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and they piled in the back and drove slowly into town. The city looked the same, as gorgeous and

exotic as ever, but somehow seeing the Redeemer statue above Corcovado mountain did not give Mimi

the same thrill it once had. She didn’t know what to think, she sure knew what the Conclave

thought, even Kingsley had wanted to go after Leviathan as soon as he’d read the report, but he

had been sent on this little adventure instead. Forsyth Llewellyn had pressed upon the surviving

Elders to make finding the Watcher a top priority. Mimi wasn’t wholly convinced, as the senator was, that the Silver Blood traitors had been fully unmasked by the Almeida fire,

sure Nan Cutler, their leader, had perished, but there had to be others among the

Coven.
    Warden Cutler had to have had

help. But that wasn’t really Mimi’s problem right now. All Mimi knew was that when Kingsley began

assembling his team, she had volunteered. She’d wanted to get out of New York, away from the

shocked, mournful faces of the surviving members of the Conclave. They were all so weak and

frightened! It annoyed her to see them cowed and terrified. They were vampires; where was their

pride?
    They were acting like cornered

sheep, bleating to Forsyth about how they should hide. Well, she wasn’t going to hide. She wanted

to find whoever was responsible for that terrible night, hunt them down and kill them one by one.

Sacrilege is what it was, disrespect. The Silver Bloods’ attack was vicious in its scope and

intensity. They had attempted to wipe out the clan’s Elders and Wardens, leaving the community

with the irrelevant and the feeble. They had shown them no mercy. Mimi planned to show them the

same.
    But first they had to find

Jordan. Jordan would tell them what had happened; Jordan would know who the Silver Bloods were

and where they were hiding.
    Because Jordan Llewellyn

was only pretending to be a child. Jordan was the Watcher, Pistis Sophia,

Elder of Elders, a soul born with its eyes open, that is, with the full command and understanding

of all its memories.
    Sophia had slumbered for

thousands of years until Cordelia Van Alen had asked the Llewellyns , one of the

oldest and most trusted families in the Conclave, to take her spirit as their newborn. The

Watcher was supposed to keep vigilance against their enemies and to sound the alarm should the

Dark Prince ever return to Earth. During the time of the Roman crisis it had been Sophia who had

first discovered the Croatan betrayal. Or something like that,

anyway.
    It was all so long ago, and

Mimi couldn’t be bothered to remember. When you had lived for thousands of years, going through

your memories was like trying to find a contact lens in a pile of broken glass. The past wasn’t

filed away in a neat tree of folders on a computer screen, marked accordingly with dates and

labels for easy access. Instead, the past was a jumble of images and emotions, of knowledge that

you did not understand and information you did not remember possessing.
    Sometimes, when she had a

moment to herself, Mimi wondered why she had volunteered so gladly. She had missed her junior

year of high school, and wouldn’t be able to graduate with her class. And it wasn’t as if she

cared about Jordan Llewellyn. She’d only met her a couple of times, and each time,

Jordan had made either a face or a rude remark. But something told her she had to go, and Jack

hadn’t stopped her either.
    It was strange how things

never turned out the way one expected. Mimi had thought she and Jack would become closer after

everything that had happened, especially with that stupid Van Alen brat finally out of the way.

Maybe they just took each other for granted now that there was no one between them. But why was

it she was here, and he was somewhere else?
    “Penny for your

thoughts?” Kingsley asked, as if he’d just noticed the silence in the