Why couldn't she just leave it alone, she wondered as the bag spun and knocked her off balance for a moment. She didn't even want Jack anymore-she had understood as much at the altar. He didn't want her, but she didn't want him either. So why was she so obsessed with his death? Because someone had to pay for Kingsley's. Kingsley was gone; he was dead, or trapped--it didn't matter. It was easier to feel a murderous rage against her brother than an overwhelming grief at her lover's demise. It killed Mimi to think that Jack had survived while Kingsley had not. That Jack was happy, somewhere out there with his half-blood concubine, and she was alone. Someone had to pay for the scope of what she had lost--someone had to pay. If
Mimi couldn't be happy then she certainly didn't see why anyone else should be.
It was beyond tiring being angry all the time, and Mimi craved the physical exhaustion her punishing workouts brought her. Most days after leaving the gym she would go home numb and too beat to do much else other than laze on the sofa with her laptop, replying to IMs and updating her status on social networking sites. On this particular night, the town house was empty when she returned, which was not a surprise. Trinity was out at some society function, as usual. The house was too big for just the two of them. The maids kept to themselves, and the silence was so depressing that on most nights Mimi had both the stereo and the television blasting while she surfed the Web.
She threw her smelly gym clothes into the hamper and took a quick shower. Still wearing her bathrobe, she fired up her computer and clicked on her in-box, scrolling through the list of unread messages. Blinking at the top was an e-mail from an unknown address. Even though the Committee's tech team begged her to stop doing so, Mimi routinely disregarded warnings about the danger of Internet viruses hiding in unknown e-mails, and as a result her computer crashed several times a month. She couldn't help it; she was too curious to not open them.
She clicked it open. The e-mail was empty save for a link. Mimi hit it, and braced for the onslaught of computer havoc, her system breaking down, or some kind of dirty video appearing on her screen. The link did take her to a video, but not one of the pornographic variety.
The screen showed a hazy video, a bunch of jerky handheld camera angles, until finally Mimi noticed that the two dark shapes in the middle of the screen were actually teenagers necking on a couch.
So it was one of those videos after all, she thought, ready to close the window. But something stopped her. As the camera zoomed closer, she realized the teenagers weren't just hooking up. The girl's face was obscured by her long hair, but Mimi could see that her lips were pressed against the boy's neck, and blood was running down her chin, as his body twitched and convulsed in an ecstatic spasm.
It was all too familiar--the boy's fervid motions, the way the girl was holding him--gentle enough to keep his frenzy in check and yet firm so that she could keep him right where she wanted him. How many times had Mimi done the same exact thing in the same exact position? It was practically out of the
Committee handbook. You didn't want a familiar's head to roll back lest he or she lose oxygen, or choke on his or her own tongue.
Mimi watched, frozen in her seat, as the girl pulled away, and for a moment, the camera zeroed in on her ivory fangs, and they caught the light, revealing their needle-sharp beauty--so much finer and sharper than any computer-enhanced prop. Meanwhile, the boy slumped back into the couch, drugged, defeated, and for the next forty-eight hours, useless. The girl, her face still in shadow, kissed him sweetly on the lips and stood up from the couch.
On the bottom of the screen was a date and a time stamp. That was just last weekend, Mimi thought, as the image cut to a larger room, where many more teenagers were gathered. Wait, wait, wait! There was something familiar about that room, with those damask curtains and that Renoir on the wall. If you got too close to the painting, you tripped the silent alarm and the house majordomo would shoo you away. She'd been to that apartment many times. It was Jamie Kip's parents' penthouse and this was his eighteenth birthday after-party. Mimi had been there Friday night. She'd left early, bored by the scene. The newest Committee members were little eager beavers, hopped up on their first taste of blood, and she was still too angry to have much fun.
When the camera focused on the girl again, her back was turned, and she disappeared in a blink of an eye, only to reappear across the room, laughing next to the keg. This was no trick, no visual effect, no clever editing. It was clear that the girl had been in one place and then without any natural explanation for it, in another. Dear God, don't tell me. . . . The camera caught more vampire tricks. Stupid junior members showing off--someone lifting the grand piano with one hand, another party guest turning into fog. The usual juvenile exuberance, vampires drunk on their newfound powers that came with the Transformation.
A cold knot began to form in Mimi's stomach. Who the hell was videotaping them? Blue Blood parties were strictly closed--vampires and familiars or soon-to-be-familiars only. That was the policy. This was against every rule in the Code. This was exposure. It was online. Had anyone else seen this?
Mimi felt the hair on the back of her neck tingle.
The scene faded and words appeared. Vampires are real. Open your eyes. They are all around us. Do not believe the lies they tell.
The Mistress lives!
The who? The what? Mimi was still trying to absorb what she'd read when the screen shifted again. Another room, but now the girl was shown tied up, bound and blindfolded, with a gag in her mouth, still unrecognizable. That was Venator rope, Mimi could tell from the silver stitching. What was going on?
What the hell was happening? Who was that girl?
The screen faded to black, replaced by more text.
On the eve of the shadow crescent . . .
Watch the vampire burn.
A match was struck, and a fire burned, filling the screen. Smoky dark flames that danced around an ebony center. The Black Fire of Hell.
Mimi shut off the computer, banging down the screen on her laptop. She found she was trembling. It was a joke, wasn't it? Someone from the party had decided to make a funny video. That was all it was. It had to be. Jamie Kip and Bryce Cutting probably put it together to spook her. They still couldn't accept she was their Regent. It was just a joke to them.
Still, Mimi didn't sleep well that night. She wished she could just forget about it, delete it, and like any normal teenager, go back to counting the number of her friends online. But she couldn't. She was their leader. She was responsible for the safety of every vampire in the Coven. She wasn't going to lose one on her watch. No way. Not this time. Not after Charles's blind denial of the existence of the Silver Bloods . . . and Forsyth's betrayal of the
Conclave. Whatever this was--a new Silver Blood threat, or something else?--she had to be prepared to deal with it. She had to take action. This video had been sent to her for a reason.
SIXTEEN
The Conspiracy
The sixty-inch monitor on the wall showed the vampire's face full of terror, frozen on the screen. Mimi looked around the conference table on Monday morning to make sure everyone had a chance to absorb it. She had skipped class for this, but even Trinity could not argue that this was less important than passing AP Mandarin.
Around the table sat members of the Conspiracy, the subcommittee that handled human-vampire relations and disseminated false information about the vampires into the human world. Conspiracy members included several best-selling novelists, one of whom had popularized the amusing idea that instead of burning to death, vampires smelled like roses in the sun, as well as film producers who kept the slash-and-behead theory alive and well in numerous blockbuster horror movies. More than a few were annoyed to have been pulled from their lucrative jobs for an emergency meeting. The
Conspiracy had not met as a body in many years.
Seymour Corrigan, Conclave Elder and head of the Conspiracy, opened the discussion. "Any ideas where this might have come from?"
"Looks lik
e one of your jobbers, Harry," joked Lane Barclay-Fish, the author of Blood and Roses and said mastermind of the floral-smelling vampires conceit. He turned to Harold Hopkins, the executive producer of a popular vampire soap opera currently running on a prestigious cable network.
"Not me--in my show the humans only use our blood as vitamins. You know, long life and all that," chortled Harold, a bald vampire who wore sunglasses indoors.
Warden Corrigan cleared his throat. "I fail to see the amusement in this enterprise."
"You guys, Seymour's right, this isn't funny," Mimi said. "This is a video from a real party. That's one of us up there, not one of Harold's overpaid actresses." It galled her that after everything that happened, they could still be so glib when one of them was missing. She knew they were just covering up their fear, but it was in poor taste.
"Right, right," Lane apologized. "I say we let the Red Bloods think it's a movie trailer. One of Josie's, maybe."
Josephine Mara was the hottest young director in the business. She had the pinched, stressed look of someone perennially on deadline. In the past year she had helmed several "underground" horror films to major success. It was easy enough to make horror films. As a vampire she didn't need to pay for special effects. She just created them. "Sure, why not?" Josephine smiled thinly. "I'll say it's a follow-up to Eidolon Memory," she said, naming her most recent hit, a haunted-house ghost story set in a girls' boarding school.
"Remember when one of the familiars penned a tell-all memoir in the 1800s?" Harold asked.
"Yes, thank God we got her publisher to categorize it as a novel," Lane said, nodding. "What was that woman thinking? And that title! Longing for
Love Forever, jeez. Lord Byron has a lot to answer for."
"He did have quite the taste for the ladies. Bite 'em and leave 'em. Meanwhile, the poor lady is stuck with the yearning and all that. Must be difficult. A pity." Harold shrugged.
"I miss the old days, when it was so easy," Lane sighed. "Remember when we came up with Count Dracula? That was fun. Sent scores of tourists to
Romania! Red Bloods will believe anything."
"That was a good prank," agreed Annabeth Mahoney, who had created a popular video game called "Blood Wars," which pitted vampires against each other. In Mimi's opinion, sometimes the Conspiracy played too fast and loose with disseminating untruths that were a little too close to the real thing.
"Gentlemen, ladies," Mimi interrupted, clearing her throat. "As much as I'm enjoying this trip down memory lane--or rather, manipulated memory lane-this is not just a security breach. Even if we're able to convince the Red Bloods this is yet another Hollywood fiction, it shows that whoever put this together knows too much about us, which puts us all in danger. That's hellfire up there. And one of our own is missing." Mimi turned to the twin Venators seated to her right. She'd pulled Sam and Ted Lennox from their previous assignment to work on this one. "Sam, what do we know so far?"
Sam took the mouse and clicked on an icon on the screen, minimizing the video and pulling up a photograph of a pretty, red-haired girl. It was the same girl from the video. "The Blue Blood in question is Victoria Taylor. Seventeen. Duchesne senior. She was last seen at a party thrown by Jamie Kip at his apartment, where this video was shot. Nothing irregular in her Transformation as far as the Committee can tell. Blue veins at fifteen, the hunger, all that.
No deviant behaviors, no aberrant actions in her history. We checked the Rep Files. Family is solid Coven stock."
He clicked on the mouse again to show another photograph. This one was of a good-looking boy with messy blond hair and dimples. "This is her human familiar, Evan Howe, sixteen, Duchesne junior, also missing since the night of the party. Ted, you want to take it from here?" he asked his brother.
"Sure." Ted pulled a reporter's notebook from his coat pocket and began to read from it. "So far, the video has been circulating on the Internet, and to
Lane's suggestion, it's already happened. The Red Bloods think it's a movie trailer."
The members nodded.
"So we've been puffing up that idea by spreading rumors that a movie called Suck is coming out. It's a documentary, handheld, horror type of thing.
So far, the public seems to be buying it. Apologies in advance to the more talented members of the group--I wouldn't presume to know how to do your job.
Sam and I had one of the tech people jazz up this footage, and this new trailer is making the rounds on the Web now, too."
Sam clicked on the mouse and the horrifying video played again. At the end, it displayed a tagline. "Suck," it read in bloodred letters. "Coming to theaters near you."
"I'll get it up on my IMDB profile as soon as possible," Josephine agreed. "Suck . . . I like it. Good title."
"So that covers the security risk, at least," Sam sighed. "But on to the real issue. We believe this is a genuine threat and that Victoria has been taken by hostiles. We haven't gotten a bead yet on where she is or who's holding her. Her parents are in Mustique for the season. They're flying back today, but they haven't seen her in months, and as far as I could gather, they don't seem to know very much about her day-to-day life."
Typical Blue Blood parents, Mimi thought. Since their "children" weren't their children at all, most vampires had very loose family connections. Mimi was always grateful that Charles and Trinity, no matter that they were only her cycle parents, had been more attentive than indifferent. It could have been much worse, as the Taylors showed.
"And the Red Blood?" she asked.
"His parents were a little more on the ball. They filed a missing persons report last week. The school is keeping it hush-hush and out of the papers, of course. No one wants any more bad publicity. But if he doesn't turn up soon, those Red Bloods are going to FNN." Sam smiled an ironic smile. "Usually the Force News Network thrives on this kind of stuff. Missing rich kids. Scandal on the Upper East Side, etcetera. But I take it they'll sit on this one?" he asked Mimi.
"Of course. They'll get nothing from us," Mimi promised.
"We traced the IP address of the computer that posted the video. It went to a ghost. We're having tech untangle that one," Sam continued. "The shadow crescent is the first sign of the waning moon. About seven days away. We're treating this as a countdown situation. This is Day One. Which means we've only got six days left."
"And you're sure this isn't the Silver Bloods?" Mimi asked.
"It's not like them to go public with this kind of stuff. They're not . . . modern, shall we say," Sam answered. "No. We're quite sure this is something else. We think it might be a human threat."
Annabeth gasped. "Are humans even capable of something like this? That's insane. It's like the sheep ambushing the shepherd."
"Unfortunately, it's not impossible," Ted said. "It's a numbers issue, and there have always been more of them than there are of us."
"If they find out who we are," Sam said, "who knows what could happen. The Conclave has always made certain that our existence remain invisible to their world. Because if not--"
"It can't happen, regardless," Ted said, interrupting his brother's thought. "We're going to shut this down."
"From what we can tell, the person who made this video is a human who's close to our community," Sam said gravely. "A familiar is unlikely, since the
Caerimonia seals the human's loyalty to his or her vampire partner; a human familiar is rendered incapable of doing harm. So it's got to be someone else. A human who knows everything about us and yet is not bound to a vampire. We've checked the records to see what humans, if any, have access to the Kip residence, and the Conduits are our best guess. It's a stretch, but they are given keys to the Repository, which means they could possibly have access to hellfire."
Hellfire was kept under the Conclave's highest security in the deepest basement of the Repository. It was almost impossible to think that a lowly
Conduit would be able to break in without alerting the Venator guard, but there was no other explanation right th
en.
Mimi sucked in her cheeks. "You will interrogate all the Conduits. Torture them if you have to. Do not spare them any mercy."
"That's the thing we want to talk to you about. We're planning to scan their memories, of course. But someone who's made something like this knows how we work and is likely to have planned ahead and may have protected themselves. As Conduits, they are taught a little knowledge of the glom, and a little knowledge goes a long way."
"How about if one of their own interviews them, trips them up somehow?" Mimi suggested, thinking immediately of Oliver. "I have just the person to ask." She had read the glowing reports from the Repository. He had a high reputation for loyalty and discretion. Plus, if he reported directly to her, she could keep a closer eye on him and monitor his communications. But getting him to agree to help was another matter. If only she hadn't been so rude to him the other day. This was going to be tricky, she could already tell.
"Could work, why not?" Sam Lennox agreed.
Lane rapped on the table. "That sounds like a plan. Are we done here? I'm meeting my editor for lunch at Michael's and I'm late. We're talking sequel."
"More roses?" Annabeth teased.
"A veritable rose parade of the undead, my friends." Lane raised his fist in a show of solidarity. "The Conspiracy lives!"
Warden Corrigan coughed into his handkerchief.
"Looks like the Venators have it covered. On our end, we'll make sure the Web is all over this movie. We'll squash any suggestion it might be 'real.'
Although it might make for good publicity," Harold said, looking meaningfully at Josephine, who nodded.
"Good point," Mimi said. "Josephine, you'll start production on that movie. Lane, Harold, Annabeth, continue doing what you've been doing. Thank you for taking the time to meet with us." Mimi bid Conspiracy members good-bye as they filed out of the room, shaking Seymour Corrigan's hand as he left.
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