The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) (23 page)

“So where is the Fleming girl now?”

“Gone missing,” Daciana said.

“How convenient.”

“Yes. The plot thickens, as they say.”

“I imagine Laura will continue her investigation in Brazil?”

“Indeed she will. I expect it will be easier to find two runaway high schoolers than it will be to find Renata.”

“Yes, that’s probably true,” Sergio said. His eyes drifted from Laura, who was standing under a tree, speaking with her bond, to Lena Trang, who was walking around the near side of the mansion. As Daciana continued speaking, Sergio kept his gaze on Lena, who went all the way around to the front of the house.

“Annika’s parents knew nothing of their daughter’s betrayal,” she said. “And it appears her closest friends were people you’ve already cleared.”

“Really?” Sergio said. Lena was now lurking in the shadows in front of the mansion, watching the students arrive. What was she doing?

Sergio heard
Nicky’s footsteps before he saw her. How wonderful it was to have a connection so strong he recognized the sound of her footsteps! He allowed his eyes to follow the sound, and then he was looking at her.

Nicky Bloom had arrived at the party.
Seeing her, he felt more alive.

As Nicky walked under the portico, passing out of view, Sergio’s eyes drifted back to Lena, who was still hiding in the shadows. He didn’t like the way Lena was looking at Nicky.

And now she was on the move. Was Lena following Nicky into the mansion?

He would have to get down there and have a closer look.

“If you’ll excuse me, I think I will head down and join the others,” he said.

“I’ll go with you,” said Daciana. “It’s nearly time to begin.”

Sergio bit into his lower lip. Nicky and Lena would have to wait.

“That will be lovely,”
he said. “We’ll greet the others together.”

They walked to the edge of the roof and jumped, descending three stories and landing softly on the grass below.
The collection of vampires standing a hundred yards away turned in their direction.

Smiles came over their faces,
glimmers in their eyes, it was as if a brightness overtook the night.

They weren’t looking at Sergio. These were Daciana’s children, eager to greet their mother after her long absence.

To welcome her back to life.

Sergio stood aside as the clan lined up to embrace Daciana one at a time.
So very, very good to see you
, they said.
How wonderful to have you back!

Daciana practically glowed with happiness.

“Welcome, my friends!” she said. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you all tonight. I have so many things to tell you. I look forward to catching up with each of you individually before the night is done. But all of that can wait. This is a party, after all! Let us begin the hunt!”

*****

Nicky approached the front door of Daciana’s mansion feeling oddly relaxed. There was no need to be
on
at this party. No need to play her role to perfection, as she had done all last semester. After all, no one at Thorndike cared about Nicky Bloom anymore.

She opened the front door and stepped inside. The chatter quickly died down, but no one looked at her, at least, not directly.

She found it marvelously strange. They couldn’t have been more aware of her presence, yet they were pretending not to see her.

She walked into the foyer, uncertain where she was going or what she was doing. She just needed to get through the room. She needed to turn her back on all these people so they could get back to their conversations and pretend she wasn’t here.

The casino setup made the foyer a bit of a maze. She worked her way to the back of the room, snaking through rows of students playing roulette, cards, and dice, finally reaching the bar, where she sat on a stool, mercifully alone.

“What can I get for you, Miss?” asked the boy tendin
g bar. He had long hair and a mustache of peach fuzz.

Nicky found herself thinking about the Masquerade. At that party too, she had stepped inside and silenced the room. At that party, she went straight to the bar to get a drink served up by someone far too young to be handling liquor.

“It’s no fun being ignored, is it?”

The voice was familiar, but in a distant way. Only a few months had passed since Nicky’s last encounter with Kim Renwick, but it felt like a lifetime ago.

“Nobody likes to be ignored,” Nicky said, turning to face her.

Kim wore a black gown that draped elegantly to the floor, with a short jacket hugging her shoulders. She walked up to the bar so she was standing right next to Nicky.

“You know that everyone is looking at us now,” Kim said quietly. “They’re wondering what we’re talking about.”

“What are we talking about?”

“We’re talking about you, Jill, and Ryan,” Kim said. “I want to hear it from your lips. Did Jill and Ryan really plan this crazy scheme to put Samantha over the top, or is this another of your games?”

“I didn’t agree to any game where Jill sent a hundred million dollars to one of my competitors,” Nicky said.

Kim nodded, her eyes half-closed. “Yes, that’s what gets me too. I have to tell you, when Jill gave her money to Samantha, it made me furious. I was certain this was another scheme the two of you were running and we’d figure it out sooner or later. But then these rumors started about Jill and Ryan, about them using you as a diversion to keep me from seeing the real threat…it’s true, isn’t it, Nicky?”

“Does it matter what I tell you?” Nicky said. “It’s not like you have any reason to trust me.”

“No, I suppose I don’t. I just want so badly to hear you say it.”

“It’s true, Kim. They made me think I was going to win Coronation. They played me for a fool.”

“I suppose that means we have a common enemy,” said Kim. “In fact, I’d expect that you hate Jill even more than I do.”

“I don’t hate Jill,” Nicky said. “Everyone’s doing what they have to do to get by, right?”

Kim laughed. “You don’t really think like that. People who think like that don’t end up at Thorndike. Not unless…oh my God, she used you from the beginning, didn’t she?”

“I thought we already established that,” said Nicky.

“Yes, but their plan for you goes back farther than the beginning of the year, doesn’t it?”

Nicky said nothing.

“This is so crazy,” Kim said. “And to think that a few weeks ago people thought you were going to win! Now you couldn’t be a bigger loser!”

“I’m a couple million dollars ahead of you, Kim.”

“That will change. Once everyone realizes how thoroughly Jill and Ryan used you—you don’t understand, Nicky. You’re going to be the perfect excuse for these people to assuage their consciences. You never belonged here. You were just part of Jill and Ryan’s game. The rest of school will start to understand it soon enough. Second semester is the bigger money, Nicky. I’m going to find a way to get past you. Mary will too. And then Samantha will win and you’ll be the girl in the cage.”

“If you say so.”

“Sucks to be you, Nicky Bloom. See you around.”

Let everyone see you. Put lots of memories of you in their minds before they’re totally drunk. Then disappear.

Those were Eve’s instructions to Jill about how to treat the first hour of the party. You laugh at everyone’s jokes, you hang on Ryan’s arm and let everyone see how happy you are, and you make the rounds of the room more than once.

The casino theme of the party made it easy to move from one place to another. Every time a game ended and Jill lost her chips she had a perfect excuse to move to another table. Thirty minutes in, she had played blackjack, roulette, craps, and baccarat; she had spent time not just with Mattie and Karmela, but also Sam, Lonnie, Wesley, Geordi, Danielle, and Jacqueline. She had made herself visible to Kim’s little group of loyalists, and said hello to Mary. She brought the same glass of wine with her wherever she went, allowing people to see her sipping from it, and watching as their glasses went from empty to full to empty again.

Early in the party, everyone wanted to talk about her relationship with Ryan, but after a few glasses of wine, they were content to focus on the gambling games. When one of the servants rolled out a glass orb full of Ping-Pong balls and a huge group gathered to play keno, Jill knew it was time to leave. They were all having too much fun to miss her.

She found Ryan at the back of a crowd, looking on as a servant pulled a plastic ball from the keno bin.

“Forty-three,” the servant announced.

As the crowd let out a disappointed sigh, Jill put her sleeve of poker chips in Ryan’s pocket.

“It’s time,” she whispered. “Cover for me if anyone gets suspicious.”

The look on Ryan’s face made Jill think he was going to try again to persuade her to call it off. But when he spoke, all he said was, “Be careful.”

“I will,” she said. Then she walked out of the foyer and into the hallway.

Her first stop was the restroom.

An attendant, a girl maybe sixteen years old, stood in front of the sink holding a towel. She gave a small bow when Jill came inside, her head ducking low enough to expose the hand dryer on the wall behind her. The power outlet was to the immediate left of the dryer. The dryer was plugged into one socket. The other socket was open.

There were three toilet stalls in the bathroom. Jill went into the middle stall and closed the door. Then she removed her bracelet and, with both hands, began flipping among the charms. She unhooked two rectangular charms and a tiny mushroom from the bracelet,
and fit the three pieces together. When she was done, she had created a device she could plug into the outlet on the bathroom wall.

She took a deep breath,
then tapped twice on her earring.

“Signal received,” came Alvin’s voice in her ear. “I’m ready when you are.”

Jill listened carefully for movement in the bathroom. There wasn’t any. It was time.

She flushed the toilet, then, the sound of the running water masking her voice, she whispered, “I’m going to insert the device in the socket now.”

“Tap three times when it’s done,” Alvin said.

The mushroom charm from her bracelet was the key to all of this. Now that she had assembled the mushroom together with the rectangles, she could plug it into the bathroom wall and allow the wires inside the mushroom to accept a charge from the outlet. Surrounding those wires inside the mushroom was a circular collet that, upon receiving a wireless signal from Alvin, would squeeze closed, pressing the wires together.

And shorting out the entire electrical circuit connected to the outlet.

One more charm to remove from her bracelet before she could go, this one a tiny, silver unicorn. She found it and unhooked it.

Her newly assembled plug in one hand, the unicorn charm in the other, Jill stepped out of the bathroom stall.

The attendant gave her another small bow and stepped aside, making room for Jill to wash her hands. Smiling at the attendant, Jill allowed the unicorn charm to slip through her fingers. It dinged like a tiny bell as it bounced on the marble floor.

“Whoops! Could you get that for me?”

The attendant crossed the bathroom and bent down to pick up the very flat, very hard-to-grab-onto unicorn charm. It took her a few seconds of squeezing at it with her fingers before she was able to pick it up.

It was all the time Jill needed. By the time the attendant finally got the pesky charm off the floor, Jill had already plugged her device into the wall and was washing her hands.

“Thank you,” Jill said as she took back the unicorn.

When Jill was done washing her hands, the attendant gave her a white towel. Careful not to seem too hurried, Jill dried herself off and left the bathroom.

As soon as she was out the door, she tapped her earring three times.

*****

It took all of ten minutes for the clan to capture and kill a truck-full of humans after they’d been released into the forest outside Daciana’s house. Now, their kills stretched across their laps, the vampires sat in small groups enjoying each other’s company while they ate.

Sergio, having chosen not to participate in the hunt, was lurking in the shadows, eavesdropping on all the different conversations.

He listened as they speculated about Renata’s whereabouts, and what could have happened to her house. He overheard vampires voicing their long-held suspicions about Renata’s loyalty, and
the discomfort they felt at the obvious conflict between Renata and Melissa.

As he moved among the conversation circles, he wondered what sort of impact his actions would have on future gatherings like this. Would there still be ceremonial hunts after he bonded with Nicky and left the clan? Would there still be parties at the mansion?