The Van Alen Legacy (2 page)

No.

According to the Conclave, she
was his killer.

Oh, gross! She’d stepped in
something icky.
Beyond icky.
It squished beneath her foot, a wet, gasping sound.
Whatever it was, it was sure to ruin her pony-hair boots. What was she doing wearing pony-hair
boots to a reconnaissance mission anyway? Mimi Force lifted her heel and assessed the damage. The
zebra pattern was stained with something brown and leaky.

Beer?
Whiskey?
A combination of all the bottom-shelf alcohol they served in this place?
Who knew? For the umpteenth time this year, she wondered why on earth she’d ever signed up for
this assignment. It was the last week of August. By all rights she should be on a beach in Capri,
working on her tan and her fifth limoncello. Not creeping around some honky-tonk bar in the
middle of the country. Somewhere between the dust bowl and the rust belt, or was it the rust bowl
and the dust belt? Wherever they were, it was a sleepy, sad little place, and Mimi couldn’t wait
to leave it.

“What’s wrong?” Kingsley
Martin nudged her. ‘
shoes
too tight again?”

“Will you leave me alone?” she
sighed, moving away from him, making it clear she found the alcove they were hiding in too close
quarters. She was tired of his teasing. Especially since, to her complete and utter horror, she
discovered she was starting to like it. That was simply unacceptable. She hated Kingsley Martin.
After everything that he’d done to her, she couldn’t see how she could feel otherwise.

“But where’s the fun in that?”
He winked. The most infuriating thing about Kingsley, other than the fact that he had once tried
to bring about her demise, was that somewhere between chasing down leads on the beaches of Punta
del Este or through the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, Mimi had started to find him . . . attractive.
It was enough to make her stomach turn.

“C’mon, Force, lighten up. You
know you want me,” he said with a smug smile.

“Oh my god!” she huffed,
turning around so that her long blond hair whipped over her shoulder and hit him square in the
face.
“As if!”

He might be faster and
stronger than she was, the big man on the Venator team, and for all intents and purposes her
boss, but really she should be the one leading them, as she outranked him in the Conclave
hierarchy. If you could call that sorry group of cowards a Conclave.

Kingsley Martin had another
think coming if he thought he had any chance with her. He might be too cute for words (damn those
rock-star looks), but it didn’t matter one iota. She was not interested, no matter how much her
pulse quickened whenever he was near. She was bound to another.

“
Mmm
.
Nice.
You don’t use the hotel shampoo from the airport Hilton, do you? This is the good
stuff,” he purred. “But is it the conditioner that makes it so soft and silky?”

“Shut up . . .
just?”

“Hold on. Save your speech for
the after-party. I see our guy. You ready?” Kingsley
interrupted,
his voice serious
now, controlled.

“Like a shot.” Mimi
nodded,
all business as well. She saw their witness, the reason they were a few
miles outside of Lincoln, Nebraska (that was it! She remembered now) in the first place. A former
frat boy, probably just shy of thirty, with a baby beer gut and the beginnings of middle-age
“
carb
face” He was the type of guy who looked like he’d played cornerback in high
school, but whose pounds of muscle had turned to fat after a few years behind a desk.

“Good, because this is not
going to be easy,” Kingsley warned. “Okay, the boys will bring him to that corner booth and we’ll
follow. Square him off and then go. No one will notice as long as we don’t get up. Waitress won’t
even bother to come around.”

It was easier and more
painless to enter the mind of another during REM sleep, but they didn’t have the luxury of
waiting until their suspect had drifted off to la-la land.

Instead they planned to barge
into his subconscious with no warning and no consideration. Better that way: there would be no
place for him to hide. No time to prepare. They wanted the unadulterated truth, and this time
they were going to get it.

The Venators were
truth-tellers, skilled in the ability to decipher dreams and access memories. While only a
bloodletting would allow them to tell true memory from false, there were other, quicker ways to
discriminate fact from fiction without having to resort to the Sacred Kiss. Mimi learned that the
Committee only consented to the blood trial when a most grievous charge had been levied, as in
her case. Otherwise, the practice of memory hunting, venatio, while not infallible, was
acceptable for their purposes. Mimi had been given a crash course in Venator training before
joining up. It helped that she had been one in previous lifetimes. Once she had relearned the
basics, it was just like riding a bike, her core memories kicked in and the whole exercise became
second nature.

Mimi watched as Sam and Ted
Lennox, the twin brothers who rounded out their Venator team, led their witness to a dark corner
booth. They had been plying him with pitcher after pitcher of beer at the bar. Mr. Glory Days
probably thought he’d just made a couple of new friends. As soon as they sat down, Kingsley
slipped into the opposite bench, Mimi right next to him.

“Hey, buddy, remember us?” he
asked.

“Huh?” The guy was awake, but
drunk and drowsy. Mimi felt a twinge of pity. He had no idea what was about to happen.

“I’m sure you remember her,”
Kingsley said, guiding the witness to lock eyes with Mimi.

Mimi held Frat Boy with her
shoulder, and for all anyone in the real world knew, the dude was just entranced with the pretty
blonde, staring deep into her green eyes.

“Now,” Kingsley
ordered.

Without a moment to spare, the
four Venators stepped into the glom, taking the witness with them. It was as easy as slipping
down the rabbit hole.

When she woke up that morning,
the first thing that came to mind was that the bright white shutters looked familiar. Why did
they look familiar? No. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t the right question to ask. She was getting
ahead of herself again. It happened. But now she had to concentrate. Every day she had to ask
herself three very important questions, and that wasn’t one of them.

The first question she had to
ask herself was,
What
is my name? She couldn’t remember.

It was like trying to decipher
a scribble on a sheet of paper. She knew what it was supposed to say, but she couldn’t make out
the handwriting. Like having something just out of reach, behind a closed door, and she had lost
the key.
Or like waking up blind.
She groped wildly in the dark and tried not to
panic.

“What is my name?”

Her name.
She had
to remember her name. Otherwise . . . otherwise . . . she didn’t want to think about
it.

Once upon a time there was a
girl named . . . “

Once upon a time there was a
girl named . . .

She had an unusual name. She
knew that much. It wasn’t the kind of name that you found on ceramic coffee mugs at airport gift
shops or emblazoned on mini-license plate souvenirs you could hang on your bedroom door after you
returned from Disneyland. Her name was pretty and unusual and had meaning. Something that meant
snow or breath or joy or happiness or . . .

Bliss.
Yes. That
was it. Bliss Llewellyn. That was her name! She’d remembered! She hugged it to herself as tight
as she could.
Her name.
Her self.
As long as she could remember who she
was, she was okay. She wouldn’t go crazy.
At least not today.

But it was hard. It was so, so
hard because now there was the Visitor to consider.
The Visitor who was in her, who was
her, for all intents and purposes.
The Visitor who answered to her name.
She
called him the Visitor because it made it easier for her to believe that her situation would be
temporary. What did visitors do, after all? They left.

Bliss wondered
,
were you still you if someone else made the decisions? Spoke in your voice? Walked with your
legs? Used your hands to bring death to the person you loved the most?

She shuddered. A sudden
unbidden memory came to her.
A black-haired boy lying limp in her arms.
Who was
that? The answer was somewhere, but she would have to dig for it. The image faded. Hopefully she
would remember later. Right now she had to move on to the second question. Where am I?

The shutters.
The
shutters were a clue. It was enough that she was able to see something. It happened so rarely
now.
Most of the time she woke up in darkness.
She concentrated on the shutters.
They were wooden and painted white.
Charming in a way, something that recalled a farmhouse
or an English cottage, except they were too bright, too shiny and perfect.
More like
Martha Stewart’s idea of an English cottage than a real one. Ah. No wonder they looked
familiar.

Bliss knew where she was now.
If she could still smile, she would have.
The Hamptons.
She was in her
Hamptons
house. They were in Cotswold. Bobi Anne had named the house. Bobi Anne?
Bliss saw an image of a tall, lanky woman wearing too much makeup and gargantuan jewelry. She
could even smell her stepmother’s noxious perfume. Everything was coming back now, and coming
back fast.

One summer during a dinner
party at a famous designer’s house, Bobi Anne had learned that all the great houses in the area
had names. Owners dubbed their homes “Mandalay?
or
“OakValley?
according
to how pretentious they were. Bliss had suggested they name theirs Dune
House for the large sand dune at the beachfront edge of the property. But Bobi Anne had other
ideas.
“Cotswold.”
The woman had never even been to England.

Okay. Bliss was relieved.
She’d figured out where she was, but it didn’t make sense.

What was she doing in the
Hamptons?

She was a stranger in her own
life, a tourist in her own body. If someone had asked her what it was like, Bliss would have
explained it this way: it’s like you’re driving a car, but you’re sitting in the backseat. The
car is driving
itself
, and you’re not in control. But it’s your
car,
at
least you think it is. It used to be yours, anyway.

Or like being in a
movie.
The movie is your life, but you don’t star in it anymore. Someone else is kissing
the handsome lead and making the dramatic monologues. You’re just watching. Bliss was an observer
of her own life. She was not Bliss anymore, but simply the memory of the Bliss that had
been.

Sometimes she wasn’t even sure
that she had ever really existed.

The bus pulled to a stop up
past the gates, and the group silently filed out. Schuyler noticed that even the most jaded of
her coworkers, a rather haughty collection of moonlighting actors and actresses along with a smug
culinary student or two, were looking around in amazement. The building and its immaculate
grounds were as opulent and intimidating as the Louvre, except someone still lived here. It was a
home, not a national monument. The H’tel Lambert had been closed to the public for much of its
history. Only a vaunted few had been welcomed inside its massive doors. The rest of the world
could leaf through pictures of it in books. Or enter as catering
staff .

As they walked past the
burbling fountains, Oliver nudged her. “All right?” he asked in French.
One more reason to
be thankful for the DuchesneSchool.
Years of mandatory foreign language requirements meant
they had been able to pass for two restaurant workers from Marseille at the job interview,
although their textbook accents were in danger of giving them away at any time.

“You look worried. What’s
wrong?”

“Nothing.
I was
just thinking about the investigation again
,,
Schuyler said as they made their way
toward the service entrance located at the back of the house. She remembered that terrible day at
the Repository, when she’d been accused so unjustly. “How could they have believed that of
me?”

“Don’t waste any more time on
it. It’s not going to change anything,” Oliver said firmly. “What happened on Corcovado was
terrible, and it wasn’t your fault.”

Schuyler nodded, blinking back
the tears that came whenever she thought of that day. Oliver was right as always. She was wasting
energy wishing for another outcome. What was past was past. They had to focus on the
present.

“Isn’t this place beautiful?”
she said. Then, whispering so no one would hear, “Cordelia brought me here a couple of times,
when she came for meetings with Prince Henri. We stayed in the guest apartments in the east wing.
Remind me to show you the Hercules galleries and the Polish library. They have Chopin’s
piano.”