The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (27 page)

How interesting. Nicky wondered what else was going to change after last night’s encounter.

She drove out of Bethesda and through Potomac, taking the same route she had driven to the Masquerade a week before. But this time, rather than exiting the country road that led up the hill to Renata’s mansion, she parked at a rest area off Highway 316 and headed into the forest on foot.

It didn’t take long to find the old trail.

Years of ceremonial hunts on Renata’s property had resulted in a series of trails on the forest floor. Carved out one running slave at a time, these paths grew more permanent with each hunt. In the years when Nicky traveled the country looking for Frankie, she came to know these paths. A small one on the left was rocky and uneven. The path next to that was a straight shot through the forest all the way to the mansion. There was a path on the right that stopped at a clearing, and another path at the far end that ran into a fence.

The longest, broadest path of them all was in the center. Back in her days of aimless, ultimately meaningless surveillance on every single vampire mansion, this was the path Nicky took. This was where she had left her marks.

She found the first mark after ten minutes of walking. She had carved it on the back side of a maple tree. A small x, five feet off the ground, carved at eye level when she was thirteen. She remembered the day she had carved that x, and the times she had used it since. She counted the trees in a diagonal line going towards the mansion, stopping at four. Then she counted four more across, in her mind drawing a square with an X inside of it. She used her arms to trace out that X, marking a mulberry tree right in the center of it.

That was her perch.

The mulberry had been the ideal lookout point for thirteen-year-old Nicky because it was so easy to climb. The trunk began to branch out just a few feet from the ground, as if inviting people to crawl up and have a look inside, and once inside, it was easy to get lost in the canopy. Climbing this tree in September was like disappearing inside a cloud, so dense were its leaves.

The tree was much easier to climb than Nicky remembered. Her arms and legs were longer. Her hands were stronger. Her balance was better. The branches felt smaller and closer together, and it took her only a few minutes to get high enough for a view of Renata’s house.

Her vantage was of the back side of the mansion, encompassing the entire back lawn and all the guest houses. The smallest guest house at the edge of the property was where the corpses were burned. At present it was quiet in that house, but at night the furnace would be fired up in case Renata got hungry and there were remains to be disposed of.

To the right of the crematorium were the servant quarters, a single-story barracks with rows of bunk beds inside. Nicky knew from years of spying on these places that the slaves took turns sleeping. If Frankie wasn’t out at the moment, she only needed to wait. Eventually the crew would change and a new shift would step out of the barracks. Sitting patiently, Nicky catalogued all the slaves that came in and out of view.

There was one tending to the flower garden. Another was edging the lawn. Two more were washing the windows on the mansion. And three more patrolled the gate. Although their guns weren’t visible from here, Nicky knew each of them had a sidearm under his coat. Inside the mansion would be at least two more standing near the windows, each carrying an A-15 rifle on his shoulder.

Morning passed to afternoon without any sighting of Frankie.
As long as it takes
, Nicky told herself.
I’ll stay up here all night if I have to
.

She didn’t have to wait that long. A little after one o’clock a small group of slaves lined up in single file to go to the barracks. As one group went in, another came out. Of those coming out, Frankie led the way.

Nicky felt her heart jump at the sight of him. He was tall, so much taller than he had any right to be, so tall she wanted to run up to him and say, ‘When did this happen? When did you get so tall?’

Of course, the last time she saw him they were both eleven years old.

His black hair was dense and curly. His broad chest threatened to break out of the standard-issue white cotton shirt. His neck was thick and his shoulders were wide. The lanky kid she had left behind six years ago had transformed into a beast.

She found herself welling with anger. She thought about Frankie doing hard labor for years, those muscles coming not of his own volition, but as the result of time spent in a Florida prison camp. They had made him big and strong because the strong ones were useful. They had nourished and nurtured him like a grass-fed calf. They wanted him to be a good worker when he was young, and a healthy, tasty dinner when he was of age.

As she watched Frankie set to work in the flower garden, Nicky mapped out an escape plan. She could do it by herself if she had the proper tools. She needed canisters of Addonox, enough to cover the yard in a fog of knockout gas. She needed a mask that would allow her to move through the Addonox unharmed and get to Frankie. She needed a gurney or some sort of cart to roll Frankie out of there—an unfortunate side effect of his bulky frame was that she couldn’t carry him out by herself.

And more than all of this, she needed access. She needed a service ID from Tremblay Property Management that she could show at the front gate and get allowed inside. This, more than anything, was what she had wanted to get out of the TPM database—knowledge of how to forge an all-access pass to Renata’s mansion—it almost certainly would have been doable if Jill had ever decrypted the stolen data.

But she didn’t. The work was unfinished and Jill was MIA.

She pondered more forcible means of entry, from cutting torches that could burn through the back gate to harpoon guns she could use to zip line into the back yard. She looked for weaknesses in their security that could be exploited, but found none. She thought about dressing herself up as a slave and trying to go inside.

Her phone buzzed. Having no intention of answering it, she pulled it from her pocket so she could turn it off, but changed her mind when she saw the name on the screen.

Incoming call from Jill Wentworth.

She pressed answer.

“Hello?”

“Nicky, it’s me. What’s happening? I got Gia’s texts. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Where the hell have you been?” Nicky hissed. “We were panicked that we couldn’t find you.”

“It’s a long story.”

Nicky looked out over the backyard of Renata’s mansion. Suddenly it wasn’t so urgent to break in and rescue Frankie. Suddenly it didn’t make any sense for her to be here at all.

“I can’t talk right now,” she said quietly. “I’ll call you back later. Please call Gia and tell her where you are.”

“Umm…okay, but, can’t you tell me….these texts I got...where are you? It sounds like you’re in a giant birdhouse.”

“Never mind that. Gia will tell you all about it. Goodbye.”

Nicky ended the call and let out a long, slow breath. The relief at hearing Jill’s voice was so intense as to be exhausting, and for a long time, she sat on the tree branch, waiting for the moment to pass.

When it did, and she was ready to get back to her life, she took a last look at Renata’s mansion and said, “See you soon, Frankie. I’m getting you out of here. I promise.”

Chapter 24

Hours before she called Nicky and rejoined the world, Jill woke up in Zack’s bed, his tattooed arm draped over her shoulder.

Still half asleep and not certain what was happening, she almost jumped up and ran. Had Zack not shifted at that moment, had he not used his arm to pull her closer, pushing his chest against her back and kissing her head, had he not made her feel so wanted, so safe, she would have left his apartment then and there and never looked back.

But she didn’t get up. Instead she leaned back in his embrace and weaved her fingers inside his. Zack let out a small moan, and Jill allowed herself to feel as content as he sounded.

After they left the carnival the night before, Zack had offered to take Jill home, and she refused.

“I’m simply having too much fun for the night to end now,” she had said.

They ended up at a diner where they shared a banana split and the sort of effortless conversation on which time can slip away unnoticed. They talked about what they wanted from life, and Jill surprised herself numerous times, saying things like, “I want to enjoy more moments,” and, “I want to be spontaneous,” and, “I want to have fun before I get too old.”

After the diner, Jill asked if Zack had any good movies they could watch at his apartment.

“You’re quite the night owl, aren’t you?” he said.

“Not always, just tonight.”

He took her to a one-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of an ancient, dilapidated building. As she stepped inside, Jill realized that she had never in her life come this close to how the rest of the world lived. The creaky, wooden floors. The dripping faucet. The smell of mildew behind the walls. The
age
of the place—a sense that generations of people had come and gone while the apartment remained unchanged…

They never got around to watching a movie. They talked all night instead. They might as well have had all the time in the world for how it seemed to them. In those moments, there was no time. There was only them. There was only the joy of being together.

They migrated to Zack’s bed in the wee hours of the morning and went to sleep fully clothed.

Now it was morning. Now they were lying together in bed, Zack’s arm holding Jill tight, the memories of the night before coming forward and telling her that this was good, that this was where she was supposed to be.

Jill lifted Zack’s hand to her lips and gently kissed his knuckles. His whole body responded. He was holding her now with his arm over her body and his legs tucked underneath hers. Even in the gentle touch of a morning embrace, Jill could feel how strong he was. She felt like he was someone she could trust to look out for her.

And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she relaxed. Without a care in her mind, Jill closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

Zack’s alarm went off a few times that morning. He kept hitting snooze. It was an odd experience for Jill, who had never hit the snooze button in her life. Never before had she enjoyed the pleasures of lying between worlds, waking thoughts and dreams swirling together like coffee and cream. She dreamt about her trip to Cozumel with Annika and the girls, only she saw the trip in random order, starting with the moment she broke into Annika’s room to hack into her computer, then jumping to the beginning of the trip when they lounged at the pool all day, then jumping again to the very end when everyone climbed onto the plane, half-awake and hung over. The dream felt like it was playing out in random order, until she realized the order matched one of the algorithms she had been working on all week. Her memory of the trip to Cozumel was being scrambled like the data she stole from TPM. If she put the trip back in order again, would she have the solution to her problem? If she decoded this dream, would that in turn decode the stolen data?

In her mind, she pulled apart the various scenes of the dream like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and spread them out before her. There were sixteen scenes in all. She had to find a way to track their starting positions before she rearranged them. Without any thought to it, her mind assigned letters to the scenes.
Yes, letters. Just keep those letters attached as you move the pictures around. They will tell you what you need to know.

She scanned the scenes to find a view of the airport, of all the girls walking through the tunnel and into the first class section of the airplane. There it was.
Letter C
. Like an icon on a touch screen, she grabbed it and dragged it to the top left. Next she found a picture of the woman at the front desk. They were checking into the hotel.
Letter A
. She put it next in line.

She was amazed at how easy it was to find the right scenes. It was as if her normal mental state was a cluttered room, and this half-asleep state was clean and organized. She could zero in on the correct thought every time, without any effort at all. One after another, she found the right scenes, put them in order, kept the right letters attached, and stored the new sequence.

When she was done she let the scenes fade from her mind so that only the letters remained. The order of these letters would tell her the sequence. They would solve the problem for her. She could write a routine that put the stolen data in the same order as she’d just put these scenes and her problem was solved.

She read the letters carefully.

C-A-R-O-L-Y-N-W-E-N-T-W-O-R-T-H.

What? Carolyn Wentworth? That couldn’t be right. Why would the sequence spell out her mother’s name. What just happened?

She went over the letters again, and suddenly the whole process was illogical to her. There were only sixteen scenes, but there was a letter sequence that stretched the whole alphabet. And some letters were repeated. How was this a meaningful sequence at all?

It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. This was just a nonsensical dream. Jill had allowed herself to believe there was some great meaning to it, but there was no meaning. There was no miracle solution to her data problem to be found in her snooze button slumber.