Unlike most designers' showrooms, which were decorated in minimal, almost clinical style with hardly a floral arrangement to break up the dazzlingly empty white rooms, the showcase interiors that housed the Rolf Morgan collection resembled the cozy quarters of an old-fashioned gentlemen's club: leather-bound books lined the shelves, while squat club chairs and comfortable shag rugs were arranged around a crackling fire. Rolf Morgan had come to fame by selling preppie, old-boy style to the masses, his most ubiquitous creation a plain-collared shirt discreetly embroidered with his logo: a pair of crisscrossed croquet wickets.
Bliss sat nervously on one of the leather armchairs, balancing her portfolio on her knees. She'd had to leave school a few minutes early in order to make her go-see appointment, yet had arrived to find the designer running half an hour late. Typical.
She looked around at the other models, all bearing the same classic American good looks commonly found in a "Croquet by Rolf Morgan" ad: sunburned cheeks, golden hair, upturned button noses. She had no idea why the designer would be interested in her. Bliss looked more like a girl from a pre-Raphaelite painting, with her waist-long russet hair, pale skin, and wide green eyes, than the kind of girl who looked like she'd just finished a rousing set of tennis. But then again, Schuyler had just booked the show the other day at the first casting, so perhaps they were looking for a different kind of girl this time.
"Can I get you girls anything? Water? Diet soda?" the smiling receptionist asked.
"Nothing for me, thanks," Bliss demurred, while the other girls shook their heads as well. It was nice to be asked, to be offered something. As a model, she was used to being ignored or condescended to by the staff. No one was ever very friendly. Bliss likened go-see appointments to the cattle inspections her grandfather used to perform on the ranch. He'd check the stock's teeth, hooves, and flanks. Models were treated just like cattle - pieces of meat whose assets were weighed and measured.
Bliss wished that the designer would hurry up and get it over with. She'd almost canceled the meeting, and only a deep sense of obligation to her agency (and a slight fear of her model booker - a bald, imperious gay man, who bossed her around like she was his slave (and not the other way around) kept her rooted to her seat.
She was still unnerved by what had happened at school earlier, when she'd tried to confide in Schuyler.
"There's something wrong with me," Bliss said, over lunch in the refectory.
"What do you mean? Are you sick?" Schuyler asked, ripping open a bag of jalapeno potato chips.
Am I sick? Bliss wondered. She certainly felt ill lately. But it was a different kind of sick - her soul felt sick. "It's hard to explain," she said, but she tried. "I'm, like, seeing things. Bad things." Terrible things. She told Schuyler about how it had started.
She'd been jogging down the Hudson the other day, and when she blinked, instead of the placid, brown waters of the river, she'd seen it filled with blood - red and viscous and churning.
Then there were the horsemen who had thundered into her bedroom one night - four of them, on tall black steeds, behind masks; they looked foul and smelled even worse. Like living death. They had been so real, the horses had left dirty hoofprints on the white carpet. But the vision from the other night had been worse: bayoneted babies, disemboweled victims, nuns hanging from crosses, beheaded ... It went on.
But the most frightening thing in the world?
Right in the middle of a vision, a man had appeared. A man in a white suit. A handsome man, with a crown of shining golden hair and a beautiful smile that chilled her to the bone.
The man had walked across the room and sat next to her on the bed.
"Bliss," the man had said, laying a hand on her head like a benediction. "Daughter."
Schuyler looked up from her tuna sandwich. Bliss wondered how Schuyler still had an appetite for normal food - Bliss had long ago lost the taste for it. She could barely stand to eat her rare-cooked hamburger. Maybe it was because Schuyler was half human. Bliss reached for a potato chip out of curiosity. She took a bite. It was salty and not unpleasantly spicy. She took another.
Schuyler looked thoughtful. "Okay, so some weird dude called you his daughter, big deal. It was just a dream. And as for all the other stuff - are you sure you're not just staying up too late watching Rob Zombie movies?"
"No - it just..." Bliss shook her head, annoyed at being unable to impart just how creepy this man was. And how it sounded like he was telling her the truth. But how could that be? Her father was Forsyth Llewellyn, the senator from New York. She wondered about her mother once again. Her father never spoke of his first wife, and just a few weeks ago Bliss had been surprised to find a photograph of her father with a blond woman who she'd always assumed to be her mother inscribed on the back with the words "Allegra Van Alen."
Allegra was Schuyler's mother, New York City's most famous comatose patient. If Allegra was her mother, did that make Schuyler her sister? Although, vampires didn't have family in the Red Blood sense: they were the former children of God, immortal, with no real mothers and fathers.
Forsyth was merely her "father" for this cycle. Perhaps that was the same with Allegra. She'd refrained from telling Schuyler her discovery. Schuyler was protective about her mother, and Bliss was too shy to claim a connection to a woman she had never even met. Still, she'd felt a kinship to Schuyler ever since she'd found the photograph.