The Homecoming Masquerade

by Baum, Spencer

  “We’re almost done dancing, Brian. I’m going to count backwards from five. When I get to one, you will remember none of this conversation. You will never know that your desire to be a nudist came from me. To you, it will seem like a piece of you that has always been there, but that didn’t come to fruition until now.”

  “I am, and always have been, a nudist.”

  “Good, Brian. 5…4…3…2…1.”

  “I really do like to look at you, Melissa,” Brian said.

  “I know you do.”

  Melissa stretched upward with her neck and gave Brian a soft kiss on the lips, just enough to drive him crazy, then she turned away and disappeared into the crowd. For the rest of the night she would cut in with whomever she pleased, allow them to fawn on her, then, at the moment her dance partner was insane with lust, she would leave him and move on to someone else.

  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.

  25

  “The 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.
r />   “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.”

  26

  “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.

  27

  He 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…