The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (20 page)

“How can this be a memory?” Nicky said. “Did my mother actually do this to me? It’s like she’s infected. When she gets here, she’ll bite me, and something will spread out from her teeth into my blood.”

“That part doesn’t ring as true, does it?” Sergio said.

“No,” said Nicky. “It doesn’t. Something isn’t right. It’s why I always wake up when she bites into my neck.”

“The scene is rooted in memory, but that doesn’t mean it happened exactly as you see it,” Sergio said.

Her mother was close. The rotten stench of the woman’s breath filled Nicky’s lungs.

“Pay attention now,” Sergio said. “Focus on what’s really happening.”

Her mother descended upon her and bit into her neck. This was the time when Nicky was supposed to close her eyes and scream as the sickness came inside. It was becoming so familiar as to be habitual.
Close your eyes and wait it out—this is when you always wake up
.

She forced herself to make a change. This time, as her mother bit into her neck, Nicky kept her eyes open. She turned her head to look at the woman who was tearing at her flesh. The woman had changed. No longer a gray-faced monstrosity, she was now a beautiful teen, with soft, white skin and long black hair. The woman pulled away from Nicky’s neck, blood dripping from her lips.

She saw the woman only for an instant. It was like a flash frame; one that was so horrifying it threw her out of the dream and woke her up.

Sitting up in bed, breathing heavy, the final image from the dream echoed in Nicky’s vision.

The woman Nicky saw in that final instant wasn’t her mother at all. It was Daciana Samarin.

Chapter 18

Jill walked out of the debriefing session at Nicky’s house with a monstrous homework assignment. Gia had tasked her with finding a way to track Melissa’s movements.

“As soon as Melissa comes to Washington, we want to know,” Gia had said. “We want to lure Melissa to the Bloom mansion where we’ll have a crew of assassins ready to meet her. We’ll have a much better chance of pulling this off if we have some kind of warning that Melissa is on her way. Create something for us.”

Create something for us.
As if breaking into the database of the Federal Aviation Administration was something Jill could do in an evening. As if she wasn’t already busy working on the mission, and the stolen data, and her own life.

As if she could just snap her fingers and find a vampire.

Jill rushed home from school on Friday afternoon intending to bang out this new program before she was due at Sutter’s Field for Brawl in the Fall. But when she got home she found her house full of people.

“Oh hello, Jill. Come in, come in. Everyone, this is my daughter Jill. Jill, meet everyone.”

Her father was already blitzed. Barely three in the afternoon and he was slurring his speech. He had a martini glass in his hand, empty save a few cubes of ice and an olive.

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“We’re celebrating,” said Walter. “A long overdue company party. You kids are going to go out and have your big shindig in the woods tonight. Why not the grownups too? Huh? Doesn’t everybody deserve a good party?”

Walter raised his glass and a dozen people cheered in response.

Jill looked around and saw all the assistants and sales staff that worked for her father’s company, Black Dart Enterprises. All of these people owed their livelihoods to Jill’s mother, the only employee of Black Dart that counted.

“Where’s Mom?” Jill said.

“Your mother is upstairs,” said Walter. “She’s the reason we’re celebrating. Right now she is working on the very last program on Daciana’s to-do list. When she’s done, we’ll have completed everything Daciana has asked of us. Can you believe it? For as long as we’ve been in business, we’ve had a huge stack of work from her, but now we’re almost at the bottom. We’re getting way ahead of the game here, Jill. We have so many clients who’ve wanted us to work for them, but I’ve told them all to step aside. Daciana comes first, of course. But she hasn’t had any new work for us in a long time. Hell, I haven’t even spoken with Daciana in months! All our contact is with Renata now, and she isn’t giving us new work. We’re about to reach the end of the backlog.”

“This all sounds really exciting, Dad, but--”

“Jill, there are people beating down the door for a chance to work with us! Starting on Monday we’ll be selling billable hours to the highest bidder until we hear from Daciana again. We’re about to make some serious, serious money.”

Jill hid her disgust. She hated the way her father said
We
as if anyone but Carolyn Wentworth was doing anything of value for the company.

“You all have fun,” she said. “I’ll be in my room.”

She pushed her way through the crowd and ran upstairs, pulling her door shut behind her. She sat down at her computer and tried to think about how one might track a vampire.

Two hours later, frustrated and angry, she grabbed her laptop and headed for the garage. She was unable to think with her father’s party going on. It wasn’t so much the ruckus, which could be negated with noise-canceling headphones; it was the reminder of how much she despised Walter Wentworth. If he was in the house having fun, she had to be somewhere else. Somewhere far away.

She got in her car and left. She drove past three coffee shops and the library, and considered each as a place where she might set up her laptop and get to work, but none of them seemed far enough from her father. She kept going, leaving Potomac altogether and heading for DC. Once she was in the city, a good place to work was even harder to find. It was Friday afternoon. Every coffee shop was packed with suits from downtown. It was like Capitol Hill was a giant zit that had just popped and all the dreck from inside it had spilled into the coffee shops.
Yuck, yuck, yuck, I can’t work here!
she thought as she went from one to another to another.

She was all the way to Columbia Heights when she forced herself to stop at a café in an old, industrial neighborhood. She pulled into the small lot between buildings and parked in the only available space. Riverwinds was the name of the shop. Jill went inside, intent on gulping down some iced coffee drink that was heavy on caramel and whipped cream before she got to work.

The Riverwinds Café seemed to take great pride in being the little guy. A sign hung above the coffee beans preaching the benefits of supporting local business. The barista at the counter had a button pinned to her apron that read “Low Prices For You & Jobs For Your Community.” With its grungy and outdated tile floor, its stained couches that would be a hard sell in a thrift store much less a coffee shop, its flickering and buzzing lights, its gigantic, messy bulletin board of local events and causes, Riverwinds practically screamed at someone like Jill to turn away.
You can have your mansions in Potomac and summer homes in France but leave this place to us
was the clear and unequivocal message Jill got when she walked inside.

She liked it. Finally, she felt like she was far enough from her father that she could get to work.

The café’s proprietor, a forty-something woman named Della, was like an octopus behind the counter, swinging her long, skinny arms back and forth at blistering speed to keep up with the afternoon crowd’s demand for lattes and cappuccinos.

“What can I getcha?” Della said when Jill approached the counter.

Jill ordered an Iced Caramel Velvet Breeze With Soy and Extra Whip, paying cash and leaving Della the change. She took a seat at the bar and opened her laptop.

She had only written two lines of code when her mind, and her eyes, began to drift. The people in this shop were much more interesting than the program she was supposed to write. There was a tired-looking man in a blue shirt sitting in one of the recliners and reading
The Times
. That newspaper alone was a nice reminder that she was out of her element. In Jill’s world, you read
The Post
if you read anything.
 
The Times
was for subways and buses….and local coffee shops.

Seated next to the man in the blue shirt was a pudgy guy with an unfortunate nose. Pudgy Guy really wanted to strike up a conversation, but Blue Shirt wasn’t having it. Blue Shirt was all about his paper this afternoon. Blue Shirt looked like he’d had a bad day.

Across the way, three women sat at a round table that was shored up with a big wad of newspaper under one of its legs. They were sharing stories about their teenage children, one of whom had broken his ankle in a soccer accident.

A woman in a bright yellow blouse asked if she could take the seat immediately left of Jill.

“Yes, of course,” Jill said.

Jill took a sip of her drink. She looked back at the mothers of the round table. Now they were discussing their displeasure at all the fundraising required to send their children on school trips.

“Why can’t they just stay home?” one of the women said. “We’re in Washington for goodness sakes! I thought kids raised money to come here, not get away!”

The women laughed at the silliness of it all. They were enjoying life, talking about their burdens to lessen the load. It was a good thing. These three were living the lives they were meant to lead.

 
Jill wondered what life she was meant to lead. Since freshman year, she’d thought her purpose was in the Network. Today she wasn’t so sure.

The memory of Nicky’s confession was still fresh in Jill’s mind.

He asked me to run away with him. He asked me to run out of the Masquerade, get in a car with him and drive.

Nicky and Ryan. Annika and Shannon. It seemed like everyone had a partner who wanted to run away with them. They didn’t want to change the world; they just wanted to leave it behind and start again someplace else, together.

Who was going to run away with Jill?

“Excuse me, is anyone sitting here?”

“No, go ahead,” Jill said.

The guy sat down with a mug of black coffee and a spiral notebook. With his left hand, he began to doodle.

Jill found her eyes drawn to the colorful tattoos on his arm. She saw intertwining snakes, or maybe dragons—they were all different colors and their heads were drawn in vivid detail. The snake-dragons swirled up and around his arm, disappearing under her shirtsleeve.

“It’s Typhon,” the guy said.

Now Jill looked up to his face and saw he was younger than the rest of the crowd here…maybe her age or a little older.

“I’m sorry, what?” she said.

“Typhon,” said the guy. He turned to her and she felt herself backing away in surprise. He had long black bangs that hung low on his face, but as he moved, the bangs parted and Jill could see his eyes. They were a vibrant, electric blue.

“Wow,” Jill said.

“Wow? Wow what?”

Wow your eyes are unlike anything I’ve ever seen
, Jill wanted to say. “Wow…um…who’s Typhon?”

“From Greek mythology. The son of Gaia and Tartarus. The king of all monsters.”

Jill’s eyes drifted to the silver stud beneath the guy’s lower lip. It bobbed up and down on the word
monsters
.

“I’m Zack,” he said, extending his hand.

“Jill,” she said, taking it. “I’m…sorry to bother you. I didn’t mean to be looking at--”

“No, no,” Zack said. “I love this tattoo. I’m glad you were looking at it. My friend Brandon did it. It’s pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Jill.

“You’re not big on tattoos, are you?”

“I don’t know,” said Jill. “I don’t…have any.”

Zack smiled at this, showing off two rows of perfect white teeth. Jill smiled back.

Although she couldn’t rightly say she’d met his type before, she felt like she knew everything she needed to know about this guy. The beautiful bad boy, able to make girls swoon with talk of his tattoo--with those crazy blue eyes this guy probably was accustomed to twenty girls following him around, and he got a kick out of sitting next to strangers and being a flirt.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” Zack said.

“I live in Potomac,” said Jill.

“Yes, I gathered that much.”

“You gathered that much? What does that mean?”

Zack laughed. “I’m sorry. That didn’t come out right. It’s just, you look…put together.”

Jill glanced over her own outfit. She was wearing a blue and white striped shirt that hung off one shoulder and tight-fitting jeans. To her this was hardly a “put-together” sort of look.

“Are you in school somewhere?” Zack asked.

Jill nodded.

“State college?” Zack said.

Jill shook her head.

“Garrett,” said Zack. “You go to Garrett.”

“No,” said Jill. “I’m in high school.”

“Oh, okay. But you’re a senior, right?”

“Yes. I go to Thorndike.”

“Seriously?”

“Don’t act so shocked. Somebody’s gotta go there.”

“I know that,” said Zack. “It’s just…what are you…I mean—look at you. You’re slumming it at Riverwinds.”