by Jenn Bennett
“Or maybe it’s one of the coded words you haven’t deciphered yet.”
But it wasn’t. And after going through every page, there was nothing about any merchant twins to whom Father had talked. No traveling merchants. No dealers in arcane items. No estate sales, no visit to the town of Constanța on the Black Sea.
Nothing but the torn page.
“Damn him!” I said, throwing the journal against the wall. It knocked a pushpin out of the corner of a map, and both the pin and the journal clattered to the floor. Candy wrappers and photographs spilled from the pages. I sighed at the mess I’d made—the mess my father had made, to get technical about it.
“I hate him,” I said miserably.
Huck nodded. “I know. Me too, sometimes.”
“Easy to love, hard to like. That’s what Mother used to say about him.”
“She must have liked him though.”
“God only knows why.” I blew out a hard breath and bent to pick up the journal and the rat’s nest of scraps that had spilled from it. As I was shoving the photographs back into pages, my fingers stilled on a small ivory rectangle of heavy card stock. I didn’t remember seeing this before. . . . I flipped it over and read the printed type on the front:
ZISSU BROTHERS
RARE JEWELRY AND ANTIQUES
ARCANE AND RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY
BRAȘOV, ROMNIA
“Huck!” I said, shooting to my feet. “Look—look!”
“I’m looking. I’m looking.” He took the card from me.
“It was here the whole time. They’re in Brașov now. Or they were this summer, anyway, when Father was touring Romania.”
“Does appear that way, doesn’t it?” he murmured, inspecting the card as if he didn’t trust it. “You never noticed this card before?”
“Have you seen the junk that’s shoved in there?”
“Brașov . . . Why do I know that?”
“It’s my mother’s hometown. Remember? I showed you on the tourist map. With the vampire bat?” I flapped my arms and bared my teeth.
“That’s right,” he murmured. “Her parents aren’t alive anymore, right? Do you think you still have any family there?”
“Cousins, probably. Not sure if they still live there, though. They don’t know me.” My Romanian grandmother died before I was born, and my Romanian grandfather died when I was a baby. I never knew them, and my mother was, like me, an only child.
“It was the same for me when I returned to Belfast,” he said, almost as if speaking to himself. “Cousins I remembered were gone and other family I didn’t know I had were there. Funny how a family can be solid one moment and then blow away with the wind.”
Yes. Funny.
I nodded at the business card. “So what do you think?”
“About Brașov? Not much to go on. Lovena did say they traveled. What if they were in Brașov this summer when your father was traveling here, but . . .”
But they aren’t now. He didn’t have to say it. I was already thinking it myself. But the one thing I was hoping, the most important thing, was that at least my father thought they were in Brașov—it didn’t matter if they were. It didn’t even matter if the ring was there. After what had happened tonight, maybe I’d had enough of magic rings.
“What’s this?” Huck said, leaning over the workbench to inspect a large piece of paper that I’d knocked sideways on the hangar’s bulletin board during my moment of rage. “Regional map. Look—these stars are the other rural post offices around Transylvania. And these here?” he said, pointing to sets of numbers written neatly on the map’s wide bottom border. “Flight coordinates. Ten post offices, ten coordinates.”
“So this plane normally flies to these other towns to deliver mail,” I said.
“Indeed it does. And see this? Right here,” he said, pointing to a star on the map. “That’s right outside Brașov. This symbol means they keep lights burning on their runway. This airfield we’re on is too small to bother with twenty-four-seven lights. Just a waste of electricity. But the Brașov airfield is bigger.”
“So you could land there without problems?”
“No, not without problems. Look at the weather, banshee.”
“The snow isn’t sticking. The runway is clear. The plane isn’t covered in ice.”
“Not worried about icing so much, but visibility might be reduced if the storm picks up, or snow could block the intake. And who knows what it’s like in Brașov. Maybe the storm hasn’t made it there yet. Maybe it won’t. Seems to be heading west, not east. But even if we’re able to land, we’ll have to deal with another postal employee who might be working there, and I don’t speak Romanian, which makes lying rather difficult—”
“Or easy. I’ll do the talking. Or we just make a run for it.”
“We’ll still need to hike from the airfield into town.” He paused, scratching the back of his neck, and mumbled, “Maybe we could hitch a ride.”
“Surely so,” I said brightly, having no idea.
He wasn’t listening to me anyway. He was too busy mumbling to himself, talking about the weather. Looking around the hangar. Making another pass around the plane again.
But after all his grousing, I knew he was seeing things my way when he took the map off the wall and handed it to me. “You’re in charge of the coordinates. We may need to find an alternate place to land if Brașov isn’t viable. Cluj, maybe. That’s northwest from here, and it takes in planes at night, too.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Huck.”
“Sure you want to do this?” he asked seriously.
“Never been so sure,” I said. “What’s a grand adventure without a plane ride?”
“It’s adventure, all right. And possibly a huge mistake. But you know what they say. When the going gets tough, the tough steal a mail plane.”
“It’s only stealing if we don’t bring it back. And we will! Now, can we please leave this frozen hellscape? My nose is going to fall off.”
He laughed. “If you think it’s going to be any warmer in that cabin, you’re in for the shock of your life.”
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
July 10, 1937
Târgșoru Vechi, Wallachia, Kingdom of România
Interesting discussion with an airdrome owner in what was once a medieval trading village called Târgșor, where a major road led from Bucharest in Wallachia to Brașov in Transylvania. I’d read about the ruins of a church here, one that was possibly built by Vlad’s father—and where the Impaler may have sheltered after a battle with the Turks, eight months before he died.
Turns out I wasn’t the first to discover this. The airdrome owner said a Hungarian gentleman by the name of Rothwild had been out here, looking for the site of the old church a month ago. He had a team of men dig up an acre of land. Why is Rothwild withholding all of this information from me? Is he paying me to run around Romania, working the same leads he’s already investigated? How does that help him?
The airdrome owner told me one interesting thing. Rothwild was raving about politics, saying that change was happening in Europe. That Hungary and Romania needed to stand their ground or allow their land to be taken. And that he was going to ensure this didn’t happen. Just a rant, I thought. But then the man said Rothwild told him that the Order of the Dragon protected these lands years ago and that Rothwild was searching for something that would help him resurrect the order.
Am I working for an unhinged man?
16
I’D RIDDEN ON MY SHARE of airplanes. Mostly Puddle jumpers, for short distances, and in Huck’s little biplane, Trixie, over Hudson Valley.
But this aircraft was no Trixie, and we weren’t flying over fields and rivers while the sun shone.
This was a ramshackle postal plane, and we were flying in a snowstorm, two thousand feet above the Carpathian Mountains.
“Stop clutching the instrument panel,” Huck’s voice said inside my headset. He sat next to me in the cramped cockpit, and though I had the v
olume turned up as loud as it would go, I was still having trouble hearing him over the insane racket of the single-engine plane. “Grab the coward strap up there, if you feel you must.”
“I’m not a coward!” I said, clutching a leather strap above my window.
“No need to yell in my ear. Relax. We’re fine.”
Liar. None of this was fine. Snow drove against the windshield so hard, I couldn’t see past the propeller on the nose of the plane—which meant he couldn’t see, either. When I dared to look out my window, I occasionally spied a single light in the mountains below, but mostly I just saw darkness. And the plane was rattling so hard, I was almost positive my tailbone was bruised.
Whose idea was this anyway, taking a stolen airplane up in a snowstorm?
Oh, right. It was mine.
“We’re going to die,” I said.
“I swear to all the saints,” Huck complained, “if you say that one more time, I’m going to open that airdrop door in the back and shove you out.”
My teeth chattered as I glanced over my shoulder at the belly of the plane and felt a twinge of guilt. Dirty canvas postal bags filled the narrow space. Pretty sure stealing mail was a worse crime than borrowing a plane.
“How far have we got now?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes, if this equipment is accurate. Let’s add that to our list of prayers.”
Several excruciating minutes passed in which my thoughts dwelled on the decrepit state of the airplane, how it was over a decade old and had been retrofitted with several improvements, half which didn’t work, according to Huck. There wasn’t even a working parachute onboard, which was the one thing that had truly given Huck pause before we took off. Why oh why hadn’t I listened?
As I was thinking about all this, Huck suddenly changed the plane’s direction and altitude.
“Um . . . what’s happening?” I asked.
“Storm’s too bad. I’ll have to take a different route.”
“Do we have enough fuel?”
“Couple hours’ worth. Don’t worry about that. I’m just going to circle back around and backtrack a bit. Try to fly around the storm so I don’t have to fight the wind.”
I hated all of this. In minutes, all our forward progress was lost as we flew back over Sighișoara, headed in the wrong direction. Just how far north was he going to fly in order to avoid the storm? Seconds ticked by, then minutes, and then we were entirely off track.
A sputtering sound rocked the cockpit. For a moment I thought it was coming from my headset, but when I pulled the padded rubber away from my ear, I heard something worse.
Silence.
The cabin was still shaking, but the unearthly sound of the engine had just . . . stopped.
No engine.
All the lights on the instrument panel faded.
It felt like being in Trixie the biplane when Huck was doing engine-stall tricks in the air. But this was no time for tricks, and Huck’s face had gone still.
He was scared.
The airplane suddenly took a sharp dip downward.
“Shite!” Huck shouted, pulling the plane back up until we were stable again. Then he fiddled with the instrument panel, and I recognized what he was doing, the same thing he’d done when we’d first gotten inside this nightmare cockpit: he was trying to start the engine.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he mumbled.
The engine didn’t respond.
He smacked the instrument panel violently. “May the devil break you into a thousand pieces, you rusty metal fucker!”
“Huck . . . ,” I said. And then: “Huck! ” louder. “W-what is going on?”
“Engine failure. Probably the carburetor. I told you this was a terrible idea!”
And I knew we were going to die up here. I knew it, knew it, knew it!
“Okay, all right. It’s all right . . . I’m going to try to land it,” he said as he slowly forced the airplane downward. “Don’t panic. We’re gliding now. We can glide for miles. If I can just find a clearing or a road—a river even. Keep your eyes open for anything.”
“I would if I could see!” I told him as my stomach dropped along with the nose of the plane.
“We’ll have better visibility when we get lower. I just don’t want to clip a mountain.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’ll try my best, banshee.”
I blew out several huffed breaths, trying to calm myself, but it just made me light-headed.
But—oh! Huck was right: I could see things now. The dark mountains. And city lights. Couldn’t be Brașov; we’d gone too far in the wrong direction. “Lights over there,” I shouted.
“That’s Cluj, I think. Best not try to land there. Too many people.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers!” I snapped.
“Beggars don’t plow down a bunch of innocent people! We can’t risk hurting anybody. We need to find a highway or a field outside of town.”
“Where, then?” I said, squinting into the windshield. “All I see is mountains and forest outside the town. Which seems like a terrible place to die. If you’re going to kill us—”
“I’m going to save us, banshee. See that? On my side.”
I saw . . . a large black spot in the middle of a large forest—a circular clearing. Extremely large. I just couldn’t tell if anything was built in that clearing.
“If that’s Cluj, then these are those haunted woods. The Hoia Forest,” he said, sounding far too excited for someone who was about to crash a plane. “Remember? The brochure we were reading on the train? One of the many places Vlad was beheaded? The brochure said it was near Cluj, and it had a big dead spot where nothing grew. This is that dead spot!”
“Yay?” I said.
“I think there’s room to land.”
“Wait!” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Fifty percent sure? Besides, it’s too late now. Better there than in the trees.” Huck took the plane lower. The sheer of wind as we descended was almost as loud as the engine had been before it died.
“My kingdom for a fucking parachute,” Huck mumbled as he tilted the plane, guiding it over the treetops, lower, and lower, and lower. . . .
“Oh, Huck,” I said. “I’m so very sorry.”
“What’s that? Must need to clean my ears, because that sounded like an apology. And Theodora Fox never apologizes.”
“I mean it, Huck. I’m truly sorry.”
“Why? You didn’t kill the engine.”
“But I may be killing us. We should’ve slept in the hangar as you suggested.”
“It’s done now. Don’t think of it.”
How could I not? I thought about that and about my father. Of the cursed bone ring calling to me back in Sighișoara. Of Lovena telling me I had old blood and of Valentin’s stories about giant white wolf priests.
And I thought about Huck. His hands on my face in the hotel in Bucharest . . . I left everything on the table, unfinished and unsaid. I should have talked to him. I should have told him how I felt. Now it was too late.
Still. If I was going to die with anyone, I was glad it was with him.
This was it. I braced for death. How truly ironic that we were going to die where the Impaler, Vlad Țepeș, was rumored to have been beheaded.
“Banshee?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to try to land us best I can. But if I screw it all up and I die but you survive, I want you to know something.” The entire plane was shuddering. Everything below was coming toward us far too fast. “I regret . . .”
The rest of his words were lost under the riotous sound of the plane.
Regret what? Regret what?
“What did you say?” I shouted.
“Hold on,” he yelled back. “This is going to sting like Satan’s whip!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for death. Then I opened them again, because, dammit, I was not a coward!
Much!
Something banged against my side of the pla
ne. Did a wing clip a tree branch? We tilted precariously to one side, and then—
We hit the ground with a terrible crash. All at once it was:
My head hitting the back of the seat.
A wave of earth and snow coming up over the propeller.
Glass shards flying.
The sound of grating-ripping-screaming metal.
Bumping, bumping, bumping . . .
And then: darkness. And the most awful silence.
Every muscle in my body had turned to stone. I couldn’t move for several seconds. Couldn’t even breathe. Snow gusted through my broken window and landed on the sleeve of my coat. Everything smelled like pine needles, engine oil, and literal scorched earth. Was I paralyzed? I moved one thing at a time, successfully testing fingers, arms, legs—oof! Sharp pain. I’d scraped the tops of my knees on the underside of the cockpit. But nothing serious.
“Banshee?” Huck’s voice was broken, and that made me think he was, too. This jostled my foggy brain.
I ripped off my headset. “Huck?”
“Are ya hurt?” he asked.
“No. A little. Not much. Are you?”
“My back—”
Oh God!
“—feels like it got kicked by a horse, but I’m all right, I think.”
Relief washed over me as he pulled off his headset and dropped it on the instrument panel.
He shook himself and said in a daze, “I never thought for one second that I could land this piece of junk, but, by God, I wrestled it down, didn’t I? And we’re alive, hoo-hoooo!” he whooped.
“Um, Huck?” I asked, sniffing the night air that was blowing in my window.
“Yes?”
“What’s that smell?”
“Huh?”
“Is that diesel?”
He swore profusely and reached behind the cockpit seats to snatch up our bags. “Out! Out now!”
I brushed away broken glass and tried the handle. “My door is jammed!”
He kicked his own door—one, twice. It flew open with a bang, and a gust of wind rushed through the cockpit. He tossed our bags outside and practically ripped my arm off, dragging me across his seat as he exited. I couldn’t even get a word out. His hands were around my waist, and I was half lifted, half jumping into the snow.