The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) (3 page)

“Renata,” Daciana said, shaking her head in disgust. “All this time, sitting in that chamber Falkon constructed for me, I’ve been thinking about Renata. It was my trust in Renata that allowed me to get into this mess.”

“Really?” Sergio said, eager to change the subject. “So Renata was a part of your capture?”

“Of course she was,” Daciana said. “She invited me to vacation with her in Europe. I felt like it was an opportunity for us to come closer together. Both of us had broken our bonds. We were the only two in the clan who were...”

She trailed off. She was about to say she and Renata were the only two in the clan who were single, but that would have been incorrect, because Sergio was single too. Sergio had been single his entire life.

“Anyway, I thought we could spend the time together and share our misery,” she said. “We landed in Manchester. We drove into the country. We went to the Hastings Castle.”

“The Hastings Castle?” Falkon said. “Now there’s a place I haven’t thought about in years.”

“I know!” said Daciana. “I thought about you when we arrived. The memories of that castle—I think Renata knew I would be nostalgic, and my guard would be down. She knew I was weak. The old crypt, the same place where you and I--”

“—She had you sleep in a coffin,” Sergio said.

“It reminded me so much of our time with the Hastings family. How we were expected to behave in those days.
All the formalities and traditions of being immortal. Yes, just before dawn, Renata and I went to the crypt and crawled into what I thought were matching coffins, side by side.”

“Yours was no coffin,” Sergio said.

“I made it so easy for them. I crawled into my own prison cell. I said good night to Renata and I shut the door on myself. Then I listened as Renata locked it.”

“Steel lining inside the wood?”

“Something like that,” Daciana said. “Whatever it was, I couldn’t break free.”

“You’re free now,” said Sergio. “Free to have the revenge of your choosing.”

“So you haven’t killed her yet?”

Sergio shook his head. “I haven’t had the opportunity.”

They crested a hill and saw Falkon’s villa in the valley below.

“Would you look at that?” Daciana said. “You and I came here when…what was the name of the man who owned this place when we came?”

“Giampietro,” Sergio said. “Governor of the northern province.”

“But now it’s Falkon’s,” Daciana said.

“Was Falkon’s,” Sergio corrected. “You killed him. The old law says it belongs to you.”

“Perhaps we could give the villa to this year’s Coronation winner. We could expand the clan’s reach overseas.”

“Perhaps,” Sergio said. The topic made him uncomfortable. Coronation was tied to Nicky Bloom who was tied to the lie he had told his maker. “Come on, let’s go have a look.”

They descended to the valley floor and approached the mansion at the center of the villa. Sergio gave a single kick to the tall doors. The wood splintered at the lock and the doors swung open. They stepped into the foyer.

“Quite a bit different than I remember it,” Daciana said, looking at the large entry room that greeted them. There was a chess board atop a stand made of marble. Daciana approached it and put her finger on the black queen.

“Where is Renata now?” she said.

“I don’t know. Finding you and tending to Falkon have required the full of my attention since I arrived in Italy.”

“We’ll find her soon enough,” Daciana said. “I hope she has gone back to Washington. I want to see the look on her face when she sees that I am alive and well. I will make her talk before I kill her. I want to understand what madness came over her that she thought it wise to betray me.”

Daciana explored the living space at the front of the house, then Sergio led her through the main hallway and down a flight of stairs. They came to a metal door that was locked shut, but had a keypad above the handle.

“While I don’t claim to understand Falkon and Renata’s motives for holding you prisoner,” Sergio said, “I believe it had something to do with what was happening in here.” He punched in a code on the keypad, the same code he had used to free Daciana from her prison. The door opened and they stepped into Falkon’s laboratory.

Or rather, what was left it. The floor was a mess of broken glass, papers, and wires. The prison cells where Falkon once held a dozen feral vampires were sitting open and empty. A cold wind blew into the lab through a broken window on a high wall.

Daciana smiled as she looked over the remains of the lab.

“What on earth do you suppose was happening in here?” she said.

“Horrid, miserable creatures,” Sergio said. “That’s what I found in this room. Feral vampires. Falkon was doing something unspeakable in here.”

“Really?” Daciana whispered, approaching the prison block, her eyes open in wonder. “That cagey fool was actually trying to do it.”

“You knew of his ambitions?”

“The last time I spoke with Falkon on friendly terms was some seventy years ago,” she said. “At that time, he was convinced humans were on the verge of achieving immortality for their entire race. He said we were entering an age of science, and it was only a matter of time before people solved all the great problems of the world, including death.”

“Funny that he would be so interested in such a topic,” said Sergio, “considering that death was not a problem for him.”

“Falkon was a strange soul,” said Daciana. She stepped into a prison cell on the bottom row and took a deep breath through her nose. Then another. She smelled something.

Curious what it was, Sergio stepped into the cell directly next to her and inhaled deeply.

He expected the odor of feral vampire, but that wasn’t what he smelled at all. In this cell, on the bottom left corner of the block, where it appeared the glass wall hadn’t been raised, but rather, broken out, Sergio smelled something lovely. The smell was charged with memory. Memory of a mysterious girl at the Homecoming Masquerade. Memory of a chance meeting underneath the Penbrook Theater where he allowed the girl to look into his mind. Memory of a strange encounter in this very room, of a beautiful girl standing above him, holding a length of steel pipe in her hands.

He didn’t understand what was happening. When he arrived at Falkon’s villa looking for Nicky, he found her in a spare bedroom of the mansion. But his nose was telling him that she had spent time in this prison block.

Not just his nose. His whole being. He was connecting with her now, as he had done when they danced at the Masquerade and he saw into her memory. Yes, as he stood in this prison cell, he felt Nicky’s presence. So much sorrow. Nicky Bloom had been locked in this corner for weeks, an eighteen-year-old girl trapped in the darkness, surrounded by monsters.

His anger at Falkon and Renata grew. It was a shame they had killed Falkon so quickly.
So painlessly. He would find Renata and make her pay for what they had done to—

“Sergio?”

He turned around to see Daciana standing just outside the prison cell.

“Yes?” he said.

“Something’s on your mind. Tell me what it is.”

Sergio shrugged his shoulders. “I was just dealing with my own anger at Renata,” he said, “for betraying you.”

Daciana stepped into the cell.

“Hang on,” she said. “This one smells different.”

Sergio took a deep breath. He saw a chain of events unfolding in the near future. Daciana returning to Washington; Daciana meeting the girls wearing black; Daciana learning about the new girl who had taken the school by storm…

Daciana smelling her and recognizing the scent.

“Falkon wasn’t just holding feral vampires in this place,” he said.

“Yes, I can tell,” Daciana said, now placing her nose close to the stone wall. “There was a human in here. A girl. Perfectly ripe.” She inhaled deeply. “Oh, it’s making me hungry just being here.”

At that moment, a vision came to Sergio’s mind with such speed and clarity he had to put his hand on the wall to stay upright. In the vision, he was charging at Daciana, biting into her throat, and tearing her apart at the neck.

“So who was she?” Daciana said.

Sergio’s mind envisioned his master lying dead on the floor. Dead at his own hands.

“Sergio?”

“Yes?”

“The girl in this cell. Do you know who she was?”

He had to tell her. Tell her or kill her, and he couldn’t bring himself to kill his own maker.

“It was the princess,” he said.

I have to find Nicky
, he thought.
I have to find her before Daciana does.

“The princess?”

“It’s December,” Sergio said. “The Rose Ransom contest has just come to an end.”

“Oh, yes of course,” said Daciana. “So Renata kidnapped a Thorndike s
tudent for the Ransom game and…and locked her here? Why did she do that?”

“I believe Renata’s intent was for the Rose Ransom to go unsolved this year,” Sergio said. “In fact, I believe Renata did all she could to make the
clues as hard as possible. She didn’t follow protocol on the contest. She kidnapped a girl wearing black, who just happened to be dating a boy from the wealthiest family in school. She kidnapped him too.”

“She intended to steal the Ransom money,” Daciana said.

“For all we know, she already has,” said Sergio.

“But which girl?” Daciana sniffed again. “I know the Renwick girl. It isn’t her.”

This is for the best
, Sergio thought. Soon Daciana would return to DC and learn all about the Rose Ransom. There was no way to hide Nicky Bloom from her.

The best he could do for Nicky was spin
a story to protect her.

“It’s a girl you’ve never met,” said Sergio. “A new girl at school.”

“A new girl?”

Sergio nodded.

“A delightful girl,” he said.

“What is her name?”

“Nicky.” The word tasted like candy on his tongue. “Nicky Bloom.”

Daciana stepped back and looked up at the entire prison block.

“Walk me through what happened,” she said. “You arrived in this laboratory to find a dozen feral vampires and one of the girls wearing black.”

The lies. So many lies would be required to protect Nicky Bloom. But what kind of lies would Daciana believe?

“I wanted to free the girl,” Sergio said, stepping over to the control console where he had seen Nicky release the feral vampires. “I pressed this button,” he said, pointing at a button Nicky had pushed. “Falkon arrived. We started fighting. The feral vampires helped me chase him into the woods.”

“What about the girl?” said
Daciana.

She
wielded a steel pipe over me when I was weak, as if she intended to kill me
, Sergio thought.

But she couldn’t do it.

“I left her here,” he said.

“So where did she go?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“I can take a pretty good guess,” Daciana said. “Renata couldn’t risk leaving the girl alive. She must be dead, right?”

“I don’t know,” said Sergio, lying yet again. He didn’t know where Nicky was, he didn’t know how she got out of here, but he knew with absolute certainty she was alive.

He felt it in his heart.
Nicky Bloom is alive and well, and I need to find her.

“Come on,” Daciana said. “We don’t have long before daylight, and we have an entire villa to explore.”

In his time, Sergio had visited all the great castles of Europe. He spent time in the largest palaces of the landed gentry in England, Spain, and France. He watched as Daciana built ever-larger and more opulent mansions across the United States, every new immortal getting a custom-built home that was the envy of the Western World.

He had never seen a home as magnificent as Falkon Dillinger’s.

The laboratory occupied just a tiny corner of the estate, which covered an entire valley between peaks of the Alps. Strolling across the villa, Sergio and Daciana counted eleven buildings in all, each of them beautiful and unique. Together, these buildings encircled a magnificent courtyard and statue garden.

Daciana spoke in open admiration of the place as they explored, every feature seeming to give her a new decorating idea for her own home. She was particularly enamored with the five-story library that stood adjacent to the lab.

“A space designed for someone who has all the time in the world,” was how Daciana described the library.

“Or thought he did,” Sergio added.

The area just east of the library was of interest to Sergio. It matched a vision that had been in his mind for the past four months. A small clearing near the forest, plate glass windows on the surrounding buildings, and a silver sphere mounted on a pedestal in the center of it all.

“Oh, look at this,” Daciana said, rushing at the same sculpture that Sergio had seen in Nicky’s mind. “This was his symbol, you know. Back when we all used wax seals to identify our correspondence.” Daciana circled around the silver sphere, lightly dragging her fingertips on its surface. “Falkon thought it was so amusing that he was a creature of the night who sealed his letters with a picture of the sun. It’s funny to say, but I’m going to miss him.”