Chapter Eighteen
Marek makes it first and hops up on the step to the bus, blocking the door from shutting with his body. He shoves it back open.
“Come on,” he grunts.
I climb up and enter. He wrenches himself from the door and follows me down the aisle. After paying, I slip into an empty seat and he sits beside me, breathing heavily.
The bus takes off, and I search the street for Nyx. She’s gone.
“Damn. This thing is pressing into my bone.” He removes the metal box he retrieved from the Sistine Chapel from his pocket.
“What do you think it is?” I ask, leaning over his arm to get a better look at it.
On the front side, the box has a combination lock. Fastened to the top is a gold cross made out of tiny skulls. A series of etched letters line the back panel.
“I think it’s some sort of cipher.” He turns it in his hand. “We need a keyword or phrase to crack it.”
A husky man a few seats up from us belts out a gravelly cough, breaking our concentration.
Marek tucks the box back into his pocket. “We need to find a safe place to examine this closer. Someplace where we can rest.”
People sitting in the rows around us make me uneasy. Any one of them could be dangerous. I would’ve never pegged Inanna as a ruthless, poison-syringe-holding killer.
I can quit. Leave Marek to figure out all this scary shit himself. I no longer want to know why I was on Adam Conte’s list. I just want to go home. Back to my regular and somewhat less crappy life.
Dalton would tell me to grow a pair. Which is insulting and sexist at the same time.
Fear has a habit of holding me down, keeping me from doing daring things. I can’t count how many times I didn’t do something because it seemed too dangerous. Dad used to say that living in fear wasn’t living. By not taking risks, I could be missing out on spectacular moments.
But this moment, here in Rome, with the Model Squad chasing us, is anything but spectacular. They killed both Cain and that doorman, and there’s no telling what they’ll do if they catch us.
“That man was dead,” Marek interrupts my thoughts. “There wasn’t a pulse. She said he was risen. How can that happen?”
“We resuscitated him. That’s all.” The nagging feeling that it all could be real sours my gut like I just drank spoiled milk.
He has this deadpan look on his face, and my breath skips. “I’ve been trying to piece it all together. The list, this scavenger hunt for clues, and now…and now our stalkers and all this bullshit about an immortal war. My grandfather held many secrets. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“What if it’s true—?”
More of the man’s coughs distracts me.
“That man with the locusts looked real to me.” Marek’s head turns to where I’m looking. “The only way to know the truth is to keep following my grandfather’s breadcrumbs. But if it’s too much for you, we’ll get you on a plane home. I completely understand if you want to go.”
The man coughs again, sounding like he’s going to hack up a fur ball. I wrinkle my nose at the disgusting noise.
I should go home. Try to forget all that’s happened over the last couple of weeks since that car hit Adam Conte and he gave me his bag full of clues.
Or more like a bag full of confusion.
But I couldn’t go home. Not without knowing my role in whatever Adam Conte tried to hide or protect. Whatever the meaning of that list, I’m on it, and so are my parents. Adam Conte might’ve had something to do with their deaths, or he may have known something about it.
“I’m staying with you,” I say.
He glances at the window, then at me, and smiles. “Okay, then. The first thing we need to do is get off this bus. Find a place to hide out for some time.”
The bus makes many stops before we exit onto a busy street with shops. We rush across uneven sidewalks, looking for a hotel, rain beating down on us. My Vans slap the pavement, water spraying up from the force.
The rain seeps through my jeggings, wet and cold. Thankfully, my bomber jacket keeps my top half dry. Marek’s hair sticks to his head, water dripping from the slight curl at the ends. We come to a familiar landmark. The Piazza di Spagna. Standing on the cobblestones, I have a déjà vu moment. I’ve seen this place in many movies and did a model of it for my geography class.
A long, broad flight of stairs rises to a chapel at the top. If it weren’t raining, people would crowd the steps, sitting and lounging in the beautiful splendor of the square. In spite of the rain, there’re still a lot of tourists around, holding up colorful umbrellas to shield them from the downpour.
At the bottom of the Spanish steps is a large fountain with a sculpture of a sinking boat in the middle. Rain pings the water in the basin. I stop, emotions stilling me. There’s a photograph of my parents in this same spot during an anniversary trip. It’s a frozen memory of theirs, and I wonder what they were feeling at the time.
Marek turns back, and there’s a worried expression on his face. “Why are you stopping? There’s a hotel at the top.”
I give the fountain one last look and climb the elegant off-center staircase beside Marek. The magnificent twin-towered church gets nearer with each step up. I know this place well. I’ve been obsessed with it ever since I found that photo of my parents. It was their last day alive, right before they caught a flight to Lake Como, and they looked so happy.
We pass the pink building where John Keats, a Romantic poet, died of tuberculosis in the early eighteen hundreds. It’s a museum now, and I can see through the windows that there are a good many people inside. Probably trying to keep dry.
The Hassler Hotel is to our right as we make it to the top.
“Shouldn’t we stay somewhere less crowded?” I say between heavy breaths after the long climb.
Marek’s breathing is practically normal. He’s definitely an athlete. I probably should work on my aversion to cardio exercise.
“My bet is,” he says, “they’ll think we’d avoid tourist spots. Sometimes you’ll go unnoticed if you hide in plain sight.”
“Something your grandfather told you?”
His eyes dart in my direction. “Yes. As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Okay, so we hide out here. I’m tired and hungry, anyway.” I head in the direction of the hotel. It’s another hike up more steps and finally across a cobblestone drive.
Breathing heavily, I push through the circular door and around into the lobby. The reception area is hopping with guests of the hotel checking in and checking out. Water drips from my hair and clothes, and a puddle forms around me. I must look like an unwrung mop slapped onto the glossy, white marble floor.
“This is nice,” I say when Marek stops beside me.
There’s a metal sculpture of a wolf and two boys suckling its engorged tits to the right of the reception desk. I raise an eyebrow as I study it. “What is that?”
“That’s Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of the city of Rome,” offers an older woman with blond hair in a style you only get from teasing and using tons of hairspray. She’s carrying shopping bags and must’ve come in behind us.
“Oh,” is all I can think to say. “It’s…interesting.”
“That it is,” the woman says and walks off.
Marek scans the lobby, most likely checking for any threats. “I’ll get us two rooms,” he says.
“Just get one. This place has to be expensive, and we need to save money.” Plus, I don’t want to be alone, but I’m not about to tell him that.
“One room, please,” Marek says to the woman behind the counter and turns on his megawatt smile that could cause a power surge. It’s the same one he flashed me the first time we met. The one when he knew I was flustered at the presence of his bare chest. “Preferably, two doubles if you have them.”
The woman eyes him, not in a nasty way, but more of a curious kind of way. Even wet, Marek is charming. “We have a deluxe with twin beds available.” Though an accent hangs on her words, her English is flawless.
Marek smiles again. “That’ll do.”
He passes her some euro banknotes, and she looks confused, as though she’s never seen money before.
“Our credit cards were stolen,” he answers her questioning look. “Bags, too.”
She nods. “How many nights?”
“Just tonight.”
Her eyebrows arch higher, but she doesn’t question him. She writes a room number on an envelope, places a key card inside, and slides it across the counter to him.
“Very well, Mr. Striker,” she says.
Striker? He must’ve given her a name on one of those forged passports from his grandfather’s bag of tricks. My fingertips run up and down the zipper of my purse. A sure sign that I’m nervous. I grab the strap instead so I won’t look so suspicious.
My heart jostles inside my chest with a restless anxiousness as we skirt around people in the lobby on our way to the elevator. Marek pushes the button, and we wait.
And wait.
Someone must be holding it up on one of the upper levels.
My tongue sweeps my dry lips, and I catch a view of myself in the mirrors surrounding the door. Wet strands of tea-colored hair stick to my forehead and cheeks, mascara runs from my eyes, and my nose is red from the cold.
Marek, on the other hand, looks effortlessly put together even wet.
I brush my hair away from my face and rub off the mascara with my fingertips.
The elevator doors slide open, and we wait for a couple to exit before we step inside. As the doors close, I spot a man staring at us. His features are sharp, his hair dark brown and beard cut short. His sea green eyes, hooded with thick brows, reflect a fierceness in their depths.
He smiles when he realizes I’m watching him, too. I swallow and step back as if I can get farther away from his stare.
The doors close and the floor rises, leaving my stomach behind.
“There’s a man in the lobby. He was watching us.”
His head snaps in my direction. “Was it Bjorn or Horus?”
“No. I’ve never seen this guy before.”
“What do you want to do?” he asks. “We could move to another hotel.”
A chill slithers across my wet skin, and all I want to do is take a hot shower. “No, we’ll stay here. I’m just jumpy. He was probably staring because we look like we were dumped in a lake or something.”
“Okay.” Marek pushes the button to the third floor.
I stab all the other ones on the panel.
He gives me a puzzled look. “Why’d you do that?”
“If he’s following us, he won’t know where we got off.”
“That’s smart.”
Yeah, but it doesn’t settle the worry sloshing around in my stomach. My left eye twitches. All this stress is getting to me. My tummy rumbles.
“We’ll get room service.” He rocks back and forth on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back. He’s just as nervous as I am.
The room is classy, white, and there’s a view of Rome outside the window. There’s a complimentary fruit plate, and I pick up an apple slice. The temperature is set to freezing, so I search the wall for a thermostat. After I push several buttons, not knowing what I’m doing, the heat turns on.
Marek orders room service as I take a hot shower, the water warming my bones. I use one of the white courtesy robes and wiggle my toes into the slippers. There’s a towel-warming rack, and I hang my wet clothes on it, making sure to hide my panties and leave room for Marek’s clothes.
While he’s in the bathroom, I stretch out on one of the beds and watch the ceiling. I try to forget everything that’s happened and just concentrate on my breathing. Though the images of Cain and the doorman and that man with the silver streak in his hair and the locusts stay with me, my exercises calm me. Breathe in.
Soothe me.
I’m safe here.
They don’t know where we are.
Breathe out.
Calm. Soothing.
My thoughts go to Shona. The police arrived when we made our escape. I’m sure she’s with them, but I can’t get the image of her mouthing for us to go out of my mind. If it were me, I’d probably beg us to stay. Not her. She’s brave. Strong. I need to be more like her.
Stop being a victim.
My psychotherapist’s words echo in my head. I replay them often in the hope they’ll take root one day and become permanent. Take control. Use power words. Don’t say I can’t, say I can.
A victim stalls. A survivor keeps going. That’s what Dad would say if he were here.
I’ll keep going.
Just as Marek finishes and comes out of the bathroom, a knock sounds from the door. He looks for a weapon on the desk.
I spring off the bed and grab both water bottles from the small table by the two-person couch. Made out of glass, they look more like wine bottles. I pass him one, and with the other in my hand, I stand on the opposite side of the door from him and ready mine to hit the person if they attack us.
“Yes,” Marek calls.
“Room service,” the accented man’s voice answers.
Marek eases the door open and peers through the crack. He lowers the bottle in his hand, which is a clue for me to do the same, and he lets the man in. The cart bumps over the threshold, and plates rattle. The man’s eyes go to my robe, then to Marek’s, and he smiles.
“Ah, honeymooners?” he says.
“No,” I practically snap and then quickly adjust my tone before saying, “He’s my brother.”
He nods as he sets up the cart next to the sofa. “Oh, very well. Twins?”
Twins? I glance at Marek. Could we pass as twins? We are the same age—both have brown hair—but we look nothing like each other. Our facial features are different. His are sharp and angled, mine are oval with rounded edges. My nose turns up slightly at the end, his is more of a Roman type.
“Yes,” I say even though it’s a ridiculous assumption.
The man leaves, and I’m thankful he’s not an assassin or something.
Marek and I sit on the sofa, eating pasta and studying the box he retrieved from the Sistine Chapel. I pick it up and examine the letters etched into the metal.
“I bet you’re right about it being a cipher,” I say.
Marek takes a sip of water from his glass. “My grandfather was always trying to get me to do them with him. He’d get mad because I didn’t have any interest in cracking the codes. I’m not very good at it.”
“We had a session on cryptology in my middle-school math class. I need something to write on.” I get up and retrieve a pen and pad of hotel paper from the top drawer of the desk. Marek moves our plates out of the way.
I jot down the letters with the spaces and punctuation exactly how it is on the box.
Jung lbh ner abj, jr bapr jrer; jung jr ner abj, lbh funyy or.
Staring at the code, I search my mind. “We did many ciphers in those two weeks of cryptology. A Caesar one would be too easy.”
“My grandfather was always talking about a rot-something or other.”
“A ROT cipher.” I nibble my bottom lip. “It’s a shift-based encryption one. That class was so long ago. I can’t remember how many letters to count to the right to replace the ones in the code. Let’s Google it.”
Marek grabs his phone and stabs his finger against the screen. “My internet’s not working.”
I check mine, and it’s not working either. “They must have Wi-Fi here.”
“Right.” He stands, finds the paper with the password, and enters it into his phone.
While he’s waiting for a signal, I turn off my roaming. I’d be grounded for life and for the next life if Jane sees charges from Italy and finds out I left the country.
“Now it’s working.”
It seems like an eternity before he finishes searching. “This site says that any number rotation can be used. A ROT13 cipher code comes up a lot in the search hits—”
“That’s it.” I interrupt him. “Your grandfather would’ve picked the most standard rotation. He’d make it easy for you to know which number to use. We have to replace each letter in the code with the thirteenth one after it in the alphabet.”
“That’s what it says here,” he confirms.
I write the alphabet in a line on the paper just under the code. “So ‘J’ would be”—I count thirteen over—“‘W.’ And ‘U’ is ‘H.’”
It’s getting dark in the room, so Marek turns on a light, and I continue deciphering the code.
When I finish, I look over at him. “It says, ‘What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.’”
“What does that mean?” Marek grabs the back of his neck, reading what I wrote on the paper. “It doesn’t make sense. The combination is numbers, not letters.”
My shoulders slump, and I lean back against the cushions of the sofa. “I don’t know. Is there anything else written on the box?”
He picks it up and turns it around in his hands, surveying every inch of it. “Nothing.”
Are we at the end of the line with Adam Conte’s freaky treasure hunt? A part of me wants it to be over, but a more significant part of me is disappointed. Now that I’m on this quest, I need resolution. For me. For Marek. And for my parents.
Numbers? I straighten. “Let me see that.”
“There are four wheels to the lock.” I check the decoded cipher. “And there are the same number of sections in that saying or whatever it is.”
“Okay,” Marek says with a confused look on his face.
A full grin stretches my lips. “I think we have to do a little math. Each letter of the alphabet has a numbered position. One through twenty-six.”
The lights go on in Marek’s eyes. “Oh, right. We get the numbers and add each section together.”
“Bingo,” I say, sounding a little smug.
“You must do good in school.”
Well. I do well in school. I want to correct him, but Dalton’s always getting on my case when I do that to him. Says it’s insulting and rude.
“I do okay,” I say instead.
Marek writes down the numbers, and I add them together with my phone’s calculator.
I punch in the last number. “It’s 189.”
“That’s too high,” he says as he checks the lock. “Each wheel only goes up to twenty-six.”
I’m getting tired. My vision is fogging, and I can’t think anymore.
Marek adds one plus eight plus nine together on the paper, and it equals eighteen.
“That’s it.” I rub my eyes, and we get back to work solving the other numbers.
After a while, we have the combination. Marek spins each wheel and enters the numbers into the lock.
18, 8, 12, 3
The lid to the box pops loose, and he opens it. Inside is a bone.
A human finger bone.