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“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 tod
ay, 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 then.
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.
