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“Whatever it was, you were very lucky. I’ve seen victims of blood spells. It’s not pretty,” Deming said, sparing Mimi the details: the scraping of remains, the consequent blood burning that was a mercy, since the immortal spirit had been blasted into nothingness. Blood spells were nasty little devices, a way to harness the glom and unleash its effects on one person, targeting the molecules in the vampire’s blood. “Anyway, Coven disbandment seems a rather radical proposition,” she observed.
“They’re trying to get rid of me because they know I would never allow it,” the Regent said, looking up with her eyes bright. “Every vampire for himself? No more cycle births? Don’t they remember what it was like before? If Charles was here they would never even attempt something like this.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll find your killer,” Deming said, putting a hand on Mimi’s arm.
“Good.” The Regent had a covetous look on her that Deming didn’t fully understand until she realized that Mimi was jealous of her. Jealous that Deming had been able to save her hostage, whereas Mimi had fallen short—and as punishment, her Coven’s very foundation was imperiled. It was surely not what she had wanted to accomplish when she had removed the wards.
“It wasn’t your fault, what happened to Victoria,” Deming said. “You shouldn’t blame yourself. Don’t worry. I won’t fail. I never have.”
Mimi shook her hand. “Make sure that you don’t. What the Elders don’t realize is that if they succeed in disbanding us . . . there is a very real possibility that we will never rise again.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The New Girl
The room she had been assigned was a small one that faced the shaft, so that the window opened to a view of a brick wall, five feet away. In Shanghai she had command of a top-floor penthouse, although pollution in the city was so bad she almost had the same view there as here: a gray darkness. The Lennox brothers, who lived on the top floor, had offered their help, but she had refused them for now. She worked better alone.
Deming grabbed her bag and left the building, planning on taking the subway uptown. The pressure on her to deliver was intense, but she savored the challenge. There was nothing she liked more than a zero endgame, especially since she had no intention of losing. Colleagues in Shanghai had called the Chen twins arrogant, but she didn’t see it that way. The twins were different from the rest. Like the legendary Kingsley Martin, they did whatever it took to get results. They were cold and ruthless, and would stop at nothing to get to the truth. Which was why the Coven had felt comfortable in sending one of them to New York, since they got to keep the other.
This was her third embed mission since becoming a Venator a year ago (she and Dehua had taken advantage of the new rules regarding recruitment, and like the Force twins, had joined up early), and she prepared herself mentally for the day to come. Until Liling Tang’s abduction, the Asian Coven’s biggest headache had been human rights abuses—too many vampires draining their familiars to full consumption and leaving a trail of Red Blood corpses in their wake, or else using memory wipes a little too liberally, so that humans became mentally impaired. Right now her sister was in the rural countryside, tracking down a probrae spiritus, a vampire who was using the glom to give the local human population nightmares.
The Duchesne assignment was more akin to what they had pulled at the International School, when they had been brought in on the kidnapping case. Liling Tang had run around with a sophisticated expatriate crowd, shunning the usual clique of rich kids from the Communist aristocracy. Her friends had been Blue Bloods from around the world, and her kidnapper a European transfer. The crime had caused the Chinese Conclave to consider seceding from the global vampire community, but so far they had elected to remain loyal to New York.
Deming was well aware that Duchesne was unlike your typical American high school—there were no cheerleaders prancing about in tiny skirts that barely covered their behinds, no hulking football players stalking the hallways, no show choir geeks, no threat of slushie facials (perhaps she had just watched too much American television), but the moment she stepped through its ornate double doors, she found it was just like everywhere else.
There was a rigid separation of the wheat from the chaff, the cool from the dorky, the beautiful from the not. The popular kids, Victoria’s friends among them, congregated in the outdoor courtyard before the first bell: the girls with enviable figures, sleek hair and blinding teeth, holding giant Parisian tote bags as backpacks, surrounded by handsome boys, tousled and dreamy-looking, their jackets and ties askew, as if they had rolled up to school straight from bed. This was the in-crowd, the charmed circle, the Blue Bloods—this was the group Deming was meant to join.
It shouldn’t be too hard, Deming thought. She did not have any false modesty about her looks: she knew she was pretty, with her straight black hair that fell all the way down her back, coffee-colored skin, her wide eyes and button nose, her slim boyish build. Plus, she had a lot of experience being “the New Girl.” Her cycle father was an industrialist with many holdings all over the world, and the twins had been educated in London, Tehran, Johannesburg, and Hong Kong. She knew how to get along with people, how to make them like her.
All Committee meetings, Junior and Senior, were postponed for the time being, as the Wardens were too busy strengthening the wards around the Coven after the Regent’s impulsive action. No one even knew how badly the Regent had exposed them to their enemies and what the repercussions would be. No wonder the Conclave had lost its faith in its leader. No wonder the future of the Coven was on the brink.
It was too bad the meetings had been canceled indefinitely. It would have been an easy way to mingle with the group without being noticed. Deming looked at her schedule. Her first class was The Spirit of the Self, a humanities elective for upperclassmen. Whoever had planned the school’s curriculum was certainly given to alliteration: she could have taken Debating Decisions (ethics), Movement and Motion (a dance class), or From Barriers to Bridges (an English class, to Deming’s surprise). Whatever happened to plain old History or Algebra or Art?
She had chosen the class because three of her top suspects were enrolled as well, and took a seat next to Francis Kernochan, whom everyone called Froggy, one of the two boys last seen with Victoria Taylor at Jamie Kip’s party. Froggy certainly didn’t look like someone keeping a terrible secret. The boy had an open, amiable face, hair an unfortunate shade of orange, and from the slouch of his rounded shoulders alone, an easygoing demeanor. Not that it meant anything. The Blue Blood boy from Guizhou who had drained twenty-four familiars to death had the face of an angel.
“Excuse me,” she said, as her messenger bag brushed the elbow of the girl seated on her other side.
“Are those chopsticks?” the girl asked. Deming looked up to see a pretty strawberry blonde sizing her up. Piper Crandall. Suspect Number Two. As Victoria’s best friend, she was the one who would have the most reason to harm the girl. In Deming’s experience, it was always those closest to us who also wished us dead.
“That’s so cool,” Piper told her.
“Thanks.” Deming’s hand reflexively went to pat the long
black hair she wore in a messy bun on the top of her head, secured with elegant sterling-silver chopsticks, the current trend in Shanghai. They weren’t any old chopsticks either: they had been forged by the master, Alalbiel, and when joined together they formed her sword, Ren Ci Sha Shou, Mercy-Killer.
“I love your watch,” she said, pointing to Piper’s wrist. “Is it vintage?”
“An original Cartier, from when Louis still made them.” Piper smiled. “Funny how Red Bloods think you can’t take it with you. I’ve had this watch for almost two hundred years.”
“It’s gorgeous,” said Deming, who didn’t need to use the glom to know the road to female friendship was paved with flattery. Why use the glom when common sense and insight into human (and vampire) behavior was available? Too many Truth Seekers had become lazy and dependent on telepathic tricks. They had lost the ability to think without them.
“Maybe I’ll let you borrow it sometime if you teach me how to wear my hair that way,” Piper said.
“Anytime,” Deming said. “I’m Deming Chen.” As part of her cover she had rolled into Duchesne wearing the latest fashions, and noticed Piper looking approvingly at her expensive handbag.
“Piper Crandall. I know who you are. We got the Conclave memo that you had transferred here. Where are you staying?”
“My uncle’s a Venator and he has some rooms on Bleecker.”
