The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (37 page)

“I’ll take you to it. Go get a
jacket. And your most comfortable shoes.”

Tributes to kings

Both born and elected

Join their inspirations in
dust

Despite 657 claims to the
eternal

Jill pondered the clue as they
drove into DC. They crossed the river and approached the National Mall. When
they were near the Washington Monument, Tarin parked the car and they got out.

“The Monument?” Jill said. “No.
We’ve already checked here.”

“You have already come to the
Monument?” Tarin said.

“No, not me, but many others
from school.”

“How come you didn’t come?”

“It’s too obvious,” Jill said.

“Is it? Has anyone solved it
yet?”

“Well, no, but people have
checked here.”

“How thorough were they?”

“Very thorough! Winthrop brought
all his friends and spent the whole day scouring this place. Mary Torrance
brought a group here too. She even took a helicopter ride to have a look at the
top.”

“And they found nothing,” said
Tarin.

“That’s right. They found
nothing.”

A guard in a Park Service
uniform approached them.

“Good evening, folks,” the guard
said. He was a chubby man with a crew cut and a sidearm hanging from his belt.

“We would like to go inside the
Monument,” Tarin said.

“Monument’s closed,” the guard
said. “The doors open again tomorrow morning at nine.”

“You don’t understand,” Tarin
said. “This is Jill Wentworth from Thorndike Academy. She would like to go
inside now.”

The security guard stood in
place for a moment, as if registering the words Tarin had just said to him,
then a big smile came over his face and he extended his hand to Jill. “Pleasure
to meet you,” he said.

Jill shook his hand.

“We would like for you to open
the doors and turn on the lights for us,” Tarin said. “We need full access,
including the stairs.”

Another short delay while the
guard seemed to think about Tarin’s request.

“Yes, of course,” he said
eventually. “It will be one moment while I get someone down here to open it
up.”

“Use your radio to call for the
Ranger. Tell him Tarin is here. He is expecting me.”

A minute later, they were
standing in the lobby of the Washington Monument, waiting while the Park Ranger
fumbled with a key ring, trying to open the door to the stairwell.

“This doesn’t seem right to me,”
Jill said. “There couldn’t be a more obvious place for a clue than the
Washington Monument. Hasn’t it been used in the Rose Ransom before?”

“Twenty-eight Rose Ransom clues
have been hidden in the Monument over the years,” Tarin said. “One year, the
rose was in the front entrance. Another year it was on the elevator. The rose
has been at the museum atop the Monument, and it’s also been in a window frame
on the observation deck.”

Jill ran through the clue in her
head.
Tributes to kings, born and elected
...

“Sorry for the delay,” the
Ranger said, still flipping through his key ring. “The stairs have been closed
to the public for years. It’s been a long time since I’ve had need to open
them. Let me try this key.”

“Tributes to kings…” Jill
whispered.

The Washington Monument was an
easy answer to the clue, so easy that Jill had immediately dismissed it. After
all, the tower was itself a gigantic tribute to the closest thing American ever
had to royalty, at least, before Daciana showed up.

“Join their inspirations in
dust,” Jill said. “I don’t get how that line fits. George Washington is dust
now, but he isn’t buried here.”

“With that line, Renata is
speaking one of her own truths,” said Tarin. “Humans built this tower intending
it to stand forever. Even though Washington himself is now dust, the tower
still stands. But stretch out the timeline long enough, and at some point this
tower will fall. For an immortal who lives forever, even a tower such as this
will eventually join its inspiration in dust.”

“So she’s just preaching to us,”
Jill said. “That line is meaningless.”

“Not at all,” Tarin said. “I
think you’ll find, when we get to the clue, that the third line is quite
helpful.”

“There it is,” said the guard,
turning a key in the lock. The door swung open, exposing a winding staircase on
the other side.

“Despite 657 claims to the
eternal,” Jill said. “How many stairs is it to the top?”

“Eight-hundred and
ninety-seven,” said the Ranger.

“Come on,” said Tarin. “Let’s
start counting.”

Counting in unison with every
step, Jill and Tarin wound their way towards the top. The staircase was narrow.
The climb was hard and slow. Having been out of use for so long, it smelled of
stale air and dirt. They stopped at stair number 656.

Stair 657 was right in front of
them.

“It looks the same as all the
other stairs,” Jill said.

“Does it now?” said Tarin.
“Perhaps you should have a look back behind you and be sure.”

Jill turned and looked at the
stairs they had just climbed. The sharp, winding angle only allowed her to view
a few of them before they rounded a bend and disappeared.

“They all look the same,” said
Jill.

“Look again,” said Tarin. “There
is a difference.”

Jill turned her head back and
forth between the stair in front of them and the stairs behind them.

“The only difference is that we
haven’t stepped on this one yet,” Jill said. “Our footprints are all over the
stairs behind us. This one in front of us…”

She stopped, realizing the
significance of the words she was about to speak.

The stairs had been closed to
the public for years. She and Tarin were the first to climb them in who knew
how long. During the time the stairs had fallen out of use, they became covered
in dust.

“The third line of the clue,”
she said. “Join their inspirations in dust!”

“Now you get it,” said Tarin. He
gestured at the dust-covered stair. “You should do the honors.”

Jill bent down and swept her
hand across the step, brushing away a thick layer of dust.

And exposing a square-shaped
crevice in the stair.

The other steps were made of
solid stone, but this one had a square-shaped tile cut into its face.
Carefully, Jill pressed her fingers against the lip of the tile, and lifted it
up.

She set the tile face-down on
stair number 658, and looked at the hollow compartment she had exposed
underneath. There was a golden, bejeweled rose inside.

“Oh wow,” she said, poking her
head into the hole. “Do you have a flashlight? I can’t see the clue.”

“Lift your head up, Jill. The
clue is right in front of you.”

“What?” She pulled her head away
from the stair and found the clue right in front of her, just as Tarin said. It
was engraved on the underside of the tile she had just removed.

An expression of mortal
frailty

Death and new life made
manifest

In the throes of agony
eternal

Within and without the square

“Okay, so what does that mean?”
Jill said.

Tarin shook his head. “I don’t
know.”

Nicky felt much more confined in
her prison cell after her conversation with Falkon.

Your mother was a scientist.
Best in her field
.

Falkon’s voice echoed in her
mind, disrupting the flow of memories. She couldn’t live in the happy memories
with her father anymore. Every time she tried to revisit those days at the lake
or in the woods, Falkon’s voice tore through the memory and brought her back
into the darkness.

She and I had similar
interests. We both wanted to cheat death
.

Without the memories to hide in,
the darkness became a frightening place. She was acutely aware that she was the
only human in a prison full of vampires.

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

Why would her mother do this?
Why would she help someone so obviously evil as Falkon Dillinger?

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

She had asked those questions of
Falkon. Now she was asking them of her mother. She was looking at the woman in
the memory, the woman in the courtyard with all the gray-faced creatures
gathering around. She saw her father reaching for her arm, begging for her to
run away with him. But she stood in place. She looked at her mother. She asked,
What are you doing with them? Why are they so sick?

And her mother answered, “I
wanted to use science to cheat death.”

For days or weeks or months or
maybe years Nicky swam about in the darkness, eager for the day when Falkon
would open the door and tell her it was time to die. Her only comfort was the
possibility that Ryan’s solitude was as blissful as hers was painful. That Ryan
truly was having the most pleasant dreams his mind could imagine.

As her agony grew, the memories
faded. She could barely see the fun times at the lake anymore. The games at the
table after dinner, once vibrant experiences that felt like they were happening
to her in real-time, were just old memories now, distant, quiet, and vague. She
forgot the smells from the kitchen. She could hardly see the Christmas tree.

Only two scenes remained vivid
in her mind. Both involved a little girl in the courtyard, gazing at the silver
sphere.

In one scene, her mother yelled
at her to run, and the gray-faced monsters swallowed her up.

In the other scene, an older
scene, her mother was the gray-faced monster. It was the original nightmare,
come back around again to haunt Nicky’s final days.

She saw her mother standing
behind the glass. Her skin was the color of death. Her eyes and teeth were
yellow. She was sick.

Her mother banged on the glass
so hard it began to crack. How many times had Nicky gone through this
nightmare? How many more times would she have to face it? The whole point of
coming to Italy was to learn the truth about this place, to reconcile herself
with her past so this dream could go away.

But now it was happening in the
darkness. A waking dream. Her mother banged on the glass again and it cracked.
Nicky took a deep breath and reminded herself this was just in her mind. When
the dream charged ahead with the scenes that always came next, her mother
breaking through the glass and chasing her down, Nicky would be ready.

It’s just fantasy
, she
told herself.
It’s just a trick of your mind
.

In that fantasy, her mother
banged again, and it sounded so real, so present, that Nicky had a tough time
convincing herself it was in her mind. She banged again, and this time the
sound dragged her right out of the vision. She was in the darkness of her
prison cell, and the banging was happening in the cell above her.

More banging. One of the
vampires was hitting the glass hard, just like her mother did in the dream.
What was happening up there?

The banging continued, and this
time it was followed by the sound of cracking glass.

“It isn’t real, Nicky,” she said
to herself. “None of this is real.”

But she didn’t believe her own
words. The sound was real. She was in a prison, surrounded by gray-faced
monsters who were each trapped behind a pane of glass, just as her mother was
in the dream, and one of them was breaking through.

Another bang, followed by more
cracking. The sound was like ice cracking in a water glass. The cracks and pops
were intense. The sounds of destruction. Nicky could swear that one of the
vampires above her was about to break out.

A final, crushing blow in the cell
above Nicky and she heard the glass shatter. She saw broken glass come raining
down in front of her cage. This was not a dream. One of the feral vampires in a
cell above her had broken the glass door of its cage.

And then it came down. A shadow
in the darkness, landing softly in front of Nicky’s cell. Hunched over, its
hands gnarled into claws, its eyes glowing in the darkness, the feral vampire
turned around and looked right at Nicky.

Her dream had come to life. The
monster standing on the other side of the glass was her mother. Gray-faced and
sick, an identical image to the one Nicky had been dreaming about for months,
her mother was a feral vampire and only a pane of glass separated her from
Nicky.

“Mom,” she whispered.

The creature approached. It put
its hands on the glass as it looked inside. Nicky felt drawn to it. She walked
to the front of her cell, standing inches away from the creature, who was now
pressing both hands against the glass.

Nicky raised her own hands, and
placed her palms directly across from the vampire.

The effect was immediate. A
charge of energy passing between them, connecting them, she was in her mother’s
mind.

Mom?
she asked.
What
happened to you? What happened in this place?

The voice came back as if it had
been floating across time since Nicky was five years old.

I was trying to cheat death
,
her mother said.
I failed.

The transfer was instant.
Memories that Nicky’s mother had been holding in a deep corner of her mind came
flowing forth. Nicky received them directly. They became her memories, as real
and as vivid as if she had lived them.

Her name was Celeste. Not
Celeste Nicole Allen, who would become Nicky Bloom. She was Celeste Amanda
Allen. Nicky’s mother.

And she had a son. Born six
years before Nicky.

I never knew I had a brother
,
Nicky thought.