“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.
FOUR
“I missed you.” Oliver’s lips against her cheek were warm and soft, and Schuyler felt a sharp ache in her stomach at the depth of his affection.