The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (33 page)

Nicky shook her head.

“Your mother,” said Falkon.

“Really?” said Nicky. “Was she
playing for her freedom too?”

“Heavens no,” said Falkon. “She
and I were colleagues. We played every week. She seemed to be getting worse and
worse as we went along. Little did I know she was hustling me. She was learning
my techniques. My weaknesses. And then, one night, she came at me with all she
had. I was completely unprepared. Here, I’ll show you.”

Falkon began rearranging the
pieces on the board.

“This is how the board looked
during the pivotal moment of our game,” he said. “Now, you might be looking at
this board and thinking you should move your rook down the third file, like
this.”

Falkon grabbed the black rook
and slid it across the board. “You would do this because, you are thinking five
moves ahead and imagining check mate.

He began moving quickly,
announcing as he went. “Bishop captures pawn. Queen comes out. Knight captures
bishop. There! And now you think the white king is trapped in two more moves.
But you failed to see something, you know what it is?”

Nicky shook her head.

“This pawn, of course!”

He moved a white pawn up a
single space.

“There is no stopping it now,”
he said. “My rook can’t get there. My bishop can’t get there. Not even my
queen. And on the next turn…” he slid the pawn to the top row of the board. 
“And there you have it. This pawn is at the top of the board and gets
promoted.”

He removed the pawn and replaced
it with a queen.

“White has two queens on the
board now,” Falkon said. “Outrageous! But it is in the rules! All the official
societies of chess allow for this nonsense. Move your pawn to the top of the
board and it turns into a queen, even if there is already a queen on the board!
It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been playing chess for a thousand years. For
nine hundred of them, you could only promote your pawn to a piece that had
already been captured.”

Falkon shook his head in
disgust.

“I was such a fool! My mind was
so trapped in the past I didn’t even see what she was doing! But there it is,
Nicky Bloom. Two queens on the board! And three moves later…”

Falkon slid the pieces in order,
again announcing them as he went. “Queen takes knight. Other queen takes
bishop. Rook moves to the first file. Checkmate! I lose! The first time I lost
a game since I was a child in the remains of the Eastern Roman Empire!”

“That’s all very interesting,”
said Nicky. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say I deserved it! Say that
your mother discovered a weakness in my mind and exploited it! Oh, Nicky. Your
mother was an amazing woman. Unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Do you ever miss
her?”

“I didn’t know her,” Nicky said.

“No, I guess you didn’t. Ah
well. I think you’ve had enough recreation for one night. I will take you back
to your cell.”

“Please don’t,” Nicky said. “I’m
enjoying this.”

Falkon smiled. “I am too, now
that you mention it.”

“Show me more,” said Nicky. “I
came here to learn about my past. Show me. Tell me about my mother.”

Falkon sat in place for a
moment, looking at the chessboard.

“No, it’s not a good idea. You
are too much like her. I made a mistake allowing myself to enjoy her company. I
should have locked her up the minute she beat me at chess. I should have known
what she was capable of.”

“What did she do?” Nicky said.

“Oh no. We’ve talked enough. It
isn’t safe.”

“You mean you’re frightened of
me.”

Falkon leaned back and let out a
hearty laugh. “You are something special, Nicky. I know of no other human who
would dare--”

“You say you’re bored with life,
like there’s no adventure left in this world at all for you, but then when I
give you the chance to have some, you turn me down. It’s no wonder you’re so
miserable. Admit it, Falkon. You’re scared of me. I mean, what difference does
it make what you show me if I’m going to die anyway? What difference does it
make unless there’s a chance I could be a danger to you?”

Falkon smirked as he watched
Nicky talk. “I can see why he likes you,” he said.

“Who?”

“Sergio.”

Nicky decided to leave that one
alone. “Do whatever you’re going to do,” she said. “Lock me up, keep me out—I’m
bored waiting for you to decide.”

“Okay, okay,” Falkon said,
laughing. “You know, you are the most entertaining company I’ve had in years.
Ten more minutes. I will take you on a brief tour before I lock you up again.”

Falkon took Nicky down a flight
of stairs and into a laboratory of some sort.

“Your mother was a scientist,”
he said. “Best in her field.”

Against one wall was a desk with
three microscopes. On another were shelves of glassware, a book case, and a
computer. A long refrigerator with glass doors ran the length of the back.
Inside that refrigerator were hundreds of vials full of blood.

The opposite wall was empty. It
was made of glass, looking out into darkness on the other side.

“She and I had similar
interests,” Falkon said. “We both wanted to use science to cheat death.”

He flipped a switch in the
corner of the room and lights came on outside the glass, showing a huge room on
the other side.

“Have a look, Nicky,” he said.
“This is where we did our work.”

Nicky approached the glass. She
felt like a spectator at some nightmarish zoo.

A hundred yards or more of open
space lay in front of her, leading to a high wall on the other side. That wall
was made of glass, just like this one, but there was no laboratory behind that
glass. There were prisoners. Four rows, each with four cells. It was a prison
that stretched from floor to ceiling. And every person inside had the same gray
skin and yellow eyes that had haunted Nicky’s dreams for months. They shrieked
in anger at the light, some of them covering their eyes, others kicking and
banging on the glass.

“Who are they?” Nicky said.

“College students, mostly,” said
Falkon. “Also a few people from the village at the base of the mountain, and
some other people I’ve met during the course of my work.”

“What are you doing with them?
Why are they so sick?”

“One moment, Nicky. I can’t bear
the sound of their squealing.”

Falkon flipped the switch and the
room became dark again. The screaming stopped.

“Ah, that’s better,” he said.
“You don’t know how long I’ve had to listen to them screech like that. Anyway,
these creatures might look sick to you, but in fact they are quite healthy.
They would live for many, many years if they didn’t have such a nasty habit of
killing each other.”

“They’re like vampires,” Nicky
said.

“They
are
vampires,”
Falkon corrected. “Artificially created in the laboratory, using a genetic
sequence your mother created.”

Nicky took a step back. “I don’t
understand,” she said.

“Well, they’re not the vampires
you know. The recipe isn’t correct yet. As you saw, they are still
quite….feral.”

“Why would you do this?”

“There it is again,” Falkon said
with a smile. “The girl who asks why. You know, I have brought many scientists
into this lab over the years, and their first question is always how? They want
to know the mechanics of it all. They want to understand the implications for
human medicine. But they never ask why.”

He walked across the room and
opened the door to the refrigerator. He pulled out a vial of blood.

“Two queens,” he said. “That’s
how your mother beat me.”

“Two queens? Why are we talking
about chess again?”

“We are talking about the big
question, Nicky.
Why?
I was the stronger player. But I was arrogant. I
was complacent. Never once did I think that, during all those games when I beat
your mother, she was studying me. Never once did I consider she was planning an
attack of her own.”

He walked up to Nicky and held
out the vial of blood. “What do you see?” he said.

“It looks like blood.”

“And to your eyes, that’s all it
is,” said Falkon. “But when I look at this vial of blood, I see life. I see
power. I was much slower to see it than Daciana, but I see it now. Do you know
the story of how Daciana created Sergio?”

Know it? I’ve seen it
,
Nicky thought. But she said nothing, and gently shook her head.

“When Daciana bit into Sergio
Alonzo,” Falkon said, “she changed his blood. She created a genetic freak. A
mutant who could create new vampires at will! When the rest of us heard of
this, we assumed she had killed him, as was our custom. We had rules, Nicky!
Rules to prevent abominations such as the Samarin clan! But she didn’t kill
him. She hid Sergio away in violation of all our laws, and none of us realized
it was happening. We were arrogant and complacent while Daciana planned her
attack. For hundreds of years the two of them hid in the shadows. We all came
to forget about Daciana and her freak.  But then she took him to the New World,
and together, they created a clan so large that none of us could match her.”

Nicky shook her head. In a
strange way, she and Falkon were allies. Both of them wanted to get rid of the
Saramin clan. Both of them recognized Sergio as the key to the clan’s power.

“That’s why my mother joined
you, isn’t it?” Nicky said. “She wanted to help you defeat Daciana.”

Falkon smiled. “Your mother’s
motivations were complicated,” he said.

“Tell me about them. I want to
know.”

Falkon walked back to the refrigerator
and put the vial away. Nicky followed him.

“Tell me!” she said. “I deserve
to know!”

He closed his eyes and leaned
against the refrigerator door. He let out a deep sigh and shook his head.

“I’ve upset you,” Nicky said.
“Something I said has angered you.”

Falkon lifted his head and
stared into the refrigerator. Nicky saw his reflection in the glass. He looked
sad.

“You do not have the power to
anger me,” he said.

Falkon walked past her, headed
towards the door. “It’s time to put you back,” he said. “That’s enough chitchat
for one night.”

“What? No! You can’t just put me
back. We’re having a conversation.”

“We are having a fruitless
conversation. There is no point in speaking to you when your death is so near,”
Falkon said. He went to the hallway.

“Wait, please,” Nicky said,
chasing after him. “What happened in there? What did I say that made you
angry?”

Falkon turned and rushed back in
her face. “You don’t
deserve
anything, Nicky Bloom, and neither did your
mother! Your time on this earth is nothing but a blip compared to mine. Your
purpose is to feed my desires!”

He had a frightening presence
when he was angry. Everything about him, from the look on his face to the smell
of his breath, told Nicky that he could kill her where she stood before her
heart had a chance for even one more beat.

“I’m sorry,” Nicky said. “I’ll
go back to my cage.”

On the Monday following Jill’s
late night at the cemetery, she told Mattie and Annika about the second clue,
and asked them to spread the word.

“Spread the word?” Mattie said.
“But that takes away our advantage.”

“There is no advantage,” said
Jill. “This isn’t a race to see who finds Nicky and Ryan first. This is a
contest between people who want Nicky found and people who want Nicky dead.
Anyone and everyone who wants Kim to lose needs to be aware of that second
clue. The more minds at work on it, the sooner it gets solved.”

By the end of that day, word was
out, and a crowd of high school seniors descended on Meadowlark Memorial to
find a bejeweled rose, fused to a block of gold, and the clue that sat behind
it.

Tributes to kings

Both born and elected

Join their inspirations in
dust

Despite 657 claims to the
eternal

Jill had written the clue on a
whiteboard in her bedroom in huge letters. But she wasn’t thinking about it
now. She had other work to do.

Despite Tarin’s insistence that
they weren’t seeing the full story on Renata’s phone, Jill could find nothing
wrong with the hack, and was convinced that if they continued to listen,
eventually they would hear something of consequence.

So she spied on Renata. She
listened to a phone call between Renata and one of her slaves as she described
the color of paint she wanted in the north hallway, and another call where she
discussed the food to serve at a dinner party next week.

She overheard a conversation
between Renata and the other Regents, discussing the most boring details of
school business. Finances, recruitment, public relations, new hires. One
evening, Jill caught herself listening in on a conversation about Ms. Benchley,
who had just announced an impending maternity leave. The conversation went on
for forty minutes, the Regents going on and on about her replacement, her
classes, other teachers in the history department, and the schedules of fifty
kids in the junior class.

Was this what it was like to be
immortal? The minutia of daily life stretched out in an endless line, day after
day after day? Jill could hardly believe this boring person she was spying on
was the same vampire who had shown up at Nicky’s house and ripped Melissa
Mayhew’s heart out of her chest. Renata had always seemed so intense to her. So
dramatic. That Rose Ransom performance alone was enough to suggest that she was
a woman whose life was filled with passion and romance.

What if that wasn’t the real
story? What if this dry and dreary woman who showed up in the phone calls, text
messages, and emails, was the real Renata?