The Van Alen Legacy

Without warning, Bliss was suddenly thrust back into the void.

“What happened?” Dylan asked. “Why are you back here?”

“I don’t know . . . I got upset . . . He must have felt something. . . .” She told him what she’d heard.

“You have to go back there. Make yourself. Do it.”

Bliss concentrated. She tried as hard as she could. She wrenched away the line that separated her from the real world—forced herself to see the world as the Visitor did.

And this time, she was right in his mind.

But he wasn’t talking to Forysth anymore.

Instead she saw what he saw. Bodies. Corpses. Piled on each other. Children, really. They were lying in an auditorium. They had drunk something. A potion. A poison. Mixed by a devil. She saw a thin spectral boy holding a guitar, and a beautiful but hard-looking girl with dark hair, and another boy—handsome and clean-cut and worried. They were all that stood against this disaster. This massacre of innocents. So many kids . . . Red Bloods . . . slaughtered.

Then she saw the demon: he was in the form of another boy. A good-looking kid but with an ugly sneer to his lips. He had caused it. Another of Lucifer’s children.

The images continued, one after another: death, destruction, hate, war. The devil’s handiwork.

Then, just as abruptly, the visions stopped. Bliss woke up. She was sitting at her desk, alone. She was shaking so much she had dropped her pen.

What had happened to Charles Force? Had he been destroyed as they thought? What were they talking about? What gate did the Visitor want to destroy?

And those visions she saw—who were those children? Was that the future? And what would the Visitor do once Forsyth was named Regis? What were they planning? Horror did not even begin to describe what she was feeling. Dylan was right: she had to find a way to stop it—whatever it was—from happening.

She closed her eyes. “Dylan?” she called. “Dylan? Are you there? Where are you?”

But there was no answer, inside or out.





THIRTY-FIVE

Schuyler


“Sky, wake up! Wake up! You’re having a nightmare! Wake up!”

Schuyler opened her eyes. She was sitting up, the bed a messy hurricane of blankets and sheets. Oliver sat next to her, a hand on her shoulder. “You were dreaming,” he said. “That dream again?”

She nodded, pulling her knees up to her chin. “The same one. Always.”

Ever since she had escaped from Leviathan that night in Paris, Schuyler had had the same dream, the very same one every night, as if her subconscious were stuck on one channel, repeating the same eerie television show.

She could never remember what it was about, only that in the dream she was filled with the deepest, most agonizing despair. For days she had woken up crying.

“You okay?” Oliver asked. His eyes were puffy from sleep, his hair tousled and messy, a little part of it in the back sticking straight up, as soft as a baby duck’s down. He was wearing a Duchesne sweatshirt and flannel pajama bottoms—his usual bedtime attire. Schuyler had teased him once about his surprising school spirit. Oliver had never worn anything branded with the school name in the daytime in his life, as far as she had known.

“I’m okay,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

They were in a capsule hotel in Tokyo. It had been a week since they’d left Paris. They had spent three days in Berlin first. Tokyo seemed like a safe place to go—as far away from France as possible.

When they’d arrived in Japan, Schuyler had been drained, with no energy even to perform the ritual that would invigorate her. She was beyond exhausted, but after seeing Jack again, and having all the old feelings stirred up, it felt disloyal to rely on Oliver so much. So she had restrained herself from performing the Sacred Kiss.

For once she wished that she had taken a docile stranger as her human familiar instead of her friend, but it felt like a betrayal to even think it.

That night in Tokyo, Oliver lay back down, his head on the pillow, facing away from her as he curled up on his side, the way he always did. This was how they slept, how they had always slept ever since their journey had begun—in one bed, yet back to back, facing outward to their enemies, having each other’s back, literally. This was the way Oliver had been taught. This was the way the Conduits had protected their vampires for centuries during times of war. In the middle of the night when Schuyler woke up, she was always comforted by the feeling of warmth from Oliver’s back pressing against her own.