The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three)

by Baum, Spencer

  “I didn’t know her,” Nicky said.

  “No, I guess you didn’t. Ah well. I think you’ve had enough recreation for one night. I will take you back to your cell.”

  “Please don’t,” Nicky said. “I’m enjoying this.”

  Falkon smiled. “I am too, now that you mention it.”

  “Show me more,” said Nicky. “I came here to learn about my past. Show me. Tell me about my mother.”

  Falkon sat in place for a moment, looking at the chessboard.

  “No, it’s not a good idea. You are too much like her. I made a mistake allowing myself to enjoy her company. I should have locked her up the minute she beat me at chess. I should have known what she was capable of.”

  “What did she do?” Nicky said.

  “Oh no. We’ve talked enough. It isn’t safe.”

  “You mean you’re frightened of me.”

  Falkon leaned back and let out a hearty laugh. “You are something special, Nicky. I know of no other human who would dare--”

  “You say you’re bored with life, like there’s no adventure left in this world at all for you, but then when I give you the chance to have some, you turn me down. It’s no wonder you’re so miserable. Admit it, Falkon. You’re scared of me. I mean, what difference does it make what you show me if I’m going to die anyway? What difference does it make unless there’s a chance I could be a danger to you?”

  Falkon smirked as he watched Nicky talk. “I can see why he likes you,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Sergio.”

  Nicky decided to leave that one alone. “Do whatever you’re going to do,” she said. “Lock me up, keep me out—I’m bored waiting for you to decide.”

  “Okay, okay,” Falkon said, laughing. “You know, you are the most entertaining company I’ve had in years. Ten more minutes. I will take you on a brief tour before I lock you up again.”

  Chapter 31

  Falkon took Nicky down a flight of stairs and into a laboratory of some sort.

  “Your mother was a scientist,” he said. “Best in her field.”

  Against one wall was a desk with three microscopes. On another were shelves of glassware, a book case, and a computer. A long refrigerator with glass doors ran the length of the back. Inside that refrigerator were hundreds of vials full of blood.

  The opposite wall was empty. It was made of glass, looking out into darkness on the other side.

  “She and I had similar interests,” Falkon said. “We both wanted to use science to cheat death.”

  He flipped a switch in the corner of the room and lights came on outside the glass, showing a huge room on the other side.

  “Have a look, Nicky,” he said. “This is where we did our work.”

  Nicky approached the glass. She felt like a spectator at some nightmarish zoo.

  A hundred yards or more of open space lay in front of her, leading to a high wall on the other side. That wall was made of glass, just like this one, but there was no laboratory behind that glass. There were prisoners. Four rows, each with four cells. It was a prison that stretched from floor to ceiling. And every person inside had the same gray skin and yellow eyes that had haunted Nicky’s dreams for months. They shrieked in anger at the light, some of them covering their eyes, others kicking and banging on the glass.

  “Who are they?” Nicky said.

  “College students, mostly,” said Falkon. “Also a few people from the village at the base of the mountain, and some other people I’ve met during the course of my work.”

  “What are you doing with them? Why are they so sick?”

  “One moment, Nicky. I can’t bear the sound of their squealing.”

  Falkon flipped the switch and the room became dark again. The screaming stopped.

  “Ah, that’s better,” he said. “You don’t know how long I’ve had to listen to them screech like that. Anyway, these creatures might look sick to you, but in fact they are quite healthy. They would live for many, many years if they didn’t have such a nasty habit of killing each other.”

  “They’re like vampires,” Nicky said.

  “They are vampires,” Falkon corrected. “Artificially created in the laboratory, using a genetic sequence your mother created.”

  Nicky took a step back. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Well, they’re not the vampires you know. The recipe isn’t correct yet. As you saw, they are still quite….feral.”

  “Why would you do this?”

  “There it is again,” Falkon said with a smile. “The girl who asks why. You know, I have brought many scientists into this lab over the years, and their first question is always how? They want to know the mechanics of it all. They want to understand the implications for human medicine. But they never ask why.”

  He walked across the room and opened the door to the refrigerator. He pulled out a vial of blood.

  “Two queens,” he said. “That’s how your mother beat me.”

  “Two queens? Why are we talking about chess again?”

  “We are talking about the big question, Nicky. Why? I was the stronger player. But I was arrogant. I was complacent. Never once did I think that, during all those games when I beat your mother, she was studying me. Never once did I consider she was planning an attack of her own.”

  He walked up to Nicky and held out the vial of blood. “What do you see?” he said.

  “It looks like blood.”

  “And to your eyes, that’s all it is,” said Falkon. “But when I look at this vial of blood, I see life. I see power. I was much slower to see it than Daciana, but I see it now. Do you know the story of how Daciana created Sergio?”

  Know it? I’ve seen it, Nicky thought. But she said nothing, and gently shook her head.

  “When Daciana bit into Sergio Alonzo,” Falkon said, “she changed his blood. She created a genetic freak. A mutant who could create new vampires at will! When the rest of us heard of this, we assumed she had killed him, as was our custom. We had rules, Nicky! Rules to prevent abominations such as the Samarin clan! But she didn’t kill him. She hid Sergio away in violation of all our laws, and none of us realized it was happening. We were arrogant and complacent while Daciana planned her attack. For hundreds of years the two of them hid in the shadows. We all came to forget about Daciana and her freak. But then she took him to the New World, and together, they created a clan so large that none of us could match her.”

  Nicky shook her head. In a strange way, she and Falkon were allies. Both of them wanted to get rid of the Saramin clan. Both of them recognized Sergio as the key to the clan’s power.

  “That’s why my mother joined you, isn’t it?” Nicky said. “She wanted to help you defeat Daciana.”

  Falkon smiled. “Your mother’s motivations were complicated,” he said.

  “Tell me about them. I want to know.”

  Falkon walked back to the refrigerator and put the vial away. Nicky followed him.

  “Tell me!” she said. “I deserve to know!”

  He closed his eyes and leaned against the refrigerator door. He let out a deep sigh and shook his head.

  “I’ve upset you,” Nicky said. “Something I said has angered you.”

  Falkon lifted his head and stared into the refrigerator. Nicky saw his reflection in the glass. He looked sad.

  “You do not have the power to anger me,” he said.

  Falkon walked past her, headed towards the door. “It’s time to put you back,” he said. “That’s enough chitchat for one night.”

  “What? No! You can’t just put me back. We’re having a conversation.”

  “We are having a fruitless conversation. There is no point in speaking to you when your death is so near,” Falkon said. He went to the hallway.

  “Wait, please,” Nicky said, chasing after him. “What happened in there? What did I say that made you angry?”

  Falkon turned and rushed back in her face. “You don’t deserve anything, Nicky Bloom, and
neither did your mother! Your time on this earth is nothing but a blip compared to mine. Your purpose is to feed my desires!”

  He had a frightening presence when he was angry. Everything about him, from the look on his face to the smell of his breath, told Nicky that he could kill her where she stood before her heart had a chance for even one more beat.

  “I’m sorry,” Nicky said. “I’ll go back to my cage.”

  Chapter 32

  On the Monday following Jill’s late night at the cemetery, she told Mattie and Annika about the second clue, and asked them to spread the word.

  “Spread the word?” Mattie said. “But that takes away our advantage.”

  “There is no advantage,” said Jill. “This isn’t a race to see who finds Nicky and Ryan first. This is a contest between people who want Nicky found and people who want Nicky dead. Anyone and everyone who wants Kim to lose needs to be aware of that second clue. The more minds at work on it, the sooner it gets solved.”

  By the end of that day, word was out, and a crowd of high school seniors descended on Meadowlark Memorial to find a bejeweled rose, fused to a block of gold, and the clue that sat behind it.

  Tributes to kings

  Both born and elected

  Join their inspirations in dust

  Despite 657 claims to the eternal

  Jill had written the clue on a whiteboard in her bedroom in huge letters. But she wasn’t thinking about it now. She had other work to do.

  Despite Tarin’s insistence that they weren’t seeing the full story on Renata’s phone, Jill could find nothing wrong with the hack, and was convinced that if they continued to listen, eventually they would hear something of consequence.

  So she spied on Renata. She listened to a phone call between Renata and one of her slaves as she described the color of paint she wanted in the north hallway, and another call where she discussed the food to serve at a dinner party next week.

  She overheard a conversation between Renata and the other Regents, discussing the most boring details of school business. Finances, recruitment, public relations, new hires. One evening, Jill caught herself listening in on a conversation about Ms. Benchley, who had just announced an impending maternity leave. The conversation went on for forty minutes, the Regents going on and on about her replacement, her classes, other teachers in the history department, and the schedules of fifty kids in the junior class.

  Was this what it was like to be immortal? The minutia of daily life stretched out in an endless line, day after day after day? Jill could hardly believe this boring person she was spying on was the same vampire who had shown up at Nicky’s house and ripped Melissa Mayhew’s heart out of her chest. Renata had always seemed so intense to her. So dramatic. That Rose Ransom performance alone was enough to suggest that she was a woman whose life was filled with passion and romance.

  What if that wasn’t the real story? What if this dry and dreary woman who showed up in the phone calls, text messages, and emails, was the real Renata?

  God, who wants to live forever if it’s like that, Jill thought.

  At school, the discovery of the second clue provided a jolt of energy to the Rose Ransom contest. Suddenly it was interesting again. Maybe it could be solved after all.

  Tributes to kings, both born and elected…

  Those first lines immediately sent the class on a race to the classic sites.

  “Our presidents are like kings,” went the argument. “They weren’t born kings. They were elected.”

  The Washington Monument, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, presidential libraries—the Thorndike senior class hit all the great tributes to American royalty in and around DC, and when they came up empty, they broadened their search.

  Parker Blake got a group excited about presidential tombs. “They join their inspirations in dust,” he said. “It’s clearly a reference to death. The answer is a tomb. Probably the tomb of a famous president.”

  They hit Lincoln’s Tomb, Grant’s Tomb, Monticello, and Arlington National. To encourage sharing and collaboration, Jill created a web page where people could track who visited which tomb, and in a matter of weeks, every presidential burial site had been touched, without any sign of another clue.

  The first lines of the clue exhausted, students turned to the last line. 657 claims to the eternal.

  Every house and building in the greater DC area with 657 in the address was examined. When all the addresses were exhausted, students turned to history, and everyone became experts on the events of the year 657. The Jenson family even hired a medieval scholar to come to Thorndike and consult with students about emperors, kings, and popes of that age.

  They came up empty. And then someone had the idea that it might have something to do with phone numbers and everyone went down that rabbit hole.

  “We’re all going to L.A. tomorrow, have you got your ticket yet?” Mattie said.

  “L.A.? Why are you going there?”

  “The 657 area code! It’s Los Angeles! Can you believe it?”

  “I….well, it isn’t typical for a Rose Ransom clue to be so far away, but--”

  “There’s nothing in the rules that says it can’t be!” Mattie squealed, “and Jenny’s family has a house in Beverly Hills! It’s gonna be awesome!”

  Jill politely declined the invite, giving an excuse that she would continue her own research into the clue at home. In truth, she didn’t want to leave town out of fear that she might miss Tarin if he ever decided to show his face again.

  That night, her father, who had been in Seattle on business, returned home for the first time in weeks. Twenty minutes after he was in the door, Jill was regretting that she hadn’t gone to L.A. with her friends.

  “You know what’s happening here, don’t you Jill?” he muttered. “It’s clear as crystal to me what’s going on. I’ve been on the phone with plenty of other parents. None of us can remember a Rose Ransom with clues that were this hard.”

  He had the smell of airplane travel still on him, peanuts and stale air and Bloody Mary mix.

  “I don’t want to talk about this, Dad.”

  “You need to sit your ass down and listen to me,” Walter snapped. “I had my reservations about this Nicky Bloom thing, but I trusted that you knew what you were doing. Now I think I’ve let it go too far. If the immortals are angry at Nicky Bloom, you know who they’re coming for next, don’t you?”

  “The immortals aren’t angry at Nicky Bloom,” Jill said, feeling depressed as she said the words. Her father was right, of course. But what could she say to him? Yes, Dad, Nicky was mixed up in an attempt to kill Melissa Mayhew and Renata found out. Yes, Dad, they kidnapped her so they could kill her, and they already came looking for me. Bernadette Paiz was here, in this house, but you don’t remember it because you’re a weak minded fool who had his memory erased. Lucky for all of us I was able to fend her off.

  Yes, Dad, I know everything about Mom, about what you did, and some day soon I’m getting her out of here and leaving you to deal with the aftermath.

  She felt her blood pressure rising. Her father had been absent so long Jill had almost forgotten how much she hated him. Looking at his face, at the sour milk color of his skin, at the nasty patches of stubble growing in because he hadn’t shaved today, smelling the vodka and tomato juice on his breath, hearing his whiny, impotent voice—

  “I can’t do this right now,” Jill said. “I’ll be in my room.”

  She was headed for the stairs when he cut her off.

  “Jill Wentworth, I am done with this defiance! I don’t know what’s gotten into you this year but I have had enough! You hear me!”

  He looked like he might hit her. Go on Dad, try it, she thought. You drunk, flimsy, squishy excuse for a man. One swipe at me so I have a reason to take you out. One swipe.

  Perhaps taken aback by the venom in his daughter’s gaze, Walter stepped away.

  “I’m only going to ask you one more time,” he said, quietly. “Go sit on the couch.
You and I need to talk about who you are supporting for Coronation.”

  “Is that an order, Dad?”

  “You bet your ass it’s an order.”

  A flurry of responses spun in her mind.

  You don’t get to order me around. I’ve been guiding you like a puppet for three years now. I am not my mother. I am not your slave!

  She said nothing. The moment was too hot.

  Calm down, Jill. He isn’t worth the effort. You need to hold it together for just a little bit longer.

  Long enough for Tarin to show up again so they could talk about the second clue. Long enough to overhear Renata say something worth hearing.

  Long enough to figure out the command that is holding your mother hostage.

  And then, a thought occurred to her that was so late in coming she was embarrassed at her own stupidity.

  Does he know the command?

  Jill had looked for the command that enslaved her mother in giant databases, on paper records, on voicemails and faxes and emails. Her mind had been so focused on the idea of an official record of the command that she had never considered that Walter might have an unofficial record in his mind.

  He might know the words that could set his wife free.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go sit on the couch. We can talk about Coronation. But for the love of God, if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it over drinks.”

  It was as if she said the magic word. Walter’s whole face brightened. His body relaxed.

  “I wouldn’t do it any other way,” he said.

  Chapter 33

  Walter ambled to the bar with a practiced motion, but Jill beat him to it.

  “Let me make the drinks,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about--”

  “I’ve been living with you long enough to know exactly what you like,” Jill said, already grabbing the martini shaker and dropping ice cubes inside. “Vodka martini, dry vermouth, twist of lime.”