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

by Baum, Spencer

  “So the memory is real. Something happened there.”

  “Yes. Something so ugly your mind tried to bury it where you would never find it again.”

  “Maybe I should leave it alone. Maybe I should bury the memory again.”

  “Ahh…but you can’t do that now, can you? A memory like this—it is a fire set loose in a dry forest. Now that it is out, if you leave it be it will run rampant until it has consumed everything in its path. Your only choice now is to face it. One way or another, this memory will take over your conscious mind. On its present course, it will bring with it all the fear and trauma that caused you to hide it in the first place. You will become a slave to that fear. It will ruin you.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “You seek out the memory as you are. You discover the truth on your own, and face it. You redefine the memory. You take ownership of it and detach the fear.”

  “You’re saying I have to find out the truth about that scene. I need to go to this place in the Italian Alps.”

  “It would be a good start for you.”

  “Why did you come here, Sergio? Was it just to tell me this?”

  Sergio smiled, and Nicky felt a rush of adrenalin. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “I wanted to better understand this connection we have made.”

  “What’s there to understand?” Nicky asked.

  “It is very strange that we’re in each other’s dream, isn’t it?”

  “Are you saying I’m in your dreams as well?”

  “Not my dreams, Nicky. My dream. Now, I’ve helped you. It’s time for you to help me.”

  Sergio was looking deep in her eyes, and she wanted to remind him that her mind was closed. But then she understood his true intent, and she made no effort to fight it. He wasn’t pushing his way into Nicky’s mind. He was inviting her into his.

  Chapter 38

  She was in a forest. The night air was warm and heavy with moisture. The tops of the trees faded into a cloud of mist that glowed in the light of a blood red moon.

  She was still wearing the black gown, the diamond necklace, the heavy make-up. The heels of her shoes struggled with the damp earth beneath her feet so she kicked them off and walked barefoot on the carpet of newly fallen leaves.

  A natural path cut through the trees and led to a village of thatch-roofed huts. Tall torches were mounted in the ground, and a raucous crowd gathered in the center of the village. Nicky approached the crowd. They stood in a circle around a wooden platform. They were viewing a fight.

  She pushed her way to the front. Nobody tried to stop her. She wasn’t really here—she understood that. She could see and hear and smell all that was going on around her, but she wasn’t actually present.

  She reached the front and stood at the edge of the platform. Sergio was one of the fighters. He had blood on his chin. One of his eyes was swollen shut. Both his fists were raised as he danced around the ring, trading punches and kicks with his opponent.

  His opponent was a tall, sinewy man of Asian descent.

  “We’re in China,” Nicky said. “You’re not immortal yet.”

  “Correct,” Sergio said, as he bobbed to the left, avoiding a jab from his opponent, and delivering a quick hook as he righted himself.

  Nicky looked around. The crowd was mostly men. They favored Sergio’s opponent, cheering whenever Sergio got hit, catcalling whenever Sergio delivered a blow. The men wore rags that were dirty and torn. Some of them were hardly covered at all. They were a filthy, smelly lot, people who worked hard by day and drank hard by night.

  Walking among them was a beautiful young woman who stood out like a rose in a weed patch. Her jet black hair hung perfectly around her face; her black dress was as elegant as these men were crude. Looking at her, Nicky realized they were a match. Two young women, elegantly dressed in black, standing on either side of a platform amidst a crowd of rowdy drunks.

  The woman was Daciana Samarin.

  “I’ve never seen her in person before,” Nicky said. “She’s beautiful.”

  Sergio threw a hard right that connected with his opponent’s nose and sent him reeling and ultimately falling out of the ring. As the crowd pushed the man back onto the platform, Sergio turned to Nicky and said, “She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

  His opponent stumbled towards Sergio, easy pickings now. Sergio threw a wicked punch that landed square on the face, and his opponent was knocked out cold. The crowd groaned in displeasure. Daciana stepped into the ring. Sergio took her hand and raised it to his lips. He kissed it, and escorted her out of the ring, stepping down on Nicky’s side.

  “Walk with us,” Sergio said.

  The crowd parted for them and they walked into the forest, Nicky on Sergio’s right, Daciana on Sergio’s left.

  “I fell madly in love with her,” Sergio said. “We were meant to bond some thirty days before this night, but she made me wait. She wanted to bond on the night of the harvest moon, and she wanted me to fight for her love before we did it.”

  “She made you fight that man?”

  “She offered the village elder a bag of gold if his son could defeat me, and she told me I could only have her if I won the fight.”

  “This is the memory where you’re seeing me?” Nicky said. “The night you and Daciana bonded?”

  Sergio nodded. “The first Festival of the Moon. A night so painful to me I struggled for two hundred years to bury it.”

  “Why is it painful? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You and Daciana were in love?”

  They came to a stop. A small stream flowed ahead of them. Sergio and Daciana sat together on a rock at the edge of the stream.

  “Yes, we were in love,” Sergio said. He bent his head to one side, exposing his neck. Daciana’s eyes went dark, her mouth opened wide, and two sharp fangs extended beneath her lips. She struck like a snake and Sergio wailed in pain at the bite. Daciana pulled him close and held him in place as she inserted her venom.

  As Nicky watched, she understood more about her own dream. The vision of her mother biting her neck—it wasn’t real. It had never been a memory in her mind. It was this. When she and Sergio were dancing, he had seen the silver sphere, and she had seen this. She had brought his memory into her own. She had combined his pain with hers.

  When Daciana released him, Sergio fell to the earth, as unconscious as the man he had beaten in the fight. Daciana stood over him for a moment, looking confused. She leaned down and touched his neck with her thumb. She shook her head, slowly at first, then with more vigor. Her eyes turned red with rage. She looked up to the sky, and let out a piercing scream.

  Then she disappeared into the night.

  Nicky bent down over Sergio’s body.

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  A bright shining light, a blur of trees and mist and moon falling away, and Nicky was back in her dressing room, looking at Sergio’s face.

  “Our bond was broken the moment I turned,” Sergio said. “Daciana felt it even as she held me there, not yet dead, not really alive either. The bond didn’t take. She should have killed me then and there.”

  “Why didn’t she?”

  “She said the memory of what we felt was still with her. It was still fresh, and she couldn’t betray it. So she left me to live, to wander the earth for eternity.”

  There was a single knock at the door before Ms. Perry pushed it open and stepped inside.

  “Curtain call in--”

  She was unable to finish her sentence. Sergio had caught her with his eyes. She stepped backwards through the door, her face a blank sheet of paper, and closed it behind her.

  “You must go upstairs,” Sergio said. “You are a girl wearing black. Your event is about to start. Come.”

  He took her hand and pulled her toward the door.

  “Wait,” Nicky said. “What happens now?”

  Sergio was opening the door. Nicky was hardly aware of herself, of the movements of her own body or the
thoughts of her mind as she passed through the door and it closed behind her. She felt the world around her shift and her mind come back to center, like a string vibrating to a stop.

  She looked both ways down the hall. It was empty. Sergio was gone.

  Chapter 39

  Nicky was the last to enter the green room.

  “My, don’t we look like a hooker?” Kim said to her.

  Nicky smiled and took a seat at an empty table in the corner.

  The green room at the Penbrook was set up as a small café with a coffee bar and five tables. A short, scruffy man with blond hair stood behind the coffee bar.

  “Care for a beverage, Ms. Bloom?” he asked.

  “No thank you.”

  All her competitors were there, each sitting at her own table, each wearing a conservative black dress. Mary was sipping from a bottle of water and looking at her phone. Samantha gave Nicky a quick once over, then turned her gaze to the TV on the wall behind the coffee bar. The TV showed a live feed of what was happening onstage. At the moment, the stage was empty, save Byron’s podium.

  Kim had a fashion magazine open in front of her. She closed it and shook her head at Nicky.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” she said.

  Nicky said nothing.

  “Seriously, Nicky. You come in from out of town, no one in your family is connected to DC, no one in your family has gone to Thorndike, no one knows you’re wearing black until you show up at Homecoming, and now you come to the Date Auction looking like a five-dollar floozy? Listen up, everyone! I have a prediction. Tonight, Nicky Bloom doesn’t even meet the minimum bid.”

  “Please for the love of God would you shut up for once in your life?” said Samantha. “She looks great and you know it. You’re just jealous.”

  “Who asked you Samantha?” Kim snapped. “Where do you even get off talking to me that way? Who’s going to bid on you tonight?”

  “I’ll have bidders.”

  “That’s enough,” said Mary. “We’re at the Penbrook, Kim. Show some respect.”

  “None of you deserve my respect,” Kim said. “Not Nicky the whore or Samantha the lamb or even you Mary. Where would you be without daddy’s checkbook?”

  “Same as you. Nowhere.”

  Samantha laughed at this one. Kim looked like she was about to stand up and start screaming. Fortunately for her, Ms. Perry came in and interrupted the fracas before it went any further.

  “Showtime ladies,” she said. “Samantha, you’re up first.”

  “This won’t take long,” Kim muttered. As Samantha left, she put her hand behind her back and held up her middle finger.

  Nicky watched on the TV as Samantha stepped onstage to a mild applause. She smiled like a beauty queen and took it all in.

  Kent Byron entered from stage right and took the podium. He placed a single folding chair front and center. Samantha took a seat. The crowd went quiet.

  “Our first lady up for bidding tonight is Samantha Kwan,” Byron said. “We start the bidding at one thousand dollars.”

  Terry Reese was the first to raise his paddle. Then Eddie Miller. The two of them went back and forth in thousand dollar increments. At six thousand, Eddie left his paddle down.

  “The current bid is six thousand dollars,” Byron said. “Going once...”

  Nicky’s mind was still swimming from her encounter with Sergio. Words he had said were on repeat in her ears.

  The scene of your memory is in the Italian Alps. You are standing in front of a building I know quite well. It belongs to the Ventigen Corporation.

  “Going twice...” came Byron’s voice from the TV.

  “Six thousand dollars. What a joke,” Kim said.

  The Italian Alps. The Ventigen Corporation.

  “Sold to the gentleman in the red tie for six thousand dollars!”

  The crowd applauded. Samantha blew a kiss to the crowd then exited stage left.

  A moment later, Ms. Perry opened the door and poked her head inside. “Mary. You’re up.”

  “Good luck you two,” Mary said as she stood to leave.

  “Suck it,” said Kim.

  Mary’s auction was a simpler affair. Her boyfriend Lucas opened the auction with a ten thousand dollar bid. Nobody matched it and he won.

  Ms. Perry came back again, this time calling for Nicky.

  *****

  Gia settled in for another long night on the watchtower at the Bloom mansion. A small room in the attic with one-way windows all around, the watchtower gave two different three-hundred-sixty-degree views of the grounds.

  The first view was out the windows, either with the naked eye or with night-vision binoculars. The second view was on the bank of televisions that lined the ceiling, each television connected to a closed-circuit camera that viewed one part of the estate.

  It was on television number eight that she caught the first glimpse. A blur in the darkness, too fast to be a human, too large to be an animal.

  Gia rewound the recording, frame by frame, until she saw her. These cameras recorded thirty frames per second. One of those frames had captured a clear view of Melissa Mayhew.

  “Really?” Gia said. “Of all nights, you had to come tonight?”

  Another blur, this time in television thirteen. She was moving around the perimeter, checking the place out.

  Gia grabbed her walkie-talkie.

  “She’s here.”

  A crackle of static, then Kendall’s voice came back.

  “She’s here now?”

  “Yes,” Gia said. “She’s on the west end of the property. Near the toolshed.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Getting the lay of the land, I think. She’s moving too fast for me to see anything.”

  There was movement on television four.

  “Now she’s way out back,” Gia said. “I expect she’ll circle the whole property.”

  “Then what?” said Kendall.

  “I don’t know,” said Gia. “Maybe she’ll ring the doorbell.”

  “Good gravy. All week we’ve been waiting on this chick and she picked the night when we’re short-handed?” Kendall said.

  “Tonight’s as good as any,” said Gia. “Let’s get ready. It will be over quickly.”

  *****

  Nicky sat in the folding chair in the center of the stage. Byron acknowledged her with a slight nod of his head before turning to the audience and saying, “We begin the bidding on Nicky Bloom at ten thousand dollars.”

  Nicky scanned the audience and found Marshall in the second row to the back. She figured the first bid would come from him. Marshall liked to be bold, and would want to make his statement early.

  But his paddle stayed in his lap. He was looking at the ground, avoiding eye contact.

  That wasn’t good.

  She turned her gaze to Vince. He too was looking at the floor.

  Art?

  Art was sitting way in the back, slouched low in his chair, like he was trying to hide.

  “Ten thousand is the minimum for a date with Nicky Bloom,” Byron continued. “Do we have any bidders?”

  Nicky took a deep breath. It was over. Kim had won. Nicky made a good show at the Masquerade, but then she lost her focus. She and Jill both. Melissa Mayhew and Frankie and thoughts of her dad and a break-in at TPM and Ryan Jenson and Sergio and the dreams—the Coronation contest had taken a back seat to all of these. While Nicky and Jill were caught up in their many distractions, Kim had gotten to Nicky’s bidders, every one of them, and now Byron would have to auction Nicky off for less than the minimum bid. Now she would suffer an indignity from which her campaign could never recover. In the entire history of Coronation, only a few girls had ever gone below the minimum at the Date Auction, and every one of them became vampire food.

  In a way, it was a relief. The Bloom family could begin plotting their escape from Washington. The mission to kill Sergio Alonzo was finished. Nicky could focus all her energy on getting Frankie loose, the
n she could get on with her life.

  “Again I call for a bid,” said Byron. “Ten thousand dollars. Going once….going twice….going three times.”

  He banged his gavel. A murmur passed through the crowd. “We will remove the minimum bid from the table,” said Byron. “A date with Nicky Bloom is now available to the highest bidder at any price.”

  *****

  Melissa circled the entire Bloom estate, staying out of sight, looking for signs of a double-cross. She found nothing out of the ordinary and decided it was safe to show herself.

  Knowing that she was about to commit treason against the clan, and feeling a bit of a thrill at the prospect of doing so, she stepped out of the shadows and onto the front porch.

  She reached out with her index finger and rang the doorbell.

  A young woman with short black hair and a rugged look about her answered the door.

  “Good evening, Ms. Mayhew,” she said. “My master has been expecting you. Please come inside.”

  With that, Melissa relaxed. Feeling vindicated, confident that she had made the right choice in coming here, she followed the young woman into the house.

  This will be the beginning of something special, she thought. Tonight, with Falkon’s help, I will assume my rightful place atop the clan that had once belonged to Daciana Samarin.

  The door closed behind Melissa with a single click, but with that click came a thousand other clicks from all over the house. The clicks were meant to be simultaneous—they had to be. Why else would so many clicks from so many different places all happen at once?

  Because I am not supposed to notice them. Because he is hiding something from me.

  And then she heard movement in the air above her head. Something was falling. It was going to land right on top of her.