The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) Read online

“Really, it’s nothing. You can always count on my loyalty.”

  He wished the words were true, but to his ears, they sounded like another lie. In truth, his plan had nothing to do with loyalty to his maker, and everything to do with Nicky Bloom.

  Chapter 4

  Zack felt drawn to the girl.

  She was leaning against the back bumper of a silver Mercedes, her curly hair glistening under the yellow light of the sodium lamp.

  She was entirely out of place in the dirt lot. Both the girl and her car were too lovely and sophisticated to be at the Red Rocket.

  It was nearly two in the morning—hat-and-mittens weather on this night—but the girl’s hands and head were exposed. Looking out on the jumble of cars that had made it impossible for her to leave, the girl breathed into her hands as she rubbed them together.

  She was stuck.

  Zack had seen this before. There was a bit of anarchy to the way people parked their cars behind The Red Rocket. If you didn’t know what to expect, you could get boxed in.

  As he approached, Zack felt a tickle in the back of his throat. A shiver ran up his arms, escaping through his shoulders. He was nervous.

  More than nervous. There was something about this girl that frightened him, in a very good way.

  “It’s no good,” he said to her. “This bar doesn’t empty out until two-thirty most nights.”

  When she looked at him, his whole being came unhinged. Everything he thought he knew about this moment, about the girl, about himself—it was all up for debate now. She was so much more than another pretty girl at another bar on another Saturday night.

  “Do I know you?” he said. “I feel like we’ve met somewhere before.”

  She looked at him. No, not at him. Through him. He felt like an open book as he stood there, this girl appraising him with her eyes and seeing the absolute truth about who he was.

  As sudden and complete as his connection to her was his realization of how empty his life had become. For months now, some important part of his life had gone missing. He hadn’t even realized it until now, but here, in this moment, with this girl…

  Even as he told himself the very idea was ridiculous, he couldn’t help but think that it was her, that she was what he needed in his life.

  “No,” the girl said. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

  Her voice only deepened his sense that her knew her. The tone of it rang in his ears. It was like a song, a tune you think you recognize but can’t quite place.

  “See, now that you’ve said something, I swear I know you,” said Zack. “Your voice…has anyone ever told you that you have a really nice voice?”

  She smiled at him and he knew, in a deeper way than he’d ever known anything in his life, that he wanted to be with her. It was an exhilarating experience just being near her. He could feel the energy of her presence. He knew. He and this girl were meant to be together.

  “My name’s Zack,” he said. “What’s yours?”

  She hesitated before she spoke. She was nervous. Was she feeling it too?

  “My name is Jill,” she said. “Jill Wentworth.”

  *****

  Jill wasn’t thinking about the future when she introduced herself to Zack. Or the past.

  Risk versus reward, Zack’s safety, the danger she created for him with her presence here—that all washed clear from her mind when he began speaking.

  She had never meant to interact with him. She came to the Red Rocket to watch him play drums, nothing more. She wanted to see him one last time. Before she fled town, never to see him again, she wanted to know that he was okay.

  Now he was talking to her in the parking lot.

  They shook hands. They smiled at each other. They talked about the chill in the air and inconsiderate people who parked their cars on all sides of her, trapping her in the dirt lot.

  She lost control of the situation, and herself. Whatever thoughts she had of a quick getaway were gone as soon as he started speaking. She couldn’t help it. When Zack talked, she wanted to listen. Nothing else seemed as important.

  Before she knew it, they were walking down the street. And into a diner. And sitting at a table. And talking over coffee, just like they did the first time they met.

  He asked her what kind of music she liked.

  “I like jazz,” she said.

  Zack took a sip of his coffee. “This is so strange,” he said.

  “What’s strange?”

  “It’s just…no, I’m totally gonna weird you out.”

  “Tell me,” said Jill.

  “I knew you were going to say jazz. It was like, right before you said it, I knew that was the answer you were going to give. Isn’t that odd?”

  “It’s not that odd,” said Jill. “Maybe you’ve just got me figured out.”

  Marty’s. That was the name of the diner. Neon script hanging in the window, pancakes, eggs, and coffee at all hours of day and night, served by poorly paid waitresses wearing sneakers with thick rubber soles. In another era, Jill and Zack would have put an ashtray between them and enjoyed cigarettes with their coffee.

  She wanted so badly to kiss him. She wanted to go to his side of the booth, put her arms around him, apologize for putting him in harm’s way, and tell him everything.

  “Are you sure we’ve never met before?” Zack said.

  “I think I’d remember,” said Jill.

  She was flirting now, leading him on, telling him with her manner that he was more than welcome to look at her the way he was looking at her now.

  It was entirely the wrong thing to do and she felt rotten for doing it. You are a thoughtless, selfish, monster of a person, Jill Wentworth. You put Zack in danger once before and it was only a single turn of good luck that kept him from being killed.

  Now she was doing it again, in spite of herself. She was doing it again because of the way he looked at her. The way he saw her.

  “You probably think I’m using a line on you or something,” said Zack. “I swear I’m not. It was just…when you said you liked jazz…”

  She had never seen Zack like this. He was nervous.

  Even in the truly terrifying moments, like when he drove up to her house and found a vampire slave chasing her with a syringe, or when he stood face to face with a vampire in her living room, he hadn’t been this way.

  It was the first time she’d ever seen him scared.

  “Enough talk about me,” Jill said. “Let’s talk about you for a minute. Tell me something about yourself, Zack.”

  *****

  Tell her something about himself?

  Zack had so many things he could say.

  I’m lost. Those were the first words that came to mind.

  I’m so lost I don’t really know where I am or how I got here. I’ve felt this way for weeks, maybe months. I can’t even remember when it began. I know I was happy once, but I can’t remember why. I don’t know where to find the happiness again. I’ve been looking and looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be found. That is, until tonight.

  “Well,” he began, “I play in a band. You know that already, though.”

  The band. Sometimes the band made his mind go quiet. The simple rhythms of the drums, the movement of hands and feet, coordinating the sounds of snare, bass drum, and high hat.

  He had come to believe the band, and only the band, had the potential to bring him happiness if he could figure out how to fill the giant hole in his life.

  He had thrown so many things into that hole. Alcohol, pills, video games, Lana…

  As if summoned by the thought of her, Lana called Zack at that moment. It was only out of habit that he pulled the phone from his pocket and looked at the screen.

  How unwelcome her name was in his world tonight. More than unwelcome. Distasteful. Her presence, even virtually, defiled the moment. Lana was the opposite of the girl sitting in front of him. Whereas Jill made him believe there was hope for something better in life, Lana’s name on his phone reminded him ho
w elusive happiness had been.

  He silenced the phone and put it back in his pocket.

  “What brought you out to our show tonight anyway?” he said.

  With a smile on her face, Jill wagged her finger through the air. “We’re talking about you, remember?”

  God, her smile. Jill wasn’t the conventional knockout that Zack might approach at the bar. She was much more than that. Her beauty was intimate. It spoke to Zack on a personal level.

  “You play in a band,” she said. “What else?”

  “What else?” Zack repeated, quietly.

  Some mornings I wake up with absolutely no idea what happened the night before. My girlfriend is someone who was in my bed on one of those mornings, and I swear, the first time I woke up next to her, I had no idea who the hell she was. I start drinking with my bandmates during practice in the afternoon and don’t stop until I’m passed out after my gig, then I have such a headache the next morning I have to kill it with these big white pills Lana buys on the street. I spend my days in a stupor.

  I’ve been sleepwalking through life, and it seems like I’m always struggling to remember a time when it wasn’t like this.

  Talking to you, I feel like I’m waking up.

  “I do landscaping work to help pay the bills,” he said.

  “Oh? What kind of landscaping work?”

  “Private residences, mostly. I mow lawns, prune trees, pull weeds.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I used to.”

  “You used to? Does that mean you don’t like it anymore?”

  Zack looked down at his coffee. This was so hard. He barely knew this girl and he wanted to tell her everything. He wanted so badly to just open up and pour out his soul for her to see.

  For her to fix.

  Who was she? Why was he so crazy about her?

  Zack had never thought of himself as a romantic. Love at first sight, head over heels, soulmates—to him, those were cotton candy daydreams for preteen girls. In Zack’s mind, love was something you nurtured over time. It was something you built, not something you ‘fell into.’

  “I used to like landscaping because it gave me time to think,” he said.

  “What changed?” said Jill.

  “I don’t know. Let’s be done talking about me for a bit. You’re the interesting one at this table.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” said Jill.

  “No, I can tell.”

  “Can you now?”

  “Yes! The same way I knew you were going to say jazz when I asked you what kind of music you liked. I may not know much about you but I’m certain you’ve got an interesting story to tell. Just looking at you, I swear, I could almost tell it myself.”

  “Try it then, if you’re so sure. What’s my story, Zack?”

  Zack sat forward, putting his elbows on the table. “For one thing,” he said, “you’re not satisfied to live a normal, boring life. Am I right?”

  “I feel like I’m having my horoscope read to me.”

  “I’m serious! Tell me that I’m wrong. You’re someone who wants to do something special with your time on this earth.”

  Jill wrapped her hands around her coffee mug. She looked pensive. There was something on her mind. How Zack longed to know what was going on in her mind!

  “Of course I want to do something special with my life,” she said. “Don’t we all?”

  *****

  She still loved him. That was the hard part of all this.

  No matter how she spun it in her mind, no matter what angle she took to approach the problem, the solution was always the same.

  She shouldn’t be here. The right thing to do was get up and walk away. She was putting Zack in danger, just like she had before.

  More than that, she was being downright cruel. Zack clearly had feelings for her. Bernadette had wiped away his conscious memories of Jill, but something remained.

  Some desire, some memory of the body, or the deepest depths of his mind, some piece of truth that hung around inside him, waiting to be coaxed out—Jill knew all about this. The same vampire who messed with Zack’s mind also tinkered with Jill’s. Bernadette had tricked Jill into believing all sorts of fantasy about a make-believe person named Tarin who always said exactly what Jill wanted to hear. When Gordon deprogrammed Jill, he didn’t erase Tarin so much as bring forth the truth, which had always been in Jill’s mind, but had been inaccessible to her when she was under the vampire’s spell. Now reality and fantasy coexisted in her memory. She could still see Tarin, could still hear his voice, but she knew he was fiction. She knew it because she could see Bernadette in those memories too. She could see the truth Bernadette had made her forget.

  The truth about us is still in there, Zack, she thought. If we wanted to, we could help you remember it.

  “You’re rich,” Zack said.

  “Excuse me?” said Jill.

  “You wanted to hear me guess about your story. That’s where I’m starting. You’re not from the neighborhood. You live closer to the action. Your family is plugged in.”

  “Plugged in?”

  “Yeah, you know—you guys have access. That’s what DC is all about, isn’t it? Access. You’re plugged in.”

  “You don’t know a thing about me,” Jill said with a smile. “What makes you so sure I’m plugged in.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Zack. “Maybe it’s something about the way you walk. Or your voice—you have the accent of those people in Potomac.”

  “The accent? I didn’t know Potomac had its own accent.”

  “Well it does and you’ve got it. And those boots you’re wearing--”

  “What’s wrong with my boots?” Jill said, lifting her leg to make one boot visible.

  Zack let out a laugh. “Nothing at all,” he said. “That’s just it. Those are the kind of boots you don’t buy in a strip mall. You probably didn’t even get those in DC, did you?”

  Jill looked down at her brown leather boots, remembering well when she bought them. The summer before, when she was courting Annika and Mattie, trying to infiltrate their group. They had gone on a road trip to New York, and shopped along the way in half a dozen boutiques in Connecticut.

  “Okay Smartie,” she said. “You’re right. I didn’t get these boots in DC.”

  “And that scarf,” said Zack. “You bought that scarf to go with those boots, didn’t you?”

  He was being playful with her, but there was something serious underneath the banter. Zack was showing her just how well he knew her. How thoroughly he understood who she was.

  The poor guy was probably working it out in his own mind. Here was this girl he had just met tonight, and something was familiar to him. It had to be driving him nuts.

  Jill wanted to set his mind at ease. She wanted to tell him this wasn’t crazy, that he really had seen her before, that his feelings weren’t some oddball bit of infatuation, but were rooted in something real.

  Something she felt too.

  For the second time that night, Zack’s phone began buzzing. For the second time, he looked perturbed at the interruption.

  “Hang on a second,” he said. “I’m just gonna turn this thing off.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” said Jill.

  He had already pulled the phone out of his pocket.

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re enjoying a conversation with somebody it’s nice to shut out the interruptions.”

  He was moving so quickly, almost angrily, that he fumbled the phone in his fingertips, and it clattered to the table.

  “Easy there,” said Jill.

  “Sorry,” said Zack, shaking his head.

  Jill noticed two things before Zack managed to scoop up his phone. The first was that his hands were shaking. Badly.

  Why are you so shaky, Zack?

  The second thing she noticed was the name and picture on the phone. The picture was of a beautiful girl with straight black hair, dark red lipstick
, and a sassy look in her eyes. Above the picture was a single word.

  Lana.

  No last name. That knockout in the picture, whose eyes just seemed to drip with sex, was recorded in Zack’s phone by a first name only.

  Zack pressed and held the power button on his phone.

  “There,” he said. “No more interruptions.”

  He was flustered. His breathing was irregular. A bead of sweat had formed on his temple. His lower lip was quivering.

  Who the hell is Lana?

  As Zack put the phone back in his pocket, Jill felt the weight of the past three months settle in on her shoulders.

  Zack had walked out of her house without a single memory of Jill in his mind. He had driven home and gone to bed that night, unaware that his girlfriend was in trouble with a vampire, or that he even had a girlfriend.

  He woke up the next morning and got on with the life he had been living before he and Jill ever met. Then he lived that life for three months.

  While Jill had been hacking into a vampire’s phone and frantically chasing Rose Ransom clues, Zack had been living three months of his own life without a single thought of Jill.

  He had a girlfriend now. Of course he had a girlfriend – it had been three months! She couldn’t just expect him to sit around and wait for her. He wouldn’t even know what he was waiting for!

  “Okay, where were we?” Zack said. “Your boots and scarf. You bought them together didn’t you? You bought that scarf, fully intending to wear them with those boots.”

  “Zack…I…”

  “You can’t help but be fashionable,” Zack said. “It’s the world you live in. That’s your story, Jill. I’m sorry, I mean, part of your story. You live in a world where people look like a million bucks every day and everywhere they go, and you are at ease blending into that world, even though it’s not who you really are.”

  She felt out of place. The phone calls from Zack’s girlfriend had dragged her back into an ugly reality. I shouldn’t have come here. I need to let him go

  She felt like an intruder. Zack had his own life now. Jill, by her mere presence, was threatening to rip him out of that life, and put him in danger again.