The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (32 page)

“It’s 18 karat,” he said,
referencing the golden block on which the rose was mounted.

“You’re blocking the sun,” Kim
said. “It looks best when it’s getting some light.”

“Oh, sorry,” Galen said,
stepping back until his shadow wasn’t touching the rose.

It was brilliant in the
sunlight. Kim could only imagine how it looked when Jill saw it, the soft light
of the moon dancing off the gemstones and metal.

While every other grave in this
cemetery had a wilted rose lying atop a patch of grass, this one plot in the
northwest corner had a bejeweled rose fused onto a heavy block of solid gold.
The gold lay flush with the ground, creating a shimmering yellow light
underneath the rose.

And the rose itself was the most
spectacular piece of art Kim had ever seen. A stem made of platinum, cast with
sharp thorns and curvy leaves, holding a head of perfectly shaped petals
enameled to a brilliant red. Inside the flower, peeking between two enameled petals,
was a round diamond that captured the sunlight and sent it out again with a
rose-colored tint.

Behind the rose was a small
tombstone, where the second clue was written.

“Tributes to kings, born and
elected,” Galen began.

“I can read Daddy,” said Kim.
“Unless you’ve got some idea what it means, we don’t need to talk about it.”

“Off the top of my head I don’t
know,” said Galen. “And that’s a good thing. We don’t want it to be easy.”

“We don’t want it to be found!”
Kim said. “Now that Jill has found it, you can bet your ass she’ll tell
everyone at school where it is! She doesn’t care who finds Nicky, so long as
somebody does, and if a hundred kids get their eyes on this clue, one of them
might solve it!”

“Six-hundred-fifty-seven,” Galen
said, totally oblivious to the ranting of his daughter. “It’s strange there’s a
number in the last line. Six-hundred-fifty-seven claims to the eternal. That
will be the key to answering it. The rest of the clue is vague, but a number
that specific is something a computer can latch onto. We’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t want to figure it out!
I want it to be gone! I want to have last night back, so when Emmitt calls you,
you can wake me up and the two of us can stop Jill before she ever gets here!”

“And what would we have done,
Kim? We can’t blackmail the girl. She’s already shown that. We can’t beat her
up. We can’t kill her. You know the rules of the contest.”

“We could have slowed her down.
We could have wrecked into her car, slashed her tires, gotten her drunk, cut a
deal with her, I don’t know, Daddy! But I’m pissed off that Jill got here
first!”

“There is just no telling with
this girl,” Galen said. “She’s been the biggest surprise of the contest. And to
think that a flimsy buffoon like Walter Wentworth is her father.”

“Why can’t you get him in line?
He was your best buddy in school.”

“Walter and I were never
buddies, just acquaintances. And you know full well why I can’t get him in
line. It’s the same reason you can’t control Jill.” Galen bit down on his lower
lip, a habit that once was endearing to Kim, but now made her sick. “Never in a
million years would I have seen this coming,” he said. “The daughter of Walter
Wentworth is getting the best of us.”

“She killed Emmitt!” Kim
screeched. “Can’t we use that somehow?”

“No, we can’t.”

“Jesus, Daddy. It seems like
you’re just giving up without a fight. There’s a dead body in those bushes back
there and we know who killed him.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Yes we do! Emmitt told you he
followed Jill into this cemetery. And then he died. Unless he dropped dead of a
heart attack--”

“He was killed by an immortal,”
Galen said. “There are bite marks on the back of his leg. An immortal sucked
him dry at the femoral artery, then poked a finger into his gut to make it look
like he’d been stabbed or shot.”

“What? But that would mean--”

“An immortal is working with
Jill, or at least, is looking out for her.”

“No, this can’t—are you sure?”

“Come have a look at the body,
Kim.”

She followed Galen to the bushes,
unaware that
have a look at the body
meant,
look at an old naked dead
man
.

“Ah geez, you took his pants
off! What the hell, Daddy! You can’t unsee that shit!”

Galen was unfazed by Kim’s
complaints, and rolled the corpse over onto its side, exposing the back of
Emmitt’s pale, flabby leg.

“See these puncture wounds right
here?” he said.

“Yeah, I see them. Jiminy
Christmas, I think I’m gonna hurl.”

“They severed the femoral
artery. With one good slurp, an immortal removed enough blood to stop Emmitt’s
heart.”

“No more talk of slurping,
please.”

“Whoever did this knew exactly
what they were doing,” Galen said. He rolled the body over onto its back,
leaving Emmitt how they found him, when they assumed he was dead from a gunshot
wound to the stomach.

“They left the body here as a
message for us,” Galen said. “Jill wants us to think that she killed Emmitt. Or
if not her, then some rough and tumble bodyguard she had with her. The immortal
chose to bite Emmitt on the leg rather than the neck in order to hide the true
nature of Emmitt’s death.”

“Jill doesn’t want us to know
she’s working with an immortal,” said Kim. “It’s against the rules for someone
in the clan to help her.”

“But she wanted to send a
message to us. She’s telling us to stop spying on her.”

“It was a stupid thing to do,”
said Kim. “We’ll show this body to Daciana.”

“She still hasn’t called me
back.”

“Then we’ll show it to Renata!
She’ll--”

“She’ll what, Kim? Look in
Jill’s mind?”

Kim balled her hands into fists,
squeezing so tight that her nails dug into her flesh.

“This is so uncool, Daddy. Jill
finds out one thing from your past, and now we’ve lost all our advantages?”

“We’ll have to be clever about
this,” Galen said. “Jill Wentworth is a worthy opponent. Come on, let’s get in
the car. I’ll have someone come to take Emmitt’s body away.”

Weeks of solitude and darkness.
Maybe months. Nicky had no idea how long she had been in that prison cell. Time
stretched into an abyss on all sides of her.

She wondered if she was going
crazy. Maybe her constant visions of past lives in this compound weren’t
memories coming back to her. Maybe they were the hallucinations of someone who
had lost it. Maybe they were her brain’s way of coping with her situation.

Did it matter either way? Sane
or insane, she was headed for death regardless. So long as Ryan was
comfortable, she didn’t care. She would sit quietly in her cell, eating the
meals that got pushed through the door, causing no trouble for anyone.

It wasn’t like she was even that
lonely. Memories that had been long forgotten but now were coming back kept her
company. Coming to this place, seeing the courtyard, the sphere, stepping into
her childhood home—it had pushed open the door to years of remembrance she had
locked away. With no distractions and nothing better to do, Nicky spent her
days exploring those memories.

Thinking about that cottage up
on the hill reminded her of an oval table where they sat to eat dinner, and
thinking about dinner reminded her that she and her father played games after
dinner was done. Cards and charades and a board game with multi-colored pieces
that moved on the roll of the dice. Laughing and talking and enjoying each
other’s company. They were happy times for her. They were memories she was
meant to have, and once she remembered them, they filled her mind, as if they
had always been there.

Her mother appeared only in a
few memories. She came in and kissed Nicky goodnight. She went for a walk in
the woods with Nicky. She sat quietly at the dinner table, lost in her own
thoughts.

Her father was the much more
present player. It seemed like he and Nicky did everything together. Fishing
and swimming at the lake, sledding down the side of the mountain, reading
books, talking.

And tied to all of these, the
most dominant memory of all, was that night in the courtyard. She was certain
now that everything about the vision was real. Her mother yelling at her to
run. The sick people descending upon her. Her father taking her into the forest…

“Come on out, Nicky.”

It was Falkon’s voice.

“We’re going to walk you around
a bit. Gotta make sure you don’t lose your marbles in there. We want you
looking happy and healthy when your classmates see you.”

Nicky stumbled forward, the
light piercing her eyes.

She wasn’t the only one in pain.
All around her, the other prisoners screamed in anger at the light. They banged
on the glass as Nicky walked past them. They snarled and roared at her in a
perfect imitation of the sound they made in the vision that had been haunting
her.

She kept her head down and let
Falkon lead her through the hallway and out of the prison. They were walking up
a flight of stairs when Nicky’s mind finally registered the words Falkon had
said.

Her classmates?

“When are my classmates going to
see me?” she said.

“At the end of the year,” said
Falkon. “You know, that game you kids play at your school. The Ransom of the
Rose or whatever it’s called.”

It was disorienting to even
think about school. Nicky had been lost in her own thoughts for so long, living
in her own past, that it was hard to even place herself in the present.

“You are confused,” Falkon said.
“You’ve been down there alone for too long. You are losing track of reality,
aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Nicky said. “I guess I am.”

“Perhaps we can take you out
more frequently. Renata is adamant that you are to be the model of beauty when
she kills you in front of your peers.”

Nicky was trying to make sense
of what Falkon was telling her, but it was hard.

“In front of my peers?” she
said.

Falkon laughed. “Oh dear. We
really have made a mess of you, haven’t we? Come with me. I know just the
activity to bring order back to your mind.”

A minute later, they were
sitting at a table in Falkon’s house, looking down on a chess board.

“You move a pawn, you move a
knight, you move a bishop, and before you know it, your mind begins falling in
line,” said Falkon. “There is no better brain exercise on earth than a good
game of chess. I will go first.”

Falkon grabbed a white pawn and
pushed it out on the board. Nicky looked at him and shook her head.

“Come on, Nicky. Be a sport,”
Falkon said. “I know you’re tired and confused. Really, this will help.”

Nicky grabbed one of the pawns
and quickly moved it up a space.

“No, no, no—there is no benefit
to your mind if you simply humor me,” said Falkon. He pushed Nicky’s pawn back
to its starting position. “Tell you what. We will make it interesting. If you
win, I let you and your friend go.”

Nicky looked at Falkon to gauge
if he was joking or not.

“I am entirely serious,” said
Falkon. “And I am a man of my word. I love a good challenge, and, like most men
who have lived a thousand years, find that there are few challenges left in the
world. So please, sit up straight, get your head into the game, and play chess.
If you win, you and Ryan are free to go.”

“And if I lose?”

“If you lose, nothing changes.
You remain my prisoner, and in a few weeks, Renata takes you back to Washington
and kills you in front of your classmates.”

For the first time since their
conversation began, Nicky understood what Falkon was saying to her. The Rose
Ransom. She was the princess. Renata would kill her after no one found her.

“I can sense the gears spinning
up there,” Falkon said. “You believe me now? Your mind is already healing and
you haven’t even made your first move.”

“That’s how she’s explaining our
absence at school,” Nicky said. “That’s why we took that photograph on the
bed.”

“Yes, yes, something like that,”
said Falkon. “Your rituals at that school are absurd, but Renata, like me, is
bored, and she is playing a game with your classmates. She has constructed some
sort of treasure hunt with nearly impossible clues. When the year ends and
nobody solves them, she must drag you out in front of the students and kill
you.”

“But what about Ryan?” Nicky
said. “He’s still alive, isn’t he? He’s still safe.”

“Your friend is asleep in my
guest room having wonderfully pleasant dreams. You know, that could have been
your fate as well if you hadn’t locked me out of your mind.”

Nicky looked down at the chess
board. She was playing the black pieces. Falkon had made a single move. A pawn
in the center, up two spaces.

“You will let us go if I win,”
she said.

“I will fly you back to
Washington myself,” said Falkon. “Now take your turn.”

Nicky gave it everything she
had. Falkon was right. The game did organize her mind. By her second turn, she
was fully alert and back in the moment. The flurry of visions she had seen in
the prison cell were stowed away in her mind with the rest of her memories. Her
total focus was on the chess board, planning many moves ahead.

But Falkon was too good. No
matter how far ahead she mapped out the game, he was always a step ahead of
her, and after an initial dance where they both put their pieces in place,
Falkon decimated her side of the board, taking two bishops and a knight on the
next three turns. He trapped her queen, then he trapped her king.

“Checkmate,” he said calmly. “A
nice effort on your part, but sadly, you were nowhere close. Would you like to
know where you went wrong?”

“Not really,” said Nicky.

“I will show you anyway,” said
Falkon. And then he walked through the entire game, move for move, explaining
exactly what Nicky was thinking at every step along the way. When he finished,
he said, “Don’t feel bad. In the past four hundred years, I’ve only lost once.
You know who beat me?”