The Van Alen Legacy by Melissa de La Cruz Page A

did Azrael have feelings?
    The little girl nodded. “Yes.

That’s her. Sophia.” She called Jordan by her real name. Mimi felt chills up her

spine.
    Ted knelt before the girl.

“How did you know her?”
    “She lived over there,” the

little girl said. “ with her grandma. We were scared of the lady. Sophia

too.”
    “Where is she now?”
    “I don’t know. They took

her.”
    “Who?”
    The girl wouldn’t

say.
    “ Propon familiar,” Mimi said gently, in the coercive tones of the sacred language. Tell your friends. She

used compulsion. She didn’t want to bring any harm to the girl, but they had to know. “Nothing

will happen to you. Tell us what you remember.”
    “Bad people. A man and a woman. They took her away,” the girl said in a flat voice. “On

Monday.”
    The Venators exchanged sharp

glances. They had arrived in Rio that day.
    “And this grandmother of hers

. . . is she still here?” Mimi asked.
    “No. She went away a few days

later.” The little girl looked at them with large, fearful eyes. “Sophia said there would be

people coming for her, good people and bad people. We weren’t sure what kind you were at first.

But she told us the good people would be with a beautiful lady, and you would give me a toy dog,”

the girl said haltingly.
    “She told you we were coming?”

Mimi demanded.
    “When the good people come,

she said to give them this.” The little girl removed an envelope from her pocket. It was grubby

and streaked with dirt. But the handwriting was beautiful calligraphy script, the kind usually

found on ivory envelopes that announced a bonding.
    It was addressed to Araquiel .
    The Angel of Judgment, Mimi

knew. Also called the Angel with Two Faces. The angel who carried both dark

and light within him.
    Kingsley Martin.

FIFTEEN

Schuyler

    The look on Jack’s face when

she broke the glass was a mixture of shock and pride, but Schuyler only allowed herself a quick glimpse. She had to stop thinking about him and concentrate on what

she was doing. She had leaped out of the room and into the sky, landing on a trellis and jumping

off the roof to the ground. She was running outdoors, in the middle of the party, a blur of pink

to the party guests.
    It was past midnight and the

festivities had taken a darker turn, that moment at every unforgettable gathering when it seems

anything and everything is available to anyone and everyone. There was a raucous feeling of wild

abandon in the air, as the Bollywood stars shimmied and shook, their bellies undulating in

serpentine curves, and a hundred drummers on wooden-barrel dhol drums beat a steady

and seductive rhythm.
    Schuyler couldn’t put a finger

on it, but there was something almost sinister about how hypnotic the music was, its attraction

bordered on menacing. Listening to it was like being tickled too hard, when the tickling stopped

being funny and became a form of torture, and the laughter unwelcome and

uncontrollable.
    She burst through a line of bhangra dancers, cymbals clanging, and knocked down one of the costumed

stilt-walkers, barely missing a crew of torchbearers standing guard by the perimeter.
    But everywhere she went, he

was right behind her.
    “A

heartbeat away. Schuyler!”

    She heard his voice clearly in

her mind. Jack would use the glom on her. It wasn’t fair. If he had said her name out loud, maybe

she would forgive him, but to know that he was in her mind, that it came as easily to him as

before ,   unnerving .
    She ran past tiger tamers and

fire-eaters, past a group of drunken European nobles fat with blood, their human

familiars left to swoon by the river walls. This wasn’t a party anymore, this was something else. Something evil and depraved . . . an orgy, a paean to monstrous indulgence, pernicious and

wicked. And Schuyler couldn’t help but feel that there was something – someone, egging

everyone on, right to the edge of