Les vampires de Manhattan

by Melissa de la Cruz

  Fletcher entered, looking rumpled and sheepish. Oliver quickly covered up the pentagram, putting the rug back in its place and smoothing out the bump with his shoe.

  “Sorry, sir—she put a spell on me. She used to be a Venator, did you know?” Fletcher asked.

  “I know.”

  “Everything all right, sir?”

  Oliver didn’t answer at first. He was recalling his conversation with Sam Lennox after the briefing, when they had discussed the pentagrams all over the city.

  “Pentagrams amplify one’s power, but there are other uses for them,” Oliver had said. “Let’s think it through.”

  “Well, traditionally in dark magic, pentagrams are used to call up a demon, to trap a dark spirit to do your bidding,” Sam said.

  “So whoever is doing this is trying to trap a demon?”

  The Venator chief had sighed heavily. “Or let one out of Hell.”

  But Lucifer was dead. Schuyler had seen to that.

  The greatest act of the devil was to convince people he didn’t exist.

  “Sir?” Fletcher asked. “You don’t look well.”

  “I’m fine,” Oliver said, stepping over the carpet with a smile. “Everything is fine.”

  11 A NIGHT AT THE HOLIDAY

  FAR DOWNTOWN, at a bar that Oliver used to patronize when he was a mortal teenager but not since moving up in the world, Ara sat on a creaky leather barstool and glowered at her full beer stein. She didn’t want to be there—the place brought back too many bad memories—but Edon had made her.

  The Holiday was an East Village landmark, harking back to the days when transgendered hookers, drug dealers, and poor artsy kids who might be one or both dominated the area. Manhattan today might be filled with slick, trendy watering holes that boasted arty “mixologists” who were obsessive about their custom cocktails, made with pureed fresh fruit, homemade bitters, and stovetop sugar syrup and priced in the double digits, but there was none of that at the Holiday.

  It was a small, cheerful, shabby little bar, aptly named because it was Christmas year-round, with twinkling lights and garlands across the mantel. It was also owned by a witch who was privy to the vampires’ secrets, which made it a safe haven and thus a go-to watering hole for off-duty Venators. The beer was cold, the chips were crisp, and if the bartenders didn’t know your name, they were at least sympathetic to your problems.

  “Mixologists my ass,” one of them said as he pulled the tap, filling a frosty mug with a dark, rich brew and placing it in front of Edon. “We’re slingers. We slaaang draaanks,” he crooned.

  Edon lifted his mug in acknowledgment and turned to Ara, who had yet to take a sip from her glass. “You all right?”

  “I’m great,” Ara said sullenly, her mind on the case. So far all the boys at Darcy’s party had checked out—the Blue Bloods among them didn’t match the blood signature on Georgina. But then that wasn’t a surprise, as they were Coven members and the Venators already knew whoever killed her wasn’t registered.

  Ara should have been working, not drinking, but Edon had insisted they needed a break. “Do we have to be here?” she asked, raising her eyebrows at a bunch of noovs nearby using their crescent blades as darts and hitting the bull’s-eye every time.

  “Looks fun,” Edon said, shrugging. “You’ve been a Venator how long? And you’ve never been here?”

  “That’s not what I said. I’ve been here. Many times.” She glowered. Too many to speak of, not to mention that one particular night just the other month.

  “Okay, then.” He finished his drink in short order and another materialized just as quickly. More Venators entered—shuffling in a sea of black, greeting each other heartily, and calling out their drink orders—but none of them made their way to Ara, and most seemed to either avoid or deliberately ignore her. Nor did she wave any of them over, either. Ben Denham caught her eye and smiled, but she turned away from him without returning it. It was true, she didn’t pal around much, and especially after what happened, she had a feeling she wasn’t too welcome. Ben would find out the gossip about her soon enough and learn to avoid her, too.

  “It’s not such a bad thing to have friends, Scott, to have people who’ve got your back,” Edon said, wiping the foam off his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Like the boys Deming asked you about?”

  Edon nodded. “My brothers, yeah. When I’m done with whatever this is here, I’ll go back to them.”

  “Back to keeping time.”

  “Someone has to,” he said dismissively.

  Ara sighed. She hadn’t meant it as a dis; she was just trying to take her mind off the case. She could see it again even with her eyes open—the girl’s neck, the twin deep, open wounds. She’d been savaged, not kissed, and the blood, so much blood… it was shocking to see how much blood one person could hold, could lose. A monster had done this to her. But vampires were not monsters. The notion that they were creatures to be feared, the devil’s minions, was the work of the Conspiracy, to keep mortals from knowing the truth about their existence. Coven rules concerning behavior around and toward humans were even stricter now. Mortal life was more sacred to the Coven, and familiars were cherished more than ever.

  Ara had yet to take a human familiar for her own, to perform the Sacred Kiss, the ritual sucking of blood. It was an intimate act, and the first time it was performed it would bind a vampire and a mortal for life—so she wanted to choose wisely. Human familiars were not necessarily romantic relationships, and in the past taking one’s human familiar as a bondmate had been forbidden. But the practice was commonplace now, since so many vampires had lost their immortal mates in the War and its aftermath. The rules had changed out of necessity, and the Regent himself was about to take his familiar as bondmate. Rumor had it that it was only a matter of time before they made it official.

  Speaking of intimate acts, her mind wandered to the last time she had been here, when she had been sitting at this same booth, but with a different person. It all got so murky—love and blood and sex and mortality.

  “She probably thought it was fun,” Ara said bitterly, voicing her thoughts. “Being chosen to be a familiar, having a vampire for a boyfriend. They all want one now, and we only have ourselves to blame. Fucking Conspiracy. I don’t know who we think we’re fooling.”

  “What about a wolf boyfriend?” Edon joked. “I heard we run hot rather than cold and tend to take our shirts off at every opportunity.”

  “You’re not supposed to use someone so young, to bind them to you so early,” she said, ignoring him.

  Edon shrugged. “But people do it all the time.”

  “People suck.”

  “No, vampires suck,” Edon said reasonably. He motioned to the bartender to pour another drink.

  Ara remembered the trace memory on the blood she had licked—the girl’s fear, the narrow tunnels—the girl knew she had been brought down there to die. She knew. She had died with her eyes open, screaming. Someone’s little girl.

  Meanwhile, in the back of the bar, someone else’s little girl was lying across a table while vampires took turns sucking blood from a thin line on her exposed belly. She was willing and eager, and had pulled up her shirt to just below her bra, displaying a taut, toned abdomen. The vampires who surrounded her weren’t Venators, and they weren’t taking enough blood to bind her to them, just getting a taste and chasing it down with a slug of tequila. It was a party trick. A “bloody shot.”

  “Didn’t take you for a prude,” Edon said, when she grimaced in distaste.

  “Why are we here, Edon?”

  “Camaraderie.”

  She sniffed. “Right—because I’m so popular, as you can see.”

  “Why the bad blood between you and D?” he asked, as the woman in question stalked in and pointedly waved to Edon while snubbing Ara. They watched, somewhat admiringly, as the crowd parted for the beautiful Venator, and Deming was welcomed with open arms and loud exclamations of affection from the group of h
ard-boiled demon chasers. Ara felt a sharp pang of jealousy and had to tell herself that really she was the one who’d been wronged. She was the younger party, the innocent.

  “You ever gonna fess up?” Edon prodded.

  “You really look like that because you’ve been working undercover?” she countered. “You know what I think? I think you work undercover because it’s an excuse to look like that. Why aren’t you with the wolves? What are you doing hanging out with us bloodsuckers?”

  It was Edon’s turn to glower and look away.

  “Aha, so the wolf’s got secrets, too.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly.

  I know they said you were beautiful and golden and glorious, she thought. And now you’re a wiseass wreck with bad teeth.

  “They said we won the War,” Edon said finally. “But mine was a hollow victory.” He looked so crushed and so sad that she wanted to take back her teasing. She knew what it was like in the War’s aftermath, how much the victory had cost her. Sometimes, she wasn’t even sure what they had won.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s all right, angel,” he said, giving her his crooked yellow smile again, and his eyes crinkled in a way that made her heart jump, just a little.

  Ara looked at him and then picked up her beer glass and downed the amber liquid in five gulps. “Damn it,” she said as she slammed the glass back on the bar and she stood from her chair.

  Fuck this. Fuck all this. Pentagrams all over the city, dead girls stuffed in dark holes, her partner’s bleak sadness, and her own recent and tawdry past. It was too much to think about at the moment. She longed for oblivion, to forget for just a little while, and maybe those noovs had the right idea. “Come on, dog. Let’s see if we can get one of those bloody shots.”

  12 SPEAK, MEMORY

  KINGSLEY WAS GONE when Mimi woke up the next morning. The apartment had a lonely, abandoned quality it didn’t have before, with highball glasses left on the coffee table, her shoes strewn on the rug, along with her dress, crumpled and discarded. He hadn’t left a note, not that she had expected him to. He always came and went as he pleased, even when they were married. It saddened her to realize she was thinking of their union in the past tense. Mimi tried to put it out of her mind for now, knowing he would show up when he wanted; he knew where to find her.

  She tried calling Ivy’s number again, but there was no answer, and the voice mail was full and not accepting any new messages. Mimi remembered that Ivy had a roommate, Jake Littman, a photographer who wasn’t quite as successful as she was, but was nonetheless represented by Murray. She logged into the gallery’s database to find his number and dialed. Jake told her he hadn’t heard from her in a week or so, but that was Ivy. She did this, disappeared once in a while. “She’ll turn up soon enough,” he said. “Her mom told me she’s been like this since she was a teenager.”

  Mimi explained that it was a little more serious this time—Ivy was expected at a patrons’ dinner on Thursday evening, and the museum had been trying to reach her so that she could approve the copy they had written to describe her work.

  “Okay, I just noticed her Twitter hasn’t been updated since last Sunday,” Jake said, typing in the background. “Or her Instagram. That is weird. Ivy’s an attention whore. Hmm. Now I am worried. Will you call me if she checks in?”

  Mimi promised she would and went to work at the gallery. Murray was attempting to soothe an irate client who had called to complain that the price of a painting he’d purchased from them had sold at auction for much lower than he had paid for it, which of course Murray tried to explain was out of his hands; he advised clients to purchase art for love, not the fickle tastes of the art market. She shook her head at the nerve of some people.

  “Dear Lord, I thought he would never get off,” Murray said when he finally hung up the phone. “Why is it my fault? I didn’t tell him to sell it!”

  She asked him if he had heard from Ivy, and of course, he hadn’t, either. “She’ll turn up for the dinner,” Murray said, fanning himself with a price sheet. “She never turns down a free meal. Artists!”

  They had a shared chuckle over that, and Mimi went back to work, although it was hard to concentrate, distracted as she was, wondering what Kingsley was up to all day. He was somewhere in New York, but what was he doing? He was in deep with something, but he wouldn’t tell her what it was, even as he so desperately seemed to need her help. His reckless and rebellious nature had been tamed by love and marriage, but Kingsley had a wild streak in him and could go off the edge. What had he gotten himself into this time? And why didn’t he trust the Coven?

  Mimi had never been the kind of girl who waited by the phone, and she was annoyed to find she kept waiting for Kingsley to turn up.

  When he finally did at the end of the day, she was more than a little huffy. He offered no explanation for his actions, as usual. But he seemed more cheerful than the night before. “Hello, darling. Miss me?”

  She snorted. “What’s going on now?”

  “I read the book. New headquarters is something else, isn’t it?”

  Mimi was impressed despite trying not to be. Not many people could break in and out of the Repository as if it had a rotating door. “So?”

  “But the page I need is locked, and I can’t read it without your help,” he said with a broad grin.

  She crossed her arms across her chest. “Really.”

  “Well, are you coming or not?” he asked, walking away.

  After hesitating for only a brief moment, she followed him, motioning to Donovan to cover the phones.

  Kingsley led her to a small coffee shop, where he ordered his usual tall latte with an inordinate amount of sugar. “So, where’s this book?” she asked.

  “In here,” he said, pointing to the side of his head.

  “Come again?”

  “The book, Arcana de Inferno, it’s here,” he said, tapping again. Of course, he was talking about the vampire sight, the photographic memory that was part of their supernatural abilities. Truth was, Mimi rarely read anything beyond Vogue, and there was no reason to recall the articles verbatim, even if the fashions were sealed in her memory.

  Kingsley stirred his coffee slowly. “I didn’t have much time, so I just scanned the whole thing. But now we can take our leisure inside my memory palace to read it.”

  She nodded, relieved he had been working instead of carousing. A “memory palace,” Mimi knew, was a mnemonic device used to preserve and improve memories. It had been popular practice during Greek and Roman times, as a way to replicate what the vampires did naturally, without even thinking.

  “Let’s go down the rabbit hole,” he said.

  “Right now? Here?”

  “They won’t notice. We’ll be back in a second,” he said and reached across the table to hold her hand.

  Mimi supposed she didn’t have a choice, and after a moment’s hesitation, she looked deep into his eyes and slipped easily back into the shadow world, the world where Venators walked into dreams and read minds, where they could access another’s memories. All these years together, and she had never been inside his mind, and part of her was like a kid in a candy shop, excited to finally be privy to all of his secrets, to his dark dreams and twisted ambitions. She fully expected it to be a full-time bacchanalia or resemble a hazy opium den. He might’ve turned into a boring homesteader in Hell, but Kingsley had lived a thousand lives on earth, chock-full of excitement and wickedness. So she was surprised and a bit touched to find that the inside of his mind was like stepping into a cramped apartment full of books. He was being too modest—there were hundreds, if not thousands and thousands of books in here, and she picked her way carefully through the ziggurats of hardcover tomes.

  “Over here,” he called, waving from the open doorway that led up to a spiral stairway.

  She followed him but hesitated, hearing music through a closed door on the other side of the room. The melody was
familiar, and she was drawn to it, feeling a mixture of dread and curiosity. She turned away from him and toward the sound instead. When she reached the door and peered through the peephole, she was not surprised to discover a vision of the two of them on their wedding day. This was his memory of that moment. They had forsaken a big wedding and had exchanged vows with only each other as witnesses. Mimi stood watching for a while, entranced by the sight of the two of them, how happy they looked. She remembered the words he had whispered in her ear that day, and what she had said in return, and how her breath caught in her throat for a moment when she saw the light shining in his eyes.

  “Hello?” Kingsley—the real Kingsley—called from upstairs.

  “Coming!” she called back, wrenching herself away from their past, her heart racing, and as she ran toward him, she saw something else, something hovering in the hallways of his mind—an image that would haunt her later. For now, she attempted a casual smile.

  “Snooping?” he asked pointedly.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said.

  He smiled to let her know he still found her sharp tongue amusing. “This is where I keep the rare and important books,” he told her, motioning to a tidy bookshelf where the books were arranged by color, from pale to dark, a rainbow of spines. Kingsley drew out the first book on the highest shelf. It was white with gold lettering on the front. Upon closer inspection, the gold embossing on the cover also showed a serpent with a forked tongue coiled around a gate. Mimi recognized that gate. It was the one that kept souls trapped inside the underworld.

  The book contained all the knowledge of the underworld, the history of Hell, the secrets lost to Time. It would tell them why Hell’s Bells were ringing and what kind of monster had been unleashed from the abyss. Or so they hoped.

  “What is it?” Mimi asked, when she saw the page Kingsley had opened to. It was completely white, with nothing on it. “It’s blank.”