The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four)

by Spencer Baum

  Daciana took a step back. She was intrigued. Sergio wondered what he could say to close this sales pitch, and make it possible for Nicky to win the contest.

  “If we arranged it now, you could have the safe shipped from Falkon’s villa to arrive here in time for the party,” he said.

  “The safe has already shipped,” said Daciana. “I’ve arranged to bring home quite a few things from Falkon’s estate.”

  “Then it sounds like this game is meant to be.”

  Daciana stood silently, thinking. “If we do this, I want to play the game in a way that it lasts. I don’t want some clever girl like Jill figuring it out right away.”

  “I’m sure we can come up with something,” said Sergio.

  The doorbell rang.

  “That’s Laura,” Daciana said. “I’ve invited her to help us figure out who was working with Renata.

  Chester entered the room.

  “Shall I answer the door, Master?” he said.

  “Yes, and invite Laura to join Sergio and me in the moon room.”

  The moon room was the prize of Daciana’s mansion. An enormous landscape of her favorite plants, the room was decorated to look like a forest at night, complete with a waterfall and a small pond. Hanging high above the room was a clear, domed ceiling, which on this night gave a spectacular view of a half moon nestled among the stars.

  There was a sitting area on the lowest level of the room. Sergio and Daciana had spent many nights there, looking at the sky as they talked. Sergio took a seat in his favorite chair. Daciana sat across from him. A minute later, Laura arrived.

  “Good evening, Sergio,” Laura said, with a respectful bow of her head.

  “It’s a pleasure to see you,” Sergio said.

  “Thank you both for your help this week,” Daciana said. Daciana sat in a high-backed chair with a floral pattern, a Victorian-era antique that was the closest thing to a throne this queen of the vampires had.

  “I just came from the airport,” Laura said.

  “Oh really?” Daciana said. “I landed only a few hours ago.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry I didn’t come to greet you. I was in a hangar on the north end of the tarmac. Hanger Three to be precise.”

  Daciana’s eyes opened wide. “Renata’s plane,” she said.

  Laura nodded. “It’s still there. Wherever Renata ran off to, it wasn’t in her private jet.”

  “I suppose that’s smart,” said Daciana. “Had she gone in her jet, we could have tracked where she landed.”

  “I searched the plane top to bottom,” Laura said. “There wasn’t much in there, but I did find a small stack of mail in a seatback pouch. There was one piece of mail in that stack that was of interest.”

  Laura reached into her coat pocket and pulled out an envelope.

  “It was sent to her anonymously,” Laura said. “No return address. The postage stamp is from the main office downtown.”

  Laura handed the envelope to Daciana, who pulled out two documents. One was a photograph. The other was a letter. It took her only a few seconds to read it.

  “You’re right,” she said. “That is interesting.”

  Daciana handed the letter and photo to Sergio. The letter was just a few lines of typewritten text.

  Dear Ms. Sullivan,

  Enclosed you will find proof positive that Shannon Evans, who was pronounced dead last summer following a boating accident, is still alive. This photo was taken at the Praia de Sol hotel.

  The photo was of a teenage girl sitting in a chair in a hotel lobby.

  “Do you think the Evans girl is involved in Renata’s scheme?” Laura asked.

  “It certainly appears that way,” said Daciana. “The Evans family are all traitors who faked their own deaths.”

  “It’s curious that someone would point her out to Renata like this, don’t you think?” said Laura.

  “Very much so,” said Daciana. “But we can worry about that later. Right now we should focus on what we know.”

  “It doesn’t appear to me that we know anything at all,” said Sergio. “At least, nothing we didn’t know already. We knew the Evans family was still alive.”

  “But we didn’t know where they were,” said Daciana. “The Praia de Sol hotel. I know the place. It’s in Rio de Janeiro. Would either of you like to take a quick trip to Brazil?”

  Sergio felt torn. On the one hand, if there was any connection between Shannon Evans and Nicky, he wanted to figure it out before Daciana did so he could quickly hide it from her view. On the other, he didn’t want to leave Potomac. He didn’t want to be far from Nicky ever again.

  “I’d be happy to go,” Laura said, deciding the issue for him.

  “Wonderful,” said Daciana. “Call your pilot. Have him prepare your jet. Find me something interesting in Brazil! I can’t wait to get to the bottom of all this treachery and put it behind us for good.”

  Chapter 18

  Jill spent a quiet Christmas at home with her parents. She gave her mother a book on a recently invented programming language called Strike. She gave her father a bottle of gin.

  Declining an invite from Samantha to spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square with most everyone else from school, Jill and Ryan went to a party at the Four Seasons, where they rubbed elbows with politicians and lobbyists. As the clock neared midnight, Jill found herself standing alone with Ryan near a window overlooking downtown.

  “Are we going to kiss to bring in the New Year?” she asked him.

  “Seems like that would be the appropriate thing to do,” Ryan said. “Why? Would you prefer not to? We could step away from the party.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Jill said. “I was just wondering what your plan was, that’s all.”

  When midnight came, they kissed gently on the lips. To anyone watching, it probably looked romantic enough. To Jill, it felt every bit the act that it was.

  Daciana’s party was three days later.

  Jill spent the better part of the afternoon before the party tending to her phone, which was blowing up with texts and pictures from everyone who had just come back to town, and wanted Jill’s approval on their outfits.

  Photos of her classmates standing in front of a mirror, holding up their cameras to capture a full-body view of the dresses they wore, photos of girls standing together, smiles plastered on their faces as they documented this moment in their lives, quick snips and selfies of outfits in progress accompanied with captions like, Going with darker eye shadow tonight. What about you? or Are we still wearing silver jewelry, or is that all done now?

  Jill couldn’t answer the texts fast enough, and in the hours leading up to the party, there was an air of desperation in the messages flying in.

  What are you doing with your hair?

  We don’t even know what color you’re wearing.

  Just give me a quick idea of your look and I’ll spread the word.

  An hour before the party was slated to begin, she composed a single text to respond to all of them.

  You look beautiful, it said. I can’t wait to see you tonight. I’ll be away from my phone now.

  She hit the send button then went to her bedroom to get dressed.

  Ryan picked her up in the Lamborghini at 7:30. They walked through Daciana’s front door together, Ryan in a white tuxedo, Jill in a purple satin dress with her faux-diamond earrings and necklace, miniature microphones in her ears, and a bracelet full of tools hidden in pewter charms on her wrist.

  She had spent at least a hundred hours in the past week studying Daciana’s mansion, but when she stepped inside, she felt like she barely knew the place at all. Blueprints and sketches and pictures couldn’t do the house justice.

  The giant mahogany doors, doors for which Jill and Alvin had found the original purchase receipt scanned into the TPM database, were more suited for a castle than a home. The black and white tile floor that began on the front porch and continued into the foyer, looked like it was hundreds of years old, even thoug
h Jill knew it had been installed in 2007 for a cost just shy of a hundred thousand dollars.

  On this night, the tile floor hosted a full casino. Roulette wheels and craps tables, small half-moon kiosks where servants in white shirts were ready to deal games of black jack, baccarat, and poker. Jill couldn’t help but admire how stylish it all was. All the tables matched, and had an early twentieth-century flair to them, as if they were walking into a casino made entirely of antiques.

  “Good evening,” said one of Daciana’s servants. “Please, come this way to leave your coats and receive your chips.”

  The servant wore a black coat with long tails on the jacket. He led them towards a counter at one end of an enormous walk-in closet, behind which sat three more servants in tuxedos. They took coats, purses, and phones, and, most importantly, credit cards. When their transactions were complete, the servants checked Ryan and Jill’s names off a list, marking both as fully paid.

  “Your chips,” a servant said, presenting each of them with a small silver canister.

  Jill opened the lid and found a stack of wooden poker chips inside.

  “Hold these for me, will you?” she said to Ryan.

  Ryan took Jill’s sleeve of chips and put them in his jacket pocket. For the rest of the night, he would serve as her bank at the poker tables, and when it came time for her to sneak out, she wouldn’t have a cumbersome sleeve of poker chips weighing her down.

  They exited the cloak room and went back to the foyer, where Mattie Dupree was waiting to greet them.

  “Hi guys! Aren’t you just the most lovely couple in the world?” she said.

  Less than a second after Mattie’s greeting, Karmela Sweet was in their face as well.

  “You’re here!” Karmela said, throwing her arms open to hug Jill and Ryan together. “Finally the party can get started!”

  With Karmela’s hug squeezing her into an awkward position, Jill found herself looking up, where she saw four giant banners hanging from the ceiling. Each banner showed a picture of one of the girls wearing black.

  Samantha’s picture hung near the western wall of the foyer, with a white border running the edge of the photo. Nicky’s picture was adjacent to hers, a red border surrounding it.

  Karmela released them from her squeeze, but Jill kept her head tilted up, making sure the cameras in her earrings got a good view of the banners.

  “Aren’t those posters amazing?” Karmela said.

  “They’re covering up the mural,” Jill said.

  “What’s that?” said Karmela.

  “There’s a mural on Daciana’s ceiling,” said Jill. “The vampire queen standing under the moon. Daciana commissioned it in 1946. It’s kind of a big deal. ”

  “Oh yeah, look at that,” said Mattie. “I see it up there. It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s interesting that Daciana would allow these posters to take attention away from the mural,” said Jill, turning her head to let her earrings get a shot of Kim and Mary’s posters as well.

  “Just goes to show what a big deal it is to be one of the girls wearing black,” said Ryan.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” said Jill.

  She would have enjoyed having a moment to explore the foyer by herself, but even more people were flowing their way now. Jenny and Jake and Amber and Isabella—Jill and Ryan were like magnets in a room full of scrap metal. Jill’s instinct was to back away from these people swarming her, but Ryan put his arm around her and held her in place.

  More hugs. More greetings. Jill smiled and laughed as, one after another, her classmates fawned over her. They showered her with compliments about her hair, her dress, her jewelry, and they practically begged for her compliments in return. Simple things like a comment on Mattie’s shoes or the way Karmela’s ring went with her necklace—all the normal pleasantries of a gathering like this seemed much more significant tonight, as if Jill’s opinion was the only one that mattered.

  “Oh my, would you look at that?” Karmela squealed, eyeing Jill’s charm bracelet. “Charms! How cute! You wore charms!”

  Jill suppressed a laugh. The charm bracelet was a messy, ugly piece of jewelry. Had Jill worn it to a party last semester, before she was the toast of the school, it probably would have drawn ridicule.

  But now it was an object of praise.

  “It’s just an old bracelet I decided to wear at the last minute,” said Jill. “I don’t know why. Maybe I like that it reminds me I live a charmed life. But enough standing around! We’re here to gamble, right? Let’s go win some money!”

  *****

  Sergio stood on the rooftop with Daciana, watching the students arrive.

  Some students came alone, pulling brightly colored sports cars into the driveway and tossing the keys at the valet. Others arrived in packs, riding in the backs of stretch limousines and stumbling out, already giggling in drunken pleasure.

  “Look at them,” Daciana said. “So carefree and confident. They’ve been led to believe the world will always provide them with whatever they want.”

  “Almost everything,” said Sergio. “Only one will win the prize they truly desire.”

  “And even that one will be disappointed in the end,” Daciana said. “Happiness isn’t something the world provides to us, even those of us who have everything.”

  “My, aren’t we philosophical tonight?”

  “I spent a few days at the Farm this week.”

  “Were you looking to get closer to your food?”

  “I was looking to see what was happening there. Did you know that place has been running on autopilot for months?”

  “I’ve never concerned myself with our property in Florida.”

  “Well I take great pride in the Farm, and when Laura told me that Melissa and Dominic have both gone missing, I knew I had to get down there.”

  “Do you think Renata killed them?”

  “I’m certain she did. Fortunately for the rest of us, Melissa had trained her staff well. They’ve kept operations going in her absence. But without an immortal there, we developed a backlog of arrivals waiting for programming.”

  “You didn’t sit in that room and program the new slaves, did you?”

  “I did indeed. For two days I went one by one and cleared out the entire backlog.”

  “How very hands on of you.”

  “It’s the new me, Sergio. I delegated too much before. I was too removed from the day-to-day. Lena and Thomas are going to move to Florida and take over the Farm, but I’m going to go down there regularly. I’m going to be involved in our operations there, just as I’m going to be more involved in the school.”

  Sergio turned to look down the other end of the roof, to the hill behind Daciana’s house. Thirty acres of woodland with a gentle downward slope on all sides. When Daciana bought this land, she still lived in a world where your enemies might try to attack where you sleep and it was best to build your house on a hill.

  How quaint it all seemed back then.

  Now Potomac was a bustling suburb, stuffed to the gills with the wealthiest people on earth, and the forest surrounding Daciana’s house was the last bit of undeveloped land before the river. On this night, that undeveloped land would be the site of a ceremonial hunt.

  The rest of the clan was gathering near the flower garden, as Daciana had instructed them to do. Sergio watched them emerge from the woods, and admired the symmetry Daciana had created. On one end of the house, the humans gathered to drink their wine. On the other, the immortals to drink their blood.

  He spotted Laura Heidegger in the crowd of immortals below.

  “Did Laura turn up any new leads in Brazil?”

  “She did indeed,” Daciana said. “The Praia de Sol was very cooperative. They shared all their records, and although the whereabouts of the Evans girl are still unknown, we learned something very interesting.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She had an accomplice in the school.”

  “One of the students?” Sergio said.
“Which one?”

  Please don’t let it be Nicky, he thought.

  “Annika Fleming,” Daciana said. “We found record of wire transfers to the Praia de Sol during the time Shannon was there. Whatever Shannon was doing there, Annika Fleming was helping to finance it.”

  “So where is the Fleming girl now?”

  “Gone missing,” Daciana said.

  “How convenient.”

  “Yes. The plot thickens, as they say.”

  “I imagine Laura will continue her investigation in Brazil?”

  “Indeed she will. I expect it will be easier to find two runaway high schoolers than it will be to find Renata.”

  “Yes, that’s probably true,” Sergio said. His eyes drifted from Laura, who was standing under a tree, speaking with her bond, to Lena Trang, who was walking around the near side of the mansion. As Daciana continued speaking, Sergio kept his gaze on Lena, who went all the way around to the front of the house.

  “Annika’s parents knew nothing of their daughter’s betrayal,” she said. “And it appears her closest friends were people you’ve already cleared.”

  “Really?” Sergio said. Lena was now lurking in the shadows in front of the mansion, watching the students arrive. What was she doing?

  Sergio heard Nicky’s footsteps before he saw her. How wonderful it was to have a connection so strong he recognized the sound of her footsteps! He allowed his eyes to follow the sound, and then he was looking at her.

  Nicky Bloom had arrived at the party. Seeing her, he felt more alive.

  As Nicky walked under the portico, passing out of view, Sergio’s eyes drifted back to Lena, who was still hiding in the shadows. He didn’t like the way Lena was looking at Nicky.

  And now she was on the move. Was Lena following Nicky into the mansion?

  He would have to get down there and have a closer look.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I think I will head down and join the others,” he said.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Daciana. “It’s nearly time to begin.”

  Sergio bit into his lower lip. Nicky and Lena would have to wait.