The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (31 page)

She knew what she was looking
for now. The one rose in the cemetery that was different—the reddest rose—would
be preserved somehow. Eternally young, like a vampire. One rose that lived
forever, a thousand roses surrounding it that were already dead.

The names on the tombstones were
part of the game as well. Renata put the clue here so students could ponder
their own imminent demise. The names on every grave had once represented a
living person, a young person.

Emma Golden, 1922 – 2001.

Charles Vox, 1945 – 2013.

Estevan Atencio, 1910 – 1999

Jill imagined the lives of these
people, now gone. She thought about where they might have been during their
senior year of high school.

Emma Golden
whose
seventeenth birthday was at the height of the Great Depression.
Charles Vox,
who turned seventeen in 1962, right when
the Samarin clan was
beginning to flex its muscles.
Estevan Atencio
, who was a teenager
during the roaring twenties, when Daciana Samarin was a new arrival on American
shores and there was no oppressive vampire clan in Washington.

First kisses, high school
graduations, children, grandchildren, maybe great grandchildren, and then
you’re buried in the ground. Did they ever wonder about their place in all of
it? Did they worry about leaving their mark?

She was onto the next row now,
still having seen nothing but plain roses at every grave. She was letting her
light flash on the tombstones, but wasn’t reading the names. She couldn’t.
There was more death in here than she cared to think about. More death all
around her than she could bear.

She could sense the phantoms.
The dead beneath the ground, their spirits floating in the mist.

You’re exhausted, Jill.
You’re traumatized. You’re broken. Just get through this night. Just find the
rose and be done.

She heard a rustle in the bushes
at the end of the row, and aimed her flashlight in the direction of the noise.
She half-expected to see Gia standing there.

There was no one.

“The wind,” she said aloud.
Nothing
but the wind
. She aimed her flashlight down and got back to work. Another
grave, another rose, another grave…

She heard Ryan’s voice, echoing
in her mind.

I feel like this is all that
matters
, it said. It was a memory from freshman year, from a few magical
weeks when she and Ryan were in love and nobody was bothering them. They were
standing on the edge of the river. Ryan had kissed her. He was looking in her
eyes, telling her there was no one else in the world.

She looked at another grave,
another rose. Kim Renwick entered her mind.

You’re nothing but a lapdog,
just like that panting, decrepit bitch you call mother
.

“Fuck you, Kim Renwick,” she
whispered, not hearing her own voice as she said the words, but rather,
Nicky’s. The Homecoming Masquerade, the first words out of Nicky’s mouth. The
look on Kim’s face as Nicky said it, like her head was about to explode.

You are the bastard child of
the most fucked up family I’ve ever met.

Funny, when Kim said that line
to Jill, it left a scratch. But now, as Jill wandered alone in a cemetery in
the middle of the night, thinking about the brevity of life and the friends who
were already gone, Kim’s words cut deep.

Your mother is a mindless
robot who obeys everything your prick of a father tells her to do.

“It’s not her fault,” Jill
whispered. “None of it is her fault.”

You’re a fraud, Jill
Wentworth
.

“I am not a fraud. I’m trying to
choose what’s right.”

A fraud!

Another rustle in the bushes.
Jill was so on edge she couldn’t control herself, and her arm flew up to point
the flashlight in the direction of the sound.

This time she saw something. A
shadow. It looked like a person, ducking into the trees ahead of her.

“Hello?” she said. “Tarin?”

For a few horrible seconds, she
stood in place, hearing nothing but her own racing heart. Then she felt a hand
on her shoulder and she shrieked.

“Shhh...it’s me,” Tarin
whispered.

“Don’t do that!” Jill hissed.
“You scared the heck out of me!”

Tarin grabbed her arm with his
hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.

His grip, or was it his
voice—Jill couldn’t say, but something about him took away all the anxiety of
the moment. Instantly, she felt herself growing more calm.

What was it about this guy? He
had a presence to him, an energy, that could just take charge of the moment.
Jill understood now why the Network trusted him for an assignment as dangerous
as going undercover in Renata’s mansion. He had so much command that you felt
at ease when he was around.

“I heard something in the
bushes,” Jill said.

“I know, I heard it too,” said
Tarin. “Probably a squirrel or something.”

“I don’t know, Tarin. I aimed my
flashlight over there. I thought I saw…”

“What? What did you see?

 
A ghost?
Could she tell
him that? Because that’s what she thought was over there. The ghost of Gia, or
Kendall, or Dante, or all three of them. The ghost of any one of these thousand
people buried underground.

You’re being ridiculous,
Jill. You’re sleep-deprived and frightened, and you’re starting to lose it.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m sure
it’s nothing.”

“I’ll go check it out,” Tarin
said. “You keep looking. Start on this row and double back that way.”

“But I haven’t finished looking
down this row yet.”

“I’ll get the rest of this row.
I’ve already checked the rest of the cemetery.”

“Really?” Jill said, looking out
at the acres of open space behind them. “You’ve checked all that?”

“The rose we’re looking for
isn’t there,” Tarin said. “But we’re getting close. It has to be somewhere in
this back corner.”

Jill shone her flashlight where
Tarin was pointing. There were maybe a hundred graves in that section. God, she
hoped he was right. She really wanted to find the clue and get out of here.

“Okay, I’ll get to work on this
spot,” she said.

She turned and Tarin was gone
again, running so fast towards the bushes she could hardly see him. What a
strange man he was. He didn’t have his flashlight on. He was sprinting to the
bushes in total darkness.

And then he was gone, what little
Jill could see of him swallowed in the foliage where she saw a ghost.

There was rustling in the
bushes, but Jill couldn’t see anything. Why didn’t he have his flashlight on?
What was he doing back there?

She aimed her own flashlight at
the bushes, and for an instant, she thought she saw the silhouettes of two
people, a man and a woman, but then they were gone.

“Tarin?”

She heard the wind, blowing
through the trees. She heard leaves falling to the ground. In the distance, she
heard a car drive by.

“Tarin? Did you find anything?”

There was more rustling in the
bushes, then a sound that frightened her so much she dropped her flashlight.

A scream.

Now she wanted to run. But she
didn’t. She held her feet in place for the sake of Nicky and Ryan.
I choose
to do what’s right.
She bent down and reached for her flashlight. As she
neared the ground, she saw something shiny in the flashlight’s beam. It was
wild and golden—a gleaming light from the ground. In her stupor, she almost
thought she saw a rose.

A rose that was on fire.

Ignore it, Jill. Your mind is
playing tricks on you.

“Tarin?” she yelled as she
picked up the flashlight. “Tarin!”

She began running towards the
bushes, her legs begging her to stop and go back the other way, her mind
reminding her that she saw a ghost. Not one ghost, but two. A man and a woman.

It’s not true
, she told
herself, forcing her legs forward.
There are no ghosts. You choose to do
what’s right. You choose to run into those bushes and find the other agent on
this mission.

“Tarin!” she yelled. “Tarin, are
you back there?”

There was rustling now, movement
in the bushes, and she stopped where she was. Something was coming out. Her
feet were backing up. They begged for her to turn and run.

I will not run away
, she
thought.
If Tarin is in trouble back there, no one can help him but me.

She aimed her flashlight at the
bushes. She saw something coming out. Arms and legs and a head—was it him? She
could swear it wasn’t him. It seemed too short. There was hair…too much hair.

And then he stepped into the
beam of her flashlight and smiled at her.

“Nothing back there,” Tarin
said.

Jill felt weak in the knees and
plopped down in the grass.

“Jill?”

Tarin ran up to her. “Are you
alright?”

“I heard something,” she said.
She was panting. Her whole body was shaking. She felt like she couldn’t catch
her breath. “I thought I heard somebody scream.”

“You’re frightened,” Tarin said.
“This is a bit much for you tonight, isn’t it?”

“I’m kind of freaking out a
little,” she said. She took a deep breath. Then another. “Are you sure nobody
was back there? I could swear I heard somebody scream.”

Tarin put his hand on Jill’s
chin and turned her face toward his. Even in the darkness, she could see his
eyes clearly. She allowed herself to get lost in them.

“You can relax, Jill,” he said.
“There was nothing back there.”

“I…but I….”

“Nothing, Jill. What you heard
must have been the wind.”

Yes, the wind
. She could
hear it whispering in her ears now.
Nothing but the wind
.

“I was losing it there for a
minute,” she said.

“It was just the wind,” said
Tarin.

“That was so crazy,” Jill said.
“I must have had a full-on hallucination. I saw silhouettes behind those
bushes. I heard a scream. I…”

I saw a rose on fire
.

“What is it Jill?”

“I think I know where to find
the clue.”

Tributes to kings

Both born and elected

Join their inspirations in
dust

Despite 657 claims to the
eternal

Kim looked at the clue that was
etched on a tombstone at Meadowlark Memorial cemetery. She was so angry she
could scream.

She wasn’t angry that they found
Emmitt’s body in the bushes. Yes, Emmitt had been a good friend to the family
for many years and she’d known him since before she could remember, but she
didn’t really care. Emmitt had been assigned the most important job of all, and
he’d failed. As far as Kim was concerned, he deserved to die.

And she wasn’t angry that this
second clue was even more obscure than the first.
Tributes to kings…born and
elected…657 claims to the eternal
…whatever. It wasn’t like Kim needed to
solve this clue. The harder and stranger it was, the better for her. The more
she read the clue, the more certain she was that Renata didn’t want anyone to
win the Ransom this year. How could anybody even begin to solve this mess?

Of course, she thought the same
thing about the last clue, but here they were. Kim and her father, having come
to Meadowlark Memorial because Emmitt filed a report late in the night that
Jill Wentworth was here.

That was why she was angry. That
was why she wanted to tilt her head back to the sky, open her mouth as wide as
it could go, and curse Jill’s name to the heavens above.

Jill Wentworth had solved the
clue. Not only that, she had solved the clue, discovered that Emmitt was
watching her, and killed him, leaving his corpse in the bushes at the far end
of the cemetery.

“Come here, I want to show you
something,” yelled Galen Renwick from across the graveyard.

“No!” Kim shouted. “You come
over here! I’ve found the second clue!”

Her daddy was such a dunce. As
far as Kim was concerned, Galen was just as useless as Emmitt and deserved the
same fate at this point. So many mistakes last night. So many unforgivable
screw-ups.

First was that horrible phone
call with Jill, where Jill was able to use the mistakes of Kim’s daddy against
her,
again
. How many times would Galen Renwick’s screw-ups come back to
haunt Kim? How much harder could he have made it for her to win this contest?

Then came news from Emmitt that
Jill Wentworth was on the move in the middle of the night, news that her daddy
sat on for two mother-fucking hours! Had Galen gotten his lazy ass out of bed
at the moment when Emmitt called to report that Jill was at Meadowlark
Memorial, they might have been able to do something about it! Instead, Galen
Renwick, power broker feared by immortal and human alike, put his head back on
his squishy pillow and went to sleep. By the time he was up again at dawn, it
was already too late. Jill came and went from Meadowlark Memorial, and Emmitt,
paragon of incompetence that he was, got his ass killed.

A part of Kim admired Jill for
that one. Who knew that Jill had all this spunk in her? First she turns the
tables back on Kim with her own blackmail threats, then she kills the
investigator the Renwicks had on her tail.

Killed him, and left his body in
the bushes for the Renwicks to find!

That was hardcore. A bold,
brilliant move that put the Renwicks on notice. Jill Wentworth played for
keeps.

“Oh my, would you look at that?”
said Galen, huffing and puffing after a quick jog from the bushes, where
Emmitt’s body still lay in the dirt.

“That’s what I’m doing,” Kim
said, really leaning into the sarcasm as she spoke.

Galen crouched down in front of
the tombstone and admired the rose.