The Van Alen Legacy (24 page)

Dr. Pat referred to her chart.
“Well, all your
bloodwork
came back normal, for a human as well as a vampire. Blood
pressure, thyroid, everything.
Normal.”

“But there must be
something.”

“Oh, there is.” Dr. Pat put
down the clipboard and leaned against the wall, crossing her arms. “Isolation is not good for the
immortal soul,” she said. “You must be among your own kind, you have been away too long. Your
body has become tense, toxic.”

“That’s it?” Schuyler asked.
“That’s the reason why I’ve been so sick lately?
Because I’ve been away from other
vampires?”

“Strange as it sounds,
yes.”
Dr. Pat nodded, tapping on her stethoscope. “The blood calls to same. You have been
alone, stressed, and alienated from vampire society. My nephew tells me you went to the
Bal
des Vampires in Paris. Did you feel better when you were there?”

Schuyler thought about it. She
hadn’t noticed in the adrenaline of the moment, but Dr. Pat was right. During the time when she
was surrounded by Blue Bloods she had experienced none of the uncontrollable shaking and
trembling. Except, of course, for those few minutes she had spent alone in the dungeon.
A
hundred feet below-ground, away from everyone, until Jack arrived.
The tremors had
returned once she and Oliver had hit the road.

“They say no man is an
island,” Dr. Pat mused. “It’s the same for Blue Bloods.”

“But what about my
grandfather?
Lawrence was exiled. He lived alone for many, many years, away from his
people. Yet he never exhibited any of my symptoms,” Schuyler argued.

“Your grandfather, as I
recall, was an
Enmortal
.
A rare breed.
Capable of long periods of
isolation from the community.
He chose exile because he knew he would be able to handle
it.
Physically and mentally.”

Schuyler absorbed the
diagnosis. “It just . . . seems . . . too easy an explanation,” she finally said.

“You know, Schuyler, the Red
Bloods have a word for it too. Homesickness isn’t just a state of mind. It has physical symptoms
as well. Your vampire self makes you stronger and faster than any human being. But the vampire in
you also exaggerates every human ailment you might feel. You’ve got the best of both worlds, so
to speak.”

Two weeks after the White Vote
was called, Mimi found a note in her Conclave e-mail asking her to visit Forsyth at the
Repository in the ForceTower that afternoon. Her last class was a free period, so she finished
early and took a cab.

She had to be at the
Repository anyway. The other evening she had been looking for her favorite fountain pen and
thought to rummage around Charles’s study. She remembered she had left it there the last time she
had needed a quiet space to do her homework. Her father’s office was as tidy as always, with
nothing on his desk but a Tiffany clock and a desk calendar. Mimi had checked drawers and
cabinets, but did not find her treasured
Montblanc
.

She had sat in his leather
swivel desk chair and spun, looking around the room. A few unmarked cassettes shoved toward the
back of a shelf caught her eye. She stood up and examined them. What was Charles doing with such
old audio equipment?

They were marked RH: Audio:
Ven. Rep. Repository of History Audio Archives.
Venator Reports.
Usually tapes from
the Repository came with written transcripts, but Mimi couldn’t find any. She turned the tape
over to see which Venator had filed them. MARTIN. These were Kingsley’s reports, from his
assignment two years ago.
The one that had sent him to Duchesne.

What were they doing in
Charles’s office? They belonged in the Repository. And if Mimi wanted to listen to them, she
would have to borrow an old tape recorder from the archives. She knew the Conduits were uploading
everything onto digital files now, but they had obviously missed these. She had put the tapes in
her pocket and taken one final look around the room. Where was Charles anyway? What had happened
to him? Jack was convinced he wasn’t dead. If Michael’s spirit was gone from Earth, they would
know for certain, he had argued.

At last night’s meeting, the
Conclave had voted to send Venators after the missing former Regis, and a team was being
assembled. She knew her brother was disappointed not to have been picked for the assignment. But
Forsyth had been adamant: they needed the twins here, he said. They couldn’t leave the Coven so
unprotected.

As she walked into the
ForceTower that afternoon, she wondered what the senator wanted to talk to her about. Forsyth had
never sought out her company before, and they had not spoken about her objection to his
crowning.

“You wanted to see me?” Mimi
asked, walking into the light-filled corner office after Forsyth’s secretary announced her
arrival. She noticed that he had set up shop in the same office Lawrence had chosen when he was
Regis. Talk about overconfidence. Charles had used the one in the old building under Block
122.

“Madeleine. Thanks for
stopping by,” Forsyth said. “Doris, hold my calls, will you dear?”

His secretary closed the door,
and Mimi took a seat across from the expansive walnut desk. She noticed that even though Forsyth
had taken over Lawrence’s office, he still kept the former Regis’s photos of Schuyler on his
desk. Mimi wished she had dressed up more; she had come straight from gym, and hadn’t bothered to
change out of her ratty Duchesne Athletics T-shirt and red running shorts. She put her bags on
the floor and waited for him to speak.

“I just wanted to commend you
on your work with the Venators. You did a fine job in Rio.” He beamed.

Mimi scoffed. “Yeah.
Right.
We didn’t find her.”

“Only a matter of time,
my dear.
Kingsley will find her. I have no doubt. He’s quite . . . resourceful,” Forsyth
said, with a hint of annoyance Mimi could not help but notice.

“All right.
Well,
thanks. I did want to go on another mission, but the Conclave says I have to finish Duchesne
first. The school isn’t going to hold my place for that long.”

“Alas, that is true. It is
unfair, is it not, that we have to go through the rigmarole of a human childhood and adolescence.
But it is in the Code,” Forsyth said, getting up to fix himself a drink from the bar cart. He
picked up a carafe and poured a shot of whiskey into a glass.

“Want one?”

“No thanks.” Mimi shook her
head. “Um, is that all? May I be excused now?”

“Oh, I am carrying on as
usual. Bliss likes to tease me about being a big blowhard.” Forsyth smiled, taking a sip and
walking around his desk so he could lean on the edge of it and look down at Mimi.

Mimi sank lower in her seat.
Llewellyn rarely spoke of Bliss. The bemused father act didn’t suit him too well: it felt bogus,
like he was trying to sell her a used car, or get her to believe he cared an iota about his
daughter. At least Charles and Trinity had tried to be there for Mimi and Jack during their
transformation. As far as Mimi knew, Bliss’s parents never bothered to explain to her what was
happening.

“How is Bliss?” she asked.
Mimi had bumped into her a couple of times, and Bliss had seemed friendly enough, but their
conversations never seemed to go anywhere. She didn’t know why that was, but something about
Bliss made her feel nervous and giggly.

“She’s much better.” Forsyth
Llewellyn nodded. “Anyway, I called you in today to discuss a rather delicate situation . . . and
forgive me if I offend . . . I realize this may not be the right time for such an occasion, but I
feel that after everything that’s happened with the Conclave . . . the community needs something
to lift its spirits right now, and perhaps, if I may . . .”

Mimi made a motion to let him
continue.

“A simple favor . . .
for the betterment of the entire community.
I know you and Jack canceled your bonding
because of the tragedy, but now is the time to renew morale, to show our people that we are still
strong, and to see the two of you together. Our strongest, our best, will bring them
hope.”

A wry smile played on Mimi’s
lips even if her heart suddenly clenched and an image of Kingsley’s smirking face came to
mind.

“So what you’re telling me is,
the
bonding’s
on?” she asked.

It took no effort to keep her
tone light and breezy. After all, she was still the same Mimi Force whose image was plastered on
a billboard across from Times Square.
The Mimi Force who tortured freshmen for sport,
making them fetch and grovel.
(How she had missed orientation week!)

Hopefully she would still fit
into her dress. . . .

If Dylan wasn’t going to come
to her, maybe she could go to him. The Conclave urged its newest members to perform the
regression therapy to access their past lives and learn from the accumulated knowledge that was
available to them from the vastness of their prior experience. Bliss sat cross-legged on her
princess bed. She closed her eyes and began the deep sorting through many lifetimes of memories.
This was the knowing. The practice of finding out
who
you really were. She was in
the void, in that space in between her conscious and subconscious self, who had she been before?
What shape had her spirit taken in its prior histories?

She was dancing across a
crowded ballroom. She was sixteen years old, and her mother had let her wear her hair up for the
first time . . . and she was laughing because tonight she would meet the boy who would be her
husband, and even before he came to stand in front of her to ask her to dance, she knew his
face.

“Maggie.” He smiled. Had he
always kept his hair that way?

Even in the nineteenth
century, Dylan, or Lord Burlington, made her heart pound.

But then, something happened
at the party, the Visitor whispering lies in her ear.
Telling her to kill.
Maggie
could hear him. Maggie did not want this, did not believe it . . . and before Bliss could open
her
eyes,
she could feel the cold water surrounding her.

Maggie Stanford had drowned
herself in the Hudson. Bliss saw the dark murky river, felt her lungs burst and her heart
collapse.

As Bliss went backward, it was
all the same. Goody Bradford had set herself on fire, pouring oil over her head, and then she had
lit a match and let the flames consume her.
Giulia de Medici “accidentally?
walked
off the balcony of the family’s villa in Florence, her broken body splayed in
the center of the square.

Quick as the flutter of a
butterfly’s wings, every image, every ‘death? Bliss had ever experienced came to the forefront.
But then . . . Maggie walked out of the funeral home. Goody Bradford survived the flames. Giulia
got up from the fall.

None of them had been
successful in ending their lives, or successful in exorcising the demon that possessed them. They
had all tried and they had all failed.

Bliss understood.

I have to die.

Because if she died,
truly died, if she found a way to never come back, then the Visitor would die as well.
He
would never have a chance to do what he was planning.

That was it. That was the only
way. She knew it.

There was no getting out of
it. There was no surviving it. She and the Visitor were locked in a fatal embrace. If she was
able to kill her spirit, the undying blood in her arms, she would bring death to him as well. She
would have to make this sacrifice, or else those horrible visions, that terrible
future,
would be unavoidable. She was a vessel for evil, and as long as she lived,
so did he.

“Dylan, you knew, didn’t you?
You knew what I would have to do. All along,” she whispered.

From the darkness, Dylan
appeared at last. He looked at her mournfully. “I didn’t want to tell you.

It had been a few days since
Schuyler had visited Dr. Pat’s clinic, and her new life in New York was finally starting to take
shape. That afternoon she and Oliver stopped by the real estate office that was holding the keys
to the small studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, which Oliver had secured for her, paying a
year’s rent in cash. To obscure her identity, Schuyler would pretend to be the only daughter of a
single mom: an ex-hippie folk singer who was usually on tour with her band. With Schuyler’s
ability to transform her facial features, she could even pretend to be the mom on occasions that
demanded it. Mutatio was easier now that she felt like herself again.

They took the subway across
town and ended up in a bustling section of

, a neighborhood that was a mixture of corporate
dormitories for Wall Street
newbies
as well as shabbier walk-up buildings next to
strip clubs and triple-X video stores. But there was a grocery store not too far away, and
Schuyler and Oliver loaded up on a week’s worth of food: organic vegetables, a loaf of raisin
bread from Sullivan Street Bakery, cans of beans. Oliver pushed her to splurge on the Spanish ham
and a block of French double- cream cheese. The clean, wide aisles of the supermarket gladdened
her heart; it was good to be back in America again, where everything was so easy and
convenient.