A match was struck, and a fire burned, filling the screen. Smoky dark flames that danced around an ebony center. The Black Fire of Hell.
Mimi shut off the computer, banging down the screen on her laptop. She found she was trembling. It was a joke, wasn’t it? Someone from the party had decided to make a funny video. That was all it was. It had to be. Jamie Kip and Bryce Cutting probably put it together to spook her. They still couldn’t accept she was their Regent. It was just a joke to them.
Still, Mimi didn’t sleep well that night. She wished she could just forget about it, delete it, and like any normal teenager, go back to counting the number of her friends online. But she couldn’t. She was their leader. She was responsible for the safety of every vampire in the Coven. She wasn’t going to lose one on her watch. No way. Not this time. Not after Charles’s blind denial of the existence of the Silver Bloods . . . and Forsyth’s betrayal of the Conclave. Whatever this was—a new Silver Blood threat, or something else?—she had to be prepared to deal with it. She had to take action. This video had been sent to her for a reason.
SIXTEEN
The Conspiracy
The sixty-inch monitor on the wall showed the vampire’s face full of terror, frozen on the screen. Mimi looked around the conference table on Monday morning to make sure everyone had a chance to absorb it. She had skipped class for this, but even Trinity could not argue that this was less important than passing AP Mandarin.
Around the table sat members of the Conspiracy, the subcommittee that handled human-vampire relations and disseminated false information about the vampires into the human world. Conspiracy members included several best-selling novelists, one of whom had popularized the amusing idea that instead of burning to death, vampires smelled like roses in the sun, as well as film producers who kept the slash-and-behead theory alive and well in numerous blockbuster horror movies. More than a few were annoyed to have been pulled from their lucrative jobs for an emergency meeting. The Conspiracy had not met as a body in many years.
Seymour Corrigan, Conclave Elder and head of the Conspiracy, opened the discussion. “Any ideas where this might have come from?”
“Looks like one of your jobbers, Harry,” joked Lane Barclay-Fish, the author of Blood and Roses and said mastermind of the floral-smelling vampires conceit. He turned to Harold Hopkins, the executive producer of a popular vampire soap opera currently running on a prestigious cable network.
“Not me—in my show the humans only use our blood as vitamins. You know, long life and all that,” chortled Harold, a bald vampire who wore sunglasses indoors.
Warden Corrigan cleared his throat. “I fail to see the amusement in this enterprise.”
“You guys, Seymour’s right, this isn’t funny,” Mimi said. “This is a video from a real party. That’s one of us up there, not one of Harold’s overpaid actresses.” It galled her that after everything that happened, they could still be so glib when one of them was missing. She knew they were just covering up their fear, but it was in poor taste.
“Right, right,” Lane apologized. “I say we let the Red Bloods think it’s a movie trailer. One of Josie’s, maybe.”
Josephine Mara was the hottest young director in the business. She had the pinched, stressed look of someone perennially on deadline. In the past year she had helmed several “underground” horror films to major success. It was easy enough to make horror films. As a vampire she didn’t need to pay for special effects. She just created them. “Sure, why not?” Josephine smiled thinly. “I’ll say it’s a follow-up to Eidolon Memory,” she said, naming her most recent hit, a haunted-house ghost story set in a girls’ boarding school.
“Remember when one of the familiars penned a tell-all memoir in the 1800s?” Harold asked.
“Yes, thank God we got her publisher to categorize it as a novel,” Lane said, nodding. “What was that woman thinking? And that title! Longing for Love Forever, jeez. Lord Byron has a lot to answer for.”
“He did have quite the taste for the ladies. Bite ’em and leave ’em. Meanwhile, the poor lady is stuck with the yearning and all that. Must be difficult. A pity.” Harold shrugged.
“I miss the old days, when it was so easy,” Lane sighed. “Remember when we came up with Count Dracula? That was fun. Sent scores of tourists to Romania! Red Bloods will believe anything.”