Misguided Angel

by Melissa de la Cruz

  Deming liked Mimi well enough, although the memory of the Blue Bloods’ long-ago insurrection was still sharp in her mind, as if it had happened yesterday. Azrael and Abbadon had led the campaign against the Almighty—had helped the Morningstar assemble a legion of the best and brightest. We are the gods now, Azrael had told them. The rule of Paradise can be ours. The great and mighty warrior queen had flattered and persuaded them, had convinced them they had been chosen personally for their strengths. How could they refuse?

  Deming looked around: this was a sorry group indeed, filled with the elderly and the untested. Some of the Conclave members looked like they were way past the time for their cycle to be over, while some, like the Regent, were only coming into their full powers and memories. Not that she should be so critical, as she herself had just celebrated her seventeenth birthday.

  That the Blue Blood ranks had been reduced to such a state was troubling, to say the least. News was bad all over: the European Coven was in a communication blackout after what had happened in Paris; they refused to send word or share information, fearing other traitors in the community. In South America, the Conclave had declared martial law, and inter-Coven transactions shut down. Deming had expected more from the North American delegation—New York was famously the most powerful stronghold of the vampires. This was where Michael and Gabrielle had made their home. But the Uncorrupted had disappeared to who knows where, and no one knew when and if they would ever return. The vampires were on their own.

  Deming drained her coffee cup. It had been an eighteen-hour flight into Kennedy Airport from Pudong, and she had spent the entire time poring over the Venator reports, re-reading every log, scrutinizing every decision. The Truth Seekers had operated by the book, and she could not find fault in their actions, but this junction required more from them than routine operations. She tried to hide a yawn. She had barely slept and could feel a giant headache forming. You’d think as immortals they would be immune from jet lag, she thought ruefully.

  At the front of the room, the Regent was calling her name, and she realized with a start that everyone was looking at her. “Please allow me to introduce Venator Deming Chen. Time and again, Deming has proven to be one of our most effective and efficient Truth Seekers. I’m sure many of you remember that she, along with her twin, Dehua, was instrumental during critical victories in our history: the Egyptian Terrors, the Crisis in Rome, and the Monumental Schism are only a few of the battles her sword has helped us win. We are grateful that her Coven was kind enough to send her to help us on this case.”

  That was quite an introduction, akin to reading a résumé, really, but Deming was used to it. As Kuan Yin, Angel of Mercy, she was highly sensitive to emotion and mood, and back in Shanghai was famous for her talent at reading a person’s guānghuán or, in the Sacred Language, affectus, the color representation of one’s interior barometer that was undetectable to the eye. She was one of two vampires (her sister was the other) who could see it without the help of the glom. Red Bloods had a name for it as well, but those charlatans who purported to read a person’s “aura” were doing nothing but guesswork. You had to have angel sight to be able to read the real thing.

  Deming stood and joined Mimi at the podium. “Six months ago, a vampire from our Coven was kidnapped,” she said, taking a remote control from the table and pulling up two photographs on the back screen. It showed Victoria, tied and blindfolded on one side, and a dark-haired girl bound in a similar manner on the other. “Liling Tang’s father is one of the richest men in China, and Liling’s abductors demanded twenty million dollars for her release. Because of the money issue, naturally we concentrated on the humans in our community. However, in the end, we discovered she was taken by one of us. A Blue Blood.”

  The assembled group did not stir. It was almost as if they had expected it, and Deming soldiered on. “Her location was hidden by a masking spell, but after a thorough investigation, we were able to figure out where she was being held, and rescued her before the appointed deadline.”

  She continued. “I’ve gone over Victoria’s file. According to the Warden overseers, Victoria arrived at the party at eleven p.m. After that she was never seen anywhere again. Otherwise the Wardens would have picked up on her glom signature when she left. Therefore, whoever took her was at that party, which means whoever did this was someone close to her as well—someone from her inner circle. Someone from Duchesne. Someone she trusted.”

  “Deming will be enrolled as a senior at Duchesne,” the Regent announced. “She will infiltrate Victoria Taylor’s close group of friends, those who had been at Jamie Kip’s party on the night in question. As we do not want to cause unnecessary fear or panic, this must remain a strict undercover operation.”

  “I’ve got a question. How did you find Liling if her glom signature was masked?” Ted Lennox asked. Deming had met him the night before; he had picked her up at the airport with his brother.

  “We sent a DeathWalker into the glom.”

  The room buzzed at this information. “A glom-induced coma? To hide the spirit trail? But the potential damage to the soul is . . .” Ted shook his head. “You’d have to be really crazy or really brave to do something like that. Who’d you find to carry out such a risky operation?”

  “I did it myself,” Deming said coolly. It was either her or Dehua, and Deming had always been the stronger of the twins. She hadn’t allowed her sister to take the risk.

  The crowd murmured its approval. DeathWalkers stripped their immortal spirit to its very essence, and in doing so mimicked death. With no trace of her spirit in the glom, she had been able to go underneath the masking spell and find the physical location of the hostage.

  The Regent tapped her lectern. “Are there any more questions?” She looked around. There were none. “I don’t have to remind you that this information is classified to the Conclave and the Venator team originally assigned to the case. No one else in the Coven must know we are conducting an internal investigation. As far as they are concerned, the Conspiracy has taken care of the security breach posed by the online video. The mainstream world remains blissfully ignorant of our existence. Victoria’s disappearance has been explained as a transfer to a Swiss boarding school. The Taylors have been alerted to the situation and are cooperating.”

  The meeting ended, and as Deming collected her things, the Regent walked to her side. Deming was struck by Azrael’s beauty. It was said among the vampires that only Gabrielle was lovelier, although it had been a while since Deming had seen her in the flesh. Deming had not been in cycle when Allegra was still active. The Regent’s translucent skin had the creamy freshness of youth, a radiant vitality in contrast to heavy sadness in her emerald green eyes. “You have everything you need?” Mimi asked. “How are the boys treating you?”

  “Venator quarters are a dump. Just like back home.” Deming grinned. “But I’ll manage.”

  “Glad to hear. Remember, at school, I don’t know you. So please don’t take anything I do or say personally.”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” said Deming. She made for the door, but she got the sense that the Regent still had something she wanted to say, so she stuck around.

  Mimi waited until the room was completely empty to speak. “There’s another thing. It’s come to my attention that there are those among us who believe that as community we pose too much of a target. Venators loyal to me have discovered that Josiah Archibald and several other Conclave members are planning a coup to disband the Coven. They’re going to shut down the Repository, move the House of Records underground, and take half of the registered families with them. I’ve let them think I don’t know anything about their plans. But I need to find the killer. If I can figure out who’s behind the videos, I can regain their trust, calm the opposition, and make the Coven whole again.”

  Deming nodded. Mimi had not mentioned this when she’d debriefed her on the assignment, and it was a shock to learn the New York Coven was in such jeopardy. But then, n
o other Coven had lost as many immortal lives. “The blood spell that hit you—do you think the Conclave had something to do with it?” Deming asked.

  “The Venators aren’t completely certain yet; they’re still breaking down the mechanics of the spell. But right now it’s our best guess that yes, it was intended to get me out of the way.” Mimi bowed her head. “The Conclave had access to my Repository log. Somehow they found out I was planning to take down the wards.”

  “Do you think they were involved in Victoria’s abduction?”

  “No. Of course not. But they used it as an opportunity to attack me.”

  “Can I ask how you deflected the blood spell?”

  The Regent sighed. “I’m not sure myself. As far as our doctors can tell, it just passed through me—neutralized on impact. As if I were wearing a bulletproof vest.”

  “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.”

  “Tragic.” Piper shook her head. “They haven’t fixed up that place since like . . .”

  “The nineteenth century,” they chorused together.

  Piper laughed. “That place is probably as old as my watch. If you get tired of staying there, come hang out at my house. We have TiVo. I bet those old-timers don’t even have a TV.”