The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (19 page)

She sent that report to the
Network before she went to bed that night. When she woke up on Tuesday morning,
she was sad to see she hadn’t received a response.

On Tuesday night she sent
another report of the goings-on at school.

Major unrest at school among
Kim’s faction. Realization beginning to dawn on them that Nicky is way out in
front. Annika and I find ourselves the most popular people on campus, with many
of Kim’s supporters trying to cozy up to us in advance of Nicky’s expected return.
I’m thinking I may try and corral all this support and aim it at Mary or
Samantha once it becomes clear that Nicky isn’t coming back. We still have the
ring on Karmela’s finger, which means we’re still going to win the Rose Ransom.
It would be good if that prize money went to Mary or Samantha. Wouldn’t it be
nice if the Renwicks were knocked off their perch?

She hit send and went to bed. On
Wednesday morning she went straight to her computer looking for a response.
There was none.

“Okay, this is starting to piss
me off,” she muttered. “Where is everybody?”

That evening she tried calling
Phillip. No answer. She sent a text message to Alvin. No response. She tried
logging into the servers in Colorado to see if she could chat with Alvin, who
was certain to be online.

Her password had been changed.

“What the hell?” she said, and
immediately began a text message to Alvin.

I can’t tunnel into the
server. No one’s talking to me. What’s going on out there? Is everything
alright? Could somebody please talk to me?

After school on Thursday, still
having heard nothing from anyone, Jill began typing a new message.

I’ve been thinking, and I’m
guessing you all aren’t talking to me because Code Orange has been called and
I’m still here. You’re afraid that anything you say to me might get spilled to
the vampires since there is danger of my cover being blown.

So let me reiterate.
Bernadette Paiz tried to look in my mind and failed. My position is perfectly
secure. The vampires think they already know what’s in my head, and even if
they decided to have another look, I think they would fail again. I was able to
resist Bernadette because of a hypnosis session with Gordon Krause. It was a
very powerful experience. I’d like to talk about it with someone.

I’m feeling totally alone out
here. Everyone I was working with on the mission is gone. My boyfriend is gone.
My friends are…

She stopped typing. She was
thinking about Ryan, who might be dead because she had encouraged him to place
a bid on Nicky at the Date Auction.

She went back, erased the last
few lines, and started again.

I discovered something about
my own family last week. Going through the data we stole from Tremblay Property
Management, I learned that my mother was born on the Farm, and my father
purchased her from Melissa Mayhew.

I took my mother to Gordon a
few days ago to try and have her reprogrammed. He wasn’t able to do it. He
needs to know the original commands Melissa used to enslave her. Gordon and I
both think Melissa wrote those commands down somewhere—perhaps they are stored
in the data from TPM. I tried a search query there but came up empty. I tried
searching the servers from my father’s company but found nothing. Now I can’t
even get into the Network database because Alvin has changed my password.

It’s fine if you don’t talk
to me. I’ll keep doing what I think is right. But if anyone out there has any
ideas on how to find the commands used to enslave my mother, I’d appreciate
your help. I’m at a loss on where to go from here.

I’ll keep sending reports of
anything interesting I see at school. I hope that at some point in the future I
stop getting the silent treatment.

The next morning, Annika stopped
her in the senior parking lot before school.

“I need to talk to you,” Annika
said. “It’s important.”

“Okay, I’m listening,” said
Jill.

Annika looked around nervously.
“Not here,” she said. “Let’s get in my car.”

“Annika, class starts in four
minutes.”

“This is urgent, Jill.”

Jill looked over Annika’s
shoulder at their classmates heading towards campus.

“So I guess we’re ditching first
period,” she said.  Without meaning to, she thought about Ryan, who, as a
freshman, left her in his car after breaking up with her. She missed first
period on that day too.

Annika already had the passenger
door open for her. “Yes, we’re ditching,” she said. “Get in.”

With the rest of the senior
class heading off towards campus, Jill got into Annika’s car and the two of
them drove away from school.

“I got a call from Shannon this
morning,” Annika said.

Shannon. So much had been happening
in Jill’s life she had completely forgotten that she promised Annika she would
get a new ID for Shannon, who had been on the run from Melissa in Brazil.

“Annika, things have changed,”
Jill said. She wondered how much she should tell Annika. “Shannon’s situation
may not be as urgent as it was a few days ago.”

“Like hell it isn’t! You know
what she told me? The people she was hiding out with robbed her blind! Took
everything she had! Her passport, her credit cards, all her money…she’s lost in
Rio with absolutely nothing. She had to call me collect using a pay phone in a
bar!”

“Wow, that sucks,” Jill said.

“It more than sucks! She’s
roaming around in the slums with nothing! How long do you think she’ll last
there?”

“I don’t…geez, that’s rough. You
know, she should go back to her house. If she goes in the daylight she’ll be
fine. Melissa isn’t looking for her anymore.”

“What do you mean Melissa isn’t
looking for her?”

Jill looked out the window. They
were driving along the river on Clara Barton Parkway. Traffic was light on
their side of the road but heavy going towards DC.

“I can’t tell you what I know,”
Jill said. “It wouldn’t be safe for you. Just tell Shannon she’s okay to go
back to her house as long as it isn’t nighttime.”

“I can’t even get in touch with
her!” Annika said. “She has no phone. They took that too! I’m flying out
tonight. She and I made plans on where I’m going to meet her. I need you to get
me an ID for her. I can’t get her out of the country without one.”

“Annika, I can’t get you a Brazilian
passport in a day,” Jill said.

“You said you were working on
it.”

“I am! These things take time!
My connections…they haven’t been speaking to me lately.”

“Well get them to speak with
you!”

“I’m trying! It’s not that easy.
These people get spooked sometimes.”

“This is just terrible,” Annika
said. “What are we going to do?”

“She needs cash and a place to
stay,” Jill said. “Get her both and she’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know how to get her a
place to stay. I don’t even speak the language!”

“Just get her a hotel room if
you have to. Rent it under your name. Pay cash.”

“Yes, I suppose I could do that.
God, this is such a mess.”

“You’ll be fine, Annika. You’ll
get her someplace safe for now. We’ll get an ID made. You’ll go back later with
it, and the two of you can ride off into the sunset.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Annika
said.

“You know, if you’re feeling
like it’s time for you and Shannon to get on with your life, don’t stick around
here on Nicky’s account,” Jill said.

There was so much more she could
have added. So much more she wanted to say to Annika, like,
Nicky’s not
coming back from Italy. All of us who supported her are screwed.

But she said none of it. Every word
she told Annika was something that could be used against them both if a vampire
looked in Annika’s mind. It was good that Annika was going to Brazil—if
Bernadette was going down a list of Nicky’s friends, Annika’s name would come
up soon enough.

“I wish I could stay gone,”
Annika said. “But I can’t. I’ll go get Shannon set up and then I’ll come right
back home.”

“Why can’t you stay in Rio? If I
know where you are, I can get the ID’s to you.”

“It’s more than the ID’s. Jill,
my eighteenth birthday is in December.”

“Why does that matter?”

“My trust fund,” Annika said.
She said the words like they should have been obvious to Jill.

Annika, like almost every
student at Thorndike, including Jill, had a large sum of money floating in her
name that became her property when she turned eighteen. For most Thorndike
students, the trust fund was just a small perk, another piece of the good life
that you didn’t think about that much because it was always there.

But for someone like Annika, who
was planning on getting out of DC and starting a new life away from the wealth
and security of her family name, the trust fund was a big deal. Once she and
Shannon disappeared, there would be no inheritance. There would be no monthly
allowance. No new cars on her birthday. No houses handed down, tax shelters to
join, cushy jobs thrown her way.

“You and Shannon need that money,
don’t you?” Jill said.

“I don’t know what else we’re
gonna live on,” said Annika. “Shannon’s got nothing left.”

Jill looked out the window and
rubbed her hand across her chin.

“What are you thinking about?”
Annika said.

“A lot of things,” Jill said. She
was thinking about Annika and Shannon, about Melissa Mayhew, about Nicky and
Ryan, Gia, Dante, and Kendall. She was thinking about how the Network was
giving her the silent treatment, how she really could use some help finding the
command that held her mother hostage.

She was thinking about Zack.

“Can we go back to school now?”
Jill said. “I don’t want to miss second period too.”

That night, Jill sent an email
to Alvin begging him to talk to her. She mentioned Shannon and her need for a
new ID, and told him she really wanted to get at the TPM data.

After she hit send, she opened
the bottom drawer on her desk and pulled out the statement for her own trust
fund.

One and a half million dollars.
It was money her dad had set aside for her when she was born, before either of
them knew they would hate each other by the time she was a teen. It was a fully
revocable trust—if she ever angered her dad enough he could take it all away.

But he never would. He still
held out hope that one day she would work for Black Dart Enterprises, and he
could have not one, but two, stellar programmers doing his dirty work.

Her eighteenth birthday wasn’t
until the spring.

I’m just like Annika
, she
thought.
Hanging on, waiting for the right moment to make my escape.

Unlike Annika, Jill didn’t have
anyone to escape to. A vampire had wiped her clean from her boyfriend’s memory.
She went to bed that night thinking about Zack, wishing things were different.

Hours later, a hand touched her
face and startled her awake. She sat up quickly in bed and tried to scream, but
found the same hand covering her mouth so tightly she could only get out a
muted moan.

“It’s okay,” whispered a man’s
voice, then, his lips right up next to her ear. “I’m from the Network.”

She allowed her shoulders to
relax, and the hand came off her face. The man was a silhouette in the darkness
of her room.

Jill reached for the lamp on her
end table. Half-awake and disoriented, she missed, and sent the lamp tumbling.
The man caught it before it hit the floor. As he set it back on the table, he
turned it on.

He was a young man, just a few
years older than Jill. He had brown, curly hair and dark eyes. He was wearing a
white shirt and black slacks.

Jill’s first thought was that he
looked like a slave from Renata’s mansion.

“Get dressed and meet me at your
back door,” he whispered. “It isn’t safe to talk in here.”

Not safe to talk in here? Jill
wanted to ask him what he meant, but before she could, he was already on his
way out. Rather than exiting through the door to her bedroom, he climbed to her
window, which for some reason, was wide open. He hopped on the trellis and
looked back at her, whispering, “I’ll find you at the back door.”

Jill made a mental note to
double check that her windows were locked next time she came to bed.

She put on a robe and slippers,
then made her way downstairs and to the back door. She half-expected him to be
gone, to get down there, find no one, and realize this was just a weird dream.
But when she opened the door, there he was, standing in the shadows, his arms
folded across his chest. Getting a better look at him now, she was certain his
outfit was exactly the same as those worn by Renata’s servants.

“Close the door behind you,” he
said, quietly. “We’ll walk in the woods.”

Jill did as he asked. They said
nothing as they walked down the path behind the house and into the surrounding
forest. It wasn’t until they were past the treeline that he spoke again.

“My name is Tarin,” he said. “I
am working undercover as a servant in Renata’s mansion.”

“I thought that outfit looked
familiar,” said Jill. “I didn’t know we had anyone working at Renata’s.”

“We didn’t until yesterday,” he
said. “Renata has been out of the country this week. We took advantage of her
absence, and of the confusion we sensed among the clan. With Melissa dead, the
Farm is disorganized. I was able to present myself as a new slave and was
accepted at Renata’s mansion.”

“But why? What do they have you
doing in there?”

“My mission at Renata’s is to
prepare for your arrival.”

“My arrival?”

“At the Rose Ransom kickoff
party on Sunday night,” Tarin said. “You do intend to be there, don’t you?”

“Yes, the whole class has to be
there,” Jill said.