by Spencer Baum
Edith’s words hung in the air for a minute, then she said in a chipper voice, “Shall we continue the tour?”
For the next hour, Kim suffered through Edith’s nasal, squawking voice as she explained all the traditions of the Purgatory House. Like everything else about Coronation, the final hours of the loser’s life were governed by rituals that had developed over the decades, like the white dress she wore when she died, one that contrasted the black of her immortal killer, and also turned bright red with her own blood. Or the adornments on her outfit when she died—items the girl hand-picked to honor the contest, the school, and the clan.
Edith was full of stories about the odd eccentricities of these girls in their final hours. Many of them demanded (and received) conjugal visits from the boys they were dating. Others made lavish requests for final meals, and Thorndike worked hard to provide them with whatever they wanted. “Turkey dinners, leg of lamb, birthday cake…” Edith had a huge menu of final meals in her memory. “Last year’s loser asked for mincemeat pie. The year before the girl wanted a salami sandwich.”
“What would you ask for, Kim?” said Galen. “For your final meal.”
“Nothing,” Kim said. “I’d go hungry.”
“Not an unpopular choice,” said Edith. “Many girls refuse their last meal.”
“Are we done here?” said Kim.
“Not until we’ve looked outside and spoken about the walk,” said Galen.
“Yes, of course,” said Edith. “Follow me.”
She took them back across the living room and into the back bedroom of the house, showing them to a door that led outside.
“The girl knows implicitly when it’s time for her to begin the walk,” Edith said. “It never ceases to amaze me. At precisely ten-fifty-nine, the girl walks through this door.”
Edith pulled on the flower-covered door, which opened to a narrow garden pathway, with shrubbery on both sides and a vine-covered trellis overhead.
“In May, this pathway becomes one of the most beautiful places on earth,” Edith said. “Flowers in bloom on all sides of you, the moon twinkling down through the vines above. All by herself, with no one telling her what to do or where to go, the victim walks along this path and pulls open the door on the other side.”
On the other side was the back entrance to Thorndike’s old gymnasium, which remained standing for a single purpose. Thorndike no longer had a basketball or volleyball team, and there was no P.E. requirement at the school.
Always and forever, an integral part of the school’s most important tradition, the old gym at Thorndike remained standing because that was where prom was held. Where prom had always been held.
“Shall we make the walk?” Edith said. “It’s part of your tour package.”
“No,” said Galen. “Let’s just stand here and allow Kim to imagine what it would be like to take those final steps, knowing that on the other side, she’s about to become food for one of her classmates.”
Kim closed her eyes and crunched down the anger raging inside her. She felt like this morning’s events would permanently change the relationship with her father. The fact that he took her here, subjected her to this—she would never forgive him.
“Think about it, Kim,” Galen said. “You walk along this path, and at the other end, you open the door and look in at the cage.”
Kim was trying with all her might not to imagine it, and failing. She could see the cage. She knew the cage. Two carpet walkways leading into it. The victim walks a purple carpet into one side of the cage. The immortal walks a red carpet into the other. Her eyes closed, Kim found herself lost in this vision she wanted so desperately not to see. She was there, in the moment, looking up at Samantha Kwan, newly immortal, fangs bared, drool coming out of her mouth.
“I smell smoke,” she said.
“I’m sorry, what?” said Edith.
“Smoke,” said Kim. She opened her eyes, which burned with irritation. “Something’s burning.”
It was like a campfire, or maybe a wood-burning stove. She was glad for it, whatever it was. The smell had tickled her nostrils, irritated her eyes, and yanked her right out of the horrid vision of the cage at prom.
“I smell it too,” said Galen.
He stepped down onto the grass pathway and began looking around.
“Over there,” he said, pointing westward, where a gray plume was rising above the tree line.
“Oh my, would you look at that?” said Edith. “I hope everyone’s okay.”
“Probably just a big burnout,” Galen said. “How many immortals were at the party last night?”
“Just Renata,” said Kim.
“Maybe more of them gathered after the rest of you went home,” said Galen. “I bet they piled all their kills into the cremation furnace at once.”
“You think so?” said Edith.
“Has to be,” said Galen. “That’s a lot of smoke, and Renata’s house is the only thing over there.”
Chapter 2
After helping her kill Falkon Dillinger, Sergio Alonzo led Daciana Samarin out of the abandoned mineshaft where she had been held prisoner for months. They emerged in a moonlit mountain forest. Daciana took a tentative step onto the snow-covered ground. She was disoriented. Sergio saw it in her face. She had no idea where she was or how she arrived here.
“You’re in the Italian Alps,” Sergio said. “We’re not far from Falkon’s villa.”
He took her hand and started down the mountainside. He thought about the hours before daylight, the servants still in Falkon’s home, many of them ripe. Daciana could eat, regain her stamina, and tomorrow night, they could fly back to America.
He hadn’t given the slightest thought to the question Daciana was bound to ask. When it came, it caught him completely by surprise.
“How did you know to look for me way out here?”
The answer to this question came quickly to his mind, where it froze in place, making no effort to push its way out through his lips.
I didn’t know to look for you in the mountains. In fact, I wasn’t looking for you at at all. I was looking for Nicky Bloom. I knew she would be here because she shared her memory with me and I saw a vision of a mountain villa you and I visited two hundred and fifty years ago.
“I became suspicious of Renata,” he said. “I followed her. She led me here.”
And just like that, Sergio broke a five-centuries-long streak of total honesty with Daciana Samarin.
It was thrilling, maybe even a bit gut wrenching, to lie to her. His maker, his friend, the woman who tried to bond with him once and failed, who was meant to kill him when she made him immortal and their bond didn’t take, who took pity on him instead, the woman who took him into her care, much in the way a human might take a pet, who allowed him to tag along with her for centuries, who allowed him to be “the third wheel” when she bonded with others, who took him to America and made him the centerpiece of a plan to create the largest, most powerful vampire clan on earth—this woman heard the words come out of his mouth and she believed them. With just a few sentences, Sergio had created an alternate reality for his maker, one he would almost certainly be required to nurture and maintain with more lies in the future.
But it had to be this way, didn’t it? Daciana couldn’t know that it was Nicky who drew him here. She wouldn’t understand why Sergio was so interested in the girl.
“Renata,” Daciana said, shaking her head in disgust. “All this time, sitting in that chamber Falkon constructed for me, I’ve been thinking about Renata. It was my trust in Renata that allowed me to get into this mess.”
“Really?” Sergio said, eager to change the subject. “So Renata was a part of your capture?”
“Of course she was,” Daciana said. “She invited me to vacation with her in Europe. I felt like it was an opportunity for us to come closer together. Both of us had broken our bonds. We were the only two in the clan who were...”
She trailed off. She was about to say she an
d Renata were the only two in the clan who were single, but that would have been incorrect, because Sergio was single too. Sergio had been single his entire life.
“Anyway, I thought we could spend the time together and share our misery,” she said. “We landed in Manchester. We drove into the country. We went to the Hastings Castle.”
“The Hastings Castle?” Falkon said. “Now there’s a place I haven’t thought about in years.”
“I know!” said Daciana. “I thought about you when we arrived. The memories of that castle—I think Renata knew I would be nostalgic, and my guard would be down. She knew I was weak. The old crypt, the same place where you and I--”
“—She had you sleep in a coffin,” Sergio said.
“It reminded me so much of our time with the Hastings family. How we were expected to behave in those days. All the formalities and traditions of being immortal. Yes, just before dawn, Renata and I went to the crypt and crawled into what I thought were matching coffins, side by side.”
“Yours was no coffin,” Sergio said.
“I made it so easy for them. I crawled into my own prison cell. I said good night to Renata and I shut the door on myself. Then I listened as Renata locked it.”
“Steel lining inside the wood?”
“Something like that,” Daciana said. “Whatever it was, I couldn’t break free.”
“You’re free now,” said Sergio. “Free to have the revenge of your choosing.”
“So you haven’t killed her yet?”
Sergio shook his head. “I haven’t had the opportunity.”
They crested a hill and saw Falkon’s villa in the valley below.
“Would you look at that?” Daciana said. “You and I came here when…what was the name of the man who owned this place when we came?”
“Giampietro,” Sergio said. “Governor of the northern province.”
“But now it’s Falkon’s,” Daciana said.
“Was Falkon’s,” Sergio corrected. “You killed him. The old law says it belongs to you.”
“Perhaps we could give the villa to this year’s Coronation winner. We could expand the clan’s reach overseas.”
“Perhaps,” Sergio said. The topic made him uncomfortable. Coronation was tied to Nicky Bloom who was tied to the lie he had told his maker. “Come on, let’s go have a look.”
They descended to the valley floor and approached the mansion at the center of the villa. Sergio gave a single kick to the tall doors. The wood splintered at the lock and the doors swung open. They stepped into the foyer.
“Quite a bit different than I remember it,” Daciana said, looking at the large entry room that greeted them. There was a chess board atop a stand made of marble. Daciana approached it and put her finger on the black queen.
“Where is Renata now?” she said.
“I don’t know. Finding you and tending to Falkon have required the full of my attention since I arrived in Italy.”
“We’ll find her soon enough,” Daciana said. “I hope she has gone back to Washington. I want to see the look on her face when she sees that I am alive and well. I will make her talk before I kill her. I want to understand what madness came over her that she thought it wise to betray me.”
Daciana explored the living space at the front of the house, then Sergio led her through the main hallway and down a flight of stairs. They came to a metal door that was locked shut, but had a keypad above the handle.
“While I don’t claim to understand Falkon and Renata’s motives for holding you prisoner,” Sergio said, “I believe it had something to do with what was happening in here.” He punched in a code on the keypad, the same code he had used to free Daciana from her prison. The door opened and they stepped into Falkon’s laboratory.
Or rather, what was left it. The floor was a mess of broken glass, papers, and wires. The prison cells where Falkon once held a dozen feral vampires were sitting open and empty. A cold wind blew into the lab through a broken window on a high wall.
Daciana smiled as she looked over the remains of the lab.
“What on earth do you suppose was happening in here?” she said.
“Horrid, miserable creatures,” Sergio said. “That’s what I found in this room. Feral vampires. Falkon was doing something unspeakable in here.”
“Really?” Daciana whispered, approaching the prison block, her eyes open in wonder. “That cagey fool was actually trying to do it.”
“You knew of his ambitions?”
“The last time I spoke with Falkon on friendly terms was some seventy years ago,” she said. “At that time, he was convinced humans were on the verge of achieving immortality for their entire race. He said we were entering an age of science, and it was only a matter of time before people solved all the great problems of the world, including death.”
“Funny that he would be so interested in such a topic,” said Sergio, “considering that death was not a problem for him.”
“Falkon was a strange soul,” said Daciana. She stepped into a prison cell on the bottom row and took a deep breath through her nose. Then another. She smelled something.
Curious what it was, Sergio stepped into the cell directly next to her and inhaled deeply.
He expected the odor of feral vampire, but that wasn’t what he smelled at all. In this cell, on the bottom left corner of the block, where it appeared the glass wall hadn’t been raised, but rather, broken out, Sergio smelled something lovely. The smell was charged with memory. Memory of a mysterious girl at the Homecoming Masquerade. Memory of a chance meeting underneath the Penbrook Theater where he allowed the girl to look into his mind. Memory of a strange encounter in this very room, of a beautiful girl standing above him, holding a length of steel pipe in her hands.
He didn’t understand what was happening. When he arrived at Falkon’s villa looking for Nicky, he found her in a spare bedroom of the mansion. But his nose was telling him that she had spent time in this prison block.
Not just his nose. His whole being. He was connecting with her now, as he had done when they danced at the Masquerade and he saw into her memory. Yes, as he stood in this prison cell, he felt Nicky’s presence. So much sorrow. Nicky Bloom had been locked in this corner for weeks, an eighteen-year-old girl trapped in the darkness, surrounded by monsters.
His anger at Falkon and Renata grew. It was a shame they had killed Falkon so quickly. So painlessly. He would find Renata and make her pay for what they had done to—
“Sergio?”
He turned around to see Daciana standing just outside the prison cell.
“Yes?” he said.
“Something’s on your mind. Tell me what it is.”
Sergio shrugged his shoulders. “I was just dealing with my own anger at Renata,” he said, “for betraying you.”
Daciana stepped into the cell.
“Hang on,” she said. “This one smells different.”
Sergio took a deep breath. He saw a chain of events unfolding in the near future. Daciana returning to Washington; Daciana meeting the girls wearing black; Daciana learning about the new girl who had taken the school by storm…
Daciana smelling her and recognizing the scent.
“Falkon wasn’t just holding feral vampires in this place,” he said.
“Yes, I can tell,” Daciana said, now placing her nose close to the stone wall. “There was a human in here. A girl. Perfectly ripe.” She inhaled deeply. “Oh, it’s making me hungry just being here.”
At that moment, a vision came to Sergio’s mind with such speed and clarity he had to put his hand on the wall to stay upright. In the vision, he was charging at Daciana, biting into her throat, and tearing her apart at the neck.
“So who was she?” Daciana said.
Sergio’s mind envisioned his master lying dead on the floor. Dead at his own hands.
“Sergio?”
“Yes?”
“The girl in this cell. Do you know who she was?”
He had to tell her.
Tell her or kill her, and he couldn’t bring himself to kill his own maker.
“It was the princess,” he said.
I have to find Nicky, he thought. I have to find her before Daciana does.
“The princess?”
“It’s December,” Sergio said. “The Rose Ransom contest has just come to an end.”
“Oh, yes of course,” said Daciana. “So Renata kidnapped a Thorndike student for the Ransom game and…and locked her here? Why did she do that?”
“I believe Renata’s intent was for the Rose Ransom to go unsolved this year,” Sergio said. “In fact, I believe Renata did all she could to make the clues as hard as possible. She didn’t follow protocol on the contest. She kidnapped a girl wearing black, who just happened to be dating a boy from the wealthiest family in school. She kidnapped him too.”
“She intended to steal the Ransom money,” Daciana said.
“For all we know, she already has,” said Sergio.
“But which girl?” Daciana sniffed again. “I know the Renwick girl. It isn’t her.”
This is for the best, Sergio thought. Soon Daciana would return to DC and learn all about the Rose Ransom. There was no way to hide Nicky Bloom from her.
The best he could do for Nicky was spin a story to protect her.
“It’s a girl you’ve never met,” said Sergio. “A new girl at school.”
“A new girl?”
Sergio nodded.
“A delightful girl,” he said.
“What is her name?”
“Nicky.” The word tasted like candy on his tongue. “Nicky Bloom.”
Daciana stepped back and looked up at the entire prison block.
“Walk me through what happened,” she said. “You arrived in this laboratory to find a dozen feral vampires and one of the girls wearing black.”
The lies. So many lies would be required to protect Nicky Bloom. But what kind of lies would Daciana believe?