The Homecoming Masquerade (Girls Wearing Black: Book One)

  Chapter 24

  On the north side of the ballroom stood the front entrance. None of the immortals would come in that way. Too visible.

  On the east was a hallway that led to a study and a library. Sometimes Sergio entered the ballroom through this hall, but none of the other immortals did.

  The south side of the ballroom was connected to the kitchen which led to the servant quarters. It would be uncivilized to enter through that side. The immortals were in formal wear and coming out to a party that honored them in all their glory. Entering through a servant area would sully their splendor.

  No, the eight immortals who had recently finished their hunt outside now entered the ballroom through an archway on the west wall, the same that led to the art gallery. Per their custom, Renata led them inside in single file, her bright red hair now in sharp contrast to the dark blue evening gown she had chosen. Melissa, feeling underdressed in her red strapless dress, followed close behind.

  Renata was wearing an outrageous necklace. A diamond lattice in the shape of a spider web that hung from the nape of her neck and across the bare space of her chest. In the center was a black onyx with eight tarnished silver legs. The whole thing created the effect of a black widow in its web, living on Renata’s chest. It was a stunning, over-the-top display piece of the kind Renata would never have worn in the old days. Renata used to go with understated looks at Homecoming, looks that Melissa not only appreciated, but tried to emulate.

  But when her bond with Chad came to an end, Renata’s sense of style died with it. Now she enjoyed wearing ridiculous showpieces like the spider necklace. Now she teased her hair so it exploded in a flaming pyre of red that clashed loudly with her blue dress. Now she wore a gold and silver mask, with a long, sharp nose and a flurry of gemstones around the eyes.

  The thing about Renata’s outfit was that most of the students wouldn’t even see it. The immortals entered the ballroom with such stealth that they went unnoticed. They were a trickle of water flowing into a lake. Even when they dressed in eye-popping getups like Renata’s, the students rarely saw them. They were conditioned not to. An immortal could slide in and out of view whenever she chose, using her charms to ensure the people all around didn’t see her unless she wanted them to, and at Homecoming, the immortals didn’t want to be seen. They wanted to observe the students, to cut in on their dances and toy with them, to laugh at how easy they were to manipulate, but not to dress up and be admired by them.

  No, Renata wasn’t thinking of the Thorndike students when she donned her bright, bold colors. She was thinking about the other immortals, her sisters and brothers in the clan who, for many years, saw Daciana wear similar outfits to Homecoming. And while Daciana never commanded the others to be more conservative in their garb, there was an understanding that Daciana had to be the most stunning, the most colorful, the most beautiful. She was the queen, after all.

  And tonight, Renata was playing the queen in Daciana’s absence. She was dressing as loudly as she could, and daring someone to challenge her on it.

  Melissa wanted to call her out but knew she couldn’t. That incident in the woods was all the conflict Melissa could handle in one night. If push came to shove, Renata was willing to take it all the way to the bitter end. Melissa wasn’t. She didn’t want to fight, and she certainly wasn’t ready to die. She just wanted things to go back to the way they were.

  Knowing that wasn’t going to happen, Melissa sought comfort in those things that remained unchanged. Things like the ballroom. Wood paneling and sculpture, golden trim, gemstone-adorned backsplashes along the walls, and the classic parquet floor that Melissa herself had once danced on as a human, so many years ago.

  Homecoming always made her nostalgic. There had been so much promise when she stepped onto the floor as a high school senior. She was a girl wearing black. She was competing for the big prize. She would live a life of eternal glory or die trying. She would right all the wrongs in her life, she would become one of the rich and powerful, and no one would ever mess with her again. It was such an amazing year, such an incredible time.

  Now, many decades later, the truth of it had set in. Whatever meaning Melissa had hoped to find in immortality wasn’t there to be found. The fears and insecurities of her human self went away, but they were quickly replaced with the fears and insecurities of an immortal. Her fear of growing old was replaced with a fear of becoming irrelevant. The world was constantly changing, but she was not. Every new generation of kids was so different than the last, and it didn’t matter if she changed her hair and her clothes, if she learned the new idioms, if she adapted to new technologies – she was still Melissa Mayhew, born in 1950, crowned Prom Queen in 1968, made master of the Farm and all its slaves shortly thereafter. Her parents were dead. Her classmates were old. Her body was unchanging, as was her soul. She was stuck in the past.

  Still, she took comfort in ritual and tradition, and at Homecoming she had her routine to follow. That routine always began with the biggest guy in the room. This year, it was some oaf named Brian Kingsbury.

  Melissa slid her way in between Brian and the girl he was dancing with, cutting in and dismissing the girl. Brian had to look down nearly a foot at Melissa. His head might as well have been in heaven for the look on his face. Yes, you dunderhead, I’m an immortal and I’m going to dance with you.

  In the summer of ’66, Melissa went on a date with a boy named Marco Clemente. He didn’t go to Thorndike, but rather, to Van Buren High School on the north side of town. He wasn’t at all in Melissa’s social class, but she didn’t care. She met him at the shopping mall, he took an interest in her, he was gorgeous beyond belief, and they went out to the drive-in together.

  Melissa was so naïve. The term “date rape” wasn’t invented in 1966. Back then, what Marco did to Melissa was a common occurrence, and girls weren’t supposed to make a fuss about it. If you went to the drive-in with a beautiful boy from a north-side high school, what did you expect?

  Seven weeks after her date with Marco, Melissa had to fly to Mexico City to see a doctor and undo what Marco had done to her. Her parents arranged it all so it could be discreet. Melissa flew out on a Saturday morning and was back home by Sunday night. She never told her friends about Marco, and her parents agreed not to send a gang of thugs to teach him a lesson (though her father was prepared to do so).

  Melissa waited it out. She entered Coronation. She won. She became immortal and, at Senior Prom, she feasted on a girl named Jacqueline Harris. The next night, she went to the north side of town and allowed her nose to guide her to Marco. She found him at the drive-in, working on another girl in the back seat of his car. Melissa broke the window with her fist and pulled Marco out with one hand.

  “Hello, Marco,” she said. “I’ve come to kill you. I suggest you run.”

  She played with Marco like a cat with its mouse, chasing him into the night, ensuring that his last hours on this earth were full of terror and regret. For three hours she made him run, and when he was able to run no more, when he collapsed onto his knees in front of her, she made him beg for mercy.

  “Please,” he begged. “I’m so sorry, Melissa. Please forgive me.”

  “That’s all I needed to hear, Marco,” she said, then she bit into his neck.

  It was all the vengeance a girl could want, and it felt good, for a time. But like everything else in an immortal’s existence, the novelty eventually wore off. In an admittedly pathetic attempt to recapture that delicious but fleeting feeling of vengeance, Melissa had developed her own Homecoming tradition in which her first dance was always with the biggest guy in the ballroom. She found the big guy, cut into his dance, and proceeded to mess with him.

  As the most skilled hypnotist in the Samarin clan, maybe in the world, she felt like it was her prerogative to get into the heads of these boys and bring them down to size. She told herself it was in honor of all girls everywhere who got treated like objects, but she knew better. She knew that the real re
ason she held up her tradition was boredom. She had righted the great wrong of her youth on her first night as an immortal and now she had an eternity with nothing better to do, so at Homecoming, she looked for new and creative ways to punish the big, burly guys whom nature had taught to be bullies.

  The first time, in 1969, she nabbed a towering boy named Walter Grayson and convinced him that his new purpose in life was to make the world a better place for little people. Walter Grayson went on to form a lobbying group on behalf of midgets and dwarves, and dedicated the rest of his life to the cause.

  In 1970, the boy she danced with was a brute named Mickey Carlisle, who stood to inherit one of the largest fortunes in Washington. For Mickey, she put a little time bomb in his head, telling him that on New Year’s Day in 1990, he was to give all his money to charity and move to Africa to build a school. Sure enough, on January 1, 1990, the entire Carlisle fortune was given away and Mickey Carlisle disappeared, never to be heard from again.

  Technically, what she was doing was against the rules – Daciana only wanted the clan using mind control on their slaves and in situations approved by her – but Melissa was so skilled a hypnotist that no one ever knew. Sometimes, as with Mickey Carlisle, she set her commands to take effect so far in the future that no one could possibly connect the strange behavior with a few minutes of dancing twenty years in the past. Other times she made her subjects conform to the commands in secret, so that no one would ever know there was strange behavior at all. Such was the case with Gordon Henley, a tall kid with spikey hair she had danced with in 1987. Melissa told Gordon he had a strong desire to sip at household chemicals when no one was looking. Gordon Henley slowly poisoned himself over a ten-year period. Neither the doctors nor his family understood why he grew sicker and sicker, and, when he died, only Melissa knew his true cause of death.

  On this night, as she danced with Brian Kingsbury, a secret neurosis like the one she had given Gordon seemed more appropriate than some time-released oddity. She had an amusing idea in mind, one that had made her smile all summer long.

  “Do you like to look at me, Brian?” she asked.

  Brian nodded eagerly, and as he did so, he went in and out of eye contact.

  “Don’t use your head to speak to me, use your voice,” said Melissa. “Tell me again, do you like to look at me?”

  “I really, really do,” said Brian.

  “Good, then look right in my eyes, okay? Look in them so deeply you forget that we’re both wearing masks, that we’re both dancing at Homecoming, that we’re both anything at all. Forget everything in your world except my eyes. Can you do that for me, Brian?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  This was a good connection. Brian was a particularly easy subject. If she wanted to, she could tell his brain to make his heart stop beating and he would drop dead then and there. Fortunately for Brian, Melissa was in the mood for something a little more playful, especially after that strange encounter with Renata out in the woods.

  “Brian, as of this moment, you are a passionate, militant nudist,” said Melissa.

  “What’s that mean?” asked Brian.

  “It means you love to be naked. You feel like it is the body’s natural state, and you’re never truly comfortable unless you are naked. Clothes make you unhappy, Brian, so the fewer the better. But you know that the rest of the world doesn’t understand your desire to be naked. You know that they aren’t as enlightened as you are, so you keep your clothes on when you are in the presence of others who don’t understand the beauty of the naked body. Do you follow me, Brian?”

  “Yes. I want to take my clothes off right now.”

  “But you won’t, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I am in the ballroom and people can see me. They don’t understand my desire to be naked. They don’t understand the beauty of the naked body.”

  “That’s right. But when you are alone, or when you are with other nudists, you can be naked as much as you want. Do you know where you can find other nudists, Brian?”

  “I don’t know where. I wish I knew. Can you tell me? I want so bad to be naked.”

  “You will have to research, Brian. You will have to learn where you can go to be with your people. And as soon as you graduate from Thorndike, you will go be with them, even if it means you have to give up everything else. Your inheritance, your career, your life in DC – you will give all of that up to be a nudist.”

  “A passionate, militant nudist,” Brian added.

  “That’s right. And remember Brian, nudism is your secret until you are with other nudists. No one else gets to know about it.”

  “I will not tell anyone about my passion for the naked body.”

  “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 appro
ached 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.