The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three)

by Baum, Spencer

Jill shook his hand.

  “We would like for you to open the doors and turn on the lights for us,” Tarin said. “We need full access, including the stairs.”

  Another short delay while the guard seemed to think about Tarin’s request.

  “Yes, of course,” he said eventually. “It will be one moment while I get someone down here to open it up.”

  “Use your radio to call for the Ranger. Tell him Tarin is here. He is expecting me.”

  A minute later, they were standing in the lobby of the Washington Monument, waiting while the Park Ranger fumbled with a key ring, trying to open the door to the stairwell.

  “This doesn’t seem right to me,” Jill said. “There couldn’t be a more obvious place for a clue than the Washington Monument. Hasn’t it been used in the Rose Ransom before?”

  “Twenty-eight Rose Ransom clues have been hidden in the Monument over the years,” Tarin said. “One year, the rose was in the front entrance. Another year it was on the elevator. The rose has been at the museum atop the Monument, and it’s also been in a window frame on the observation deck.”

  Jill ran through the clue in her head. Tributes to kings, born and elected...

  “Sorry for the delay,” the Ranger said, still flipping through his key ring. “The stairs have been closed to the public for years. It’s been a long time since I’ve had need to open them. Let me try this key.”

  “Tributes to kings…” Jill whispered.

  The Washington Monument was an easy answer to the clue, so easy that Jill had immediately dismissed it. After all, the tower was itself a gigantic tribute to the closest thing American ever had to royalty, at least, before Daciana showed up.

  “Join their inspirations in dust,” Jill said. “I don’t get how that line fits. George Washington is dust now, but he isn’t buried here.”

  “With that line, Renata is speaking one of her own truths,” said Tarin. “Humans built this tower intending it to stand forever. Even though Washington himself is now dust, the tower still stands. But stretch out the timeline long enough, and at some point this tower will fall. For an immortal who lives forever, even a tower such as this will eventually join its inspiration in dust.”

  “So she’s just preaching to us,” Jill said. “That line is meaningless.”

  “Not at all,” Tarin said. “I think you’ll find, when we get to the clue, that the third line is quite helpful.”

  “There it is,” said the guard, turning a key in the lock. The door swung open, exposing a winding staircase on the other side.

  “Despite 657 claims to the eternal,” Jill said. “How many stairs is it to the top?”

  “Eight-hundred and ninety-seven,” said the Ranger.

  “Come on,” said Tarin. “Let’s start counting.”

  Counting in unison with every step, Jill and Tarin wound their way towards the top. The staircase was narrow. The climb was hard and slow. Having been out of use for so long, it smelled of stale air and dirt. They stopped at stair number 656.

  Stair 657 was right in front of them.

  “It looks the same as all the other stairs,” Jill said.

  “Does it now?” said Tarin. “Perhaps you should have a look back behind you and be sure.”

  Jill turned and looked at the stairs they had just climbed. The sharp, winding angle only allowed her to view a few of them before they rounded a bend and disappeared.

  “They all look the same,” said Jill.

  “Look again,” said Tarin. “There is a difference.”

  Jill turned her head back and forth between the stair in front of them and the stairs behind them.

  “The only difference is that we haven’t stepped on this one yet,” Jill said. “Our footprints are all over the stairs behind us. This one in front of us…”

  She stopped, realizing the significance of the words she was about to speak.

  The stairs had been closed to the public for years. She and Tarin were the first to climb them in who knew how long. During the time the stairs had fallen out of use, they became covered in dust.

  “The third line of the clue,” she said. “Join their inspirations in dust!”

  “Now you get it,” said Tarin. He gestured at the dust-covered stair. “You should do the honors.”

  Jill bent down and swept her hand across the step, brushing away a thick layer of dust.

  And exposing a square-shaped crevice in the stair.

  The other steps were made of solid stone, but this one had a square-shaped tile cut into its face. Carefully, Jill pressed her fingers against the lip of the tile, and lifted it up.

  She set the tile face-down on stair number 658, and looked at the hollow compartment she had exposed underneath. There was a golden, bejeweled rose inside.

  “Oh wow,” she said, poking her head into the hole. “Do you have a flashlight? I can’t see the clue.”

  “Lift your head up, Jill. The clue is right in front of you.”

  “What?” She pulled her head away from the stair and found the clue right in front of her, just as Tarin said. It was engraved on the underside of the tile she had just removed.

  An expression of mortal frailty

  Death and new life made manifest

  In the throes of agony eternal

  Within and without the square

  “Okay, so what does that mean?” Jill said.

  Tarin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 37

  Nicky felt much more confined in her prison cell after her conversation with Falkon.

  Your mother was a scientist. Best in her field.

  Falkon’s voice echoed in her mind, disrupting the flow of memories. She couldn’t live in the happy memories with her father anymore. Every time she tried to revisit those days at the lake or in the woods, Falkon’s voice tore through the memory and brought her back into the darkness.

  She and I had similar interests. We both wanted to cheat death.

  Without the memories to hide in, the darkness became a frightening place. She was acutely aware that she was the only human in a prison full of vampires.

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

  Why would her mother do this? Why would she help someone so obviously evil as Falkon Dillinger?

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

  She had asked those questions of Falkon. Now she was asking them of her mother. She was looking at the woman in the memory, the woman in the courtyard with all the gray-faced creatures gathering around. She saw her father reaching for her arm, begging for her to run away with him. But she stood in place. She looked at her mother. She asked, What are you doing with them? Why are they so sick?

  And her mother answered, “I wanted to use science to cheat death.”

  For days or weeks or months or maybe years Nicky swam about in the darkness, eager for the day when Falkon would open the door and tell her it was time to die. Her only comfort was the possibility that Ryan’s solitude was as blissful as hers was painful. That Ryan truly was having the most pleasant dreams his mind could imagine.

  As her agony grew, the memories faded. She could barely see the fun times at the lake anymore. The games at the table after dinner, once vibrant experiences that felt like they were happening to her in real-time, were just old memories now, distant, quiet, and vague. She forgot the smells from the kitchen. She could hardly see the Christmas tree.

  Only two scenes remained vivid in her mind. Both involved a little girl in the courtyard, gazing at the silver sphere.

  In one scene, her mother yelled at her to run, and the gray-faced monsters swallowed her up.

  In the other scene, an older scene, her mother was the gray-faced monster. It was the original nightmare, come back around again to haunt Nicky’s final days.

  She saw her mother standing behind the glass. Her skin was the color of death. Her eyes and teeth were yellow. She was sick.

  H
er mother banged on the glass so hard it began to crack. How many times had Nicky gone through this nightmare? How many more times would she have to face it? The whole point of coming to Italy was to learn the truth about this place, to reconcile herself with her past so this dream could go away.

  But now it was happening in the darkness. A waking dream. Her mother banged on the glass again and it cracked. Nicky took a deep breath and reminded herself this was just in her mind. When the dream charged ahead with the scenes that always came next, her mother breaking through the glass and chasing her down, Nicky would be ready.

  It’s just fantasy, she told herself. It’s just a trick of your mind.

  In that fantasy, her mother banged again, and it sounded so real, so present, that Nicky had a tough time convincing herself it was in her mind. She banged again, and this time the sound dragged her right out of the vision. She was in the darkness of her prison cell, and the banging was happening in the cell above her.

  More banging. One of the vampires was hitting the glass hard, just like her mother did in the dream. What was happening up there?

  The banging continued, and this time it was followed by the sound of cracking glass.

  “It isn’t real, Nicky,” she said to herself. “None of this is real.”

  But she didn’t believe her own words. The sound was real. She was in a prison, surrounded by gray-faced monsters who were each trapped behind a pane of glass, just as her mother was in the dream, and one of them was breaking through.

  Another bang, followed by more cracking. The sound was like ice cracking in a water glass. The cracks and pops were intense. The sounds of destruction. Nicky could swear that one of the vampires above her was about to break out.

  A final, crushing blow in the cell above Nicky and she heard the glass shatter. She saw broken glass come raining down in front of her cage. This was not a dream. One of the feral vampires in a cell above her had broken the glass door of its cage.

  And then it came down. A shadow in the darkness, landing softly in front of Nicky’s cell. Hunched over, its hands gnarled into claws, its eyes glowing in the darkness, the feral vampire turned around and looked right at Nicky.

  Her dream had come to life. The monster standing on the other side of the glass was her mother. Gray-faced and sick, an identical image to the one Nicky had been dreaming about for months, her mother was a feral vampire and only a pane of glass separated her from Nicky.

  “Mom,” she whispered.

  The creature approached. It put its hands on the glass as it looked inside. Nicky felt drawn to it. She walked to the front of her cell, standing inches away from the creature, who was now pressing both hands against the glass.

  Nicky raised her own hands, and placed her palms directly across from the vampire.

  The effect was immediate. A charge of energy passing between them, connecting them, she was in her mother’s mind.

  Mom? she asked. What happened to you? What happened in this place?

  The voice came back as if it had been floating across time since Nicky was five years old.

  I was trying to cheat death, her mother said. I failed.

  The transfer was instant. Memories that Nicky’s mother had been holding in a deep corner of her mind came flowing forth. Nicky received them directly. They became her memories, as real and as vivid as if she had lived them.

  Her name was Celeste. Not Celeste Nicole Allen, who would become Nicky Bloom. She was Celeste Amanda Allen. Nicky’s mother.

  And she had a son. Born six years before Nicky.

  I never knew I had a brother, Nicky thought.

  But of course she didn’t know. The memory told her why. She never knew her brother. Her mother never said a word about him.

  His name was Robin. He was four years old when the symptoms began. That was always puzzling to Celeste. How could it be that this illness just sat there, unknown, for the first four years of Robin’s life? How come, for four magical years he was healthy, and then one day, he wasn’t?

  As a geneticist, it was a question that fascinated Celeste. Fascinated her, and haunted her. What was wrong with her son?

  It began with the bruises. He came into the bedroom in the morning, a look of concern on his face.

  “Mommy, something happened to my leg.”

  One year and countless tests later, Robin was diagnosed with Idiopathic Aplasia.

  Idiopathic. It was a word Celeste had used in her own doctoral thesis. Unknown. From the Greek words Idios, meaning “one’s own,” and Pathos, meaning “suffering,” Idiopathic was the perfect word to describe Robin’s illness. One’s own suffering.

  No one knew what was wrong with Robin. The illness was uniquely his.

  An unknown illness meant an unknown cure, and the doctors were content to leave Robin untreated. But Celeste was not. She used all the resources available to her as a senior scientist at the Ventigen Corporation to run her own tests on her son. She hired her own doctors and she oversaw treatments of her own devising.

  Nothing worked. But Celeste was undeterred. This was her son, and just because she couldn’t solve the problem didn’t mean it was unsolvable. She published her research on her son’s condition and attempted treatment in the hopes that somewhere, a scientist would read about Robin’s illness, think of it a different way than she did, and present her with a solution.

  And while no one in the scientific community came up with an answer, her research didn’t go unnoticed. Higher-ups in her own company were excited at the work she was doing. Her boss called her into his office one afternoon and told her the company wanted to move her to Italy where she could have a state of the art laboratory and all the funding she needed.

  “Why Italy?” she asked.

  The evasive answer she got from her boss should have warned Celeste that she was treading into dangerous water. He spoke of sensitive work, remote locations, and keeping the research secure. He also mentioned a wealthy investor who had taken a personal interest in her work. The warnings for Celeste were all there in that initial conversation, but she was blinded by her drive to cure her son.

  Her boss gestured at Celeste’s pregnant belly. “If you need to take a few months before making a move like this--”

  “Oh no,” she said. “There is no time to wait.”

  Five months pregnant with the girl who would become Nicky Bloom, Celeste moved her family to Northern Italy, where she met an immortal named Falkon Dillinger.

  Their partnership was uneasy at first. Falkon wanted to know everything about what she was doing, and Celeste wanted to be left alone. Falkon wanted frequent reports about her progress, and looked horribly displeased when Celeste told him only what she thought he needed to hear.

  Falkon wanted their relationship to be closer than that of boss and employee. He wanted to dine with the family. He wanted to converse with Celeste while she worked. He wanted to socialize and play games—he was particularly fond of chess.

  Celeste wanted none of that. She only wanted to work.

  She was nine months pregnant, due any day, when Robin took a turn for the worse. Celeste showed up in the lab one night in tears, certain her son was at death’s door. Falkon came up to her, put his arm over her shoulder, and said, “I can help your son. But before I do, we need to talk.”

  That night, Falkon put Celeste in a wheelchair and rolled her into a wing of the lab she had never seen before.

  “Our purposes are aligned, Celeste,” he said. “We both understand that it is the blood in our veins that gives us life, and that some of us are blessed with stronger blood than others. I have spent many years thinking about this problem.”

  He pushed her into a laboratory with a long storage refrigerator on one side, and floor-to-ceiling windows on the other.

  “You know what troubles me, Celeste? It is a single word. Why?”

  He rolled her up to the windows. There was nothing on the other side but total darkness.

  “I want to know why it is that some peo
ple are blessed with eternal life, while others are cursed with life-threatening illness as children. I want to know why, with all our powers to manipulate the world around us, we can’t ensure the things we want most in life.”

  He touched Celeste’s very pregnant belly.

  “I want new life to come into a world where sickness and disease are a thing of the past.”

  He flipped a switch on the wall, and an immense research space lit up on the other side of the glass. At the end of that research space was an array of test subjects.

  “What is this?” Celeste said. “Are you testing on apes?”

  But she knew the answer even as she asked the question. Those weren’t apes on the other side. They were people. They were very strange, very sick people.

  “I don’t like this,” Celeste said. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “This is the result of your research,” Falkon said. “Your attempts to fix your son—to create a perfect, self-sustaining circulatory system.”

  “I attempted no such thing,” Celeste snapped.

  “Ah, but you did. All your research has been aimed at modifying a body that is weak and sick, and moving it towards a body that is perfectly self-sustaining.”

  “I never tested on humans. I don’t know how my research could ever result in…this! What is this? What are we looking at?”

  “You are looking at our combined efforts,” Falkon said. “While you have been trying to create a healthy human, I have been trying to create a vampire. Your research filled the gaps in mine. As you can see, I now have a batch of living, breathing specimens. They’re not perfect, but they are so much closer than I’ve ever come before.”

  “No,” Celeste whispered. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.”

  She felt a sharp surge of pain in her abdomen. She breathed through it. Not tonight, little girl, she thought. I need you to stay in there for a little bit longer. Your brother needs me. He needs a miracle.

  Falkon waited for the contraction to pass, then he knelt down beside her wheelchair and put his hand on her face.

  “Your son is dying,” he said. “I gave you all the help I could provide, but we are out of time. I visited him today. I can smell the death consuming him.”