CHAPTER 34
Bliss
It was the night before the first day of school. It had been a week since Dylan appeared to her, and sometimes Bliss was convinced she was just dreaming about him. A good dream, but just a dream. But then he kept coming back and talking to her, telling her things she didn’t know (which never happened in a dream: somehow she always knew she was just talking to her subconscious), and she finally decided that it was Dylan whom she was speaking to, or at least a version of him.
She never knew when he would come back. Sometimes she would close her eyes and wait and nothing would happen. Other times she would be in the middle of something, ordering coffee or trying on shoes, and she would have to get out as fast as possible and find someplace she could be alone. That day she was arranging her books for class. She loved the smell of new textbooks, and liked to run her fingers over the glossy pages. The start of a school year always promised so many good things. She was glad to be going back.
“I liked it too,” Dylan said, looking over her shoulder. It startled her to see him standing next to her, with a hand on her desk.
“God! You scared me.”
“Sorry. Tricky, getting to the front you know. I have to make you see me, although now that you know I’m here it’s a little easier.” He continued to look over her shoulder. “What are you taking this year?”
“The usual. A bunch of AP and honors classes. I might check out that Individual Art Study.”
Dylan nodded and hoisted himself up on the edge of her desk so his long legs swung off the floor. “Wanna see something cool?”
“Sure.”
And without warning, suddenly Bliss was sitting with Dylan on the roof of the Cloisters, a museum on the uppermost edge of Manhattan. Of course they were only there in her mind, or in his mind. In reality she was still sitting in her chair at her desk in the apartment. Dylan explained it was his memory that had brought them there. Bliss had never been to the Cloisters.
Dylan explained that they could be anywhere. They didn’t have to be in a black void, with nothing surrounding them, or wherever Bliss happened to be at the moment. They could go anywhere as long as one of them had already been there. It was like having a passport to anywhere in their past. And Dylan loved the Cloisters. The view from the roof was pretty amazing.
“Uh-oh,” Bliss said. “He’s back.”
Dylan looked over his shoulder, at the storm clouds that had suddenly gathered over the city. Even in their self-contained bubble they could not escape the Visitor. “You know what to do,” he said.
“Do I?” Bliss asked. But Dylan was already gone, and Bliss had left their happy moment on the rooftop.
The Visitor had taken charge, and slipping into the darkness, Bliss assumed the stillness of a statue. While outside, her body was pacing the room, barking orders at Forsyth. “And the Conclave?”
“Barlow has passed a resolution offering Charles Force the leadership of the Conclave again, should he return,” Forsyth said nervously. “He was quite adamant.”
The cobra quivered, hood up. This was agitating. Michael! Always they turn to Michael! They forget who brought them to Paradise! Forsyth loosened his tie anxiously.
“Ah . . . and about Paris. Leviathan has confirmed it, there is no longer a gate in Lutetia. Only an intersection, leviathan just missed getting sucked into it. That was why the subvertio did not work, because there was no gate to destroy. We were deceived. Charles had laid a trap for us. But Leviathan’s releasing of the white death into the intersection created a time vacuum. Leviathan was almost pulled inside it himself. But the good news is, he believes Charles’s trap was also his undoing. The archangel has been destroyed.”
“He can prove this?”
“No, my lord. But there has been no sign of Charles Force since Paris.”
“So. Michael was playing games with us as well,” the Visitor ruminated. “I was there, you know, the day he forged the key to the gate. The day he anointed himself keeper.”
“He is tricky, my lord. Michael was never to be trusted.”
“Crafty is what he is. But now we know. The gate is no longer at Lutetia. He must have found a way to move it.” The Visitor brooded for a while. “This Barlow resolution must be crushed. But do it gently. You shall convince the Conclave they cannot go on without filling the position. The spirit of the Coven demands a Regis. They will come around, as the weeks and months go by and still Charles remains absent. You shall refuse at first, but they will press you to accept. You will be named Regis.”
“As you wish, my lord.”
“Once installed, our real work can begin. Without Charles, without Lawrence, they will be looking for a new leader. You shall step into that vacuum. They will come back to me. They will beg me to lead them once again, and through you, Forsyth, our real work can begin. . . .”
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.
CHAPTER 35Schuyler
“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.