Mimi shook her head. Did Helda expect her to believe that crap? Kingsley was suffering down here. Who knew what kind of tortures and agonies he’d endured. She didn’t know what kind of game Helda was playing, but she decided to keep her mouth shut so the old bird would let her pass.
“You are prepared this time. You have your barter?”
Helda asked.
“I do,” Mimi said, motioning to the window.
Helda observed Oliver trying to lean as far away from the trolls as possible without looking like he was avoiding them. “I see,” she sighed. “A human’s a poor substitute for the soul you’re taking from me. But very well. If you are able to convince Araquiel to return with you, you may have him.”
NINE
Studio Session
The address that the gallery assistant had left on her answering machine brought Allegra to a warehouse near market Street. She took a creaky factory elevator to a loft on the top floor.
Last night she had spent the remainder of the party re-miniscing about high school with her old friends, many of whom were starting their lives in the world: newly minted investment bankers and law students, a scattering of television PA’s and cub reporters, along with fashion assistants and the self-described ladies and gentlemen of leisure who had come into their inheritances and were whiling away their days on the social circuit—their lives a succession of parties and benefits and festivals; a jet-setting crowd who frequented Wimble-don, Art Basel, and the Venice Film Festival. Her friends had cooed over her new haircut and wanted to know why she had disappeared from their lives without an explanation. People like Allegra were not supposed to do such disagreeable things.
Their kind kept in touch out of habit, forever recounting the glory days when one had been a scrapper at St. Paul’s or Endicott. She had apologized profusely and promised to have them all over, in New York, once they were finished with the renovations on the town house on Fifth Avenue, where she and Charles were supposed to live after they were bonded.
The elevator opened right into Ben’s studio. “Hello?”
“In here!” Ben called. She walked out to find him standing in front of a large painting, wiping his hands on a wet rag.
“You’re here,” he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it. He put the rag away and wiped his hands on his jeans. He was nervous, she was surprised to discover. He had none of the breezy nonchalance he’d displayed the night before.
“You invited me.”
“I wasn’t sure you would come,” he admitted.
“Well, I’m here now.” She gave him a tentative smile. She didn’t know why he was acting so strange. Had she misread him? He had invited her to see the studio, and she had thought it was a sincere invitation—not one of those casual, polite things that people say to each other at dinner parties.
Was this yet another mistake? She had woken up this morning excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and hoping that he would be alone. They stood facing each other for so long that Allegra finally felt he was being rude. “Well, are you going to show me your work?”
Ben blushed. “Sorry, seem to have forgotten my manners.
Please, by all means.”
Allegra walked around the room. The studio was a large white loft with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay.
There were paint cans and paintbrushes everywhere, and plastic on the floor. The oily smell of gesso filled the air.
“Sorry it’s a bit messy,” he said.
She nodded, not quite sure what to say. The loft was filled with an assortment of canvases in all sizes, a few stretched eight feet high and ten feet across. There were smaller paintings propped on easels or tacked on the walls. Some were framed and encased in plastic. As Allegra looked around, she noticed a theme in all of his work. Every painting—from the mural that showed a girl lying dreamily in bed, like a modern odalisque, to the small ones, which were like the one she had purchased—each and every painting in the studio was a portrait of her.
She walked through the space, studying the paintings and drawings in complete silence and utter shock. Ben followed her wordlessly, waiting to hear her reaction. For now, she didn’t have one. She was merely processing the information he was giving her. The paintings held the breadth of their short love story: Allegra on the bed, in her white camisole; Allegra in the woods, the night of her initiation into the Peithologians,
“a secret society of poets and adventurers,” which meant they got drunk in the forest after curfew; Allegra holding up a Latin textbook, laughing at how terrible she was at the language; Allegra nude, her back turned to the viewer. There was a small dark painting, all black except for the bright blond hair and ivory fangs. Allegra the vampire princess.
She understood now. The carefree artist and jocular heir-about-town from the night before was all an act. The familiar’s kiss had marked him, had changed him, and in order to deal with her abandonment, he had created a shrine to her. This obsessive recollection of every moment of their relationship was his way of keeping her close to him. He painted her over and over so that he would never forget her. It was all there—his love and need for her. This was his true heart, open and exposed and bleeding.
Now she understood what his mother had tried to tell her when she had said, “You’re the girl in the paintings.” Decca Chase was worried about her boy, and had thought that maybe if she brought Allegra to him, he would find a way to be with her or get over her. Smart woman.
Ben shuffled his feet, his face slowly turning a brilliant shade of crimson. He gulped. “Well, what do you think?”
“I’m so sorry for leaving you,” Allegra said slowly, not quite able to meet his eyes. “I’m so sorry I disappeared that night. You don’t understand—I’m not free…. I don’t have a choice about whom I can love. You have to forget about me….
It’s better for everyone. For you.”
Ben frowned. “No… no… you don’t understand.”
But Allegra was back in the elevator, and this time she would not return. She had made a mistake in seeking him out, in putting her entire future at risk, and she would not make it again.
Sometimes it was better to keep Pandora’s box closed.
TEN
City of the Dead
ItwasonlyaftertheVenatorshadrelaxedtheirhostilestance that Schuyler noticed their surroundings. They were inside a small stone room, and she wasn’t sure, but it looked as if the shelves were made from grave markers, and that two ornately carved tombstones formed a table. “Are we where I think we are?” she asked.
Sam nodded, apologized for the smell, and explained why they were living in a mausoleum, called the City of the Dead by the locals. They were in the eastern part of the city, in a necropolis that served as a home for people whose ancestors were buried in the basement catacombs, or for those who had been forced out of the crowded areas of Cairo, unable to afford apartments. There were anywhere from thirty thousand to a million people living among the dead, Sam explained. The cemeteries were equipped with a minimal sewage and water system, while electric wires connected to nearby mosques provided light and heat. Since the tombs had been built to ac-commodate the traditional mourning period, when people stayed at the cemetery with their dead for the requisite forty days and nights, living in them was a natural progression when there were no other options.
“We got a lead on a Nephilim hive in Tehran. We shut that down, did the same to one in Tripoli, then came here when we heard rumors that girls have been disappearing from the City of the Dead.” He explained that the disappearances and kidnappings did not conform to typical Red Blood crimes.
There was a systemic, even ritualized aspect to them that piqued the Venators’ interest. “It’s got Hell-born written all over it, so we’ve been bunking here to be close to the target.”
“Last week we raided their nest and got them all—except for one that got away,” Deming told them.
“You thought that was me,” Schuyler said.
Deming nodded. “Yes.” She did not apologize for the mistake. She recounted the events in New York, how she had caught the Nephilim who had been after the vampires.
“So it is as we suspected,” Schuyler said, catching her breath at the news. “This has been going on for some time now.” She told them what they had discovered in Florence, and confirmed what the Venators already knew about bloody work of the Petruvian priests, who hunted and killed the human women who had been taken by Croatan, along with their offspring. “The girl who’d been taken had a mark on her: three intertwining circles that contained Lucifer’s sigil, a sheep, and the Blue Blood symbol for union.”
“Paul—the Nephilim in New York—carried the same symbol on his arm,” Deming said. “It looked like a birthmark instead of a tattoo. All the Nephilim carry it on their bodies.”
“But they aren’t born evil,” Schuyler said. “These women and children are victims of a vicious crime; they’re innocent.”
“I don’t know about innocent,” Deming argued. “Paul Rayburn took two immortal lives. Who knows how many more vampires he’s murdered over the years.”
“So these Petruvians… these killing priests who believe they do God’s work,” Sam said. “I had never heard of them until Deming told us what that bastard said, and I’ll bet no one in any Coven has either, which means they’re not part of the official history. How can that be?” he asked his former commander.
“I don’t know.” Jack frowned. “I was not part of the Order of the Seven and not privy to decisions made at the time.”
“Regardless, the Petruvians’ cleansing goes against everything in the Code of the Vampires, which mandates the protection of human life,” Schuyler maintained.
“The Nephilim are not human,” Deming said. “I have the scars to prove it.” She raised her sleeve to show the white marks she carried from battling their foes.
“Has anyone seen the Venator reports on this area?” Jack asked. “I tried to find the local conclave offices, but no one would tell me where they had relocated.”
Sam shook his head. “The Coven here is barely hanging on. many of their members have been brutally murdered, burned—not just young ones but Elders. There was an attack at the Cairo Tower last month, their headquarters. That’s why you couldn’t find them. They’re ready to go underground. It’s like that everywhere. Our kind is retreating—they went back into the shadows.”
“What’s the latest in New York?” Jack wanted to know.
Deming and Sam exchanged glances. “The Regent’s disappeared and supposedly she took the Repository keys with her, to keep the Coven from disbanding. No one knows where she went. But without your sister, New York is not going to last very long,” Deming said.
So. Mimi was Regent. Oliver had told the truth. Schuyler watched Jack process this information. She thought she knew what he was thinking—that he should have been with Mimi; that without the twins, the Coven had no one.
“We thought Azrael had come after you,” Ted said to Jack. “For the blood trial, when you didn’t return to New York.”
“We haven’t seen Mimi,” Schuyler said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“What are you doing in Cairo?”
Schuyler was careful not to reveal the exact reason for their journey. “We’re looking for someone. Catherine of Siena, a friend of my grandfather’s. Jack heard of a holy woman named zani, who we thought might be her. One of her dis-ciples was supposed to meet us at the market and take us to her. You guys must have scared him off. Do you know where we can find her?”
“The name rings a bell—where have we heard it before?”
Sam asked.
“It’s name of a priestess at the temple of Anubis,” Deming said. “Where the girls have been disappearing.”
ELEVEN
White Wedding
Where to next? Is there a map?” Oliver asked.
When he saw the look on Mimi’s face, he felt chastened.
“Okay, I promise to stop asking stupid questions. I’m just making conversation.”
“There’ll be a second checkpoint or something,” Mimi explained. They were still driving through the desert, but after a few miles, Oliver noticed the road was now along a seashore, and he could see the blue waves of an ocean, and a breeze blew. If they were descending deeper into Hell, it was getting nicer instead of worse. Mimi drove until they spotted an elegant hotel by the beach.
“Am I dreaming? It looks like martha’s Vineyard,” Oliver said. He recognized the hotel. It was a famous one on the island. He half expected a group of inebriated teenagers to walk out wearing Black Dog T-shirts.
Mimi pulled into the driveway and looked around expect-antly. When no one came to park the car, she sighed. “In Hell there’s no valet?” she asked, driving into the parking lot.
Oliver chuckled. “Isn’t that just like the Vineyard? What is this place?”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Mimi said. They got out of the car and walked toward the resort entrance. There was music playing from a string quartet, and a waitress in a crisp white shirt and black pants appeared carrying a tray of champagne. “The party is in the back. Come join us.”
Oliver took a glass. The champagne smelled delicious—buttery and bubbly, with a hint of apple and strawberries, along with a musky undertow of something earthy and delightful. He was not surprised to find he was wearing a khaki suit and a pressed white shirt, while Mimi was now wearing a plain linen dress and sandals, and she had a flower in her hair. “If this is what life is like in the underworld, it doesn’t seem too bad,” he said, clinking Mimi’s glass.
“That’s what you’d think, of course,” Mimi said, rolling her eyes. “But wait till you’ve seen Paradise.”
“What’s that like?”
“It’s been so long I don’t even remember anymore. It was just—different. Peaceful,” she said wistfully.
“Boring.”
“No. It wasn’t like that. Of course people think it would be boring, but it’s not. It’s like the best day of your life, for the rest of your life,” Mimi said. “Anyway, it looks like we’re here for some sort of wedding.” They’d followed the crowd to the back of the hotel, by the beach, where white wooden folding chairs had been set up, and a sandy aisle led to a flowered trel-lis. The guests were a ruddy-cheeked New England bunch—the men in seersucker, the women in modest day dresses. Children ran round blowing bubbles. It was beautiful and festive, and not too hot.
Yet there was something about the scene that felt familiar, that felt too close to something that Oliver did not want to acknowledge, and he never took a sip from his glass. “Whose wedding is this?” he said, gritting his teeth, as the string quartet began to play “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” his favorite hymn.
“Ours, of course.” A girl appeared by his side. She looked exactly like Schuyler. She had Schuyler’s long dark hair and bright blue eyes, and she was wearing her bonding dress, the one made of the palest blue silk that hung off her shoulders.
She had a spray of freckles on her cheeks that she always got during the summers, which they used to spend together right on this beach.
Oliver did not know what to do or where to look. His cheeks burned, and he felt as if his heart had been put on display only to be humiliated and broken.
“Ollie, what’s wrong?” She looked and sounded exactly like Schuyler. What was this— who was this? A true mirage.
What devilry had created this doppelganger, Oliver thought, trying to move away from her. Where was Mimi? He looked around wildly but could not find her. Not-Sky took his arm and linked it through hers, the way she used to, and rested her head against his shoulder.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I did too,” Oliver replied, without thinking.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered.
He took back his words. This was Hell. He knew exactly where he was now, and exactly what this was. This was his deepest desire, his deepest secret, which he had buried
deep inside his heart so that he had been able to fully celebrate with his dearest friend on her special day. Now, to see his desire so cruelly made real, forced him to acknowledge that even if he was healed, even if he did not ache for her anymore, even if he was no longer her familiar nor her Conduit, and merely her friend, he still loved her, and would always love her.
How was it possible to feel love and desire but no pain?
Freya, the witch he had met in the East Village, had healed his blood of the familiar’s mark, but his heart would always remember and would always yearn. As long as he lived, he knew he would love Schuyler Van Alen.
“Don’t hate me, but I don’t think I can go through with it.
I love Jack. I do. But seeing you today… Ollie… I’m so sorry.”
The girl who wasn’t Schuyler looked deep into his eyes, and it took his breath away.
“About what?” he asked, and it was then that he realized they were replaying the same conversation they’d had the night before her bonding—but it was going a different way, and he knew exactly what she would say before she said it, because they were the words he had wanted her to say.
“Making the biggest mistake of my life,” she said huskily, tightening her grip on his arm. He could smell her perfume.
She had started wearing it only recently, she’d explained back then. A scent made for Catherine de médicis that she’d bought from the convent of Santa maria Novella.
“Don’t,” he said in a strangled voice, and he pulled at his collar, as he had found it suddenly hard to breathe. “Don’t do this. You’re not Sky. Leave me alone.”
“No, you have to hear it,” she said, and put her mouth right on his ear. He could feel her soft breath as she whispered the words he wished she’d said to him on that fair day in December, in Italy. “I should never have left. I love you. I love you more.”
Then she was kissing him, and it was Schuyler’s lips, and she smelled just like Schuyler, and her hair was silky and soft like Schuyler’s, and he knew that when her back was turned, he would see a mole right between her shoulder blades that was just like Schuyler’s. She was Schuyler, and she returned his love, and Oliver did not see why he had to pretend he did not want this, did not want her, did not want exactly what was happening right now.
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