Blue Bloods (Blue Bloods 1)

"So what does Jack want to do about it? What does he know?" Oliver asked.

"He wants to find out what's hunting us." She told him about Jack's memory about Plymouth. The message nailed to a tree in a lonely field. Croatan.

"How is he going to do that?" Oliver asked.

"I don't know, but I think we can help him."

"How?"

Schuyler looked around the old room.

"This library holds the entire history of the Blue Bloods, right? Maybe there's something in here we can find."

CHAPTER 30

They had invaded the sanctuary. Ever since Mimi could remember, her father retreated into his book-lined den after work and hardly ever came out for dinner. It was a locked door, a special place, where children weren't allowed. Mimi recalled scratching at the door when she was a child, desperate for his attention and love, only to have her nanny cart her away, with admonishments and threats. "Leave your father alone, he's a busy, busy man with no time for you."

Her mother had been the same way - a distant satellite - always on vacation somewhere children were not allowed or welcomed. It had been a lonely, quiet childhood, but she and Jack had made the most of it. They were each other's sole company; they depended on each other to the point where Mimi didn't know where she ended and her brother began. Which made what she was about to do even more necessary. He had to know the truth.

She strode into the great marble hallway and walked right up to the locked door to their father's study. With a wave of her hand, the lock disintegrated and the door blew open with a bang.

Charles Force was sitting at his desk, nursing a crystal goblet of dark red liquid. "Impressive," he congratulated his daughter. "It took me years to learn that one."

"Thank you." Mimi smiled.

Jack followed behind, slouching forward, his hands in his pockets. He looked at his sister with a newfound respect.

"Father! Tell him!" Mimi demanded, walking up to the desk.

"Tell me what?" Jack asked.

Charles Force took a sip from his glass and watched his children with hooded eyes. His so-called children. Madeleine Force and Benjamin Force. Two of the most powerful Blue Bloods of all time. They had been there in Rome, during the crisis. They had founded Plymouth, they had settled the New World. He had been the one to call them up again and again, whenever they were needed.

"About the Van Alen mongrel," Mimi said. "Tell him."

"What about Schuyler? What do you know?" Jack asked. "More than you, my brother." Mimi said. She took a seat in one of the leather club chairs across from her father's desk. She turned to her brother, flashing her green eyes at his identical ones. "Unlike you, I've accessed my memories. She's not in them. I've checked. Again and again. She's not there. She's not anywhere. She isn't supposed to exist!" Mimi's voice took on a high screech. Her fangs were bared.

Jack took a step backward. "That can't be. I have her in mine. You couldn't be more wrong. Father, what the hell is she talking about?"

Charles took another sip from his glass and cleared his throat. Finally, he said, "Your sister's right."

"But I don't understand..." Jack said, slumping down into the other club chair.

"Technically, Schuyler Van Alen is not a Blue Blood." Charles sighed.

"That's impossible," Jack declared.

"She is and she's not," Charles explained. "She is a product of Caerimonia Osculor, of a union between a vampire and a human familiar."

"But we can't reproduce - we don't have the capacity..." Jack argued.

"We cannot reproduce among ourselves, that is true. We cannot create new life; we merely carry the spirits of those who have passed in a new embryonic form through in vitro fertilization. I believe it is even common among the Red Bloods these days. Our women are implanted with the seed of an immortal consciousness so that it can take on a new physical shell in the Cycle of Expression.

"But since the Red Bloods have the ability to create new life, new spirits, miscegenation between the two is apparently not impossible. Improbable, but not impossible. However, in all our years, it has never happened before. To conceive a baby of mixed blood is against the strictest laws of our kind. Her mother was a troubled and foolish woman."

Mimi poured some of the liquid in the decanter into a new Baccarat glass. She took a sip. Rothschild Cabernet. "She should have been destroyed," she hissed.

"No!" Jack cried.