Homecoming Masquerade, The (18 page)

She started with the Featherstone
boy, who was cute enough, she supposed. When he got thoroughly hot and
bothered, she moved on to the mayor’s kid, who nearly passed out by the time
she was done with him. From one to another she moved, waiting to find the
pleasure she always got from dancing with the seniors at Homecoming.

It wasn’t coming. She was
thoroughly bored with all of it this year. Too many things were wrong. Too much
was out of order for her to enjoy this night at all. Daciana was missing.
Renata was on a terror. Everything was changing. Melissa had an aching hunger
in her belly, having missed out on the chance to feast with the others after
Renata beat her in the hunt. All of this came together in a strange way for
Melissa. It gave her a feeling that immortals rarely experienced. She felt a
sense of urgency.

She felt like everything might
change at any moment, like the long party that began when she became immortal
was finally coming to an end. She felt as if all the terrible things she had
done in her life were going to come back to exact their vengeance on her, just
as she had done on Marco Clemente.

That sense of urgency, of the
past chasing her down, got all mixed up with her hunger and she found herself
with a strong desire to hunt and kill. She felt like the human part of her was
going on hiatus, and the vampire would get full reign of her body and mind. She
felt like the ballroom was a swirling mass of trouble, and at its center,
fueling it all, was some monster that had been chasing her for years, always
there, always ready to strike, but never making itself known until now.

She could smell the monster. It
was a familiar smell even if she didn’t fully recognize it. It was buried in
the folds of her mind, associated with something awful. And although it was a
smell she knew, it was also different. It had changed. Whenever it had last
entered her nose, it was a younger, riper smell.

It was a human. A human whose
scent brought about fear and regret and anger all at once, with a new, sweet
scent on top of it that appealed to her hunger in a profound way, as if she
could make the monster and the hunger go away all at once if she just bit into
the girl and—

What was that last part? The
girl? Yes. Dear God, yes that was it. It was the girl. The smell of the girl.
She was here
.

Melissa inhaled deeply through
her nose and allowed it to guide her. She turned to her left. She sidestepped
across the floor, letting the smell pull on her like a rope. As she approached
the girl and the full implications of it all became reality, Melissa realized
it was better if the girl didn’t know, at least not yet. Melissa ducked into a
shadow where she could see the girl, but the girl couldn’t see her.

The girl. The one who got away.
Nicky. She was here. She was here wearing black.

“T
he immortals have arrived,”
Nicky said.

“What? The immortals? I don’t
see them,” said her current dance partner, Marshall Beaumont.

Nicky wondered how it was even
possible that he didn’t see them. They were everywhere, roaming about and
cutting in wherever they chose. Marshall had been looking all around the
ballroom during their dance, no doubt eager to spot the immortals when they
arrived. It seemed like they were awfully hard to miss.

Unless Nicky was able to see
things the other students couldn’t.

The immortals were supposed to
be stealthy, yet, to Nicky’s eyes, they were just meandering about where anyone
could see them, not stealthy at all. It just happened to be that no one was
turning to look. It had to be some sort of mind control, some kind of groupthink
the immortals were forcing upon the ballroom. They didn’t want to be seen, so
no one was seeing them. No one, except Nicky, on whom their mind control didn’t
work.

“How do you know they’re here?”
Marshall asked.

“I don’t,” said Nicky. “I
thought I saw one, but...I don’t know. I’m probably wrong. I’m just excited that
they’re coming, I think.”

In reality she saw seven of
them. Renata, with her sunfire-colored hair; Alexander Chapman with his bond
from Germany. Mark Spinoza, Bernadette Paiz, Thomas Byrne, Lena Trang – these
creatures had been central in her life for the past six years – she had been
following them around, staking out their mansions, looking for two people they
had enslaved.

Renata, Alexander, Mark,
Bernadette, Thomas, Lena...and Dominic. The seventh vampire she saw was Dominic
Volcker, bond to Melissa Mayhew.

Gia and the strategists from the
Network were certain Nicky’s identity was safe whether or not Melissa was here.
In the years since Nicky’s escape, Melissa had reprogrammed more than a
thousand kids. It would be awfully hard to recognize a girl she spent a few
minutes with six years ago, particularly when that girl is wearing a mask.

Of course, this was just
conjecture. Nobody knew for sure what would happen. If Melissa was here, and
she did recognize Nicky, the mission was over and everyone involved was as good
as dead.

“You know what’s weird?”
Marshall said. “I don’t really care if I dance with one of them or not. I know
it’s supposed to be a big deal, but, come on, it’s just a dance.”

“You’re so full of it,” Nicky
said. “If an immortal came over here right now and cut in, you’d be on Cloud
Nine.”

“That’s what you think, but
immortals aren’t really my type,” said Marshall.

“What? You don’t go for older
women?” said Nicky.

Marshall just smiled at that one
and let it pass.

The truth was, Marshall did go
for older women, but he thought his proclivities were his own little secret.
Marshall and the junior history teacher at Thorndike, a married woman named
Suzanna Benchley, were having an affair that would be an epic scandal at school
and around town if anybody found out.

The Network stumbled onto the
affair when Nicky asked Jill to do some spying on Marshall. At the time, Nicky
had no idea Marshall was sleeping with a teacher. She was just curious about
him because he seemed like an independent spirit, and he was Nicky’s pick to
win the Brawl in the Fall fundraiser.

Jill uncovered a stream of text
messages and phone calls that suggested Marshall and the history teacher had
been seeing each other for nearly a year. It was a goldmine of dirty secrets,
and the sort of information that could get Marshall expelled. Nicky fully
intended to use it to win Marshall to her side.

If she had to. It was better to
get him on board through friendly persuasion first, if possible.

“Are you going to enter Brawl in
the Fall?” Nicky asked.

“I’m thinking about it,”
Marshall said.

“I think you should enter,” said
Nicky. “I’d bet on you if you did.”

“No you wouldn’t,” said
Marshall. “You’re flirting with me because you want my support.”

“That’s true,” said Nicky. “And
I wouldn’t waste my time if I didn’t think you were a good prospect. On your
own, you don’t have enough money to make much difference to me. But if you win
the brawl, then everyone will want a piece of you. When that happens, I hope
you remember that I believed in you first.”

“You’re a strange and surprising
girl, Nicky Bloom,” said Marshall. “Where in the world did you come from?”

“I’m from Chicago,” said Nicky.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Nicky
said with a smile. “You want to know how a new girl that nobody knows ends up
wearing black to the Homecoming Masquerade.”

Marshall nodded.

“Can you keep a secret?” Nicky
asked.

“When I want to,” said Marshall.

“Hopefully you’ll want to keep
this one,” Nicky said, and then she dove into the story about the secret
consortium of Nicky Bloom backers. From there, she went straight into her sales
pitch.

“You and I are outsiders,
Marshall,” she said. “We know we have to play the game, but we’re both doing it
by our own rules. We’d make a good team, you and me.”

“I’ve never been much of a team
player,” Marshall said.

“It’s Coronation. You have to
choose somebody. Come to my after-party tonight. It’s at the Hamilton. Jada
Razor will be there.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Marshall.

The music was winding down. The
next partner change was just a few steps away.

“I really want to see you
there,” Nicky said. “Kim doesn’t understand your role in this contest, but I
do. Right now she’s not paying you a lick of attention. She assumes you’ll be
another one of the lemmings who comes to her party.”

“Maybe she’s right.”

“Cut the crap, Marshall. You’re
training your ass off to win Brawl in the Fall. You want that prize money and
all the power that comes with it. You’re doing it in secret because you want
Kim to come begging at your door after you win.”

“How do you know about my
training?”

The music stopped. It was time
to switch.

“I know a lot of things about a
lot of people,” Nicky said. “And I’d be glad to tell you more tonight, at the
Hamilton.”

With that, she turned away,
leaving Marshall to wonder how much more Nicky knew about him. Hopefully his
curiosity would bring him to the Hamilton tonight. If he came, she’d have to
decide how much more to tell him. She couldn’t let all the secrets out at once.
Marshall was the kind of guy who—

She couldn’t finish the thought.
Her next partner was in front of her, and it wasn’t someone she had expected at
all.

“Ryan,” she said. “Are you going
to dance with me?”

Ryan grabbed her hand and threw
his arm around her back.

“Be quiet and listen,” he said.
“I need to talk to you, and there isn’t much time. Sergio’s on the floor and
will be looking to dance with you any minute now.”

“I
want you to leave with me.
Right now,” Ryan said. “I want for the two of us to walk out the front door,
get in my car, and drive. I have a hundred and forty thousand dollars in my
bank account. If we leave now, no one will think to look for us for a few
hours, and by then we’ll be in Philadelphia.”

The look in his eyes as he said
it – the sincerity in his voice – here she was, a Network spy, dancing with a
boy she was supposed to seduce...

And he was seducing her. He was
looking at her with eyes that saw right through the charade. He didn’t know she
was a spy, but he didn’t need to. He saw the real person inside, the girl Nicky
had learned to put away. Ryan knew nothing of Nicky’s history, of her agenda,
of her mission, but he saw who she was and he liked it. He connected with it,
and now that connection was pulling hard at Nicky.

That connection made her want to
stop living in the past, to face the reality that the family from her childhood
was gone and it was time to move on. Time to be someone besides the lost girl
driven by her past. Time to finally put her old life behind her and start a new
one.

“I know this guy,” Ryan
continued. “If we go to Philadelphia he can help us get away. He gives people
new identities so they can escape. He says he helps people do it all the time.”

“Ryan, I—”

“No, listen to me Nicky. This is
our only chance. I swear to you this guy is legit. I started looking into this
during freshman year. The guy’s name is Patrick. I met him online. I researched
the heck out of him. Last summer I went to Philadelphia and met him,
anonymously. I gave him a fake name, and wore a hat and sunglasses. I told him
I wasn’t ready to go yet, but I was thinking about it. He told me to come back
whenever I was ready and he’d get me out. It’s what he does. He helps people
who have gotten in trouble with the immortals, people who need to disappear
without a trace. He says there is an escape route that leads out of the
country.”

Ryan was talking about the
Network, without even knowing he was talking about it. The man he had met was
Patrick Hall, a goofy, skinny guy with salt and pepper hair who loved to make
bad jokes. When Nicky and Gia were staking out the immortals in Pennsylvania,
they stayed in Patrick’s apartment.

The escape route Patrick had
mentioned to Ryan was known as The Wormhole, and was a string of safe houses
throughout the world where the residents were Network sympathizers with the
training and connections required to forge identity papers that could get
people out of the country. If they went to see Patrick, he would draw up new
driver’s licenses and passports for them and put them on the next flight out of
the country. While they were in the air, Patrick would make arrangements for
another Network sympathizer to meet them at the airport and give them yet
another new identity. On and on they could go, bouncing from safe house to safe
house along The Wormhole until they had effectively disappeared.

“So what do you say? Let’s go
now, Nicky. The immortals are on the floor. Sergio’s going to cut in and dance
with you any minute now, and when he does, it’s all over. After you dance with
Sergio, you’ll be as committed to the contest as the people who made you
enter.”

Oh, Ryan
, she wanted to
say.
If only you knew. If only I could tell you that Sergio won’t have the
same effect on me that he’s had on everyone else, that the reason I’m here
wearing black is because the immortals can’t control me
.

Why couldn’t she tell him? If
she wanted to, she could walk out the door with him right now, just like he was
saying, and then she could tell him everything. The second they hit the highway
she could tell him the truth about what she was doing here, about how the story
she’d told him was a lie, that there wasn’t some evil interest group making her
enter the contest to defeat Kim, but that she’d entered of her own volition,
that she was here to kill Sergio.

That she was here to save the
world. That her mission was already well underway, and many people had risked
their lives to bring it this far. Jill, in particular, would be left holding
the bag if Nicky disappeared in the night. Jill, who had risked her life to
hack her way into the admissions database, who had been undercover all summer,
who had betrayed her parents the moment she told the story about a secret
consortium of which they were a part...

And Ryan. Had he given any
thought to what he would leave behind if he ran away?

“I can’t,” Nicky said.

The music was blaring now. Nicky
felt the sound vibrate in her chest, but she heard none of it. In that moment,
for her, the world was silent.

In that moment, Nicky wished she
could be the girl Ryan saw. She wished she could go away with him and hide
inside some secret life like so many other people the Network had sent away.

“We can’t leave, Ryan. We’re too
visible. Our families..”

“Our families put us in this
position,” he said.

Now Ryan was the one being
dishonest. Whatever animosity Ryan felt toward his parents, Nicky knew he
didn’t want to leave them behind for dead, and dead is exactly what they’d be
if Ryan and Nicky up and left. Nicky was a girl wearing black. There were rules
governing her movements now. If Nicky disappeared, everyone connected to her
would be suspect. The immortals would question and punish them all. The Network
would be exposed. Ryan’s parents would be killed.

“My family has done some
terrible things, but I can’t leave them to die,” Nicky said. “And you can’t
either.”

Ryan said nothing in response.
Nicky had pulled him out of that moment of bliss when all their problems could
be solved by running away. He hadn’t thought it through. He had just said it.
He wanted to just do it. Nicky loved him for that. But they both had to live in
the real world. They both had to recognize the consequences of their actions.

 They circled the ballroom
without speaking. They circled again, and Nicky put her head on Ryan’s chest.
The current song was maybe half-way done, but Nicky had a sense that their
dance would soon be over, so she she kissed him on the cheek and whispered,
“I’m sorry,” in his ear.

“I’m sorry too,” Ryan said.

A few seconds later, a dark,
shadowy presence pushed his way in between them, and Nicky was dancing with
Sergio Alonzo.