The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (38 page)

But of course she didn’t know.
The memory told her why. She never knew her brother. Her mother never said a
word about him.

His name was Robin. He was four
years old when the symptoms began. That was always puzzling to Celeste. How
could it be that this illness just sat there, unknown, for the first four years
of Robin’s life? How come, for four magical years he was healthy, and then one
day, he wasn’t? 

As a geneticist, it was a
question that fascinated Celeste. Fascinated her, and haunted her. What was
wrong with her son?

It began with the bruises. He
came into the bedroom in the morning, a look of concern on his face.

“Mommy, something happened to my
leg.”

One year and countless tests
later, Robin was diagnosed with
Idiopathic Aplasia
.

Idiopathic
. It was a word
Celeste had used in her own doctoral thesis.
Unknown
. From the Greek
words
Idios
, meaning “one’s own,” and
Pathos
, meaning
“suffering,” Idiopathic was the perfect word to describe Robin’s illness.
One’s
own suffering
.

No one knew what was wrong with
Robin. The illness was uniquely his. 

An unknown illness meant an
unknown cure, and the doctors were content to leave Robin untreated. But
Celeste was not. She used all the resources available to her as a senior
scientist at the Ventigen Corporation to run her own tests on her son. She
hired her own doctors and she oversaw treatments of her own devising.

Nothing worked. But Celeste was
undeterred. This was her son, and just because she couldn’t solve the problem
didn’t mean it was unsolvable. She published her research on her son’s
condition and attempted treatment in the hopes that somewhere, a scientist
would read about Robin’s illness, think of it a different way than she did, and
present her with a solution.

And while no one in the
scientific community came up with an answer, her research didn’t go unnoticed.
Higher-ups in her own company were excited at the work she was doing. Her boss
called her into his office one afternoon and told her the company wanted to
move her to Italy where she could have a state of the art laboratory and all
the funding she needed.

“Why Italy?” she asked.

The evasive answer she got from
her boss should have warned Celeste that she was treading into dangerous water.
He spoke of sensitive work, remote locations, and keeping the research secure.
He also mentioned a wealthy investor who had taken a personal interest in her
work. The warnings for Celeste were all there in that initial conversation, but
she was blinded by her drive to cure her son.

Her boss gestured at Celeste’s
pregnant belly. “If you need to take a few months before making a move like
this--”

“Oh no,” she said. “There is no
time to wait.”

Five months pregnant with the
girl who would become Nicky Bloom, Celeste moved her family to Northern Italy,
where she met an immortal named Falkon Dillinger.

Their partnership was uneasy at
first. Falkon wanted to know everything about what she was doing, and Celeste
wanted to be left alone. Falkon wanted frequent reports about her progress, and
looked horribly displeased when Celeste told him only what she thought he
needed to hear.

Falkon wanted their relationship
to be closer than that of boss and employee. He wanted to dine with the family.
He wanted to converse with Celeste while she worked. He wanted to socialize and
play games—he was particularly fond of chess.

Celeste wanted none of that. She
only wanted to work.

She was nine months pregnant,
due any day, when Robin took a turn for the worse. Celeste showed up in the lab
one night in tears, certain her son was at death’s door. Falkon came up to her,
put his arm over her shoulder, and said, “I can help your son. But before I do,
we need to talk.”

That night, Falkon put Celeste
in a wheelchair and rolled her into a wing of the lab she had never seen before.

“Our purposes are aligned,
Celeste,” he said. “We both understand that it is the blood in our veins that
gives us life, and that some of us are blessed with stronger blood than others.
I have spent many years thinking about this problem.”

He pushed her into a laboratory
with a long storage refrigerator on one side, and floor-to-ceiling windows on
the other.

“You know what troubles me,
Celeste? It is a single word.
Why
?”

He rolled her up to the windows.
There was nothing on the other side but total darkness.

“I want to know why it is that
some people are blessed with eternal life, while others are cursed with
life-threatening illness as children. I want to know why, with all our powers
to manipulate the world around us, we can’t ensure the things we want most in
life.”

He touched Celeste’s very
pregnant belly.

“I want new life to come into a
world where sickness and disease are a thing of the past.”

He flipped a switch on the wall,
and an immense research space lit up on the other side of the glass. At the end
of that research space was an array of test subjects.

“What is this?” Celeste said.
“Are you testing on apes?”

But she knew the answer even as
she asked the question. Those weren’t apes on the other side. They were people.
They were very strange, very sick people.

“I don’t like this,” Celeste
said. “I don’t want to be here.”

“This is the result of your
research,” Falkon said. “Your attempts to fix your son—to create a perfect,
self-sustaining circulatory system.”

“I attempted no such thing,”
Celeste snapped.

“Ah, but you did. All your
research has been aimed at modifying a body that is weak and sick, and moving
it towards a body that is perfectly self-sustaining.”

“I never tested on humans. I
don’t know how my research could ever result in…this! What is this? What are we
looking at?”

“You are looking at our combined
efforts,” Falkon said. “While you have been trying to create a healthy human, I
have been trying to create a vampire. Your research filled the gaps in mine. As
you can see, I now have a batch of living, breathing specimens. They’re not
perfect, but they are so much closer than I’ve ever come before.”

“No,” Celeste whispered. “This
isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.”

She felt a sharp surge of pain
in her abdomen. She breathed through it.
Not tonight, little girl
, she
thought.
I need you to stay in there for a little bit longer. Your brother
needs me. He needs a miracle
.

Falkon waited for the
contraction to pass, then he knelt down beside her wheelchair and put his hand
on her face.

“Your son is dying,” he said. “I
gave you all the help I could provide, but we are out of time. I visited him
today. I can smell the death consuming him.”

“Don’t say that! What a horrid
thing to say about somebody’s child.”

“He will die before the sun
comes up unless we help him.”

Celeste looked across the room
at the people in cages. Their skin was gray and thick. Their bodies were
hunched over. They were hardly people at all.

“No,” she said. “Whatever you
are thinking, the answer is no.”

“I only wish to treat your son,”
Falkon said. “I want to see him get better.”

“Don’t connect these
abominations to my son. I reject everything you’re doing here!”

Falkon turned her face with his
hand so she was looking right at him. “You know, I am not accustomed to asking
for what I want. Usually, I look people in the eye and I tell them.”

“You know that doesn’t work on
me,” she said.

“Yes, you are quite difficult to
control. You do what you want to do. You listen to nothing I say.”

“Because that’s our deal,
Falkon! I am here to save my son!”

“And I have been quite patient
while you have tried. But it’s over now. Robin will die tonight unless I choose
to save him. Your project is finished. But if you continue working for me, we
can save your son. I can keep him alive while you figure out how to move my
research to the next step. Our purposes will remain aligned. We will hold death
at bay while we figure out how to give your son a long and happy life.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” she
said. She tried to stand, but a monstrous contraction threw her back into the
wheelchair. She waited for it to pass, then, speaking quietly, she said, “I’m
having a baby tonight. We can talk more tomorrow.”

“Indeed we can,” Falkon said. He
held his hand up and snapped his fingers. A few seconds later, one of his
servants appeared.

“Take my friend to the
hospital,” Falkon commanded.

“No, not yet,” Celeste said. “I
want to see Robin first.”

Falkon ignored her. As the
servant pushed her one way down the hall, he walked the other.

Celeste was in labor for four
hours. During that time, Falkon went into her home and stole her son. Robin was
minutes away from death when Falkon injected him with a serum that transformed
him into a monster. By the time Nicky was born, her older brother had a gray
face, yellow eyes, and a thirst for blood.

The memory was too intense for
Nicky to look at. She pulled herself away from the glass. She was back in the
darkness of her prison cell, a creature that had once been her mother standing
on the other side.

“It’s too much,” Nicky
whispered. “I can’t see any more. It’s too painful.”

Looking right at Nicky’s eyes,
her mother raised her hands up, and balled them into fists. She brought both
hands down on the glass at once. Nicky jumped back and shrieked. A crack formed
in the glass.

“No, no, no,” Nicky said.
“Please don’t do this.”

The fists came down again. An
alarm was sounding outside her prison cell. Flashing lights and a buzzing
noise. The other ferals were going crazy. And the crack widened.

In the dream, Nicky was outside
when her mother broke the glass. In the dream, she would already be running.
But here, she had nowhere to go. Trapped in a concrete prison, with a feral
vampire about to come in.

Her mother punched the glass
again and the crack spiderwebbed in all directions.

“No,” Nicky sobbed. “Mom,
please. Not like this!”

The feral vampire punched the
glass again, and this time it shattered. Shards flew in all directions and the
entire sheet cascaded to the ground like a water fall. Nicky screamed. She was
back against the corner. Her mother was coming inside.

There was no avoiding it now.
She had lived this scene so many times she knew how it worked. No matter what
she tried, her mother would catch her, bite into her neck, and spread her
sickness.

It happened quickly. The feral
vampire that had once been Celeste Allen leaped to the back of the cell,
landing inches away from Nicky, who crouched in the corner and awaited her
fate. 

Her mother’s teeth never bit
into her neck. The icy cold sickness never spilled into her blood. Instead, a
hand touched her cheek. Nicky opened her eyes. She saw her mother standing over
her. Her mother was looking at her with love in those yellow eyes, and was
caressing her cheek.

Nicky reached out and embraced
the creature. She squeezed it tight, and in that moment, she let go of all the
pain she had buried in her five-year-old mind. She opened her mind to all of
who she was, allowing the memories of a deeply troubled and scarred little girl
to join the rest of her, making her whole.

And she heard her mother’s
voice.

You have to finish, Nicky.
You have to finish what I started.

The vision flashed through her
mind so quickly she could hardly see it. A room full of computers. A code that
needed to be changed. A job that needed to be finished to set things right.

I will do it, Mom. But I
don’t know how
.

Now more memory came pouring in.
A user name. A password. A code to open the door. A set of commands. They were
flowing into Nicky’s mind from her mother. Everything her mother had once been,
the human who was still buried deep inside this feral vampire, it was all being
transferred to Nicky.  She felt like her mother had been holding onto these
memories for just this moment. She wasn’t sharing the memories with Nicky, she
was giving them away. Letting them go.

Like a record scratching to a
stop, the memory ended and Nicky was back in the cell, listening to the
deafening sounds of an alarm and dozens of screaming vampires. She looked to
her mom, whose face had changed. Celeste Allen was no longer in the body of
this creature. Nicky was looking at a feral vampire.

Her mother roared like a lion
and the stench of death engulfed Nicky’s face. Then the creature was gone,
jumping out of the prison cell and into the hallway, where she roared again.

“Mom?”

A horrible sound followed the
roar. It was as if the gates of hell had opened and a hundred demons came
screaming out. Nicky leaned down and picked up a shard of broken glass from the
floor. Holding the glass up like a dagger, she headed for the door.

Her mother was fighting with
someone. Someone fast. Her equal. They were tussling with such speed Nicky
couldn’t keep track of it. They were on the ground. Then they were high on the
wall. They bounded about on the ceiling. Bodies were thrown and torn and teeth
were snarling and the entire hall was filled with rage.

“No stop!” Nicky yelled.
“Please! Don’t hurt her!”

And then it was silent. She
looked across the darkness to see two bodies on the ground, one leaning over
the other.

“It’s too late,” said one of
them. It was Falkon. He was crouched on the ground.

“No,” Nicky whispered.

“It’s too late! She attacked me!
She intended to kill me!”

He sounded desperate as he
yelled the words, like he was sad.