Then the Lennox brothers met Deming back at Venator quarters, one look at their drawn faces told her all she had to know. Sam sunk into the nearest battered armchair. “You were right. The bloodline is unmistakable. Victoria Taylor is dead. She’s been dead for weeks.”
“And we checked the bond records,” Ted added. “Victoria didn’t have a bondmate in this cycle. Stuart didn’t either. They were free agents. At least in this lifetime. But in any event, they weren’t together, and they never were. It was all a lie. All the e-mails were faked.”
Deming kept her calm, but her hands were shaking. “Stuart Rhodes?”
Sam shook his head. “The only thing we found at the airport terminal was an urn with remains. The lab’s going through it now, but I have a hunch it’s Stuart. Looks like the body’s been dead for three days. The video was a lie. There was no saving him from the beginning.”
“Where’s Paul?” she asked.
If it were possible to look more desolate, Ted Lennox managed it. “The team lost him a few hours ago. He slipped away; they don’t know how. Look, whoever or whatever this guy is, he’s dangerous. He’s not one of us, and he’s killed two vampires already. He’s able to conjure a doppelg?nger. That’s real dark magic right there.” The Venators had found no trace of the girl in Paul’s car in the glom memory, which meant she had never existed.
“And according to you he’s able to manipulate his affectus. You’d better be careful down there,” Sam warned. “Are you sure we can’t talk you out of this?”
“No. I need to do this,” Deming said. What had Paul said to her? I heard about you, that you were coming. He had been able to prepare. He knew all about her. He knew that she relied on her talent, her facile way of knowing what was so hard for other Venators to read. He knew she would be proud of it, arrogant even. He had found a way to use her talent against her.
But he hadn’t counted on her ability to learn from her mistakes. She might have been fooled once, but he was wrong to think she would fall for a love story again.
“Right. But even if we can’t find him on this side, we’ll find him in the glom. I’m going in. We have a DeathWalk to complete.”
*
Every vampire experienced the glom in a different way. For Deming, the twilight world manifested as an empty plaza in the middle of the Forbidden City, in Beijing. It had been years since she had seen the Forbidden City this way in real life. Nowadays it was crowded with so many tourists it was hard to comprehend the magnitude of its beauty. But in the glom, the ancient walled city was silent and empty.
She walked past the guardhouse, through the Outer Court to the Inner one, taking the Imperial Way, a path that was only reserved for the Emperor, until she was standing in the steps of the Hall of Mental Cultivation, which meant she was deep in the protoconscious. In the physical world, her heart stopped beating. She walked the line between the worlds, in the thin membrane that separated the living and the dead.
Paul was waiting for her at the steps of the farthest pavilion. In the glom, his soul was even more beautiful than his eyes. He smiled sadly at her. “I knew you would find me.”
Deming walked up to him. Her wings beat against her back. She could choose to appear to him in any form, and came to him as the Angel of Mercy. “Why did you kill them?”
“It’s a long story,” he said, putting her hand against his cheek.
“Does it begin in Florence? In the fifteenth century?”
Paul’s face lit up. “Why yes. You were getting there, weren’t you?”
“You saw the Repository files in my bag. You knew I would find out. That’s why you conjured the illusion that afternoon. The girl in your car who was meant to be Victoria.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“So tell me, what happened in Florence?”
“It’s simple, really. Stuart and Victoria were part of a sect. They were called the Petruvians. Ghastly group, really. Butchers. Murderers. The worst kind of slayer. They killed in the name of peace, in the name of justice, in the name of God. They killed my mother.”
“They must have had good reason,” Deming protested. “The Code of the Vampires would never allow—”
“The Code of the Vampires does not protect the innocent!” Paul snapped. “The Code only serves to protect the vampires. No one else matters.”
“You’re wrong. The Code was created to protect humans. It always has.”
Then Deming realized: the symbol of union in the video. Silver Bloods had mated with human women. Paul Rayburn was demon born, Nephilim. The bastard child of Croatan and Red Blood. “You should not exist,” she said. “The vampires were not given the gift of creating life.” Even Allegra’s daughter was considered Abomination by some of the community. No one knew how Schuyler came into being.