The Van Alen Legacy (Blue Bloods 4)

But she had always loved this song, which wasn't so much a love song as the opposite of one. "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me." And she loved that Oliver wanted to dance. He held out his arms and she stepped into them, resting her head on his shoulder as he circled her waist. She wished dancing was all they had to do. It was so nice just to live in the moment, to enjoy holding him so closely, to pretend for a little while that they were merely two young people in love and nothing else.

Oliver led her smoothly through every dance, a product of mandatory ballroom lessons from his etiquette-obsessed mother. Schuyler felt as graceful as a ballerina in his confident direction.

"I never knew you could dance," she teased.

"You never asked," he said, twirling her around so that her silk pants floated prettily around her ankles.

They danced through two more songs, a catchy polonaise and a popular rap song, the music a schizophrenic mix of high and low, Mozart to M.I.A., Bach to Beyonce. Schuyler found she was actually enjoying herself. Then the music stopped abruptly, and they turned to see what had caused the sudden silence.

"The Countess of Paris, Isabelle of Orleans," the orchestra conductor announced, as an imposing woman, very beautiful for her age, with coal black hair and a regal bearing entered the room. She was dressed as the Queen of Sheba, in a headdress made of gold and blue lapis. Her right hand held an immense gold chain, and standing at the end of it was a black panther wearing a diamond collar.

Schuyler held her breath. So that was the countess. The prospect of asking that woman for shelter suddenly seemed more daunting than ever. She had expected the countess to be plump and elderly, frumpy even, a little old lady in a pastel suit with a bunch of corgis. But this woman was sophisticated and chic; she came across as remote and distant as a deity. Why would she care what happened to Schuyler?

Still, maybe the countess only looked imperious and inaccessible. After all, this party could not have been easy for her. Schuyler wondered if the countess was sad to have lost her home. The H'tel Lambert had been in her family for generations upon generations. Schuyler knew the recent global financial crisis had humbled even the grandest houses and the richest families.

The Hazard-Perrys had invested well: Oliver told her they had gotten out of the market years before it crashed. But all over the Upper East Side, Schuyler heard, jewelry was being auctioned, art appraised, portfolios liquidated. It was the same in Europe. None of the other Blue Blood families could even afford to buy the Lambert. It had to go to a corporation, and it did.

The countess waved to her guests as the ballroom exploded in applause, Schuyler and Oliver clapping as heartily as the rest. Then Isabelle took her exit, the music started up again, and the tension in the room abated. A collective exhale.

"So what did the baron say?" Schuyler asked, as Oliver twirled her away from the center of the room.

The Baron de Coubertin was in the countess's employ and served his lady as human Conduit, as Oliver was to Schuyler. Anderson had told them a meeting with the countess could only be facilitated by the baron. He was the key to an appeal. Without his permission, they would never be able to even get within a hairsbreadth of the countess. The plan was for Oliver to introduce himself the minute the baron arrived at the party, waylaying him as he stepped off the boat.

"We'll find out soon enough," Oliver said, looking apprehensive. 'don't look up. He's coming our way.

CHAPTER 11

Mimi

The four Venators made very little sound as they landed on the roof of the building. Their footsteps could be mistaken for the rustle of bird's wings, or a few pebbles dislodged from the hillside. It was their fourth night in Rio, and they were in the favela de Rocinha, systematically going through the population, block by block, street by street, dilapidated shack by dilapidated shack. They were looking for anything, a scrap of memory, a word, an image, that could maybe shed some light on what had happened to Jordan and where she might be.

Mimi knew the drill so well she could do it in her sleep. Or actually, their sleep. Look at these Red Bloods, so cozy and secure in their slumber, she thought. They had no idea that vampires tiptoed through their dreams. Memories were tricky things, Mimi thought as she entered the twilight world of the glom. They weren't stable.

They changed with perception over time. She saw how they shifted, understood how the passage of time affected them. A hardworking striver might recall his childhood as one filled with misery and hardship, marred by the catcalls and name-calling of playground bullies, but later have a much more forgiving understanding of past injustices.

The handmade clothes he had been forced to wear became a testament to his mother's love, each patch and stitch a sign of her diligence instead of a brand of poverty. He would remember Father staying up late to help with the homework, the old man's patience and dedication, instead of the sharpness of his temper when he returned home, late, from the factory.

It went the other way as well. Mimi had scanned thousands of memories of spurned women whose handsome lovers turned ugly and rude, Roman noses perhaps too pointed, eyes growing small and mean, while the ordinary looking boys who had become their husbands grew in attractiveness as the years passed, so that when asked if it was love at first sight, the women cheerfully answered yes.

Memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves. Using the glom, the netherworld of memory and shadow, a space the vampires could access at will in order to read and control minds, was like stepping into a darkroom, into a lab where photographers developed their prints, submerging them in shallow pans of chemicals, drying them on nylon racks.

Mimi remembered the darkroom at Duchesne, how she used to hide there with her familiars. Spinning through the revolving door, leaving the Technicolor world of school behind to enter a small, cramped space that was so dark she'd wonder for a second if she had gone blind. But vampires could see in the dark, of course.

Did they even have darkrooms anymore, other than in movies where they had to track down the serial killer? Mimi wondered. Everyone had digital cameras now. Darkrooms were prehistoric. Like handwritten letters and proper first dates.

"Darkrooms, Force? You don't strike me as a photographer."

"But I will strike you," Mimi sent back.

"Har-har."

"Go back to your patient. You're going to wake mine."

It was against protocol for Kingsley to pop into her head space. The four Venators could sense each other, but they were supposed to be on separate channels, watching different dreams. They had entered a women's dormitory, a place in the city where girls from the outlying provinces paid a pittance for a bed.

Mimi was in a girl's mind. The girl was the same age as her, roughly, for this cycle: seventeen.