The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (12 page)

Ryan smirked as he turned toward Nicky. “You can relax and do whatever you need to,” he said. “I imagine you’ve got lunch plans to figure out or something. I’ll take care of the assignment.”

“I’ll be doing my own work, thank you very much,” Nicky said.

“Come on, Nicky. Girls wearing black don’t sit around and do math problems.”

“This one does,” Nicky said. “In fact, this one bets you five dollars she can finish the assignment before you.”

“Oh really?” Ryan’s voice was playful now. “Alright, a race it is. But I think we should raise the stakes a little bit. Five dollars is hardly a worthy bet in this town.”

“You wanna make it a hundred?”

“I want to make it lunch today, right after this class gets out. Loser buys.”

Nicky was unable to conceal her surprise at this offer.

“You’re thinking about Kim,” said Ryan. “Don’t.”

“I can’t help it,” said Nicky, keeping her voice low. “I thought she--”

“The arrangement is that she gets my money, nothing more,” Ryan said. “After you and I got off the phone last night, I went out and had a little talk with Kim and made a few things clear. She can have my money at the Date Auction, but I don’t have to be her whipping post until then.”

“How did she respond to that?” Nicky asked.

“She didn’t like it, but she’ll deal. Kim isn’t going to do anything stupid. There’s too much on the line, especially now that you’re in the picture.”

“Now that I’m in the picture,” Nicky said quietly, almost whispered.

“Before you showed up, the reality was Kim was headed for immortality whether I liked it or not, and I had to do what she said if I didn’t want…”

He trailed off.

“If you didn’t want her to hurt you,” Nicky finished.

Ryan nodded. “But you’ve changed the equation. Now it’s a contest. Now she really needs my family’s money.”

“Now you have a little bit of power,” Nicky said.

“Just a little. Enough to go to lunch with whomever I please. So are we doing this or not?”

“Doing what?”

“These problems.”

Nicky laughed. “I guess we can do some math now. Race to the finish. Loser buys lunch. On your marks…”

“Just go,” Ryan said. “I’ll give you a head start.”

“Oh, you’re gonna regret that,” Nicky said, grabbing her pencil and opening her textbook.

You are standing 50 meters from a tree. You observe that the angle between the ground and the treetop is 20 degrees…

It was a trigonometry problem. Nicky tried to remember what little trig Gia had taught her the summer before. Her pre-Thorndike education, which had started out strong when she and her dad were on the road (her dad gave her lessons every night in the RV), had gone off in an odd direction after the black vans stole her in the night. For the past seven years her studies were skewed more towards sword-wielding, lock-picking, and how to manipulate people to her advantage. She hadn’t done a lick of high school math until Gia called her down to Washington to become the newest senior at Thorndike. Since then, she had crammed years of math into a few summer evenings, and not everything stuck.

Nevertheless, she was pretty confident she could figure this stuff out. From what Gia had taught her, it was all derived from just a few basic rules and principles. Nicky sketched out a triangle to fit the problem, labeling the 50-meter base, the 20-degree angle….

Use the tangent function to estimate the total height of the tree to the nearest tenth of a meter…

“I’m starting now,” Ryan said.

“Yeah, yeah…just do your work,” said Nicky.

As Ryan scribbled away furiously on his paper, Nicky thought about the nights she spent staking out the various mansions of the immortals, looking for Frankie and her father. She saw herself in the diagram she had drawn—an anonymous little figurine placed at the proper angle for the perfect line of sight. A pair of binoculars in her hand, a tall tree bathing her in shadow, an immortal on the balcony, its pale face lit only by the moon.

The vision of Frankie carrying a dead body to a dumpster popped back in her mind.

“Done!” Ryan announced, laying his pencil flat on his paper.

“Seriously?” Nicky said.

“Yes. How far did you get?”

Nicky held up her paper. “I’ve made a very nice sketch of a tree,” she said. “It looks kind of like a Russian Olive, don’t you think?”

“A Russian what?” Ryan said with a laugh.

“A Russian Olive. You know, the tree.”

Ryan grabbed the paper from Nicky’s hand. “This is an olive tree?”

“Oh forget it,” Nicky said. “You clearly are not a nature lover.”

“Maybe not. But I’m lightning fast with the sines and cosines, and you owe me lunch. Where are you taking me?”

“I don’t know,” Nicky said. “What do you like?”

“Anything’s fine. Really I just want to ride in that car you drove here this morning. Where did you find that thing? It’s a total classic.”

“It was a gift,” Nicky said, reciting a line from her script. The ’66 Vicenza had a whole storyline behind it that Nicky could lean on should anyone ask her too many questions about it, but the short answer was that someone gave it to her. The idea was to keep it simple and vague so people’s imaginations could run wild. They would think about the wealth and connections it took to have a car like that, and they would come up with their own story.

From the look on his face, it appeared Ryan was doing exactly that. The playful smile was gone.

“Ryan…are you sure you want to…you know--”

“Of course I’m sure,” he said. “We’re going to lunch, and we’re not going to spend another second thinking about it.”

That last sentence practically echoed in the room, which had gone silent with people eavesdropping on Nicky and Ryan’s conversation. The two of them were going to be the talk of everyone’s lunch hour. By the time fifth period started, the rumors would be swirling.

And while that should have made Nicky happy—it was good PR for her Coronation campaign after all—it made her angry instead. It made her angry because she didn’t want to share this part of her life with these parasites. She didn’t want Ryan Jenson to be caught up in the growing whirlwind that was Nicky Bloom.

She wanted to set Nicky Bloom aside and let Ryan speak with Celeste Nicole Allen instead.

The bell rang and everyone put their desks back in order. Nicky and Ryan left Matteo’s class together and made a beeline for the senior parking lot. They didn’t say anything as they walked, both of them having the same goal: get to Nicky’s car and get away before anyone could stop them. Nicky knew this was just a lunch date, but as she walked she found herself fantasizing that they were off to execute the escape plan Ryan had presented at the Masquerade. Get in the car and drive. Leave all their cares behind them. Start a new life of true freedom, without any vampires, any slaves, any agendas.

They stepped through the front door of Sullivan Hall moving in lockstep and hit the main walkway with determination. They were almost running when Art appeared out of nowhere, cutting into their path with such alacrity Nicky almost ran him over.

“Nicky I need to talk to you,” he said. His breathing was heavy, as if he’d been running to get here.

“Art? I….could we catch up later?”

Art shook his head. “I’ve been waiting all morning. I can’t wait any longer.”

“It can wait,” Ryan said, stepping towards Art and, if Nicky was seeing it right, throwing his chest out a bit. “She’ll talk to you later.”

The look on Art’s face at this provocation was a mix of anger and confusion. This was a dangerous moment for Nicky. If she had her priorities in order, she’d give her attention to Art right now. He was the one who showed up to her after-party. He was the one who would be bidding on her at the Date Auction.

And Lord knew he had every reason to want Nicky’s attention. She and Jill should have planned better for this moment. They knew Art would wake up this morning without any real memory of the night before—Nicky’s own experience with an Addonox-induced slumber was a hazy mess in which a whole day was lost—but they hadn’t planned for how to handle Art after he got to school. They didn’t know how he would react to the clues they’d left for him. Empty wine bottles on his nightstand, an open bottle of his dad’s pills—they were hoping Art would see the evidence and be scared silent. They wanted him frightened of the possibility his dad might find out he was in the medicine cabinet. They wanted Art in full cover-up mode.

But there was an unspoken piece of the plan between Nicky and Jill, one that Nicky had agreed to implicitly when she showed up at Art’s front door last night, and one Nicky had failed to execute. It was
her
job to find Art this morning and see where his head was. It was her job, not Jill’s, to make sure Art wasn’t going to be trouble. Between the assembly, all the attention she got from students and teachers, between texts from Annika promising that Art would be taken care of and this thing with Ryan…

What was this thing with Ryan? What was she doing?

Now Ryan was grabbing Nicky by the arm and gently pulling her away from Art. They were leaving.

“You were at my house last night!” Art snapped. “My butler told me you were there.”

Nicky felt Ryan loosening his grasp.

“I smelled your perfume on my shirt when I woke up,” Art said. “There were empty wine bottles by my bed…”

Ryan’s hand let go of Nicky’s arm altogether.

Art leaned in close.

“Do you remember anything that happened last night?” he said.

Nicky felt Ryan stepping away from her. There was nothing she could do to stop this now. She turned to him with an apologetic look in her eyes, and opened her mouth to speak, but Ryan raised his hand to stop her.

“I’ll see you around, Nicky,” he said. Then he turned and walked away.

From behind her, Nicky heard a new voice, this one approaching from across the yard. It was Annika.

“There you are,” Annika said. “We’ve got a lunch date, remember?”

“I can’t go to lunch with you right now,” Art said. “I have to talk to Nicky.”

“Art, it’s not polite to leave a girl hangin’.”

Nicky watched Ryan disappear around the side of Mead Hall. She took a deep breath and tried to focus herself. She was making a giant mess of things and needed to get her priorities straight. Ryan was a distraction. She had to let him go.

She turned back to find Art and Annika both standing behind her now, waiting to see what she’d do.

“Annika, if it’s alright with you, I’ll need to cut in on your lunch date,” Nicky said. “Art and I need to talk.”

Annika furrowed her brow, the look in her eyes saying,
This was not the plan
.

Nicky gave her a quick wink, then she turned to Art, placed her arm in his, and headed for the parking lot.

Chapter 12

“I’m sorry I left,” Nicky said. “I should have at least written a note or something. I was embarrassed.”

They were driving down Presley Avenue in Art’s Audi. Huge oak trees on either side of the road stretched overhead into a continuous canopy. They had stopped at a drive-through three blocks from school and Nicky ordered a milkshake. They hadn’t stopped since. Art wanted it that way. He didn’t know what Nicky was going to say to him, he didn’t know where this conversation was going, and he preferred to have it in the safety of his own car.

“Why were you embarrassed? What happened?” Art asked.

“You don’t remember any of it?”

Art shook his head.

“Gosh, that’s crazy. You were really messed up, Art.”

“What were we doing? What time did you come over?”

“I got there a little after six,” Nicky said.

“But why? Why were you at my house?”

“Because you’d asked me to come. At the after-party. We made plans. Do you not remember that either?”

Art searched his memory, which at the moment was a dark and confusing place. The night before at his house was all a blank. The after-party wasn’t much better—just a series of disconnected scenes, all of them shrouded in the fog of liquor.

“We were talking at my after-party and decided I was coming over to your house. You were going to have your chef make dinner for me and we were going to hang out,” Nicky said.

Art was furious at himself for getting so drunk he couldn’t remember any of this. He’d had the courage to ask out a girl wearing black at her own after-party, and she’d said yes? Why did that memory have to be gone? Why couldn’t he erase the memory of waking up sick in the hotel room instead?

“So you came over,” Art said. “Then what? Did we have dinner?”

“No,” said Nicky. “We talked for a bit first. You were already drinking.”

“What was I drinking?”

“Wine,” Nicky said. “Expensive bottles from your father’s stash. I had some too. It was pretty amazing, even better than what Renata was serving at her mansion.”