33	A CERTAIN SATURDAY NIGHT IN AUGUST

DO ANY OF YOU HAVE A LIGHT?” Kingsley asked. “Nobody smokes anymore? That’s a shame.” He snapped his fingers and a small flame appeared. He lit his cigarette and took a deep inhale.

“Start at the beginning. When did you come back from the underworld and what have you been doing here?” Ara demanded.

“Everything?” Kingsley asked. “Then I suppose I’ll have to start with Darcy.”

He propped his foot up on the table and unreeled his tale.

Come on, Damien, let’s have a good time.

Her name was Darcy McGinty, and Kingsley knew the minute he set foot inside the taxicab that he had made a mistake. He should get the fuck out of there. What was he doing with these kids? He was too old for this; he had been out of his mind to think he wanted this. He wanted to get out of the car, get back to Mimi, and clear his head. Stop that ringing in his ears, which was starting to drive him insane. He thought he might know what caused it, but he wasn’t sure. Although he knew for certain that it was irritating.

“Listen, I’ve got to go,” he said, reaching for the door latch.

“What? Why? Stay,” Darcy said, annoyed.

“No, I should go.” He told the cabdriver to pull over.

“Stay, this party is going to be something else,” she said, uncurling her fist and showing him a white pill.

“Thanks, but no thanks, darling. I don’t do drugs. I’m high on life,” he said with a smile, thinking of his friend Oliver, who used to say that.

“It’s not a drug. It’s from angels,” she said. “Right, Georgie?” She turned to her friend, who looked just like her. Blonde, too much makeup, too little clothing. The girl in the front seat turned around with an avid smile. “It’s awesome, you should try it.”

“Angel dust?” Kingsley asked. “That all?” He shrugged. Big deal.

“No, not that sad, old seventies thing. Angel blood. Sangre Azul. Blue Blood. Holy blood. Because angels are real.”

Kingsley stopped and turned around to look at her. “They are? How do you know?”

Darcy giggled. “I’ve seen one. I’m looking at one right now,” she said and pretended to shoot him.

She was pretending, of course. She had no clue, he saw soon enough. It appeared she was already a little high on something. But what was this talk about angel blood, the Sangre Azul, and angels being real? Where did she hear that? Kingsley leaned back into his seat. “All right, then, give it to me.” A drug made from angel blood. Was it a joke? It had to be. Were the Venators aware of this? Weren’t they supposed to keep the Coven’s secrets safe? What was going on if kids could get their hands on this stuff?

“How does it make you feel exactly?” he asked.

“It’s awesome. You feel so good, and all your senses are, like, alive; you hear better, you see better, everything you touch feels good,” she said dreamily, as the cab stopped in front of a dark warehouse building. “All right, here we are. Time to fly with the angels.”

The room was pitch-black, and the music was more than loud; the stereo system pumped the rhythm so violently it beat in your heart, throbbed in your chest, you drowned in the music, it washed over your soul, became part of your body, until you were just a vehicle for the beat. Thump, thump, thump. Kingsley squinted. He was used to nightclubs, to dance floors, to weeklong music festivals in the rain, but this was different. It was like the music was more sinister, more intimidating, or maybe he’d just gotten old.

“Feeling good?” Darcy laughed, and ran her hands up and down his chest.

He smiled and took her hands off him, shaking his head. She was way too young, and besides, he was married. Maybe he was with her at this party because old habits died hard, but he had stayed because he was working a job now. He fingered the pill he’d hidden in his pocket. So far, it didn’t seem to do much to the kids except what you would expect, a lot of floppy dancing, a lot of glazed eyeballs, a lot of sweaty foreheads. Maybe the pill was nothing but a placebo. Maybe the Conspiracy was behind it, although those mythmongers usually stuck to creating pop fantasies, not influencing underground drug culture. He was starting to have a bad feeling about this.

Kingsley danced for a few more songs, then went into the men’s room. He removed the pill. There was a quick test that would let him know whether Darcy was telling him the truth. He was sure the girls were being ridiculous, but out of overabundance of caution, he decided it wouldn’t hurt to test the product.

He pulled out his blade and cut his thumb, and let his blood drip on the little white pill.

It hissed and smoked.

There was Fallen matter in it all right.

The blood of the angels, she had called it.

Fuck.

Kingsley shuddered. This was the stuff of nightmares. He’d been in the underworld for a decade and everything was off the rails. He had to get to the bottom of this.

He wandered around the party, talking to people, and heard other names for the drug. They called it Angel Wings, or Vitamin P, or Type A, or Sang Blue (some kind of mishmash of Sangre Azul and Blue Blood). Others called it something even more insidious—Allegra’s Sacrifice. How did these mortal teenagers know about Allegra? How did they know so much about the Coven?

They were all popping or snorting it. But no one would tell him anything about the drug or where to get it. Whenever he asked, they only said, “Darcy.” And when he asked Darcy, all she did was give him a seductive little smile. He tried reading her mind, sifting through her memories, but he found little that could offer a concrete answer. Maybe she was too out of it to remember where she got this from, or maybe she didn’t care.

He motioned to Darcy that he was going out for a smoke and made his way through the sweaty tangle of bodies toward the door.

“Hey, can I have a light?” a girl asked, walking out with him. She was one of the girls from the taxicab with Darcy. The one who looked just like her, blonde and pretty, but somehow outside, alone, Kingsley saw he was wrong. She wasn’t like Darcy at all. Her pink dress had looked more scandalous in the dark, but the cut was actually conservative. She didn’t look like the type to hang out at some rave on the outskirts of Brooklyn. “You’re too young to smoke,” he told the girl. “And you should never start.” He was immortal, after all, but she was not.

“Fine.” She sighed.

“What’s your name again?”

“Georgie,” she said, hugging herself tightly.

“What’s wrong, Georgie?” he asked because he sensed she was feeling low, and he felt bad for her. She looked too young to be at a place like this.

“I’m tired. I have school tomorrow. I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Come on,” he said, tossing the cigarette. “I’ll take you home.”

“What about Darcy?” she asked fearfully.

“What about Darcy?” He shrugged.

Georgina was a nice kid. He called for a car and dropped her off at her apartment building in Midtown. She was different from Darcy, he could tell right away. He liked Georgina. He and Mimi should have a kid, he thought. Why didn’t they? Oh, right, she didn’t want to raise a kid in Hell. This is no place for a baby, she’d said many times.

“Call me,” he said, plugging his digits—he’d picked up a burner the other week—into her phone. “We’ll hang.” He needed an informant, he thought, someone who could tell him where Darcy was getting this stuff and who was making it.

For the next week or so, Kingsley worked on Georgina, spending time with her, befriending her. Darcy told everyone Georgina had “stolen” him, and they let her think that. There was nothing inappropriate between them. Kingsley could see that mostly what Georgina needed was a friend. School had started, and she was working too hard; her parents put a lot of pressure on her to do well, and it was getting to her. Plus, there were the usual teenage crises like not having enough money and friends being more like enemies, like Darcy for one.

She liked to come to his place and study there. It was a nice house, he had to agree; a little dusty and the air was a little stale, but once the windows were open it was all right. He’d told her his parents were in Bermuda and he was homeschooled.

“Do you know where Darcy gets those pills? Angel blood?” he asked casually one afternoon after they’d met. He was smoking by the windows.

Georgina tapped a pencil against her cheek. “I don’t know. She mentioned some friends from some kind of committee were passing them out.”

“Committee?” He raised an eyebrow. There were many committees in New York, but there was only one that mattered to the Coven.

“Yeah, I think it’s some kind of social group, etiquette classes, that sort of thing.”

“And it’s a drug front?”

“I don’t know, okay?” She laughed. “I mean, I just heard her talking about getting more of it during a ‘committee meeting.’ ”

“Can you find out more?”

“Sure, why? I thought you didn’t take that crap. What are you, some kind of cop?” she asked.

“Maybe.” He smiled.

“Damien, you are so lame. Okay. Whatever. I’ll find out. See you later. My mom’s here,” she said. She walked out the door of Schuyler’s old house. It was the safest house in the Coven, and his old friend wouldn’t mind. It wasn’t as if she was using it right now. Kingsley had put up wards around the place and made sure he wouldn’t be disturbed.

“I found out where the Committee’s getting it,” Georgina said on his voice mail, sounding terrified the next Saturday evening. “Darcy’s having a party tonight. Meet me there. I’ll text you the address. By the way, if you are a cop, I want some kind of award or citation or something. I don’t know what this is, but I’m scared, Damien. I don’t want any part of it. I think someone’s been following me around since I’ve been asking questions about the pills. But you’ll make it okay, right, Damien? Right?”

Kingsley called her back, but she didn’t pick up the phone. He had been working on his own on this, and his first instinct was to contact his old friends in the Coven. But when he heard the Committee was involved and that Georgina was scared, he changed his mind.

Someone from the Coven was distributing angel blood. Possibly even Allegra’s blood.

But who?

Georgina wasn’t at Darcy’s party, and no one seemed to know where she had gone. There was another text on his phone. He’d asked her to try to ask the kids she knew in the Committee to let them know she was buying and would pay a pretty price for it. It looked like they hooked the big fish.

DARCY’S SUPPLIER SAID TO MEET HIM AT CANAL AND MOTT. I TOLD HIM WHAT YOU SAID THAT YOU WOULD PAY TRIPLE WHAT SHE DOES.

Good girl, Kingsley thought. She could work undercover one day. Maybe he would get her a job as a human Conduit for the Venators.

It was a busy Saturday night in Soho, and the crowds were thick on the sidewalk—NYU students roaming in packs, girls in high heels tottering down the cobblestones to the cocktail bars, couples on dates, arm in arm, headed to the little restaurants. The stores were shuttered, but their window displays were illuminated. He stood at the corner, waiting for Georgina, and decided to grab a double latte. Coffee was a weakness of his.

Kingsley sat on a bench and waited. Fifteen minutes. Thirty. There was no Georgina. No one at all. He called her cell phone again. No answer. Forty-five minutes passed. Even with New York traffic that was a long time. An hour stretched into two, and he was worried now. He wandered off to get another coffee, and when he came back, he saw that the intersection of Canal and Mott had a small hidden door in the ground. One that had a pentagram etched on its surface.

Kingsley suddenly had a terrible feeling that he was too slow. Too slow. He dashed into the hole and fell into the dark cavern. “GEORGINA!” he yelled. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

But already he knew it was too late. Why had he given her the job? Why had he asked her to do something so dangerous? Had he really been in the underworld that long to have made such a tragic mistake? To give a schoolgirl a Venator’s job? What was he thinking?

When he found her, she was dead.

She was lying in a puddle, bleeding from the wounds on her neck. She had found out who was distributing those angel pills and it had gotten her murdered. She had struggled and fought, but she was no match for her enemy, for her killer. Her killer had taken her left hand and had drawn a bloody pentagram on the wall.

He carried her away from the pentagram’s dark influence and hid her body in a safe place in the tunnels, where the Venators would find her, because they always did.

“So that’s my story. After that happened, I realized I needed help, so I went to see my wife. She’s the only one I can trust. I was, ah—Reluctant to tell her what I was up to—I didn’t think she would take kindly to finding out I was clubbing with teenagers—but I decided I had to risk it. Then I went back to hang out with Darcy to see if she would tell me anything more about where she got it. But she didn’t know. She said the pills would just appear in her locker one day. In this bag.”

He showed them the plastic bag he had shown Mimi, the one with the five silver triangles. The one that Ara had found on the Nephilim and in the burned-out hive.

“You’ve seen this before, I take it?” Kingsley asked.

Ara nodded. “We found their hive. So I was right—they were using the pentagrams to mark their territory and identify their targets. That’s why they were all over New York. Because they were everywhere.”

“They knew I was here. They marked my hiding place as a warning,” Kingsley said.

“Yeah, we saw the pentagram on the Van Alen safe house,” said Edon. “Nephilim selling angel blood. Allegra’s Sacrifice. Who’d have thought?”

“In death is life,” Kingsley muttered.

“What did you say?” asked Ara.

“It’s something I read in the Book of Hell, below a pentagram. In death is life. Why?”

“That’s interesting, isn’t it? Because those two dead girls—the ones who were bitten—their bodies are missing, and the Venators said it was as if they had just walked out of the morgue,” Ara said.

Kingsley snapped his fingers. “Because that’s exactly what they did. In death is life, the Little King will rise again. Somehow, whoever has done this has made the Conspiracy real. It’s a joke on us, on the Blue Bloods,” Kingsley said. “A cosmic joke.”

“Because of course there’s no such thing as vampires. A vampire bite can’t turn you into one. That’s only a fairy tale,” Edon said.

Kingsley sighed. “Except now it isn’t. Lucifer’s made a mockery of us. He’s made our lies true. Mortals take the angel drug, and when humans are bitten to death, they rise up again as vampires.”