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

by Baum, Spencer

  Annika stepped in his way, pushing him wide of his mark.

  “Excuse me,” Art said, trying to step around Annika.

  “Oh hey there Sweetie!” Annika said, a big smile across her face. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  Art was still trying to push past her before he fully registered the words she was saying. It wasn’t until Annika grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away from Nicky that she really had his attention.

  “Hold on there Cowboy,” Annika said. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Ummmm….yeah, you want to talk to me? I just wanted to talk to--”

  “I know, Baby. Everyone wants to talk to Nicky this morning. Don’t you fret it. There’s plenty of that girl to go around. But what I want to talk about can’t wait.”

  “Oh. Okay. What is it?”

  “I wanna have lunch with you today.”

  Art was watching Nicky step out of the car. She was wearing an exceptionally short plaid skirt that teased his eyes with its ebbs and flows as she stood up. Her legs looked so smooth, so strong. Had she really been at his house last night? How could he have forgotten something like that?

  “Hello, Art? Anybody there?”

  Art turned to Annika, who still had a giant smile on her face.

  “I’m sorry, what were you saying?” Art muttered.

  Annika rolled her eyes. “You know, when a pretty girl asks you on a date, the least you could do is look at her face.”

  “What? A date?”

  “Yes, you’re having lunch with me today. We’ll meet at your car right after fourth period. Don’t be late. You’re taking me to Budokan.”

  “I am?”

  Annika put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a gentle squeeze.

  “Yes, you are. We need to talk about some things. Do you like Japanese food?”

  Did he like Japanese food? What was happening here? Art turned to see Nicky stepping away from the lot and onto the north lawn. She was headed to class, surrounded by a crew of admirers, with Mattie on one side, Jenny on the other, and Vince Weir trailing behind.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Annika said.

  “Huh? I mean…yes, I’ve been to Budokan before. I like it.”

  “Great. Then I’ll meet you back here after fourth. Have a great day, Love.”

  Annika waved goodbye and floated out of the lot, leaving Art completely befuddled. On any other day, a surprise lunch invite from Annika would be beyond welcome—she’d even called it a date, hadn’t she? But on this day…

  As he watched Annika race to catch up to Nicky and their crew, he imagined himself doing the same thing. But he couldn’t talk to Nicky in front of all those people. What was he even going to say? Did you come to my house last night and the two of us got crazy on wine and prescription pain pills from my father’s stash? Do you remember any of that happening? I don’t remember it at all, but my butler says you were there.

  It was all so odd. If any of that were the case, wouldn’t Nicky have wanted to speak with Art too? Wouldn’t she have at least tried to find him, maybe tried to arrange a private moment with him?

  How had she even gotten home? Art was in such a stupor this morning that he hadn’t asked Etson that basic question. Apparently, Nicky had been in the house with him last night, but this morning she was gone. If they both got wasted, she wouldn’t have made it home unless someone took her, but Etson and the rest of the staff were all in their quarters.

  The second bell rang. Now there were three minutes before class began. Shaking his head at how confusing the world had become, Art left the senior lot and headed across the lawn to go to school.

  Chapter 10

  The lockers at Thorndike were like miniature wardrobes, each made of stained mahogany, each large enough to house three wide shelves. It was traditional at Thorndike for seniors to carve their initials or some other tag inside their lockers. While not officially condoned, this locker tagging was a tradition dating back many decades at Thorndike and was acceptable to the administration because so many of these students could expect to lead noteworthy lives. It wasn’t unusual to open a locker and find it tagged by students who had gone on to become titans of business, powerful politicians, or even immortals.

  During those quiet first weeks of school, when Nicky was the invisible new girl who didn’t have many friends and mostly kept to herself, she had plenty of time to work on her tag, and she completed it the day before Homecoming. Her tag, hand-carved with a steel scraper in the locker’s left-hand wall, gave her initials underneath a picture of the sun. It was meant to be a joke. A picture of the sun, that eternal enemy of vampires everywhere. At the end of the year, when Sergio was dead and Nicky was long-gone, this tag would infuriate the immortals who saw it.

  But now, as she opened her locker, and her work of the past week stared her in the face, she realized that her tag was much more than a joke. A circle, eight rays of sunlight coming off of it at matching angles along the sides—there was no denying what she was looking at. She had carved the same sun she had seen as a silver sculpture in her dream.

  She stared at it now, realizing for the first time what she’d done. This thing, this image—it was a message from her subconscious. Something was in there that wanted to come out.

  And more than that, it was proof that this vision that haunted her dreams last night wasn’t something Sergio had put there. Whatever that dream was, with a young Nicky standing near a building…the broken glass, her mother, the sculpture of the sun—it had been in her mind before she ever danced with Sergio. It had to be. She had carved it on the wall of her locker without even realizing what she was doing.

  “What’s with you, Baby?” came Annika’s voice from behind her.

  It took Nicky a second to realize Annika was talking to her. “Oh…nothing. Just thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nicky said. “It’s nothing.”

  “If you say so. Don’t forget about the assembly this morning.”

  “No, I’ll be there,” Nicky said, thankful for the reminder. Her mind was cluttered with so many things she had indeed forgotten about the assembly.

  “Where’s Jill?” Annika said, gesturing at the locker next to Nicky’s.

  “I don’t know,” Nicky said. “Haven’t seen her this morning.”

  “Maybe she’s already at the chapel,” said Annika. “That’s where we need to be. Come on, girl.”

  “Okay,” Nicky said. She took one last look at the carving on the inside wall before slamming her locker shut, then she joined Annika on a walk up the brick path to the chapel.

  The Albert and Melba Anderson Chapel on the east end of the Thorndike campus was the sort of cruel irony that the immortals loved. A relic from Thorndike’s past, it would have made sense for the immortals to tear the chapel down after they took over the school. Chapels such as these were gathering places for the resistance once. Holding onto old superstition that vampires feared crosses and holy water, vampire hunters were frequent church-goers, tending to their business in chapels and churches, frequently with the aid of a pastor or priest. The Network itself derived its name from the old network of Catholic monasteries where men retreated into the woods to seek spiritual comfort and rigorous training in the art of vampire hunting.

  Daciana had crushed all those hubs of resistance long ago. These days a church was a church and a monk was a monk. The vampire hunters had their own network, entirely detached from the religious institutions that once nurtured them. But still the connotation remained. A chapel like the one in which Nicky now sat, with an altar, a cross, and little statuettes of the saints, wasn’t the sort of place one would expect to find a vampire, or a collection of teenagers who longed to become one. Yet here they were.

  Terry Reese, the senior class president, went to the front of the chapel and stood at the lectern.

  “The Festival begins this Friday,” Terry said. “Brawl in the Fall will be at Sutt
er’s field. The party starts when the sun goes down.”

  Terry was referring to the next event in the Coronation contest: The Festival of the Moon.

  Inspired by a lunar harvest festival Daciana had witnessed in China, The Festival of the Moon commemorated the Chinese goddess Chang’e, who, according to legend, chose eternal life even though it meant she was forever confined to the night sky. For Daciana, the analogy to her own life as an immortal was clear. Just as the villagers on the Pearl River Delta celebrated Chang’e, the goddess of the moon, Daciana wanted the students at Thorndike to celebrate her and all the other immortal creatures of the night.

  The Festival of the Moon opened with Brawl in the Fall. A variant of a ceremony Daciana once witnessed in a South China village, Brawl in the Fall was a night of drunken debauchery in the woods where boys from the senior class fought in a tournament for a million dollar prize.

  After Brawl in the Fall, the Festival continued with nightly celebrations at school to commemorate the goddess of the moon. Then, at the end of the week, in an old theater downtown, the Festival closed with the next fundraising game for the girls wearing black: the Date Auction.

  “The Date Auction will be at the Penbrook Theater on 48th Street,” Terry said. “Tickets will be on sale through the activities office starting today. Those who intend to bid must be seated with auction paddles in-hand no later than eight o’clock.”

  Terry went on to talk about student council, a meeting for the honors society, a meeting for the rotary club, and some gathering in the Provost’s office for people who liked chamber music. He finished with a terse, “Thank you,” then left the podium.

  Ms. Childs, the assistant principal, was next up to the lectern, and in a squeaky voice she said, “The Danson Citizenship Medal For Teachers is awarded to one high school educator every year who...”

  The interesting part of the assembly already finished, students all around the chapel pulled out their phones. Nicky hadn’t even gotten the phone into her hand before the first text arrived. It was from Annika, who was sitting right next to her.

  Someone please kill me now.

  Nicky reached out with her elbow and gave Annika a nudge.

  Another text came in, this one from Mattie. Where do you all wanna go to lunch?

  Annika responded: Sorry gals. I already made lunch plans with Art.

  Nicky turned to Annika and mouthed the words, “Lunch plans with Art?”

  Annika went back to her phone and typed: Art and I need to have a little business discussion.

  What are you going to tell him? Nicky texted back.

  I’m going to tell him that if he wants a piece of you, he needs to pay for it at the Date Auction like everyone else.

  Be careful not to drive him away, Mattie texted. He’s rich.

  From what I saw at Nicky’s after-party there is no driving him away, Annika texted back.

  Mattie snickered at this one. Nicky did too. Poor Art had really made a spectacle of himself at the after-party, following Nicky everywhere she went, hanging all over her like some drunk monkey.

  I’m being the bad guy on this one, Annika texted. I’ll tell Art that Nicky is crazy about him, but I’m making her stay away until after the Date Auction. We want Art to be a pent-up ball of hormones when it’s time for him to raise his auction paddle.

  At the front of the chapel, Ms. Childs was getting gushy about the award for Ms. Benchley. “Sarah Benchley has a fierce love for her students…”

  Nicky grinned, thinking of things the Network knew about Ms. Benchley and her fierce love for students, or for one student at least—things that Ms. Childs and the Danson Award Committee did not.

  Nicky took a moment to look around the chapel. Most of the students were looking down at their phones, making Art, whose eyes were gazing up to the podium, stand out. The poor guy was still in a stupor from the Addonox.

  “And so,” Ms. Childs continued, “it is my great privilege to present this year’s Danson Award for Excellence in Teaching to Sarah Benchley.”

  Ms. Childs raised her hands to applaud. When only a few students joined her she started waving her arms, begging the chapel to give Ms. Benchley a standing ovation. As everyone climbed lazily to their feet, Nicky included, her phone buzzed one more time. This text was from Ryan.

  Sorry I missed your call last night.

  Nicky knew exactly where he was sitting, but had purposely kept her eyes away from him. This thing she was doing with Ryan, whatever it was, needed to stop. It was a threat to the whole mission.

  So it was with some disappointment in herself that she turned to look at him anyway, and found him standing at the end of her row, leaning forward and looking right at her. They shared a smile between them like a secret, their eyes making contact for only a second before he looked away and joined the rest of the students in applause for Ms. Benchley.

  Chapter 11

  The assembly ended and students went off to their second period class, which for Nicky, was history with Ms. Johnstone.

  One of those teachers who wants everyone to like her was how Jill described Ms. Johnstone in the briefing book. The trick with her is not to like her too much. She develops little teacher’s pets in every class.

  In the first weeks of school, before she came to Homecoming in black, Nicky had allowed herself to become one of Ms. Johnstone’s favorites, sitting in the front row and giving the teacher her undivided attention. It was the sort of counterintuitive strategy that was necessary at Thorndike. If you want to go unnoticed by the students, sit in the front and let the teacher take a liking to you.

  Now, of course, everything had changed, and Nicky walked to the back of the class, where she continued her text conversation with Mattie and Annika. Ms. Johnstone did nothing to stop Nicky from typing away at her phone all during class. She had been teaching at Thorndike long enough to know how things worked. A girl who wore black to Homecoming had more important things to do than take careful notes, and it was smart for teachers to be nice to all the Coronation candidates. No one wanted to be the least favorite teacher of a future immortal.

  Third period was literature with Mr. Enberg, a class that always began with a quiz. On this morning, Nicky’s copy of the quiz had all the answers already written on it, and at the bottom of the paper, written in Enberg’s sloppy red pen script were the words, “Good luck.”

  Fourth period took Nicky to Sullivan Hall, the newly constructed building that housed a 24-karat gold statue of Renata Sullivan in the foyer. Walking past that statue, Nicky thought of Frankie, trapped in Renata’s mansion. A vision from many years ago, a different time in her life, when she spied on an immortal’s mansion and watched one slave carry another’s dead body away—that vision flashed in her mind, this time with Frankie carrying the corpse.

  Breathe in me.

  Nicky used her mantra to shut it down. Now wasn’t the time. Frankie turned eighteen in December. Renata wouldn’t kill him before then. If Nicky tried to rush some rescue operation together before it was ready she would fail and Frankie would die. Gia was coming to the house later in the week for a debriefing session. They would discuss Frankie’s rescue then, as well as everything else that was going on.

  Right now, her focus had to be on the mission. To remind herself of her priorities, Nicky walked to the back of the foyer and looked out the window.

  Sullivan Hall was a round building with an open courtyard in its center. That courtyard housed a cemetery, an actual cemetery on a high school campus, with long, tightly-packed rows of identical headstones. Buried in that cemetery were the remains of every girl who had entered Coronation and lost, each gravesite marked with her name and the year of her death.

  She was here to put an end to this. For every tombstone in the courtyard, there was a matching immortal somewhere in America. A winner and a loser. The loser died, and the winner went on an epic killing spree, feasting on innocent people for centuries. Frankie was important, but the mission was important too. The missi
on was designed to save thousands upon thousands of people like Frankie, people who died in the prime of life because some immortal wanted a snack.

  Nicky went to the second floor, making her way to room 205 for senior math with Mr. Matteo. As was her routine now, she headed to the back of the room where she could act appropriately aloof and superior. Half-way to the back row, she froze in place, a familiar face catching her completely off guard.

  “Ryan? Since when are you in this class?” she said.

  Ryan smiled. “Since this morning,” he said. “I’ve been doing some tinkering with my schedule.”

  Nicky took the seat next to him. “How come?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said, turning his attention to Mr. Matteo, who was beginning his lecture.

  Mr. Matteo led the class in a brief review of the homework he had assigned over the weekend (homework almost no one had completed), then he assigned problems from the textbook and invited the class to work in pairs. Before anyone else could claim her, Nicky turned her desk toward Ryan’s.

  “I take it you want to work with me?” he said.

  “Shut up and turn your desk,” Nicky said.

  Ryan smirked as he turned toward Nicky. “You can relax and do whatever you need to,” he said. “I imagine you’ve got lunch plans to figure out or something. I’ll take care of the assignment.”

  “I’ll be doing my own work, thank you very much,” Nicky said.

  “Come on, Nicky. Girls wearing black don’t sit around and do math problems.”

  “This one does,” Nicky said. “In fact, this one bets you five dollars she can finish the assignment before you.”

  “Oh really?” Ryan’s voice was playful now. “Alright, a race it is. But I think we should raise the stakes a little bit. Five dollars is hardly a worthy bet in this town.”

  “You wanna make it a hundred?”

  “I want to make it lunch today, right after this class gets out. Loser buys.”

  Nicky was unable to conceal her surprise at this offer.