by Jenn Bennett
Lovena flinched. “What did you say?”
“Um, he has a one-eyed white dog?” I said. “He claims she’s part Carpathian wolf—”
“She is,” Lovena said sharply, hands suddenly shaking with rage. “Her name is Lupu, and she is my dog. She was lured into a trap and stolen from the woods outside my home a month ago.”
“Christ alive,” Huck mumbled. “The wolf is yours?”
“I tracked her blood for two miles down the road until I lost the trail and could not hear her anymore,” the woman said, standing up from her chair. “I raised her from a pup. She’d been shot in the eye by a hunter, and I nursed her back to health. Lupu is special. She—” Lovena paused, hands on hips, eyes flicking as she considered something. “I thought Rothwild took her as revenge when I refused to give him the ring. Only someone with knowledge of spellwork could have hidden Lupu from me. But this Sarkany must have bewitched her to follow him. Who is this man? Is he a member of Rothwild’s occult order?”
“We wondered if he was Rothwild’s rival,” I said. “Because it seems as if he’s trying to get Vlad Dracula’s ring too. We think he’s been tracking us with magic on that banknote—the one I just told you about?”
Lovena lowered her eyes. “Tell me everything you know.”
Huck and I talked over each other, threading together the story of when he first encountered Sarkany in Tokat. The banknote. The robed goons. And it was only when we told Lovena about the murder scene at Natasha Anca’s home that she became livid. “He used my dog—my dog—to kill?” A string of curses in Romanian followed.
I didn’t know what to say. Huck, either. We just sat there, feeling awkward while Lovena paced around the room, dragging one bad leg behind her, visibly upset.
“You may be right,” she mumbled. “Perhaps this Sarkany is Rothwild’s rival. But that makes both of them more dangerous, because men who compete for power often succumb to violence to reach their goal.”
After a long silence she shuffled to a table filled with bottles, herbs, and small copper bowls. She picked out a small green pouch, opened it, and brought it to me, dropping its contents onto my palm.
A tiny bit of wood carved into a rudimentary female figure. It was about the size of a chess piece and smelled herbal. “Put this in your pocket and keep it close to you. Under your pillow when you sleep.”
“What is it?” Huck asked, wide-eyed.
“A simple talisman anointed with comfrey root oil—for safe travel. A little goddess to guard the little empress, yes?” She gave me a soft smile and closed my fingers around the wooden talisman, patting my hand. “It seems your fates are now tied to mine. I do not know who this Sarkany is, but I will ask my crows. It may take some time, but I will see the truth. He cannot hide from me.”
I did not doubt it.
It felt as if she was ready for us to leave, so I stood up and slipped the talisman into my coat pocket. “I’m sorry about your dog. We didn’t know. I just want to find my father, that’s all.”
She looked me in the eye. “If you find him, little empress, please convince him to break from Rothwild. I said you shouldn’t fear me, but you should fear those who would abuse blood magic and twist it—people who do not care about hurting people, animals, or the land to get what they want. These men who covet the ring? Sarkany, and whatever group he belongs to . . . Rothwild and his Order of the Dragon? They are all what I would call evil men.”
That seemed a fair assessment.
She switched to Romanian and said in a low voice, “I fear that you are being pulled into their affairs by the hands of fate. Be wary. Do not allow bad men to take what doesn’t belong to them.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered back.
“You will.”
Hmph. Now she sounded like my father, doling out information as if it too much of it would rot my teeth. “Did you mean what you said earlier?” I asked in Romanian. “Can I really talk to my mother?”
A slow smile lifted her lips. “What do you think?”
Well, let’s see. We were standing in the house of a self-proclaimed crow witch who was able to suss out my heritage by listening to my blood and gave me a magic talisman for protection. And the man following us was possibly mixed up in some sort of cult—or a rival cult, which could be worse. He was a dog thief, likely a sorcerer, and most definitely a murderer. So . . . what did I think? I thought we were up to our necks in all of this, and it would be nice if for once in my life someone told me the truth.
But Lovena was done dispensing esoteric secrets. Switching back to English, she quickly told us how to find her sister as she herded us back through the house and onto the porch. There was a train station in town, she told us, and our taxi was still waiting out front.
I didn’t want to leave. She hadn’t told me enough, and it felt as if we were walking out of a safe space and into the unknown. The witch’s somber face told me I wasn’t wrong. Maybe there was nothing more she could do.
After we thanked her, she watched us leaving and shouted out to us when Huck was opening the door to the cab.
“If the Frenchman’s health does not improve, tell them to send me a telegram in care of the local Snagov post office. I will try to help. And if you see my dog again, you tell her to come home.”
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
July 6, 1937
Sibiu, Transylvania, Kingdom of România
Jean-Bernard and I made the mistake of hiring a car in Sibiu to take us to Sighișoara, and that’s why we’re currently sitting by the side of the road as the driver tries to repair a steaming engine. At least it’s warm, and J.B. had the good sense to bring along a bottle of wine.
Since there’s nothing to do but waste time, here is a partial list names I’ve pieced together from all my archival research in Sibiu and Bucharest—possible members of the Order of the Dragon by date:
Original Order, 1408:
Sigismund von Luxemburg, King of Hungary and Bohemia
Barbara von Cilli, Queen of Hungary and rumored alchemist
Albrecht Dürer, renaissance artist (dragons hidden in his work)
Vlad II (“Dracul”) and Vlad III (“Dracula”)
Stefan Lazarević, Prince of Serbia
Henry V, King of England
Pope Eugene IV
Revival of order, 1598:
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor (“Golem of Prague”)
Elizabeth I, Queen of England
John Dee, occult philosopher and royal adviser
Elizabeth Báthory, Blood Countess of Hungary
Possible second revival, current?
Unknown
14
OUR TAXI DROVE US AWAY from the painted cottage, down the lake’s dirt road, and toward the village center. I spent the first part of the ride in a haze, trying to come to grips with everything Lovena had told us. Fighting the urge to return to her. I still had a million and one questions. About Rothwild and the Order of the Dragon. About talking to my mother. About the talisman she gave us and my so-called old blood. Should I be worried or upset or delighted?
Why wouldn’t she tell me more?
Considering an ever-increasing range of possible answers to these questions made my chest buzz and my head spin. Which wasn’t good. With everything going on right now, I needed my head to stay firmly stationary.
“Focused!” I murmured, snapping my fingers.
“What?” Huck asked.
“Twelve across, seven letters, ‘head straight.’ F-O-C-U-S-E-D.”
“Banshee,” he said. “You’re the only person I know who does crossword puzzles in your head all day long.”
“Must be my old blood,” I said, feeling self-conscious and a little feverish at the same time.
“What does that even mean?” he whispered close to my ear, as if the taxi driver might hear and kick us out of the cab. “How did she know about your mother?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered back.
“All of this feels like on
e vast web of weirdness, and we’ve flown right into it like stupid insects,” he lamented. “You trust her?”
I did. I couldn’t explain why exactly. It was just a gut feeling, and my mother always said to pay attention to those. Oh, to talk to her again. Just the idea of it was . . . too much to hope for. Funny, but I think Mother would have liked Lovena. I held on to her coin around my neck, warming the metal with my fingers, and when Huck settled back in the seat next to me, I gave it a quick kiss.
Huck and I briefly talked about following our new lead to Lovena’s sister in Sighișoara, but it wasn’t much of a discussion. Of course we were going. It was the best clue to my father’s whereabouts we’d had so far. Where else would we go?
Even so, we were both overwhelmed.
I was worried about my father. I was worried about Jean-Bernard.
I was worried for us.
It felt as if we were crossing over a threshold, going deeper into Romania, away from the Orient Express, away from Bucharest, and that once we committed to moving forward, there was no way back.
Our driver dropped us off at a tiny train platform near the village center, where we had to wake a snoozing ticket agent, who provided us with a printed train schedule. I asked the young man if he’d seen my father, giving him a name and physical description, but he just looked confused. “I only work three days a week,” he told me in Romanian, shrugging his shoulders.
No matter. We were fairly certain where Father was headed. We just needed to catch up to him, and that was all there was to it.
The train that ran into the Carpathians was due to arrive in an hour. Huck and I waited on a desolate platform, studying railway tourist pamphlets about Transylvania while hungrily dismantling a fat cluster of purple grapes that we purchased from a friendly Romanian peddler. Despite both the taxi and the train tickets being cheap, we were now down to our last couple of lei. Another reason to find Father and fast: it was difficult to lead a daring rescue mission across a foreign country without proper funds.
When the train finally arrived, the Orient Express it was not. It looked as if it belonged in a Victorian museum, to be honest. No Pullman sleepers, no restaurant car . . . no anything but wooden seats, dirty windows, and facilities that were scarcely more than a hole cut into the floor. On a positive note, it was free of any shady cultist characters who’d been trailing us on this trip; maybe Lovena’s pocket travel talisman was working.
Enduring a few curious stares from the smattering of passengers traveling with us, we chose an isolated seat and were promptly ignored. Then, with a puff of steam and a clacking rumble, the train departed and a five-hour trip into the mountains began.
After our tickets were punched by the conductor, Huck tugged down his flat cap to cover his eyes, slouched in the train seat, and promptly set out to take a nap. I couldn’t understand how someone could sleep at a time like this.
“Hey, Huck?” I said softly.
“Mmm?” he answered, not moving his cap.
“I was thinking . . .”
“Uh-oh.”
“If Rothwild is as dangerous as Mama Lovena claimed . . . If he really poisoned Jean-Bernard or put some kind of spell on him . . . Do you think Rothwild used that as a threat and that’s why Father is chasing after the ring?”
“Maybe,” Huck said in a sleepy, deep voice.
“Because if Father knew there would be people like Sarkany and the robed cultists following us from Istanbul, I can’t believe he would just run off and feed us to the proverbial wolves.”
“Or literal wolf dogs.”
“By the way, what kind of person steals someone’s dog?”
“The lowest kind, banshee,” he mumbled from beneath his cap.
“Do you think Sarkany did it to intimidate Lovena into giving up the ring?”
“Don’t know.”
“I mean, what’s the point of kidnapping if you don’t ask for a ransom?” I considered this further and said, “Maybe all of these people are trying to intimidate everyone into giving up their rings until they find the real one. Rothwild hurt Jean-Bernard, which urged my father into action. Sarkany took Mama Lovena’s dog and used it to kill someone else connected to the ring—”
“Yeah, but it sounds like the widow was part of this dragon society.”
“Maybe she just dabbled in the esoteric. If she was part of the order, wouldn’t Rothwild have had access to the first bone ring and known it was a reproduction before he . . . conspired with Natasha to kill her husband in order to get the ring?”
“Got me there, banshee. Don’t know.”
I sighed heavily, churning it all over in my head. “None of this explains why Father would abandon you in Tokat without so much as a word. Why not just tell you what was going on?”
“Maybe he wanted to keep us away from Rothwild. To draw fire while we got out of danger. Maybe he thought he was protecting us.”
I snorted. “That worked out well, didn’t it?”
“I never said Fox doesn’t make mistakes. Maybe he was upset about Jean-Bernard. Maybe Rothwild threatened him to find the ring. Maybe he thought we could take care of ourselves.”
Father knew damn well how I felt about Huck, so he must have known that seeing him again after all this time would be a shock. As callous as Richard Damn Fox could be, I didn’t think he would carelessly just throw Huck and me together out of convenience.
Huck slung an arm over the back of our seat. Almost touching my shoulders but not quite. Close enough to cause a little tremor in my stomach. “Whatever the reason, I’m not sorry he did it. I mean, despite the constant terror, the dead bodies, and the witch saying that you’ve got old Romanian blood, some good things have come out of this . . . don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I admitted, checking to see if his hat was still covering his eyes. “I suppose there have been . . . um, some good things. It’s hard to tell yet.”
Fox said if he ever allowed me back home, it would be strictly as a member of the family.
“Give it time,” he murmured. “You know what they say. Romania wasn’t built in a day.”
“I’m not even going to bother correcting that.”
“That’s half the fun, you know.”
“I know,” I murmured, smiling to myself.
Satisfied, he relaxed and made a noise that indicated he was done talking. I knew precisely when he fell asleep, because he began tipping sideways until his head rested on my shoulder and his cap fell into my lap. Good grief, he was heavy. And close. Draped on me like a heavy blanket. I should have pushed him away, but he smelled like shaving cream and the warmth of him was a comfort. So I just let him be and dug out the French crossword I still had in my handbag from the Orient Express.
The first half of our railway journey took us through boring, desolate country. It was overcast and a bit foggy, especially after we passed several potato fields. But the view changed drastically when we entered the Transylvanian region. Misty foothills rose up around the track. Pockets of quaint villages dotted the slopes between spiky firs. Here, there were fewer cars and more horse-pulled carts—even a shepherd and two fluffy dogs, herding slow-moving sheep into a valley.
But the farther into the mountains we went, the foggier and darker it got. Colder, too. Huck woke with a start as raindrops pattered against the window. He didn’t apologize for falling asleep on me, and I discreetly rotated my shoulder to counter the effects of my arm going numb under his weight. It was as if we’d jumped back in time to when I was fifteen and using every possible excuse to touch his hand at the dinner table and he was sixteen and using every possible excuse to brush my arm as he passed by me in the hallway, and neither of us acknowledged any bit of it.
We still had a couple of hours to go. To get my mind off all that remembered touching and to pass the time, I suggested we read through tourist brochures Huck had picked up at the train station. One of them had a foldout map of Romania designed for tourists, with legends translated in several languages and
whimsical Gothic drawings of medieval towers, castles, and pointy-toothed vampires. Ignoring the schlock, I pointed out the Carpathian town where my mother was born, Brașov—east of where we were now—and it made my heart beat faster, wondering what she’d think if she knew I was finally traveling here, so close to her roots.
According to this map, we soon learned that everything worth seeing in Romania was either religious (painted Orthodox churches), medieval (villages in the Carpathians), or haunted—haunted monasteries, haunted homes, and even a haunted forest. “Outside Cluj. It’s supposedly the place where Vlad was beheaded,” Huck informed me, reading the English translation.
“I thought he was killed on a battlefield by the Turks?”
“According to the Romanian tourist board, he’s been killed in multiple locations. In this particular one, on the spot where he was beheaded, there’s a circle inside the woods where nothing grows. People who go into those woods disappear on the regular too.”
“That sounds positively delightful. Let’s be sure to stop there and take photographs.”
He smiled, eyes merry. “I’ll add it to our must-see list.”
By the time we made it to our stop, the fog and drizzle had changed to fog and snow. Delicate flakes fluttered onto my coat as we stepped off the platform beneath a Gothic-script metal sign that swayed in the wind. It read:
SIGHIȘOARA
TRANSILVANIA
LOCUL NAȘTERII LUI VLAD ȚEPEȘ
Birthplace of Vlad Țepeș. If I remembered my history correctly, he didn’t live here long, but the small town had clearly embraced him as their own. Apart from the sign, there wasn’t much to see around the railway station. It was a bit desolate out here, with a smattering of weary cottages on one side of the tracks and a few newer buildings on the other. It was also cold. I dug a pair of thin leather gloves from my coat pockets and tugged them on as we left the station.
We zigzagged over a street along with a small pack of tourists from the train, avoiding horse-pulled carts and old black cars with overlarge skinny wheels while following signs to Old Town. The farther we walked, the more it felt as if we were stepping back in time.