Masquerade (6 page)

T
he Forces had booked the four-bedroom presidential suite at the St. Regis. Almost all the rooms in the hotel were taken over by Blue Blood families. It was a tradition, since it meant a simple ride in the elevator to the ballroom and guaranteed less crinkling of the ladies’ gowns. Charles Force fastened his remaining cuff link. He was a tall, proud man with a handsome head of silver hair. He was wearing white tie and tails, as well as white gloves. The tailcoat was beautifully cut in the traditional fashion, with a two-button closure and a velvet stripe down the side of the trousers. He stood in the living room with his hands clasped behind him, waiting for the women in his family to finish dressing. His son, Jack, was dressed similarly, and looked dashing in his tailcoat. Jack had chosen a pointed collar that lay flat on his dress shirt rather than the traditional butterfly collar that turned up against the chin.

Jack had been quiet all day, and suddenly he swung his legs off the couch and stood up. He looked his father in the eye. “What did you say to Schuyler before she left?”

“Still concerned about the Van Alen girl?” Charles asked. “I would think that after she wrongly accused me of being Abomination, you would have lost interest in her.”

Jack shrugged. “I’m not concerned, father. Just curious,” he said. During the ruckus that had surrounded Dylan’s disappearance and Cordelia’s passing, his father had taken Jack into his confidence, telling him the truth of Schuyler’s ancestry. That night, Jack had also discovered the truth about his relationship with his sister. Mimi was his other half, for better or worse, his best friend and worst enemy, his twin in more ways than one.

But although Jack had reconciled himself to the truth of his family, questions remained: what was The Committee hiding? Had a Silver Blood truly returned? His father acted as if the entire situation were completely resolved, since the killings had abruptly stopped several months ago.

Charles sighed. “I simply told her that her journey to Venice would be useless. She has gotten it into her head that her grandfather is somehow going to provide the necessary answers to all of her silly questions. But he shall not. I know Lawrence very well; he will stay out of it as he always has. She has embarked on a fruitless journey.”

Jack had guessed as much. He was aware of his father’s dislike of Lawrence Van Alen, and his newly surfacing memories confirmed it.

“Any more questions for me?” Charles asked.

Jack looked down at his patent-leather shoes, shined especially for the occasion. He could see his brooding reflection on their shiny surface.

“No, Father.” He shook his head. How could he doubt his father? Charles Force was Michael, Pure of Heart, the Regis. A vampire by choice rather than sin, and infallible.

“Good,” Charles said, brushing the lint off Jack’s black tailcoat and admonishing his son to stand up straight. “This is the Four Hundred Ball. Your formal presentation to our people. I’m proud of you.”

“Trinity, my dear? Are you ready?” Charles called from the living room.

Jack saw his mother, Trinity Burden Force, walk out of her dressing room and smile affectionately at her husband. She was dressed in a deep-red silk charmeuse ball gown with a sweetheart neckline and a plunging back. The two of them would open the ball with their entrance. But Jack knew from his father that Trinity had not been honored in this fashion in the past. In fact, this would be only the sixteenth year that Allegra Van Alen did not take her place by her brother’s side. The sixteenth year that Gabrielle would not lead the coven.

* * *

In an adjoining suite, Mimi Force was draped in a plush Turkish bathrobe, sitting on a gilt-back chair while a bevy of stylists and manicurists surrounded her, tending to every inch of her. Her hair was being brushed back into a graceful chignon, while another assistant held an industrial-strength hair dryer. Two of the most well-known makeup artists in the city were working on their final touches: one was brushing on lipstick, the other dotting her face with bronzer.

All the while, Mimi held a cell phone to her ear while she blew on her nails, painted a pearly “Socialite.”

“Oh my God, it’s a madhouse in here, sorry—I can’t hear you that well. What time did you say you guys were getting there?

“We’re at the hotel. Yeah, the penthouse. Sorry, do you mind? Excuse me, hello, you there,” she said sharply to the goateed stylist with the hair dryer. “You almost singed my ear off,” she said, giving him a dirty look. “Sorry, Bliss, I gotta go.”

Mimi flipped her cell phone closed, and the activity around her came to a standstill.

“Are we done?” she asked.

“Look.” The stylist handed her a mirror.

“Polaroids!” Mimi demanded.

One of the black-shirted assistants took a quick snap.

Mimi checked her reflection as well as the photograph. She studied herself critically, searching for any detectable flaw, no matter how minute. Her hair was brushed and styled to a burnished sheen, and framed her face like a golden crown. Her skin glowed; a dark smoky shadow brought out the green in her eyes, and her lips looked stained with freshly picked roses.

“Yes, I think that will be all,” she said regally, dismissing her entourage with a wave of the hand and without a trace of gratitude. Mimi considered it a privilege for them to work on her, not the other way around.

Soon after, her maid entered the room bearing a white cardboard box the size of a small child’s coffin. It had been messengered over to the hotel at the last minute, and Mimi clapped her hands when she saw it.

“It’s here!” her maid said happily, having been the unlucky recipient of Mimi’s tantrums at the fact that the ball was starting in a few hours and her dress had still not arrived.

“I see that. I’m not an idiot,” Mimi snapped.

She ran over to the box, laid it on the bedspread, and ripped open the brown parcel paper like a whirling dervish.

After leaving the Dior showroom, Mimi had complained to her mother about the lack of proper ball gowns, and Trinity had secured her an appointment at the Balenciaga atelier to meet with the head designer himself.

Over the course of the five-hour meeting, Mimi had rejected and dismissed countless designs, causing the designer to rip up more than several dozen sketches.

“What is it you’re looking for?” he had asked, completely exasperated. “You’re pickier than a bride.”

Mimi inhaled sharply. “Exactly.” She closed her eyes and saw herself and Jack together—during their first bonding. The dress she’d worn then was simple, white, merely a sheet, like a toga, and they had walked barefoot down the streets of Venice together, hand in hand, for the ceremony.

“White, the dress has to be white,” she murmured. “White like snow. Transparent like tears.”

Now, there it was, nestled in deepest tissues. The dress of her dreams.

It was made of the thinnest white silk satin, and when she picked it up, it felt like a whisper between her fingers, it was so fragile. Just as she had ordered, it was severe in its simplicity. It looked like nothing on the hanger—like a plain white piece of cloth. It was corded with a heavy silver chain at the hips, and had a sexy, unexpected keyhole cut out at the hip bone—the one concession to modern fashion she had allowed.

Mimi shrugged off her bathrobe, tossing it to the floor. She stood in the middle of the room, completely nude as her maid held the dress aloft. Mimi stepped into it, feeling the light, gossamer fabric fluttering about her like mist, settling against her slim form.

“Go,” she said curtly to her maid. The frightened servant almost tripped on the bathrobe in her haste to leave.

She tied the cord around her waist and assessed the tanned skin that peeked through the cutout. When she stood in front of the light, her form would be shown in complete blackened silhouette; every curve of her body, every line from neck to breast, from waist to hips to her endless legs, she would be at once covered and yet exposed, clothed and unclothed, garbed and yet nude.

No underwear necessary.

It was spectacular.

“Wow.”

She smiled. That didn’t take long.

She turned around to face her brother.

Jack was standing in the doorway to her room, leaning a hand on the doorknob. Charles had sent him to collect his sister. His fine, platinum hair was brushed back from his forehead, and there was a tender look on his face.

You look . . .
He sent.

I know. . . .

They had gone back to their old habits of talking without speaking—Jack letting his sister into his every thought, his every memory.

His eyes glazed over. She could see what he saw through his eyes, and she knew he was remembering that first night as well. She could see the cloudless Venetian sky, their footsteps light and quick over the bridge. She could see herself through his eyes, an eternity younger—how young they had been then—at the dawn of the world, before the wars, before the dark.

How did you find . . . is it the same one?

No, sadly that dress is gone to the Tiber river. . . . Silk does not keep a thousand years, my darling. This is a new one, for a new bonding.

“But not yet,” Jack blurted.

Their shared vision disappeared, and Mimi was annoyed to find herself wrenched out of a very pleasant memory.

“No, not yet,” Mimi allowed. They would not be bonded officially until their twenty-first birthday. According to vampire law, the bond—the holy matrimony between vampires—was an immortal vow, but the ceremony could not be performed until they were of age. The two of them were obligated to renew their bond in every cycle, although this was the first time that they had been born as twins to the same family, confusing matters due to pesky human laws. But no matter. They were vampire twins, which had a different meaning among their kind. It meant their souls had twinned in heaven, where they had pledged their love.

The bond could not be performed until they had both come into their full memories and mastered their powers. Vampire twins sometimes spent cycles looking for each other, and bonded couples had to be old enough to be able to recognize the latest reincarnation of their spouse in a new physical shell.

She knew that in the entire history of the vampires, there was only one couple that had forsaken their bond. Gabrielle as Allegra Van Alen had forsaken Michael, Charles Van Alen Force, in this cycle. She had married—
married
—in a church, a holy sanctuary, had said the words, had pledged her troth to a human! To her human familiar! And look what happened . . . Gabrielle trapped in a coma forever, caught between life and non-death. Condemned to eternal silence.

“But why wait?” Mimi asked. “I’ve known who you were ever since I could see. And you know who I am now.”

Mimi was referring to the night in her father’s study when Jack’s memories had finally rushed back, allowing him to finally see what was right in front of him all along. They were two who were one. She was his. For eternity.

“I love you, you know,” Mimi said. “You make me crazy, but God help me, Jack, I do.”

Jack bent his head so that his nose was buried in Mimi’s hair. It smelled of honeysuckle and jasmine, and he inhaled deeply.

“I love you too,” he replied.

“My God.” Trinity said, with a sharp intake of breath.

Mimi and Jack slowly parted from their embrace and looked to see their mother standing at the open doorway.

“Mimi, you are only sixteen. And that is certainly not a dress for a sixteen-year-old,” Trinity accused, her voice shaking.

“Should I remind you I am centuries older than you, ‘Mother’?” Mimi sniffed. She was coming of age now, the memories flooding back, and Mimi did not want to have to play at being Red Bloods anymore, with typical nuclear family dynamics.

“Charles,” Trinity said. “Control your children.” “Mimi, you look beautiful,” Charles said, kissing his daughter on the forehead. “Let’s go.” Trinity scowled. “Come, darling, it is time to dance,” Charles said soothingly, taking his wife’s hand and leading her out of the room. “Shall we?” Jack asked, holding out his hand. “We shall.” Mimi smiled. And together the Force twins walked out, arm in arm, to the party of the year.

A
few blocks away, in an altogether different penthouse—the Llewellyns’ outlandish triplex, nicknamed “Penthouse des Rêves” due to its awesome, if surreal, extravagance—Forsyth Llewellyn was standing in front of a secret compartment behind the shoe closet. He quickly turned the knob on the vault two clicks to the right, then three clicks to the left, and stepped back as the five-inch stainless steel door swung open. “Daaaad, what’s this all about?” Bliss asked, standing beside him. “I’m supposed to meet Jaime in the lobby at eight.” She was holding Miss Ellie, her Chihuahua, in her arms. Miss Ellie was her canine familiar, named after her favorite character, on
Dallas
, of course. Just as promised, Mimi had set Bliss up with Jaime Kip. It was a total friend-date. Jaime had absolutely no interest in Bliss, and vice versa. In fact, it was Jaime who had suggested they meet in the St. Regis lobby since they were both attending with their families. Bliss got the distinct impression Jaime had asked to be her escort for the sole purpose of getting Mimi off his back. Mimi could be quite pushy when she wanted to be.

Bliss crossed her arms and looked around at her stepmother’s enormous dressing room. It never failed to impress guests during the ritual house tour. The “closet” was easily two thousand square feet. It had a step-down Roman bath lined with travertine marble and was equipped with dancing showerheads along the side, so that you bathed in the midst of a fountain. There was an endless hallway of mirrors that masked a series of compartments that housed five thousand items of designer clothing, which had been catalogued and archived by BobiAnne’s personal assistant. Too bad so much of what was inside was, in Bliss’s opinion, vulgar and tasteless. BobiAnne had never met a marabou-trimmed leopard-print poncho that she didn’t like.

BobiAnne was absorbed in her own toilette, and Bliss could hear her stepmother’s gravelly laugh echo around the dressing chamber as she gossiped with her two stylists.

Bliss looked at herself in the infinity of mirrors. She had decided to wear the green Dior after all. Her father and stepmother had simply gasped when they saw her.

“My dear, you are so beautiful,” BobiAnne had whispered, clasping her stepdaughter in her bony arms made stringy by too much Pilates. It was like being hugged by a skeleton.

BobiAnne was forever praising Bliss’s good looks to the heavens, and disparaging her own daughter’s rather plain appearance. Jordan, who at eleven was too young for the ball, had peeked in while Bliss was getting dressed and rendered her own judgment. “You look like a slut.”

Bliss had thrown a pillow at her sister’s retreating back.

After showing her parents the dress, her father had taken her aside and led her to the safe. He pulled open several of the suede-lined drawers custom-made to BobiAnne’s exact specifications. Bliss could see the sparkle of her stepmother’s many diamond tiaras, necklaces, rings, and bracelets. It was like the inside of Harry Winston. In fact, rumor had it that when the Texans had moved to Manhattan, the senator’s wife had cleaned out the vaults at all the major diamond merchants in order to celebrate their ascendance in the city’s social realm.

He pulled out a long black velvet box from a bottom drawer.

“This was your mother’s,” he said, showing her a massive cushion-cut emerald set in a platinum necklace. The emerald was as large as a fist. “Your real mother’s, I mean. Not BobiAnne.”

Bliss was struck silent.

“I want you to wear it for this evening. This is an important time for us, for our family. You will honor your mother’s memory with this jewel,” Forsyth said, clasping the necklace around his daughter’s neck.

Bliss knew little of her mother, only that she had cycled out early for an unknown reason. Her father never talked about her, and Bliss had grown up understanding that her mother was a painful subject. There was little to remember her by, and what few photographs remained were washed-out and faded, so that her mother’s features were almost indistinct. When Bliss asked about her, her father only said to “channel her memories,” and that she would meet her mother again if time allowed it.

The dog in Bliss’s arms went berserk, snapping and growling at the stone.

“Miss Ellie! Stop!”

“Silence!” Forsyth ordered, and the dog jumped from Bliss’s arms and high-tailed it out the door.

“You scared her, Daddy.”

Bliss looked at the emerald, which had nestled itself inside her cleavage. It was heavy against her skin. She didn’t know if she liked it or not. It was so big. Had her mother really worn this?

“The stone is called the Rose of Lucifer, or Lucifer’s Bane,” the senator explained with a smile. “Have you heard the story?”

Bliss shook her head.

“It is said that when Lucifer fell from heaven, an emerald fell from his crown. The emerald was called the Rose of Lucifer, the morning star. Some other stories even call it the Holy Grail.”

Bliss absorbed the information quietly, not knowing what to think. Her mother owned a jewel linked to the Silver Bloods?

“Of course,” Forsyth said, shaking his head, “it’s only a story.”

At that moment, BobiAnne entered the room wearing a frightful Versace dress that looked like metallic vinyl siding spray painted on her body.

“How do I look?” she asked her husband sweetly.

Bliss and her father exchanged a glance.

“Very pretty, darling,” her father said with a frozen smile. “Shall we? The car’s waiting.”

In front of the hotel a phalanx of photographers had gathered, and a swelling crowd of curious onlookers were being held back by security gates and a legion of New York’s Finest. As each black town car pulled up to the entrance, flashbulbs exploded in a cacophony of staccato bursts.

“Here we go,” BobiAnne exclaimed joyfully as she stepped out of the car and leaned on her husband’s arm.

But the paparazzi were only interested in Bliss.

“Bliss! Over here! Bliss! One for me! Bliss—this way!”

“What are you wearing?”

“Who made that dress?”

A few of the photographers and reporters were polite enough to ask the senator and his wife what they thought of the party, but it was obvious Bliss was the main attraction.

There were only ten steps from the curb to the hotel entrance, but it took Bliss a good half hour to get there.

“It’s madness,” Bliss remarked, looking pleased when she finally arrived in the pink and gold lobby and found her date waiting impatiently by the front reception table.

The St. Regis Ballroom had been transformed into a twinkling winter wonderland: the crystal chandeliers were hung with softly beaded strings of rhinestones, and glorious American Beauty roses bloomed everywhere, from the soaring, six-foot-tall centerpieces (so heavy that the tables had to be reinforced) to the massive garlands on every archway. A snow-white carpet on the marble floor led the way from the front reception room into the ballroom proper.

“Senator and Mrs. Forsyth Llewellyn,” the herald announced as the politician and his wife appeared at the top of the stairs. A spotlight shone on them, and the percussionist played a dramatic drumroll.

“Mr. James Andrews Kip. Miss Bliss Llewellyn.”

The four of them walked slowly into the party.

The two fifty-piece orchestras faced each other across the expanse of the ballroom, playing a serene waltz as the Blue Bloods displayed their finery—the men dashing and suave in their tails, the women preternaturally thin and impossibly stylish in their couture ball gowns. It was a magical sight. The Committee had really outdone themselves this time. The whole ballroom was filled with a dazzling, white brilliance: the antique crystal chandeliers shone, and the terrazzo floors gleamed.

Jaime deposited Bliss at her table, saluted her, and promptly disappeared for the rest of the evening. So much for that. Bliss found Mimi standing with her parents at the front of the reception line.

“Wow, look at that!” Mimi said, zeroing in on the necklace immediately. “What a rock!”

“It was my mother’s,” Bliss explained. She told Mimi the legend of Lucifer’s Bane.

Mimi took the emerald in her hands, stroking its glacial coldness. Once she touched it, she was transported back to that final battle, flashes of the black day, trumpets sounding in the distance, Michael with his flaming sword, the banishment, and then the cold. The cold . . . waking up immortal on earth and dying to
feed
.

“Oh.” Mimi’s eyes glazed, her hand still cupping the stone. And then she dropped it as if it had burned her.

Bliss was startled. She knew something had happened to Mimi, the flash of insight, the memory spike when she had touched it. And yet when Bliss touched the stone herself, nothing happened. It was just a dead piece of jewelry. Lucifer’s Bane. It gave her shivers.

“It’s the Heart of the Ocean,” Mimi cracked. “Just promise me you won’t throw it off the deck of the
Titanic
.”

Bliss tried to laugh. But the stone, fifty-five carats, weighed heavily on her skin.

Rose of Lucifer. Lucifer’s Bane. The Prince of the Silver Bloods, his most precious possession, hung around her neck like a noose. She shuddered. Part of her wanted to rip it off her throat and throw it as far away as she could.