All You Desire (26 page)

Together they drifted by the ancient stone Temple of Dendur, past gleaming suits of medieval armor, and around a statue of Andromeda chained to a seaside cliff. Inside one of the French period rooms, Alex and Calum hopped over a velvet rope and made themselves at home on a pair of plush chairs with gilded legs. The three walls of the room featured white paneling trimmed in gold. The atmosphere was refined and opulent, despite the unmistakable smell of sausage in the air.

“Help yourself,” Alex said. An eighteenth-century French console held several covered silver platters. Calum jumped up and lifted one of the lids.

“Hot dogs?” he groaned. “We're sitting in a room taken from the home of the Marquis de Cabris, and we're going to eat
hot dogs
?”

“I
like
hot dogs,” Alex said. “And so do French people. Don't be such a snoot, Calum. It's not very attractive. Besides, the people who built this room weren't as fancy as you'd think. They used to pee in the corners.”

“You remember that?” Calum squealed with laughter.

“No, I read it in a book,” Alex said.

Haven passed on the hot dogs, but she did pour herself a cup of coffee from a silver pot that looked as if it had been snatched from another part of the museum.

“Crap!” Calum yelped. He'd accidentally smeared some carnival mustard on the three-hundred-year-old upholstery and was dabbing at it with a white cotton napkin.

“All right,” Alex said, ignoring Calum's cursing. “Spill it, Haven. Who was the girl with the golden dress?”

“What do you know about the history of the OS?” Haven asked.

“Not much,” Calum said, looking up from his chore. “The only history that fascinates me is my own.”

“You're stalling.” Alex huffed comically.

Haven hesitated, but she couldn't think of a reason not to tell them. “In the 1920s, I was a girl named Constance. She was one of the original members of the Ouroboros Society. I started having visions of her life when I was just a little kid. She and her boyfriend died in a fire in 1925. I knew the fire hadn't been an accident, so I came to New York about a year and a half ago to find out what had really happened.”

“What
had
happened?” Alex moved to the edge of her seat.

“They were both murdered by a girl who was in love with Constance's boyfriend.” Haven neglected to add that the murderess had since been reborn as Padma Singh.

“Oh my God!” Alex said. “That's horrible! So did Constance really love this guy—the one she died with?”

“Yes.”

“So maybe you'll find each other again. You know that sort of thing happens all the time. There are lots of people at the OS who think they've discovered ‘the one.'”

Haven resisted the urge to share too much. She still didn't know Alex and Calum that well, but she knew better than to trust them with secrets.

“We did find each other.”

“And?!” Calum prodded.

“What happened?” Alex asked.

“First he disappointed me. Then he died. In another fire.”

“You're talking about Iain Morrow, aren't you?” Alex asked.

“How do you know?”

“Oh, come on, Haven, you think we don't read the gossip pages? You're the heir to the Morrow fortune. To be honest, we're a little hurt that you didn't tell us yourself. I thought maybe Iain had said terrible things about us or something.”

“You knew Iain?” Now Haven was surprised.

“Sure,” Alex said. “We met at the Society. We were friends for a while. I even went out with him a few times. It was only for show, of course. We both needed the publicity.”

“Iain's a jerk,” Calum blurted out. “Hot as hell, but still a jerk.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed sadly.

“Why do you say that?” Haven asked. “What did he do?”

“We used to be close,” Alex said, “and then one day he just decided that he didn't want to be my friend anymore.”

“For no reason?”

“Well . . .” Alex looked to Calum.

“Go ahead and tell her,” he urged.

“So a couple of years ago, I let my OS account get low. I'd just used a bunch of points for a little nip and tuck here and there. And I was busy with my Oscars campaign. You have no idea how expensive those things can get. I felt like I was transferring points to every person I met. Anyway, the old president of the Society—that bitch Padma Singh—was really tough about making people keep points in their accounts. I dropped under the fifteen-point minimum, and I was informed that I'd have to earn more immediately if I wanted to stay in the club.

“Iain promised to loan me the points, but then Padma called and offered me a job. She needed someone young and innocent looking to deliver some drugs to a Society bigwig on vacation in Paris. It would take less than a day, I'd get a free trip to France, and I'd make enough points to drag myself out of debt. The offer was too good to refuse, and I was pretty naive back then. I told her I'd take the job.”

“You delivered drugs?” Haven asked.

“No. I decided against it in the end. I found another way to refill my account.”

“Alex won't even tell
me
what she had to do,” Calum said, and the girl glared at him.

“I tried to talk to Iain, but he was so pissed that I'd even considered helping one of the drug dealers that he refused to speak to me.”

“He always looked down on us,” Calum sniffed. “Like we were tainted.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed, “and I never understood why. He wasn't exactly a model citizen himself. He'd gone through every pretty girl at the OS by the time he turned eighteen.”

“So I've heard,” Haven said. A few years earlier, Iain had infiltrated the Society disguised as a womanizing playboy to hide his true identity from Adam. Apparently, his disguise had fooled Alex and Calum as well.

“Is that why you were curious about Mia Michalski?” Alex asked.

“Iain and Mia?” Haven remembered the kiss Iain had planted on Mia's cheek. She'd convinced herself it was innocent. It probably had been. But why hadn't Iain mentioned that Mia was one of the girls he'd “dated”?

“Yeah, they tried to keep it hush-hush, but everyone knew they were together. And then Mia disappeared, and Iain decided he preferred old ladies and started sniffing around Padma Singh's wrinkled old carcass. But”—Alex bit into a hot dog—“that was back in the dark days of the Society. It isn't one big orgy anymore.”

“No, everyone's a model citizen now,” Calum complained. “If you ask me, Iain was always more like one of the creepy robot kids than one of us.”

“Robot kids?” Haven mumbled, finding it hard to keep up her side of the conversation. If Iain's womanizing had really been nothing but a disguise, why had he kept his relationship with Mia hush-hush? It didn't make any sense.

Calum rolled his eyes as if the mere mention of the subject annoyed him. “Have you met many young people at the OS?”

“No,” Haven said.

“I call them the robots. Most of them take the Eternal Ones thing
way
too seriously. All they think about is their glorious future.”

“Yeah, it's amazing how much the OS is changing,” Alex said.

“For the
worse
,” Calum groaned. “Can you imagine what it's going to be like now that the little robots at Halcyon Hall are starting to graduate?”

“You mean the kids at the school Adam started? What are they like?” A wave of guilt washed over Haven. She had almost forgotten about Adam's young recruits.

“They're not allowed to talk to the likes of me,” Calum said. “But their leader is this guy named Milo Elliot. He's a total tool. I bet he was shopping at Brooks Brothers when he was in the third grade.”

“Adam
loves
Milo,” Alex said.

“Yeah,” Calum agreed. “I suppose the rest of us should just face it. Adam has big things planned for his robot army. My guess is it starts with world domination.”

“World domination? What in the
hell
are you talking about?” Alex rolled her eyes. “The Halcyon Hall kids are just goody-goodies. They're not
evil
.”

“That's what
you
think,” Calum said solemnly. “My sources tell me otherwise.”

“You and your ‘sources' have always been full of it,” Alex replied. “I'm not going to sit here and let you fill Haven's head with this crap. Let's take her to the fund-raiser and let her decide for herself.”

“Forget it!” Calum squawked. “I'm not going to be responsible for Haven dying of boredom.”

“Fund-raiser?” Haven repeated.

“What are you doing tonight?” Alex asked innocently.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

When Haven saw all the studious Society members filing up the steps of City Hall, she was glad she'd worn her most conservative dress. Alex's plaid skirt and pearls made her look more like a kindergarten teacher than a movie star. Even Calum had buttoned his shirt and topped it with a crimson and navy striped cravat.

“You forgot to mention that the party was going to be
here
,” Haven whispered. Bathed in spotlights, the two-hundred-year-old landmark was breathtaking.

“Don't be so dazzled, darling.” Calum was out of sorts. He didn't want to waste an evening at a fund-raiser, and he'd complained nonstop until Alex had threatened to kick him out of the car on the way downtown. “This is just the mayor's way of earning a few precious points.”

“You're saying the mayor rents out City Hall?”

“If you know the right people, everything in New York is for rent,” Alex explained. “You could have a cocktail party inside the Statue of Liberty for fifteen points. If you ever decide to join the OS, I'll throw you a midnight bash on the top of the Empire State Building.”

Inside, the trio flitted past the security guards in the building's magnificent white rotunda, where the coffin of Abraham Lincoln had once been on view. Following the other guests, they then scaled the grand stairway and entered a bright green room, its walls decorated with priceless paintings framed in gold.

Despite the grandeur of the Governor's Room
,
the atmosphere was somber. Unlike the other OS parties Haven had witnessed, this one seemed to be short on booze and scantily covered skin. The snippets of conversation Haven picked up as she and her companions traipsed through the crowd were too dull to lodge in her memory.

“Look. There's the man of the hour,” Calum said, grabbing Haven's hand and whispering in her ear. “That's Milo. What'd I tell you? Is that kid a robot or what?” He pointed to a clean-cut young man in his late teens. Milo was blond and fair and unremarkable in almost every way. Even his off-the-rack suit was just a notch above the uniform favored by the Society's drones. And yet Milo was clearly important. Haven recognized the bald man with whom he was chatting as the tycoon who ran the biggest bank in New York. Milo said something that made the man chuckle.

“I thought you guys didn't give a damn about changing the world.” Haven spun around to find Owen Bell looking dashing in a conservative suit. He smiled at Haven. “It's nice to see
you
again, though. I'm glad they finally dragged you out of that fancy hotel.”

“Thanks,” Haven said. “What are you doing here?”

“Yeah, what
are
you doing here, Owen?” Calum demanded, as if Owen had crashed the party.

“As you may recall, Calum, I'm employed by the Ouroboros Society. I get paid to be here.”

“That's right. How could I forget? Owen has dedicated his talents to helping the robots seize control,” Calum explained. His tone was flippant, but his eyes were serious. “He's a traitor to the human cause.”

“Who knows? Maybe I'm a double agent,” Owen quipped. “Maybe I'm protecting the human race from Milo.”

“Joke all you want, but I still don't know why Adam wastes his time on that kid,” Alex said. “You're the one with all the big ideas, Owen. You're the one Adam really listens to.”

“Adam listens to you?” Haven asked Owen, trying not to show the disappointment she felt. Maybe she had been wrong about Owen. Maybe his soul was already too polluted to save.

“He humors me,” Owen corrected her.

“Owen's just being modest,” Alex jumped in. “He has all of these great ideas for improving the OS. He told Adam about them, and Adam's been making the changes.”

“You're exaggerating, Alex,” Owen said, embarrassed.

“Am I? You convinced Adam to forgive debts for members under twenty-one, and you helped kick out the serious drug dealers.”

“Adam really agreed to do all that?” Haven asked in astonishment. If it were true, it was the first real proof she'd found that the OS was evolving.

“Yes, soon everything at the Society will appear completely dull and legitimate,” Calum jumped in. “We wouldn't want rumors of criminal activity to jeopardize Milo's career, would we?”

“My suggestions were never meant to help Milo,” Owen said. “I don't like him any more than you do. But if Adam's convinced that Milo's the future, I'm going to do what I can to make sure that future is one I can live in. So if you'll excuse me for a moment, it's time for me to get the Society's great hope to take the stage.”

“How long have you guys known him?” Haven asked as Owen disappeared into the crowd.

“Just a year or so,” Alex said. “Calum took one look at Owen after he joined the OS and decided to make himself Owen's own personal welcoming party.”