Misguided Angel

by Melissa de la Cruz

  “We were thinking of heading up to Rufus’s in Greenwich. He’s having people over this weekend,” Bryce said. “Chopper’s going to pick us up in an hour. We’re staying over; you in?”

  An overnight trip, twenty-four hours with her mysterious new boyfriend and her prime suspect in the death of an immortal. This was the opportunity she was looking for. She gave him a brilliant smile and promised to meet him at the helipad with her bags ready.

  THIRTY-ONE

  House Party

  The King estate sat on twenty acres of beachfront property in southwestern Connecticut. Rufus’s father was one of those hedge fund types who had managed to make money off the recession instead of losing it, by betting against the economy. Deming wondered how much of that fit in with the Vampire Code to enlighten the human race. It seemed in the present, many of the vampires were not interested in helping humanity as much as they were interested in helping themselves to as much as possible.

  It was dark when they arrived, the party already in full swing. Deming followed the boys into the house to find the hallway littered with tossed-off backpacks and discarded clothing. Loud rap music was playing, accompanied by splashing noises. Rufus King, who had graduated the year before and was a freshman at Yale, greeted them with expansive hugs. “Hey, thanks for coming. Pool’s in the back.”

  The house had an outdoor pool covered by a tarp, as well as an indoor pool located in a glass atrium in the middle of the house. Deming walked with the group toward it. Bryce’s friends were already in the water, so he immediately removed his pants, shirt, and socks and dove in with a loud whoop, wearing only his boxer shorts.

  “Hey guys,” she said, walking over to the clique of girls dangling their feet in the water.

  “Oh hi, how was the copter ride?” Stella asked, but then turned away before Deming could answer. No one else bothered to say hello. Piper made a face before turning away. Piper had taken Deming’s blow off the other day to heart, and had not been friendly ever since. But then again, Piper was exactly the sort of girl who would be annoyed that her new friend had found a boyfriend. Some girls were just built that way, and there was nothing Deming could do about it. Not that she cared. She wasn’t here to make friends.

  Deming felt a bit impatient for being stuck at a silly party. She was only there so she could finally cross Bryce Cutting off her suspect list. After tonight, if Bryce’s affectus didn’t reveal anything related to the case, she would take another look at the case file. She had been convinced that she would find her killer in this group of hedonistic self-centered teenagers, but after a week in their company, she began to think she might be on the wrong track. It annoyed her to have wasted so much time: Victoria’s killer was still out there, and the Regent was counting on her to keep the Coven together.

  She left the girls and found an empty bedroom, where she could change into her swimsuit. After she was dressed, she joined a bunch of kids who were gathered around the bar in the kitchen, surprised to find that a few of them were Red Bloods.

  One of the boys looked up when she came near. “Hey, Deming, right?” he said. She had seen him around the Repository, arguing with another scribe who was stuffing books into boxes. The Regent was right to worry; the Conclave wasn’t playing around. If Mimi couldn’t find a way to stop them, they were going to take the vampires underground again.

  “You’re Oliver,” she said, shaking his hand. “Mimi’s friend.” She had bumped into him once leaving the Regent’s office.

  Oliver’s lips twitched. “That’s a new one. She’s not my friend here.”

  “Nor mine,” she told him, and they shared a conspiratorial laugh.

  “I didn’t know there were going to be humans at the party,” she told him, accepting a red Solo cup full of grain alcohol and a dash of Mountain Dew. The liquor was for the humans. It made their blood taste sweeter during the Caerimonia, for when the vampires would drink later.

  “We’re friends with Gemma Anderson, Stella’s Conduit. As for all the one-lifers on the guest list, I think this is one of those recruitment parties,” he said, meaning the Blue Bloods had invited a group of humans they thought would make good familiars. A “tasting party,” they sometimes called it.

  “Your hat’s not in the ring, though,” she said, noticing the small bite marks on his neck. “All the good ones are always taken.”

  Oliver smiled at that, but it was a wan smile, and it told her everything she had to know. Whoever his vampire was, she was no longer with him. Poor sap.

  “Do you know Paul?” Oliver asked, turning to the guy hovering behind her.

  “We’re in Spirit of the Self together. Hi,” Deming said.

  “You mean Satan and Self-Interest,” Paul said with a sly grin.

  “The Devil will have his due,” Oliver quipped. “I took that class last year. You guys are on Paradise Lost now?”

  Deming took a sip from her cup and winced at the taste. “Yes, Paul here thinks Milton was too kind to Satan. Made him too much of a romantic figure for us to love.”

  “It’s the bad-boy syndrome; chicks dig it,” Paul said, his bright eyes flashing. “Speaking of,” he mumbled under his breath, just as Deming felt a cold hand on her bare shoulder.

  “There you are,” Bryce said. He didn’t bother to greet the other boys. “C’mon, we’re out by the pool.”

  “Excuse me,” Deming mouthed to Oliver and Paul as she walked away with Bryce. “God, you don’t have to be so rude,” she chided as they slipped into the shallow edge. “Just because they’re Red Bloods, they’re not completely useless. One of them’s in the Repository.”

  She wrapped her legs around Bryce under the water. “There’s a room upstairs . . . just for us,” she whispered, breathing into his ear. “You’re not . . . bonded to anyone are you? Not yet, at least?”

  “Nmm.” He kissed her neck. “You?”

  “Actually, I’m a starborn twin. I don’t have a bondmate,” she told him. It was a rare thing in the vampire world, to have a trueborn sibling. Starborn twins were two halves of the same person, made from the same empyrean star that split and produced two spirits instead of one and were identical in every aspect.

  Deming would never understand the laws of the blood-bound, of the celestial soul mates. Of those who were self-contained and yet incomplete. Many of the starborn became Venators, like Sam and Ted Lennox.

  Once every hundred years or so she had a romantic relationship with someone who had lost their bondmate, but mostly she kept to herself. Starborn vampires usually lived out their cycles alone.

  But it didn’t mean she had to be alone all the time.

  “Meet me upstairs,” she told Bryce. She was going to coax the dark angel out of his shadow.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Interrogation

  Bryce loomed over her body, dark and gorgeous in the moonlight. She ran her fingers over his firm abdomen, tracing the line of each muscle. His kisses were deep and insistent, proving he was the kind of boy who always got what he wanted. Any other girl might have been thrilled, but after kissing for what seemed like hours, Deming was bored and impatient to get down to business.

  He stopped kissing her neck for a moment and looked in her eyes. “Something wrong?” he asked huskily since she had stopped—what was she doing? Oh right, dutifully moaning and clutching his hair.

  “No, not at all . . .” she said, and decided to go for it. It was one of the reasons she was such an effective Venator. She didn’t need to use the glom to get people to tell the truth. She seduced it out of them. She became their best listener, a shoulder to cry on, someone to confess to, someone who understood. And now, with Bryce on top of her, it was the perfect time to ask something he did not expect to hear. “I’m worried about Victoria, what Stella said the other day. Do you think it’s true? That maybe she’s not in Switzerland and the Conclave is hiding something?”

  “Who knows?” Bryce asked. “I mean, it’s not the first time, right?”

  “Did you know
her well?”

  “Vix? As well as anyone did,” he said as he bent down to kiss the nape of her neck. She shivered a little from the draft coming in through the window, but Bryce took it as a response to his sensual ministrations and pressed down further. “I mean, she was a friend. Part of the group. You know,” he murmured.

  “Do you think anyone might have—I dunno—had something against her? Maybe that was why she had to go away?” she asked.

  Bryce crushed his body against hers, but instead of responding in kind, Deming kept her body rigid. “Sometimes when kids have a hard time at school, their parents will send them somewhere else. Maybe Victoria was having a problem with someone—like Piper, maybe?”

  He stopped his downward progression and wouldn’t meet her eyes. She had chosen Piper’s name at random and had not expected Bryce to react like he did. She felt his body turn cold all of a sudden. That was interesting.

  “Piper didn’t like her?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, rolling off.

  Now she knew there was definitely something here. His affectus was a deep shade of vermillion. She could see it all around his body, almost a physical reality. He was agitated, worried. He knew something about Piper and Victoria. Deming felt her heart rate quicken, but her face was a mask. Was she getting somewhere finally?

  “Were they fighting? Did Victoria do something to Piper that might have made her mad?” she pressed.

  “Not that I knew,” Bryce said, scratching his nose. He seemed to shrink away, and his affectus began to pulse in shades of scarlet and black, shining like a flare in the darkness.

  Deming charged into the glom, barreling through the wards that protected his spirit from intrusion. She pushed through the haze of his memory. Then she saw it: the memory that had triggered his agitation. The night of the party: Piper Crandall arguing with Victoria Taylor. She couldn’t make out what the girls were saying—Bryce had been too far away to hear—but it was clear that Piper was extremely upset when they left together. Which meant that Piper was the last person who had seen Victoria alive. Victoria had left with Piper, and then Victoria was never seen again.

  That was all she needed to see. Deming pulled away and scrambled into her clothes. She had to go over Piper’s file again to see what she had missed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you—I have to get back to the city tomorrow to meet my uncle,” she said, without looking back.

  She left Bryce alone in the bed and crept downstairs. It was past midnight and the party was over. Most of the Blue Bloods had left or retired to one of the numerous bedrooms. A few Red Bloods were slumped on the couch or passed out on the floor, abandoned by their new masters.

  “Hey!” she said, coming across Paul Rayburn as he walked out the front door. “Devil boy.”

  “Oh, hey, what’s up,” he said, looking surprised to see her. She noticed his neck had no bite marks, which meant he had not been chosen. He was cute enough, but Deming figured most of the vamp chicks at the party didn’t go for the smart and sensitive type. “Thin-blooded,” they called it. She felt an odd sense of relief at that, which puzzled her. Why would she care if another vampire had marked him as her own?

  “Are you taking off ?” she asked. She had planned to run all the way back, at Velox speed, but the journey would tire her. “Are you going into Manhattan? Can you give me a ride?”

  “Actually . . .” He looked around. “I was waiting for someone. But it’s all right. Yeah, sure. Why not. I’ve got my brother’s car.”

  “Great.” She smiled. “I’m in the Village.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  A Tale of Two Friends

  Paul Rayburn drove with his hands on the wheel at two and ten o’clock. He kept glancing at Deming shyly. He cleared his throat. “I thought you were with Bryce.”

  “I was,” Deming yawned. “But not anymore.” That was definitely done. She had no more use for Bryce Cutting now that she knew his secret.

  “That was quick. . . . What are you, some kind of heartbreaker?” Paul asked.

  “Since when are you so concerned with my love life?” she teased.

  Paul looked over his shoulder to change lanes, and their eyes met briefly. “Since the beginning.”

  He had a crush on her. She had thought as much, had read it in his affectus every time he looked at her. Deming felt an odd thrill. She’d left a dark angel panting in a bedroom upstairs, but in a car with a mere mortal she found she was feeling something she hadn’t felt just few minutes ago. Interest. Attraction. It turned out, smart and sensitive was her type. She began to wonder what his blood tasted like—she bet those prejudices were wrong.

  “I have to warn you, though, you’re not going to get rid of me as easily as that,” Paul said.

  “No?”

  “No, I mean—if you were my girlfriend, I’d make sure, for instance, that you didn’t leave a party with some other dude.”

  “What else would you do?” she asked, curious.

  “I’m not going to tell you.” He blushed.

  “Because I can imagine quite a lot.” She smiled. This was fun. The conventional wisdom on why certain humans were chosen as familiars was that it was a purely physical response on the vampire’s part, submitting to the allure of the blood chemistry. Deming had yet to mark a human as her familiar. While more and more vampires were taking their familiars at a younger age, she didn’t plan on doing so until her eighteenth birthday.

  When Paul reached over to remove the iPod in the glove compartment, his hand accidentally brushed hers, and Deming felt an electric jolt of energy pass between them. It was as if she was a match that had lit with his touch. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. Was this what everyone was talking about? Was this the bloodlust? Until now, she had never experienced it—the hunger, the acute, unmistakable desire for a certain human being’s blood. It was as if her entire body were calling for a taste of his blood, and she would not be satisfied until she drank from him.

  “You all right? You look a little pale.”

  “I’m okay.” Deming looked away. She put a hand up to cover her mouth. Her fangs were protruding; her mouth was watering. She wanted him. She wanted him so badly it took all of her concentration to stop herself from jumping him. Whatever this was, she had no time for it. Even if she wanted Paul and was experiencing bloodlust for the first time, she had to focus. She had a job to do.

  “How’d you know those guys?” she asked, affecting a casual air, and trying not to notice the electricity buzzing between them. “Through Gemma?”

  “Uh-huh. But Piper invited me. She kind of had to since I was standing next to her at the time. It was a pity invite.”

  At the mention of Piper’s name, Deming refocused her energy. “Piper’s nice. . . .” she said, letting him take the lead. She wanted to find out what other people thought about Piper. Bryce’s memory was one piece of the puzzle, but if she was going to pin this on Piper Crandall she’d need a lot more information to build her case.

  Paul changed lanes again. “Piper’s all right. You guys hang out, huh?”

  “Kind of. I heard she was pretty tight with some girl named Victoria Taylor, who left before I got here.”

  He fiddled with the stereo and the car swerved a little. “Oh great, I missed my exit. Sorry, what were you saying? Piper and Victoria?” he asked, as the Cowboy Junkies played in the background.

  “They were best friends?” Deming prompted.

  “You mean they were friends, until . . .”

  “Until?” Deming leaned closer.

  Paul glanced at her. “Look, I don’t listen to gossip, especially about those who are basically unaware of my existence; it’s too demeaning. But what can I say? I go to this school, I’m not deaf. I heard that Victoria and Bryce were hooking up and Piper found out the night of Jamie Kip’s party.”

  “Really? Victoria and Bryce? They were together?” She hadn’t found any indication of that in t
he reports, and Victoria had not played a prominent role in any of Bryce’s memories.

  “Yeah. And it really pissed Piper off.” It was clear that Paul was lying when he said he did not enjoy gossip. He was bathed in a yellow light, warm and glowing, illuminating his features.

  “But why would Piper care?”

  “Piper and Bryce used to date.” Paul shrugged. “I thought everyone knew that.”

  So that’s what the girls had been arguing about at the party, why Piper had looked so murderous. This was the secret rancor Deming had been searching for, the poison inside the apple. She understood the dark violent emotions that claimed lives and caused people to burn and torture their best friends, to decide that they were no better than a pile of wood chips. As a Venator she had seen the consequences that the bitterness of resentment and jealousy could bring to a seemingly close friendship. Piper and Victoria had loved the same dark angel.

  Piper and Bryce had been together, but Victoria had come between them. Jealousy over a boy had turned one friend against the other. Deming didn’t think Bryce knew what Piper had done, but he had suspected enough to feel guilty about it. The night of Jamie Kip’s party, Piper discovered that her best friend had betrayed her.

  Finally, Deming had what she was looking for: a motive.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Bond Less

  Piper Crandall glared at her from across the interrogation table. The Lennox brothers had picked the suspect up Monday afternoon from school, and had taken her to Venator headquarters for questioning.