The Van Alen Legacy (4 page)

She was Bliss Llewellyn.
The daughter of Senator Forsyth Llewellyn and stepdaughter of the late Bobi Anne
Shepherd.
She had grown up in Houston until her family moved to Manhattan soon after her
fifteenth birthday. She was a student at the DuchesneSchool on 
E. 96th
Street
, and her favorite hobbies were, in no particular order: cheerleading,
shopping, and modeling. Oh my god, I’m a bimbo, Bliss thought. There had to be more to her than
that.

Start again. Okay. Her name
was Bliss Llewellyn, and she’d grown up in a big, grand house in Houston’s River Oaks
neighborhood, but her favorite part of Texas was her Pop-Pop’s ranch, where she would ride horses
over lush prairies blanketed with wildflowers. Her favorite subject in school was Art Humanities,
and one day she had hoped to own her own art gallery or, barring that, become a curator at the
Met.

She was Bliss Llewellyn, and
right now she was in the Hamptons.
An upscale beach community two hours away from Manhattan
(depending on traffic) where people from the city went to “get away from it all” only to find
themselves smack-dab in the middle of everything.
August in the Hamptons was as frantic as
September in New York. Back when she was still just Bliss and not a vessel for evil (or V.F.E.,
as she had come to think of her situation when she wanted to laugh instead of cry), her
stepmother had dragged them out here because it was ‘the thing to do.” Bobi Anne had been big on
‘the thing to do” and had compiled a huge list of dos and don’ts – you’d think she had been a
magazine editor in a former life. The sad thing about Bobi Anne was that she always tried so hard
to be fashionable and always ended up the complete and total opposite.

Images from Bliss’s last real
summer in the Hamptons began to flood her brain. She was an athletic girl, and had spent the
three months horseback riding, sailing, playing tennis, learning to surf. She had broken her
right wrist again that year. The first three times had been because of sports, skiing, sailing,
and tennis. This time she’d fractured it for a stupid Hamptons-style reason. She’d tripped on her
new
Louboutin
platforms and landed on her wrist.

Now that she had answered the
first and second questions in detail, she had no choice but to move on to the third. And it was
always the third question that was the most difficult to answer.

What happened to
me?

Bad things.
Terrible things.
Bliss felt herself grow cold. It was funny how she could still feel
things, how the ghost-memory of being alive and fully aware through each of her senses lingered.
She could feel her phantom limbs, and when she slept, she dreamed she was still living an
ordinary life: eating chocolates, walking the dog, listening to the sound of the rain as it
drummed on the roof, feeling the softness of a cotton pillowcase against her cheek.

But she couldn’t dwell on
that. Right now there were things she did not want to remember, but she had to force herself to
try.

She remembered their apartment
in the city, how the white-gloved doormen called her “Miss” and always made sure her packages
were sent up quickly. She remembered making friends at school: Mimi Force, who had taken her
under her wing and had laughed at her white leather handbag. Mimi was patronizing and
intimidating at the same time. But she’d had other friends, hadn’t she? Yes, of course she had.
There was Schuyler Van Alen, who had become her best friend, a sweet girl who had no idea how
strong she was, or how beautiful, and Oliver Hazard-Perry, the human boy with the wry sense of
humor and the impeccable wardrobe.

She remembered a night at a
club, shared cigarettes in an alley, and a boy. She had met a boy.
The black-haired boy,
lying limp in her arms.
Dylan Ward. She felt numb. Dylan was dead. She remembered
everything now. What had happened in
Rio
.
Everything.
The killing.
Lawrence. Running down the hill, away from Sky and Oliver because she
did not want them to see her face, to see her for who she really was.

Silver Blood spawn.

With Forsyth, she had returned
to New York for Bobi Anne’s funeral.
A memorial, really, because like the other dearly
departed members of the Conclave, there was nothing to bury.
There was nothing left of
Bobi Anne, not even a singed lock of her highlighted hair. A giant blown-up glamour shot on an
easel took the place of a coffin at the front of the altar. The photograph showed her stepmother
at her finest moment, when she had been profiled in a society magazine.

The funeral had been packed.
The entire Blue Blood community had come out for it, to show support for those who had stood
against the Silver Bloods. Mimi had been there with her twin brother, Jack. They had offered her
words of solace and comfort.

If they only knew.

At the funeral Bliss was still
aware enough of what was around her. She had heard Forsyth tell her (but not her; he was talking
to the Visitor even then, she understood now) not to worry. Jordan was no longer a problem. Worry
about what? What problem? Oh.
Right.
She’d almost forgotten.
Her little
sister.
Jordan had known that Bliss carried the Visitor inside her. Jordan had tried to
kill her.

The exercise was over. She
knew who she was, where she was, and what had happened to her. She was Bliss Llewellyn, she was
in the Hamptons, and she was carrying the soul of Lucifer inside her body.

That was her story.

The next day she would have to
remember it all over again.

Lawrence
’s
killer.
Her grandfather’s killer.
Okay, so the Inquisitor didn’t come out and
say it, no, nothing
so
coarse as that. But he’d hinted enough. Cast enough doubt on
her story that he might as well have branded the word across her forehead.

She hadn’t seen it coming. She
was still in shock from losing Lawrence so
violently,
forget about having to defend
herself to the Committee afterward. She had told them what happened as well as she could, never
even considering the possibility that they might not believe her.

“Miss Van Alen, allow me to
walk you through your testimony. According to your recollection of the events at Corcovado, a boy
had been transformed into the image of Lucifer himself. Your grandfather ordered you to kill him,
but you missed. Lawrence then struck the fatal blow, mistakenly killing an innocent and unlocking
Leviathan’s prison, setting the demon free. The demon then murdered him. Is this all correct so
far?”

“Yes,” she said
quietly.

The Inquisitor consulted his
notes for a moment. Schuyler had met him once before, when her grandfather had hosted a few
members of the Conclave at the house. His name was Josiah Archibald, and he had retired from the
Conclave years ago. His granddaughters were her classmates at Duchesne. But if he felt at all
sympathetic to her plight, he masked it well. “He was right in front of you, was he not? The
boy?” the Inquisitor asked, looking up.

“Yes.”

“And you say you were holding
your mother’s sword?”

“Yes.”

He snorted, looking pointedly
at the assembled Elders, who then leaned forward or shuffled in their seats. The only active
surviving member of the Conclave was Forsyth Llewellyn, who sat in the back, his head covered in
bandages and his left eye swollen shut. The others were emeritus members like the Inquisitor.
They sat clustered in a semicircle, looking like a group of shrunken elves. There were so few of
them left: old Abe Tompkins had been fetched from his summer home on Block Island; Minerva
Morgan, one of Cordelia’s oldest friends and the former chairwoman of the New York Garden
Society, sat gargoyle still in her knit boucle suit; Ambrose Barlow, who looked like he was fast
asleep.

“Gabrielle’s sword has been
lost for many, many years,” the Inquisitor said. “And you say your mother appeared to
you
?,
poof! Out of nowhere, and handed it to you. Just like that.
And then
disappeared.
To go back to her bed at the hospital, presumably.”
His voice
dripped with sarcasm.

Schuyler shifted uncomfortably
in her seat. It did seem fantastic and amazing, and unreal. But it had happened.
Just as
she had described.

“Yes . . . I don’t know how,
but yes.”

The Inquisitor’s tone was
condescending. “Pray tell us, where is this sword now?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t. In
the chaos afterward, the sword seemed to have disappeared along with Leviathan, and she told them
so.

“What do you know about
Gabrielle’s sword?” the Inquisitor asked.

“Nothing.
I
didn’t even know she owned a sword.”

“It is a true sword. It holds
a special kind of power. It was forged so that it always meets its target,” he grumbled, as if
her ignorance were a sign of guilt.

“I don’t know what you’re
getting at.”

The Inquisitor spoke very
slowly and carefully. “You say you were carrying your mother’s sword. A sword that has been lost
for centuries and that has never failed to strike its enemies in all its history. And yet . . .
you did. You failed. If you were indeed holding Gabrielle’s sword, how could you
miss?”

“Are you saying that I wanted
to miss?” she asked, incredulous.

“I’m not saying that: you
are.”

Schuyler was shocked. What was
happening? What was this? The Inquisitor turned to his audience. “Ladies and gentlemen of the
Conclave, this is an interesting situation. Here are the facts of the matter. Lawrence Van Alen
is dead. His granddaughter would like us to believe a rather outrageous story, that Leviathan, a
demon that Lawrence himself buried in stone a millennium ago, has been released, and that that
same demon killed him.”

“It’s true,” Schuyler
whispered.

“Miss Van Alen, you had never
met your grandfather until a few months ago, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“You barely knew him from a
stranger on the street.”

“I wouldn’t say that. We
became very close in a short amount of time.”

“Yet you harbored bitterness
against him, did you not? After all, you chose to live with your mother’s estranged brother
rather than with Lawrence.”

“I didn’t choose anything! We
were fighting the adoption. I did not want to live with Charles Force and his family?”

“So you say.”

“Why on earth would I want to
kill my grandfather?” she practically shouted. This was insane.
A kangaroo court, a
charade, a travesty.
There was no justice to be served here.

“Perhaps you did not mean to
kill him. Perhaps, as you told us earlier, it was an accident.”

The Inquisitor smiled, looking
like a shark. Schuyler slumped in her seat, defeated. For whatever reasons, the Inquisitor did
not believe her story, and it was clear the remaining members of the Conclave would not either.
The hidden Silver Blood among their ranks had been discovered, Nan Cutler had perished in the
Almeida fire. The Conclave believed that, at least. They had accepted it. Forsyth Llewellyn had
been the victim of Warden Cutler’s betrayal and had borne witness.

But the ruling body did not
want to accept the reality of Leviathan’s return. It was one thing to accept the testimony of a
fellow Elder, and another thing to take the word of a half-blood. They would rather believe
Schuyler had deliberately killed Lawrence than that a demon stalked the earth once
more.

There were no other witnesses
to back her up except for Oliver, and the testimony of human Conduits was inadmissible in a
Committee investigation. Humans simply didn’t count, when it came down to it. So the night before
the Conclave cast judgment and decided what to do with her, she and Oliver fled the
country.

It was ten o’clock in the
evening, and the first guests were arriving at the landing. As befitting the Oriental theme, a
platoon of authentic Chinese junks rented for the party made a stately procession up the river,
banners flying the crests of the Great Houses of Europe. Hapsburg.
Bourbon.
Savoy.
Liechtenstein. Saxe-Coburg.

Blue Bloods that had
remained in the Old Country in favor of seeking a new home across the ocean.
Schuyler
stood sentry with the army of servers lined up against the stone wall, just another faceless
drone, or so she hoped. Each of them carried a different libation: there were pink cosmopolitans
in martini glasses, goblets of the finest Burgundy and Bordeaux from the hostess’s vineyards in
Montrachet
, sparkling water with lemon slices for teetotalers. She carried a heavy
tray of champagne flutes, bubbles clustered at the lip, golden and bright.

She could hear the crack-thump
of the wind whipping against the multiple sails. Some were decorated as dragon boats, complete
with gold-plated scales and luminescent emerald eyes at the bow. Some were kitted out as warships
with brightly colored “cannons” poking out of the stern.
A grand imperial parade, at once
indulgent and beautiful.
She noticed something else as well, the crests on the banners
were moving, changing with the light, transforming in a fluid dance of form and color.