The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four)

by Spencer Baum

  “Mary’s bedroom is on the south side,” Winnie said. “Second floor.”

  Frankie saw it. A four-poster bed, a collection of porcelain dolls on the shelves, photos of wild animals on the walls—the bedroom was easily visible from the road through huge windows on the south corner of the house.

  “Those windows are a problem,” said Helena.

  “I know,” said Winnie. “We’ll have to work quickly. Look at the wall facing the back yard. There’s a deck out there, with a door leading to Mary’s bedroom. That’s where Sergio will enter. Mary will leave that door unlocked for him.”

  “This is madness,” Helena said. “Maybe there’s still time to find another way. A petition. I’ve heard of petitions holding up the Coronation results before. We petition the school, saying Mary broke the rules.”

  “Please stop talking about Coronation,” Winnie said. “That ship has sailed.”

  “But Nicky was supposed to win! We stayed in town so she could win the Coronation contest.”

  Frankie was surprised at the desperation in Helena’s voice. Winnie had told him that Helena was one of the best hunters in the Network. Tonight she seemed weak and unstable.

  “Two agents go in through the bedroom,” Winnie said, ignoring Helena. “We hit Mary with a dart and knock her out. Then we clear the house. Anyone inside gets put to sleep. We leave Mary in the bed, make it look like she’s resting while she waits. Sergio will want to see her before he comes inside. If only we didn’t have to deal with those blasted windows. There are a hundred ways for Sergio to get out of there before we’ve even taken a shot.”

  “It’s got to be in Bethesda,” said Helena. “We had it all worked out.”

  “Yes, we did,” said Winnie. “Doing it in this house will be a long shot at best. But a long shot is better than no shot at all. Somehow, Frankie, we’ve got to get you behind Sergio after he enters the bedroom.”

  Winnie’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen.

  “It’s Jill,” she said.

  *****

  Jill and Ryan were back on the highway, driving to Bethesda. Gordon was in the car behind them. Jill had her phone to her ear and her tablet up and running in her lap.

  “Sergio found the safe house,” Jill said. “Ryan, Helena, and Phillip have all been compromised.”

  “What?” said Winnie. “I’m standing here with Helena right now.”

  “Where are you?” said Jill.

  “We’re in your neighborhood. We’re scoping out Mary Torrance’s house.”

  “You need to get everyone back to Bethesda,” Jill said. “Gordon’s on his way. He’s just deprogrammed Ryan. Don’t tell Helena another word until we’re certain her head is clear.”

  “What happened? What has she been programmed to do?”

  “Sergio found us at the safe house. He commanded Ryan to stay in Potomac and help Nicky win the Coronation contest. I expect Phillip and Helena’s programming is similar.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Jill said. “It’s about Nicky. Sergio didn’t want her to leave.”

  “Well this complicates things,” said Winnie. “Helena was going to be on the team that hunted Sergio. We’re coming to Mary’s house tomorrow night.”

  “I don’t think Sergio should be our primary focus anymore,” said Jill. “Nicky is trapped in the Purgatory House. We’ve got to get her out.”

  “Yes, I suppose we do,” said Winnie.

  “And there’s still time to salvage this operation,” Jill said. She was flipping through the screens on her tablet, looking at blueprints of Daciana’s mansion. “Maybe we can revisit my idea of breaking into Daciana’s house during prom.”

  Helena laughed. “I admire your spunk, Jill. Yes, now that the original mission is in shambles, I will admit, your idea sounds more appealing. We’ll talk about it when you get to the house.”

  “See you there.”

  Chapter 42

  After escorting Nicky to the Purgatory House, Daciana went to the senior parking lot and retrieved her new car.

  A ’66 Vicenza. Boy, did this car ever take her back. For Daciana, the 1960’s were the time when the clan went from a regional entity to a national one. It was in those years that Daciana got her first look at the Western United States, after decades on the eastern seaboard. She put new immortals in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Seattle, and San Francisco, and drove the new interstate highway system to visit them all.

  Long nights on the open road with stops in small towns where she fed on unsuspecting locals who had never seen an immortal before, and she did it all in her ’66 Vicenza. What a great car that had been for her.

  How truly wonderful it was to have it back in her life.

  She revved the engine a few times, allowing the sound to fill her with nostalgia, then she tore out of the parking lot, quickly taking the speedometer over a hundred. She cruised to the Huntington Heights neighborhood in Northwest Potomac, where she visited the family of Mary Torrance.

  Congratulations to you, yes this changes everything, Mary will be young and beautiful forever more, make sure she is in her bedroom by ten o’clock tomorrow night, she has to be in her prom outfit which I’m sure you know requires three articles of clothing that honor the clan…it was a speech Daciana used to give every year before she farmed it out to Renata. It felt good to be back in the saddle. It had been a good semester. This year’s contest had been one for the ages, and Daciana had a feeling she’d always have a special place for Mary Torrance in her heart.

  She left the Torrance house just after midnight, spinning the keys to her new car around her finger as she went down the walkway. She had parked the Vicenza across the street.

  Right in front of the woods.

  She felt an extraordinary sense of déjà vu. The black Vicenza parked in front of the woods, opposite a beautiful white mansion—even though she had never come to this house, somehow she had seen it all before.

  In a different neighborhood. Yes, Granwood Oaks—she and Nicky had come to Granwood Oaks together, and parked the Vicenza in front of the woods, in the exact spot where a taxi had once dropped off Annika Fleming.

  How curious it was that Mary’s neighborhood had the exact same design. Houses on one side of the street, undeveloped woodland on the other.

  And then she saw it in her mind. Both neighborhoods connecting together as one. A circle of houses surrounding a large plot of forest.

  Granwood Oaks and Huntington Heights were two sides of the same development.

  Immediately, she sprinted into the woods. It took her less than a minute to cover them from one side to the other. The foliage was thick, and from either side, it appeared that the forest went on for a good distance.

  But it didn’t. Someone who knew where she was going, someone like Annika, could easily cut through these woods on foot.

  Daciana emerged in Granwood Oaks, not far from where she knew the taxi had dropped off Annika Fleming.

  “Oh, you little devil,” she whispered. “You clever, clever girl.”

  She ran back through the forest, back to the Huntington Heights neighborhood, back to the Torrance house. When Mary’s father answered the door, she looked in his eyes and latched onto his brain.

  “Has Annika Fleming ever been here?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary’s father said.

  “Why am I wasting my time with you?” Daciana muttered. “Step aside.”

  Mary’s father got out of the way and Daciana raced upstairs. She burst into Mary’s bedroom. It was empty. But the shower was running. She ran to the bathroom and pulled back the curtain. Mary shrieked in surprise.

  “Annika Fleming,” Daciana said, quickly grabbing hold of Mary’s mind. “Tell me about Annika Fleming. Did she come here?”

  Mary gazed back at Daciana, completely under the vampire’s spell.

  “Annika has never been to my house.”

  “Then why would she come here? Who would she come see
in this neighborhood?”

  “There are many Thorndike students who live in this subdivision,” Mary said. “It’s the nicest neighborhood in town.”

  “Tell me who they are.”

  “Jake Castillo’s family lives two houses down. Lisa Andrews is on the block behind us. Sam Featherstone lives in the brick house on the corner of Mulberry and Honeycomb.”

  “Which of those students would Annika want to see?”

  “Any one of them,” said Mary. “Annika was very popular.”

  “Jake Castillo, Lisa Andrews, and Sam Featherstone,” Daciana said. “Can you think of anyone else Annika might come to see?”

  “Yes,” Mary said. “At the top of the hill, in the big house that backs up to the woods on the other side. Jill Wentworth lives there.”

  *****

  It was a long, emotional night at the Bloom mansion.

  Helena and Phillip were more difficult to deprogram than Ryan. Gordon had to work until the early hours of the morning to clear their minds. When he was finally done, his subjects were both overcome with guilt and remorse for their behavior over the past four months.

  “We should have left,” Helena said to Jill. “You wanted to leave and I wouldn’t let you go. We would all be safe if we had left.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jill said. “We’re going to get Nicky out.”

  “And we’re not giving up on our primary objective,” Winnie added. “We’re still taking a shot at Sergio.”

  By morning, they had worked out a plan to run three separate operations in the next eighteen hours, all of them happening in different parts of town.

  At Thorndike, they would perform a jailbreak, springing Nicky from the Purgatory House before she got ushered into prom as the new immortal’s first victim.

  In Northwest Potomac, a team of vampire hunters would break into Mary Torrance’s house, neutralize the family, and wait for Sergio to arrive.

  And at Daciana’s mansion, a team of agents and volunteers would give Jill a second shot at Daciana’s computer, with the aim of emptying every bank account in the clan.

  Jill was awestruck as she watched Winnie get the personnel and materials organized. With only a few phone calls, Winnie got them a getaway car for Nicky, new weaponry to deal with the specific challenges the hunters would face at Mary’s house, a laundry list of items Jill required to pull of the hack, and all the people they would need to do it.

  “The hunters are coming with me,” Winnie said. “Everyone else is at your command, Jill. Get them organized.”

  Getting everyone organized required a venue where Jill could gather a large group together and speak to them all at once. She chose the same movie theater at the Hillsdale Mall where they planned the last break-in. Alvin helped Jill hook her tablet up to the projector so she could put blueprints from the TPM database on the big screen. In the early afternoon, a crowd of familiar faces, all having purchased tickets to a movie that wasn’t actually playing, came pouring into theater thirteen.

  They were the same people who answered the Network’s call for help at Renata’s mansion. People from the DC area who gave money and resources to the Network, who offered their houses as safe havens for Network agents, who were dedicated to fighting the clan, even if they weren’t full-time operatives like Jill and Nicky. They were people who had looked to Jill for leadership when the Network rescued all the slaves in Renata’s mansion, and emptied the house of all its valuables.

  They were ready for her to lead them again.

  And there was one new face in the crowd. One volunteer who hadn’t participated in the liberation of Renata’s mansion the winter before. He arrived a few minutes later than everyone else, and looked more than a little confused when he stepped into the movie theater.

  “Him?” said Ryan. “You invited him?”

  “Yes,” said Jill. “He’s one of us.”

  She jogged up the aisle to greet Zack.

  “Welcome to our meeting,” she said.

  Zack smiled. “Meeting?” he said. “I told the guy at the ticket counter I wanted to see the 2:15 showing of Gatorland Blues.”

  “This is it,” said Jill. “Take a seat.”

  With a blueprint of Daciana’s mansion on the screen, and an audience who was eager to join in the fight, Jill walked the group through a plan where a Network agent broke into the mansion and used Addonox to knock out the slaves.

  “Phillip will be the first one inside,” she said. “He’ll use the air conditioner to spread the knockout gas throughout the house. When the rest of you enter, you’ll be in gas masks. As you move through the house, I’ll need you to open every window and door. I’ll need the place aired out by the time I get there.”

  “What? You can’t do a delicate computer hack where every keystroke counts with a giant rubber mask on your face?” said Alvin.

  “Pretty much,” said Jill. “You all will find forty to fifty slaves in the mansion, and you’re going to rescue every one of them. Alvin and Phillip will take lead on this part of the operation. Ryan and I need to make a showing at prom. I’ll arrive at the mansion to do the hack after you’ve cleared the house.”

  She told them where to go, how they would get in, what wires they would cut to disable the alarm, where to find the main power switch, and how to get out again.

  “This will be just like Renata’s,” she said. “First we get the people out, then we take the files, the valuables, and anything else you can carry. The only place you cannot go is the crypt. You leave that space alone for me.”

  After all the details were covered, Jill sent most of the crowd on its way, telling them they would meet up again at their assigned places at dusk. Only Alvin, Ryan, and Zack stayed behind.

  “That’s quite a plan, Jill,” Alvin said. “But it doesn’t get us any farther than we got last time. What about the two-step verification on Daciana’s phone?”

  “Forget your computer hack for a minute, please,” said Ryan. “Nicky is trapped at the Purgatory House and prom is tonight. What are we doing to get her out?”

  Jill swiped at the screen on her tablet, bringing up a new blueprint from the TPM database. This blueprint showed the Purgatory House, the gymnasium, and the courtyard that connected the two.

  “Oddly enough, rescuing Nicky and getting past the verification code on Daciana’s phone are part of the same operation,” she said. “The trick is this corridor on the north end of the gym.”

  On the blueprint, she pointed at the gymnasium, which was divided into three sections: the gym, the lobby, and a long corridor labeled ‘Equipment Storage.’

  “Did you take a close look at your prom invitation, Ryan?” Jill asked.

  “Not really,” Ryan said. “It looked just like any other invite to a Thorndike event.”

  “That’s what I saw too,” said Jill. “Like every single invitation Daciana has sent out this semester, the prom invite had a line at the bottom saying that all cell phones had to be checked at the door.”

  “Let me guess. The coat check station is that little room at the back of the lobby,” said Alvin.

  “That’s right,” said Jill. On the diagram, she pointed at the back door of the gym. “At different times tonight, Nicky and I both will go through this door, and then enter this hallway. Nicky will use it to get out at this exit, where a car will be waiting for her.”

  “And you’ll use it to sneak into the coat check station,” said Alvin.

  “If all goes well,” said Jill. “Daciana’s phone will be there waiting for me.”

  “That’s a big if,” said Ryan. “The back door to the gym is reserved for the loser of the Coronation contest. It’s part of the walk she takes from the Purgatory House to the cage. What if somebody sees you using it?”

  “That’s why Zack is here,” said Jill. “While the rest of the crew is at Daciana’s, he will be at Thorndike with us. Zack, I need you to show up at nine o’clock, and park your car on the east side of Jefferson Road.”

&nbs
p; “Sounds easy enough. Then what do I do?”

  “Then you wait for my text, count to twenty, and make sure anyone who might be out in the neighborhood that night is looking at you, so I can sneak into the gym unnoticed.”

  Chapter 43

  Nicky had a quiet night at the Purgatory House. She was offered a sponge bath, a massage, a facial, and a pedicure. She declined them all, asking instead to be left alone with her thoughts.

  As alone as was allowed. There were armed guards standing outside every door and underneath every window. They faced away from the house, not at all concerned that Nicky might try to leave, but present to fend off anyone who might try to steal her away.

  Parents, a distressed boyfriend, the Network—these were the only people the clan considered a threat to remove the loser of the Coronation contest. The notion that the girl might leave of her own volition wasn’t even considered.

  Looking out the window at one of the guards, Nicky hoped Jill and the others weren’t going to try and storm their way in here. It would be so much easier for Nicky to break out on her own.

  And, truthfully, she was in no hurry to leave.

  The bed was the most comfortable she had ever slept in, and the house was perfectly dark and silent all through the night. When she woke in the morning, she felt as rested as she’d ever been.

  At eight o’clock, Edith rolled in a breakfast tray with eggs, bacon, fruit, and an obscenely delicious cup of coffee. As Nicky ate, Edith walked her through the rest of the day.

  “Visiting hours begin after lunch,” she said. “Is someone bringing you the three items you need to add to your prom outfit? If not, I can arrange to have them fetched for you. Daciana will see you at dusk, and will ask you to explain the items you have worn to honor the clan.”

  It was amusing to Nicky that she was supposed to care. What was Daciana going to do if Nicky wasn’t wearing the proper items on her prom outfit. Kill her?