The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) (36 page)

Daciana threw another log on the fire then took a seat on the sofa. She looked at the clock. Nearly four in the morning.

Lena was late.

“Chester come in here!” she called out.

Her head of house,
who had been waiting patiently at the entryway to the Great Room, approached.

“What may I do for you, Master?” he said.

“Grab my phone and see if I have any messages from Lena Trang.”

“Right away,” Chester said. He gave a small bow and then hurried out of the room. When he returned a minute later, phone in-hand, he said, “No messages from Ms. Trang, Master.”

“What about from her bond? Thomas.”

“The only message on your phone is from an unknown number,” said Chester. “Shall I read it to you?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Message received on Saturday at 1:42 am,” Chester said, reading the message. “From unknown number. Your verification code is six, four, nine, six, five, seven.”

Chester looked up from the phone. “Shall I read it again?” he said.

“That was it?” said Daciana. “Who did you say that was from?”

“Unknown number,” said Chester.

“Weird. Everything about the world today is weird, Chester, don’t you think? I me
an, people spend all their time looking at these little screens and what do they tell you? What did that screen just tell us?”

“I’m not entirely certain of the meaning of this message, Master.”

“There is no meaning. It’s gobbledy-gook! Absolute nonsense! Of course, there’s so much nonsense like that floating around these days—they have a name for it. What’s that name people use for all the nonsense messages?”

“Spam, Master?”

“Right, spam! For the life of me, Chester, I’ll never understand why the kids insist on carrying those horrid devices around with them everywhere. Delete the message. Then call Lena Trang and tell her she’s late!”

“Right away, Master.”

*****

Nicky returned to school on Monday morning, taking her first steps onto the Thorndike campus since the day before the Date Auction.

It was an easy, quiet day for her. Nobody cared about Nicky Bloom anymore.

She drifted from class to class, speaking to no one. She eavesdropped on conversations in the hall, and read people’s lips from across the courtyard.

Everyone at school was obsessed with numbers.

What’s your lucky number? Wanna hear mine?

How is it that we all have a lucky number now? When did that happen?

How much money was in that safe again?

A quiet first day of school for Nicky became a quiet first week. She grew accustomed to staying silent from the time she left the house in the morning to the time she returned in the afternoon. Her phone never rang. The only texts she received were from Ryan and Jill, and even those were rare. As far as the Network was concerned, Jill was running this operation now. Nicky was just a prop.

Not wanting the other students to see her eating alone, Nicky began spending the lunch hour shopping the boutiques on Staley Street. She saw a necklace that caught her eye at a shop called Mandy’s Treasures. The necklace had a heavy topaz pendant that was bezel set in a silver casing. She didn’t understand why she was drawn to it until she brought it home, and saw that the topaz was a near perfect match in size and shape to the ruby Sergio gave her at the party.

That ruby, which had been hiding in the drawer of her vanity, came with her to school the next day. She took the ruby and pendant to a bench jeweler during the lunch hour and asked to have the stones switched out.

The jeweler was more than a little impressed with the ruby.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“Someone gave it to me,” Nicky said.

“It’s gotta be at least fifty carats. And the quality is outstanding. You ever have it appraised?”

“No.”

The jeweler held the ruby under a magnifier lamp and turned it slowly in his fingertips.

“It’s just spectacular.
I’ll get it appraised for you. You definitely want a stone like this appraised and insured.”

“
Just mount it in the pendant please.”

“We’re going to need to sign a liability agreement before I start working with a stone like this.”

“Whatever you need. I just want to wear it.”

When she went to school on Thursday morning, she was wearing the ruby Sergio gave her around her neck.

Also on Thursday morning, word spread around the school that Daciana’s safe had been moved to the chapel, where it was surrounded by armed guards. The students got their first look at the safe’s new location during Friday morning service. As all the Thorndike students lined the pews and sang the school song, they looked at the safe, standing front and center on the altar, the four posters of the girls wearing black hanging directly above it.

In Daciana’s mansion, the posters had been arranged in a circle, but in the chapel, they hung in a straight line, starting with Samantha and continuing in order through Mary. Nicky and Jill shared a glance when they saw the new arrangement of the posters
, their borders more visible now.

When Friday evening came, and the class gathered in the chapel again, many of them had figured out the connection between the posters and the gemstones on the safe. By the time Daciana took the stage, a teenage slave rolling her clear globe of Ping-Pong balls alongside her, everyone understood that the girls wearing black
each had their own number, and together, those numbers made up the combination to this safe.

Eight times Daciana went to that globe, pulled out a plastic ball, and called a number. Eight people guessed at the combination of the safe. Josh Manson, Terri Weingarten, Amy Thayer, Jake Castillo, Terry Reese, Parker Blake, Tatiana Klebb, and Esperanza Vigil—one by one they went up to the altar of the Albert and Melba Anderson Memorial Chapel, turned the four knobs on the safe, and failed to open it.

“Thank you everyone,” Daciana said after the eighth and final attempt. “I will see you again next week. You are dismissed.”

*****

Daciana exited through the back door of the chapel and towards the car she had waiting on the street. As she walked down the sidewalk, another car, parked by itself, just a few lengths away from hers, caught her eye.

A black 1966 Vicenza Roadster. Daciana hadn’t seen one of those in decades. She approached it.

It was an exquisite piece of machinery. Well cared-for, the tires and paint gleaming in the moonlight, the car made Daciana wistful for a simpler time in her life. Back in the time of cars like these, the clan was small and tight. No one would have thought for a second to betray the clan in those days.

No one would dare.

In many ways, Daciana felt like the world was getting away from her. The cars, the kids, the other vampires, the technology…

It hadn’t been a great week. Lena and Thomas were officially missing.
Her new choices to run the Farm, already gone. The last time anyone had seen either of them was at her party. There was no sign of either of them now.

Had her enemies already struck again? Were Lena and Thomas part of the same conspiracy that ensnared Rena
ta, or were they victims, killed precisely because Daciana had chosen them to take on a more important role in the clan? She didn’t know, and she didn’t know how to find out.

That part was particularly frustrating. Renata had be
en enormously clever in her getaway. Before burning down her mansion, she had emptied it of everything important to the clan. Everything that Daciana would have wanted to look at for clues to Renata’s whereabouts. Computers, file cabinets, important documents—there were fire safes in the house but they had been emptied before it was set ablaze. There was a sprinkler system and other defenses against such destruction, but someone had disabled all of them before lighting the match!

No, it
hadn’t been a great week so far, and to top it off, Daciana’s phone kept getting hit with spam. These little ‘verification code’ text messages. Seemed like she got at least one a day.
Your verification code is
and then it gave her a 6-digit number, a new one every time! What the hell was that? Why was spam such nonsense? What purpose did it serve to fill people’s email and text messages with this crap?

Standing on the curb, Daciana ran her fingers along the curves of the car, and wished for a time when machines were simple, like this one. No microchips. No encryption codes. No smart phones and computer networks and Ethernet cables and
Wi-Fi and everything else that had invaded the world all of a sudden. Back when Vicenzas ruled the road, people did important transactions on paper. They sat down at desks and wrote each other letters. They talked, in person, in actual sentences rather than 140-character ‘Tweets.’

And back then, the world you lived in today was the same one you would live in tomorrow. There wasn’t new
disruptive technology
showing up at California conventions every six months. You learned a few basic things, like how to drive a car, and then you functioned in the world day in and day out.

It was funny. People thought the clan was this infinitely powerful boogeyman, but sometimes Daciana felt just as helpless as anyone else. If she truly was as powerful as everyone thought, she’d get rid of computers altogether and go back to a time when the most sophisticated machines in the world were black roadsters like the Vicenza.

When people didn’t carry around miniature thinking machines that got clogged with Spam about ‘verification codes.’

“You like it?” came a voice from behind her.

Daciana looked up to see Nicky Bloom standing a few feet away, a smile on her face.

“Is this yours?” Daciana said.

Nicky nodded. There was a confidence to this girl, a lack of fear in her eyes and in her movements—it was refreshing.

“I’m glad to be speaking with you, Nicky Bloom,” she said. “You and I have some things we need to talk about.”

“Okay. Would you care to go back into the chapel?” Nicky said. “It’s a little cold out here for me.”

“Nah. Why would we go back into that stuffy old place when we could speak in your car?”

“You want to go for a ride?”

“Only if you let me drive,” Daciana said. “I used to own one of these, you know. I always regretted letting it go when I did. Who knew they would become such collector’s items?”

Nicky had a clutch hanging from her shoulder. She reached inside and pulled out a set of car keys, which she threw over the roof to Daciana.

As soon as she caught the keys in her hands she was back in a memory of a different time. A clan just being built, a school that was still new, and the promise of good times ahead stretching into infinity—that’s what Daciana felt when she held the undersized rectangular key for the Vicenza in her hand.

“Now we’re talking,” she said.

A minute later, with Nicky in the passenger seat, Daciana hit the parkway going 88 miles per hour. By the time she’d worked her way over to the far left lane, she was going over a hundred.

“Oh isn’t that a marvelous sound!” Daciana said as the engine roared. “They don’t make cars like this anymore! Come on, Baby, let’s see what you can do!”

Slamming on the gas pedal, Daciana took the car to 110…115…120. They picked up a cop as they crossed the river doing a hundred-and-thirty-three miles an hour.

“Now things really get fun!” Daciana said. “Let’s see if our new friend can keep up!”

With lights flashing and sirens blaring, one cop car became two, driving in a straight line along the breakdown l
ane. As they crossed highway 122, a helicopter started flying above them.

“Are you having fun, Nicky?”

“Not as much fun as you are,” Nicky said.

“This is so awesome! Let’s see if we can lose them in the city!”

Daciana carried their pursuers off the highway and across the surface streets of DC, running red lights, allowing the tires to skid out as she took hard turns, and screaming in elation as they moved.

Sadly, on a Friday night, the streets of DC were too congested for them to get far. A few blocks into town they were surrounded.

“Come out with your hands up!” came a man’s voice from a bullhorn.

There were flashing lights on all sides of them.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Daciana said. “When I first came to America, I couldn’t get enough of it. Eventually, the police learned to leave me be. They decided I wasn’t worth their time since all I ever wanted to do was play.”

“We have you surrounded! Come out!” the bullhorn repeated.

“This will just take a second,” Daciana said.

She got out of the car and had a chat with the police officers, who were happy to let her go. As they drove away, she invited Nicky to step out, and the two of them leaned against the side of the car, looking up at the moon.