The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three)

by Baum, Spencer

  “I don’t know what it means,” Nicky said.

  “Here’s another question for you,” said Falkon. “What do you think it means when a vampire takes such a keen interest in you that he travels across the world to find you, aware that he is risking his life in the process? There are only a handful of vampires in the world who are strong enough to kill Sergio Alonzo, and you’re looking at one of them now.”

  She knew Sergio was going to move before it happened. It was almost as if he told her, and by the time Sergio flew across the room and collided with Falkon, Nicky was already on the floor, having dropped to her stomach half a second before the mayhem started.

  They were a tumbling ball of fury as they fought, moving far too quickly for Nicky to see or understand anything. They were in the air. They were crashing into the walls. They were leaping back and forth across the giant room, smashing lights and concrete and support beams as they moved. They were like two living, breathing, explosions of rage, and it was all Nicky could do to roll under the control desk and cover her head with her hands.

  Metal bars from the ceiling clanged to the floor. Glass shattered and rained down. Lights exploded, making the room go dark, only to light up again in the flashing tones of the alarm. Through it all, the ferals went wild in their cages, bouncing and screaming as the vampires fought.

  The mayhem ended with a loud crash and the sound of flesh being torn apart. Nicky lifted her head to see Falkon and Sergio not more than ten feet away from her.

  Falkon was crouched over Sergio’s body, a huge hunk of Sergio’s flesh in his claws.

  “It’s over,” Falkon hissed. “Five hundred years I’ve been waiting to kill you! Do you see this, Nicky? Do you see what I am about to do to this abomination of a vampire!”

  Without thinking of what she was doing or why, Nicky scrambled out from underneath the control desk and jumped to her feet.

  “Have a look at that Sergio,” Falkon said. “I think she intends to help you. Come on over, Nicky. Come have a look at him before he dies!”

  She reached out to the control desk, seeing her mother’s fingers in her own hand. She was living the memory now—twelve years ago her mother reached down to the keypad on this same control desk and typed in a six digit code that saved her daughter’s life. Nicky reached for the keypad and typed in the same code. 1-1-0-7-0-8.

  The feral vampires rushed to the front of their cages as the glass doors slid open. Falkon jumped to his feet, a look of panic in his eyes. He turned to Nicky, his fangs dripping in blood, and then he was overcome. All the ferals came at him at once, the entire pack rushing at Falkon and Falkon alone.

  He fought the first few off of him, but then it was too much. They leapt on him at once, a ball of fangs and claws, plowing across the room. Falkon broke free long enough to leap for the ceiling and crash through a window. The ferals chased after him. Nicky was left alone in the room with Sergio.

  She looked over at where he lay. He was still breathing. His body, bleeding profusely, was already beginning to heal.

  “What have I done?” she whispered.

  The whole mission. Four years, millions of dollars, dozens of lives at stake, including her own—it was all aimed at killing Sergio Alonzo, and in the moment when Sergio lay on the floor, about to die, Nicky had saved him.

  She grabbed a long metal rod off the ground and ran over to him. He was still weak. His body was still pulling itself back together. One hard thrust from this rod, a heavy bar of steel that had fallen from the ceiling, straight through his heart, and he would die. It wouldn’t matter that she couldn’t finish the mission. It wouldn’t matter if she never made it out of Italy. She could end it now. Sergio was weak and on the floor and she had a weapon in her hand she could use to kill him.

  He looked at her. There was nothing. No openings in her mind, no visions inside his, no weakness in her knees or urge to take in his incredible presence—in that moment, he was too weak to have any effect on her. All he could do was look at her with fear in his eyes.

  She raised the rod, grabbing tight with both hands and aiming it over his heart.

  Come on, Nicky. Kill him now. The entire mission is about this moment.

  She hesitated, and in that hesitation, Sergio regained enough strength to throw her off of him. She landed hard and skidded across the floor, the metal bar clanging on the tile as it bounced out of her hands. She rushed to get back to her feet, and found Sergio standing as well. His body had completely healed. Her moment of opportunity was over.

  He looked in her eyes for a second. There was no message in his gaze. They weren’t sharing any thoughts. He just looked at her. And then he left. With a single leap he cleared the high wall and jumped through the broken window, following Falkon and the ferals into the night.

  Nicky stood in place, breathing hard. Her mother’s voice broke her from her stupor.

  You have to finish what I started.

  She knew which way to go. Her feet carried her out of the room and into a dark hallway. She was hardly present as she ran. She belonged to the memory now.

  Another door, another six-digit code. The glass slid open and she stepped into a room full of computers. They were stacked on shelves, a gigantic library of computing equipment, similar but not identical to what she had seen in the memory.

  In her memory, the computers sat on open-faced shelves. Now they were locked behind an iron cage. In the memory, the computers were older than what she saw here. In the memory, the room was half as big as the one she stood in now.

  Nicky went to the screen, which stood on a wide shelf, sharing space with a keyboard and a telephone. She touched the keyboard. A prompt came up asking for her user name.

  C.Allen

  It asked for her password.

  TwoQueens

  Text scrolled down the screen giving the name of the software, the maker, the date, the copyright information. She entered the first command.

  Genetic Sequencer

  This command put her inside the program Falkon used to crunch the data. Celeste’s research had given this program all the data it needed to create the genetic code of a feral vampire. Nicky’s job was to delete it.

  Sequence Alpha

  This command called up a string of numbers the massive computer had created based on the data Celeste had put inside. It took a minute for the sequence to load. When it was done, the screen said READY.

  Access Text User C.Allen Code 110708Alpha.

  That was the command Celeste had slipped into the system. That was the back door that would bring up the massive string of letters Falkon had been working to rebuild ever since Nicky’s mother destroyed it.

  Invalid Command.

  “What?” Nicky said. “No, it’s not invalid.”

  She entered the command again. She could hear her mother’s voice spelling it out as she typed it. She knew she had it right.

  Invalid Command.

  Falkon had fixed the software.

  Twelve years ago, her mother had written a back door into this program that allowed her to stop Falkon from creating a new master race of vampires. Falkon had rebuilt and was ready to try again. Nicky’s mother had shared her memories so Nicky could stop him, just as Celeste had done.

  But she couldn’t do it. Falkon was ready for her. The commands from her mother’s memory no longer worked.

  She looked at the stacks of computers all around and wondered if there was another way. She grabbed at the iron grate separating her from the machines and shook it. It was locked shut and barely budged.

  “What do I do, Mom?” she whispered. “The code doesn’t work anymore.”

  If only Jill were here, she thought.

  And then a solution came to her that was so simple, so straight-forward, she was embarrassed she hadn’t thought of it right away.

  There was a phone next to the keyboard.

  Nicky grabbed the receiver. A heavy piece of beige plastic, to Nicky, this phone was a relic from another era. But it worked
. When she lifted the receiver to her ear, she heard a dial tone. She reached for the buttons on the base of the phone and began dialing.

  Chapter 43

  Annika’s eighteenth birthday party was everything Jill had come to expect from the girl.

  The house was full of roses. Roses in vases, rose bushes in the yard, rose petals all over the floor, and giant, foam roses hanging from the ceiling.

  But the trick was, most of these roses were white, orange, or pink. There were only a few red roses in the house, and for the first party game, Annika challenged everyone to find them.

  “When you find a red rose,” she announced, “you must yell Ollie Ollie Oxen Free at the top of your lungs! Every time someone yells that out, the rest of us must stop what we’re doing and have a drink!”

  Of course, a few minutes into the game, people figured out that it was fun to cry out like you’d found a red rose, even if you hadn’t, and within the hour, everyone was blitzed.

  “Gotta take people’s minds off what troubles them,” Annika said to Jill. “Everyone’s getting worried that you haven’t solved the third clue yet. But if you down enough liquor you find there’s nothing to worry about!”

  “Why is it my responsibility to solve the third clue?” said Jill. “Everyone should be working on it.”

  “Everyone did work on it,” said Annika. “Until they decided it was too hard and gave up. They know you’ll get this one eventually.”

  Annika slapped Jill on the back and moved on to mingle with her other guests. Jill shook her head. She didn’t share Annika’s confidence. She had no more idea how to solve the clue than anyone else, and she didn’t know when or if Tarin was showing up to help her.

  After the red rose drinking game ran its course, the staff set up an inflatable jump house in the back yard. Shaped like a giant princess castle, the jumphouse lasted for all of fifteen minutes before someone too drunk to know better poked a hole in it.

  “That’s alright!” Annika announced. “On to the hula hooping contest!”

  The hula hooping contest was another drinking game. In this one, you had to down a shot every time the hula hoop fell from your waist, which of course made you too drunk to continue hula hooping which in turn made you drink more shots.

  By ten-thirty, the party was absolute pandemonium, and a surprisingly sober Annika grabbed Jill by the arm and said, “Now that everyone’s having fun, let’s sneak away so we can talk.”

  Annika led Jill to her bedroom and closed the door behind them.

  “I have two things to show you,” she said. “The first is something small.”

  Annika reached into her pocket and pulled out a gold ring with a red garnet. “Last Saturday I had drinks with Karmela,” Annika said, handing Jill the ring. “It took some doing, but I finally convinced her to take off her ring so I could look at it. You should have heard her pitch a fit while I was looking at the ring. She is still livid at you for dropping her ring after the Date Auction.”

  “It was the only way I could think of switching it out without her noticing,” Jill said.

  “I used a similar tactic to switch it back,” said Annika. “While I was holding the ring, I stretched my elbow a bit too far and accidentally spilled my drink to distract her. It was so much fun! Anyway, you may rest assured that the genuine ring is now safely on Karmela’s finger. This is the imitation.”

  Jill held the ring up to the light. It had been weeks since she’d thought about this thing.

  “It was a good plan,” Annika said. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if that ring were on Nicky’s finger right now?”

  “It would make everything a lot easier,” said Jill. She turned the ring over in her hands, looking at the engraving on the underside.

  “It’s a really nice-looking ring,” said Annika.

  “You want it?” said Jill. “It’s worthless to me now.”

  Jill handed the ring back to Annika, who tried putting it on her finger.

  “It’s a little small for me,” she said. “But you know, it might be a good fit on Shannon.”

  “You’re going to see her soon, aren’t you?” said Jill.

  Annika nodded. “My plane leaves tomorrow morning.”

  “Nice,” said Jill. “Party all night, sleep on the long flight.”

  “Exactly. We’re not actually celebrating my eighteenth birthday tonight, even though that’s what everyone thinks. We’re really celebrating my escape. Can I show you how I made my bag? I’m really proud of it.”

  Jill was about to answer no, that she’d rather not see the bag, she’d rather not know the names on Annika’s phony passports, and she wished she didn’t even know where Annika was going, but her cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Hang on,” she said. “My mom has become really high maintenance lately. This will be quick.”

  She pulled the phone from her pocket and saw that it wasn’t her mom’s name on the screen.

  “Caller unknown,” Jill murmured.

  “Ooo…a late night mystery caller,” Annika said with a grin. “I wonder who it could be.”

  “Me too,” Jill said. Tarin had never once tried to reach her by phone, but if he needed her tonight, phone was the best way. It wasn’t like he could just sneak into Annika’s party.

  “Hang on a sec. I’m gonna see who this is,” Jill said. She pressed answer and held the phone to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Jill, are you someplace safe? I need your help right away. I don’t have much time.”

  Jill recognized the voice at once but refused to believe her ears.

  “Who is this?” Jill said.

  “It’s me, Jill. It’s Nicky.”

  *****

  Nicky was staring at the computer screen, which was black, save a few letters of text and a blinking cursor.

  “Nicky! Where are you?” cried Jill from the other end of the phone. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” Nicky said. “I’ll tell you everything later, okay? Right now, I need your help with something urgent.”

  “Okay, I’m listening,” said Jill.

  “I need to erase a hard drive on this computer in a way that it can never, ever be recovered.”

  “A computer? You’re on a computer?”

  Not just one computer, Nicky thought, her eyes glancing at the stacks of interconnected computers all around her.

  “It’s Falkon Dillinger’s computer,” said Nicky. “He and Renata are up to something terrible. But all their work is stored on this computer. We need to erase everything on it.”

  “Falkon Dillinger? Where the hell are you, Nicky?”

  She heard movement outside the computer room. “There’s no time!” she said. “Just tell me how to do this. Is there a simple command to erase everything?”

  “Nicky, I don’t know. What kind of computer is it?”

  Nicky looked at the command prompt blinking on the screen.

  User Session Ended

  “I think it kicked me out,” Nicky said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to. I think the machine kicked me out. I should log back in, right?”

  “Do you know how to log in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then yeah, sure, log in. Tell me what you see.”

  Nicky typed C Allen in the user name field, and Two Queens in the password field.

  “Invalid password,” she said, reading the message that came back on her screen.

  “Nicky, talk to me. What are you trying to do?”

  “Hang on. I put a space in the password. There’s no space. Let me try again.” Speaking the password aloud as she typed it, Nicky entered TwoQueens.

  “Two queens?” said Jill. “Is that a password?”

  Text start floating up and down Nicky’s screen. “Yes, that was it,” she said. “I’m back in.”

  “Back in what? What kind of computer is this?”

  “A really, really big
one. Lots of computers connected together. A room as big as a house.”

  “That doesn’t help me Nicky. What does it say on your screen?”

  Nicky began reading from the top. “Ventigen 1100 MCP Operating System Level 286P. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “It sounds like custom written software,” Jill said. “MCP stands for Master Control Program. I think this system is really old. We can figure this out. What we’ll have to do is bypass the operating system and talk to the compiler. How much time do you have?”

  Nicky looked through the glass. She thought she saw a shadow move out there.

  “Not much time at all,” she said. “I managed to get Falkon out of here, but he might come back. He might come back really soon.”

  “That’s no good, Nicky. We need time to pull this off. Could you give me an IP address? Since we know the password maybe I could break in from here and you could get out of there.”

  “I don’t think it’s even connected to the Internet.”

  “Nicky, is it really important that you do this? I mean, it sounds like you’re in trouble. Don’t you think you should get out of there?”

  “It’s very important! It’s everything, Jill! More important than anything we’ve ever done. If I have to die here, it will be worth it if we can wipe out this machine!”

  “If I just had time, I could do it, Nicky!”

  “We don’t have time! Falkon’s coming back any minute now!”

  “But I don’t know anything about that operating system. I suppose we could start messing around with things and seeing what…”

  Jill trailed off and Nicky heard nothing but silence.

  “Jill?” Nicky said. “Jill, are you there?”

  “I’m here. Hang on for just a second. I’m going to conference somebody in on this.”

  “Good idea. Maybe Alvin knows something.”

  “No, not Alvin. Just a minute, Nicky.”

  A few clicks on Jill’s end, then the sound of a phone ringing as they waited for a third party to pick up.