The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (42 page)

But Sergio was standing in front
of the prison cells, nowhere near a light switch.

“What a marvelous surprise!”
came Falkon’s voice. He was standing at the back wall, a big smile on his face.
“Sergio Alonzo, how many years has it been?”

Sergio cast his eyes in Nicky’s
direction. They shared a quick glance, and in that glance he told her to find a
place to hide.

“Quite a few years,” Sergio said
quietly. “Looks like you’ve been busy.”

Falkon cupped his hands together
and held them in front of his chest. “Indeed I have, my friend. Indeed I have.
And I see you have Nicky with you. I’d like to say I’m surprised, but in truth,
nothing this girl does surprises me anymore. She’s like her mother that way.”

“You knew her mother?” Sergio
said.

“It’s a long story,” said
Falkon.

“Funny, those were the same
words Nicky used.”

Nicky was backing away from both
of them. She sensed where this was going. There was mounting aggression in
every word they spoke.

“You know, Sergio, my partner
and I were speaking about you the other day. We wondered if you had a role to
play in this particular drama.”

“You mean Renata,” said Sergio.
“No need to hide her name from me.”

“So you’ve figured her out?”
said Falkon. “We feared that might happen. You knew where I was, you knew Nicky
had an interest in this place, you saw that Nicky and Ryan were abducted for
the Rose Ransom. Well, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on when you have all
the information. Renata was adamant that we had to find a way to kill you. But
I told her to relax. I’ve known Sergio for years, I said, and one thing I know
about that vampire is that he doesn’t talk. Did you know that, Nicky? Did you
know that Daciana was the only vampire Sergio ever spoke with?”

Nicky said nothing. Her back
pressed firmly against the control station, she was trying to keep her mother’s
memories from slipping deep in her mind. When these two came to blows, she
needed to run to the computer room, and at the moment, she wasn’t entirely
certain where it was.

“Even when he knew that Renata
was consorting with the enemy, he said nothing, because he had no one to talk
to,” said Falkon. “With Daciana gone, Sergio was all alone in the world. All
alone, except for you.”

Falkon was approaching her with
slow, even footsteps. “What do you think it means, Nicky?” he said. “Sergio
doesn’t speak to anyone in his clan, but he talks to you.”

Nicky shook her head.
If
you’re going to do something, Sergio
, she thought,
now would be a good
time to do it.

“What do you think it means that
your mind is a locked door to me, as it is to Renata and was to Melissa, but
when you get close to Sergio, the door starts to open?”

“I don’t know what it means,” Nicky
said.

“Here’s another question for
you,” said Falkon. “What do you think it means when a vampire takes such a keen
interest in you that he travels across the world to find you, aware that he is
risking his life in the process? There are only a handful of vampires in the
world who are strong enough to kill Sergio Alonzo, and you’re looking at one of
them now.”

She knew Sergio was going to
move before it happened. It was almost as if he told her, and by the time
Sergio flew across the room and collided with Falkon, Nicky was already on the
floor, having dropped to her stomach half a second before the mayhem started.

They were a tumbling ball of
fury as they fought, moving far too quickly for Nicky to see or understand
anything. They were in the air. They were crashing into the walls. They were
leaping back and forth across the giant room, smashing lights and concrete and
support beams as they moved. They were like two living, breathing, explosions
of rage, and it was all Nicky could do to roll under the control desk and cover
her head with her hands.

Metal bars from the ceiling
clanged to the floor. Glass shattered and rained down. Lights exploded, making
the room go dark, only to light up again in the flashing tones of the alarm.
Through it all, the ferals went wild in their cages, bouncing and screaming as
the vampires fought.

The mayhem ended with a loud
crash and the sound of flesh being torn apart. Nicky lifted her head to see
Falkon and Sergio not more than ten feet away from her.

Falkon was crouched over
Sergio’s body, a huge hunk of Sergio’s flesh in his claws.

“It’s over,” Falkon hissed.
“Five hundred years I’ve been waiting to kill you! Do you see this, Nicky? Do
you see what I am about to do to this abomination of a vampire!”

Without thinking of what she was
doing or why, Nicky scrambled out from underneath the control desk and jumped
to her feet.

“Have a look at that Sergio,”
Falkon said. “I think she intends to help you. Come on over, Nicky. Come have a
look at him before he dies!”

She reached out to the control
desk, seeing her mother’s fingers in her own hand. She was living the memory
now—twelve years ago her mother reached down to the keypad on this same control
desk and typed in a six digit code that saved her daughter’s life. Nicky
reached for the keypad and typed in the same code.
1-1-0-7-0-8
.

The feral vampires rushed to the
front of their cages as the glass doors slid open. Falkon jumped to his feet, a
look of panic in his eyes. He turned to Nicky, his fangs dripping in blood, and
then he was overcome. All the ferals came at him at once, the entire pack
rushing at Falkon and Falkon alone.

He fought the first few off of
him, but then it was too much. They leapt on him at once, a ball of fangs and
claws, plowing across the room. Falkon broke free long enough to leap for the
ceiling and crash through a window. The ferals chased after him. Nicky was left
alone in the room with Sergio.

She looked over at where he lay.
He was still breathing. His body, bleeding profusely, was already beginning to
heal.

“What have I done?” she
whispered.

The whole mission. Four years,
millions of dollars, dozens of lives at stake, including her own—it was all
aimed at killing Sergio Alonzo, and in the moment when Sergio lay on the floor,
about to die, Nicky had saved him.

She grabbed a long metal rod off
the ground and ran over to him. He was still weak. His body was still pulling
itself back together. One hard thrust from this rod, a heavy bar of steel that
had fallen from the ceiling, straight through his heart, and he would die. It
wouldn’t matter that she couldn’t finish the mission. It wouldn’t matter if she
never made it out of Italy. She could end it now. Sergio was weak and on the
floor and she had a weapon in her hand she could use to kill him.

He looked at her. There was
nothing. No openings in her mind, no visions inside his, no weakness in her
knees or urge to take in his incredible presence—in that moment, he was too
weak to have any effect on her. All he could do was look at her with fear in
his eyes.

She raised the rod, grabbing
tight with both hands and aiming it over his heart.

Come on, Nicky. Kill him now.
The entire mission is about this moment
.

She hesitated, and in that
hesitation, Sergio regained enough strength to throw her off of him. She landed
hard and skidded across the floor, the metal bar clanging on the tile as it
bounced out of her hands. She rushed to get back to her feet, and found Sergio
standing as well. His body had completely healed. Her moment of opportunity was
over.

He looked in her eyes for a
second. There was no message in his gaze. They weren’t sharing any thoughts. He
just looked at her. And then he left. With a single leap he cleared the high
wall and jumped through the broken window, following Falkon and the ferals into
the night.

Nicky stood in place, breathing
hard. Her mother’s voice broke her from her stupor.

You have to finish what I
started.

She knew which way to go. Her
feet carried her out of the room and into a dark hallway. She was hardly
present as she ran. She belonged to the memory now.

Another door, another six-digit
code. The glass slid open and she stepped into a room full of computers. They
were stacked on shelves, a gigantic library of computing equipment, similar but
not identical to what she had seen in the memory.

In her memory, the computers sat
on open-faced shelves. Now they were locked behind an iron cage. In the memory,
the computers were older than what she saw here. In the memory, the room was
half as big as the one she stood in now.

Nicky went to the screen, which
stood on a wide shelf, sharing space with a keyboard and a telephone. She
touched the keyboard. A prompt came up asking for her user name.

C.Allen

It asked for her password.

TwoQueens

Text scrolled down the screen
giving the name of the software, the maker, the date, the copyright
information. She entered the first command.

Genetic Sequencer

This command put her inside the
program Falkon used to crunch the data. Celeste’s research had given this
program all the data it needed to create the genetic code of a feral vampire.
Nicky’s job was to delete it.

Sequence Alpha

This command called up a string
of numbers the massive computer had created based on the data Celeste had put
inside. It took a minute for the sequence to load. When it was done, the screen
said READY.

Access Text User C.Allen Code
110708Alpha.

That was the command Celeste had
slipped into the system. That was the back door that would bring up the massive
string of letters Falkon had been working to rebuild ever since Nicky’s mother
destroyed it.

Invalid Command
.

“What?” Nicky said. “No, it’s
not invalid.”

She entered the command again.
She could hear her mother’s voice spelling it out as she typed it. She knew she
had it right.

Invalid Command.

Falkon had fixed the software.

Twelve years ago, her mother had
written a back door into this program that allowed her to stop Falkon from
creating a new master race of vampires. Falkon had rebuilt and was ready to try
again. Nicky’s mother had shared her memories so Nicky could stop him, just as
Celeste had done.

But she couldn’t do it. Falkon
was ready for her. The commands from her mother’s memory no longer worked.

She looked at the stacks of
computers all around and wondered if there was another way. She grabbed at the
iron grate separating her from the machines and shook it. It was locked shut
and barely budged.

“What do I do, Mom?” she
whispered. “The code doesn’t work anymore.”

If only Jill were here
,
she thought.

And then a solution came to her that
was so simple, so straight-forward, she was embarrassed she hadn’t thought of
it right away.

There was a phone next to the
keyboard.

Nicky grabbed the receiver. A
heavy piece of beige plastic, to Nicky, this phone was a relic from another
era. But it worked. When she lifted the receiver to her ear, she heard a dial
tone. She reached for the buttons on the base of the phone and began dialing.

Annika’s eighteenth birthday
party was everything Jill had come to expect from the girl.

The house was full of roses.
Roses in vases, rose bushes in the yard, rose petals all over the floor, and
giant, foam roses hanging from the ceiling.

But the trick was, most of these
roses were white, orange, or pink. There were only a few red roses in the
house, and for the first party game, Annika challenged everyone to find them.

“When you find a red rose,” she
announced, “you must yell Ollie Ollie Oxen Free at the top of your lungs! Every
time someone yells that out, the rest of us must stop what we’re doing and have
a drink!”

Of course, a few minutes into
the game, people figured out that it was fun to cry out like you’d found a red
rose, even if you hadn’t, and within the hour, everyone was blitzed.

“Gotta take people’s minds off
what troubles them,” Annika said to Jill. “Everyone’s getting worried that you
haven’t solved the third clue yet. But if you down enough liquor you find
there’s nothing to worry about!”

“Why is it my responsibility to
solve the third clue?” said Jill. “Everyone should be working on it.”

“Everyone did work on it,” said
Annika. “Until they decided it was too hard and gave up. They know you’ll get
this one eventually.”

Annika slapped Jill on the back
and moved on to mingle with her other guests. Jill shook her head. She didn’t share
Annika’s confidence. She had no more idea how to solve the clue than anyone
else, and she didn’t know when or if Tarin was showing up to help her.

After the red rose drinking game
ran its course, the staff set up an inflatable jump house in the back yard.
Shaped like a giant princess castle, the jumphouse lasted for all of fifteen
minutes before someone too drunk to know better poked a hole in it.

“That’s alright!” Annika
announced. “On to the hula hooping contest!”

 The hula hooping contest was
another drinking game. In this one, you had to down a shot every time the hula
hoop fell from your waist, which of course made you too drunk to continue hula
hooping which in turn made you drink more shots.

By ten-thirty, the party was
absolute pandemonium, and a surprisingly sober Annika grabbed Jill by the arm
and said, “Now that everyone’s having fun, let’s sneak away so we can talk.”

Annika led Jill to her bedroom
and closed the door behind them.

“I have two things to show you,”
she said. “The first is something small.”

Annika reached into her pocket
and pulled out a gold ring with a red garnet. “Last Saturday I had drinks with
Karmela,” Annika said, handing Jill the ring. “It took some doing, but I
finally convinced her to take off her ring so I could look at it. You should
have heard her pitch a fit while I was looking at the ring. She is still livid
at you for dropping her ring after the Date Auction.”