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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. H
ad 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 like 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.
