"So you've found Catherine's diary. Yes, I left my initials there. For someone to find. I didn't know it would be you," Cordelia said, amused.
"It wasn't me. It was Oliver Hazard-Perry actually."
"Ah. Oliver, yes. A very helpful boy. From an excellent family. For Red Bloods, that is."
"Don't change the subject. What's Croatan?"
Cordelia raised the partition separating them from Julius. When it was fully closed, she turned to Schuyler with a frown. "What I am going to tell you is verboten. We cannot speak of it. The Committee has legislated it out of existence. They have even tried to suppress it from our memories."
"Why?" Schuyler asked, looking out the window at the city. It was another gray day, and Manhattan seemed to be lost in a fine mist, ghostly and majestic.
"As I told you, times have changed. The old ways are no more. The people in power do not believe. Even the woman who wrote that diary would disown her words. It would be too dangerous for her to admit her fears."
"How do you know she would feel that way?" Schuyler asked.
"Simple, because I wrote it. It's my diary."
"You're Catherine Carver?" Schuyler asked.
"Yes. I remember the Plymouth settlement clearly, almost as if it were yesterday. It was a terrible journey." She shuddered. "And an even more terrible winter followed it."
"Why? What happened?
"Croatan." Cordelia sighed. "An ancient word. It means Silver Blood."
"Silver Blood?"
"You were told the story of our Expulsion."
"Yes." The car slowly made its way across Fifth Avenue. Because of the bad weather, there were only a few people milling outside the department stores, a handful of tourists taking pictures of the window dressing, shoppers trying to get out of the rain.
"When God cast out Lucifer and his angels from heaven, as punishment for their sins, we were cursed to live our immortal lives on Earth, where we became vampires, dependent on human blood to survive," Cordelia said.
"They told us all this at The Committee meetings."
"But they don't tell you this part. It's been stricken from our official records."
"Why?"
Cordelia didn't answer. Instead, her voice took on a monotone quality, as if she were reading from a book committed to memory. "Early in our history, Lucifer and a small host of his loyal followers broke off from the group. They rejected God, and were contemptuous of their banishment. They did not want to regain the Lord's Grace. They did not believe in the Code of the Vampires."
"Why not?" Schuyler asked, as the car idled at the light. They were on Sixth Avenue now, among the skyscrapers and corporate office buildings with the names of their companies engraved on the fa?ade. McGraw-Hill. Simon and Schuster. Time Warner. A bank of televisions in the Morgan Stanley building blasted the latest news from the stock market.
"Because they did not want to live within any kind of law. They were willful and arrogant, on earth as they were in heaven. Lucifer and his vampires discovered that performing Caerimonia Osculor on other vampires instead of humans made them more powerful. As you know, Caerimonia Osculor is the sucking of blood that vampires commit on humans in order to gain strength. In the Code of the Vampires, it is forbidden to perform the Caerimonia Osculor on fellow Blue Bloods. But this is exactly what Lucifer and his vampires did. They began to consume Blue Bloods to complete Dissipation."
"You mean - "
"Until they had sucked out the very life force from a being, yes. Until they had consumed a Blue Blood and all his memories."
"But why? And what happened then?"
"By consuming the Blue Blood's life force, Lucifer and his vampires' blood turned Silver. They become the Silver Bloods. Croatan. It means Abomination. They are insane, with the lives of many vampires in their heads. They have the strength of a thousand Blue Bloods. Their memories are legion. They are the devil in disguise, the devil that walks among us; they are everywhere and nowhere."
As Cordelia spoke, they drove past Sixth Avenue to Seventh, and the neighborhood changed again. Schuyler saw Carnegie Hall on the corner and several people lined up outside buying tickets, huddled under their umbrellas.
"For thousands of years, the Silver Bloods hunted and killed and consumed Blue Bloods. They broke the Code of the Vampires by directly interfering in human affairs and acquiring power in the world of men. They were unstoppable. But the Blue Bloods never stopped fighting them. It was the only way to survive."
"The Last Great War between the Blue Bloods and the Red Bloods ended during the final years of the Roman Empire, when the Blue Bloods were able to unseat Caligula, a powerful and wily Silver Blood vampire. After Caligula was defeated, for many centuries Blue Bloods lived in peace in Europe."