Aliss: переводы

→“That’s good to hear. Thanks, Ally. See ya.” Bliss smiled.

→“Bliss? Is that you? Hey?” A pretty girl with long blond hair, wearing a floppy straw hat and a chic one-shouldered dress, walked over. Bliss recognized the girl immediately. She was Allison Ellison, or Ally Elli, as she was called, one of the Red Bloods from Duchesne.

→In a moment he would be upon them.

→Schuyler couldn’t put a finger on it, but there was something almost sinister about how hypnotic the music was, its attraction bordered on menacing. Listening to it was like being tickled too hard, when the tickling stopped being funny and became a form of torture, and the laughter unwelcome and uncontrollable.

→“I found it in the garden earlier,” he said, showing her the crushed fourleaf clover. “For luck.”

→With Forsyth, she had returned to New York for Bobi Anne’s funeral. A memorial, really, because like the other dearly departed members of the Conclave, there was nothing to bury. There was nothing left of Bobi Anne, not even a singed lock of her highlighted hair. A giant blown-up glamour shot on an easel took the place of a coffin at the front of the altar. The photograph showed her stepmother at her finest moment, when she had been profiled in a society magazine.

→Now that she had answered the first and second questions in detail, she had no choice but to move on to the third. And it was always the third question that was the most difficult to answer.

→Like a mouse creeping into a hole. Schuyler was anxious by nature, and she needed almost all her self-control to keep it together. At any moment she feared she might scream, she was already so nervous she couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. They vibrated, fluttering in her lap like trapped birds.

→And now, after almost a year of hiding, they were coming out into the open. It was a gamble, but they were desperate. Living without the protection and wisdom of the secret society of vampires and their select group of trusted humans had taken its toll. And while neither of them would ever admit it, they were both tired of running.

→Now it was August in Paris, and hot. They had arrived to find most of the city a ghost town: bakeries, boutiques, and bistros shuttered while their proprietors absconded to three-week vacations in the beaches up north. The only people around were American and Japanese tourists, who mobbed every museum gallery, every garden in every public square, inescapable and ubiquitous in their white sneakers and baseball caps. But Schuyler welcomed their presence. She hoped the slow-moving crowds would make it easier for her and Oliver to spot their Venator pursuers. Schuyler had been able to disguise herself by changing her physical features, but performing the mutatio was taking a toll on her. She didn’t say anything to Oliver, but lately she couldn’t even do so much as change the color of her eyes.

→She had marked her sixteenth birthday aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, celebrating with a cup of watery Nescafé coffee and several crumbly Russian tea cookies. Somehow, her best friend, Oliver Hazard-Perry, had found a candle to light in one of the suharkies. He took his job as human Conduit pretty seriously. It was thanks to Oliver’s careful accounting that they had been able to stretch their money so far. The Conclave had frozen his access to the well-funded Hazard-Perry accounts as soon as they had left New York.

→There had been little time to mourn. Upon returning to New York after Lawrence’s murder in Rio (covered up by the Committee with a proper obituary in the Times), Schuyler Van Alen had been on the run. No rest. No respite. A year of constant motion, barely one step ahead of the Venators hunting her. A flight to Buenos Aires followed by one to Dubai. A sleepless night in a youth hostel in Amsterdam followed by another in a bunk bed in an auditorium in Bruges.