“Come with me,” Nicky said. “If we can’t leave this town, at least we could be together tonight.”
“You sound like an old movie,” Ryan said.
“I’m being serious!” Nicky heard desperation in her voice, and knew that the alcohol was behind this rant. But she didn’t care. She deserved this. Ryan deserved it to. “You have to be good to yourself sometimes,” she said, “or else what’s it all for?”
They stopped in front of the limo. Ryan was looking at her. She could tell he was considering her offer.
“Please Ryan,” she said. “We’re going to spend the rest of our lives pretending to be people we aren’t. Let’s be ourselves tonight. Just this once.”
The activity all around them was extraordinary. Engines were starting and cars with drunk teenagers behind the wheel were crashing into each other. The mob had spread out to cover all the open space. A group of guys had taken planks out of the bonfire and were holding them up as torches as they ran around the field, screaming taunts at anyone in their way. Girls were fleeing the riot and were running past Nicky and Ryan to get into the safety of the surrounding woods.
Safe in their own little bubble, neither Nicky nor Ryan saw the danger coming until it was too late. Danger in this case was a guy who moved with footsteps that blended into the chaos all around them. Even as this guy charged straight for them, they didn’t pay him any mind. Surely he would turn away at some point and run into the woods like everyone else.
But he never did. He ran right up to them, pushing his way in between Nicky and Ryan, and throwing a roundhouse punch in Ryan’s face.
“Art?” Nicky said. “Art, what the hell are you doing?”
Ryan fell back to the ground, landing hard on his side.
“You’ve had that coming for a long time, asshole!” Art shouted at Ryan.
Nicky ran past Art and knelt on the ground near Ryan, who was holding his cheek.
“I’m okay,” he muttered. “Back to your car. We’ve got to get you out of here.”
A pair of hands grabbed Nicky under the shoulders and pulled her away.
“And you!” Art said as he lifted Nicky to her feet. “You and I are going into those woods and finishing what we started.”
The look in Art’s eyes was beyond the lustful determination she had seen at the after-party and in the camper. Art had completely lost his mind. Wrapping one arm firmly around Nicky’s waist, he lifted her off the ground and started carrying her to the woods.
Nicky was shocked at his strength. This was not the same Art she had so easily pushed into Rosalyn at the Masquerade. Some combination of alcohol and anger had turned him into a monster and Nicky couldn’t escape his grasp.
“Art, stop it! What’s gotten into you?”
And then she remembered. She heard Melissa’s voice in the camper.
You are going to tell the police you wanted to have sex with her, she resisted, you fought, and she died.
Something was going haywire in Art’s brain. Melissa’s command was consuming him. He was trying to make it real.
“Art, you’re only supposed to confess if somebody finds me dead,” Nicky said. She was flailing in his grasp now, throwing elbows and punches and kicks, but nothing was registering. The power of his grasp was extraordinary.
“This wasn’t your command, Art! This isn’t what you’re supposed to do!”
They were nearing the woods now. Art was moving quickly, almost running while he carried Nicky. His body was using some reserve of strength that wasn’t available to normal people. Melissa’s command was in complete control of him.
The next events all happened quickly, and in later days Nicky’s memories of them would be jumbled in a blur of fear, anger, and drunkenness. There was a thump, a blow to Art’s back. He slid forward then he fell. Nicky landed on her back with Art on top of her. Movement above her. Rumbling sounds, leaves crackling, twigs breaking. Art rolled out of her way and she jumped to her feet. She saw Ryan on top of Art, delivering a hard punch to his face. Art fell back, knocked out cold. Ryan grabbed Nicky by the hand and took her back to the limo. Without saying a word to her, he opened the back door, pushed her inside, and closed the door behind her. He banged on the driver’s window and yelled at him to get out of here.
“Wait!” she said.
Come with me, she wanted to add, but already she knew that wasn’t an option. The moment they had together, that sliver of time where Ryan had considered stepping into the limo with her, was gone, lost to all the chaos and violence she was leaving behind.
Chapter 22
Zack took Jill to a carnival in Upper Marlboro, where they rode a roller coaster, played midway games, ate corn dogs, and were serenaded by a barbershop quartet who sang about dancing by the light of the moon.
It was an appropriate song for the night. The harvest moon, bloated and full, hung low in the sky. Every time Jill looked at it, she wondered what was happening at Sutter’s Field.
She was tempted to feel guilty about ditching the Brawl, but only tempted. The truth was nobody would miss her. Brawl in the Fall was an event for people who liked to party, not for Jill. Annika was the one who needed to be at Nicky’s side tonight. Annika was the one who would get another round of drinks, say all the right things, laugh at all the right times, and attract all the right people. Jill would just get in the way.
The barbershop quartet finished their tune. Jill clapped and Zack threw a dollar in the quartet’s tip bucket. They moved on to a baseball toss game, where Zack knocked over a set of bowling pins and won a toy bear for Jill. The bear, a cheap pink thing stuffed with Styrofoam beads, wasn’t worth the three dollars it cost Zack to play, but Jill didn’t care. It was the first time in a long time someone had given her something special.
“It needs a name,” she said.
“So give it one.”
Jill thought about the sign that greeted them at the entrance to the fair. The Prince George’s County Fair is an Upper Marlboro tradition dating back to 1842, the sign began. Jill was surprised that an event so old, so fun, had been off her radar all this time. Why had she never heard of this fair? What else was going on right under her nose that she’d never seen?
“His name is George,” she said. “George the cheap pink bear from China. I’ll treasure him always.”
“Let’s not get carried away now,” Zack said. He gestured at the “House of A Thousand Laughs” up ahead and asked Jill if she wanted to check it out.
“I don’t know. Do you know how long it would take to laugh a thousand times?”
“We’ll never know unless we try. Come on.”
The House of A Thousand Laughs was a rickety wooden construction with warped mirrors, shaking stairs, a padded floor that shook back and forth, and a tunnel with rotating walls that seemed to trap giggling kids like fly paper. Half-way through the tunnel, Jill and Zack got caught between two groups of mid-schoolers who were purposely riding up the walls and falling on top of one another. At first, Jill felt like she was in the way and tried to move ahead, but Zack grabbed her hand and held her back, forcing her to join the tumbling pile.
“Lay your back on the ground like this,” he said, lying on the floor so his body conformed to the shape of the tunnel.
Jill was slow to respond and Zack gently pulled her down. “Come on, you have to do it before the walls get too high.”
The mid-schoolers were following Zack’s lead and now the whole tunnel was like a slow-moving clothes dryer full of kids.
Jill sat on the ground just in time for her butt to start climbing up the wall.
“Press your head back,” Zack said.
Jill pushed her head against the wall to mimic Zack’s pose, and together they rode up past the midway point, sticking on the wall until gravity took hold and they tumbled down. As she landed, she found herself giggling with as much abandon as the preteens all around her.
They left The House of A Thousand Laughs and went straight to “Poltergeist Place,” wher
e they rode a trolley car through a quaint attempt at a haunted house. Jill leaned against Zack when a plastic skeleton dropped in front of them. Zack put his arm over her shoulders and left it there until the end of the ride.
Later in the night, when the crowd started to thin and the carnival barkers began packing up their wares, Zack took Jill on the Ferris wheel. They glided slowly over the fair’s closing moments, sharing a roll of cotton candy and holding hands. Jill loved how the slow pace of the ride separated them from the rest of the world, how it grew really quiet whenever they neared the top.
“You don’t come to things like this very often, do you?” said Zack.
Jill shook her head. “I wish I did.”
“What do you do instead? Besides the computer stuff you’ve already told me about.”
It was interesting to Jill how much she wanted to tell Zack exactly what she did with her free time, to let him know that she had dedicated herself to a secret cause that dominated her personal life. It would have been so liberating to open up to him about that part of herself. It would have been the most truthful answer she could give.
And as she examined her own motivations, she found herself feeling sympathy for Nicky, at whom she’d been angry since the week before. This notion that Ryan was Jill’s, and Jill’s alone, that Nicky wasn’t allowed anywhere near him, that Nicky’s role as a Network agent was only to feign interest in boys but never allow any real feelings to take root—it was all kind of harsh. Here was Jill, upset that she couldn’t talk about her true self and make a genuine connection with Zack, and she was carrying around a fraction of the lies that Nicky had to bear. At least Jill got to go by her real name. At least she lived with her real parents in the house she grew up in. At least she played the role of herself at school, hiding only one facet of her life.
Nicky, in contrast, was living in a total fabrication. What was that like, Jill wondered, to go by a phony name? To have actors play your parents, to memorize a make-believe history of yourself and present it to the world as truth? To show your true self, whoever that is, only to people working with you? To have no real friends, just colleagues?
To do it all alone?
After the Masquerade, Nicky had her past thrown in front of her in a pretty horrific way when a vampire broke into her limo. The girl had just found out that her father was dead. She just learned that her childhood friend was Renata’s slave.
And Jill was mad at Nicky for talking to Ryan in secret.
If her phone wasn’t dead Jill would have excused herself right then and called Nicky to apologize. She would have told her that she couldn’t understand what Nicky was going through but would be glad to talk about it sometime. She would have offered herself as a friend, a real friend who cared about the person Nicky was rather than the person Nicky pretended to be.
“Jill?”
“Sorry. I was thinking about the question you asked me.”
“And?”
“And the answer is I don’t really do anything. I go out with my friends, we go shopping, we go to restaurants, we go to movies, we go on trips, but I don’t do anything like what I’m doing tonight. I don’t ever let go and do something just to have fun.”
“Shopping and eating and trips all sound fun to me.”
“They can be. You always find a way to have a good time. But at Thorndike it’s never like this. You’re never being yourself. You’re always being the person you think you’re supposed to be.”
Beneath them, the operator was helping a woman get out of a wheelchair and into one of the seats on the ride. The ride came to a stop while the woman got settled into place. Jill and Zack were at a standstill at the top of the wheel, the entire carnival beneath them.
“Who are you supposed to be?” Zack asked.
Jill was looking down at the ground, at a family gathered near the water fountain. The dad was holding a toddler in his left arm while he pushed along a baby in a stroller with his right. Both kids were asleep. The mom was filling a water bottle at the fountain. They all looked tired, but happy.
“I’m supposed to be a lot of different people,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like the person I really am gets lost in all the roles I have to play.”
“What role are you playing tonight?”
She sensed him looking right at her, so she turned to face him, and he kissed her. His lips were warm and soft, inviting, and she answered his question in the way she kissed him back. I’m playing myself, her lips and tongue and hands told him. I’m playing myself for the first time in years.
Chapter 23
The silver sphere, the building in the mountains, the breaking glass—this time Nicky was determined not to let her mother bite into her neck. As soon as the glass broke and her mother was loose, Nicky was on the run, moving as fast as she could towards the trees that surrounded the parking lot. But her young legs were too short. She felt her mother’s cold breath on her back as she neared the treeline. She tripped and fell down the hillside, twigs and branches scratching at her face as she tumbled. Her back crashed hard into a rock and she came to a sudden stop. Barely able to open her eyes for the pain, she stumbled to her feet, only to find her mother waiting for her, teeth bared. Nicky screamed as her mother bit into her neck.
Then she woke up.
The sun was glowing bright outside her windows. The house was quiet. Nicky went downstairs.
“You look like hell,” Gia said.
“I’ve been better,” Nicky said. “But I’ve also been worse.”
She plopped down on the couch.
“I take it Melissa didn’t come last night,” Nicky said.
Gia shook her head.
“What about Jill?” Nicky asked. “Anyone heard from her?”
“No, but I got Alvin on the line last night,” Gia said. “He pulled the record on Jill’s phone and we listened to the last call she made. It was at seven-thirty-three to Sparky’s Roadside Assistance. It seems that she went to a coffee shop in Columbia Heights yesterday and while she was there, somebody slashed the tires on her car.”
“A coffee shop in Columbia Heights?”
“Strange, I know. But Alvin’s report gives me hope. He said he could tell by the strength of the signal that the battery in the phone was low. It may well be that Jill is out of touch simply because she has no phone to call us with.”
“It doesn’t explain why she didn’t show at the Brawl,” said Nicky.
“We’ll give her a few more hours to turn up before we sound the alarm. I’m pretty confident she’s okay. If one of our enemies caught her, we’d all be dead by now.”
“Yes, I suppose we would,” Nicky said.
Gia put her hand on Nicky’s knee. “Take a nap today,” she said. “I’ll be back this evening with the rest of the crew. Maybe tonight’s the night Melissa will show.”
“I hope so,” Nicky said. “I don’t know how many more times I can fool her.”
Gia left and Nicky went upstairs. She popped two aspirin in her mouth, took a shower, and changed her clothes. Her bed looked inviting, but the thought of facing the dream again kept her on her feet. The dream always ended with the promise of death, and she was tired of thinking about death.
She had gone into Winthrop’s camper expecting to die in there, and with thoughts of her own death came a wave of regret. Frankie was alive and was waiting for her. A week had passed since she learned that Frankie lived and she had done nothing about it. When she stepped into that camper, she did so knowing that it wasn’t only her life that was ending, it was his as well.
She grabbed her keys, went downstairs and into the garage, hopped in the Vicenza, and left. Right away she noticed that no one was following her. Melissa had called off her slaves in the green station wagon.
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.
The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) Page 19