The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (26 page)

“Send someone to Rio de Janeiro.
The Praia de Sol hotel. Shannon Evans is there. I guarantee it.”

“And if we’re going to blackmail
Annika, we would need evidence connecting her to Shannon.”

“Annika and Shannon have been
talking. Find out what they’re saying to each other.”

“Okay. I’ll get after it. You
better get back to your party.”

*****

Frankie ran down the hill,
spreading his legs in long strides, allowing gravity to do the work. He heard
movement in the trees, the vampires, whooping and hollering as they leapt among
the branches behind him. He sensed a change in them. They weren’t observers
anymore. They were coming for him. They were coming quickly.

Shadows in the moonlight. Leaves
and twigs on the forest floor. Tree trunks racing by on either side. Piercing
screams from the vampires behind him.

Battle cries.

He saw the shadow before she
landed. She flew through the air above his head and landed with her back to
him.

I must kill everyone before
they kill me.

There was no hesitation. No
thought about what it meant to attack a vampire. He raised his hatchet and
struck the woman while she was still turning around to face him. The blade of
his hatchet landed between her shoulder and her neck.

Had the blade not been so dulled
already she would have lost her head on that first strike, but this hatchet had
no sting left after Frankie smashed it against the lock on a steel gate.

The vampire looked at him with
horror in her eyes. Frankie yanked the hatchet free and blood began flooding
from the wound. The vampire was weak and disoriented, but not dead.

I must kill everyone before
they kill me.

He raised the hatchet for a
second swing.

“Frankie!”

The sound of his master’s voice,
calling his name, pulled him under. The real Frankie, who had been so occupied
with the task at hand he never got to enjoy his freedom, got sucked back into
the vortex. Frankie the slave was back.

Renata landed right next to him.

“Frankie, no!” she said. “Stop!”

“Yes, Master.”

He was an observer again,
trapped somewhere behind the eyes that now looked at the vampire he had nearly
killed.

Lena was her name. Frankie the
slave knew all their names and faces. Lena Trang.

She was kneeling on the forest
floor, using her hands to hold her head in place. Her wound was healing itself.
Her strength was returning.

“He’s mine!” she snarled. “I
will rip him apart!”

“Cool it, Lena!” Renata snapped.
“It’s your own damned fault. I can’t believe you almost got killed by a human.”

The others were laughing. It was
funny to them that Lena almost died. One of them put his hand on Frankie’s
shoulder, declared him to be an amazing piece of meat.

“And almost ripe,” said Renata.

“What a treat he will be,” said
Mark Spinoza. “I dare say I’m jealous he’s not in my pantry.”

Renata looked at Frankie and
smiled. “Yes, Frankie is a very special boy. The sort you don’t eat unless it’s
a special occasion. Okay you clowns, I won the scrum. Where’s Bernadette? I
want to talk about my prize money.”

*****

Jill had worked her way past the
login, had disabled all the tracking software, and was creating a mirror of
Renata’s phone on the laptop.

It was taking a long time.

“How big is this phone?” she
whispered.

She looked at the system stats.
The phone had a 16 gig hard drive—hardly anything at all. The mirror should
have been written in just a few minutes. Why was it taking so long?

She looked at the processing
speed on the laptop and the phone. Everything looked normal.

“Odd,” she said. Perhaps there
was some security clogging things up?

She spent the next few minutes
double checking everything about the hack. It all looked good. Not a thing was
going wrong. It was just taking longer than she thought it should.

Blowing it off as something to
do with the phone, something she didn’t understand yet but would once she had
complete access, she slouched back in the chair. Nothing to do now but wait.

Her eyes drifted to a strange
black and white picture hanging on the wall next to the desk. A young Renata
Sullivan, twelve or thirteen years old, standing onstage, holding a skull in
her hand.

It was Renata’s love of
performance that drove the theatrics of the Coronation contest. A dance where
everyone came in costume, a stage erected in the woods where boys beat each
other to a pulp, an auction at a theater downtown where the girls wearing black
were sold to the highest bidder…

And tonight, a play. The Rose
Ransom performance would begin in just a few minutes. Jill could explain away
her absence from the party. But come the performance, where everyone had an
assigned seat at a table--if she wasn’t back upstairs by the time the play
started she was in trouble.

Higher on the wall, above the
picture of Renata, hung a tapestry with two sentences embroidered into the
fabric.

Tis thee, myself, that for
myself I praise,

Painting my age with beauty
of thy days.

The door opened, startling her
and making her jump up from the desk.

“Jill, it’s me,” came Tarin’s
voice.

“Tarin you nearly scared me to
death!”

Tarin rushed down the stairs. “Are
you done?” he said. “It’s time.”

“I’m in and everything is
working, but it’s going slow. I need a few more minutes.”

“We don’t have a few more
minutes. I have to be back at my post.”

“If I stop the hack now we have
nothing,” said Jill. “If I get a few more minutes, we’ll have full remote
access to Renata’s phone.”

Tarin stood on the bottom step
for a second. The crypt was illuminated only by Jill’s flashlight and the glow
of the screens, but somehow the light fell on Tarin in a way that he was
crystal clear.

He was an exceptionally
good-looking guy.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a keyring. “Take this.”

“Renata’s keys? Oh, I don’t--”

“It’s the only way. You take the
keys. You stay down here and finish the hack. When you’re done, leave
everything where it is. Lock the door behind you and get back to the party.
I’ll get another set of keys from the barracks and come down here later to
clean up.”

“I don’t like this plan, Tarin.
I don’t even know if I can find my way back through all those halls. And the
security camera?”

“You can do this, Jill. I have
faith in you. Have a little faith in yourself.”

“I have plenty of faith in
myself! But you’re talking about leaving me alone in the crypt of Renata’s mansion!”

Tarin placed the keys on the
computer desk.

“You can do this,” he said.

“Tarin, wait. Can’t you give it
just a few more minutes?”

He was already running back up
the stairs.

“I have to get back, Jill.
Renata will notice if I’m gone.”

Before she could utter another
word of protest, Tarin was at the top of the stairs, closing the door behind
him.

The hack finished running not
more than five minutes after Tarin left.

“Crazy loon,” Jill muttered.
“Couldn’t wait even a few minutes to help me get out of here.”

She grabbed the keys and went up
the stairs. She stopped at the door and listened for movement on the other
side. It was quiet, so she opened it. The room outside was empty. Jill closed
the door behind her and locked it using the keys Tarin left for her. With no
pocket on her outfit for keys, and her handbag checked at the front door of the
mansion, she had no choice but to hold them as she ran. She ran with only a
vague memory of which way to go, but a sense that if she had faith in herself,
she could pull if off. Up the huge staircase, into the maze of long hallways,
down one to the left, and to the left again. The chandeliers, the suit of
armor, the glass case with treasures from antiquity—she recognized every space
she passed through, and she even remembered where to look for security cameras.
She was doing it. It was an incredible, exhilarating feeling. She was making
all the right moves at the right times. She was about to enter the art gallery
when the sound of footsteps stopped her in her tracks.

There were two pairs of feet.
One with hard soles that clomped across the floor. The other a pair of high
heels moving with a light touch.

Both were coming her way.

Jill backed into the nearest
room off the hallway, finding herself in a museum of sorts. Pedestals rose from
the floor, a dress inside a glass case on top of each one. The dresses were
extravagant and varied. Some were big Victorian Era gowns with giant hoops and
tight bodices. Others were more contemporary, hanging on slim mannequins inside
their glass cases.

Every dress had a big blood
stain on the front, as if the poor soul who was wearing it got stabbed in the
stomach. And now she saw a bloody knife lying on the pedestal underneath each
dress. Glass cases with bloody dresses and bloody knives--Jill felt like she
had stumbled into a museum of murder evidence.

“No, I’m headed to my dressing
room now,” came a voice from the hall. It was Renata. One of the people she
heard in the hallway was Renata!

Frantically looking for a place
to hide, Jill backed into one of the pedestals and the glass case on top began
to tip.

“Yes, I’m scheduled to do the
performance in just a few minutes,” Renata said. The voice was louder. She was
getting closer.

Jill caught the tipping glass
case before it fell over. She pressed it back into place, then she bolted for a
door on the far wall. She opened it to find a small closet. She stepped inside
and closed the door behind her.

Seconds later, Renata came into
the room.

“I’ve spoken with several of the
students,” she said. “None of them know a thing.”

A thing about what? Who was
Renata talking to?

“Sergio is the only one I’m
worried about,” she said.
She must be on the phone
, Jill thought.
But
who came in with her?

“Yes, he’s here tonight. I’m
surprised too. He never comes. What was that? The students? Oh no. I have ways
of getting the students to play nice for me. Have I ever told you about the
Rose Ransom performance I put on for these kids?” Then, more quietly, Renata
said, “Frankie, my shoes are in that closet over there. Go get them for me.”

The second pair of footsteps.
Renata hadn’t come in here alone, and now someone was walking to the closet
where Jill was hiding. She pressed her back into the corner and held her
breath.

“It really has been my greatest
contribution to the clan,” Renata continued. “In its way, my little play is
just as important as Coronation itself. Not that Daciana ever recognized that.”

A hand on the closet door. The
doorknob started to turn.

“Yes, you’ve got it,” Renata
said. “It’s much more than a simple play. For these students, it’s everything.
One of the great moments of their young lives.”

The door opened. Light came
flooding into the room. Jill stood perfectly still in the back corner.

The big, burly servant, the same
one who ran into Jill at the party and forced her to have a dumpling, stuck his
head inside, and started scanning the floor. He was looking for shoes. Outside,
Renata continued talking. With the closet door open, her voice was much louder
in Jill’s ears.

“I’m on stage in two minutes.
Call you later.”

As Renata snapped her phone
shut, the servant snatched up a pair of shoes on the floor of the closet. He
was standing up, about to leave, when his eyes fell on a second pair of shoes,
and the feet inside them.

He was looking right at Jill
now. With her eyes, she begged him not to say anything.

They were locked in place for
two very long seconds, the servant staring at Jill; Jill staring back. Then he
backed away and closed the closet door behind him.

“Here you are, Miss,” he said.

“Oh you found them,” said
Renata. “My lucky shoes. I’ve worn these for every Rose Ransom performance
since the very beginning. Can you believe that, Frankie?”

“I believe everything you tell
me, Master.”

“Of course you do. Zip me up in
the back. This dress is a beast.”

Jill heard the sound of a
zipper, then two pairs of feet walking away from the room. She stood perfectly
still, her back still pressed into the corner of the closet.

The footsteps moved down the
hallway and faded into silence.

What just happened?
she
wondered. That slave…would he rat her out? Why didn’t he say anything when he
saw her?

From elsewhere in the mansion,
Jill heard a brass fanfare. The overture. The play was about to start. She had
to get out of here.

Slowly, she opened the closet
door and poked her head out. Confident it was clear, she ran out of the room.
Back down the hall, through the foyer, and into the ballroom. She snuck in
through the back door and slunk down the side of the room. People saw her but
she didn’t care. The overture was still playing. She had made it. She found her
table and took the empty seat next to Annika.

“Where the hell have you been?”
Annika whispered.

“Oh, just…around,” Jill said.

Onstage, the curtain began to
rise, rescuing Jill from answering anymore questions. She leaned back in her
chair and took a deep breath.

I made it.

As the audience gasped at the
beauty of the set on the stage, Jill closed her eyes and allowed herself a
moment of pride. So much had gone wrong since the Date Auction ended, but
tonight, one thing went right. She was still a Network agent, and she had just
pulled off the most dangerous, audacious assignment ever.