Analiese Rising

by Brenda Drake

  Breathing heavily, I push through the circular door and around into the lobby. The reception area is hopping with guests of the hotel checking in and checking out. Water drips from my hair and clothes, and a puddle forms around me. I must look like an unwrung mop slapped onto the glossy, white marble floor.

  “This is nice,” I say when Marek stops beside me.

  There’s a metal sculpture of a wolf and two boys suckling its engorged tits to the right of the reception desk. I raise an eyebrow as I study it. “What is that?”

  “That’s Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of the city of Rome,” offers an older woman with blond hair in a style you only get from teasing and using tons of hairspray. She’s carrying shopping bags and must’ve come in behind us.

  “Oh,” is all I can think to say. “It’s…interesting.”

  “That it is,” the woman says and walks off.

  Marek scans the lobby, most likely checking for any threats. “I’ll get us two rooms,” he says.

  “Just get one. This place has to be expensive, and we need to save money.” Plus, I don’t want to be alone, but I’m not about to tell him that.

  “One room, please,” Marek says to the woman behind the counter and turns on his megawatt smile that could cause a power surge. It’s the same one he flashed me the first time we met. The one when he knew I was flustered at the presence of his bare chest. “Preferably, two doubles if you have them.”

  The woman eyes him, not in a nasty way, but more of a curious kind of way. Even wet, Marek is charming. “We have a deluxe with twin beds available.” Though an accent hangs on her words, her English is flawless.

  Marek smiles again. “That’ll do.”

  He passes her some euro banknotes, and she looks confused, as though she’s never seen money before.

  “Our credit cards were stolen,” he answers her questioning look. “Bags, too.”

  She nods. “How many nights?”

  “Just tonight.”

  Her eyebrows arch higher, but she doesn’t question him. She writes a room number on an envelope, places a key card inside, and slides it across the counter to him.

  “Very well, Mr. Striker,” she says.

  Striker? He must’ve given her a name on one of those forged passports from his grandfather’s bag of tricks. My fingertips run up and down the zipper of my purse. A sure sign that I’m nervous. I grab the strap instead so I won’t look so suspicious.

  My heart jostles inside my chest with a restless anxiousness as we skirt around people in the lobby on our way to the elevator. Marek pushes the button, and we wait.

  And wait.

  Someone must be holding it up on one of the upper levels.

  My tongue sweeps my dry lips, and I catch a view of myself in the mirrors surrounding the door. Wet strands of tea-colored hair stick to my forehead and cheeks, mascara runs from my eyes, and my nose is red from the cold.

  Marek, on the other hand, looks effortlessly put together even wet.

  I brush my hair away from my face and rub off the mascara with my fingertips.

  The elevator doors slide open, and we wait for a couple to exit before we step inside. As the doors close, I spot a man staring at us. His features are sharp, his hair dark brown and beard cut short. His sea green eyes, hooded with thick brows, reflect a fierceness in their depths.

  He smiles when he realizes I’m watching him, too. I swallow and step back as if I can get farther away from his stare.

  The doors close and the floor rises, leaving my stomach behind.

  “Are you okay?” Marek asks.

  “There’s a man in the lobby. He was watching us.”

  His head snaps in my direction. “Was it Bjorn or Horus?”

  “No. I’ve never seen this guy before.”

  “What do you want to do?” he asks. “We could move to another hotel.”

  A chill slithers across my wet skin, and all I want to do is take a hot shower. “No, we’ll stay here. I’m just jumpy. He was probably staring because we look like we were dumped in a lake or something.”

  “Okay.” Marek pushes the button to the third floor.

  I stab all the other ones on the panel.

  He gives me a puzzled look. “Why’d you do that?”

  “If he’s following us, he won’t know where we got off.”

  “That’s smart.”

  Yeah, but it doesn’t settle the worry sloshing around in my stomach. My left eye twitches. All this stress is getting to me. My tummy rumbles.

  “We’ll get room service.” He rocks back and forth on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back. He’s just as nervous as I am.

  The room is classy, white, and there’s a view of Rome outside the window. There’s a complimentary fruit plate, and I pick up an apple slice. The temperature is set to freezing, so I search the wall for a thermostat. After I push several buttons, not knowing what I’m doing, the heat turns on.

  Marek orders room service as I take a hot shower, the water warming my bones. I use one of the white courtesy robes and wiggle my toes into the slippers. There’s a towel-warming rack, and I hang my wet clothes on it, making sure to hide my panties and leave room for Marek’s clothes.

  While he’s in the bathroom, I stretch out on one of the beds and watch the ceiling. I try to forget everything that’s happened and just concentrate on my breathing. Though the images of Cain and the doorman and that man with the silver streak in his hair and the locusts stay with me, my exercises calm me. Breathe in.

  Soothe me.

  I’m safe here.

  They don’t know where we are.

  Breathe out.

  Calm. Soothing.

  My thoughts go to Shona. The police arrived when we made our escape. I’m sure she’s with them, but I can’t get the image of her mouthing for us to go out of my mind. If it were me, I’d probably beg us to stay. Not her. She’s brave. Strong. I need to be more like her.

  Stop being a victim.

  My psychotherapist’s words echo in my head. I replay them often in the hope they’ll take root one day and become permanent. Take control. Use power words. Don’t say I can’t, say I can.

  A victim stalls. A survivor keeps going. That’s what Dad would say if he were here.

  I’ll keep going.

  Just as Marek finishes and comes out of the bathroom, a knock sounds from the door. He looks for a weapon on the desk.

  I spring off the bed and grab both water bottles from the small table by the two-person couch. Made out of glass, they look more like wine bottles. I pass him one, and with the other in my hand, I stand on the opposite side of the door from him and ready mine to hit the person if they attack us.

  “Yes,” Marek calls.

  “Room service,” the accented man’s voice answers.

  Marek eases the door open and peers through the crack. He lowers the bottle in his hand, which is a clue for me to do the same, and he lets the man in. The cart bumps over the threshold, and plates rattle. The man’s eyes go to my robe, then to Marek’s, and he smiles.

  “Ah, honeymooners?” he says.

  “No,” I practically snap and then quickly adjust my tone before saying, “He’s my brother.”

  He nods as he sets up the cart next to the sofa. “Oh, very well. Twins?”

  Twins? I glance at Marek. Could we pass as twins? We are the same age—both have brown hair—but we look nothing like each other. Our facial features are different. His are sharp and angled, mine are oval with rounded edges. My nose turns up slightly at the end, his is more of a Roman type.

  “Yes,” I say even though it’s a ridiculous assumption.

  The man leaves, and I’m thankful he’s not an assassin or something.

  Marek and I sit on the sofa, eating pasta and studying the box he retrieved from the Sist
ine Chapel. I pick it up and examine the letters etched into the metal.

  “I bet you’re right about it being a cipher,” I say.

  Marek takes a sip of water from his glass. “My grandfather was always trying to get me to do them with him. He’d get mad because I didn’t have any interest in cracking the codes. I’m not very good at it.”

  “We had a session on cryptology in my middle-school math class. I need something to write on.” I get up and retrieve a pen and pad of hotel paper from the top drawer of the desk. Marek moves our plates out of the way.

  I jot down the letters with the spaces and punctuation exactly how it is on the box.

  Jung lbh ner abj, jr bapr jrer; jung jr ner abj, lbh funyy or.

  Staring at the code, I search my mind. “We did many ciphers in those two weeks of cryptology. A Caesar one would be too easy.”

  “My grandfather was always talking about a rot-something or other.”

  “A ROT cipher.” I nibble my bottom lip. “It’s a shift-based encryption one. That class was so long ago. I can’t remember how many letters to count to the right to replace the ones in the code. Let’s Google it.”

  Marek grabs his phone and stabs his finger against the screen. “My internet’s not working.”

  I check mine, and it’s not working either. “They must have Wi-Fi here.”

  “Right.” He stands, finds the paper with the password, and enters it into his phone.

  While he’s waiting for a signal, I turn off my roaming. I’d be grounded for life and for the next life if Jane sees charges from Italy and finds out I left the country.

  “Now it’s working.”

  It seems like an eternity before he finishes searching. “This site says that any number rotation can be used. A ROT13 cipher code comes up a lot in the search hits—”

  “That’s it.” I interrupt him. “Your grandfather would’ve picked the most standard rotation. He’d make it easy for you to know which number to use. We have to replace each letter in the code with the thirteenth one after it in the alphabet.”

  “That’s what it says here,” he confirms.

  I write the alphabet in a line on the paper just under the code. “So ‘J’ would be”—I count thirteen over—“‘W.’ And ‘U’ is ‘H.’”

  It’s getting dark in the room, so Marek turns on a light, and I continue deciphering the code.

  When I finish, I look over at him. “It says, ‘What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.’”

  “What does that mean?” Marek grabs the back of his neck, reading what I wrote on the paper. “It doesn’t make sense. The combination is numbers, not letters.”

  My shoulders slump, and I lean back against the cushions of the sofa. “I don’t know. Is there anything else written on the box?”

  He picks it up and turns it around in his hands, surveying every inch of it. “Nothing.”

  Are we at the end of the line with Adam Conte’s freaky treasure hunt? A part of me wants it to be over, but a more significant part of me is disappointed. Now that I’m on this quest, I need resolution. For me. For Marek. And for my parents.

  Numbers? I straighten. “Let me see that.”

  He hands me the box.

  “There are four wheels to the lock.” I check the decoded cipher. “And there are the same number of sections in that saying or whatever it is.”

  “Okay,” Marek says with a confused look on his face.

  A full grin stretches my lips. “I think we have to do a little math. Each letter of the alphabet has a numbered position. One through twenty-six.”

  The lights go on in Marek’s eyes. “Oh, right. We get the numbers and add each section together.”

  “Bingo,” I say, sounding a little smug.

  “You must do good in school.”

  Well. I do well in school. I want to correct him, but Dalton’s always getting on my case when I do that to him. Says it’s insulting and rude.

  “I do okay,” I say instead.

  Marek writes down the numbers, and I add them together with my phone’s calculator.

  I punch in the last number. “It’s 189.”

  “That’s too high,” he says as he checks the lock. “Each wheel only goes up to twenty-six.”

  I’m getting tired. My vision is fogging, and I can’t think anymore.

  Marek adds one plus eight plus nine together on the paper, and it equals eighteen.

  “That’s it.” I rub my eyes, and we get back to work solving the other numbers.

  After a while, we have the combination. Marek spins each wheel and enters the numbers into the lock.

  18, 8, 12, 3

  The lid to the box pops loose, and he opens it. Inside is a bone.

  A human finger bone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The bed is so comfortable it’s like lying on a cloud, but I can’t sleep. Staring up at the ceiling, wondering why Adam Conte would put a human finger bone in an antique-looking box haunts me. Actually, it's several bones that make up a finger fastened together with wires. A slip of paper with an address written on it was underneath the finger. Hopefully, it doesn’t lead to a dead body.

  There’s a blue hue hanging over the room. It’s coming from a light somewhere outside that’s seeping through the sheer curtains. Before getting into bed, neither one of us thought to close the thicker ones in front of it. Hints of furniture polish and our leftover meal linger in the air.

  Marek’s on the twin bed that’s not even two inches apart from mine, breathing heavily, and it sounds like slow waves rolling in and out of a beach. I should be obsessing about how near he is and how we’re sleeping so close to each other, but I’m not.

  Well, except for just now. Mostly, I keep going over everything that’s happened the last few weeks. My stomach should be in bigger knots than it is. Nothing makes sense. What will we find at the end of all this? At the end of this hunt for clues. I need a distraction.

  I roll on my side, tug down the robe that has risen up my thighs, and stare at Marek as he sleeps. The sheet doesn’t entirely cover his bare chest, and I watch what little chest muscle I can see rise and fall with his breathing. How is he sleeping?

  “Why this hunt? He could’ve just left a letter,” I wonder out loud.

  “Because.” Marek’s voice startles me. I flip onto my back, so he doesn’t catch me staring at him. “He doesn’t want whatever it is falling into the wrong hands.”

  “But ciphers. They’re so easy. Anyone can figure them out eventually.”

  “It’s easy so that I can figure it out.” His voice has that tired, scratchy sound to it. “Except he didn’t realize a teen boy’s mind wanders too much and that I’d forget what he taught me about them. The part that was hard, the part meant to keep others from finding the clues, was the envelope with my drawing in it. Only I would’ve known there’d be a message on it. No one else could’ve guessed. It’s what starts the hunt. Without it, the other clues can’t be found.”

  “Are you scared?” I ask.

  Marek bounces onto his side. He props his head up with one hand and gives me a smoldering stare that threatens to melt me into a puddle. “A little. Bjorn and the others could have killed us, but they didn’t.”

  “They killed Cain and that doorman.”

  His lids lower as he thinks. “I believe they were already dead. At least that doorman was. I swear he didn’t have a pulse.”

  I push myself up against the pillows. “That thing Inanna said…” I drop my gaze to my hands and pick at my cuticles. “She thinks I brought that doorman back to life.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think she’s right.”

  Now he sits up. “Why do you say that?”

  “I touched a dead frog, and it came to life. Those moths showed up. Just like they d
id with the doorman.”

  He reaches across the tiny gap between the beds and grasps my hand. My heart jumps at his touch, and I gasp. His hand yanks away from mine.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean—”

  “No, I mean, it’s okay. You just startled me.”

  He adjusts to lie on his back and crosses his hands above his head. I mimic him and face the ceiling.

  “Where do you think your grandfather got that finger bone?”

  “He wasn’t a serial killer, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  That’s precisely what I’m thinking, but I’m not admitting it, so I choose to ignore what he said. Besides, by the look on his face, this has to be hard for him. After all, he lost his grandfather, and chasing his clues has to be painful.

  “Is it another clue? It makes no sense.”

  He lets out a long sigh. “I’ve been racking my brain over it all night. I got nothing. Maybe we’ll have clarity in the morning.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I tug the covers up to my chin and continue staring at the ceiling in silence.

  …

  The sun’s out, and the step I’m sitting on is just high enough to get a good view of the piazza and the fountain below. I cross my legs, bask in the warmth, and people-watch. Marek maneuvers the steps on his way down, looking for a place to get us coffee and pastries.

  Sleeping didn’t give us any clarity on what the severed bone in Mr. Conte’s box means. It’s a creepy thought, using someone’s finger as a clue. Couldn’t he have just written down the clue and been done with it? To say I’m a little frustrated is more than an understatement, it’s an under-understatement. It’s the lowest of understatements.

  Just then, a WhatsApp notice goes off in my pocket. I forgot Dalton installed it on my phone so he could contact me internationally. I wrestle the phone out of my pants pocket and read his message.

  how’s it going? did you find anything out?

  I type back.

  Some wild stuff. It’s too confusing. Explain later.

  I pause and wonder if I should ask about Jane. If I know she’s found out I’m not at camp, it will add to my stress. I sigh and send it anyway.