When Bliss was growing up, her family lived in one of those mega-mansions that were ubiquitous in River Oaks, a wealthy Houston suburb. Their house was the epitome of "Texas Excess," at twenty-eight thousand square feet. Bliss used to joke that it should have its own zip code. She had never felt comfortable in it, and preferred her grandparents' rambling ranch in the wilds of West Texas instead. Despite their Yankee roots, her family was considered Lone Star aristocracy - their money made in oil, cattle, and well...mostly oil. The story the Llewellyns liked to tell was how the family patriarch had scandalized his upper-crust family by dropping out of Yale to work at an oil field. He'd quickly learned the ropes, buying up thousands of acres of oil-rich land to become the luckiest oil baron in the entire state. Was it luck or due to vampire ability, Bliss wondered now.
Forsyth was the youngest son of the youngest son. Her grandfather was a rebel who'd stayed East after boarding school, married his Andover sweetheart, a Connecticut debutante, and raised their son in her family's Fifth Avenue apartment, until bad luck on the stock market sent the family back to the Texas homestead.
Her grandfather had been one of her favorite people. He'd retained his Texan drawl even after his years in the Northeast, and he'd had an ironic, saucy sense of humor. He liked to say he didn't belong anywhere and therefore belonged everywhere. He was nostalgic about his life in New York, but he'd dug in and took over the family business when no one else wanted the ranch, preferring to move to the glass metropolises of Dallas or San Antonio instead. She wished Pap-Pap had stuck around; what was the point of being a vampire if you had to live a human-length lifetime anyway, and then had to wait to get called up again for the next cycle?
Bliss had grown up among many cousins, and until she moved to New York and turned fifteen, had always assumed there was nothing particularly special or interesting about her. Perhaps it was a willful ignorance. There had been signs, she realized later on: her older cousins hinting of "the change," furtive giggles from the already initiated, her father's rotating secretaries who, she now understood, served as his human familiars. It just recently occurred to Bliss how odd it was that no one ever spoke of her real mother.
BobiAnne was the only mother she'd ever known. Bliss had an uneasy relationship with her tacky, over-protective stepmother, who showered Bliss with affection while ignoring her own child, Bliss's half sister, Jordan. BobiAnne, with her furs and diamonds and ridiculous decorating schemes, had tried too hard to replace the mother Bliss had never known, and Bliss couldn't hate her for it. On the other hand, she couldn't love her for it either.
Forsyth had married BobiAnne while Bliss was still in the cradle, and Jordan had been born four years later. A silent and strange child, who was pudgy to Bliss's willowy form, pasty to Bliss's ivory complexion, and difficult in comparison to Bliss's easygoing temperament. Yet Bliss couldn't imagine life without her younger sister, and displayed a fierce protectiveness whenever BobiAnne would tease or insult her own progeny. For her part, Jordan adored her sister when she wasn't mocking her. It was a normal sibling relationship - full of spats and bickering, and yet bolstered by a faithful and abiding loyalty.
One always took the most important things in life for granted, Bliss thought, when a few days after the fashion show she took a taxi to the uppermost reaches of Manhattan. She directed the driver to the Columbia-Presbyterian hospital.
"Are you family?" inquired the guard at the reception desk, pushing forward a visitor sheet for her to sign.
Bliss hesitated. She touched the photograph hidden in her coat pocket for luck. It was similar to one her father kept in his wallet, a copy of which she'd found in a jewelry case and now held in her hands.
"Yes."
"Top floor. Last room at the end of the hallway."
She wished she had someone to accompany her, but she couldn't think of anyone she could ask. Schuyler would certainly demand an explanation, and Bliss would not be able to provide a reasonable one. "Um, I think you and I might be sisters?" just sounded too preposterous.