“? He peered at her over his glasses.

It was only then that Bliss
realized with a start that Henri was talking about her going back to work.

Sensing her hesitation, which
he took as a sign of surrender, Henri went straight into business mode, setting down his glass
and picking up his BlackBerry. “It’s nothing too difficult, just something easy to get back in
the swing of things. You know Muffie Astor Carter’s yearly fashion show for charity? She hosts it
on their estate out on the East End?”

Bliss did. Her stepmother used
to complain that Muffie never gave her a front row seat even though Bobi Anne always ordered a
trunkload
of clothes at the show.

“You’d be perfect for it. Can
I tell her you’ll do it?” Henri wheedled.

“I don’t know . . .”
Modeling.
How precious it seemed now, how trivial. How much fun it would be to go back to
that old life?
go-sees
, fittings, gossiping with the hairstylists and having
designers fawn over you, getting your makeup done, going to parties, did this mean that life was
still open to her? She had completely given up thinking about it. Had totally assumed that that
life was over, given what had happened. But what had the Visitor said? No one must suspect. After
all, it had been a year. No one would fault her for going back to work, would they?