The Van Alen Legacy (20 page)

But Jack did not say what they
all knew.
That while the Silver Bloods had failed, it had not been without a small
victory.
Charles Force was gone. He never made it to the surface, and the catacombs were
empty.

“So is he dead?” Schuyler
asked dully.

“I’m not certain. I think he’s
just lost,” Jack replied.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know just yet,” he
sighed. “
the
Conclave is not what it was. I don’t foresee garnering any help from
that direction. But they’re all we’ve got.” Jack looked exhausted. “What about you? What will you
do?”

“Run,” Oliver said firmly.
“We’ll keep running.”

“You can’t run forever,
Schuyler. The tremors, your sickness, you can’t hide it. It’s part of your transformation. You
must go to the right doctor who can help you. You’re only endangering yourself by keeping away. I
can vouch for you with the Conclave. I will make them understand. They will call off the
Venators. Trust me. You’ll be safe in New York. You can’t risk being alone anymore. The coven is
weakened and leaderless right now, but we will regroup. Come back to New York.”

Come back to me. Jack did not
say it out loud, but Schuyler heard it loud and
clear
nevertheless.

She shuffled on her feet. The
two boys stood on either side of her, both of them with their hands jammed into their pockets.
Oliver’s chin was almost at his
chest,
his head was bowed so low. He couldn’t look
her in the eyes. Jack was looking at her directly, with that overpowering stare. She loved them
both, and she could feel her heart breaking over them. She would never be able to choose. It was
impossible.

Oliver was telling her to keep
running, while Jack wanted her to go home. More than anything, she wanted to go back to New York;
to stop, to rest, to recover, but she could not make the decision alone. As much as she still
loved Jack, and as much as it would make her miserable forever to leave him again, there was
Oliver to consider.
Her gentle truehearted friend.

“What do you think, Ollie?
What should we do?” she asked, turning to the boy who had kept her safe for more than a
year.

It was the night before the
first day of school. It had been a week since Dylan appeared to her, and sometimes Bliss was
convinced she was just dreaming about him.
A good dream, but just a dream.
But then
he kept coming back and talking to her, telling her things she didn’t know (which never happened
in a dream: somehow she always knew she was just talking to her subconscious), and she finally
decided that it was Dylan whom she was speaking to, or at least a version of him.

She never knew when he would
come back. Sometimes she would close her eyes and wait and nothing would happen. Other times she
would be in the middle of something, ordering coffee or trying on shoes, and she would have to
get out as fast as possible and find someplace she could be alone. That day she was arranging her
books for class. She loved the smell of new textbooks, and liked to run her fingers over the
glossy pages. The start of a school year always promised so many good things. She was glad to be
going back.

“I liked it too,” Dylan said,
looking over her shoulder. It startled her to see him standing next to her, with a hand on her
desk.

“God!
You scared
me.”

“Sorry. Tricky, getting to the
front you know. I have to make you see
me,
although now that you know I’m here it’s
a little easier.” He continued to look over her shoulder. “What are you taking this
year?”

“The usual.
A
bunch of AP and honors classes. I might check out that Individual Art Study.”

Dylan nodded and hoisted
himself up on the edge of her desk so his long legs swung off the floor. “
Wanna
see
something cool?”

“Sure.”

And without warning, suddenly
Bliss was sitting with Dylan on the roof of the Cloisters, a museum on the uppermost edge of
Manhattan. Of course they were only there in her mind, or in his mind. In reality she was still
sitting in her chair at her desk in the apartment. Dylan explained it was his memory that had
brought them there. Bliss had never been to the Cloisters.

Dylan explained that they
could be anywhere. They didn’t have to be in a black void, with nothing surrounding them, or
wherever Bliss happened to be at the moment. They could go anywhere as long as one of them had
already been there. It was like having a passport to anywhere in their past. And Dylan loved the
Cloisters. The view from the roof was pretty amazing.

“Uh-oh,” Bliss said. “He’s
back.”

Dylan looked over his
shoulder, at the storm clouds that had suddenly gathered over the city. Even in their
self-contained bubble they could not escape the Visitor. “You know what to do,” he
said.

“Do I?” Bliss asked. But Dylan
was already gone, and Bliss had left their happy moment on the rooftop.

The Visitor had taken charge,
and slipping into the darkness, Bliss assumed the stillness of a statue. While outside, her body
was pacing the room, barking orders at Forsyth.
“And the Conclave?”

“Barlow has passed a
resolution offering Charles Force the leadership of the Conclave again, should he return,”
Forsyth said nervously. “He was quite adamant.”

The cobra quivered, hood up.
This was agitating. Michael! Always they turn to Michael! They forget who brought them to
Paradise! Forsyth loosened his tie anxiously.

“Ah . . . and about Paris.
Leviathan has confirmed
it,
there is no longer a gate in
Lutetia
. Only
an intersection, leviathan just missed getting sucked into it. That was why the
subvertio
did not work, because there was no gate to destroy. We were deceived.
Charles had laid a trap for us. But Leviathan’s releasing of the white death into the
intersection created a time vacuum. Leviathan was almost pulled inside it himself. But the good
news is
,
he believes Charles’s trap was also his undoing. The archangel has been
destroyed.”

“He can prove
this?”

“No, my lord.
But
there has been no sign of Charles Force since Paris.”

“So.
Michael was
playing games with us as well,” the Visitor ruminated. “I was there, you know, the day he forged
the key to the gate.
The day he anointed himself keeper.”

“He is tricky, my lord.
Michael was never to be trusted.”

“Crafty is what he is. But now
we know. The gate is no longer at
Lutetia
. He must have found a way to move it.” The
Visitor brooded for a while. “This Barlow resolution must be crushed. But do it gently. You shall
convince the Conclave they cannot go on without filling the position. The spirit of the Coven
demands a Regis. They will come around, as the weeks and months go by and still Charles remains
absent. You shall refuse at first, but they will press you to accept. You will be named
Regis.”

“As you wish, my
lord.”

“Once installed, our real work
can begin. Without Charles, without Lawrence, they will be looking for a new leader. You shall
step into that vacuum. They will come back to me. They will beg me to lead them once again, and
through you, Forsyth, our real work can begin. . . .”

Without warning, Bliss was
suddenly thrust back into the void.

“What happened?” Dylan asked.
“Why are you back here?”

“I don’t know . . . I got
upset . . . He must have felt something. . . .” She told him what she’d heard.

“You have to go back there.
Make yourself. Do it.”

Bliss concentrated. She tried
as hard as she could. She wrenched away the line that separated her from the real world, forced
herself
to see the world as the Visitor did.

And this time, she was right
in his mind.

But he wasn’t talking to
Forysth
anymore.

Instead she saw what he saw.
Bodies.
Corpses.
Piled on each other.
Children,
really.
They were lying in an auditorium. They had drunk something.
A potion.
A poison.
Mixed by a devil.
She saw a thin spectral boy holding a
guitar, and a beautiful but hard-looking girl with dark hair, and another boy, handsome and
clean-cut and worried. They were all that stood against this disaster.
This massacre of
innocents.
So many kids . . . Red Bloods . . . slaughtered.

Then she saw the demon: he was
in the form of another boy.
A good looking kid but with an ugly sneer to his lips.
He had caused it.
Another of Lucifer’s children.

The images continued, one
after another: death, destruction, hate, war.
The devil’s handiwork.

Then, just as abruptly, the
visions stopped. Bliss woke up. She was sitting at her desk, alone. She was shaking so much she
had dropped her pen. What had happened to Charles Force? Had he been destroyed as they thought?
What were they talking about? What gate did the Visitor want to destroy?

And those visions she saw, who
were those children? Was that the future? And what would the Visitor do once Forsyth was named
Regis? What were they planning? Horror did not even begin to describe what she was feeling. Dylan
was right: she had to find a way to stop it, whatever it was, from happening.

She closed her eyes. “Dylan?”
she called. “Dylan? Are you there? Where are you?”

But there was no answer,
inside or out.

“Sky, wake up! Wake up! You’re
having a nightmare! Wake up?” Schuyler opened her eyes. She was sitting up, the bed a messy
hurricane of blankets and sheets. Oliver sat next to her, a hand on her shoulder. “You were
dreaming,” he said. “
that
dream again?”

She nodded, pulling her knees
up to her chin. “
the
same one.
Always.”
Ever since she had escaped from
Leviathan that night in Paris, Schuyler had had the same dream, the very same one every night, as
if her subconscious were stuck on one channel, repeating the same eerie television
show.

She could never remember what
it was about, only that in the dream she was filled with the deepest, most agonizing despair. For
days she had woken up crying.

“You okay?” Oliver asked. His
eyes were puffy from sleep, his hair tousled and messy, a little part of it in the back sticking
straight up, as soft as a baby duck’s down. He was wearing a Duchesne sweatshirt and flannel
pajama bottoms, his usual bedtime attire. Schuyler had teased him once about his surprising
school spirit. Oliver had never worn anything branded with the school name in the daytime in his
life, as far as she had known.

“I’m okay,” she said. “Go back
to bed.”

They were in a capsule hotel
in Tokyo. It had been a week since they’d left Paris. They had spent three days in Berlin first.
Tokyo seemed like a safe place to go, as far away from France as possible.

When they’d arrived in Japan,
Schuyler had been drained, with no energy even to perform the ritual that would invigorate her.
She was beyond exhausted, but after seeing Jack again, and having all the old feelings stirred
up, it felt disloyal to rely on Oliver so much. So she had restrained herself from performing the
Sacred Kiss.

For once she wished that she
had taken a docile stranger as her human familiar instead of her friend, but it felt like a
betrayal to even think it. That night in Tokyo, Oliver lay back down, his head on the pillow,
facing away from her as he curled up on his side, the way he always did. This was how they slept,
how they had always slept ever since their journey had begun, in one bed, yet back to back,
facing outward to their enemies, having each other’s back, literally. This was the way Oliver had
been taught. This was the way the Conduits had protected their vampires for centuries during
times of war. In the middle of the night when Schuyler woke up, she was always comforted by the
feeling of warmth from Oliver’s back pressing against her own.

A year of sleeping back to
back, never once turning to each other, not even for the
Caerimonia
. In bed, it
would have been too intimate . . . too much like the other thing that they had resisted so far,
an unspoken agreement to wait for the right time. Because what else did they have but time? They
would be together always. That much they knew.

“Are you awake?” Schuyler
asked. Their room was approximately the size of a small coffin. She could only just sit up. The
pods were little boxes stacked on top of each other, with a fiberglass door and a curtain for
privacy, and one window. The capsules were popular with Japanese businessmen who were too drunk
to go home. It was the cheapest accommodation Schuyler and Oliver could find. They had stored
their packs in a locker in the lobby.

“Uh-huh.”