by Spencer Baum
Mark’s face was pale. His eyes were drenched in tears. “Sergio, is it hard for you?” he said. “You know, being unable to bond?”
“When the bond happened,” Sergio pressed. “Between you and Bernadette. How did it come about?”
“I attended a party in Bernadette’s honor after she was made immortal,” Mark said. “We kept in touch after the party. She had me over as a dinner guest many times. It became a ritual for us, and that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? The ritual.”
Yes, Sergio thought. The ritual. Just thinking of the word made his blood flow faster. There was something so appealing to the idea of falling in love and formalizing it with a ritual.
“After her mansion was built, Bernadette began holding these parties every Sunday,” Mark continued. “The same group of guests. There were ten of us. We always arrived at nine o’clock and had drinks. Then we played all these parlor games Bernadette was learning from the others in the clan.”
Sergio was on edge. It was as if Mark’s simple story, told with such sadness in his voice, was the most suspenseful, compelling tale Sergio had ever heard.
A bonding ritual. Bernadette invited Mark over every Sunday and turned their gatherings into a ritual. It sounded so delightful, so perfectly wonderful.
“Bernadette kept count of the parties on a calendar,” Mark said. “It happened on the twenty-third party. Twenty-three is a number of significance to her.”
“Bernadette won the twenty-third Coronation contest,” Sergio said.
“Yes,” said Mark. His face was soaked in tears now. His breathing was labored, like he might break into the hyperventilating sobs of a child at any moment. “It happened while we danced,” he moaned. “At every party, Bernadette played music at midnight and we danced.”
“It was part of the ritual,” Sergio said, barely able to contain his excitement.
“And on the twenty-third party, while we danced, it came over us both like a tidal wave.”
Mark broke down in a fit of hysterics. “Oh Sergio, how can I go on without her?”
“So it was sudden when it happened,” Sergio said, ignoring Mark’s pain. “Sudden, but not immediate. Bernadette was an immortal for a long time before you bonded.”
“It took four months to build her mansion,” Mark said. “So yes, she was an immortal for four months and, well, and twenty-three Sundays. That’s how long between when she became immortal and when we bonded.”
“But she knew she wanted you long before then,” Sergio said. “She created the ritual to bring you both into the moment. She knew she wanted to bond with you so she had twenty-three parties because, yes, that’s how Bernadette is. She loved her friends. She was close to her friends and she wanted them to share the moment. But that isn’t a requirement. It’s just how she wanted the moment to come about. The requirement is the ritual.”
“Sergio, I’ll be happy to tell you all about how bonding works another time if you’d like,” Mark said. “I know it must be of interest to you. I can’t imagine what it’s like not being able to…well, right now, you have to understand how hard it is for me to--”
“The moment must be completely magical,” Sergio said. “That’s why you have the ritual. If the moment isn’t exactly right, the venom doesn’t flow. Or worse, it does flow, but not fully, and creates a perverse abomination of a vampire, one who can’t bond, or maybe, one who takes five-hundred years to figure out how.”
“Sergio, please. Enough about this. I want to avenge my love! Tell me what we’re going to do! Give me your blessing to go find Jill Wentworth and kill her!”
“The ritual leads you to the moment, and when you’re in the moment, you know it’s time, without a shadow of a doubt,” Sergio said. “Am I getting it right?”
Mark sat still, confusion on his face.
“Tell me if I’m right!”
“Yes, Sergio, that’s right,” Mark whimpered. “I knew it without a shadow of a doubt. When it came time for the ritual to conclude, for Bernadette to make me immortal, neither of us could stop it from happening.”
Sergio went to Mark and sat next to him. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“It’s hard for me, Sergio.”
“I want you to tell me about it. Tell me about how it felt.”
Mark took a deep breath. “You’re trying to help me through it, aren’t you? You’re making me face my feelings now so I can move on.”
“Tell me how it felt.”
“It was rapturous,” Mark said. “Love so powerful, so pure, that the rest of the world disappears, and it’s only the two of you. The bond took control of everything, and I just rode the wave. I knew with my whole body what I had to do. I was drawn to Bernadette with every cell, and in the moment when it happened, when she bit into my neck, it was pure ecstasy. Our blood needed to connect. Until it did, nothing else mattered. When we connected, I felt a kind of release. A frenzy of joy and elation—no words can describe it, Sergio.”
Sergio thought of the moment when Daciana bit into his neck. She too had constructed a ritual before their attempted bond. She had made him fight every young man in that village. She stood by and watched while he took on all comers, and only when he was the last man standing did she take him into the woods and attempt to bond with him.
The ritual was what made the bond. The stronger the ritual, the stronger the bond.
And it was such a personal thing. To Daciana, it was always a test of manhood. Her lover had to prove himself to her before she would bond with him.
To Bernadette, it was 23 parties with her closest friends, who were all present to witness the special moment.
Yes, he knew all about bonding rituals, but they had never meant anything to him before. For centuries, Sergio turned away when other vampires spoke about bonding.
Even still, after so many years, he had collected more than a few stories about how other immortals had made their bonds.
Like the baroness from Ukraine who washed the feet of her future lovers. She was a vampire who always bonded with boys from the lower classes, and made herself subservient to them before making them immortal.
Or Renata, who tortured her one and only lover before turning him into a vampire. She hung the man by his wrists for a week, bringing him within seconds of death before granting him such a lengthy life.
Or Daciana, who gave her lovers such challenging tests that some of them never got the chance to bond with her. To Daciana, that was part of the excitement. Many years after her failed attempt to bond with Sergio, she speculated to him that the reason their bond didn’t take was because his test wasn’t hard enough. Because he was too strong for the men he faced. It was so easy for you to defeat the others, she told him. I wonder what might have happened between us had you fought with a more worthy opponent.
“Please,” Mark said. “No more talk of the love I lost tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” Sergio said. “I’ve roamed the earth for five hundred years without the slightest desire to begin a bonding ritual, but lately, I feel like that might be changing.”
“Sergio, you’re not saying you might be bonding with someone, are you?”
Sergio looked over the acres of wreckage that surrounded them, and saw one structure in the back yard that was still standing. Renata’s cremation furnace, where she burned the bodies of the slaves she killed. That building, designed to withstand heat far greater than a house fire, hadn’t burned at all.
It was probably still functional.
“I really don’t know, Mark. I have no experience in the matter.”
“Believe me, Sergio. You would know. You would already be thinking about the ritual. You wouldn’t be able to do anything else until the ritual was--”
Mark couldn’t finish his sentence before Sergio was on him, his teeth deep in Mark’s neck. Half a second later, Mark’s corpse fell to the ground in two separate pieces. Sergio gathered his remains and carried them to Renata’s furnace.
As he expected,
it still worked. Mark’s ashes mingled with those of whatever slave had last been cooked. While the fire still burned, Sergio gathered Renata’s remains and threw them inside as well.
Standing outside the furnace, looking up to the chimney and the secrets disappearing in the smoke, Sergio thought about his own bonding ritual, something special that would bring him close to Nicky Bloom, and seal them together for eternity.
A car turned onto the private drive leading to Renata’s house, interrupting his thoughts. Sergio ran into the woods. Taking cover from the moonlight in the shadow of an oak tree, he waited to see who was coming.
Chapter 8
Nicky and Jill drove around the back side of Renata’s property, looking down at the estate from Trinity Hills.
They saw no sirens, no flashing lights, no movement at all.
“We have to go down there,” Nicky said. “I have to get closer.”
Jill drove back to the front of the property and up the hill that led to the private drive. The front gate was still hanging open, just as the Network had left it.
“There’s a loop around the grounds we can drive,” Jill said as she pulled into the property. “One time around and then we’re going home.”
“Fine,” said Nicky.
But it wasn’t fine. Five minutes later, the two of them having driven the entire loop, Nicky wanted more.
“There’s no one here,” she said. “I just need two minutes out there, then I swear I’ll be done.”
Jill looked at Nicky for a second, judging if she was serious.
Deciding she was, Jill put the car in park and turned off the engine.
“Two minutes,” she said.
*****
When it happens, there is nothing you can do to stop it.
Standing silently in the forest, Sergio thought about Mark’s description of the bonding process. You will be drawn to each other in a way you cannot understand or control.
Sergio had only been thinking about himself when Mark said those words, about his own attraction to Nicky.
He hadn’t thought at all about how she might be drawn to him.
But here she was, on a cold moonlit night, stepping out of a car onto the grounds of a ruined mansion, unaware that Sergio was fifty yards away from her, hiding in the woods.
She was with the Wentworth girl. It couldn’t be coincidence they were here.
Something has brought you here, Nicky Bloom. Something neither you nor I can understand or control.
He watched as they walked onto the property, both of them unaware that they were moving in his direction.
*****
“This was the front door,” Nicky said, as they walked up the concrete steps and approached the wreckage.
Jill thought about her first visit to this house. She imagined herself stepping inside for the first time, wearing an emerald green dress and bejeweled mask.
A brick portico still stood, hanging over a gaping hole where the wooden doors once were. They walked through, and Jill felt like there were ghosts floating among the ashes. A hundred Thorndike students holding glasses of wine and laughing nervously as they waited for the girls wearing black to show up.
“We cleared out the mansion before we burned it, you know. We had a huge team of volunteers. We took out all the computers, all the documents--”
“I’m not looking for anything like that,” said Nicky. She found a path in the wreckage and started walking through it. “I’m not looking for anything at all.”
From where they stood, Jill could see a charred block of marble that had once been the bar at the rear of the ballroom. She imagined Annika standing at the bar, a crowd of admirers gathered round. She heard Annika’s voice.
Hey Honey, have you seen Nicky?
“I don’t want to leave,” Nicky said.
“I only promised you two minutes, Nicky.”
“No, I don’t mean this place. I mean the mission. I don’t want to leave Washington. I don’t feel like our job here is finished.
Jill sighed. “I understand how you feel. But it’s not like we’re walking away with nothing. Look around you. Look what we’ve done.”
“It’s what we haven’t done that bothers me,” Nicky said. “We started this mission knowing there was a good chance we’d be dead before it was over. How is it any different now? What do we gain by leaving?”
“The odds of success on this operation have shrunk dramatically,” said Jill. “Everyone in Potomac is going to be questioned about what happened at this mansion.”
“I can handle their questions,” Nicky said.
“Yes, but the rest of us can’t,” said Jill. “Has anyone told you what happened to me while you were gone? Do you know what Bernadette did to me?”
“Helena mentioned something about it,” said Nicky. “To me, that’s just more proof we can do this. You had a vampire get inside your mind and you’re still here. You still won!”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Nicky. I’m just as sad as you are to leave. I grew up here. I’ll be leaving my whole life behind. But by this time tomorrow, the clan is going to be scurrying to figure out what happened. They’re going to notice Renata is gone. They’re going to find her body somewhere in this mess. We’re counting on them finding her and getting paranoid about who killed her. Their paranoia will make them weak.”
“They’ll be quick to figure out it was us if we disappear.”
“Yes, but they won’t know why we were involved, and I guarantee you they won’t believe we were acting alone. They’ll assume some other clan, one of their enemies, had something to do with this. If we’re lucky, we might start a war.”
“If we stayed, we might be able to do all of that, and complete our mission,” Nicky said.
“I don’t see how. Even if we managed to stay under the radar, and that’s a big if at this point, there’s no way you win Coronation now. Nicky, I gave the Ransom money to Samantha.”
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I knew the mission was over and I’ll be damned if Kim Renwick is going to become an immortal!”
“We could have figured it out. We still can.”
“How could you possibly win Coronation now that Samantha’s ninety million dollars ahead of you? How would I explain to everyone at school that I gave the money to Samantha after spending the first semester supporting you? What would you tell people about what happened when you and Ryan were kidnapped? What if a vampire questions Ryan? If we stay, Nicky, then Ryan has to stay too! You want to put him at risk?”
Nicky seemed to drift on mention of Ryan. It was almost as if she hadn’t been thinking about him, like she was so focused on staying that she forgot about the people she would put in danger.
“He could leave,” Nicky said. “He could disappear, just like Annika.”
Jill shook her head. “You’re tired. You’re not thinking clearly. You’ve been through so much. I know it’s hard for you to hear this, but I don’t think you’re ready to continue the mission even if we had a good reason to. Nicky, you were held prisoner in…”
Nicky didn’t seem to be paying attention to her anymore.
“What is it?” Jill said.
Nicky was looking to the forest beyond the house.
“Did you hear something?” Jill asked.
“No,” Nicky said. “I was just…thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. You’re right.”
Nicky waved her hands in the air. “It’s cold out here and I know I’m not making any sense and you’re totally right. I definitely don’t want to drag Ryan any farther into this. I don’t know why…”
She trailed off, her eyes gazing out to the forest again.
“Nicky?”
“I’m confused,” Nicky said quietly. She was shaking her head. “So confused.”
Jill didn’t know that she had ever seen Nicky this way. Even in the most difficult moments of the mission, Nicky had always been in control. Right
now, she wasn’t.
Jill had only heard an abbreviated version of what happened to Nicky and Ryan in Italy. She had been in such a rush to go see Zack that she hadn’t made time to talk to the others.
To be there for Nicky.
She went to Nicky and put her arm over her shoulder.
“Can we leave now?” she said.
“Yes, we can go.”
Jill kept her arm around Nicky as they walked to the car. She opened Nicky’s door for her and helped her get into the passenger seat.
“You need to rest,” Jill said. “You’ve got to be tired after all you’ve been through.”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” said Nicky.
Jill walked around the car and got in on the other side.
“Now you’ve seen what happened to Renata’s mansion,” she said. “Now you can go home, knowing it’s over.”
“Right,” Nicky said. “It’s over.”
As Jill drove off the property, Nicky said the words again, quieter this time, like she was trying to convince herself they were true.
“It’s over.”
Chapter 9
Sergio followed them to a run-down house with an overgrown jungle of a yard. The whole of it buried in a thick pile of fallen leaves, the house looked more suited for a meth addict than a Thorndike student. A pair of shoes were strung over a nearby power line. Deep cracks in the street and sidewalk were full of brown, frozen weeds.
To an immortal, or anyone in the power elite, this entire neighborhood was as good as invisible. It was a great place for enemies of the clan to hide. As Sergio watched Nicky and Jill go around the side of the house and enter through a back door, he resolved not to underestimate these people, lest he end up like Renata and Bernadette.
Moving quietly and staying in the shadows, he went to the back door and listened.
Footsteps inside. Two pairs of feet. Jill and Nicky were either the only ones in the house, or the only ones awake. He considered breaking the door down and charging inside to take Nicky, but he knew that wasn’t right.