5

THE GIRL IN THE TOWER

The ride back up was as silent as the descent, though this time, Adelaide didn’t mind. Between learning her mother had been a member of the Red Rose Society and seeing her uncle for the first time in over a decade, she welcomed the brief moment to process the information. Or at least try to.

Dr. Jameson had still been talking to them when Gideon slipped out of the room with Matriarch, so Adelaide hadn’t gotten a chance to confront him. But even if she had, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to. Whoever Gideon was now, he wasn’t the man she had known. They may share the same blood, but over the years he had become a stranger. When she did talk to him, if she did talk to him, it would be for her mother’s sake, not her own.

How could she not have known? Sure, admitting to your daughter that you had been in a secret society of historical descendants probably wasn’t the easiest conversation to start. But the more Adelaide thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense. Her mother had been a researcher, a historian for hire to top-tier universities, organizations, and individuals who needed someone to dig into the past for them. Her mother had loved the unpredictability of the task and excitement of discovering something new from the past in her work. But the one thing she loved to do more than anything was genealogy, tracing family lines and mapping family trees. Knowing what Adelaide did now, it wasn’t that big of a leap to consider that if her mother had been a member of the Red Rose Society, they must have been the ones to teach her.

But why hide it?

Adelaide felt like she had at five years old, doing puzzles with her uncle on the back porch. The pieces were large, the desired outcome clearly defined by the picture on the box, but still she couldn’t quite fit them together. Usually because the puzzle was old and pieces were missing. The truth teased just out of reach. Until it came close enough to grab, close enough to take on solid form instead of floating through her mind in pieces as disjointed as her traces, she would keep digging.

While Adelaide knew the reason for her silence, she wasn’t sure why Teo remained quiet too. Though she guessed it had to do with Barrow’s death. The actual extent of their relationship was still a mystery to her, but whatever it was, it had been enough for her death to shake him. Teo seemed the type to never let a crack show in his polished façade, despite the things he must have witnessed growing up as he did, the son of a notorious mobster. Adelaide might have missed it, the false bravado, introspection and eyes dimmed by pain, if she hadn’t known the kind of loss that held such power. Despite the arguments and anger she had witnessed back in the French Revolution, Barrow had meant something to him. Of that much she was certain.

Teo leaned back against the elevator wall across from her and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. No quippy remarks or imposing questions peppered the air, despite having an arsenal of new information to draw from. She could feel him watching her, words teased on his lips as he ran them over his palate as if deciding whether to swallow them or spit them out. He shifted on the wall and spat them out. “Where’s your head at, Dollface?”

It was sweet of him to ask and not at all what she had expected him to say. But between the loss of her parents and Xander cutting her out the way he had, Adelaide had spent the last year building a wall of bricks around her heart. Teo’s question felt too close to one that could topple them all. “What? Are we talking now?”

His eyes narrowed as he rolled his shoulders back. “I guess not, but from what I just heard it sounds like your family is even more screwed up than mine. Forget I asked.”

Adelaide massaged her temple, wishing she could take back the words. She’d become accustomed to pushing others away for the sake of her heart, but more often than not, it was at the expense of it. How many times could you push a person away before they decided it was easier to give up on you than tear down the wall?

Adelaide knew she was in the wrong, but she didn’t have the right words. And as the elevator stopped at her floor, it was easier to slip through and leave Teo inside than risk letting her walls crumble. Finding the portrait of Elizabeth I, she turned down the hall adjacent to it that led to the living quarters. She should be headed to the library. Dr. Jameson had instructed her to do some research on World War II before they reconvened in a few days when the time machine was fixed. But the last thing she wanted to do was read a book right now.

Adelaide passed the rooms of the other Kindred. She had learned they would live within these walls until the Red Rose Society determined they were ready to place on assignment. After that, they could find themselves anywhere in the world, preserving the past, protecting the present, and forging the future. Isn’t that what she wanted to do as a historian? So what if a stepping stone on that path was training within the Red Rose Society? Sure, initiating Kindred the way they did with a test in time might not be the most ethical way to go about swearing in new members, but Juniper said scouts had been watching. They would have stepped in if they thought any of the initiates were in real danger. Right?

Then how come Barrow and Jonas are dead? Their names echoed in her head. She could still see the blood blossom across Barrow’s chest like a rose, see Jonas’ lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling of the coliseum. Who was protecting them?

She made her way to the door at the back of the hall. Someone had carved roses into the dark wooden frame around it. A cherry stain dusted their polished petals with a hint of red. A rusted keyhole sat flush to the door, but instead of inserting a metal key, Adelaide waved the rose ring she’d been gifted at the gala over the scanner inside. The lock clicked, and she bumped the door open with her hip. The door gave way to a set of spiral stairs ascending to a small but neat room in a turret of the castle.

Charlie had tried to explain to her the technology behind it all, how on the outside, the building of the Red Rose Society’s headquarters looked like a set of dilapidated ruins, but in actuality, had been rebuilt according to the original designs and masked by some expensive tech and a trick of light. But Adelaide could do little other than nod to show she was paying attention, only half understanding what Charlie was saying. Try as she might, her brain was hard-wired for history, literature, and art. Numbers and equations were as foreign to her as ancient runes or alchemy.

Adelaide sighed, relieved to find the room empty. Though she didn’t necessarily mind Elise’s company, she was glad to have a few moments to herself, especially after everything she had just learned. She flopped on her bed, not bothering to remove her high-tops, and stared up at the ceiling trying to remember the last time she had seen her uncle. The most recent memory she could conjure was her seventh birthday party. His arms had circled her waist and lifted her up to reach the piñata which took her nearly five swings to finally break and send a cascade of candy, like sugared rain, to the spring grass. She recalled his photo on the piano and post cards on the fridge telling stories of daring adventures and promises to visit soon. But since that day, he remained absent from her memory, and his figure slowly faded to the background as the years passed.

Thoughts of her uncle slowly morphed into thoughts of her parents. In the aftermath of the fire, Adelaide had mourned the loss of the big moments to come—graduations without them in the crowd, a walk down the aisle without her father beside her, the grandchildren her mother would never be able to hold. Their absence in those future moments still broke her heart, but in the days since, she had found herself missing more of the small moments, like a cold winter’s night not long ago.

She’d tiptoed downstairs for a glass of water. Her feet carefully fell on the wooden floorboards in the same manner they had when she was young and trying to sneak around the house undetected. Despite the late hour, her mother was awake and scrawling in a journal as a fire sparked in the grate and threw shadows across her face. The fire darkened the already deep red leather of the cover to near black. The journal had been a Christmas gift from Adelaide, a new, blank canvas for her mother to fill with stories, both real and make-believe. Sensing her presence in the way only mothers can, she had set her journal down and moved to the side before throwing the blanket wide so Adelaide could squeeze in beside her. They sat that way for hours, moving comfortably in and out of conversation and silence until sleep claimed them both.

The irony of mundane moments is you don’t see their beauty until they only exist in memory. With time, even that begins to fade. Adelaide tried to take comfort in the fact that her mother still existed on paper, that her words remained behind even if she could no longer speak them herself, but how do you sum up the whole of a person in twenty-six little letters. It didn’t seem like enough.

Adelaide shifted her eyes to the foot of her bed. The room had been sparse when she and Elise were assigned to it. The only real items, aside from the staple bits of bedroom furniture, were a few odds and ends left behind from whoever lived there last; a thick woolen sweater, a ticket stub from an indie concert at a local coffee shop, and a worn copy of The Great Gatsby with the initials S.B. imprinted in gold foil on the cover. Though it didn’t seem likely, there was still the possibility whoever the items belonged to would come back for them. It had seemed wrong to throw them away, so she’d piled them up beneath her bed for safe keeping.

Her own belongings had arrived a few days earlier. Of the little she owned, most was still back in America, save for the carry-on she had packed for the plane ride to Scotland. But a few boxes of clothes and books, along with her mother’s trunk, had made the long flight over. The trunk now sat at the foot of her bed. She still hadn’t been able to get herself to open it, or more importantly, read through any of her mother’s journals inside. She sat up suddenly as a thought fluttered through her mind. Was there a chance her mother had written about the Red Rose Society?

Before her brain could catch up with her feet, Adelaide found herself kneeling in front of the trunk and lifting the latch. The familiar scent of worn leather and ink that had clung to her mother like perfume hit her as she eased the top open. Suddenly, she was a kid again, curled up in bed with her mother’s cardigan draped over her shoulders. Its weight and scent were a comforting shield against bad dreams and monsters in the dark. Her hands moved on their own accord, aching to clasp these few remaining bits of her mother and glean all she could from the pages, but as if she were hit by an electric shock, she recoiled her hands. What would happen if she touched them? While the journals still called to her, it wasn’t in the same way as the other objects that had catalyzed a trace. Mixed as her emotions were at the possibility of seeing her mother again, even in disjointed scraps, Adelaide knew she would have to open the journals eventually.

She dropped her hand and let her fingertips graze the embossing on the top cover. Her mind remained void of images, other than the ones Adelaide conjured herself. She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved in the absence of a trace as each journal passed through her hands. She had forgotten how beautiful they were, all of them handcrafted and most of them purchased from a quaint little shop just outside of their countryside town. Journals were one of the few things she could remember her mother splurging on. When Adelaide had pointed that out to her, she had simply said, “a weapon as powerful as words must be properly sheathed like a sharpened sword.”

She lifted one from the trunk and took a shaky breath before cracking open the pages. A tear slipped down her cheek as she ran her eyes along the familiar looping scrawl of her mother’s handwriting. Unlike her father’s heavy, messy script, which had been crammed together so tightly it looked as if each individual letter was in a race to surpass the other, her mother’s was neat and light. Though the pages of the journal were unlined, a few centimeters of white above and below her words acted as a buffer between them. The entry Adelaide had opened to was dated back to her middle school days. She read a few other entries, most of which had covered quirky things Adelaide had said and done, family vacations they had taken or projects her mother was working on. She closed the journal, intending to finish it later, but she wanted to read something more recent. She rifled through the trunk, searching for the dark red leather of the journal she had given her mother on her last Christmas, but after checking and double-checking the volumes, she still couldn’t find it among the others.

Adelaide was about to go through them a third time when footsteps sounded on the stairway. She looked up from the trunk, a journal in hand, just as Elise stepped through the door. A pile of books spilled from her arms as she peeked around the stack at Adelaide.

“Hey, Ad.” Elise tossed the books on the bed opposite of Adelaide’s and dropped down beside them. The pale pink rouching of her skater skirt bunched beneath her as she shimmied out of her boots.

Adelaide wasn’t sure when they had crossed the threshold of familiarity that made Elise feel comfortable calling her “Ad” and not Adelaide, but given the fact the girl had saved her life more than once back in the French Revolution, she didn’t correct her.

“What have you got there?” Elise kicked her boots to the side and came to stand beside Adelaide, peering over her shoulder at the contents of the trunk.

“My mother’s journals. I was looking for one in particular, but it doesn’t look like it ever made it into the trunk.” She placed the one in her hand back inside, shut the lid, and sat on top.

“You lost them. Didn’t you? In a house fire?” Elise, empathy clear on her face, sat back on the foot of her bed.

Adelaide wasn’t sure how Elise knew about the fire, though with her eidetic memory she supposed the girl could have read about it somewhere and only recently connected her name to the article. Not trusting herself to speak with the fresh set of emotions her mother’s words had brought to the surface, she simply nodded.

Adelaide gripped the trunk on either side of her and bit her lip. “What’s with the books?”

Elise didn’t push her, taking the change of subject in stride. “Juniper wanted me to start by learning the history of the Red Rose Society, so she sent me back with some books to read up on before we meet again.”

Adelaide still hadn’t gotten the chance to speak with Juniper privately. She supposed she could have asked Charlie or Xander how the woman fit in here as they had both known her outside of the Red Rose Society, but she wanted to hear it straight from her. While Juniper and her parents hadn’t necessarily been close, the woman had always existed in the peripheral of Adelaide’s life. It wasn’t until the fire that she really became a central presence, hiring Adelaide at her diner, helping her find an apartment, checking in on her with a doggie bag of food and a cheesy romcom to divert her mind from the rift that had opened up in her world.

When they had been divided and assigned jobs, part of her had hoped she would get to apprentice under Juniper and train in the position Elise was now learning. At least then she would have had an excuse for asking questions and digging in places she wasn’t supposed to. But given she was a Timewalker, whatever that really meant, she would have to be a little creative with how she searched for the truth. If she couldn’t be a Keeper in training, having a roommate that was served as the next best thing.

“What do you know about the Red Rose Society? My invitation didn’t exactly come with a detailed description of what I was getting myself into.”

Elise pursed her lips. “Admittedly, probably not much more than you. To be honest, I’m not quite sure how they even found out about me, but my best guess is Colden. The auctions and parties his work throws attract quite an interesting array of people. I’ve been to several and would bet my ballet slippers at least one of them had a Red Rose Society member in attendance.”

“Do you think Colden knows more about them?” She had a hard time believing he was oblivious to the kind of clientele his work associated with. Then again, her two best friends and her mother had been knee deep in the Red Rose Society and she hadn’t had a clue.

“I don’t think so.” Elise shook her head. “Colden does the wining and dining, but all of his clients either find him or are hand-picked from a master list. If they were there, it wasn’t because he invited them.”

Colden might not know who among the guests of his openings and parties were Red Rose Society members, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know any. “Do you know who makes the list?”

Elise shrugged. “Probably someone at the auction house, but I couldn’t tell you who.”

If neither Elise or Colden knew much about the Red Rose Society, why did they show up at the gala at all? It had to be more than curiosity. If it hadn’t been for the newspaper clipping of the fire that came with her invitation to the Red Rose Society, Adelaide wasn’t sure she would have batted an eye at the letter. “Did anything else come with your letter?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did they,” she cocked her head, trying to figure out how to phrase the rest of her sentence, “promise you anything?”

A shadow passed across Elise’s eyes.

“They did. Didn’t they? What was it?”

Elise bit her lip, weighing her words. “I’ve been dancing all my life, but a few years ago, I broke my ankle. Several surgeries later and it still isn’t the same as it was. The only chance I have of ever dancing on stage professionally again is an experimental surgery far more expensive than what I can afford. And the waiting list for it is already pages long. I’ll be aged out unless someone pulls some strings.”

“And the Red Rose Society promised to do that, to bump you up the list?”

Elise ran the fabric of her comforter through her fingers, unable to meet Adelaide’s eyes. “All the way to the top. Ballet is in my blood. It’s the only future I’ve ever planned for myself, the only constant in my life other than Colden and his parents. Without it, I’m not sure what I am.”

Though she was about as graceful as a peg-legged duck, Adelaide could understand where Elise was coming from. History wasn’t necessarily something she could lose, but she would be equally as crushed if her dreams of pursuing it were derailed. It was an inherent part of her she couldn’t remove without taking pieces of herself with it.

“What about you?” Elise questioned, finally meeting her gaze. “What did they promise you?”

“Answers.”