The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (39 page)

“Who asked you Samantha?” Kim snapped. “Where do you even get off talking to me that way? Who’s going to bid on you tonight?”

“I’ll have bidders.”

“That’s enough,” said Mary. “We’re at the Penbrook, Kim. Show some respect.”

“None of you deserve my respect,” Kim said. “Not Nicky the whore or Samantha the lamb or even you Mary. Where would you be without daddy’s checkbook?”

“Same as you. Nowhere.”

Samantha laughed at this one. Kim looked like she was about to stand up and start screaming. Fortunately for her, Ms. Perry came in and interrupted the fracas before it went any further.

“Showtime ladies,” she said. “Samantha, you’re up first.”

“This won’t take long,” Kim muttered. As Samantha left, she put her hand behind her back and held up her middle finger.

Nicky watched on the TV as Samantha stepped onstage to a mild applause. She smiled like a beauty queen and took it all in.

Kent Byron entered from stage right and took the podium. He placed a single folding chair front and center. Samantha took a seat. The crowd went quiet.

“Our first lady up for bidding tonight is Samantha Kwan,” Byron said. “We start the bidding at one thousand dollars.”

Terry Reese was the first to raise his paddle. Then Eddie Miller. The two of them went back and forth in thousand dollar increments. At six thousand, Eddie left his paddle down.

“The current bid is six thousand dollars,” Byron said. “Going once...”

Nicky’s mind was still swimming from her encounter with Sergio. Words he had said were on repeat in her ears.

The scene of your memory is in the Italian Alps. You are standing in front of a building I know quite well. It belongs to the Ventigen Corporation.

“Going twice...” came Byron’s voice from the TV.

“Six thousand dollars. What a joke,” Kim said.

The Italian Alps. The Ventigen Corporation.

“Sold to the gentleman in the red tie for six thousand dollars!”

The crowd applauded. Samantha blew a kiss to the crowd then exited stage left.

A moment later, Ms. Perry opened the door and poked her head inside. “Mary. You’re up.”

“Good luck you two,” Mary said as she stood to leave.

“Suck it,” said Kim.

Mary’s auction was a simpler affair. Her boyfriend Lucas opened the auction with a ten thousand dollar bid. Nobody matched it and he won.

Ms. Perry came back again, this time calling for Nicky.

*****

Gia settled in for another long night on the watchtower at the Bloom mansion. A small room in the attic with one-way windows all around, the watchtower gave two different three-hundred-sixty-degree views of the grounds.

The first view was out the windows, either with the naked eye or with night-vision binoculars. The second view was on the bank of televisions that lined the ceiling, each television connected to a closed-circuit camera that viewed one part of the estate.

It was on television number eight that she caught the first glimpse. A blur in the darkness, too fast to be a human, too large to be an animal.

Gia rewound the recording, frame by frame, until she saw her. These cameras recorded thirty frames per second. One of those frames had captured a clear view of Melissa Mayhew.

“Really?” Gia said. “Of all nights, you had to come tonight?”

Another blur, this time in television thirteen. She was moving around the perimeter, checking the place out.

Gia grabbed her walkie-talkie.

“She’s here.”

A crackle of static, then Kendall’s voice came back.

“She’s here now?”

“Yes,” Gia said. “She’s on the west end of the property. Near the toolshed.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Getting the lay of the land, I think. She’s moving too fast for me to see anything.”

There was movement on television four.

“Now she’s way out back,” Gia said. “I expect she’ll circle the whole property.”

“Then what?” said Kendall.

“I don’t know,” said Gia. “Maybe she’ll ring the doorbell.”

“Good gravy. All week we’ve been waiting on this chick and she picked the night when we’re short-handed?” Kendall said.

“Tonight’s as good as any,” said Gia. “Let’s get ready. It will be over quickly.”

*****

Nicky sat in the folding chair in the center of the stage. Byron acknowledged her with a slight nod of his head before turning to the audience and saying, “We begin the bidding on Nicky Bloom at ten thousand dollars.”

Nicky scanned the audience and found Marshall in the second row to the back. She figured the first bid would come from him. Marshall liked to be bold, and would want to make his statement early.

But his paddle stayed in his lap. He was looking at the ground, avoiding eye contact.

That wasn’t good.

She turned her gaze to Vince. He too was looking at the floor.

Art?

Art was sitting way in the back, slouched low in his chair, like he was trying to hide.

“Ten thousand is the minimum for a date with Nicky Bloom,” Byron continued. “Do we have any bidders?”

Nicky took a deep breath. It was over. Kim had won. Nicky made a good show at the Masquerade, but then she lost her focus. She and Jill both. Melissa Mayhew and Frankie and thoughts of her dad and a break-in at TPM and Ryan Jenson and Sergio and the dreams—the Coronation contest had taken a back seat to all of these. While Nicky and Jill were caught up in their many distractions, Kim had gotten to Nicky’s bidders, every one of them, and now Byron would have to auction Nicky off for less than the minimum bid. Now she would suffer an indignity from which her campaign could never recover. In the entire history of Coronation, only a few girls had ever gone below the minimum at the Date Auction, and every one of them became vampire food.

In a way, it was a relief. The Bloom family could begin plotting their escape from Washington. The mission to kill Sergio Alonzo was finished. Nicky could focus all her energy on getting Frankie loose, then she could get on with her life.

“Again I call for a bid,” said Byron. “Ten thousand dollars. Going once….going twice….going three times.”

He banged his gavel. A murmur passed through the crowd. “We will remove the minimum bid from the table,” said Byron. “A date with Nicky Bloom is now available to the highest bidder at any price.”

*****

Melissa circled the entire Bloom estate, staying out of sight, looking for signs of a double-cross. She found nothing out of the ordinary and decided it was safe to show herself.

Knowing that she was about to commit treason against the clan, and feeling a bit of a thrill at the prospect of doing so, she stepped out of the shadows and onto the front porch.

She reached out with her index finger and rang the doorbell.

A young woman with short black hair and a rugged look about her answered the door.

“Good evening, Ms. Mayhew,” she said. “My master has been expecting you. Please come inside.”

With that, Melissa relaxed. Feeling vindicated, confident that she had made the right choice in coming here, she followed the young woman into the house.

This will be the beginning of something special
, she thought.
Tonight, with Falkon’s help, I will assume my rightful place atop the clan that had once belonged to Daciana Samarin.

The door closed behind Melissa with a single click, but with that click came a thousand other clicks from all over the house. The clicks were meant to be simultaneous—they had to be. Why else would so many clicks from so many different places all happen at once?

Because I am not supposed to notice them. Because he is hiding something from me.

And then she heard movement in the air above her head. Something was falling. It was going to land right on top of her.

Melissa dove out of the way and almost made it clear of the steel cage that fell from the ceiling. Almost, but not quite. It caught her ankle and pinned her to the ground with an extraordinary weight. She looked up to see the woman who had answered the door pulling two handguns from underneath her waistcoat. Behind the woman, the floor itself popped open and two men sprung out, each carrying a long silver tube in his hands. The men pointed their tubes like guns, and a burning light poured out from them. The light scorched her skin and she screamed in pain. It was like they had captured the full force of the sun in those tubes and released it in a single, white hot beam.

“No!” she shouted. “No!”

Now the woman was on her too, both guns blazing. Round after round the woman unloaded into Melissa’s chest while she was held in place, her ankle trapped by the cage.

Shrieking at the pain, feeling heavy from the lead now filling her chest cavity, Melissa put all her energy into her leg and pushed. The steel cage creaked as she lifted it off the ground.

“No you don’t!” the woman shouted, pointing one of her guns at Melissa’s leg.

She ignored the pain and pushed harder. The steel cage lilted on a corner and she was free.

“She’s out!” someone shouted. “I’m taking her now!”

Melissa heard the blade before she saw it. She was rolling across the floor, her body heavy with bullets. The woman who answered the door had unsheathed a sword and was swinging it through the air, aiming for Melissa’s neck.

Coming to a stop on her back, Melissa attacked with the only part of her body that wasn’t laden with lead. Her right leg was untouched, and with it she kicked up at a speed much faster than any human could swing a sword. While the woman was only half-way done with her swing, Melissa’s leg made contact, hitting the woman in the flank and sending her flying across the room.

The woman clear, her partners shone the laser lights on Melissa again, and she had no choice but to continue her barrel roll, this time all the way across the floor, finding the legs of a monstrous man and sending him stumbling.

His body landed flat across hers, pinning Melissa to the ground. He truly was a giant, his entire body swallowing Melissa’s with its weight and girth. Her face was buried in his chest. His waist and legs gave her complete cover.

In a fortuitous accident, this enormous man was acting as a shield from the other attackers.

“Dante!” shouted the woman with the sword. “Get up. Get off of her!”

This gargantuan man, Dante, tried to roll off Melissa. He threw his weight around with the experience of a wrestler. The physics of the situation were to his advantage. There was no way for Melissa to grab onto him and hold him in place. In half a second he would be off her and those blinding hot laser lights would be toasting her flesh again.

So she bit. Bringing forth her fangs, she bit right into his chest, slicing through layers of skin, muscle, and fat, and latching onto his sternum with her mouth. She heard him cry out in pain. She sensed him trying to push himself to his feet.

Like a dog with a bone, Melissa shook her head and tore his chest apart. She followed her nose to his heart and bit into it. The giant fell dead on top of her, and in so doing, gifted her with a few seconds of safety, which was all it took. In those seconds, her burned and charred skin healed itself. Her innards pushed the bullets out of her chest cavity, her organs clearing the metal and going into rapid self-repair.

Her strength returned and she heaved at the weight on top of her, sending Dante’s corpse flying across the room and the other hunters scurrying to avoid the three-hundred pound projectile. She saw a clear path out of this madhouse and bolted at a window, expecting to break through the glass as if she were diving into a pool.

The glass cracked but it didn’t give. There was something solid inside it. Intensely solid. It pushed back on her like steel and she fell to the ground, winded from the collision.

“Over there!” shouted a lanky man with graying hair. The man came charging at Melissa, a machine gun in his hands snapping as he ran. She jumped to her feet and leapt across the room, using the furniture like stepping stones, bounding from chair to sofa to table, all the while absorbing the bullets from the man’s gun.

To his credit, the man stood his ground, aiming his gun at Melissa until the last possible moment. As she descended on him, as their bodies crashed to the floor, as she ripped out his throat with her teeth, his gun was still firing.

Melissa took the weapon from his hands and sent a spray of machine gun fire all around the room. Spinning in a circle, she was like a sprinkler on a lawn, bullets and expended casings flying everywhere. She forced her attackers to stay down, and her body had time to expel the bullets it had taken.

When the gun ran out of ammo, Melissa threw it to the floor and reveled in the quiet of the room.

She listened for breathing. For heartbeats.

There was only one.