Masquerade bb-2

by Мелисса Де Ла Круз

  There were no secrets between the Force twins. Mimi had learned to live with the fact that Gabrielle's face had haunted Jack's dreams for over a millennia. But now the power of attraction had transferred from mother to daughter, and that she could not accept.

  Mimi knew now what she had to do. To save their bond, to save themselves.

  She had to destroy Schuyler Van Alen.

  THIRTY

  The banging on the door was insistent, shaking the thin rattan walls of the beachside hotel. The sound broke the silence of the dawn. It was almost five in the morning.

  "Schuyler! Schuyler! Wake up!”

  Schuyler stumbled out of bed and opened the door a crack. She saw Bliss standing in the outdoor hallway looking panicked, still wearing her outfit from the night before, her hair in disarray.

  Schuyler unlocked the door chain and opened the door fully.

  "What?”

  "Oh my God, Schuyler, you have to help me, I'm in huge trouble, oh shit, it's bad, I think he's dead," Bliss said, shaking uncontrollably.

  Schuyler immediately woke up. "Dead? Who's dead?”

  "Morgan—the assistant—I…come quick.”

  As Schuyler ran down the beach with her, Bliss told her the story. "I did it. I did the Caerimonia Osculor. The Sacred Kiss. I don't know, I just felt like it. I wanted to get it over with, you know? I was hating being the only one in our year who hadn't done it. And it was great, it was fine, he seemed to really get into it—but then, I don't know, I think I went too far. Oh shit, Schuyler, if The Committee finds out, I'm in huge, huge, huge trouble.”

  Bliss led Schuyler to the spot where she and Morgan had made out, in a secluded area underneath palm trees, behind a sand dune.

  The boy was lying face up in the sand, blood still dripping from the two small punctures on his neck.

  "He's not breathing," Bliss said nervously. "I think I went too far.”

  Schuyler knelt down and took his pulse. "There's no pulse.”

  "Oh my God, they are going to kill me! No human has ever been killed in a Caerimonia!

  Ever!”

  "Shhh…Let me think.…Jack. We need to get Jack," Schuyler decided.

  “Jack? Why?”

  "Because he's done this before. Morgan might not be dead. Maybe this is what happens to Red Bloods after the ritual. Maybe Jack will know something we don't.”

  Jack was at the door, fully dressed and wide awake before Bliss had even finished knocking. Schuyler marveled at his speed. She bet he would be a natural for the Velox test. She hadn't thought to use the vampire speed in such a fashion—she was still wearing her pajamas. Jack listened to Bliss's story and was at the boy's side in seconds.

  He knelt on the sand and took Morgan's pulse by pressing two fingers against his neck.

  "It's there…You can sense it, very faint, but it's there.”

  "Oh thank God," Bliss said, sinking to the ground in relief.

  "So he'll be okay?" Schuyler asked.

  "He'll be okay." Jack said. "He might not remember what happened, but when he awakes, he'll be looking for you. He'll be drawn to the one who marked him as her own.”

  "Why?”

  "The Sacred Kiss creates a bond. It means he's yours. No other vampire can take him.

  When you took him, your blood mixed with his, and it will be poison to any other Blue Blood.”

  Bliss and Schuyler absorbed this new information.

  "So he's like my boyfriend?" Bliss asked, not sure if she really wanted that.

  "If you want," Jack allowed. "It's not a casual thing, you know. It means something. For both parties.”

  Bliss blushed. "I…”

  "It's okay," Jack said. He lifted the boy up. "Let's just take him back to his room. He'll probably just think he has a really bad hangover in the morning.”

  "Thanks, Jack," Schuyler said, when both Morgan and Bliss were safely stowed in their rooms. She put a light hand on his forearm to show how much his actions that evening had meant to her.

  Jack smiled, his green eyes shining in the dim light. Schuyler thought she had never seen anyone so calm under pressure. He had been such a stabilizing influence, a natural leader, assuaging Bliss's anxiety and taking such respectful care of Morgan. He put his left hand on top of Schuyler's. "Any time. And tell Bliss not to worry. We all make mistakes.”

  His skin felt warm and smooth to her touch, and Schuyler thought they could stand like that forever, framed in the doorway to her room. But Jack released his hand first, and she reluctantly took hers back as well.

  "Well…good night," Jack mumbled, nodding to the sunrise that was slowly breaking through the clouds. He began to walk away, his footsteps soft on the wood floor. "'Night," Schuyler whispered. "Sweet dreams?"

  "You bet," Jack replied.

  Schuyler laughed softly to herself as she unlocked the door to her room. She hadn't meant for Jack to hear her last words, but there were no secrets from a vampire with extrasensitive hearing.

  Later that morning, Schuyler and Bliss shared a taxi to the airport. Their flight was scheduled at eight, and both of them had had only two hours' sleep after all the ruckus.

  "You okay?" Schuyler asked.

  "God, I need a cigarette," Bliss said, fumbling for her purse. She brought one out and lit it, while rolling down the window at the same time. "Want one?”

  Schuyler shook her head.

  "I'm not sure," Bliss admitted. "I kind of wish I had waited. I don't know, I just felt like doing it. You know? Because Mimi talks about it all the time—and all those other girls, they always brag about their familiars. And I felt like such a stupid, I don't know, virgin or something.”

  "So what was it like?" Schuyler asked.

  "Honestly?”

  "Yeah.”

  "It was awesome. It's like you devour their soul, Schuyler. I could taste his…being. And then I felt great, you know. It's a high. A rush. I know why people do it now," Bliss confessed.

  The taxi whizzed along, and the girls looked out at a view of the flat, untroubled waters of the Caribbean. It was a spectacular sight, but both of them were glad to be going back to the dirty, gray streets of New York.

  "I haven't done it yet," Schuyler confessed, taking a deep breath.

  "You will," Bliss said, flicking her ashes out the window. "But take it from me when you do take a familiar, make sure he matters something to you. I feel a pull toward Morgan, and I don't want to. I hardly even know the guy.”

  PATIENT RECORD St. Dymphna Home for the Insane Name: Margaret Stanford Age: 16 Admitted: April 5, 1869 PREVIOUS HISTORY: Recommended isolation therapy, April 30, 1869 Patient unresponsive. Isolation therapy no longer recommended, May 23, 1869.

  Patient continues to have delirium, delusion, nightmares.

  Suicidal tendencies more pronounced.

  Patient is violent, danger to self and to others. Recommend transfer to full-security facility.

  PRESENT CONDITION: A week before patient was to be transferred, patient started responding to treatment. Patient stayed and was allowed to remain in our facility for several weeks, in which no signs of delusion, hysteria, or dementia were observed. Patient responds well to questions and appears to have fully recovered. Recommend release to family in three months if progress continues.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Every Valentine's Day, the student council sponsored a holiday fundraiser by selling roses that would be delivered in class. The roses came in four colors: white, yellow, red, and pink, and the subtleties of their meaning were parsed and analyzed by the female population to no end.

  Mimi had always understood it thus: white for love, yellow for friendship, red for passion, and pink for a secret crush. Every year on Valentine's Day, Mimi was the recipient of the biggest and most elaborate bouquets. One of her human familiars had once bought five dozen red roses to declare his undying devotion.

  Mimi perched on her stool in Chem lab, her first class that morning, and waited for the floral tidal wave.

 
The student council flunkies arrived with their buckets of flowers. "Happy Valentine's Day!" they chirped to a harried Mr. Korgan.

  "Go ahead, get it over with," he complained.

  Many of the girls received several small bouquets—most were yellow roses, which meant the girls had spent their money on each other, in the way girls do to make themselves feel better about not having a Valentine on that holiest of holidays.

  Schuyler, sitting at her usual table—they had rotated around so that she was back with Oliver again—accepted a pretty yellow bouquet. Oliver had sent her one last year as well, and sure enough, the accompanying card had his precise handwriting on it.

  "Thanks, Ollie," she smiled, inhaling the fresh blooms. "And here's one for you, Mr.

  Hazard-Perry," the freshman delivery girl said, handing him a bouquet of pink roses. Oliver colored. "Pink?”

  "A secret crush!" Schuyler teased. She had decided to send him the pink flowers since they always traded yellow roses, and it was getting too predictable. Why not spice it up a little.

  "Ha. Right. I know they're just from you, Sky," Oliver said, plucking the card from the top. He read it aloud: "Oliver, will you be my secret valentine? Love, Sky." He placed it back in the envelope and couldn't look at Schuyler for a moment.

  Schuyler wanted to peer inside his mind. She had been successful in accomplishing the first factor of the glom-telepathy—but Oliver had been taking lessons as well, and as soon as he had mastered the antidote to telepathy—occludo, which meant closing your mind to external influence—Schuyler couldn't get a read on him anymore.

  Bliss, who was sitting with Kingsley, received two red bouquets of similar size. "Ah, I have a rival I see," Kingsley drawled.

  "It's nothing. It's just from some guy I don't even know that well," Bliss mumbled. Sure enough, the second bouquet was from Morgan, who had ordered the flowers all the way from his dorm room in Rhode Island.

  "You are always on my mind. Love, M." his card read.

  Kingsley handed his bouquet to her personally. "I wish these were green, they would suit you better. The color clashes with your hair.”

  "It's fine," Bliss muttered. She still didn't know how she felt about Kingsley. Being with him seemed like a betrayal to Dylan's memory.

  Having handed out all the middle-size bouquets, the floral messengers were now bringing out the big guns. The three or four dozen mega-arrangements, roses of the deepest scarlet, all of which seemed to have Mimi Force's name on their cards. Soon, the area around her desk looked like a funeral parlor.

  "Looks like that's it," Mr. Korgan grumbled.

  "Wait we have one left," the runner said, bringing out what was surely the most expensive bouquet of all: a three-foot-tall arrangement of two hundred white roses, in the palest ivory color.

  All the girls swooned. Almost no boys bought white roses ever. It was too big a sign of commitment. But this one practically trumpeted a captured heart.

  The runner set the bouquet in front of Schuyler.

  Mimi raised an eyebrow. She had always won the roses lottery. What was this all about?

  "For me?" Schuyler asked, awestruck by the size of the thing.

  She took the card from the tallest stem.

  "For Schuyler, who doesn't like love stories." It was not signed.

  Mimi glared at her red bouquets; the flowers seemed to wilt a little at her stare. She didn't have to guess who had sent the dazzling white flowers to the little beast. White for light. White for love. White for forever.

  The time for her plan was at hand.

  When she walked by Schuyler's desk, she pretended to trip, and caught a strand of Schuyler's dark hair under her fingertips as she steadied herself on Schuyler's chair.

  "Ouch!" Schuyler yelped.

  "Watch it," Mimi sniffed, the strand of hair securely in hand.

  It wouldn't be long now.

  THIRTY-TWO

  After mastering the first principle of the glom, Schuyler had moved on to the second principle: suggestion. The second tenet was the ability to plant a seed of an idea in another mind.

  "It is how we push the Red Bloods to strive for excellence, art, and beauty," her grandfather revealed. "We use the suggestion. It is a useful tool. Most people don't like to think their ideas are not theirs, so we suggest them instead. If we did not, the humans would have never had the New Deal, Social Security, or even Lincoln Center.”

  Suggestion was even more complicated than telepathy. Lawrence explained that one had to do it subtly, so the human would not feel as if they were being manipulated. "Subliminal advertising was invented by one of our kind, of course, but when the Red Bloods discovered it, they immediately forbade its use. A pity.”

  The night before, Lawrence had asked her to suggest something to Anderson. After several hours of Schuyler attempting to not only find the target signal, but to send something to it, Anderson suddenly stood up and said that he felt like a cup of tea, and did anyone else want one?

  When he left, Lawrence looked over at his granddaughter.

  "That was you, wasn't it?”

  Schuyler nodded. It had taken almost all of her strength to send one simple request.

  "Good. Tomorrow we will move from afternoon delicacies to more important matters.”

  The next day at school, the effort it had taken to perform the suggestion took its toll on Schuyler. As she walked down the back hallways after third period, she suddenly began to feel woozy. She swooned and would have tumbled down the back stairs, had Jack Force not been there to catch her.

  "Hold on," he said. “Are you okay?”

  Schuyler opened her eyes. Jack was looking at her, concerned.

  "I just lost my footing…I fainted.”

  The girls on the stairway behind her exchanged knowing smiles. Fainting was a regular occurrence at the school, and a telltale sign of anorexia. Of course Schuyler Van Alen was suffering from an eating disorder. Everyone could tell the bitch was too skinny.

  "Let me take you home," Jack said, lifting her to her feet.

  "No—Oliver—my Conduit—he can…and really, it's nothing, just I've been working too hard on the glom," she said, half delirious.

  "I believe Oliver is currently giving a presentation in English class," Jack said. "But I can call for him if you'd like.”

  Schuyler shook her head. No, it wasn't fair to ask Ollie to take a bad grade just because she felt ill.

  "C'mon, let me put you in a cab and get you home safe.”

  Lawrence was writing in his study when Hattie knocked on the door. "Miss Schuyler is back, sir. It seems she had an episode at school.”

  He walked down the stairs to find Jack Force holding Schuyler in his arms. Jack explained that Schuyler had fallen asleep in the cab on the way home. "I'm Jack Force, by the way," he said as an introduction.

  "Yes, yes. I know who you are. Just put her down on the couch, there's a good lad," Lawrence instructed, leading Jack into the living room. Jack placed Schuyler gently on a velvetupholstered divan, and Lawrence covered her with an afghan blanket.

  Schuyler's skin was so pale it was transparent, and her dark lashes were wet against her cheek. She was breathing in irregular, tortured gasps. Lawrence put a cool hand on her hot forehead and asked Hattie to bring a thermometer. "She's burning up," he said in a tense voice.

  "She fainted at school," Jack explained. "She seemed all right in the cab, and then she said she felt sleepy, and…well…you can see.”

  Lawrence's frown deepened.

  "She's been working on the glom, she said." Jack looked sharply at Lawrence out of the corner of his eye.

  "Yes, we were practicing." Lawrence nodded. He sat next to his granddaughter and gently inserted a thermometer between her parched lips.

  "That's against Committee rules," Jack noted.

  "I don't recall you ever caring very much for rules, Abbadon," Lawrence said. Neither of them had acknowledged their former friendship until then. "You, who stood with us at Plymouth at great cos
t to your own reputation.”

  "Times change," Jack muttered. "If what you say is true, then she has been weakened by your own hand.”

  Lawrence pulled the thermometer out of Schuyler's mouth. "One hundred and twelve," he said matter-of-factly. A temperature that would certainly spell imminent death or permanent damage to a mortal. But Schuyler was a vampire, and it was still within an acceptable range for her kind. "A tad high, perhaps," Lawrence pronounced. "But nothing a good rest won't cure.”

  A few minutes later, Schuyler woke up to find Jack and her grandfather looking at her keenly. She shivered underneath the wool blanket and pulled it around her shoulders tightly.

  "My dear, has this happened before?”

  "Sometimes," Schuyler acknowledged softly.

  "After lessons?”

  Schuyler nodded. She hadn't admitted it, because she wanted the lessons to continue.

  "I should have seen this. The first time this happened—when you went into hibernation that was several days after you chased me in Venice, was it not?”

  Schuyler nodded. She remembered what Dr. Pat had said: Sometimes it's a delayed reaction.

  "I have figured out why you are so weak," Lawrence said. "I chastise myself for not realizing the problem earlier. It's simple. By exercising your vampire powers, your blue-blood cells are working overtime, and since your red-blood cells aren't high to begin with because of the mixed nature of your blood composition—your energy flags. There is only one solution to keep your blood counts in the normal range. You must take a human familiar.”

  "But I'm not even eighteen," Schuyler protested, citing the age of consent for the Sacred Kiss. "I was kind of planning on waiting.”

  "This is serious, Schuyler. I've already lost your mother to a coma, I don't want to lose you as well. While you possess certain special powers that vampires your age wouldn't even dream of having, in many ways, you are also much weaker than the average Blue Blood. You cannot escape from the progress of the transformation, but you can control some of its more adverse effects. You must take a familiar sooner than eighteen. A human boy. For your own sake.”