“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.