The Van Alen Legacy (18 page)

“I thought that was just a
myth . . . you know, like in the movies, when humans think they can kill us with a stake through
the heart,” she said.

“There is always some truth to
a myth,” Kingsley said kindly. ‘
the
Conspiracy saw to that.
So that the Red
Bloods feel no need to look for the actual truth.”

“Well, someone should have
told me. I owe you one,” Mimi said. “What took you so long anyway?”

“We found two dead Silver
Bloods out back,” he said. “But those had been taken care of properly. What did you
find?”

In answer, Mimi stood up. “I
found something.
Someone.
In the bathtub.”
She led him to the room and
showed him the body.

When Kingsley saw the small
figure in the flannel pajamas, he crossed himself. They exchanged a look of anguish and
sorrow.

“Do it,” he said. Mimi
nodded.

Slowly she turned the body
over.

It was Jordan Llewellyn. Mimi
recognized the girl’s gray eyes. They were open and staring at the ceiling. In death she looked
even younger than her eleven years. She was wearing a grubby pair of pajamas, the same ones she
had been wearing the night she was abducted. From the girl’s sallow complexion, Mimi knew without
having to be told: every drop of Jordan’s blood had been drained.
Full
consumption.

Mimi felt as if she was going
to throw up. Nothing had prepared her for this. This was so much worse than almost being taken by
the half-dead warden. She had joined the Venators to find adventure, to get out of New York. . .
. She had never once thought they would fail in their search.
Never.
And to know
they had come so close, only to be so very far. . . . She was not prepared to see the dead body
of a child. It was an image that she would carry with her forever.

Mimi was a confident person.
She had an unshakable belief in herself and in her abilities, and she had believed in Kingsley’s
power to find Jordan. She had believed he would not let them down. She looked at him now, with
the deepest sense of betrayal.

But Kingsley was doing
something odd. He had taken out a magnifying glass from his Venator kit and was looking into the
dead girl’s eyes. “Lennox, what do you think? Can you see it?” he asked Ted, who was hunkered by
the doorway.

Ted peered through the glass.
After a few minutes he handed it to his brother, who did the same. “No. I don’t see
it.”

“I didn’t think so,” Kingsley
said, and there was a note of triumph in his voice. “Force, take a look? Closely, do you see it?
Or more correctly, do you not see it?”

She took the magnifying glass
and looked into Jordan’s eyes. What was she looking at? What was she supposed to not see? This
was morbid. Jordan’s expression was a blank, remonstrative gaze. Finally she noticed it. Jordan’s
eyes were missing their pupils. In the space in the middle, where they should have been, there
was nothing, her eyes were one simple surface. She looked like a doll.

“What happened to her? What
does it mean?” Mimi asked.

Kingsley’s drawn face broke
into a grin. “It means,
Force, that
we haven’t failed just yet. The Watcher is
alive.

Waiting was the hardest part.
Schuyler remembered how she used to sit in the apartment on 
Perry
Street 
waiting, just like this, for Jack to arrive for their secret
rendezvous. It always seemed like such a miracle every time he walked through the door. So
unbelievable that he was hers, and that he had been looking forward to seeing her as much as she
had been longing to see him.

It was as if she had left him
only yesterday, the emotions he stirred up in her were so dizzying, the memories he brought back
to the surface so strong. She had loved watching him walk inside the apartment. She remembered
how his face wore a look of anxiety as he appeared in the doorway, as he too had always readied
himself for disappointment. The question lingering on his features . . . Would she be there
waiting for him? She had loved him so much for that. To know that he was just as vulnerable, just
as nervous, as she had been. He had never once taken her for granted.

Now she waited for him again.
He would return for her, she believed that. Believed it so much more, as she waited, sitting on
the cavern floor in an underground catacomb in Paris, than she ever had sitting on a couch in an
apartment in New York.

She believed he would return
for her, because if he did not, it meant - no. No. There was no way he could have been killed.
But what if, what if he had been harmed? What if he was somewhere down one of those dark tunnels,
the tunnels she had not chosen?
what
if he was somewhere down there, bleeding and
unconscious? What then?

She couldn’t even begin to
think about what had happened to Oliver. She hoped Jack had been right, that the Silver Bloods
had left him alone. . . . The
Croatan
weren’t interested in humans . . . were they?
How could she have left him? She would never forgive herself for deserting him. And now, Jack too
. . . Jack was gone as well. Was she fated to lose both of them in one night?

She should go. She had waited
long enough. Jack needed her. She had to go looking for him; she couldn’t just wait around doing
nothing. She took the torch off the floor. But just as she stepped toward the first tunnel, she
heard a noise from behind her.

Footsteps.
She
turned around, brandishing the flame.

“Stay back!” she
called.

“It’s
me’don’t
worry, it’s just me.” Jack stood in front of her. He looked untouched, unharmed. Not a single
hair out of place. No cut on his cheek. His clothes were clean, and looked freshly pressed. He
looked perfect, the way he always did, and not as if he had just battled a pack of monstrous
Silver Bloods.

She did not put down the
flame. Was it Jack? She remembered the baron’s crimson eyes. She had not seen the Silver Blood
underneath the human disguise at first. Was this Jack Force or was it something else?
Another shape-shifting enemy?

“How do I know you’re you?”
she asked, holding her torch as if it would save her from whatever creature stood before
her.

“Schuyler, I’ve just narrowly
escaped with my life. You’ve got to be joking,” Jack said.

“Stay away from
me?”

A thought occurred to her:
What if this was all part of the Silver Blood scheme?
A deadly ploy?
A
masquerade?
What if they had planned for Jack to ‘rescue’ her so he could gain her trust?
A year had gone by, loyalties changed. How did she know he had not been turned? They had been so
far away from all the news in the coven, what if . . . what if . . .

“Schuyler, I am not a Silver
Blood?” Jack looked angry now, and a vein on his forehead was throbbing. His voice was hoarse
from shouting. “Stop this. You need to trust me! We don’t have much
time,
my father
can only hold them back for so long. We’ve got to get out of here!”

“Prove it!” she hissed. “Prove
you are who you say!”

“We don’t have time for this!
You really want me to prove who I am?” he asked.

“Yes!” she
challenged.

In answer, he took her in his
arms, lifting her up and against the wall. He pressed his lips against hers, and with each kiss
she could see into his mind, into his soul. She saw a year of hate . . . saw him alone,
alienated, hurt. She had lied to him and had left him. With every kiss he made her see, made her
feel . . . every emotion, every dream he had of her . . . every ounce of his wanting and his need
. . . and his love . . . his all-consuming, life-affirming love for her.

In the darkness they found
each other again . . . and she kissed him back, so greedily and hungrily, she never wanted to
stop kissing him . . . to feel his heart against hers, the two of them intertwined together, his
hands in her hair, then down the small of her back. She wanted to cry from the overwhelming
emotion that engulfed the two of them. . . .

“Now do you believe me?” Jack
asked huskily, pulling away for a moment so they could look into each other’s eyes.

Schuyler nodded, breathless.
Jack.
Every fiber of her being tingled with love and desire and remorse and
forgiveness.
Oh, Jack . . . the love of her life, her sweet, her soul . . .

But how?

How could he still feel this
way about her? He was already bonded to his vampire twin, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he? She had seen the
invitations.
Mimi in her white bonding dress.

“The bonding . . .” she
croaked.

“It never happened. I am not
bonded to my twin.”

He was still free. He was
still himself, still the boy she had fallen so deeply and irrevocably in love with that even a
year apart could not quench her love for him. And he loved her still, she knew that now. They
looked at each other, suddenly understanding everything between them that had gone
unsaid.

Jack let go first. He looked
at the rubble with a frown. The Silver Bloods had destroyed the stone steps that led to the exit
ten stories up. Schuyler could see a small pinpoint of light from the hole above.

“That’s the intersection. If
we get past it, they cannot follow. Hold on,” he said,
unspooling
a coil of rope
that was attached to his Venator pack. He swung the hook over the edge and took her by the waist.
“Don’t look down,” he said as he
zoomed
them up through the air like a couple of
superheros
.

“Wait! Someone’s down there! I
think, I think it might be your father,
Yes
! It’s Charles! Wait, Jack!”

The rope slipped, caught;
there was a struggle as they were suddenly pulled downward again, back down to the depths . . .
and Schuyler could see, far in the distance, Charles Force battling Leviathan himself, the demon
taking the form of a basilisk, a dragon, and a chimera, changing shape and taunting its attacker
with mirthless glee.

“GET OUT OF HERE!” Charles
Force bellowed when he saw them dangling on the wire above him. “SAVE YOURSELVES!” And she felt
it, felt his ferocious might push them out of the
hole
, send them flying through the
air and sprawling out onto the sidewalk. They made it to the surface just in time.

Just behind or underneath, she
wasn’t
sure,
she felt a huge wave, as if a lightning bolt had just missed her by a
centimeter. Then the universe wobbled.

A ripple.

A tear.

A wound.

For a moment the world was not
in focus. Schuyler could see into the vastness of space and infinity.
Alternate
universes.
Alternate endings.
Alternate outcomes.

She felt a trembling deep
inside herself as well as out, as if every atom in the known universe were shaking, as if time
itself were being unhinged, as if the very earth, the very world they lived in, were in danger of
being destroyed.

But then, just as suddenly,
everything snapped back into place. Time fixed itself. The universe stopped trembling. The world
was the same as it ever was.

Schuyler was sprawled on the
sidewalk. She couldn’t feel anything: her legs, her arms, everything was numb. Jack lay on the
ground beside her. With the last of her remaining strength, she reached for him, brushing her
fingertips against his cold ones, and then she felt his hand grasp hers in his strong, firm grip.
He was alive. Her heart rejoiced. He was alive. They had survived.

But there was no sign of
Charles Force anywhere.

“Is it really you? How is this
possible?” Bliss asked, marveling at how well he looked. The Dylan she remembered had been skin
and bones, but this Dylan looked healthy. His cheeks were pink, and his dimples were
back.

“It’s really me,” Dylan
assured. “You know, the Corruption, the thing that turns vampires into demons, works by drawing
out the soul through the blood, and so the times that, uh . . . you know . . .”

Bliss nodded. The times that
the Visitor had been in control, and had sucked Dylan’s blood, she had taken enough of his spirit
into her own, so that a shell image, or a faded version, a piece of his consciousness, lived
inside of hers.

“So . . . you’re alive?” Bliss
asked.

“In a way,” he said. “In that
I can think, and I can still feel.”

“But you’re not real, are
you?” she asked.

He shook his head sadly. “No.
I’m not. Not in the way that you are. I mean, no one else can see me but you.”

“Is that bad? Does it feel
weird?” she asked.

For a while, Dylan merely
smiled, and it was his same crooked sad little smile. “I don’t know how to explain it, but part
of me is here, with you, and another part is . . . somewhere else. I don’t know, but I know I am
not complete. I’m like . . . like a . . . template . . . you know, like a virtual personality
trapped in a computer,” he explained.