Bliss walked to the end of the hall and found the room. She pushed the door open and slipped inside.
Allegra Van Alen’s room was as cold as a meat locker. The woman slumbering in the bed did not move. Bliss approached the bedside tentatively, feeling like an intruder. Allegra looked peaceful, ageless, her face unlined. She was like a princess in a glass coffin: beautiful and still.
She thought that when she finally saw Allegra she would sense something—know for sure whether she was related to her or not. But there was nothing. Bliss touched the necklace hidden underneath her shirt for comfort, then reached over to hold Allegra’s hand, feeling her papery skin. She closed her eyes and tried to access her past lives, her memories, to see if she had any knowledge of Gabrielle.
In flashes she would catch a glimpse of someone who looked familiar, who might have been her, but Bliss wasn’t sure. In the end, the woman in the bed was as much a stranger as the nurse in the hallway.
“Allegra?” Bliss whispered. It seemed presumptuous to call her “mother.” “It’s me. I’m . . . Bliss. I don’t know if you remember me, but I think you might be my . . .” Bliss suddenly stopped short. She felt a pain in her chest, as if she couldn’t breathe. What was she doing here? She had to go. She had to leave immediately.
She was right; she would find no answers here. She would never know the truth. Her father would never tell her, and Allegra could not.
Bliss left, troubled and confused, still seeking answers to questions she kept in her heart.
She did not know that when she left the room, Allegra Van Alen began to scream.
EIGHTEEN
Committee meetings never started on time, so Mimi didn’t worry when her conference call with her bonding planner ran a little longer than she’d planned. Ever since Lawrence had been installed as Regis, the meetings had less and less to do with social planning and fund-raising and more to do with, in her opinion, totally redundant vampire lessons. Edmund Oelrich, the doddering senile goat from the Conclave who was the new chief warden, didn’t run as tight a ship as the late Priscilla Dupont, and was completely ignorant of the fact that if they wanted to secure the right honorary chairs for the annual spring gala for the ballet in May, they should have sent feelers out a few weeks ago. As it was, all the former First Ladies were already unavailable, and the governor’s wife was immersed in her husband’s latest scandal. At this rate they would have to settle for the mayor’s girlfriend, who wasn’t remotely fashionable or at all interested in doing social work under the guise of social-climbing.
Mimi entered the library room at Duchesne, found a seat in the back, and tapped on the Bluetooth device attached to her ear as an excuse for not greeting her friends. She thought the Committee’s lessons were a complete waste of time. She’d been adept at all her skills since transformation, and it galled her that other vampires were so slow. Today they were supposed to learn more about mutatio, the ability to change into the elements: fire, water, air. Mimi sighed. She had been disappearing into a fog since she was eleven. She had “developed” early, as they say.
“Sorry, could you repeat that again?” she asked, shaking the tiny silver receiver wedged in her ear. “You think we could have it at the White House? No?”
The firm she’d hired, Elizabeth Tilton Events, had recently orchestrated a five-day extravaganza in Cartagena, wherein Don Alejandro Casta?eda, the Blue Blood heir to his father’s sugar-and-beverage fortune, had been bonded to his vampire twin, Danielle Russell, a recent Brown graduate. Mimi and Jack had represented the family, and Mimi had been a little miffed when the talk at the rehearsal dinner was about how extraordinary everything had been. The best man had announced that “the next bonding will have to be on the moon, since no one else is going to top this!”
Mimi was sure going to try.
“Darling,” Lizbet Tilton cooed. “I’m sorry, but with the new administration, the Rose Garden is out of the question. I don’t think we contributed enough to the campaign. But there has to be somewhere else you’d like to have it.”
“What about Buckingham, then? I’m sure my father can call in a favor.”
Lizbet laughed heartily. “Sweetheart, what century are you in? Have you got your lifetimes confused? Even though you’re a Royal, that branch of the clan has never forgiven us for leaving. Besides, they’re terribly strict these days. Even Charles and Camilla had to get married off-site.”