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

by Baum, Spencer

  “Annika was late to the Brawl?” Jill whispered to herself. How completely unlike her.

  The traffic still inching ahead in starts and stops, Jill went to the next text from Nicky, this one at 10:48.

  Where are you? It’s important that you contact me right away. Let me know that you’re okay.

  Yikes. What was that one all about? The next text, at 10:56, was even worse.

  XO

  The emergency text. Melissa was here.

  “Shit!” Jill said. Her hands were shaking now. Gia had told her to write a program to track Melissa’s movements and she hadn’t done it. She had been frustrated and angry at the world, had stormed out of her house and gone to Riverwinds to work on it, and she hadn’t worked on it at all.

  Jill looked around her. Bumper to bumper in all directions. The nearest turnoff was at least five minutes ahead. Her heart was racing. She was breathing hard. She scrolled to the next text, this one from Gia at 12:10.

  XO.

  Both of them had been screaming at Jill to get someplace safe. What the hell happened last night?

  She dialed Nicky.

  “Hello?” Nicky whispered.

  Why was she whispering?

  “Nicky, it’s me,” said Jill. “What’s happening? I got Gia’s texts. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Where the hell have you been?” Nicky hissed. “We were panicked that we couldn’t find you.”

  “It’s a long story,” Jill said.

  “I can’t talk right now,” said Nicky, still speaking so quietly Jill could barely hear her. In the background Jill thought she heard a robin chirping. “I’ll call you back later. Please call Gia right now and tell her where you are.”

  “Umm…okay, but, can’t you tell me….these texts I got...” Now a grackle started squawking in the background. “Where are you?” Jill said. “It sounds like you’re in a giant birdhouse.”

  “Never mind that. Gia will tell you all about it. Goodbye.”

  “Nicky wait…is it Melissa?”

  There was no answer. Jill pulled the phone away from her ear to see that Nicky had ended the call.

  “Not good,” she said.

  She dialed Gia.

  “Hello.”

  “Gia, it’s me. What’s going on?”

  “Are you safe?”

  “I don’t know, am I? Last night I got emergency texts from you and Nicky.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m stuck in traffic on River Road near Wilson.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I was out with a friend. My phone died. I’m sorry. I--”

  “We’ll talk about all of that later. Right now I want you to tell me you’re okay.”

  “I am. I mean…why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Jill, this is important. Search your memory starting last evening at dusk and going through the whole night. Are there any gaps at all?”

  “No,” she said, running through the night in reverse, suddenly feeling thankful that it was one of the most memorable nights in her life. “I can account for every minute.”

  “Are you sure?” Gia said. “Melissa Mayhew’s in town and is picking out Nicky’s closest friends one by one. We know with certainty that she’s already gotten to Annika.”

  “Annika,” Jill said. “Oh no. That’s terrible.”

  “Annika’s fine. Melissa let her go,” Gia said. “Our larger concern has been you. You can imagine what we thought when we realized Melissa was going after Nicky’s supporters and you went missing. What friend were you out with again?”

  “A new friend. A guy I met at a coffee shop.”

  Silence on the other end of the line. Jill was starting to feel very small. What terrible timing. The one night they really needed to get in touch with her and her phone was off.

  “And you were with this boy….all night?” Gia asked.

  “Yes,” Jill said, her face flush, her brow sweating.

  Gia laughed. “Well whoever this boy is, he might have saved your life. He might have saved everything. I don’t need to tell you what danger we’re in now that Melissa has decided to come poking around in people’s heads.”

  “No, you don’t,” Jill said, feeling like she might need to pull off the road and vomit. She had known since the first day she went fooling around in the forbidden chatrooms on the Internet that she might get herself killed, but somehow she’d managed to push those thoughts aside and get deep into the Network. Now she realized how naïve she had been to think she ever was safe.

  A vampire was looking for her last night. If she allowed herself to be found….

  She couldn’t bear to think of what might happen if she allowed herself to be found.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do,” Gia said. “Go home. Tell your parents you’re spending the night at Nicky’s. If they question you about any of this--”

  “They won’t,” Jill said. “My dad left town this morning and my mom doesn’t care.”

  “Okay, but make sure your mom knows you’ll be at Nicky’s. If Melissa comes to your house looking for you, we want all signs pointing her at Nicky’s house.”

  “Got it,” said Jill.

  “Wait until about 5:30 to leave, then come to the mansion for a sleepover. Drive slowly in case anyone is watching. If anyone follows you, don’t try to lose them. Let them see exactly where you’re going.”

  “I understand,” said Jill. “I’ll see you at Nicky’s tonight.”

  She ended the call with Gia just as traffic started moving again, and she let out a loud, heavy sigh. Her blissful escape from reality was over, and as far as she knew, she might never have another one.

  Chapter 25

  Jill pulled into her neighborhood at two in the afternoon. A beat-up green station wagon, the same that had followed Nicky all week, was parked under a tree a block away from Jill’s house.

  They’ve been waiting for me, she thought. Melissa Mayhew has been looking for me.

  Remembering what Gia had told her about letting followers see where she went, she drove casually through her neighborhood and up to her house, leaving the car parked in the driveway.

  She went to her bedroom, took a shower, changed clothes, and packed an overnight bag. She looked at the chickenscratch she had written on the glass panels on the walls. Broken algorithms, incomplete patterns, symbols and code she had developed to create shortcuts for her ideas—for the past week, her mind had been a chaotic mess.

  So was her room.

  Long ago, Jill had made clear that the maid was to stay out of her bedroom. Normally that wasn’t a problem, as Jill wasn’t a messy person. But this past week she had allowed the room to get as cluttered as her mind, and now, as she considered the possibility that a vampire was chasing her, that she might not make it through another night, the mess really bothered her. This was not how she wanted to be remembered.

  An hour later, her room clean (but the algorithms still on the wall—she wasn’t ready to give up on those quite yet), she threw her overnight bag over her shoulder and went to her mom’s study upstairs.

  She found her mother sitting at the window, looking out at the forest below. It was a stunning, memorable image. In all her life, Jill had never seen her mother sit and stare out the window.

  “Mom?”

  “Hmm? Oh, Jill…hi. How was school?”

  “It’s Sunday, Mom.”

  “Oh. Okay. Good.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, Jill. Everything is fine.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not working.”

  “At the moment there is nothing for me to do.”

  “So you finished the final assignment from Daciana,” said Jill. “Did you at least get to join the party?”

  “Party?” said Carolyn.

  “Yes, Mom. Last night Dad was throwing a party to celebrate all the work you’ve done.”

  “Oh. Your father knows I don’t like parties. I worked on my final assignment
until midnight then I went to bed. When I woke up, your father was gone. He’s off to New York, you know. He’s meeting with a new client. This will be an interesting change of pace for the company. Until now, we’ve only worked for Daciana.”

  The company. Jill’s mother didn’t understand that she was the company. If Carolyn Wentworth ever decided her own life was worth living, if she ever decided to go for a walk or have coffee with a friend or stare out the window for too long or do anything at all for herself, the company would go down the drain.

  “It’s a shame you missed your own party,” Jill said. “Maybe you should celebrate.”

  “Celebrate?”

  She couldn’t be sure, but Jill thought she saw a hint of a smile on her mother’s face. If she had, it would truly be a strange afternoon. Not only had her mother stepped away from her computer and gone to the window, but now she was smiling? What was happening?

  Jill threw her bag on the ground.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

  “A walk? Oh…I don’t--”

  “Please, Mom. I’d really like it if you did.”

  Carolyn Wentworth sat in place, the simple request from her daughter clearly having left her puzzled. Watching Carolyn sit there and ponder the apparently terrifying idea of leaving the house, Jill got angry at her father. Carolyn Wentworth was a woman who had issues, who needed help, but rather than help her lead anything resembling a normal life, Jill’s father had put his wife in a bedroom and allowed her to become a prisoner of her own neurosis.

  On a normal day, this would be the moment when Jill turned around and left, shaking her head at the tragedy of Carolyn Wentworth. But this wasn’t a normal day. This was a day when she woke up realizing she had fallen for a cute guy she met in the coffee shop, a guy whose timely arrival kept Jill hidden from the vampire who was out looking for her the night before. This was a day when Carolyn Wentworth stopped working and looked out her window instead. It was a day when she might have smiled at the idea of celebrating.

  This was a day when Jill walked across the room and grabbed her mother by the hand.

  “Come on,” Jill said.

  “But…I’m not wearing shoes.”

  Jill kicked off her sandals and let them bounce across the floor. “Now I’m not either. I used to walk barefoot in the woods all the time. It’s fun.”

  She could sense the hesitation in her mother, but this was a woman who was accustomed to taking orders, so eventually she stood up and did as her daughter asked.

  When they stepped out the front door together, Jill wondered why she had never done something like this before. All those years she had been so angry and had never done anything about it. She was angry at her father for asking so much of his wife, and angry at her mother for choosing work over everything. Was this all she had to do to ease the anger? Grab her mother by the hand and take her out the front door?

  “The ground is cold,” Carolyn said. It wasn’t a complaint so much as an observation, maybe even a happy one.

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Jill.

  They walked down the brick path that led to the forest, moving slowly, enjoying the afternoon.

  “It’s so noisy out here,” Carolyn said.

  Jill didn’t say anything in response. Compared to the silent room where her mother lived her life, even a quiet afternoon outdoors with the birds and the bugs was noisy.

  A carpet of freshly fallen leaves welcomed them into the woods. It was cold and damp under their feet. Jill’s mother moved with an awkward, sideways gait, a stranger in foreign territory. When a squirrel leaped across the trees ahead of them, she shrieked in surprise.

  Then she laughed, and Jill did too. It was a perfectly thrilling moment. Jill had never once heard her mother laugh. It was a sound so full of joy it brought tears to her eyes.

  “That squirrel,” Carolyn said. “You know… I think I’ve seen that squirrel at the window before, but I never paid him any mind. It’s different when you’re out here.”

  “You mean it’s different when you’re not lost in your own thoughts about the program you’re writing.”

  “Yes, I guess that is what I mean.”

  “How come we’ve never done this before, Mom? We’ve missed a lot of time we could have spent together.”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ve been too busy,” Carolyn said. Her voice was sad, but more than that, it was confused. When she said I don’t know, Jill got the feeling that she really meant it, that this woman had left her daughter to grow up on her own and didn’t even realize it was happening.

  “Let’s make an agreement that starting now we both step away from our computers once in a while and do something together,” Jill said.

  “Yes, I think I’d like that,” said Carolyn.

  “No matter how busy we get,” said Jill.

  “Okay. It doesn’t seem like we ever should be too busy to step outside for a few moments.”

  “Of course we’re never too busy. This is important. We should have been...do you realize how hard it was for me to grow up with you locked away in that room every day? You barely even come out to eat.”

  They stepped into a small clearing where the sun had an open path all the way to the ground. Without even talking about it, both of them stopped to allow their feet to warm up.

  “No, Jill. I guess I don’t realize it,” Carolyn said. “Or I didn’t. I do now because you’re telling me. I was trying to do my best for the family, I promise. I have a gift. Your father helped me share it with the world. You have the gift too. I’ve seen--”

  “I don’t want to talk about any gifts,” Jill said. “Yes, you’re a super smart lady, off the charts even, and you gave some of that to me and it can be really cool, but not if we don’t use it properly.”

  “You don’t think I’m using my gift properly?”

  Jill took a deep breath. The cool air and damp ground had made her just alert enough to realize how drained she felt. The late night with Zack, the realization that she had to let him go as soon as she found him, the revelation from Gia that a vampire was looking for her—the previous twelve hours had left her exhausted, and she didn’t have the strength to censor herself. The words were going to flow in a truthful tone, whether Jill wanted them to or not.

  “You write software for the immortals,” she said. “They use it to spy on people.”

  “You sound like you disapprove,” Carolyn said.

  “Mom, the immortals--”

  “The immortals take care of us,” Carolyn said, quietly but forcefully. “All that you have, this house, this big property with trees and birds and squirrels, your school—the immortals gave it to us.”

  “They didn’t give us anything,” Jill said, surprised at her own anger. “They take the hard-earned wealth of others and then they barter with it. You gave them every waking moment of your life, and in exchange, they gave us a lot of stolen money.”

  “Jill, I’m trying to do good. The work we do saves lives.”

  “Saves lives? Who are you kidding? Do you know who the immortals are? Do you know what they do?”

  “I’ve heard enough,” said Carolyn. “I’m going back.”

  Carolyn turned back towards the house, the cautious stagger that took her out now replaced with a more determined gait.

  “Fine, just go!” Jill yelled after her. “I was a fool to think we could spend even a few minutes together!”

  Carolyn didn’t respond. Jill stood in the clearing and watched her mother disappear into the trees.

  A moment passed.

  “Screw this,” Jill said, then started running back to the house. She caught up to Carolyn on the brick path.

  “Hey!” she yelled.

  Carolyn ignored her. Jill ran right up next to her.

  “Hey!”

  Carolyn winced at the noise and lifted her hand up as if Jill were some annoying stranger in a crowd.

  Jill stepped in front of her and cut her off.

  “Stop
!” she yelled.

  Carolyn stopped. Her head was down, her shoulders were back—she looked like a dog that was about to get beat.

  “Mom, what’s the matter with us?” Jill said.

  “There is nothing wrong with me.”

  “Really? You think everything is fine? You’re okay with having a daughter who has lived with you for seventeen years that you barely know?”

  “I’ve been so busy, Jill. My work is too important--”

  “You’re not busy now. You said so yourself. You’ve run out of work to do.”

  Carolyn shrunk farther into herself, as if the topic of her workload was a painful one for her.

  “Why is it so hard for us to spend a few moments together like a normal mother and daughter?”

  “I suppose because we’re not a normal mother and daughter at all,” said Carolyn.

  She was looking at the ground, avoiding Jill’s eyes. A part of Jill knew it wasn’t fair to press on her mother like this. The woman was an extreme introvert who was only comfortable when speaking with a computer. She was a genius whose brain had allocated all its available neurons to math and logic, leaving none behind for emotions and relationships.

  But another part of Jill remembered the sound of her mother laughing. That freak second of emotion was so powerful to Jill, so telling. There was a real person in there, somebody who had been squashed in favor of a computer programming machine. Somebody that had been her own person once, but lost herself to the demands of an abusive husband.

  Jill approached her mother, slowly, and gave her a hug. It was a gentle embrace, one that pulled Carolyn’s face into Jill’s shoulder. Carolyn didn’t hug her back.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Jill said. “I know you’re doing the best that you can.”

  She hugged her mother a while longer, holding out hope that if she stayed, her mother might hug her back.

  It never happened. Carolyn had gone stiff. The moment was too much for her. Jill let her go.

  “I’m off to Nicky’s tonight, Mom. I’ll see you later.”

  Carolyn nodded, her eyes still aimed at the ground.

  Jill went back inside to grab the overnight bag she’d left in her mother’s office. Then she went to her bedroom and fired up the computer. She created a new file called Where in the World is Melissa Mayhew and got to work. She created a program that hacked into the Federal Aviation Administration and checked passenger manifests for Melissa’s name. If it didn’t find her by name, the software looked for chartered flights with irregularities in their flight plans. It paid special attention to flights that took off and landed at night.