The Regent sighed. “I’m not sure myself. As far as our doctors can tell, it just passed through me—neutralized on impact. As if I were wearing a bulletproof vest.”
“Whatever it was, you were very lucky. I’ve seen victims of blood spells. It’s not pretty,” Deming said, sparing Mimi the details: the scraping of remains, the consequent blood burning that was a mercy, since the immortal spirit had been blasted into nothingness. Blood spells were nasty little devices, a way to harness the glom and unleash its effects on one person, targeting the molecules in the vampire’s blood. “Anyway, Coven disbandment seems a rather radical proposition,” she observed.
“They’re trying to get rid of me because they know I would never allow it,” the Regent said, looking up with her eyes bright. “Every vampire for himself? No more cycle births? Don’t they remember what it was like before? If Charles was here they would never even attempt something like this.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll find your killer,” Deming said, putting a hand on Mimi’s arm.
“Good.” The Regent had a covetous look on her that Deming didn’t fully understand until she realized that Mimi was jealous of her. Jealous that Deming had been able to save her hostage, whereas Mimi had fallen short—and as punishment, her Coven’s very foundation was imperiled. It was surely not what she had wanted to accomplish when she had removed the wards.
“It wasn’t your fault, what happened to Victoria,” Deming said. “You shouldn’t blame yourself. Don’t worry. I won’t fail. I never have.”
Mimi shook her hand. “Make sure that you don’t. What the Elders don’t realize is that if they succeed in disbanding us . . . there is a very real possibility that we will never rise again.”
TWENTYSEVEN
The New Girl
The room she had been assigned was a small one that faced the shaft, so that the window opened to a view of a brick wall, five feet away. In Shanghai she had command of a top-floor penthouse, although pollution in the city was so bad she almost had the same view there as here: a gray darkness. The Lennox brothers, who lived on the top floor, had offered their help, but she had refused them for now. She worked better alone.
Deming grabbed her bag and left the building, planning on taking the subway uptown. The pressure on her to deliver was intense, but she savored the challenge. There was nothing she liked more than a zero endgame, especially since she had no intention of losing. Colleagues in Shanghai had called the Chen twins arrogant, but she didn’t see it that way. The twins were different from the rest. Like the legendary Kingsley Martin, they did whatever it took to get results. They were cold and ruthless, and would stop at nothing to get to the truth. Which was why the Coven had felt comfortable in sending one of them to New York, since they got to keep the other.
This was her third embed mission since becoming a Venator a year ago (she and Dehua had taken advantage of the new rules regarding recruitment, and like the Force twins, had joined up early), and she prepared herself mentally for the day to come. Until Liling Tang’s abduction, the Asian Coven’s biggest headache had been human rights abuses—too many vampires draining their familiars to full consumption and leaving a trail of Red Blood corpses in their wake, or else using memory wipes a little too liberally, so that humans became mentally impaired. Right now her sister was in the rural countryside, tracking down a probrae spiritus, a vampire who was using the glom to give the local human population nightmares.
The Duchesne assignment was more akin to what they had pulled at the International School, when they had been brought in on the kidnapping case. Liling Tang had run around with a sophisticated expatriate crowd, shunning the usual clique of rich kids from the Communist aristocracy. Her friends had been Blue Bloods from around the world, and her kidnapper a European transfer. The crime had caused the Chinese Conclave to consider seceding from the global vampire community, but so far they had elected to remain loyal to New York.
Deming was well aware that Duchesne was unlike your typical American high school—there were no cheerleaders prancing about in tiny skirts that barely covered their behinds, no hulking football players stalking the hallways, no show choir geeks, no threat of slushie facials (perhaps she had just watched too much American television), but the moment she stepped through its ornate double doors, she found it was just like everywhere else.