The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (9 page)

“He said he was done squashing Daciana’s soldier ants one by one and intended to take out the queen.”

“Wild. Looks like our friend Merv is getting himself into all kinds of trouble, doesn’t it? What a jerk.”

“I don’t know that Merv ever responded. I only found the one letter.”

“Even still,” said Jill. “The fact that Falkon made the advance…he knew that Merv would keep quiet about it.”

“We’ll need to have someone look into what he’s up to,” said Nicky. “I took a picture of the letter. I’ll email it to you.”

Jill’s phone started buzzing. She pulled it out and looked at the screen.

“It’s Annika,” she said. “Probably wondering where I’ve been all day. I got so excited about this break-in that I never called her.”

“Are you going to answer it?”

“I don’t know what I’d say to her right now. I promised I’d help her, but I don’t know what help I can give.”

“What kind of help does she want?” Nicky asked.

“She wants to make sure Shannon is safe. She wants to make a run for it at the end of the year so she and Shannon can live happily ever after.”

“Don’t we all,” Nicky said, quietly.

“I know I do,” said Jill. She pressed the button to send Annika to voicemail. “Hey, did I hear your phone ringing in there tonight?”

“Yes,” Nicky said. “Sorry. I should have turned the ringer off as soon as we got you inside. Hope I didn’t disturb your work.”

“No, it didn’t disturb me at all. Who called you?”

Nicky paused for a second. “Tommy,” she said. “He wanted to talk about my outfits for Brawl in the Fall and the Date Auction.”

“Did you decide something?”

“He’s going to come over tomorrow for a fitting,” Nicky said. “You’re welcome to come if you want to give some input.”

“I’d like that,” Jill said. “Maybe I’ll be there.”

They arrived at Jill’s neighborhood a few minutes after eleven. Nicky took a roundabout way through the side streets. When she was confident no one was following them, she pulled up to Jill’s driveway and they said goodnight. Jill found her father waiting for her when she stepped inside.

“Where the hell have you been?” he said. His speech was slurred. On Sundays he started drinking during his golf game and never stopped.

“None of your business,” Jill said, brushing past him and heading to the stairs.

“You can stop right there young lady! I heard about what you did last night. You went to the new girl’s party instead of Kim’s. Do you know what you’ve done? You’re gonna come down here and talk to me about it.”

Jill stopped at the first landing on the stairs.

“There’s nothing to talk about, Dad. I made a judgment call last night. Nicky will win Coronation. She completely owned Kim from the start of the dance. The only reason she didn’t get the whole class to her after-party is because people are scared to make the leap. But that will change.”

“Who is this new girl? I’ve never even heard of her or her family!”

At that, Jill turned around and went back down the stairs, stopping when she was right in front of her father’s face.

“She’s the next immortal, Dad, so you’d better get in good with her now. The reason you’ve never heard of her is that the people who brought her here were keeping it that way.”

“What are you getting at?”

“It’s no accident that the perfect competitor to unseat Kim just showed up out of the blue. I knew something like this was going to happen at Homecoming.”

“How? How could you possibly know about this?”

“I saw people plotting.”

Her dad wrinkled his forehead. All the liquor was making this conversation hard for him.

“But Chester Featherstone said twice as many people were at Kim’s party as at Nicky’s,” he said. Already the confidence in his voice was gone. Walter Wentworth was good in situations where he got to boss others around, but when he had to read people, had to try and understand their motivations, he was a like a lost puppy.

“Who are you gonna believe, Dad? Chester Featherstone, whose only connection to all this was a ten minute talk with his son, or me?”

“Well…I...”

“I don’t think you’re hearing me,” Jill said. “
I saw this coming
.”

She tilted her head to give the words weight.

“Are you saying…on the computer….have you been spying on…”

“Good night, Dad.”

The final look in her father’s eyes told her all she needed to know. He was convinced. Whatever his golfing buddies had told him meant little when weighed against his daughter’s opinion. He had never forgotten that night that he came to Jill in a panic and asked her to finish the computer program that had stumped her mother. He had no clue about all the mischief Jill was causing, but he knew she could work magic at a computer terminal. And he knew that, in the end, Jill was the one who wrote the software that gave Daciana eyes and ears all around the world. He’d never asked Jill what she could do with that software.

“We’ll talk more about this later,” he said.

“I’m sure we will,” said Jill.

Chapter 8

The Bloom family home was a gaudy piece of new construction built on the eastern edge of Bethesda with all the other “McMansions” in town. The shamelessly large house not only projected an arrogance that was fitting with the personalities of the Blooms as the Network had written them, it also masked the unusual nature of the house. Like the magician who told a joke to distract from his sleight of hand, or the pickpocket who crashed into his victims so they didn’t feel the soft removal of their belongings, the Bloom family mansion used distraction to hide its true intentions. Visitors to the house were so taken with its sprawling splendor they didn’t notice the unusually thick windowpanes, the many locks on the doors, or the counterintuitive floor plan that wasn’t designed for pleasant family life, but rather to trap and kill a vampire.

Nicky entered through the garage, locking the door behind her as she stepped inside. The clock above the oven read 1:41. Nicky sighed and shook her head. The Masquerade and all-night party, followed by a quick rest during the day, followed by a late-night adventure at the Tremblay mansion—all of it left her feeling out of sorts. Not only was her body mixed up about day and night, but her mind was mixed up about who she was and what she was supposed to be doing.

There was a note for her on the kitchen counter.

Saved some dinner for you in the fridge. Wake me if you need anything. Dad.

 
Nicky felt a surge of affection for the man. It was cute that Phillip signed the note ‘Dad.’ He had been slow to commit to his role, and for most of the summer had treated Nicky as a fellow Network operative rather than a daughter. A few weeks
 
ago he would have left the note unsigned rather than call himself Dad, but as the mission got into full swing he embraced his role more fully, and even though they still viewed each other as equals, he seemed more comfortable pretending to be her father.

Nicky wondered if she was any more comfortable playing his daughter.

She had a dad once. A mom too, although her mom died when Nicky was too young to remember her. She and her dad were close. They lived in an RV that traveled the country, and they shared the same spirit of adventure.

She had given up on finding her dad a long time ago, and although it couldn’t be said she had found peace at his loss, she had at least moved on.

Melissa Mayhew changed all that last night.

I used your father and many others to really understand how mind control works, to try and learn how a little girl could look me in the eyes and just walk away…

She heard Melissa Mayhew’s voice ringing in her ears, the words like bullets crashing into her chest and tearing at her innards. She saw Melissa’s face, the two of them cramped together in the back of a limousine after the Masquerade. Nicky Bloom and the vampire who murdered her father.

I took them in and out of hypnosis. I placed powerful commands deep in their subconscious to lock off their minds, then asked my bond to try and get in and see what was there. I experimented with emotional and sensory extremes.

Nicky looked at the little finger on her left hand and remembered the agony she felt when her bones snapped. Melissa broke her finger to make her fearful. She threated to break every finger on both hands, one at a time, and wanted Nicky to fear the pain. She thought if Nicky got frightened enough, her mind would open up and Melissa could get inside.

It was a technique that apparently had worked before, a technique Melissa had used on Nicky’s
 
dad.

All participants, including your father, were disposed of when we were done….In a way it’s your fault.

She tortured them. All those years that Nicky thought her father was trapped in one of the mansions, all those years spent roaming the country, looking for him, and he had been at the Farm the whole time, locked in some underground bunker where Melissa was torturing him, and ultimately killing him.

Nicky was crying now, and without any thought to it, she had her phone in her hand and her fingers were bringing up the recent calls. A voice in her head told her to stop it, that this was a terrible idea, that she would regret it and she needed to put down the phone right now…

But she couldn’t stop, and before she knew it, the phone was on her ear and she was waiting for Ryan to answer.

She got his voicemail and immediately hung up.

“Celeste Nicole Allen, what are you doing?” she whispered.

She put the phone on the counter and went upstairs. Ten minutes later, she was asleep.

That night she dreamed about her mother, or at least, she thought it was her mother. A part of her knew it was fantasy, that she was dreaming about her mother because she longed to know the woman, that her brain was playing a trick to bring her comfort.

In the dream, Nicky and her mother were separated by a thick pane of glass. Her mother was excited that Nicky was there and started banging on the glass, desperate to break through. Nicky punched and kicked at the glass from the outside, trying to help.

Come on, this is my dream. Get this glass out of here. Let me see my mother
.

Through force of her will, Nicky got a single crack to form right where her mother pounded with her fist. The crack spread down the glass, Nicky’s eyes following it as it went. Down the pane, through the center, now off to the right it went. For a second, Nicky thought the crack would reach the edge of the pane and the glass would break, but then it stopped.

Gazing at the point where the crack ended, Nicky saw her own reflection in the glass, and in that reflection she wasn’t the seventeen-year-old who was having this dream. She was a little girl. A chubby-cheeked, freckle-faced troublemaker with frizzy, unwashed hair. She took a moment to stare at the reflection. It was quite amazing to get this retro view of herself. It was something she had craved for a long time. Unlike anyone else she knew, Nicky had no pictures of herself as a child. The only image she had of how she used to look was in her own memory, and those images were fleeting and sparse. Her memories were a flipbook of broken pictures—she remembered how she looked in the mirror of a gas station bathroom, how she looked in the surface glare of a pond, how she looked in the rearview mirror of the RV. Months, sometimes years, separated these memories, and without any pictures to reference them to, Nicky never knew how trustworthy those memories were.

But here, in the dream, she knew it was correct, and she couldn’t help but stare at it. There she was, little Nicky Allen, maybe four years old, looking back at her from the glass. And behind little Nicky was a metal sculpture mounted on a short pedestal.

She turned to see that the sculpture was real. A s
ilver sphere polished to a mirror shine with eight lines sticking out on the sides, like rays of the sun. The sculpture was a familiar vision to Nicky. She had seen it before….not too long ago….someplace important…

She had seen it in her mind when she danced with Sergio at the Masquerade.

As if summoned by the thought of him, Sergio appeared in the dream, his body fading in from nothing until he was fully there.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” he said.

“The sculpture? No, it’s not fascinating at all,” said Nicky. “I don’t like it.”

“It makes you feel sad,” Sergio said.

“It makes me feel betrayed,” said Nicky, an excitement coming to her as she said the words. She was onto something with that sentence. This sculpture, this mysterious vision that had found its way into her mind when she danced with Sergio, was important somehow, and the feeling of betrayal was a clue that would help her figure it out.

“I was right here,” Nicky said, now standing before the silver sphere, staring at her own warped reflection in the metal, seeing the four-year-old again, “and something important happened. Something I’ve forgotten.”