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

  That wasn’t part of the ritual.

  Nicky had come to him tonight. Without even knowing it, she had entered his world. Forces outside them both were conspiring to bring them together. I need to have faith that whatever brought us together tonight will continue to push us forward, he thought. I need to have patience, and allow the bond and its ritual to guide me.

  His ear pressed against the back door, he could hear Jill and Nicky talking. They were speaking about someone named Frankie. Someone who, apparently, had left the house while they were away.

  There was sadness in Nicky’s voice as she spoke of this person. A minute after the conversation ended, a window on the near side of the house slid open. Nicky poked her head out. Pressing her elbows onto the windowsill, she looked up at the moon, longingly.

  You are sad, Nicky, he thought. And you don’t understand why. You feel empty and incomplete. I will help you understand your feelings.

  Nicky closed the window and walked away. But she left the window unlocked.

  The forces bringing us together are larger than either of us understand, Sergio thought.

  Staying low and close to the house, he went to the window. He looked inside, peering into a small laundry room. Beyond that room was a galley kitchen.

  Quietly, he pushed the window open and crawled inside.

  He sensed her presence immediately. The house smelled like she was here. This is it, he thought. After all these years, finally, my moment can begin.

  But only begin. The ritual. It was all about the ritual now. He would open the door for Nicky tonight. She would have to choose to step through. She would initiate the music that would reach its crescendo five months later after the ritual was done and they were ready to seal their bond.

  The only sounds in the house were light footsteps of two people preparing themselves for bed. Sinks went on and off, dresser drawers opened and closed, lights throughout the house switched off, starting in the front room and falling like dominoes through to the back.

  When the house was dark and silent, Sergio moved further inside.

  He passed through a small living area that was empty of people. He went into a hallway and walked to the end, where he found a young man asleep on a cot.

  The Jenson boy. Yes, he was meant to be part of the ritual. When Sergio stood in the forest beyond Renata’s mansion, listening to Nicky and Jill talk, it was clear that Ryan Jenson was the tether holding Nicky in place. She wanted to stay in Washington—Sergio had heard it in her voice—but as soon as Jill mentioned Ryan Jenson, Nicky had gone silent.

  Sergio leaned down and whispered into Ryan’s ear. Nicky cannot leave. It is her destiny to stay at Thorndike and win the Coronation contest. It is her destiny to be with me.

  It was freeing to say the words. Never before had anything sounded so correct to him. So precisely true. And when he was done telling Ryan all that was in his heart, he asked the boy for confirmation that he understood the implications of this truth.

  “Do you understand?”

  From the depths of his slumber, the Jenson boy opened his mouth to acknowledge Sergio’s commands.

  “I understand.”

  Next, Sergio went into a bedroom, where he found a man and woman pressed together on a double bed. He didn’t know who they were or how they were involved, but his gut told him they too would be part of the ritual. He leaned over their sleeping frames and spoke to them at once.

  “Nicky will stay at Thorndike. Her work here isn’t complete. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” came a response in unison.

  Just a nudge, he thought. Just a simple nudge to help keep the ritual going.

  He went to another bedroom, where he found the Wentworth girl in the early stages of sleep. Clearly, she was the most important of Nicky’s colleagues. What to say to her? Should she get a more specific command? Should he give her more specific guidance on what to do? If he wanted to, Sergio could put the right words in her mouth for Jill’s next conversation with Nicky.

  He approached her bed. He was leaning down over Jill and about to speak when Nicky arrived.

  “Sergio.”

  Her voice gave him chills. Even in a whisper, it was so perfectly beautiful when Nicky Bloom said his name.

  He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway.

  “Leave her alone,” Nicky said.

  There was no mistaking the tone in her voice. She was giving him an order. At some level, she understood the power she held over him.

  It was thrilling to obey her.

  He walked away from Jill and towards Nicky, their eyes locked on one another. He could take her now. He could let his fangs come out, find the soft spot on her neck, and fill her blood with his venom.

  But it wasn’t time yet. Stronger than his desire to connect with her was his understanding that it had to be done right. Their ritual had barely begun.

  As he approached, Nicky stepped back from the door, clearing a path for him to come into the hallway. Then she led him through the living room and to the front door.

  He was happy to follow.

  He joined her on the front porch of the house. Her skin glowed softly in the moonlight. She wore a black nightgown. Her hair draped over her shoulders. There was no makeup on her face.

  He had never seen her look so beautiful before.

  He went to her, put his hand on her cheek, gazed in her eyes.

  “Sergio,” she whispered. “What--”

  He put his finger to her lips and she stopped talking. He stared at her, drawing out the connection between them.

  Yes…there it was. The air between them grew hot. Nicky felt it just as much as he did—he was sure of it. He saw it in her eyes.

  He had created so many immortals, but none had meant anything, not when compared to her. Mark’s description of bonding seemed so perfectly true now. Our blood needed to connect. That’s what Sergio was feeling. The other girls he created were a want. He made them immortal because he wanted to please Daciana. Nicky was different. Nicky was a need.

  “You were going to leave,” Sergio said.

  Nicky was silent for a few seconds, then she said, “You were at Renata’s mansion, weren’t you? You followed us here. You heard us talking.”

  “I know all about you, Nicky Bloom. I know about the Network. I know about your mission. And I know why, even though you came here to kill me, you couldn’t do it when you had the chance.”

  She looked at him for a few seconds before she spoke.

  “I was scared, Sergio. You and Falkon were fighting. I was confused.”

  “There is no need for you to lie to me,” Sergio said. “I know the truth about you and I don’t care, because there is something happening between us that is larger than what brought you to Washington.”

  She stood in place. He could see the war raging inside her head, and as he looked on, he knew the conflict inside her wasn’t a normal response, that very few others would make any effort to resist the bonding ritual.

  She was so incredibly strong. It was, perhaps, his favorite thing about her.

  “You can’t leave, Nicky. At the Homecoming Masquerade you made a promise to me that you’d stay.”

  “If you know everything about me, then you know I never had any intention of keeping my promise. If you know who I am, then you know--”

  “—that you came here to kill me? So kill me then, Nicky. Go inside and grab a knife. I will wait here for you to come back. And if you can do it, I won’t try to stop you. That’s my promise to you. If the true desire in your heart is to kill me, then I want you to do it.”

  He pushed closer to her.

  “But I know that’s not what you want,” he said. “You feel it. I know you do. Tell me that you feel it.”

  “I feel it,” Nicky whispered.

  There was fear in her voice. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to tell her that what was happening was the most beautiful, most natural thing in the world, and there was nothing to fear.<
br />
  But that wasn’t in the spirit of the ritual. Nicky had to face her feelings. She had to make the conscious decision to proceed in spite of her fear.

  “I want you to stay at Thorndike,” Sergio said. “And I know you want to stay as well.”

  “I can’t stay,” Nicky said. “It’s time…my friends.”

  “Tomorrow morning, you may find your friends more amenable to the idea of sticking around,” Sergio said.

  Nicky’s eyes opened wide. “What have you done?”

  “The commands were simple,” he said. “I have left your friends just as they were before, with only a simple change in their minds. Now they understand the importance of staying so you can finish what you started. And I haven’t spoken with the Wentworth girl at all. You found me before I had the chance. Shall I go speak with her now?”

  “No! Please, I--”

  “You and Jill are the two key players in this attempt to come here and kill me, are you not?”

  Nicky said nothing.

  “Yes, I think maybe it’s best that I leave the Wentworth girl alone,” Sergio said. “Perhaps that’s why you discovered me before I could say anything. Perhaps it should be your job to convince her to stay, not mine. Yes, that feels right. After all, it was her work that brought you here, correct? In a way, she is the one who set our ritual in motion.”

  “Sergio, you keep talking about a ritual. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  He smiled at her. He couldn’t wait to be with her. Their bond would be strong. A hundred years or longer. He could sense it. How amazing it was going to be! No longer alone in the world, but joined at the heart with another.

  With her.

  “We are bonding, Nicky Bloom, and every bond is strengthened and sealed with a bonding ritual. Our ritual began at the Homecoming Masquerade. How fitting it was that we began our bonding ritual with a dance! Because at root, that’s what our ritual is. The back and forth. The dance. You thought you were coming here to kill me. I thought you were here to join the clan. We were both wrong. We have both been dancing around the truth, Nicky. The truth that brought us together and demands that we finish what we set in motion when we first met.”

  “You want me to win Coronation,” Nicky said. “That’s this bonding ritual you’re talking about.”

  “We don’t choose the ritual,” Sergio said. “It chooses us. And a good ritual prepares us for the bond. It forces us to overcome the obstacles that would keep us apart. For us, the obstacles are huge, aren’t they, Nicky? I have been loyal to my maker for centuries, but now she is an obstacle to our bond, and last night I lied to her in order to protect you.”

  “Sergio, I can’t win the contest anymore. Things have changed.”

  He leaned even closer, his eyes now centimeters away from hers. The silence outside was total. It would be dawn soon. It was time for Sergio to go.

  “You must choose for us to be together,” he whispered. “It’s the only way. You must choose us, and when you do, the rest will be easy. All the problems you and Jill were discussing tonight are easily resolved if you choose to stay and continue our ritual.”

  He felt so content looking in her eyes. He would have been happy to stay there and gaze at her forever.

  “Go rest now,” he said. “Tomorrow morning you will make your decision. If you choose to run away, I won’t try and follow you. But I hope that’s not your choice. I hope you choose to stay, and see our ritual through to the end.”

  Chapter 10

  Thirty minutes later, Nicky sat at the breakfast table with Helena.

  “I’ve been thinking about our plan,” Helena said. “Thinking about it a lot, actually. I may have even dreamed about it.”

  “You’re not as excited about leaving anymore, are you?” Nicky said.

  A surprised look came over Helena’s face. “That’s precisely what I’ve been thinking about!” she said. “You’re thinking it too? Oh, that just makes me all the more certain we need to reconsider our exit. It just seems like a mistake to get out of here so suddenly, don’t you think?”

  Nicky didn’t get to answer, because Phillip came into the kitchen at that moment and immediately started speaking. “I want to say something, and it might sound crazy,” was how he began. Then he launched into a painful bit of circular logic, where he argued that it was precisely because Bernadette and Renata were dead and the mission was in shambles that they needed to stay. “The vampires will be on edge, looking for the culprit,” he said. “What if we stayed here and pointed them in the wrong direction? What if we used the chaos of the past few days as an opportunity to inject a bit of paranoia into the clan?”

  “I think it sounds brilliant,” said Helena.

  The two of them started riffing off each other, making ever-wilder arguments in favor of staying in Potomac and continuing the mission. They had worked themselves into a near-frenzy by the time Jill came into the kitchen.

  “What’s everyone so excited about?” Jill asked.

  “We’re staying in town,” said Helena. “We’ve got the clan on its heels and we’re finishing the mission.”

  “We are?” said Jill. She looked to Nicky for help.

  “I’m going to go check on Ryan,” Nicky said.

  “Wait. Nicky, did you convince them to do this, because last night Helena--”

  “Last night I wasn’t thinking clearly,” Helena said. “This morning I am.”

  “Me too!” said Phillip. “We’ve got a chance to really do something special here. We can’t turn tail now.”

  Jill was still looking at Nicky. “I thought you and I were in agreement about what we had to do.”

  Things have changed, Nicky thought.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. “I really just…I’ll be right back.”

  She pushed her way out of the kitchen and went straight for Ryan’s cot at the back of the house. She couldn’t talk to the others until she saw him. She had to know what Sergio had done to him. She had to know how bad it was.

  She made it to the utility closet and found the cot empty. There was a blanket on the floor. Ryan’s shoes, which had been under the cot, were gone.

  “Ryan?” she said.

  She went down the hall to the nearest bathroom and pushed the door open.

  “Ryan?”

  She checked the bedrooms. Then the living room. She went to the window in the laundry room and looked into the back yard.

  There were footprints in the snow.

  She ran out the back door and through the yard, following the footprints that went from behind the house and out to the sidewalk, where the snow came to an end and the footprints disappeared.

  She ran back to the house, where she found Jill, Phillip, and Helena still arguing in the kitchen.

  “I would love to stay and finish the job,” Jill was saying, “but I just don’t see it happening. Do you? Samantha’s going to win Coronation now. There’s no stopping it.”

  “You guys,” Nicky said.

  “Samantha’s lead is not insurmountable,” said Phillip. “Second semester is when the big money starts to flow. You know that. And we’ve got Ryan Jenson on our side now. Wasn’t that the game plan from the beginning?”

  “You guys I can’t find Ryan,” Nicky said.

  “No one at school is going to trust me,” Jill said, not even hearing Nicky’s words. “I got everyone to support Nicky, then I turned around and gave the Ransom money to Samantha. I can’t just flip flop and support Nicky again! How’s that gonna look?”

  “You guys, I think Ryan is gone!”

  “What?” said Jill.

  “I think he got out of bed, went out the back door, and left.”

  “Why would he do that?” said Phillip.

  Because Sergio messed with his mind, just like he messed with yours, Nicky thought, but didn’t say.

  “He’s not well,” Helena said. “He might be delirious. We should have strapped him down.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t go
far,” said Phillip. “Come on. We’ll take two cars and canvas the neighborhood.”

  *****

  It happened after his second dance with Nicky at the Masquerade. In a way, he knew it even then.

  He knew Nicky could never be his.

  Four months ago, but he remembered it like it was yesterday. Ryan was dancing with Nicky. Sergio arrived. The vampire cut in, as was his right, and stole Nicky away. Ryan remembered how they looked when they danced, how Nicky and Sergio’s bodies seemed to meld together as one while they spun across the floor, how Nicky radiated an almost supernatural energy when the song was finished.

  He had been so jealous of whatever it was they had between them. So angry. And it wasn’t until he and Nicky were imprisoned together on Renata’s plane that he was able to let it go. It wasn’t until Nicky told him the truth about who she was and why she was here that he allowed himself to believe she was his, that Nicky Bloom’s heart belonged to him and not Sergio Alonzo.

  Then he and Nicky got caught up in a firefight in Renata’s mansion. Ryan crashed to the floor headfirst. When he stood up, he was in a fog, a fog he couldn’t shake. It seemed to stay with him hour after hour, through the night, into the next day, the next night—how strange it was to be trapped in the fog! Words didn’t come out right when he spoke them. Sleep took over his body in lengthy intervals, and he had nonsensical, colorful dreams.

  But then the fog lifted, all at once, and he saw the world more clearly than ever before.

  Maybe the fog had given his mind a much-needed rest, or shook loose those parts of the brain the scientists say everyone has but never uses. He didn’t know exactly what process of mind and body allowed him to finally see the world for what it was, but he was thankful for it. As hard as it was to accept the truth about Nicky Bloom, it was better to live in the real world than to chase some fantasy that was never meant to be.

  The truth was that Nicky’s heart did belong to Sergio, and because it did, she couldn’t leave.

  The truth could be summed up in two sentences that were so right, so spot-on, Ryan couldn’t deny them, no matter what the implications were. Nicky must stay at Thorndike and win Coronation. Her work here isn’t done.