Homecoming Masquerade, The (9 page)

N
icky didn’t even try to strike
up a conversation with Art. He was one of Kim’s little lapdogs, eager to follow
her wherever she went, do her bidding, and kiss her ass. Anything Nicky said to
him would be reported to Kim, so it was best not to say anything at all.

Art didn’t seem to mind.

As they made the first turn,
Nicky thought about Jill’s description of Art in the briefing book.

A chip on his shoulder...a
disappointment to his father...a gym rat...big muscles, but about as macho as a
goldfish...

Nicky had never met Art’s
father, but she had heard all about him. A notorious trophy hunter, Merv Tremblay
used his extraordinary wealth to fund safaris all over the world, and brought
home lots of exotic work for the taxidermist. The Tremblay mansion in Potomac
was known for being a zoo of dead animals. Buffalo, elk, antelope, wild boar,
rhinoceros – even an African elephant stood in the Tremblay estate, a stuffed
relic of a once majestic creature, killed not because nature demanded it, but
because a man thought it would be fun.

Vampire Envy
. It was
something the Network saw all the time with these insider types. Regular
interaction with vampires made them into pathetic imitations. They couldn’t
hunt humans, so they hunted rhinos. They couldn’t own slaves so they hired
full-time servants and treated them like dogs. They couldn’t stay young forever
but used plastic surgery to try. Some sufferers of vampire envy ran afoul of
the law, thinking they should be allowed to do whatever they pleased, just like
the immortals.

Some did far worse. The Network
had its suspicions about Merv Tremblay and the sorts of things he did on his
round-the-world hunting trips. There were places in the developing world where
rich people could pay large sums of money to gain some of the privileges of an
immortal, even if only for one night. A quick glance at the stamps on Merv’s passport
suggested he might be frequenting such places. If he was, then Art had a truly
heinous man for a father.

Nicky felt bad for Art, growing
up in the Tremblay house. It was bad enough that they all were the immortals’
playthings. To have some sick immortal wannabe as your father – the poor guy
was born to be rotten.

They had been dancing for two
minutes now, and Art was really starting to lose his way. His feet were so far
from the rhythm that Nicky tried to take the lead, eliciting the first words
from Art’s mouth since the dance began.

“Stop it” he said. “The guy
leads.”

He was so drunk she could have
lit his breath on fire. Apparently, he wasn’t done hitting the booze either.
With every turn around the ballroom floor, he was glancing over to the bar, as
if he couldn’t wait to get back there at intermission and have another. Nicky
tried to follow his eyes, but saw nothing of interest back there. All the girls
wearing black were on the dance floor, as were most of the Renwick groupies Art
liked to hang out with. The only person from Art’s group of friends who wasn’t
dancing was Rosalyn. She was standing alone in limbo-land, half-way between the
bar and the ballroom, cradling her unusually full goblet of wine with both
hands.

“I’ll let you lead when you start
leading,” Nicky said.

Art grunted and shook his head.
Stupid
drunk
, Nicky thought.

She had fallen into the habit of
looking for Marshall on the dance floor, but realized it wasn’t necessary this
time. Intermission would follow this dance, so it didn’t matter how close she
was to Marshall when the music stopped. She couldn’t spot him on the crowded
floor anyway.

She did, however, find Ryan. He
was dancing with Pauline Wabash. As they swayed in front of the band, Ryan and
Nicky’s eyes met for a second. He made no effort to look away.

God, he was beautiful. It was a
testament to how messed up this school was that a guy who looked like Ryan
Jenson could somehow become an outcast. Now a few minutes removed from the
revelation that Kim was blackmailing him, Nicky was more puzzled about Ryan
than ever.

Before tonight, Nicky had
convinced herself that she had Ryan all figured out. She thought the reason he
had no friends was because he refused to make any. She thought he was different
than the other students because he didn’t care about the popularity games,
about the things that drove every interaction at school and informed the
behavior of every student. Ryan didn’t care who was going to win Corornation,
or how he could get an in with that person. He didn’t care about increasing his
social standing, or counting the number of people above him on the popularity
ladder.

Or so Nicky thought. The fact
that Kim was blackmailing him made her wonder. Blackmail only works if the
victim doesn’t want the information released. If Ryan didn’t care about his
social status, then he wouldn’t care if some embarrassing bit of info leaked
into the gossip current.

Which meant that Nicky had
misjudged him, or whatever secret Kim was holding over him was bigger than
school gossip. It meant Ryan did in fact care about his social standing, or, if
he didn’t, Kim had found a way to make him care. She had something on him so
good he wouldn’t even consider Nicky’s offer.

Whatever it was, it was a
problem Nicky had to solve right away. Either she had to figure out how to free
Ryan from Kim’s blackmail, or find another mega-billionaire to court. And the
only kid in school whose wealth was anything close to Ryan’s was the doofus she
was dancing with now.

Nicky and Art started their
third lap of the ballroom. As they made the turn, Nicky’s eyes, which had been
on Ryan this whole time, caught sight of Rosalyn. Her face, hidden behind a
gaudy golden mask in the shape of a butterfly, became visible over Ryan’s
shoulder, and gave Nicky pause.

Rosalyn had been looking right
at her.

What in the world was up with
that girl? Rosalyn had been standing there the entire dance, just holding onto
her wine.

Her totally full glass of wine,
from which she, the class lush, hadn’t taken a single sip.

As they rounded the bend on the
other side of the ballroom, coming towards Rosalyn, Art’s steps fell out of
rhythm again. And he wasn’t letting Nicky turn. It was a waltz. They were
supposed to turn. But Art, who had been dancing correctly just a few steps ago,
was now moving in a very non-dancelike motion. He was pushing Nicky in a
straight line going backwards.

Even as her back was turned,
Nicky saw the whole thing come together in her mind. Art Tremblay had come out
of nowhere at the end of the last dance and pushed Marshall out of the way,
forcing Nicky to be his partner. Rosalyn had ordered a full goblet of wine at
the beginning of this dance, and then held it in place as she hovered near the
dance floor. It was the final dance before intermission, meaning there would be
no time to arrange an outfit change before the immortals hit the floor.

The grandfather clock, the
orchestra, Ryan and Pauline, the bar – Nicky used all of these to orient
herself and get ready for what was coming. Art intended to push her into
Rosalyn. Sure enough, as they got closer, he leaned in and tried to put his
hands on her shoulders. Nicky grabbed tightly onto his wrists. She found it all
to be surprisingly easy.

Big muscles, but about as
macho as a goldfish.

Allowing Art’s own momentum to
do the work, Nicky leaned hard to the inside, and Art swung around behind her,
crashing into Rosalyn. The wine spilled all over them both. Nicky didn’t get
hit by a single drop.

“What the fuck?” Rosalyn yelled.

The music and dancing stuttered
to a stop. The ballroom went silent. All eyes were on Nicky. It suddenly felt
very familiar, like the opening moments of the night happening all over again.

Nicky looked around the room.
When she found Kim, she smiled at her, and said two words. She directed the
words right at Kim, but spoke them loud enough for everyone to hear.

“You missed.”

Before the Homecoming
masquerade, before her first day at Thorndike, before the Network, before there
even was a Nicky Bloom, there was a girl named Celeste. Celeste Nicole Allen,
but her dad called her Nicky.

Celeste is just too beautiful
a name to throw around willy nilly
, her dad had said to her once.

Celeste was her mother’s name.
And her grandmother’s. Nicky never knew either of them.

When Nicky and her dad hit the
road, she had to leave the name Celeste behind.

“It will always be our secret,”
said her dad, “but never more than a secret. We’ll never tell anyone else,
okay? Starting now, Nicky isn’t just your nickname, it’s your real name.”

Nicky’s first memory was when
she and her dad went to visit the man with the scar and the eye patch. She was
five. In later years, she would discover that most children had at least some
memories from before they were five. Frankie could remember a day all the way
back to when he was three.

But for Nicky, everything before
age five was a blank. The timeline of her life began with the man with the eye
patch. They were in a cluttered room with two chairs and a desk. The man gave
Nicky’s dad a shoebox full of papers.

Those papers were their new
identities. A birth certificate for Nicky, a driver’s license for her dad,
Social Security cards for both. Nicky’s new name was Nicky Jennifer Crenshaw.
Her dad’s new name was Bruce Crenshaw. They were from Windsor, Connecticut,
wherever that was.

“Why do we have to change our
names?” Nicky asked her dad.

“Because there are bad people in
the world who don’t like us, but they’ll never be able to find us so long as we
don’t use our real names.”

This is what she remembered
about her dad. He was a tall man with the same reddish-brown hair that she had.
He had big, strong forearms. He kept glasses in his shirt pocket and pulled
them out whenever he needed to read something. He didn’t talk a lot. He trusted
Nicky to do whatever she wanted to do with her time, and he almost never
scolded her about anything.

She remembered when her dad told
her that she did have a mother, once.

“You’re going to look just like
her some day,” her dad said.

After they said goodbye to the
man with the eye patch and left, they went to a big parking lot full of RV’s.
Her dad bought one. He and Nicky drove it off the lot, onto the freeway, and
across the country.

They went from town to town,
parking in open fields with other nomads, doing what was necessary to survive,
and moving on. When Nicky started her thieving habit, it wasn’t from need, but
desire. She was a kid. She saw stuff and she wanted it. She and her dad walked
through grocery stores and she put candy in her pockets. She followed her dad
into the thrift store with a bare neck and came out wearing a scarf. The first
time she picked a pocket was at a bus stop in Atlanta, taking some guy’s wallet
while he spoke on the phone. The first time she burgled a house, she was eight
years old.

As she grew older, she came to
understand that her life wasn’t normal, that most people would find her way of
living to be crude and frightening. She knew that when people spoke of
“jackals,” they were talking about her. A jackal was the nickname for all the
many homeless or near-homeless thieves who roamed the streets. It was spoken
with disdain, with pity, even.

But to Nicky, it was a marvelous
life. Sneaking into people’s pockets, their cars, their homes, and taking what
she wanted—it was a game to her, and the better she played it, the more they
had to eat that night. Life was a joy, and after they picked up Frankie it got
even better.

Frankie Velasquez was an
eight-year-old jackal they found walking along Highway 44 in Connecticut. It
was raining, so Nicky’s dad pulled over to give him a ride. When Nicky’s dad
asked Frankie where he was going, Frankie shrugged his shoulders.

“Alright then,” said Nicky’s
dad. “If you have no place to go, you’ll ride with us.”

In Frankie, Nicky had a partner
in crime, a playmate, and a brother. Together, they discovered that a
two-person team could do more than just burgle homes. Two people working
together could pull off a heist.

Finding that convenience store
clerks were mistrustful of Frankie with his dark hair and skin, Nicky concocted
a technique where Frankie stood in the back of the store, drawing all the
cashier’s attention, while Nicky roamed the aisles filling her pockets. Growing
bolder, the two of them executed a heist in Missouri where Frankie shoplifted
in plain sight, causing the shopkeeper to chase him out of the store, and
leaving the cash register available for Nicky to empty. Growing bolder still,
they broke into the cleaning closet of an old hotel, stole the master key, and
went room to room, announcing themselves as housekeeping, and opening the door
to any room where no one answered. They hit the jackpot in Room 1402, finding a
big wad of cash and a pair of diamond earrings in an open suitcase.

Their boldest heist ever came in
Dallas. Nicky and Frankie were roaming through alleys and backyards in a
wealthy neighborhood, watching families come and go, getting the lay of the
land. They got a little careless in the yard of a particularly large house, and
a little boy poked his head out the second story window to get a better look at
them.

“Run,” Frankie whispered.

“No, wait,” Nicky said. She and
the boy were looking right at each other now. She waved at him. He waved back.
A minute later, the boy came down, and the three of them played tag in the
boy’s backyard.

The little boy’s name was
Timothy. He was six. Completely fascinated with Nicky, Timothy didn’t find it
at all strange that she and Frankie were roaming around behind his house. When
he invited them inside, Nicky told Timothy they would only go in if he agreed
to tell his parents that Frankie and Nicky went to his school.

“But you don’t go to my school,”
Timothy said.

“Yes we do,” said Nicky. “We
hang out with the big kids. You’ve seen us before. We’re on the playground all
the time.”

She spoke with such authority in
her voice that Timothy immediately agreed, saying, “Oh yeah, now I remember
you.”

“So you’ll tell your parents we
go to your school, right?”

“Yes.”

Nicky and Frankie shared a look
as Timothy let them inside his house. Without a word between them, they both
understood how this heist was going to work.

Timothy introduced Nicky and
Frankie to his mother, saying in a loud, clear voice, “They go to my school.
I’ve seen them on the playground with the big kids.”

Nicky convinced Timothy’s mother
that she lived in one of the mansions down the street, that Frankie was her
classmate from a few blocks away and was spending the day with her. She talked
about how much fun it was to play with Timothy in the back yard, and said nice
things about the décor in the house.

“May I use your restroom?”
Frankie asked, in an exceptionally polite voice.

“Of course,” said Timothy’s
mother. She pointed Frankie down the hall and to his right.

While Frankie was gone, Nicky
talked about anything and everything that might keep Timothy’s mother from
stepping out of the room. She asked about her job. Timothy’s mother said her
job was to raise Timothy.

“What about Timothy’s father?”
Nicky asked.

“He’s a doctor.”

“So he saves people’s lives?”

“Sometimes. Mostly he helps
people.”

“I bet he’s a really nice
person. You seem really nice too. I knew Timothy had nice parents. Everyone at
school gets along real good with him. Do you like school, Timothy?”

Nicky went on like this for ten
minutes, keeping Timothy and his mother trapped in the sitting room until
Frankie returned.

“Nicky, I forgot. My mom’s
coming to pick me up at two. We have to go,” Frankie said.

“Oh, okay,” said Timothy’s
mother. “Do you kids need a ride?”

“No, thank you ma’am,” said
Nicky. “Like I said, just down the street.”

And with that, they were gone,
stepping out the front door, Frankie’s pockets stuffed to the gills with stolen
jewelry and cash.

Among the loot was an oversized
silver cuff bracelet with a rugged texture hammered into the metal. Nicky
really liked that bracelet. When the end came, she was sad for the loss of her
family, of course, but she was also sad for the loss of that bracelet.

Nicky didn’t understand the way
the world worked back then. She didn’t know anything about Washington, the
Samarin clan, Thorndike Academy, the Farm, or the many institutions the
immortals had set up to take honest people’s money and give it to the
bloodsuckers. But she did know that people like her weren’t safe, that children
who didn’t live in actual homes had a tendency to disappear in the night.

Still, when the end came, it
surprised her. They were in Danville, Vermont, continuing their northward trek
after Nicky and Frankie’s fabulous heist in Dallas. Nicky and Frankie went into
town that day to spend the money they had stolen. They returned to the RV at
sundown and played cards. Nicky’s dad came back just before midnight. They
locked the door, got in their respective beds, and said good night.

Nicky remembered having terrible,
vivid dreams that night. She dreamt about monsters with poison fangs, prison
cells with burning hot walls, thousands of spiders eating her skin...when she
woke up, she wasn’t in the RV anymore. She was tied to a chair in a small room
with cinderblock walls and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. A
beautiful girl with short blonde hair, her body only eighteen or nineteen years
old, sat across from her.

“Hello, Nicky,” she said. “My
name is Melissa.”

As Melissa spoke, she didn’t
look at Nicky, she looked into her. She gazed in Nicky’s eyes, as if Nicky’s
pupils were tiny windows to the brain.

Nicky had never seen a vampire
before, but she’d heard about them. She knew they could control your thoughts,
and when they wanted to get inside your head, they looked in your eyes. The way
this girl was looking at Nicky, the way she was speaking...

Was Melissa a vampire? It seemed
like Nicky should have felt something different if she was.

Melissa started saying the
strangest things. She told Nicky a list of rules or something, and after every
statement, she asked Nicky if she understood.

There are yellow lines
painted on the floor that mark the borders of the farm. You will not cross the
yellow lines unless a supervisor tells you to. Do you understand?

“Yes,” Nicky said. What else was
she going to say? If this girl was a vampire, Nicky certainly wasn’t going to
argue with her.

You are to control your
emotions, never allowing yourself too much joy or sadness. Do you understand?

Nicky never had a problem controlling
her emotions. “Yes,” she said.

You will tell me your full
name now as it is written on your birth certificate.

Which birth certificate? Nicky
thought, and almost smiled. “Nicky Jennifer Crenshaw,” she said.

You will not speak unless
spoken to. Do you understand?

“Yes.”

And on and on Melissa went,
staring at Nicky and giving these odd commands. Nicky said yes to all of them. Then,
as suddenly as the session had begun, it was over. Melissa got up, untied
Nicky, and walked out, leaving the door open behind her. Nicky waited until the
sound of Melissa’s footsteps had faded into silence, then walked out of the
room, down the hall, and out the front door, stepping over a yellow line
without the slightest feeling of hesitation or remorse. She ran down the hill
and into the wetlands below, expecting to find her dad and Frankie out there
waiting for her.

Search lights, barking dogs,
wet, mucky marsh, alligators, snakes, and lots of mosquitoes. There were
pursuers on the first day, but she lost them in the night and they never caught
up with her again. At dusk on the second day, she stepped on a water moccasin
and the snake responded with a sharp bite just above her ankle. That night,
sick and delirious, she collapsed under a tree, where she almost certainly would
have died were it not for a young Network Operative named Gia Rossi, who found
her in time to provide life-saving first aid and get her out of the swamp.

“You were on the Farm,” Gia told
Nicky many days later. “You were meant to be enslaved. That blonde woman who
spoke to you is an immortal named Melissa Mayhew. She was trying to reprogram
your brain. Somehow, it didn’t take. That’s why you were able to leave. Had the
reprogramming worked, you never would have been able to step across the yellow
line.”

“Why didn’t it work on me?”
Nicky asked.

“I don’t know but I’m quite
curious,” Gia said. “As far as I know, you are the first person who ever
escaped from the Farm.”

––––––––

A
fter nursing Nicky back to
health, Gia tried to get a look inside her mind.

“Melissa Mayhew is notorious for
leaving little traps in people’s heads,” Gia said. “For all we know, Nicky, she
might have arranged it so you could walk out, and at some point today,
tomorrow, or in ten years, some hidden programming that you can’t remember will
kick in and you’ll be her slave.”

Gia had Nicky sit in a cushy
blue chair and try to clear her mind. At Gia’s instruction, Nicky took slow,
deep breaths, one after another. She stared at a single spot on the ceiling
while Gia spoke soft, simple commands, telling Nicky to relax her body and
mind.

It didn’t work.

“Funny,” Gia said. “I’ve never
had that happen before.”

“I was trying to relax,” Nicky
said. “Trying to do what you said.”

“Maybe you were trying too
hard,” said Gia. “Let’s start over. Just sit back and relax. Listen to me, but
don’t try to do what I’m telling you to do. Just relax and listen.”