The Van Alen Legacy (7 page)

Anderson was leaving the city
too. Upon a vampire’s death, human Conduits were released from service and allowed a choice: the
Repository or freedom. They could work for the Coven at large, or they could have a normal
life.

Anderson told them he had no
desire to live out the rest of his life in a basement. He was going back to Venice, back to the
University. Of course, his memory would be erased by the Conclave. That was a prerequisite to his
leaving them. The Blue Bloods kept their secrets.

Schuyler understood Anderson’s
choice, but it saddened her all the same. Anderson was the last remaining link to her
grandfather. Once he left the Coven, he would be a stranger to her. But she would not deny him
his desire for an ordinary existence. He had spent a lifetime in service to the Van
Alens.

“Go and find the countess,”
Anderson continued. ‘
tell
her everything that has happened. There has been distrust
between the covens, so she might not know the truth about the massacre in Rio.
And,
Schuyler?”

“Yes?”

“I know what they’ve planned
for me tomorrow at my exit interview.
The forced amnesia.
But don’t worry, I will
never forget you.” He shook her hand, and she clasped his in hers.

“Nor shall I forget your great
kindness,” Schuyler replied. Oliver was right as usual. They had to leave immediately. The
Venators would come for her that evening. They would come to take her away.

“The countess will help
you.”

Schuyler hoped her
grandfather’s old friend was right.

“Look at you,” Oliver
murmured, coming up from behind to rest a warm hand on Schuyler’s exposed hip.

She turned to him with a soft
smile and placed her hand firmly on top of his so that they were practically embracing. Whatever
happened tonight, at least they had each other. It was a source of great consolation to both of
them.

“You don’t look too bad
yourself,” she said.

He was dressed as a Mogul
prince, in
a fine
gold brocade riding jacket and a white turban atop his
caramel-colored hair.

In answer, Oliver took her
bejeweled hand and pressed it to his lips, sending a delicious shiver up her spine.
Her
friend and her familiar.
They were a team. Like the Los Angeles Lakers, unbeatable,
Schuyler couldn’t help thinking. She always made corny jokes when she was nervous.

“What’s this?” she asked, as
Oliver pressed something into her palm.

“I found it in the garden
earlier,” he said, showing her the crushed
fourleaf
clover.
“For
luck.”

I don’t need luck, I have you,
she wanted to say, but she knew Oliver would think it was cheesy. Instead, she accepted the
flower and tucked it into her sari with a smile.

“Shall we?” he asked, when the
bhangra
pop ended and the orchestra switched to a
waltzy
version of the
Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” He led her out to the middle of the dance floor located in the grand
ballroom just off the courtyard. The room was festooned with floating Chinese lanterns, delicate
orbs of light that looked incongruous against the French classical architecture. There were only
a few people dancing, and Schuyler worried they would look conspicuous as the youngest people on
the dance floor by several decades.

But she had always loved this
song, which wasn’t so much a love song as the opposite of one. “I once had a girl, or should I
say, she once had me.” And she loved that Oliver wanted to dance. He held out his arms and she
stepped into them, resting her head on his shoulder as he circled her waist. She wished dancing
was all they had to do. It was so nice just to live in the moment, to enjoy holding him so
closely, to pretend for a little while that they were merely two young people in love and nothing
else.

Oliver led her smoothly
through every dance, a product of mandatory ballroom lessons from his etiquette-obsessed mother.
Schuyler felt as graceful as a ballerina in his confident direction.

“I never knew you could
dance,” she teased.

“You never asked,” he said,
twirling her around so that her silk pants floated prettily around her ankles.

They danced through two more
songs, a catchy polonaise and a popular rap song, the music a schizophrenic mix of high and low,
Mozart to M.I.A., Bach to
Beyonce
. Schuyler found she was actually enjoying herself.
Then the music stopped abruptly, and they turned to see what had caused the sudden
silence.

“The Countess of Paris,
Isabelle of Orleans,” the orchestra conductor announced, as an imposing woman, very beautiful for
her age, with coal black hair and a regal bearing entered the room. She was dressed as the Queen
of Sheba, in a headdress made of gold and blue lapis. Her right hand held an immense gold chain,
and standing at the end of it was a black panther wearing a diamond collar.

Schuyler held her breath. So
that was the countess. The prospect of asking that woman for shelter suddenly seemed more
daunting than ever. She had expected the countess to be plump and elderly, frumpy even, a little
old lady in a pastel suit with a bunch of corgis. But this woman was sophisticated and chic; she
came across as remote and distant as a deity. Why would she care what happened to
Schuyler?

Still, maybe the countess only
looked imperious and inaccessible. After all, this party could not have been easy for her.
Schuyler wondered if the countess was sad to have lost her home. The H’tel Lambert had been in
her family for generations upon generations. Schuyler knew the recent global financial crisis had
humbled even the grandest houses and the richest families.

The Hazard-
Perrys
had invested well: Oliver told her they had gotten out of the market years before it crashed. But
all over the Upper East Side, Schuyler heard, jewelry was being auctioned, art appraised,
portfolios liquidated. It was the same in Europe. None of the other Blue Blood families could
even afford to buy the Lambert. It had to go to a corporation, and it did.

The countess waved to her
guests as the ballroom exploded in applause, Schuyler and Oliver clapping as heartily as the
rest. Then Isabelle took her exit, the music started up again, and the tension in the room
abated.
A collective exhale.

“So what did the baron say?”
Schuyler asked, as Oliver twirled her away from the center of the room.

The Baron de Coubertin was in
the countess’s employ and served his lady as human Conduit, as Oliver was to Schuyler. Anderson
had told them a meeting with the countess could only be facilitated by the baron. He was the key
to an appeal. Without his permission, they would never be able to even get within a hairsbreadth
of the countess. The plan was for Oliver to introduce himself the minute the baron arrived at the
party, waylaying him as he stepped off the boat.

“We’ll find out soon enough,”
Oliver said, looking apprehensive. ‘
don’t
look up. He’s coming our way.

The four Venators made very
little sound as they landed on the roof of the building. Their footsteps could be mistaken for
the rustle of bird’s wings, or a few pebbles dislodged from the hillside. It was their fourth
night in Rio, and they were in the
favela
de
Rocinha
, systematically
going through the population, block by block, street by street, dilapidated shack by dilapidated
shack. They were looking for anything, a scrap of memory, a word, an
image, that
could maybe shed some light on what had happened to Jordan and where she might be.

Mimi knew the drill so well
she could do it in her sleep.
Or actually, their sleep.
Look at these Red Bloods, so
cozy and secure in their slumber, she thought. They had no idea that vampires tiptoed through
their dreams. Memories were tricky things, Mimi thought as she entered the twilight world of the
glom. They weren’t stable.

They changed with perception
over time. She saw how they shifted, understood how the passage of time affected them. A
hardworking striver might recall his childhood as one filled with misery and hardship, marred by
the catcalls and name-calling of playground bullies, but later have a much more forgiving
understanding of past injustices.

The handmade clothes he had
been forced to wear became a testament to his mother’s love, each patch and stitch a sign of her
diligence instead of a brand of poverty. He would remember Father staying up late to help with
the homework, the old man’s patience and dedication, instead of the sharpness of his temper when
he returned home, late, from the factory.

It went the other way as well.
Mimi had scanned thousands of memories of spurned women whose handsome lovers turned ugly and
rude, Roman noses perhaps too pointed, eyes growing small and mean, while the ordinary looking
boys who had become their husbands grew in attractiveness as the years passed, so that when asked
if it was love at first sight, the women cheerfully answered yes.

Memories were moving pictures
in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves. Using the
glom, the netherworld of memory and shadow, a space the vampires could access at will in order to
read and control minds, was like stepping into a darkroom, into a lab where photographers
developed their prints, submerging them in shallow pans of chemicals, drying them on nylon
racks.

Mimi remembered the darkroom
at Duchesne, how she used to hide there with her familiars. Spinning through the revolving door,
leaving the Technicolor world of school behind to enter a small, cramped space that was so dark
she’d wonder for a second if she had gone blind. But vampires could see in the dark, of
course.

Did they even have darkrooms
anymore, other than in movies where they had to track down the serial killer? Mimi wondered.
Everyone had digital cameras now. Darkrooms were prehistoric. Like handwritten letters and proper
first dates.

“Darkrooms, Force? You don’t
strike me as a photographer.”

“But I will strike you,” Mimi
sent back.

“
Har-har
.”

“Go back to your patient.
You’re going to wake mine.”

It was against protocol for
Kingsley to pop into her head space. The four Venators could sense each other, but they were
supposed to be on separate channels, watching different dreams. They had entered a women’s
dormitory, a place in the city where girls from the outlying provinces paid a pittance for a
bed.

Mimi was in a girl’s mind. The
girl was the same age as her, roughly, for this cycle: seventeen.

The girl worked as a
chambermaid in one of the hotels. Mimi scanned the last three months of her life. Saw her making
the beds and clearing out the trash, vacuuming rugs and pocketing the small tips the guests left
on the bedside tables. Saw her waiting for her boyfriend, a bike messenger, after work at a small
café.
Work, boyfriend, work, boyfriend.
What’s this? The hotel manager was forcing
the girl into his office and making her take off her clothes.
Interesting.
But was
it real?

Venator training meant Mimi
had learned how to distinguish fiction from reality, expectation from realization. Was the girl
really being abused by her boss or was she just fearful that it would happen? It looked like a
fear dream. Mimi placed a compulsion: she imagined the girl pushing her boss away, kicking him
right where it hurt. There. If it ever happened, the girl would know what to do now.

“Call it. Lennox One?”
Kingsley’s voice echoed through the darkness.

“Clear.”

“Two?”

“Clear.”

“Force?”

Mimi sighed. There was no sign
of the Watcher in any of the girl’s thoughts. “Clear.” She blinked her eyes open. She was
standing over the girl, who was sleeping soundly under the covers. Mimi thought she had a small
smile on her lips. There is no need to be afraid, Mimi sent. A girl can do anything she wants to
do.

“Right.
Move
out.” Kingsley led them into the night, through the unpaved roads and rickety steps leading
farther into the tumbledown, jigsaw row of makeshift houses and apartment buildings cut into the
mountains. She followed the team up the hill, walking by overflowing garbage cans and piles of
rotten junk.

Not all that different from
certain parts of Manhattan, Mimi thought, although it was amazing to see how closely people lived
and how twisted their priorities were. She had seen homes, hovels, really, with no running water
or toilets, but whose living rooms boasted forty-two-inch
flatscreen
televisions and
satellite dishes. There were shiny German cars in the makeshift garages while the children went
without shoes.

Speaking of children:
she heard them before she saw them.
The merry little band of brats who had been
following them around all week.
Their dirty faces streaked with tar, their ragged clothes
bearing faded American sports team insignias, their hands outstretched, palms facing upward,
empty. It reminded her of a public-service announcement that used to run in the evenings: “It’s
ten p.m. Do you know where your children are?”