Revelations

 

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.

"Do you still get those - you know, blackouts?" Schuyler asked.

Bliss shook her head. The blackouts had stopped at about the same time the visions had begun. She didn't know what was worse.

"Sky, do you ever think about Dylan?" she asked tentatively.

"All the time. I wish I knew what happened to him," Schuyler said, picking apart her sandwich and eating it one section at a time: bread first, then a scoop of tuna, then a bite of the lettuce. "I miss him. He was a good friend."

Bliss nodded. She wondered how she could broach the subject. She had been keeping a huge secret for too long now. Dylan, whom everyone had given up for dead, who'd been taken by a Silver Blood, who'd completely disappeared...had come back, crashing through her window just two weeks ago and telling her the most outrageous stories. Ever since the night he had returned, Bliss didn't know what to believe.

Dylan had to be completely mental. Crazy. What he'd said that night. It just didn't make sense, but he was convinced it was the god's honest truth. She could never talk him out of it, and lately he'd been threatening to do something. Just that morning he'd been seriously unhinged. Raving. Shouting like a maniac. It had been hard to watch. She'd promised him she would...she would...what would she do? She had no idea.

"Bliss Llewellyn?"

"Here," Bliss replied, standing and tucking her portfolio under her arm.

"We're ready for you. Sorry for the wait."

"Not a problem," she said, giving them her most professional smile. She followed the girl into an airy room in the back. Bliss had to walk what seemed like the length of a football field to reach the small table where the designer was seated.

It was always like this. They liked to watch you walk, and after you said hello, they'd ask you to just turn around and walk again. Rolf was casting for his Fashion Week show, and seated next to him were his team: a tanned, blond woman wearing dark glasses, a thin effeminate man, and several assistants.

"Hi, Bliss," Rolf said. "This is my wife, Randy, and this is Cyrus, who's putting the show together."

"Hi." Bliss offered her hand and shook his firmly.

"We're well acquainted with your work," Rolf said, taking a cursory glance at her photographs. He was a deeply tanned man with salt-and-pepper hair. When he crossed his arms, his muscles bulged. He looked like a cowboy, down to his custom-made alligator boots. That is, if cowboys got their tans in St. Barth's and their shirts made in Hong Kong. "In fact, we're pretty sure you're the girl for us. We just wanted to meet you."

Instead of putting Bliss at ease, the designer's friendliness made her even more nervous. The job was now hers to lose. "Oh, um, okay."

Randy Morgan, the designer's wife, was the quintessential "Morgan girl," down to the windswept hair. Bliss knew she had been Rolf's first model, back in the seventies, and still occasionally starred in some of the advertising campaigns. Randy pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and gave Bliss a brilliant smile. "The brand is going in a different direction for the show. We want to set an Edwardian mood - old-fashioned romance. There's going to be a lot of velvet, a lot of lace, maybe even a corset or two in the collection. We wanted a girl who didn't look too contemporary."

Bliss nodded, not quite sure what they were getting at, since every other brand that had booked her in the past thought she had looked "contemporary" enough. "Do you want me to walk or ... ?"

"Please."

Bliss headed to the back of the room, took a deep breath, and began to walk. She walked as if she were walking in the moors at night, as if she were alone in the fog. As if she were a bit lost and dreamy. And just as she hit the pivot marker, the room spun and she had another vision.

Like she'd told Schuyler, she never had blackouts anymore. She could still see the showroom, as well as the designer and his team. Yet there it was: seated in the middle between Rolf and his wife was a crimson-eyed beast with a silver forked tongue. Maggots were crawling out of its eyes. She wanted to scream. Instead she closed her eyes and kept walking.

When she opened her eyes, Rolf and his team were clapping.

Apocalyptic visions or not, Bliss was hired.