"I know it's a lot. It's a lot to handle. But remember what happened Saturday night? When we were waltzing? We saw it because it's happened before. Everything she said in there is true."
Schuyler shook her head. No. She wasn't going to fall for this. They might all be drinking laced Kool-Aid in there, but she had a good head on her shoulders. Things like vampires and past lives and immortality just didn't exist in the real world. And Schuyler was a card-carrying member of the real world. She didn't want to check into CrazyTown any time soon.
"Do this," Jack said, tapping his face, motioning to the side of his jaw.
"Why?"
"You should start feeling them. Right here," he said, pressing a thumb and index finger against each side of his mouth.
"There?"
"Yeah, I know, the Red Bloods think we have them in our front canines, but that's just one more of The Conspiracy's doings. Our wisdom teeth are the ones a bit to the side."
"Wisdom teeth? Like the ones that get taken out at your dentist?" Schuyler asked, trying not to roll her eyes.
"Oh, I forgot, that's what the Red Bloods call them too. No, not that far back. They stole that term from us, but it doesn't mean the same thing. C'mon, try it. They start appearing right around now."
She rolled her eyes. But she stuck her finger inside her mouth, trying to see if she noticed anything. "Nothing, there's no - Oh." Underneath a small tooth she'd never noticed before, on each side, she felt a sharp point.
"If you concentrate, you can bring them out."
She rolled a finger over them, and pictured the teeth lengthening, coming out of her gums. Amazingly, small sharp enamel fangs began to protrude downward.
"You can learn to extend and retract them."
Schuyler did, her finger tracing the sharp, needlelike end of the tooth. She felt sick to her stomach with an excitement she couldn't control.
Because it was only then that she realized what she had been denying all along.
She was a vampire. Immortal. Dangerous. Her fangs were sharp enough to draw blood - to pierce the skin of a human being. She retracted them slowly, feeling an ache at their disappearance.
She really was one of them.
;
CHAPTER 19
It was so funny to see how scared the fresh blood looked. Mimi remembered sitting in that same room last year, thinking they would all start planning the yearly Four Hundred Ball (Theme? D��cor? Invites?) and that would be the end of it. Of course, Jack had known something was up, nothing really got past her brother - and apparently, some of them had more of an idea about what was happening to them than others.
Mimi had had the flashbacks too - the memories that would creep up on her without warning. Like the time she'd been in Martha's Vineyard, and instead of being outside the Black Dog, she was outside a farmhouse, wearing some hideous gingham dress - believe it or not. Or the time she was taking her French test and she hadn't studied at all but she aced it, finding that she was suddenly fluent in the language.
She smiled to herself at the memory, and watched as several members of the Senior Committee, her mother among them, entered the room, their Blahnik heels clicking softly on the rose marble floor. There was a hush. The well-coifed women nodded to one another and waved gaily to their children.
The Jefferson Room was the front entry room to the Flood mansion, in the style of Monticello, a tribute to the third president. There was a high, domed cathedral ceiling, several Gainsborough portraits, and in the middle a large round table, where the new members were sitting, looking alternately bored or scared. Mimi didn't recognize all of them, as some were from other schools. God, those Nightingale uniforms were ugly, she thought. The rest of the members of the Junior Committee were sitting on the study desks, or leaning on the windows, or standing with their arms folded, watching silently. She noticed that for once, her brother Jack had deigned to grace them with his presence.
So the Wardens had thought to include the Van Alen girl after all. That was odd. Mimi had no memory of her from her past, not even from Plymouth. She had to have been there somewhere; Mimi just had to dig deeper into her subconscious. When Mimi looked around the room, she could see glimmerings of who everyone else used to be. Katie Sheridan, for instance, had always been a friend - they had "come out" during the 1850 deb season together, and Lissy Harris had been an attendant at her wedding in Newport later that year. But that wasn't the case with Schuyler.
As for Jack, well, they had been together for longer than eternity. His was the only face she ever saw constantly, waiting for her in every incarnation of her past. If Mimi practiced her meditations, perhaps she would be able to access the deepest recesses of her history, back to their creation, in Egypt before the floods.
Mrs. Priscilla DuPont, a regular presence in the city's society pages, and the financial and social force behind many of New York's most august cultural institutions, stepped forward. Like the other women behind her, she was preternaturally slim, with a soft, buttery bob that framed her line-less face. She cut a severe figure in her sharp black Carolina Herrera suit. As committee chair and Chief Warden, she called the meeting to order.
"Welcome to the first meeting of the New York Blood Bank Committee of the season," she said, smiling graciously. "We are very proud to have all of you here."
Mimi zoned out for a bit, barely listening to the standard lecture concerning civil duty and noblesse oblige, enumerating the many services the committee provided their community. The yearly ball, for instance, raised a tremendous amount of money for blood research programs, which was dedicated to the eradication of blood-borne diseases like AIDS and hemophilia. The Committee had founded hospitals and research institutions, and had been instrumental in funding stem-cell research and other advances in medicine.
Then, after the standard spiel, Mrs. DuPont looked intently at the ten young people seated at the table.
"But helping others is not all that The Committee does." There was an expectant silence.