The Van Alen Legacy (5 page)

“Do you see that?” She turned
to the girl standing next to her.

“See what? A bunch of rich
people in some stupid boats?” the waitress cracked, looking at her dubiously. Only then did
Schuyler realize that the flashing symbols were visible only to those with the vampire sight.
They were Blue Blood sigils, from the Sacred Language.

She had almost given herself
away, but thankfully no one had noticed. Her lip quivered, and she could feel her body tense as
the guests walked down the dock and approached the waiters. What if someone recognized her? What
if someone from the New York Coven were at the party? What then? It was madness to think she and
Oliver could get away with this. There were sure to be Venators here, weren’t there?

If any of the Blue Bloods
recognized her before she was able to make her case to the countess, she wouldn’t have a chance
in the world, and what would become of them then? She wasn’t afraid so much for herself as for
Oliver. She feared what the vampires would do to a human Conduit of whom they
disapproved.

Hopefully the crowd would
remain as oblivious as they looked, another bunch of pleasure-seeking socialites, as her coworker
had dismissed them. Just because they were immortal didn’t mean they didn’t enjoy the
trivial.

Schuyler tried not to stare at
the women, most of whom looked even more fantastic than the boats. The female guests were dressed
variously as Japanese geishas, in full white powder makeup and gaily printed kimonos, or Chinese
empresses with tasseled pointy red-and-gold headdresses, or Persian princesses with real jewels
pasted on their foreheads.

One famous German socialite
known for her outrageous wardrobe came dressed as a pagoda, a heavy metal costume that wouldn’t
allow her to walk or sit for the entire evening. Instead, she rolled out of the boat on a
Segway
. For a moment Schuyler forgot her nerves and tried not to laugh as the
archduchess almost mowed down a group of waiters carrying caviar and
blinis
.

The men wore Russian officers’
uniforms, Fu Manchu mustaches, and turbans. It was all so politically incorrect and yet
stupendously fabulous and anachronistic. One guest, the head of Europe’s largest bank, was decked
out in a large sable hat and a plush wolf-fur-trimmed cape. It was August! He had to be
suffocating in the heat, and yet, like the lady in the pagoda who could not sit down, he was
suffering to make a statement. Schuyler hoped it was worth it.

Human familiars were in
attendance as well, only the small, discreet scars at the base of the neck giving them away.
Otherwise they were just as festively attired and barely distinguishable from their vampire
masters. The night was balmy and clear. Sitar music wafted down from the rotunda, a distinctive
high-pitched wailing, and the line of junks waiting to disembark their fancifully dressed
passengers was growing.

Several speedboats carrying
young European Blue Bloods cut the line. They were much more daring in costume than their Elders.
One of the girls, the daughter of the Russian finance minister, was wearing nothing but draped
metal ropes and a wisp of black chiffon. Another svelte nymph was dressed in see-through chain
mail. Of course, the boys were dressed as ninja assassins in black silk jumpsuits or as samurai
warriors, and carried decorative swords.

When her tray was empty,
Schuyler headed back, walking past Oliver’s sight line from the second level. She glanced up and
saw him making a turquoise-colored cocktail adorned with sizzling firecrackers. She saw him nod,
and she knew he had seen her. She ditched her tray in a dark corner and walked swiftly into the
main hall, past cordoned-off areas of the residential wing.

This is where she and Cordelia
had stayed on their visits. There was a bathroom to the right, behind the Sabine murals. It was
empty. She locked the door and took a deep breath. Phase one of the plan was complete. They had
succeeded in worming their way into the party. Now it was time for phase two.

She shook out her ponytail and
slipped out of her catering uniform, peeling off the layers. She found the small rucksack she had
hidden underneath the sink earlier. She removed its contents and began to dress, putting on a
bejeweled sari, luscious pink silk encrusted with diamonds. Oliver had helped her pick it out at
the shop in Little Jaffna in the 10th arrondissement. He’d insisted on getting it even though it
had been prohibitively expensive.

The silk draped elegantly over
her bare shoulders, and the dazzling pink made a nice contrast to her long blue-black hair. She
looked at herself in the mirror. She was thinner than she had ever been: lack of sleep and
security would do that to anyone. Her cheekbones, already sharp, were thrown into sharper relief,
cut like the edge of a blade. The bright sari brought color to her cheeks, and the dazzling
gemstones glittered in the light. She sucked in her stomach even though her hip bones were
prominent above the dress’s low-
waisted
harem pants.

She removed a tiny cosmetic
bag from the same backpack and began to apply some makeup. She dropped her powdered compact to
the floor, and only then realized her hands were shaking again.

She wasn’t ready for this.
Whenever she contemplated what she was about to do, what she was about to ask, she couldn’t
breathe. What if the countess turned her away? She couldn’t run forever, could she? If the
countess refused them an audience, they had nowhere else to go. More than anything, Schuyler
wanted to go home. She wanted to be in the same place her grandparents had lived.
Back in
her small bedroom with the peeling paint and the clanging heater.

She had already missed an
entire year of school. In a month, Duchesne would be back in session. She wanted to go back to
that life, even though she knew it was lost to her. Even if the European Conclave gave her
shelter, it did not mean she would be able to return to New York.

Outside the band was playing
‘thriller,’ Michael Jackson to a
bhangra
beat, cymbals crashing. She bundled her
waiter’s uniform into the bag and stuffed it in a trash can, then left the powder room, slipping
past the velvet rope.

“Champagne?” a server offered.
Thankfully, the waitress didn’t recognize Schuyler as a fellow serf on the bus.

“No, thank you,” Schuyler
demurred.

She walked to bottom of the
staircase, elaborately costumed as an Indian princess. She held her head high even as her throat
constricted with fear. She was ready for whatever the night would bring, and she hoped she
wouldn’t have to wait too long.

“The Silver Bloods are much
more clever
than we give them credit for,” Kingsley said, when they arrived at yet
another airport. They had left the U.S. the night before. Now they were back where it had all
started, before that wild-goose chase had sent them halfway around the world.
Back in
Rio.

“You think?” Mimi replied, not
even trying to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “You should know. You are one.”

She put on her oversize
sunglasses and rescued her battered
Valextra
roller from the luggage carousel. She
was irritated that Kingsley made them fly economy everywhere. She was used to having her bags
wrapped and secured in plastic whenever she traveled internationally. Her poor little valise was
not surviving the rough treatment from the baggage handlers. She spotted yet another muddy
footprint on its smooth leather surface.

“It’s not funny,” Kingsley
said as he took her bag and tossed it into the baggage cart, almost as if he were dunking a
basketball and not lifting a seventy-pound weight. (Mimi never traveled light. A girl needed
choices.)

“I’m not laughing,” Mimi
snapped. “I just don’t know how we could’ve missed it the first time.”

“Just because we’re Venators
doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes. And it’s one thing to be incompetent, but it’s another thing
to be deceived. We weren’t looking for it, that’s why we missed it.”

They walked out of the
terminal and into the mild, tropical afternoon. Thank goodness for the upside-down weather here.
Mimi had braced herself for blistering heat, and discovering it was winter in South America was a
pleasant surprise.

The Lennox boys had hailed
their own cab to the hotel, which meant she and Kingsley were stuck with each other again. The
two brothers had been under Kingsley’s command for centuries, but kept to themselves. They
preferred their own company and often only spoke when they were spoken to, in monosyllabic
grunts. She and Kingsley had had no choice but to talk to each other or die of
boredom.

Kingsley whistled for a cab,
and they piled in the back and drove slowly into town. The city looked the same, as gorgeous and
exotic as ever, but somehow seeing the Redeemer statue above Corcovado mountain did not give Mimi
the same thrill it once had. She didn’t know what to think, she sure knew what the Conclave
thought, even Kingsley had wanted to go after Leviathan as soon as he’d read the report, but he
had been sent on this little adventure instead. Forsyth Llewellyn had pressed upon the surviving
Elders to make finding the Watcher a top priority. Mimi wasn’t wholly convinced, as the senator
was,
that the Silver Blood traitors had been fully unmasked by the Almeida fire,
sure Nan Cutler, their leader, had perished, but there had to be others among the
Coven.

Warden Cutler had to have had
help. But that wasn’t really Mimi’s problem right now. All Mimi knew was that when Kingsley began
assembling his team, she had volunteered. She’d wanted to get out of New York, away from the
shocked, mournful faces of the surviving members of the Conclave. They were all so weak and
frightened! It annoyed her to see them cowed and terrified. They were vampires; where was their
pride?

They were acting like cornered
sheep, bleating to Forsyth about how they should hide. Well, she wasn’t going to hide. She wanted
to find whoever was responsible for that terrible night, hunt them down and kill them one by one.
Sacrilege is what it was, disrespect. The Silver Bloods’ attack was vicious in its scope and
intensity. They had attempted to wipe out the clan’s Elders and Wardens, leaving the community
with the irrelevant and the feeble. They had shown them no mercy. Mimi planned to show them the
same.

But first they had to find
Jordan. Jordan would tell them what had happened; Jordan would know who the Silver Bloods were
and where they were hiding.

Because Jordan Llewellyn
was only pretending to be a child.
Jordan was the Watcher,
Pistis
Sophia,
Elder of Elders, a soul born with its eyes open, that is, with the full command and understanding
of all its memories.

Sophia had slumbered for
thousands of years until Cordelia Van Alen had asked the
Llewellyns
, one of the
oldest and most trusted families in the Conclave, to take her spirit as their newborn. The
Watcher was supposed to keep vigilance against their enemies and to sound the alarm should the
Dark Prince ever return to Earth. During the time of the Roman crisis it had been Sophia who had
first discovered the
Croatan
betrayal. Or something
like
that,
anyway.

It was all so long ago, and
Mimi couldn’t be bothered to remember. When you had lived for thousands of years, going through
your memories was like trying to find a contact lens in a pile of broken glass. The past wasn’t
filed away in a neat tree of folders on a computer screen, marked accordingly with dates and
labels for easy access. Instead, the past was a jumble of images and emotions, of knowledge that
you did not understand and information you did not remember possessing.

Sometimes, when she had a
moment to herself, Mimi wondered why she had volunteered so gladly. She had missed her junior
year of high school, and wouldn’t be able to graduate with her class. And it wasn’t as if she
cared about Jordan Llewellyn. She’d only met
her a
couple of times, and each time,
Jordan had made either a face or a rude remark. But something told her she had to go, and Jack
hadn’t stopped her either.

It was strange how things
never turned out the way one expected. Mimi had thought she and Jack would become closer after
everything that had happened, especially with that stupid Van Alen brat finally out of the way.
Maybe they just took each other for granted now that there was no one between them. But why was
it she was here, and he was somewhere else?

“Penny for your
thoughts?”
Kingsley asked, as if he’d just noticed the silence in the taxicab.

“It’s going to cost much more
than that,” Mimi said. “Let’s just say however much it is, you’ll never be able to afford
it.”

“Oh really?”
Kingsley cocked an eyebrow.
His signature move.
Guaranteed to pull in the
ladies.
She could read it all over his arrogant face.
“Never say
never.”

The hotel they’d booked was a
modest one: three
stars,
and that was stretching it. It was miles from the beach,
and the elevator was broken when they arrived. Mimi spent a listless night on itchy sheets and
was surprised to find the team in extraordinarily good spirits the next morning. Well. Someone
had to like percale.