The Van Alen Legacy (Blue Bloods 4)

Jack took a step toward her. "I'm not your enemy, Schuyler. No matter what you think. You're wrong. That way is lost. There is a protection you don't feel, one that Lawrence did not teach you about. You will shatter against the glass. And I will not have any harm come to you."

"No?"

"You don't have a choice. Come with me, Schuyler, please." Jack held out his hand. His flashing glass-green eyes were suddenly gentle, pleading. The foreboding look on his face had all but disappeared. He looked vulnerable and lost. It was the same way he had looked at her that night. When he had asked her to stay.

She gave him the same answer she had back then.

"No."

Before she could take a breath she was already running sideways and up, so fast that she was a pink blur against the gold wall, and then she had thrown herself upward so that she broke through the ceiling, sending a rain of crystal shards crashing down on the marble floor. It was all over in an instant.

He was wrong. She knew the spell that held it in place, and she knew the counterspell that had destroyed it. Contineo and Frango. Lawrence had been thorough in his tutorials. In this at least, she would not fail her grandfather.

I'm sorry, Jack. But I can't go back there.

Never.

Then she disappeared into the night.

ER 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.

The girl worked as a chambermaid in one of the hotels. Mimi scanned the last three months of her life. Saw her making the beds and clearing out the trash, vacuuming rugs and pocketing the small tips the guests left on the bedside tables. Saw her waiting for her boyfriend, a bike messenger, after work at a small caf¨¦. Work, boyfriend, work, boyfriend. What's this? The hotel manager was forcing the girl into his office and making her take off her clothes. Interesting. But was it real?

Venator training meant Mimi had learned how to distinguish fiction from reality, expectation from realization. Was the girl really being abused by her boss or was she just fearful that it would happen? It looked like a fear dream. Mimi placed a compulsion: she imagined the girl pushing her boss away, kicking him right where it hurt. There. If it ever happened, the girl would know what to do now.

"Call it. Lennox One?" Kingsley's voice echoed through the darkness.

"Clear."