The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (20 page)

“I am learning my way around the
mansion as we speak,” Tarin said. “I have keys and alarm codes that can get you
access to some of the more hidden areas.”

They were coming up on a
clearing now, the same clearing where, days before, Jill had confronted her
mother about working for the immortals.

“You’re telling me I’m going to
sneak away from the party on Sunday and do some sort of break-in,” she said.

Tarin nodded. “Half-way through
the cocktail hour, when the vampires go outside to play one of their games,
you’re going to slip away from the party. I will find you in the hall between
the ballroom and the kitchen. From there, I will lead you to a secure location
and give you Renata’s phone. You’ll have twenty minutes to hack it.”

“You want to listen in on her
calls?”

“And her emails. And her texts.
Can you do this?”

“Well…yeah, I’ve done hacks like
that before. I’ll need a laptop with me when we do it.”

“Put everything you need to do
this hack on your back porch before morning. I will take it to Renata’s and you
will have it for the job.”

They were walking through the
clearing now, the moon hanging high above their heads.

“Tarin, this assignment is a big
deal. It’s the sort of thing I might spend months prepping for.”

“You are ready to do it now.
It’s no different than any of the other hacks you’ve done since you came to
Washington.”

“But, the plan…it seems like
there are so many variables. I have to sneak away from the party. What if I
can’t do it?”

“You can and you will. I will
have it all under control by Sunday.”

“That sounds great and all, but
I don’t know you. We’ve never worked together before.”

Tarin stopped walking. He looked
right at Jill. The moon was bright enough that she could see him clearly. His
eyes were intense, a deep brown with a confident strength behind them.

“You might not know me,” he
said, “but I know you. I know all about you, Marsh Hawk.”

Jill felt exposed hearing him
use her online handle.

“What did you say?”

“I can’t begin to tell you what
an inspiration you’ve been to me for the past three years,” Tarin said. “I was
in a dark time in my life when the Marsh Hawk showed up on the message boards.”

“You shouldn’t know my screen
name,” Jill said. “We’ve never worked together before.”

“Every mission we were doing
back in those days failed,” Tarin said. “Agents were dying faster than we could
replace them. I was ready to quit. It was your words that inspired me to stay.”

“How do you know I’m Marsh Hawk?
Who told you?”

“The strategists told me, Jill.
They told me because it was the only way to make me do this crazy assignment.
When I got a call saying I had to break into Renata’s mansion, establish myself
among the slaves, and lay the ground work for some hacker to crack Renata’s
phone, I told them no way. I told them it was sheer madness. But then they told
me the hacker was you.”

“Tarin, I’m flattered, really.
But I don’t like that you know my handle. I don’t like that you just showed up
in my room tonight and --”

“The world is out of balance,”
Tarin said. “The vampires are growing in strength and numbers at a pace that is
sure to be the end of humanity.”

He was reciting her own words to
her now. Words she had written when she was a hot-headed thirteen-year-old who
hated her parents and took to an illegal message board to vent.

“You don’t have to do this,”
Jill said. “I don’t want--”

“It was one thing when they hid
in the shadows and picked us off one at a time to feed their hunger,” Tarin
continued. “But to affix themselves at the top of human society, to make us all
their slaves—it’s unconscionable.”

The words made Jill cringe. She
had been so sure of herself back in those days. So confident in her angry
diatribes and certain that she had the courage and the skill to back up the
words she wrote on the Internet.

“By the time they kill us we are
already dead,” Tarin went on.

“Please,” Jill said. “Just stop.
You’re embarrassing me.”

“Everything that makes our lives
worth living has been stolen away.”

“I get it, Tarin. I used to go
on the message board and write these essays--”

“--to reclaim our freedom we
must fight! If we run, or worse, if we acquiesce, we have accepted our fate as
their slaves. I want none of this. I want to take the war to them. I want the
predators to become the prey!

“Do you know what those words
meant to me, Jill?”

“I’m glad you liked them,” Jill
said. “But I was thirteen years old when I wrote that essay.”

“You were our voice! You gave us
confidence to continue the fight when all seemed lost. Your words changed
everything!”

Jill didn’t know what to say.
She remembered writing those diatribes and enjoying that other people on the
message boards spoke highly of them.

But she never actually thought her
words were making a difference. She couldn’t imagine an operative using them to
stay motivated.

“I’ve done eight assignments in
the past three years,” Tarin said. “All of them were successful. The Network
chooses me for the toughest, most dangerous missions with the lowest odds of
success, and I always come through. I know your current mission went south,
Jill, and I’m sorry to hear about that. But even though you’ve lost the battle,
you can still win the war. We’re going to do this. You’re going to put our ears
inside Renata’s phone, and when it’s done, you’ll go down in history as the one
who turned the tide. You’ll be the agent who took down the vampires with the
strength of your mind. Future generations will look back at this time in
history as one of horrible oppression, and they’ll be thankful it’s over. They’ll
be thankful for you.”

“Enough,” Jill said. “I get it.
I’ll do it.”

A big smile came across Tarin’s
face. Looking at him, thinking about all he’d just said, Jill smiled too.

Renata spent the better part of
her week preparing the perfect Rose Ransom. If this was to be her last
Coronation event, it would be the best one she ever put on.

She decorated her house to look
like a forest at night. She ordered her slaves to create new props for the
performance of the Rose Ransom legend. She created perfect invitations for the
kickoff party and sent them to the entire senior class. She invited the best
chamber orchestras in the world to her home so they could audition for the
right to play at the kickoff party. She had six chefs submit menus and samples
for the banquet, and selected one from New Orleans she had never worked with
before.

She commissioned a six-foot ice
sculpture of herself, and had her servants construct a wishing well to go
around it, thinking she could fill the well with bottles of vintage champagne.
She ordered a 10-tier wedding cake, just for the hell of it, and had the best fondant
artist in the world create the perfect rose to go on top of it.

And in the midst of all of this,
she found time to create three perfect clues that would send the students on
the most challenging, elegant, and artful scavenger hunt ever devised.

She finished the final clue
while flying on her private jet. She and a team of her servants were headed to
Italy to pay a visit to Falkon and his prisoners.

“They really should award me
some sort of prize for the artistry in these Ransom clues,” she said. “Don’t
you guys think?”

One of the slaves, a
fourteen-year-old blonde girl named Daisy, was quick to nod her head. Another
slave, a behemoth of a boy named Frankie, was looking out the window and didn’t
hear her.

“What are you looking at there,
Frankie?”

“Oh, I’m sorry Master. I was
just looking at the wing of the plane.”

Frankie was an interesting boy.
The strongest member of her staff by far, he was incredibly useful around the
house. He was also unusually pensive for a slave from the Farm. Renata got the
sense that he was quite smart underneath all the programming.

Smart and strong. Such a unique
slave. So much potential. She had big plans for Frankie.

Frankie and Daisy were on this
trip to work. Neither of them was ripe yet. The rest of the slaves on the plane
were in case Renata got hungry.

Slaves like Opal.

“Come here, Opal,” Renata said.
“I want to tell you a story.”

Opal approached and took the
seat across from Renata.

“I would enjoy listening,” Opal
said. “Is this a true story, my master?”

Opal had been a chef in Renata’s
kitchen since she was thirteen. Her face was leathered beyond her years from
working over a hot stove preparing meals for the many dinner parties and galas
Renata held at her house.

Opal was nineteen now. She
smelled delicious.

“Indeed it is,” Renata said. “It
is a true story about a sweet little girl with beautiful red hair and a
gorgeous smile. This little girl’s parents were two of the richest people on
earth, and the girl had many things. A room full of toys. A stable full of
horses with a pony to call her own. She had giant birthday parties with lots of
presents and she could have candy whenever she wanted.”

“She sounds like a lucky little
girl,” said Opal.

“You would think so,” said
Renata, “but something bad happened to this girl when she was eight years old.
Something dreadful, in fact.”

“What was it, my master?”

Renata sighed. The memory was so
distant now, and she had spoken of it thousands of times. Still, this part was
a challenge to think about. “Well, my darling, the girl wandered away from her
family during a picnic in the mountains. A man found her roaming through the
woods by herself. A bad man. A crazy man. He picked her up, covered her mouth,
and carried her to a shack on the other side of the mountain.”

“That sounds bad,” said Opal.

“It was awful, and the girl was
terrified. The man tied her to a post and started raving about God’s will. He
took off all his clothes and went outside to roll around in the mud.”

“This sounds like a crazy
person.”

“Oh yeah. Totally bonkers,” Renata
said. “Can you imagine how frightened I was?”

“You, Master?”

“Yes, the story is about me.
When I was a little girl, I was kidnapped.”

“I am so sorry this happened to
you, Master.”

“It’s okay. The story has a
happy ending. You see, the man came back into the shack with a knife in his
hand. He walked up to the little girl. She was certain he was going to kill
her. But he didn’t. Instead, he threw a penny in the air.”

“A penny?”

“He let it bounce on the floor.
He jumped up and down with excitement while he waited for it to stop. The girl
could see the coin from where she stood. When it finally stopped moving, it was
tails side up.”

“Was that bad?”

“No, it was good. Very good! The
crazy man screamed and yanked at his hair, then he went outside and disappeared
for a long time. He had a routine, you see. He went outside, then he came into
the shack and flipped a coin. If it landed tails side up, he had to go outside
again. He wasn’t going to kill the girl until the coin turned up heads.”

“But eventually the coin would
be heads, Master, wouldn’t it?”

“Five times in a row it was
tails!” Renata said. “And before he came back to throw it a sixth time, a
hunter arrived at the shack. The little girl was saved.”

“It’s an amazing story, Master.
You were so very lucky that the coin always went your way.”

“Indeed I was,” said Renata. “I
am the luckiest girl in the world. And I learned a very important lesson that
day. You know what that lesson was?”

“Please tell me, Master.”

“You must trust in fate. It is
more powerful than all of us. And it is only when we trust in fate that we may
find true bliss. Do you trust in fate, Opal?"

Renata had her hand in her
pocket, reaching for a coin.

“I do not know about fate,
Master.”

“Well, let’s see how fate treats
you, shall we? Do you like heads or tails?”

Opal looked confused. The simple
choice of one side of a coin was too much for her.

“Fine, I will choose for you,”
Renata said. “I choose heads.”

She was about to flip the coin
when her phone rang.

“Hang on, Opal. That’s Falkon
calling.” She pressed the answer button. “Hello there. I’m on my way to see you
now.”

“Looking forward to it,” Falkon
said. “I have set up my camera in the master bedroom, just as you requested. Is
there anything else you would have done before you land?”

“You have the rose petals,
right?”

“I do.”

“Then no, I think we’re set. How
are things coming with the research I brought you?”

“Dr. Weiss has entered the data
into the computer stack. The DNA is sequencing now. We’ll be able to run some
initial tests soon, but we are constrained until you can get us more money.”

Renata looked across the plane
at Frankie. “I have something in the works,” she said. “Just a few more days
and I should have a nice stack of cash for us. What about our prisoners? How
are they doing?”

Falkon chuckled. “Our prisoners
are fine,” he said. “Mr. Jenson is sleeping soundly. Ms. Bloom…well, there are
some things I should tell you about Ms. Bloom.”

“Yes? What sort of things?”

“To start, your interrogation
with her was all a lie. She repelled your advances into her mind and lied to
your face, just as she did to Melissa.”

“That’s impossible,” Renata
said. “Why on earth would you think that?”

“I’ve looked at her mind
myself,” Falkon said. “It is a locked door. A genetic aberration I have only
seen once before in my life.”

Renata wanted to protest, but
she knew Falkon was telling her the truth. A part of her had felt uneasy with
that entire interrogation. When she spoke with Nicky, she felt like she wasn’t
ever in complete control.