The Van Alen Legacy (11 page)

And wasn’t the best way to
deal with grief and loss to find something to distract you? And what could be more distracting
than a big, silly, frivolous fashion show? As Henri had said, look at those people who had lost a
lot of other people’s money and caused the crash, weren’t they all going about their lives as if
nothing had happened? Hosting charity benefits and shopping at Herm’s while the victims of their
financial recklessness cried into their crystal wineglasses?

She remembered a young widow,
a teacher from Duchesne, who had gone back to teaching after her husband passed away suddenly.
Going back to work, going back to her old life . . . it suddenly seemed . . . not
impossible.

Get rid of him, the Visitor
had ordered. Well, giving Henri what he wanted was the surest way to secure his exit. As soon as
her agent was assured he had his old client back, he was certain to announce he had pressing
concerns elsewhere. Asking about her welfare was probably just a pretense to see if he could book
her for the show.

“Okay,” she said, taking a
deep breath and letting it out in a long exhale.

“Okay?” Henri raised an
eyebrow.

“Okay.” Bliss
smiled.

After saying good-bye to her
old taskmaster, Bliss sat alone on the couch for a moment. At some point during Henri’s visit she
had sensed a change in herself. The Visitor was gone. The backseat was empty, as far as she could
tell. Perhaps she had passed the test. In any event, like Elvis, he had left the building. But he
had left the door open. He had unwittingly given her back the key to her own body.
Or had
forgotten to take it back.

Like a parent who leaves the
keys to the Ferrari on the table. Just like in that old movie she used to watch when she was
little when it would run on the USA channel . . . someone’s day off. The kid had crashed the
Ferrari through the window. She wouldn’t do anything that stupid, of course. It was
her
own
body. She had little time and had to use it wisely. She decided to take a bath, and
walked upstairs.

Each of the ten bedrooms in
the house had its own spacious bathroom, and Bobi Anne had allowed Bliss to help design her own.
It was a pretty space: all warm travertine marble and flattering incandescent lighting. She
turned on the faucet and filled the antique claw tub, squeezing in a generous dollop of her
favorite scented bath gel. Then she quickly shed her clothes and climbed in, delighting in the
soapy bubbles and the slick sensation of warm water running down her bare back.

Afterward she put on one of
the fluffy Turkish robes her stepmother had stocked for the house, and went downstairs to the
kitchen, where she asked the cook to make her lunch. She ate a cheeseburger, rare, the juices
running out and mixing with the French mustard in a way that always made her happy she was a
carnivore.

Only then did Bliss realize
she wasn’t hungry in the real sense.
The vampire sense.
The old bloodlust was muted.
The craving was gone. What did it mean?

She pushed the empty plate
away and ran her hand through her hair. She would have to make an appointment at the salon as
soon as possible. The Visitor wanted her to keep up appearances, didn’t he? Keeping up
appearances was something that came naturally to Forsyth Llewellyn’s daughter.

When your father was a senator
from New York, scrutiny was impossible to avoid.

Kingsley’s face was
unreadable, and Mimi could stand it no longer.

“So? What? She’s gone to a
Miley
Cyrus concert? She’s written a cell phone novel? What does it say?”

He quieted her with a look and
showed them the letter.
One line, written in the same beautiful calligraphy.
Phoebus
ostend
praeeo
.

Phoebus was the name of the
sun king in the old tongue, Mimi knew, and the rest was easy enough to understand.

“The sun shall show the way,”
she said. “What does it mean?”

In answer, Kingsley folded up
the note carefully and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

He has no idea, does he, Mimi
thought. “Why would the Watcher take the trouble to send us a note but then have the note be
nonsense?” she asked, annoyed. “And how did she know I was coming? And bringing a stuffed
toy?”

“You forget. The Watcher can
see into the future. If she was being held by Silver Bloods, as she surely was, she must have
felt threatened enough to allow only the most cryptic of communications.”

“It’s a riddle. A clue,” Ted
said suddenly.
“A clue to her whereabouts. ‘the
sun shall show the way.”

It was the longest sentence he
had said in a year. Even Sam looked surprised to find his brother so garrulous. Kingsley
nodded.

“Of course.
Sophia always did say wisdom had to be earned.”

A riddle.
Great.
A year of tracking down the Watcher, and when they finally get somewhere,
they find some kind of one-eyed sphinx blocking the path. Could it have hurt her to have written
Am being held captive at

! Come soon and bring a Luna Bar! Or was that just too much to ask?

“You make
light of trivial matters”
, Kingsley sent.

“Just trying to keep things interesting
”, Mimi
telepathed
in
return.
“And get out of my head. You don’t belong
here.”

Meanwhile, the other Venators
were deep in the glom, consulting their memories, trying to ascertain the meaning behind the
words. Finally, Ted opened his eyes and spoke.

“There’s a bar not too far
away called El Sol de
Ajuste
.
The Setting Sun.”

“So?” Mimi said.

“It’s an old Silver Blood
expression, the setting sun describes Lucifer’s fall to Earth,” Kingsley explained. ‘That could
be it.”

Right, Mimi remembered.
Lucifer was the Prince of Heaven.
The Morningstar.
It made sense that to the Silver
Bloods, his doom was akin to the setting sun.

“Well, what are we waiting
for?” Mimi asked. “We’ve got a missing Watcher to find, and I don’t know about you guys, but I
need a drink.”

“There’s nothing to fear.
Please don’t run from me again.” Jack’s breath was hot in her ear, and Schuyler felt each word as
a caress. But his hands did not release their hold, his fingers gripped tightly around her
arms.

“Let me go!” she said. “You’re
hurting me.”

She gasped, even though, to
her surprise, her tremors had lessened the moment he’d touched her. She felt his grip loosen, and
part of her sagged a little that he had given in so quickly. That damnable, hateful part of her
that missed his touch the moment it was withdrawn. She hugged herself, trying not to feel so
abandoned. Why did she feel this way? She was the one who had spurned him. She was the one who
had left. Jack was nothing to her now.
Nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” He looked at her carefully. “You’re trembling.”

“It’s just this thing . . . I
get shaky sometimes . . . it’s nothing,” she said. She turned to face him directly. “Anyway, I’m
not going back. I’m not going back to New York.”

To her surprise, Jack suddenly
looked relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

“Is that why you’ve been
running? Because you thought I was taking you back to New York? That’s not why I’m here at
all.”

Now it was her turn to be
confused. ‘Then why?”

“You really don’t know?” Jack
asked.

She shook her head.

“You’re in danger here,
Schuyler,” he said, looking around warily. ‘
there
are Silver Bloods all around.
Can’t you feel them?
Their hunger?”
The minute he said it, she could feel exactly
what he was talking about, that deep and consuming voraciousness, an unabated wanting.

So that’s what she’d felt at
the party, a bottomless appetite of greed and sex and desire, that spellbinding siren call to
depravity. It hummed in the background, like a noise you couldn’t make out but knew was there.
Croatan
.
So she did have reason to be afraid. She had felt
it.

Jack had backed her into a
corner of the prison cell, and Schuyler was starting to feel claustrophobic in the small space.
She knew instinctively that many souls had suffered and died in the same place she was standing
now. She could feel the primal pain, an unmistakable sense of injustice. Back then prisoners were
sent to the dungeons to die, rotting underground, never to see the sun.

How funny that the
Conspiracy made humans believe vampires feared the sun, when the opposite was true.
They
had loved it so much they had been exiled from heaven because of their love of Lucifer’s light.
Schuyler shivered as Jack continued to explain.

‘The party has been
compromised. They’re here for you.”

“But why do the Silver Bloods
even care about me? What’s so important about me?” Schuyler asked, trying not to sound petulant
and self-pitying. Why her? She hadn’t chosen this. All she’d ever wanted was to be left in peace,
but it was as if she had been born already a target.

When Jack answered, it was
with the assurance and gravity of a much older presence, revealing a small glimpse into the very
ancient creature behind the young vampire mask. What had Lawrence called him?
Abbadon
.
The Angel of Destruction.
The Angel of the
Apocalypse.
One of the most fearsome of Lucifer’s former generals.

“The cycles are the key to our
existence; they guarantee our continued invisibility in the human world. According to the Code,
the expression of each spirit is closely monitored and recorded. There are lists and rules that
govern who is called up, and by whom and when. There was no record of Allegra being allowed to
bear a daughter in this cycle. So the mere fact that you were born was already a
violation.”

From birth she had been a
mistake, Schuyler thought.
Her mother . . . that still, silent figure in the hospital bed .
. . why did she choose to have me?
Schuyler wondered.

“But so what?
That still doesn’t explain it. Why would they even care about that? What’s it to them? It doesn’t
make sense.”

“I know,” Jack
sighed.

“You’re not telling me
everything,” Schuyler realized. He was protecting her. ‘
tell
me the truth. There has
to be a reason why they’ve been trying to kill me.”

Jack hung his head. Finally he
spoke. “A long time ago, during the crisis in Rome, the
Pistis
Sophia saw the
future. She said that one
day,
the irrevocable bond among the Uncorrupted would
break. That Gabrielle would spurn Michael and bear a daughter with a Red Blood. And that daughter
would be the death of the Silver Bloods. Sophia has never been wrong.”

“So I’m their death?” Schuyler
found it absurdly funny. “Me? They’re scared . . . of me?” A half-hysterical yelp escaped before
she could stop herself. It was so absolutely ridiculous. What could she do to harm them? As the
Inquisitor had pointed out, she had used her mother’s sword and missed. She might be fast and
strong and light, but she was not a fighter, not a warrior, not a soldier.

Jack crossed his arms. “It’s
nothing to laugh about. Leviathan would have killed you right there that night in Rio if he had
known who you were. And now that he knows he was so close and failed to kill you, he’s tracked
you down here to finish the job.”

“But how do you know Leviathan
has tracked me?”

“Because I have been tracking
Leviathan,” Jack said grimly. “My father and I have been tracking him for months.”

“Charles is here?” she asked.
She wondered why the news did not make her feel safer. Charles Force was the greatest of them
all. He was Michael, Pure of Heart, the Valiant, Prince of the Angels, Supreme Commander of the
Lord’s Army. She had been looking for Charles herself, and to know that he was here in Paris, and
as her protector, or one of them, anyway, should have gladdened her heart. But it did
not.

Charles Force was not a
friend. He was not an enemy, but he was not a friend either. But maybe now she would be able to
find out what Lawrence had asked her to do. Charles would have to tell her about the Van Alen
Legacy. Schuyler had to know. She owed her grandfather that much. Jack nodded.

“Yes. He decided to come
himself when the Conclave would not send the Venators after Leviathan following your testimony.
We have been one step and two cities behind him for months. When Leviathan led us here, to this
party, we thought he was after the countess, as she was instrumental in bringing about his
imprisonment on Corcovado. But when we saw you in the ballroom, we suddenly knew what his real
intentions were. Charles sent me to make sure you were safe while he took care of Leviathan
himself.”