Homecoming Masquerade, The (19 page)

H
e brought darkness with him.
His presence felt cold but his touch was full of life-giving warmth. He took
her hand and drew her close. She smelled him before she really saw him. Sure,
her eyes registered his porcelain skin, his bright blue eyes behind the black
mask, his perfect nose, his perfect lips, his perfect teeth...

But what really caught her in
those first seconds was the intoxicating scent. It was like cloves and vanilla,
a fresh, healthy smell, the clean air on a mountaintop, the sort of scent you
didn’t sniff but rather inhaled.

Nicky was filling her lungs with
the smell of him when a small voice from the deepest recesses of her brain
sounded the alarm:
humans don’t smell like this
.

That voice was enough to shake
her mind loose from its trance and allow her to look at her partner’s face.
Shoulder-length black hair, tight, rigid muscles behind his face and neck, a
haunting look in his eyes.

Her new partner was Sergio
Alonzo. She was dancing with a vampire, and he was doing something to her.

With that realization came a
rush of panic. This wasn’t supposed to happen. She was immune. She had resisted
Melissa Mayhew, the best hypnotist in the Samarin clan. Surely she could resist
Sergio Alonzo.

Couldn’t she?

She felt like she was falling –
losing herself to his presence, to his strength, the feel of his body on hers...

They were dancing, soaring
around the floor, enveloped in the music. He moved with perfect confidence and
control and Nicky had no choice but to follow. She could feel her body slipping
into ever deeper submission to his. Her mind was in a daze, conscious thoughts
brief and discrete. She saw the dance floor as if from above, from out of her
own body, looking down at herself and her partner, moving in such perfect
unison that they were no longer two people, but a single being, their bodies
intertwined, their movements one with the music. She imagined her own body held
closer to his, held tightly in his arms, and he made it happen.

And the music. The gentle
bouncing motion, waves in an ocean –
he’s pulling me back to the water from
which my life had come, back to the most basic, animal part of myself. He’s
pulling me into a place where I throw aside manners, conventions, memories,
rules, a place where I give reign to the creature that lay dormant inside me
.

The rhythm was everything now.
One-two-three
one-two-three one-two-three breathe-in-me.

Those last words were like a
whisper on the wind. What did they say?

Breathe in me
.

It was a message. A signal from
a part of Nicky she was about to lose.

One two three, breathe in me.
Breathe in me one two three one two three
.

She saw a picture in her mind, a
bright silver ball with beams of sunlight bursting from all sides, and the
image made her scared. It was the first of a deluge waiting to come out.

Breathe in me
.

Something was wrong. Something
inside her head, something put safely away, wanted to come out. It was hidden
behind that bright silver ball. It spoke to her now, in her father’s voice.

We’re going on an adventure,
Nicky. We leave tonight
.

“No,” she whispered.

“No?” said Sergio. “You deny
me?”

“You go too far,” Nicky said.
The words were exhausting to her, as if every syllable was a brick she had to
push from her throat.

Sergio smiled. Such a beautiful
smile. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“I go wherever I want,” he said.

Breathe in me breathe in me
one two three one two three
.

One two three
turn
two
three breathe in me
turn
two three
.

She repeated the words to
herself in time to the music. She was back in the ballroom, matching the words
to the movement of her feet, trying to remain in the moment.

Breathe in me
.

She was dancing. Dancing with
her sworn enemy, coming back from the brink.

She looked at him with fresh
eyes. He was beautiful, nothing more. Just beautiful.

Breathe in me
.

He smelled good, but it was just
a smell.

One-two-three, one-two-three,
breathe in me, breathe in me
.

His body felt good next to hers,
but she could control her desires.

I can resist the taut muscles
on his back, the perfect lines and curves of his body
.

“You’re fighting me,” Sergio
whispered. “Why?”

Her head still in a daze, she
had no idea what to say to this question. So she told him the truth.

“I don’t want to be your slave.”

Like a dog on a leash, Sergio
pulled her to a stop. The music still played, but Sergio and Nicky stood still.
He looked right in her eyes.

“What did you say?”

“I said I don’t want to be your
slave. I want to be your equal. That’s why I wore black tonight.”

She could tell by the way he was
looking at her that this was a pivotal moment. She had not reacted as he
expected her to. Now he was suspicious. If she didn’t play this exactly right,
the entire mission was over.

Breathe in me breathe in me –
come on....breathe in me...

Her pulse, her pupils, her
breathing – Gia had warned her of this and she hadn’t prepared herself
properly. Sergio had tried to get in her head and she had pushed him out. He
knew.

They began to dance again.
Sergio was looking at her, appraising her.

“You are a very interesting
girl,” he said.

“I am who I am. Perhaps you
don’t normally encounter that with the girls wearing black.”

“I most certainly don’t.”

“Some of it’s your fault, you know.”
She felt herself sliding into character. Nicky Bloom, the girl with the nerve
to tell a vampire she wants to be his equal. Someone sassy. Someone fearless.

“Please...enlighten me,” he said.

“You just came in here with your
delicious smell, your perfect body, your brooding face behind the mask, and
then you swept me up. For a moment there, I would have been anyone you wanted
me to be.”

“But now you won’t?” Sergio
asked. There was genuine curiosity in his voice.

“I suppose that’s up to you,”
Nicky said. “I have a feeling if you wanted to, you could turn on the charm to
a degree I couldn’t resist no matter how hard I tried.”

“Perhaps we’ll find out some
day,” said Sergio. “For now, we will dance. I will lead.”

And oh did he lead. For a few
glorious minutes, they were a torrent of movement, and the sheer audacity of
what they were doing ripped at Nicky’s heart. All that she thought she knew
about herself and the character she was playing were called into question.
Years of burning, vengeful hatred for these creatures, of desire for justice,
of memory – all of it became clouded in those moments, and the best she could
do was hold on.

“Do you know why I come to the
Masquerade?” Sergio asked.

Yes. She did know why he came.
He came to dance with her, and the other girls wearing black.
He makes them
come to their own funeral
.

Nicky shook her head.

“I am supposed to get inside
your head and command you to remain loyal to the contest to the bitter end. And
when I am done, I am supposed to leave you with a mark.”

“A mark? What kind of mark?”

“You’re being coy,” said Sergio.
“But I like that. You know what kind of mark. Would you like to have it?”

“I don’t know,” said Nicky. “Is
your work with me complete?”

“It isn’t,” said Sergio. “You
pushed me out. If I am to place the command in your mind, you’ll have to allow
me back in. Do you intend to do that?”

“I don’t,” said Nicky.

“Then it will be our little
secret that I left you alone,” said Sergio. “Just make sure you don’t lose the
contest.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t lose.”

Sergio smiled, and Nicky felt
herself swoon back into the trance. Had the music continued, she might have
lost herself completely.

But the music stopped. The sound
of silence was like an alarm waking Nicky from a deep sleep.

She looked up and Sergio was gone.
A white orchid corsage was pinned to her chest.

N
icky staggered off the dance
floor and collapsed onto a stool at the bar.

“I see you got your corsage,”
said the girl next to her. It was Annika Fleming. A sad version of Annika
Fleming. All the jollity that was her normal persona had been spent, and all
that remained was a girl who was drunk.

“How was it?” Annika asked.

“How was what?” asked Nicky.

“Dancing with Sergio.”

“Did you see us out there?”
Nicky asked, wondering how anyone could have seen her at all, thinking about
how she felt like she was somewhere else entirely during that last dance.

“No. Hardly anybody sees Sergio,
even when he’s dancing with someone. He’s like that. But you have your corsage,
and you look like a girl who’s just danced with an immortal.”

Was she that obvious? Nicky was
disgusted with herself. Not only had she allowed Sergio inside her mind, but
she came away from the encounter looking like any other girl who had danced
with a vampire.

“I’m just a little tired,” Nicky
said.

“Honey, you look like you could
use a cigarette,” said Annika.

A second of silence passed
between them, then they laughed. Annika laughed a little too hard. Nicky waited
for her to finish before saying, “Jill tells me you’re not coming to my party.”

Annika’s shoulders slumped. “No,
I’m not,” she said.

“You’re scared of Kim,” said
Nicky.

“You don’t know anything about
it,” said Annika.

“I know enough,” said Nicky.
“You hate Kim Renwick. Not only do you hate her, but you hate everything she
stands for. You hate that there are some people whose whole purpose is to keep
other people down, and that it’s those people who have all the power in
Washington. You hate the thought of going to Kim’s after-party, but you’re
going anyway, and you hate yourself for it.”

“Holy shit, New Girl. That was
harsh.”

“Calling it like I see it,” said
Nicky. And she was. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear to her, she was
being completely candid. It probably wasn’t the wisest strategy. Nicky had seen
Jill out of the corner of her eye. She was ten yards behind them, watching. In
a minute, Nicky would turn Annika over to Jill so the blackmailing could begin.
As it stood, drunk, defiant Annika was going to be a difficult subject for Jill
already. If Nicky angered her, she’d make Jill’s job even harder.

“Maybe I should call it like I
see it too,” said Annika. “Maybe I should tell you that you’ve signed your own
death warrant tonight, and it’s a shame too, because I’m sure you would have
had a nice future. You’re smart, you’re pretty, tonight you’ve shown that you
have self-confidence in spades, but still you’re going to die. You’ve entered a
contest you can’t win. And don’t start telling me Jill’s bullshit about a
secret consortium. I don’t know who you’ve got backing you, but they’re not
enough. All the Renwicks have to do is snap their fingers and the richest
people in the world all show up and want to give them money. You’re right,
Nicky. I do hate the way all of this works, I hate the game and I hate myself
for playing it, but I do what I have to do. Come graduation, I’ll still be
alive. And then I’m out of here.”

“Out of here?” Nicky said.
“Where are you going?”

“None of your business,” said
Annika. “But I guarantee you this. While the rest of these fools spend their
entire lives kissing Kim’s ass, I’ll be living my own life, on my own terms.”

Living in Brazil
, Nicky
wanted to add,
with Hong Chung
.

But that wasn’t her line, it was
Jill’s, and now was as good a time as any for her to deliver it.

“Sounds great,” said Nicky. “Good
luck with that. I really mean it. I hope that you’re able to get away from all
this madness. See you around.”

As Nicky stood to leave, she put
her hand on Annika’s shoulder and gave a friendly squeeze, a gesture that
wasn’t quite a hug, but was enough to tell her she wanted to part as friends.

She’s all yours, Jill
,
Nicky thought,
and she’s ready for some tough love. Don’t fuck it up
.

J
ill watched as Nicky and Annika
sat at the bar, talking. She couldn’t hear their conversation, but she could
see that Annika was going through a full range of emotions. She recognized the
way Annika was leaning in as she spoke, moving with slow, exaggerated
movements. It was the same way she moved on the night they watched
Crimson
Sunrise
at her house. It was the way she acted when she was drunk.

Nicky said something that
agitated Annika. The way Annika responded, like a cornered dog, made Jill
nervous. She didn’t know if she could go through with this.

Spying on her classmates,
breaking into the school computer, pushing out a whisper campaign about Nicky
Bloom and a secret consortium behind her – Jill had signed up for all of it,
and, truth be told, had enjoyed doing it. But blackmail...blackmail was a
completely different universe of activity. Blackmail was forcing someone to act
against her own will. It was head-on conflict, and the thought of it terrified
Jill.

What if it didn’t work? Jill
imagined herself talking to Annika, and, in her mind, her own voice was weak.

I know about you and your
secret boyfriend. If you don’t want anyone else to know, you’ll do as I say.

What if Annika sensed Jill’s
weakness and fought back? It wasn’t like Annika was without options here. Jill
needed her, badly, and Annika knew it. Without Annika and the crowd she
brought, Nicky’s after-party was a bust. Was Jill in a position to dictate
anything to her? All Jill had on Annika was some dirty laundry, obtained
illegally. Jill had broken into Annika’s hotel room and put illegal software on
her computer. If Annika refused to cooperate and Jill had to release the dirt,
Annika could easily arrange to take Jill down with her.

It was all a giant bluff, and
Annika was sure to see that. It was a big confidence game, like everything else
in Washington, the sort of game at which Annika thrived and Jill stunk.

Nicky and Annika seemed to be
past the worst of their confrontation now. They were speaking quietly to each
other. Nicky was looking straight ahead. Annika was looking right at Nicky. In
her drunken state, Annika probably didn’t know she was staring, her eyes
affixed on Nicky’s face even as no words passed between them.

And now Nicky was getting up to
leave. It was go-time for Jill. She needed to put aside all these doubts and
just do it. She didn’t have any other options.

But Jill observed two things
happen as Nicky took her exit.

The first was a touch, Nicky’s
hand on Annika’s shoulder. It was a friendly gesture, mature and full of
self-assurance, more like a teacher to a student than one student to another,
and Annika responded in a big way. Annika leaned into Nicky’s touch, like a cat
arching its back to meet its master’s hand. As Nicky let her hand slide away,
Annika’s body followed along, extending the touch as long as possible.

The second was a stare from
Annika, practically a gape. As Nicky walked away, Annika’s eyes followed her
out, scanning from top to bottom to top again. She looked like a hungry lion
gazing upon its prey.

Or just another dude who was
checking Nicky out.

The part of Jill’s brain that
had taken in the entirety of her mother’s
Clean Street
code and seen the
error, the same part that could sift through thousands of lines of dialogue all
around and hear the pertinent bit of gossip, the one sentence that had any
meaning – it now saw all the disparate ends of her relationship with Annika,
from the Annika she barely knew before this summer to the Annika who took her
to Cozumel to the Annika who watched
Crimson Sunrise
to the Annika who
had a secret lover in Brazil.

Not a secret boyfriend. A secret
lover. A secret lover to whom Annika sent encoded messages where the other
students at Thorndike were all characters from
Crimson Sunrise
.

Jill turned around and walked
away from the bar. She went to the far wall and walked along the outer edge of
the ballroom, going all the way to the front of the mansion where she asked the
slaves to kindly open the door so she could step outside.

She ran to the far end of the
driveway and banged on the back door of her limo. Her driver, a tall and plump
fellow named Dante, popped the locks so she could get inside.

“Hello, Miss,” he said. “How was
the dance?”

“It’s still going on,” Jill
said. “I just had to come out here to think. I’ll need some privacy please.”

“Certainly,” said Dante. He
pressed a button on his dashboard and a plastic screen rose up behind his head,
giving Jill her own soundproof space.

Jill reached under her seat and
pulled out her tablet computer, which she used to log onto her system at home.
She pulled up the old surveillance files from freshman year, the text messages
and phone calls she had intercepted from her classmates in a moment of boredom.
All the data from that spying job was stored in a database that could be
filtered by name and phone number. She of course had studied Annika’s data
stream to the point of memorizing it.

Tonight she was interested in
one text message Annika had received on November 14th, a Thursday.

I really enjoyed talking to
you last night. My parents are going out of town this weekend. Come over
tomorrow and watch a movie with me
.

Annika’s response to that
message, a benign acceptance of the offer, had never struck Jill as unusual or
noteworthy. The text had come from Shannon Evans, who had been a member of
Annika’s group since the beginning. So what if they had watched a movie together
one weekend in freshmen year? The exchange was no different than a hundred
others Annika had with every one of her friends.

It was what happened after that
exchange that suddenly seemed significant to Jill, and that she now wanted to
verify. Scrolling through the rest of the file, looking at every incoming and
outgoing message from Annika’s phone until Jill had shut down the surveillance
software, there was no other communication with Shannon. None at all. Annika
texted people in her group every day, but not Shannon. And it wasn’t like
they’d had some falling out or something. Far from it. From the beginning of
freshman year right up until her untimely death, Shannon was a member of
Annika’s clique in good standing. Jill had freshman algebra with both of them
that year. Miss Metzler, fourth period – Jill remembered how Shannon and Annika
always came in to class together, how they always sat in the same two desks in
the back corner, how they giggled and carried on every day until Metzler
screamed at them to shut it.

Jill flung that data out of the
way and got into some different software, using her tablet to log into Annika’s
laptop with the spyware she had installed in Cozumel. She got into Zhang Li’s
secret email account and looked at the properties, pulling up the account
creation date.

November 17th, freshman year,
just three days after Annika’s final text message exchange with Shannon.

They had quit communicating by
text because it wasn’t secure. Now they were using anonymous web mail accounts,
named after the main characters in the movie they had watched at Shannon’s
house that weekend, a movie about two teenagers whose secret love pits them
against the rest of the world.

She pulled out her phone and
made a secure call to Alvin Green from the Network.

“Jill, I’m surprised to hear
from you. Is the dance over already?”

“Don’t worry about the dance
right now,” Jill said. “I need you to do some research, and I need it right
away. I could use an answer in the next minute or two.”

“What can I do for you, Jill?”

“I need you to hack into the
motor vehicle division in Rio de Janeiro and use facial recognition software to
find someone.”

“Wow. That’s a tall order for
the next minute or two. That could take weeks.”

“Just find a point of entry and
I’ll walk you through it.”

“Even finding a point of
entry—”

“They have a web site,” Jill
snapped. “Just get me the IP and DNS info and we’ll go from there.”

“Alright, alright, give me a
second...”

Alvin needed more than a second,
but Jill kept her cool. No use yelling at him now. She didn’t have remote
access to the Network’s facial recognition software or the databank of photos,
so she was stuck with Alvin if she wanted to finish this.

“Okay, got it,” Alvin said.

“Look for all the threads
leading out to adjacent servers,” Jill said. “Tell me what you see. All we need
is one connection and I can get you in.”

Jill took Alvin on a quick tour
of her best break-in techniques, using the Marsh Hawk Protocol to ride
Clean
Street’s
access privileges right into the master database for the Detran in
Rio de Janeiro, where all driver’s license photos were stored.

“Connect the facial recognition
software and scan the database going back to the beginning of the summer,” Jill
said.

“Whose face am I looking for?”
said Alvin.

“Shannon Evans.”