by Jenn Bennett
“The twins,” I murmured.
“Which could be the brothers Lovena mentioned? The traveling merchants—what did she say their name was? Zifu? Zizu?”
“Zissu,” I said. “I haven’t found any journal entries about any traveling merchants. There’s that page that’s been torn out, remember? Really hope it’s not that. Maybe I missed something.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he told me, rubbing my upper arm in reassurance, a simple gesture that he used to do without thought. Both of us seemed to realize this at the same time, and he withdrew his hand quickly. After a moment of awkwardness, he said, “Sure you’re all right?”
I puffed up my lips and blew out a long breath, shaking my head. “I mean, I just heard a bunch of supernatural heartbeats, so, you know . . .”
“Wolves. Witches. Magic spells on banknotes. What’s a few supernatural heartbeats?” he said, shrugging comically. “If a vampire in a cape jumped out of the alley, I would not be surprised at this point.”
There were plenty of costumed vampires in capes shuffling in the crowd with all the historical Vlads, so that wasn’t a stretch.
I turned everything over in my mind and looked back at the mustard-colored house. “You know, maybe we don’t need David to set up a meeting with the baroness. He mentioned she was giving a speech at a clock tower. Maybe we can just catch her there. Do you still have the map of the town?”
“Don’t think we need one. Going to take a wild guess that it’s the big medieval tower with the clock at the top, there,” Huck said, nodding his head down the short lane, where people were gathering in front of a small stage.
That would be it. “Perfect,” I said. “Let’s go see if we can find this baroness.”
“How will we know who she is?” Huck said.
“We’ll figure that out when we get there.” Better than standing around in the snow.
We shuffled down the lane with several other people, ending up at the back of the crowd loitering in front of the empty stage. It was set up near the base of the clock tower, a stone building with needlelike spires that stabbed into the snowy night sky. A clock face adorned the top alongside a set of painted medieval figures that waited for the hour to strike and propel them into rotation. Glancing around, I was pretty certain it was the tallest structure in the fortress, and the only one that looked truly foreboding as it loomed over the cheery fairy-tale lanes.
And I wasn’t the only one looking up. Everyone’s attention was focused on the clock tower’s observation gallery: a covered balcony that banded around all four sides. Several hundred years ago, the city guard probably patrolled that balcony, keeping a watch for foreign invaders.
Something moved up there. On a balustrade with large, open arches, a lone figure leaned into the tower’s spotlights. A woman. Long, silver hair billowed in the snow-flecked wind. Her clothes were torn and bloody.
The watching crowd let out a collective gasp. Someone shouted out, “Baroneasă! ”
Baroness.
“Lovena’s sister,” I told Huck. What was she doing up there? A palpable, contagious panic rolled through the crowd.
With an anguished sob, the baroness climbed onto the snow-dusted handrail, as if a gun was pointed at her back, but I couldn’t see anyone else up there. What was she doing? She moved as if controlled by invisible puppet strings. As if her body wasn’t her own. She flailed wildly—
And tumbled over the side of the clock tower.
A rag doll falling through the snow. Down, down . . .
Until her body crashed through the stage.
The crowd surged backward. For a moment chaos and mayhem ruled. Screaming. Shouting. At the base of the clock tower, dark figures rushed toward the broken stage.
Was she dead? Could anyone survive a fall like that?
In shock, I stood frozen, gaping at the clock tower, unable to process the violence I’d just witnessed. It felt surreal, like a nightmare from which I’d awake. Huck’s firm hand gripped my arm and pulled me to the side to make room for someone who was trying to get their children away from the horrible scene.
“Was it her?” Huck shouted near my ear to be heard over the crowd. “It was the baroness? Lovena’s sister?”
It had to have been. Even now I heard her family name, “Kardos,” spoken in the buzzing chatter around us: A shocking tragedy. Why would she do such a thing? And then: Her poor family.
David.
His slender figure raced past us, pushing through the rubbernecking crowd with one of the guards who’d escorted us outside. A few others followed. There was more shouting and chaos. Uniformed police. Someone said she wasn’t dead.
“Did you see her clothes?” Huck said, dark brows knitted into a slash above his eyes, forehead marred with worry lines. “She was covered in blood before she jumped.”
My mind revived the ghastly scene, and a shiver raced down my back. I’d never seen anything like that before. The horror of it burrowed under my skin and made me feel shaky and unsafe.
And that’s when everything fit together in my head.
“She didn’t jump,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“She didn’t do it of her own accord. She was pushed. Or coerced . . . like a puppet. She was trying to get away from something. Didn’t you see her face? She was in agony.”
“Bewitched,” Huck said, making the sign of the cross.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
“A trail of blood is following us wherever we go!” Huck despaired.
It truly was. And this was no random act of violence. In an instant the shock of what we’d witnessed fell away.
Sarkany. He was behind this. Had to be. I didn’t know how. I just knew. And from the look on Huck’s face, he was thinking the same thing.
We both glanced around the crowd in a panic. No sign of him. No white wolf dog. And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning: everyone was out here gawking. All attention here. It was a distraction. A gruesome, horrific distraction . . .
“We’re idiots,” I said. “The ring!”
Huck understood immediately. In unison, we jogged up snow-slicked cobblestones, zigzagging through the crowd of onlookers. We ran until we came to the mustard-colored house, rounding the corner into the main square.
The line in front of the Drăculești Family Living Museum had broken up. The ticket-booth attendant was gone. A couple of people were scattering out of the front door, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. When another person raced out of the exit, I didn’t waste time; I just barged inside as I’d done before.
Glass crunched under my brown boots. Huck raced in behind me, wild eyes flicking across the room. He held up an arm as if he were prepared to take a swing at someone.
He needn’t have bothered. The room was deserted—no Sarkany.
And no infernal thumping. No sound at all.
The display case we’d inspected earlier had been smashed open. Medieval tools were strewn. And the red velvet that cradled the dark family heirloom was now empty.
The bone ring had been stolen.
15
WE EXITED THE MUSTARD-COLORED HOUSE, rattled and confused. Not knowing what to do or where to go. Ambulances were arriving, along with more uniformed poliţie reinforcements, their cars blocking many of the citadel’s narrow streets as they cleared tourists and gawkers. I questioned a stranger, who said that someone who’d been near the stage confirmed that the baroness had, indeed, survived the fall, but her condition was unknown.
The tragedy at the clock tower had been a cruel distraction. I didn’t know how, but I knew Sarkany was involved. He’d threatened the baroness, or drugged her, or compelled her with some kind of dark spellwork to jump. I believed that as much as I believed the earth was round.
Men who compete for power often succumb to violence to reach their goal.
Lovena. Had we brought this horror here to her family? Or were we just standing on the outside, unable to stop what was already in
motion? With trembling fingers, I felt around my pocket for the witch’s travel talisman. Still there. If it indeed had offered us protection, I felt horrible that it hadn’t extended to Lovena’s poor sister. “This is horrific,” I told Huck. “What if Lovena’s sister doesn’t survive? Or what if she’s paralyzed? Oh God, Huck.”
“It’s terrible,” he agreed. “But this isn’t our fault.”
“Is it not?” I argued, feeling a sense of frenzy rising in my gut.
“No. I don’t think so? Jaysus, banshee, I don’t know!”
I exhaled and tried to breathe in slowly through my nostrils to calm myself. We’d witnessed something horrible. The bloody fall. The stolen ring. Chaos and confusion. I was still in a little shock. But I needed to get a grip on my emotions so that we could figure out what to do. While I was doing this, Huck realized something more immediately crucial. “They’ll think we did this,” he said, motioning toward the museum house. “They’ll think we took the ring.”
I glanced around, paranoid. “But it was already gone when we went inside. If Sarkany took it, someone had to have witnessed it.”
“Aye, but people panic and get confused, banshee,” he said. “We’re outsiders here. Easy targets. We already had to be escorted out of the house, and David will be looking to blame someone. If nothing else, we’ll be questioned by the police as suspects.”
“Dammit,” I mumbled, glancing around. My nerves were frayed. I still expected Sarkany to leap out of the shadows. But Huck was right. “We need to leave the town.”
“Agreed,” he said.
But where were we supposed to go? “Do we have enough money to take another train? We never got to talk with the baroness and find out where Father was going. . . .”
“We’ll figure something out,” he said, sounding surer than I felt. “All I know is that we can’t find Fox if we’re behind bars, and there’s nothing we can do for Lovena’s sister. We’ve got to leave, banshee.”
Part of me resisted, not wanting to feel like a criminal slipping away from the scene of the crime. But it wasn’t our crime, and what good did it do us to stick around and volunteer ourselves up as patsies?
I nodded at Huck, breath white in the cold night air. “Let’s go.”
We made our way across the square. It seemed best not to exit the citadel the way we came in, due to all the police, so we walked in the opposite direction, past drunken revelers and shopkeepers who gossiped together in doorways and beneath the festive white lights strung over the streets. Once we’d serpentined our way to the citadel’s walls and slipped out of an arched exit, I felt a little relieved.
And a little lost.
Huck spotted the river we’d crossed on our way from the train station. It wasn’t until we picked our way down a snowy hill and found a bridge to cross into the newer part of town that we slowed our manic pace, and I forced myself to think about what to do next.
Snow fell harder. After counting what little money Huck had in his pockets, we were positive we didn’t have enough for the train—or even a bus. Hotel? No. Meal? Everything here was closed anyway. The citadel was the heart of the town. This was borderland, something between civilization and countryside, and for the life of me, I didn’t know where to go. Huck didn’t either, if the permanent worry line in his forehead was any indication. But we kept walking. What else could we do?
Several minutes passed. We turned down a street and hiked alongside a paved stretch of highway that wound out of town. A few cars passed us, their headlights flashing in the dark. Huck stuck out his arm, attempting to hitch a ride, but no one stopped.
“These Sighișoarans are a tough bunch,” Huck said. “Am I that ugly?”
“Maybe you should show some leg.”
“If they hate my face, my hairy leg won’t help. I promise you that.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll just freeze to death soon. No big deal.”
Buildings were getting fewer and farther between along the road, and the snow wasn’t letting up. We found a lone apartment building and considered trying to hole up in the stairwell but couldn’t get past a barred gate. Had it been a lock, Huck could have picked it, but it looked like it could only be opened from the inside. I remembered my mother telling me that outside cities, Romanians lock up everything at night—farms, homes, barns. Night brought fear, fear brought superstition, and it was very, very dark in the outskirts of this Carpathian town.
“Looks like mountainous countryside out there,” Huck said, shielding his eyes to see past the last lamppost near the highway. “We’ll have to go back. At this point, I’d rather sleep in the clock tower. Maybe one of the churches or taverns will let us inside.”
“Or maybe we could hot-wire a car,” I suggested.
“Why, banshee, how dare you. I’m not a common criminal.”
I huffed out a shivering laugh. “You hot-wired that car in France two years ago.”
“French cars, sure,” he joked cheerfully as he shivered, hands thrust into his coat pockets. “Romanian cars are a whole other bucket o’ parts. Besides, you see any cars to hot-wire?”
Not in several minutes, I hadn’t. However, I did see something else. Something much better. Bigger, too.
“What about that?” I asked, pointing to a metal building at the end of a short dirt road that branched off the highway. It looked like a small warehouse with a covered shed extending off the back. Less a shed and more a hangar, for beneath its metal roof was the silhouette of a small airplane. And on the side of the building, a lone yellow light shone on a painted pair of words: POȘTA ROMNĂ.
“That’s a post office, yeah?” Huck said. “And their mail plane.”
“Airplanes don’t have locks, right?”
“You’re suggesting I steal government property?”
“Better than stealing a crop duster from a poor farmer. Besides, it’s not really stealing. It’s borrowing.”
“You sound just like bloody Fox,” he informed me, and then mimicked Father in a deep, booming voice: “ ‘Go on, pick the lock on that duke’s summer home, Huxley—dumb bastard doesn’t know Greeks from Romans, so we’re almost doing him a favor, taking this priceless statue off his hands.’ ”
I snorted a laugh, and Huck flashed merry eyes at me. Maybe the cold weather was making us both a little loopy. Or maybe I was trying to get over the shock of seeing someone plunge several stories from a clock tower. Or maybe, just maybe, hearing heartbeats while under the spell of a four-hundred-year-old ring had damaged something in my brain.
Take your pick.
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “We should borrow the plane and fly it to . . .”
“To . . . ?”
“You know,” I said, gesturing loosely. “Where my father went. To the twins. It’s next on his list.”
“We don’t even know for certain that these Zissu brothers are your father’s twins. Didn’t Lovena say they traveled around? Last she knew, they were somewhere near the Black Sea. They could be anywhere now.”
“There’s got to be a clue in the journal. I just missed it,” I insisted. “The hangar has light, so I can look it up there. When I find where they’re at, we can just fly there, find my father, then bring the plane back. Zip-zip.”
“Oh, really. That’s what we’ll do? That’s your plan?” he said, sounding both perturbed and a little amused.
I shrugged one shoulder. “Unless you don’t think you can fly a plane like that . . .”
“Pfft.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Not falling for that, am I?”
“Are you sure? That’s what a coward would probably say.”
“You forget, banshee. I have no male pride. Call me a coward. Call me soft. Bothers me not,” he said, shaking his head slowly.
“All right, then. What do you propose we do? If what David told us was true, then Father left here yesterday, which makes him a day ahead of us. We need to keep moving to catch up with him. And besides, Sarkany could be back in the citadel
along with the police, who you said would question us, so we can’t go back there. And if we just sit here arguing, we’ll likely die of frostbite.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Know all that, don’t I? But we can’t fly to nowhere.”
“It’s not nowhere. It’s . . . somewhere in Romania,” I said dramatically, fanning my hand out over the landscape.
Huck laughed. We both knew this was ridiculous.
“Let’s just walk over to the hangar,” I urged. “Maybe there’s someone working inside the post office who can help us, or I can look at Father’s journal. At the very least, it’s shelter from the snow. One wall is better than none.”
With this logic Huck finally agreed, so we made our way down the dirt road. The brick building had no windows, only a locked door. When we knocked, no one answered, so we headed around back to the hangar. Not much to see there: some locked tool cabinets, a locked back door that led into the building, and an air-to-ground wireless stand—also locked.
The airplane, however, was not. Huck walked the length of it, inspecting the fuel tank, popping open panels and checking cables and mechanical systems. “Fueled up. Probably used regularly. Not the best I’ve seen by a long shot. Needs service badly. But seems airworthy for a short trip. Probably.”
“Marvelous!”
“No, not marvelous. I could lose my private pilot license back in the States—and completely ruin any chance of getting one in Belfast.”
“If we sit around here and do nothing, I could lose my father,” I countered.
“You act like I’m not concerned about that,” Huck said, irritated. “We’re both on the same side here.”
Point taken. Before we could get into another fight, I hauled my satchel to a workbench and flipped on a small overhead light there. Then I rooted through my clothes and books until I found the journal, laid it out on the workbench, and began scanning through it. “Twins, twins,” I mumbled, flipping through the thick pages.
“Maybe he doesn’t call them twins. Try looking for brothers. Or merchants.”
“Doing that already,” I said in a singsong voice.