Nancy A Collins-Vamps 02 (10 page)

Cally frowned. “What’s that?”

“It is a dangerous power that allows whoever wields it to kill anyone, vampire or human, simply by touching them. Pieter Van Helsing had it and used it to 98

wreak havoc on our people on a level unlike any vampire hunter before him. Then in 1835 he destroyed the original Bathory Academy and Ruthven’s School for Boys.

“When your grandfather, Adolphus, learned what had happened, he tracked the vampire killer down.

Then he drained Van Helsing’s blood, usurping his bloodright and powers.”

“Did your father get the Shadow Hand next?” Cally asked.

Victor shook his head. “Nor did it manifest with me. When Lilith was born, I watched her closely. No again. As it turns out,
you
are the one who carries the Shadow Hand.”

“That’s
it
! I’m calling bullshit on this right now!” Cally said angrily. “How could I
possibly
have this Shadow thingy without knowing about it? I mean, I started developing stormgathering abilities when I was
thirteen
. Remember when I accidentally made it rain inside our old apartment?”

“Your grandmother was
so
mad you ruined her sofa.” Sheila chuckled.

“See? There’s no way I could have the kind of power you’re talking about without it making itself known before now.”

“I’m afraid it already has, Cally . . . you just didn’t realize it.” Victor handed her a piece of folded parchment 99

he’d taken from the breast pocket of his suit. “I only recently received this from Madame Nerezza. It’s a report by your physical education instructor, Coach Knorrig. Go ahead: read it. She describes a manifesta-tion of the Shadow Hand while you were in a partial trance during your physical skills assessment. Do you remember that?”

“Yes. I remember.” Cally nodded, her voice becoming distant as she tried to recall what had happened in the grotto that night. “I was trying to shapeshift into a wolf and something . . . something strange happened. I don’t really know what.”

“Neither did your physical education instructor—at least not fully. But your headmistress recognized the Shadow Hand when she read Knorrig’s report. Luckily, Madame Nerezza is an old friend of the family: she’s agreed to keep the information secret.

“However, I have reason to believe a member of the school staff leaked a copy of the report to Vinnie Maledetto. That is why he has suddenly expressed such a keen interest in your welfare. He hopes to win your trust in order to turn you into an assassin for the Strega.”

“No! You’ve got it all wrong!” Cally shook her head in protest. “That’s not the reason the Maledettos are nice to me. One of the twins got stuck with a bat face after flying class, and I helped her turn back. Vinnie—I 100

mean, Mr. Maledetto—provided me with a driver to thank me for helping his daughter, that’s
all
.”

“What you say could very well be true. Perhaps it started innocently enough—but I can tell you that nothing involving Vinnie Maledetto stays innocent for long. The man has an unerring ability to identify the deadliest thing in a room and exploit it to his own ends. And you, my dear, are the deadliest by far. You cannot trust the Maledettos, Cally—not the father, not the son, not even the girls. Your mother told me of your involvement with Lucky Maledetto. . . .”

“My what?” Cally was momentarily baffled—she’d forgotten trying to throw her mother off Peter’s scent by claiming she’d been sneaking off with Lucky.

“He and his kin are sworn enemies of all who carry Todd blood in their veins. That is why you must break your ties to that accursed family.”

“But Bella and Bette are my
friends
!” Cally protested.

Seeing the look on his daughter’s face, Victor placed a hand on her shoulder. “I understand how confusing all this is for you. I realize you must feel that I have no right to come in here and tell you who you should and shouldn’t be friends with. I haven’t been a father to you up to this point, Cally, but I want that to change.” The serious look on Victor’s face lightened as he moved his hand to touch her chin, tilting Cally’s head back so 101

that she looked directly into his eyes. “I’ve seen your grades and read all the summaries your instructors have written about you. You are an incredibly intelligent and gifted girl, with or without the Shadow Hand, and one I am proud to have as my daughter. I pray to the Founders that you will find it in your heart to forgive me for whatever hurt my actions may have caused you over the years. Still, you
must
believe me when I tell you that severing your ties with the Maledettos is for your own good.”

Cally took a deep breath and stepped back as she pondered what to do. She had visualized all sorts of scenarios for when she finally met her father face-to-face. Some were angry. Others were tearful. Some were bittersweet. But not one of them had involved him asking her to discard her friends in the name of family.

Part of her wanted to tell him to forget it. She had gotten along just fine without him up to now. But what if she told him no and he decided to wash his hands of her entirely and she never got to see him again? She had spent her entire life waiting for her father to make his appearance. She wasn’t about to risk his leaving her again.

“Okay, I’ll do as you say,” she sighed.

Her father smiled and opened his arms. Cally stepped into his embrace, rubbing her cheek against the lapel of 102

his wool suit as he hugged her. “That’s my girl,” Victor Todd said, smiling in quiet triumph as he stroked his daughter’s hair. “That’s Daddy’s girl.” Cally closed her eyes and sighed happily to herself.

He even
smelled
like she had imagined fathers should.

103

As Lilith hurried down to the bottom floor of her family’s penthouse apartment in time for her waking meal, she was unpleasantly surprised to find her mother already waiting for her in the dining room.

“Hello, Lilith,” Irina Viesczy-Todd said, glancing up from her crossword puzzle just long enough to acknowledge her daughter’s arrival. Mother and child had not seen each other in six weeks, which was just fine with all concerned.

Irina held a cut-crystal goblet filled with scarlet liquid in one hand, and the mechanical pencil she used on her crossword puzzles was in the other. With her strong cheekbones and long blond hair artfully piled atop her head, Irina looked to be in her early thirties rather than the 150 years Lilith knew her to be. As Lilith drew closer, she noticed her mother was still dressed in her 104

satin robe, which revealed far more toned and artifi-cially tanned flesh than any daughter wanted to see.

“Hello, Mother,” Lilith said sullenly.

“You needn’t sound so put upon,” Irina said as she sipped at her waking repast, which had been triple-screened for impurities and contaminants such as HIV, West Nile virus, and hepatitis. “What kind of mother would I be if I wasn’t present for my only daughter’s Grand Ball debut? By the way, while I was at the tables in Monaco, I received a letter from an old school friend of mine—Verbena Mulciber.”

“You mean Madame Mulciber?” Lilith looked up, surprised. “My alchemy teacher?”

Irina nodded. “She wrote to inform me that you’re on the verge of flunking out.”

“It’s been difficult for me to focus on schoolwork lately, what with Tanith being killed and everything,” Lilith replied. Suddenly an undead servant in a maid’s uniform appeared, took the crystal goblet from Lilith’s place setting, and vanished into the kitchen to fill it with warmed blood.

“You fledglings today have no idea how easy you have it! By the time I was your age, half of my graduat-ing class had been annihilated,” Irina said, clucking her tongue in disapproval. “If I’d let my friends being killed interfere with my education, I’d still be in Russia, tapping peasants on some hell-forsaken communal farm!

Bathory Academy has one of the finest preparatory 105

programs available
anywhere
for girls your age, and since your great-aunt Morella founded the school, the
least
you could do is not embarrass the family by getting kicked out.”

Irritated by her mother’s needling, Lilith countered,

“If their prep program is so good, then why did they enroll a New Blood?”

“New Blood?”
Irina looked up from her crossword, her eyes darting around the room as if there might be ninjas hiding in the corners. “There is a New Blood attending Bathory?”

“Her name’s Cally,” Lilith said, fighting back a smile as she dangled Daddy’s secret daughter in front of her unwitting mother.

“The very idea!” Irina exclaimed, her eyes flashing.

“I will have your father speak with the headmistress about this outrage. We are
not
paying for you to rub elbows with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells!”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Lilith said as the maid returned with the goblet full of warmed blood. She turned to glare at the servant. “Hey! What are you,
stupid
or something? Get me a straw! I don’t want to screw up my lip gloss before I get to school!” The maid jumped like she’d been stuck with a hot poker, a look of genuine alarm in her eyes. “Yes, Miss Lilith! I’m so sorry! Right this minute!” Within seconds a straw was bobbing in the goblet.

Lilith took a tentative sip. AB poz, with just a trace of 106

anticoagulant to keep it free flowing: not a bad way to start off the night.

“There’s no other way I
could
feel about something like that,” Irina replied flatly. “However, that is no excuse for your abysmal performance at school. Your father and I expect to see significant improvement in your grades after the Grand Ball, young lady! You’re spending far too much time partying and not enough studying.” Irina’s tone was even but firm, an unmistak-able warning that she was in no mood for one of her daughter’s tantrums. “Now why don’t you see if Bruno has brought the car around for you, my dear?” Lilith snatched up her book bag and headed out the door for school. As she rode the elevator down to the lobby, she began to think that maybe having Irina home for the holidays might not be that horrid after all. Imagine all the near collisions she could orchestrate between Cally and her mother! If nothing else, watching her father scramble to prevent Irina from learning his dirty little secret would be deeply satisfying.

As Cally entered Madame Boucher’s Avoiding Detection 101, she spotted Lilith seated in one of the desks, gossiping with Carmen. What she now knew about Carmen and Jules made her blush, and she quickly looked away.

She saw Bella Maledetto sitting near the back, waving at her and pointing at the open desk across the aisle.

Without thinking, Cally took an automatic step in the 107

direction of her friend, only to remember the promise she had made to her father the night before to disconnect herself from the Maledetto family.

Instead of sitting down next to Bella, Cally slid into the desk beside Annabelle Usher. She guiltily glanced over at her friend and saw a look of baffled hurt on Bella’s face. Cally sighed and turned away. Tonight was the start of what would probably be a very difficult and lonely time in her life, but she told herself it was worth proving her loyalty to her father and winning his approval.

“Good evening, young ladies,” Madame Boucher said as she looked out across her class. She was a small-boned woman who appeared to be in her early fifties, her ginger-colored hair piled high atop her head in an old-fashioned beehive.

“We’ve studied some of the tried-and-true methods of avoiding detection, such as faking your own death and later reappearing in the same community as a younger relative, preferably a niece or granddaughter.

“Today we’ll start focusing on practical camouflage and misdirection. I will be drilling you on these techniques until they become as natural to you as breathing or flying.

“When I was a schoolgirl, avoiding detection wasn’t as necessary a skill as it is today. Back then, reflective surfaces were nowhere as common as they are today.

108

Everything was made out of wood and stone, not plate glass and stainless steel!”

The instructor motioned to an undead servant dressed in the school’s livery, who pushed a dolly carrying a large, upright object covered by a drop cloth to the front of the class.

“Ladies, it is time that you get to know your enemy!” Madame Boucher said as she yanked the cloth away, revealing a full-length cheval mirror. An audible gasp rose from the assembled students. A couple even hissed and instinctively raised their arms to shield their faces.

Since she had been raised around mirrors, Cally’s reaction to the looking glass was far more muted. She glanced around and noticed that the only other student in the room who didn’t seem agitated was Lilith.

“There’s no need to be afraid,” Madame Boucher assured her class as she stepped in front of the mirror.

Or at least her clothes did. Her gray tweed skirt, white silk blouse, and maroon cardigan appeared to hang empty in midair.

“The most common form of camouflage is the creative use of clothing, in particular hooded cloaks, as well as using the humans’ own numbers against them.

After all, who would notice one reflection missing from the hundreds half glimpsed at any one time in the windows along Sixth Avenue?

109

“First, you must become familiar with your reflec-tions so that you understand what the humans do and don’t see in a mirror. How many of you have
never
seen yourselves in a mirror before?”

Annabelle Usher raised a trembling hand.

“Big surprise there, Usher! Not!” Lilith snickered.

Annabelle was the last of a once-fabled line who had fallen on such hard times she did not have a dresser to see to her appearance before leaving the house. As a result, the poor girl usually came to school looking like a Barbie doll that had fallen into the hands of a sadistic little brother.

“Like ballet, you cannot master camouflage unless you can
see
what you’re doing wrong. I want each and every one of you to line up and step in front of the cheval and look at yourself first full face, then profile, and then over your shoulder. And, Miss Usher, I want
you
to be the first in line.”