The other paintings showed a naked baby Cupid firing an arrow into the heart of a lady, a hunter aiming a gun at a deer, and a king lounging on a throne.
“I don’t see anything,” Adi said.
From the door at the top of the stairs came a rattling noise.
Sierra tensed.
“Do we think the mausoleum door auto-locked?” Carter said.
Beck murmured something, and Carter leaned closer to hear.
Sierra tugged at the ring in her lip, holding her breath. “Come on, we can do this—”
Carter gasped, pulling away from Beck. “You’re a genius! The grapes. The vineyard. Like the grapes from before.”
“It’s the same picture code as for the curio cabinet,” Adi said. “The grapes were—?”
“A!” Carter cried. “And the stag with the antlers wasV.”
Sierra’s heart leaped to her throat. Of course! The hunter was aiming his gun at a stag, not a deer. They were going to do this. They were actually going to get out—
“So we haveAandV?” Adi said, searching the other paintings. “What could the word be? It’s only four letters.”
“‘Vlad’ again?” asked Carter.
Adi dropped his sword to try, but it didn’t work. “Lava?” he suggested. “No, there’s only one grape painting.”
“There was a heart in the code.” Sierra pointed to the painting of the Cupid. “What letter did it represent?”
Adi shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
Beck and Carter stared at Sierra, wide-eyed.
She turned desperately to the other picture. “The king—a crown? There was a crown somewhere near the start of the alphabet.”
“MaybeB?” Carter said. “B-A-V? No.”
Adi paced in front of the upright coffin. “It’s no good. We don’t have the code. We need to think of words that haveA-Vin them.”
“Save!” Carter said. “I bet the crown stood for theE!”
Adi triedS-A-V-Efor the code. No good. Neither wasHAVEorGAVE.
“It has to be something to do with vampires,” he said, frustrated. He triedV-A-M-P.
Sierra shut her eyes, pleading with her brain to put the pieces together. “We have to think how Louis thought.”
Beck coughed, then groaned. “Vera.”
“Vera. Right.” It had been Vera all along, that obnoxious but brilliant girl who never got the credit and always lived in the shadows, risking her life to expose the killer—
“Vera,” Beck said again.
Carter squealed, lifting the hand that wasn’t holding Beck’s wound. “Adi! The code! It’s—”
“VERA!”
Suddenly, Sierra could see it all. The silver earring in the chem lab jar, a perfect match to the one so often dangling from Vera’s ear. The palette of vivid eyeshadows tucked in with the clutter in the alien bunker. The chameleon stuffie that matched her tattoo.
