The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (48 page)

Phillip came all the way up to
the landing now. He took Jill by the hand.

“Let’s go to your bedroom,” he
said. “You’ll want to be sitting down when you hear the rest of this.”

You are mine, Jill Wentworth.
From this moment on, you are mine. Do you understand?

Bernadette’s voice was low and intense
in the recording. It was painful to hear.

Painful because it was real.
Even though she had no conscious memory of the conversation she was hearing,
somehow, Jill knew it had happened. It was like strange, vivid déjà vu.
Listening to it, Jill felt like she was reliving a painful memory from her
past.

I understand
, said the
Jill in the recording.

That Jill was already lost. Her
voice was in a monotone. Her mind was putty in Bernadette’s hands.

From this moment on, you will
listen to the commands I tell you. Should another vampire try to program you or
see in your mind, you will resist them. You will hide what I have told you so
deep that it cannot be found. Do you understand?

I understand.

This includes Renata’s group
hypnosis during the Rose Ransom. When her performance begins, you will
recognize it for what it is, and you will repel her attempts to control your
mind. Do you understand?

I understand.

Jill felt like she was going to
be sick. All this time, she thought she was strong enough to resist Bernadette,
to resist the Rose Ransom performance. Now she was learning it was all a lie.

I’m glad to have a spy on my
side, and from what you’ve told me, it sounds like you are very good with
computers. Am I correct?

You are correct.

Are you so good that you
could hack into the computer of an immortal?

If you give me enough time,
there is no computer I can’t crack open.

She had been a pawn in some
scheme. Bernadette had been using her, just as Walter had used her mother.

Renata is up to something
,
Bernadette said.
She has betrayed the clan, but I don’t know why. I suspect
she is working with one of our enemies. If you hacked into her computer, do you
think you could find out what she’s doing?

These days, you’re more
likely to find the truth about someone if you hack into their phone
, said
Jill.

Her voice was so dull and
lifeless in the recording. She couldn’t believe this happened to her. Not only
did she do a vampire’s work, but she helped the vampire figure out the right
work to do.

The phone?
said Bernadette.
You can hack into a phone?

It is just a miniature
computer
, said Jill.

Yes, then we could hear her
conversations
.

And read her text messages.
And her email
, said Jill.

It’s perfect
, said
Bernadette.
But how would I access the phone once you’ve hacked into it?

A powerful laptop is what you
need
, said Jill.
I can sync the phone and laptop together so that
everything that happens on the phone shows up on the laptop
.

I would be able to see and
hear what’s happening?

You would know everything
.

And there would be no way for
Renata to know I was spying on her?

I can do the hack in a way
that it’s impossible for Renata to find out
.

Lovely, Jill Wentwoth. Just
lovely. It sounds like you and I will be working together for a little while.
Are you excited?

I am.

Here is how it will go. From
this moment on, when you look at me, you do not see a vampire. You see a human,
a human you trust.

I see a human I trust.

The human you see looks
nothing like me.

I see a human who looks
nothing like you at all
, said Jill.

And now the fun part
,
said Bernadette.
You get to make me up in your mind. Imagine a human you
would trust with your life. That’s who I am. Imagine a face, a body, a
disposition, and a name you can believe in.

Jill was shaking violently as
she listened. The recording was almost too much to bear.

It all made sense now.
Everything that was strange about Tarin, his charisma, his charm, his ability
to do almost anything…

In her mind, Jill had made
Bernadette into a sort of superhuman who could do no wrong.

I’m sure we will have need to
meet several times over the next few months
, said Bernadette.
When we
do, it’s up to you to make our relationship work. If ever I say anything that
rubs you wrong, if ever you start to doubt me, you are to make up a story in
your mind that makes you trust me again.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing
this,” Jill said. “Did this really happen?”

“It’s okay,” said Phillip,
rubbing her back with his hand. “It’s over now.”

She remembered that first
meeting with Tarin, when she didn’t want to do the hack. At that meeting, Tarin
told her one of the most personal, intimate details about her life. He
recounted for her, word for word, her passionate Internet diatribes as the
Marsh Hawk.

He had regained her trust by
telling her he admired her work.

God, she was so shallow! A
vampire tells her to create a person she can trust, and she makes a handsome
young man with big muscles, a glowing smile, and a long-held admiration for her
work!

We’ll get Renata’s phone at
the Ransom ceremony
, Bernadette said.
You’ll need to create a story
about me that puts both of us in Renata’s mansion at the same time. Ooo…I
know…maybe I can be a spy, just like you.

You are a spy, just like me.

And maybe I’m on a mission in
Renata’s mansion. Can you make yourself believe that?

I can.

Have fun with it, Jill. Make
me into someone you’re glad to see. When all of this is over, I’ll probably
have to kill you. It’s much more pleasant to be killed by somebody you like. Do
you understand?

I understand.

I want you to go back to your
normal life now. I want you to forget we had this conversation. Come up with a
story to reconcile it all in your mind. Your boyfriend is gone, you don’t want
to run away anymore, you want to stick around and be a student at Thorndike, at
least until you and I are finished.

I will make up a story.

Jill leaned into Phillip, too
weak to even sit up and listen. The story Jill had made up to reconcile
everything in her mind was that Bernadette failed to hypnotize her. She had
been so proud of herself. So certain that her little mantra about choosing to
do what’s right had made her immune to the vampires.

What was worse was that she had
handed over her own mother to a vampire. Now Jill doubted that Carolyn really
had been deprogrammed. Clearly, Bernadette had added at least one new layer of
hypnosis in Carolyn’s mind—after all, when Carolyn looked at Bernadette she saw
Tarin, just like Jill! Was Carolyn seeing the same Tarin that Jill saw, or was
she creating her own version?

Was Carolyn really a work addict
who had to fly to Seattle when she had nothing to do, or had Bernadette
programmed her to work her tail off day and night?

I think we’re done here,
Jill. I’ll come back to speak with you when I’m ready. This is going to be so
much fun!

Phillip pressed a button on his screen
to end the recording. As soon as he did, Jill began to cry.

“It’s alright,” Phillip
whispered, his arm tight around her shoulders. “It’s over. Bernadette is dead.
You’re one of us again.”

That night, Patrick dumped
Bernadette’s body and head in the Potomac. The next morning, Phillip, Helena,
and Alvin undid as much of the damage to Jill’s house as they could. While they
worked downstairs, cleaning the floors, hanging new drywall, and repainting the
walls, Jill spent the day in her mother’s study, talking to Gordon Krause.

“Well, a lot certainly has
happened since you and your mother came to visit me in Landover,” Gordon said.

“It was so strange, Gordon. You
know, I convinced myself that my hypnosis session with you made me strong
enough to resist a vampire.”

“In the end, you may find that
it did.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have found, over the years,
that the stronger a person’s sense of self, the easier it is to perform the
deprogramming.”

“I don’t know about my sense of
self,” said Jill. “I feel like I don’t know who I am at all right now.”

“That will change,” said Gordon.
“Shall we begin?”

Gordon took her into a state of
relaxation, just as he had done in his house. When Jill was deep in hypnosis,
he began reciting the commands Bernadette put in her mind, commands he had
transcribed directly from the recording on Phillip’s phone. It was a tiring
experience, rather like pulling weeds. With every command they found, Gordon
taught her to recognize it as foreign and remove it from her mind. As they went
command by command, the landscape of Jill’s memory began to change. She could
feel her mind growing, memories from deep in her subconscious coming to the
surface.

It was liberating to have her
mind opened up like this. She felt like she was stepping out of a long, vivid
dream, and was more than ready to go back to reality.

“When I snap my fingers, you
will open your eyes and come back to the present, feeling awake and alert.”

Gordon snapped his fingers. Jill
opened her eyes on a brand new world.

“It was all fiction,” she said.
“Every memory with Tarin.”

“You are not the first to
describe it that way,” said Gordon. “Please, sit still and take a moment to
acclimate to your new reality. Search your mind. Separate fact from fantasy.”

All the scenes from her memory
with Tarin, scenes that had once seemed real, were more distant now. She
recognized that they weren’t reality. They were like scenes she had put there
herself, like she had read them in a book.

And in place of those fictional
scenes was a new reality, one where Jill was in constant contact with
Bernadette.

“I had her phone number,” Jill
said. “I called her every night to tell her about things that were happening at
school, to talk about the Rose Ransom clues, to update her on the hack. That’s
how she always knew to come at the right moment.”

“At the right moment?”

“Yes! It was like, whenenver I
needed Tarin, that’s when he showed up. But Bernadette only came to my house
when….”

She saw herself tossing and
turning in bed, thinking about the Rose Ransom clues.

“Take your time, Jill. Your mind
needs a few moments to process all this new information.”

She saw herself researching on
the Internet for hours, writing software that scoured the web for relevant info
about the 4-line poems she had to solve. She saw herself dreaming about
connections, about cemeteries and monuments and stairs and dust.

She realized that, until now,
she had no recollection of any of this. She had changed the story in her mind
to give all the credit to Tarin.

“It was me,” she said. “It was
me all along.”

“Pardon?”

“I figured out the first two
clues,” Jill said. “I tricked myself into believing Tarin told me the answers,
but it was me the whole time. As soon as I figured them out, I called
Bernadette and she came with me when I solved them.”

“It’s incredible what the mind
can do, isn’t it?” said Gordon.

“Put me under again!” Jill
snapped.

“I’m sorry?”

“The answers are in there,” Jill
said, pointing at her head. “They were in there the whole time. For the first
two clues, it took me months to find the answers and pull them out, and we
don’t have months. The year-end party is tomorrow!”

“You want me to hypnotize you
again?” Gordon said.

“Yes, and when you do, ask me
this!”

Jill raced to the computer desk,
snatched a sheet of paper from the printer, and scribbled down a four-line
poem.

“It’s the third clue,” she said.
“We have one day to solve it. If we don’t, Nicky and Ryan are dead.”

“Alright, Jill. You know how
this works. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

It was like Jill was getting
better with practice. On this, her third hypnosis session with Gordon, she took
only a minute to reach the relaxed state where he could speak to her
subconscious.

 “You have asked me to read a
poem to you,” Gordon said. “Here it is. An expression of mortal frailty, death
and new life made manifest, in the throes of agony eternal, within and without
the square.”

They sat in silence as the words
sunk into Jill’s mind. After a minute, Gordon asked, “What are your thoughts?”

“Mortal frailty is the theme of
the entire Ransom,” Jill said. She spoke slowly, her voice as soothing and
distant as Gordon’s. “Things that separate humans from immortals like old age
and death have been central to every clue.”

Her mind was moving slowly, but
with great purpose. In her relaxed state, she was able to see so much more. It
was like her mind was an immense library so full of books that it was hard to
navigate at full speed. Her normal pace of thinking was so fast she never got a
chance to step back and look at the entire library. The best she could do was
grab books off the shelf at random and hope to find something of interest.

But with her eyes closed, and
her body and mind supremely relaxed, she could stand back and look at the whole
thing. She could dismiss all the shelves full of irrelevant ideas and go
straight for the book she needed.