Les vampires de Manhattan

by Melissa de la Cruz

  For the next week or so, Kingsley worked on Georgina, spending time with her, befriending her. Darcy told everyone Georgina had “stolen” him, and they let her think that. There was nothing inappropriate between them. Kingsley could see that mostly what Georgina needed was a friend. School had started, and she was working too hard; her parents put a lot of pressure on her to do well, and it was getting to her. Plus, there were the usual teenage crises like not having enough money and friends being more like enemies, like Darcy for one.

  She liked to come to his place and study there. It was a nice house, he had to agree; a little dusty and the air was a little stale, but once the windows were open it was all right. He’d told her his parents were in Bermuda and he was homeschooled.

  “Do you know where Darcy gets those pills? Angel blood?” he asked casually one afternoon after they’d met. He was smoking by the windows.

  Georgina tapped a pencil against her cheek. “I don’t know. She mentioned some friends from some kind of committee were passing them out.”

  “Committee?” He raised an eyebrow. There were many committees in New York, but there was only one that mattered to the Coven.

  “Yeah, I think it’s some kind of social group, etiquette classes, that sort of thing.”

  “And it’s a drug front?”

  “I don’t know, okay?” She laughed. “I mean, I just heard her talking about getting more of it during a ‘committee meeting.’ ”

  “Can you find out more?”

  “Sure, why? I thought you didn’t take that crap. What are you, some kind of cop?” she asked.

  “Maybe.” He smiled.

  “Damien, you are so lame. Okay. Whatever. I’ll find out. See you later. My mom’s here,” she said. She walked out the door of Schuyler’s old house. It was the safest house in the Coven, and his old friend wouldn’t mind. It wasn’t as if she was using it right now. Kingsley had put up wards around the place and made sure he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “I found out where the Committee’s getting it,” Georgina said on his voice mail, sounding terrified the next Saturday evening. “Darcy’s having a party tonight. Meet me there. I’ll text you the address. By the way, if you are a cop, I want some kind of award or citation or something. I don’t know what this is, but I’m scared, Damien. I don’t want any part of it. I think someone’s been following me around since I’ve been asking questions about the pills. But you’ll make it okay, right, Damien? Right?”

  Kingsley called her back, but she didn’t pick up the phone. He had been working on his own on this, and his first instinct was to contact his old friends in the Coven. But when he heard the Committee was involved and that Georgina was scared, he changed his mind.

  Someone from the Coven was distributing angel blood. Possibly even Allegra’s blood.

  But who?

  Georgina wasn’t at Darcy’s party, and no one seemed to know where she had gone. There was another text on his phone. He’d asked her to try to ask the kids she knew in the Committee to let them know she was buying and would pay a pretty price for it. It looked like they hooked the big fish.

  DARCY’S SUPPLIER SAID TO MEET HIM AT CANAL AND MOTT. I TOLD HIM WHAT YOU SAID THAT YOU WOULD PAY TRIPLE WHAT SHE DOES.

  Good girl, Kingsley thought. She could work undercover one day. Maybe he would get her a job as a human Conduit for the Venators.

  It was a busy Saturday night in Soho, and the crowds were thick on the sidewalk—NYU students roaming in packs, girls in high heels tottering down the cobblestones to the cocktail bars, couples on dates, arm in arm, headed to the little restaurants. The stores were shuttered, but their window displays were illuminated. He stood at the corner, waiting for Georgina, and decided to grab a double latte. Coffee was a weakness of his.

  Kingsley sat on a bench and waited. Fifteen minutes. Thirty. There was no Georgina. No one at all. He called her cell phone again. No answer. Forty-five minutes passed. Even with New York traffic that was a long time. An hour stretched into two, and he was worried now. He wandered off to get another coffee, and when he came back, he saw that the intersection of Canal and Mott had a small hidden door in the ground. One that had a pentagram etched on its surface.

  Kingsley suddenly had a terrible feeling that he was too slow. Too slow. He dashed into the hole and fell into the dark cavern. “GEORGINA!” he yelled. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

  But already he knew it was too late. Why had he given her the job? Why had he asked her to do something so dangerous? Had he really been in the underworld that long to have made such a tragic mistake? To give a schoolgirl a Venator’s job? What was he thinking?

  When he found her, she was dead.

  She was lying in a puddle, bleeding from the wounds on her neck. She had found out who was distributing those angel pills and it had gotten her murdered. She had struggled and fought, but she was no match for her enemy, for her killer. Her killer had taken her left hand and had drawn a bloody pentagram on the wall.

  He carried her away from the pentagram’s dark influence and hid her body in a safe place in the tunnels, where the Venators would find her, because they always did.

  “So that’s my story. After that happened, I realized I needed help, so I went to see my wife. She’s the only one I can trust. I was, ah—Reluctant to tell her what I was up to—I didn’t think she would take kindly to finding out I was clubbing with teenagers—but I decided I had to risk it. Then I went back to hang out with Darcy to see if she would tell me anything more about where she got it. But she didn’t know. She said the pills would just appear in her locker one day. In this bag.”

  He showed them the plastic bag he had shown Mimi, the one with the five silver triangles. The one that Ara had found on the Nephilim and in the burned-out hive.

  “You’ve seen this before, I take it?” Kingsley asked.

  Ara nodded. “We found their hive. So I was right—they were using the pentagrams to mark their territory and identify their targets. That’s why they were all over New York. Because they were everywhere.”

  “They knew I was here. They marked my hiding place as a warning,” Kingsley said.

  “Yeah, we saw the pentagram on the Van Alen safe house,” said Edon. “Nephilim selling angel blood. Allegra’s Sacrifice. Who’d have thought?”

  “In death is life,” Kingsley muttered.

  “What did you say?” asked Ara.

  “It’s something I read in the Book of Hell, below a pentagram. In death is life. Why?”

  “That’s interesting, isn’t it? Because those two dead girls—the ones who were bitten—their bodies are missing, and the Venators said it was as if they had just walked out of the morgue,” Ara said.

  Kingsley snapped his fingers. “Because that’s exactly what they did. In death is life, the Little King will rise again. Somehow, whoever has done this has made the Conspiracy real. It’s a joke on us, on the Blue Bloods,” Kingsley said. “A cosmic joke.”

  “Because of course there’s no such thing as vampires. A vampire bite can’t turn you into one. That’s only a fairy tale,” Edon said.

  Kingsley sighed. “Except now it isn’t. Lucifer’s made a mockery of us. He’s made our lies true. Mortals take the angel drug, and when humans are bitten to death, they rise up again as vampires.”

  34 DEVIL’S OWN

  ARA JUMPED DOWN from the table in excitement. “We need to stop it—Find out who’s gotten it—Get every human familiar tested before their vampires bite them…”

  “We will,” Kingsley said. “So far, it looks as if it’s just a few club kids. It can’t have gotten far.”

  “But where were they getting it? The blood, I mean?” Edon asked. “Allegra has left the building, so to speak.”

  “The paintings,” Kingsley said. “They have to be from the paintings. Stephen’s paintings of Allegra. He used his blood in the paint.”

  “His blood—but not hers.”

  “But when a vampire takes a human familiar their blood mixes—so ev
en if it was his blood, it was hers as well. They are one and the same. That is the essence of the blood bond,” Kingsley said. “When Mimi reminded me of that last night, I knew where it came from.” He should have confided in her earlier, he thought. His wife had always been so clever.

  “The paintings had been in storage until a few months ago. We can check the records, see who had access to it,” Ara said.

  “But here’s the thing,” Kingsley said. “This is the same pill from a few weeks ago. The one Darcy gave me. Look.” He removed an envelope from his pocket.

  He showed them the pill—it was coal black now, shiny, like a black diamond. “This isn’t just angel blood. If it was, it would remain white. Allegra was pure-blooded. And if what we think is true, if those dead girls are walking around, alive, it’s not just her blood that made them so. An angel’s blood is not enough to wake the dead. You need a demon for that.”

  “Demon’s blood?”

  “Or a demon’s remains,” Kingsley said. “The chimes of Helheim signal the beginning of the eternal darkness brought by the Morningstar’s White Worm to poison the gift of the Heavens.” He quoted from the Book of Hell. “White Worm… like a snake… A snake sheds its skin… its skin remains… Lucifer’s remains. His ashes,” Kingsley said. He turned to Ara. “Do you know where they are?”

  “Blood-locked in the Repository, in the safest safe in the world. Guarded by Venators.” Ara looked at them. “Oh my God, the missing time stamps… this is what was stolen that night.”

  “Lucifer’s remains are in these pills,” Kingsley said, his voice hoarse. “It’s the only explanation. An angel and a demon together. Lucifer stole the gift of procreation from the mortal world to create the Nephilim, but his blood would be too potent; it would be enough to raise the dead, but not turn them into—”

  “—vampires,” Edon said. “At least the popular conception of such. Whoever did this needed Allegra’s blood for that. Together they turn mortals into monsters.”

  “The Nephilim mean to infect the populace but let the Blue Bloods do the dirty work for them,” said Ara.

  “We need to find those dead girls before they bite anyone else. Limit the contagion. Shut it down before it gets too far,” Kingsley said.

  “But first—we need to stop the distribution at the source. Darcy said she got it from the Committee, right?” Ara asked.

  “That’s all she would tell me. I kept trying to get her to tell me more. I even used the mind lock on her, but someone had tampered with her memories,” Kingsley said.

  “You broke the rules.”

  “I decided it was time. Georgina was dead. There were no more rules. But the supplier had gotten to her first. Someone knew I was looking around and started covering their tracks.”

  Ara told them of the suspicion she’d had earlier, that they had assumed because the blood signature on file wasn’t in the records that the vampire who had killed Georgina and Ivy was a renegade. But what if the records had been scrubbed? What if they were able to find it that way?

  “So whoever did this had access to the Committee, access to the Repository, access to the blood records… someone who can manipulate the time stamps… Other than Oliver… who has this kind of access?” Kingsley asked.

  “There’s only one other person in the Coven,” Edon said. “You know who it is.”

  Kingsley nodded.

  “No,” Ara said. “No, you’re wrong.”

  “Ara,” Edon said. “He sent for me to muzzle you. He thought I would be a fuckup and that I would distract you from your work. You and Rowena were getting too close to the truth.”

  She closed her eyes and felt ill. She had been close to solving the mystery of the pentagrams, and after she had killed that Nephilim downtown, he had taken her home, had made love to her, so she couldn’t see what he really was.

  Sam Lennox.

  Venator chief.

  Murderer.

  35 KING WITHOUT A CROWN

  THE APARTMENT WAS ALL WHITE, and when Oliver woke up, his first thought was that maybe he had died and gone to Heaven. Only he was never going there. He was immortal now, a vampire; he had chosen to live on earth forever. Maybe it was all a bad dream, and when he got out of bed, Finn would be alive and well, and everything would be just the same as ever.

  Except the girl who walked through the doorway was not his love but his friend. Mimi smiled at him sadly. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I’m living in a nightmare. Wake me up, will you?”

  “You’re safe with me. Kingsley cloaked my apartment, they won’t find you here,” she said. She placed a glass of water on the side table. “Look at us, nothing ever changes; we’re still here, still fighting Lucifer.”

  “Lucifer is dead.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I kept telling Kingsley, too,” she said. “Buck up, Oliver, we’ll figure it out.”

  “Mimi, how you’ve changed,” he said with a smile.

  “Have I?”

  “You were never this optimistic before.”

  “Well, we did get him last time,” she said.

  Oliver brooded on that. They hadn’t seen each other in ten years, and they should have been catching up on their lives, sharing stories. Instead, only the heavy weight of grief hung between them. He had been so proud of all he had done, so proud of his work, what he had built, and now he had lost everything.

  “What happens now?” he asked aloud.

  “Rest,” Mimi said. “Rest. When Kingsley gets back, we’ll figure out what to do.”

  She left him alone again.

  Oliver slumped back into the pillows. What happened back there? Had he really killed her? How had he lost control? He had stopped—he knew he had to—he would never deliberately kill her. Oh, God—did he kill her?

  Finn.

  Where are you?

  This can’t be real.

  She was killed by her vampire and she was blood bound to him. He held the blood of the Coven in his blood, he was their Regis but now his own Venators were after him, they were hunting him; he was a criminal.

  Mimi told him that there was something going on, about some drug Kingsley had discovered that was being distributed by the Committee to the mortal populace. It was contained with club kids for now, but who knows where it would end. Angel blood, it was called. There was a traitor in the Coven, just like before. His Coven. His peaceful, wonderful Coven. The community he had brought back from the ashes. The community that was now falling apart, right when they were to celebrate its return. What was his mistake? What had he done wrong?

  There was something in Finn’s blood, he remembered…

  Angel blood. Infection.

  How had he not seen it before?

  Poison.

  It was why he had lost his sense of taste, his sense of smell, why the sun had started to hurt his eyes. Whatever had poisoned her had also poisoned him. The darkness was inside him as well, but he had to be certain.

  He put on a robe over the pajamas Mimi had loaned him and walked out to the living room where she was on the phone.

  “I need to see her,” he said. “I need to see Finn. I need to see her body.”

  “Yes, we do,” Mimi said, putting down the phone. “Oliver—I don’t want you to freak out, but it might be too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That was Kingsley. The two dead girls are gone, and he just found out that Finn’s body disappeared from the morgue a few hours ago,” she said, her face ashen.

  “What do you mean, it just disappeared? Dead bodies don’t just walk out the door!” Oliver yelled. Then he knew.

  He stared at Mimi.

  She stared back at him.

  Oliver suddenly remembered everything. Everything that happened when he drank Finn’s blood last night.

  The taste of the silver poison.

  It spread throughout his entire being, and as he drank from her, he realized the poison was not meant just for him or his blood, but the blood of the en
tire Coven—which he had just taken into his soul during the investiture ceremony. If he let the poison run its course, it would infect every vampire in the Coven, turning them into their enemies—

  Silver Bloods—

  Vampires who hunted vampires—

  Lucifer’s army—

  A new demon army would rise from the Coven’s ashes, and he would be in the middle of it, as their dark and fearless leader. The darkness would be alive within him.

  If he let it.

  He had to fight it.

  Fight the ghost, fight the shadow, fight the creature that was starting to gain control…

  Oliver fought. He struggled against his hold on Finn’s neck, attempting to extricate himself, to remove his fangs, but he could not—and so the only way to fight was to drink harder, to suck out every molecule, to cleanse the poison of Lucifer’s soul with his own blood, to let it wash through his own spirit, a soul that had been blessed by the Almighty, and he would hold it in his heart; and he would not let the blood of the Coven, that bright, shining star in the center of his universe go dim; he would accept the darkness first—he would take all of the darkness into himself…

  He took the darkness. I accept your anger and your rage and your hate, and I meet it with love. I take it all. I wrap my soul around your anger and your fury. He drank from her blood, filled himself with the poison, and took it all—

  —and in the end, he won.

  The darkness was defeated in a blazing light of his surrender, and when it was over, the poison was gone.

  Defeated.

  He told Mimi what he just remembered. “I was able to stop the worst from happening, to stop the Silver Bloods from taking the Coven. But in order to do so, Finn died.”

  “But she’s not dead, Oliver,” Mimi said. “That’s the worst part about all this.” She picked up her ringing phone. “Kingsley says to meet him at Coven headquarters. He knows who’s behind it, and he wants you there when they arrest him.”