Please, by all means.”
Allegra walked around the room. The studio was a large white loft with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay.
There were paint cans and paintbrushes everywhere, and plastic on the floor. The oily smell of gesso filled the air.
“Sorry it’s a bit messy,” he said.
She nodded, not quite sure what to say. The loft was filled with an assortment of canvases in all sizes, a few stretched eight feet high and ten feet across. There were smaller paintings propped on easels or tacked on the walls. Some were framed and encased in plastic. As Allegra looked around, she noticed a theme in all of his work. Every painting—from the mural that showed a girl lying dreamily in bed, like a modern odalisque, to the small ones, which were like the one she had purchased—each and every painting in the studio was a portrait of her.
She walked through the space, studying the paintings and drawings in complete silence and utter shock. Ben followed her wordlessly, waiting to hear her reaction. For now, she didn’t have one. She was merely processing the information he was giving her. The paintings held the breadth of their short love story: Allegra on the bed, in her white camisole; Allegra in the woods, the night of her initiation into the Peithologians,
“a secret society of poets and adventurers,” which meant they got drunk in the forest after curfew; Allegra holding up a Latin textbook, laughing at how terrible she was at the language; Allegra nude, her back turned to the viewer. There was a small dark painting, all black except for the bright blond hair and ivory fangs. Allegra the vampire princess.
She understood now. The carefree artist and jocular heir-about-town from the night before was all an act. The familiar’s kiss had marked him, had changed him, and in order to deal with her abandonment, he had created a shrine to her. This obsessive recollection of every moment of their relationship was his way of keeping her close to him. He painted her over and over so that he would never forget her. It was all there—his love and need for her. This was his true heart, open and exposed and bleeding.
Now she understood what his mother had tried to tell her when she had said, “You’re the girl in the paintings.” Decca Chase was worried about her boy, and had thought that maybe if she brought Allegra to him, he would find a way to be with her or get over her. Smart woman.
Ben shuffled his feet, his face slowly turning a brilliant shade of crimson. He gulped. “Well, what do you think?”
“I’m so sorry for leaving you,” Allegra said slowly, not quite able to meet his eyes. “I’m so sorry I disappeared that night. You don’t understand—I’m not free…. I don’t have a choice about whom I can love. You have to forget about me….
It’s better for everyone. For you.”
Ben frowned. “No… no… you don’t understand.”
But Allegra was back in the elevator, and this time she would not return. She had made a mistake in seeking him out, in putting her entire future at risk, and she would not make it again.
Sometimes it was better to keep Pandora’s box closed.
TEN
City of the Dead
ItwasonlyaftertheVenatorshadrelaxedtheirhostilestance that Schuyler noticed their surroundings. They were inside a small stone room, and she wasn’t sure, but it looked as if the shelves were made from grave markers, and that two ornately carved tombstones formed a table. “Are we where I think we are?” she asked.
Sam nodded, apologized for the smell, and explained why they were living in a mausoleum, called the City of the Dead by the locals. They were in the eastern part of the city, in a necropolis that served as a home for people whose ancestors were buried in the basement catacombs, or for those who had been forced out of the crowded areas of Cairo, unable to afford apartments. There were anywhere from thirty thousand to a million people living among the dead, Sam explained. The cemeteries were equipped with a minimal sewage and water system, while electric wires connected to nearby mosques provided light and heat. Since the tombs had been built to ac-commodate the traditional mourning period, when people stayed at the cemetery with their dead for the requisite forty days and nights, living in them was a natural progression when there were no other options.
“We got a lead on a Nephilim hive in Tehran. We shut that down, did the same to one in Tripoli, then came here when we heard rumors that girls have been disappearing from the City of the Dead.” He explained that the disappearances and kidnappings did not conform to typical Red Blood crimes.
There was a systemic, even ritualized aspect to them that piqued the Venators’ interest. “It’s got Hell-born written all over it, so we’ve been bunking here to be close to the target.”
“Last week we raided their nest and got them all—except for one that got away,” Deming told them.
“You thought that was me,” Schuyler said.
Deming nodded. “Yes.” She did not apologize for the mistake. She recounted the events in New York, how she had caught the Nephilim who had been after the vampires.
“So it is as we suspected,” Schuyler said, catching her breath at the news. “This has been going on for some time now.” She told them what they had discovered in Florence, and confirmed what the Venators already knew about bloody work of the Petruvian priests, who hunted and killed the human women who had been taken by Croatan, along with their offspring. “The girl who’d been taken had a mark on her: three intertwining circles that contained Lucifer’s sigil, a sheep, and the Blue Blood symbol for union.”
“Paul—the Nephilim in New York—carried the same symbol on his arm,” Deming said. “It looked like a birthmark instead of a tattoo. All the Nephilim carry it on their bodies.”
“But they aren’t born evil,” Schuyler said. “These women and children are victims of a vicious crime; they’re innocent.”
“I don’t know about innocent,” Deming argued. “Paul Rayburn took two immortal lives. Who knows how many more vampires he’s murdered over the years.”
“So these Petruvians… these killing priests who believe they do God’s work,” Sam said. “I had never heard of them until Deming told us what that bastard said, and I’ll bet no one in any Coven has either, which means they’re not part of the official history. How can that be?” he asked his former commander.
“I don’t know.” Jack frowned. “I was not part of the Order of the Seven and not privy to decisions made at the time.”