The Lady Rogue

by Jenn Bennett

  Snow! And ground, most solid! Who cared that it might be haunted ground where nothing grew? Not me, buddy! I could have dropped to my knees and kissed it—and I almost did exactly that by accident because my knees were wobbly as Jell-O. Huck yanked me back upright. We grabbed our bags as flames shot up over the plane.

  “Now run!” Huck shouted.

  He didn’t need to tell me twice. I held my beret against my head as we dashed over the clearing. Light from the flaming airplane cast a disorienting, dancing shadow and made it difficult for my eyes to adjust to our surroundings, but I finally spotted the edge of the clearing . . . and the darkness of the forest beyond.

  As we rushed into the trees, a thunderous explosion shook the ground and lit up the clearing, spewing up shards of metal that littered the ground behind us. I stumbled forward, racing as if the devil were behind me in the blazing inferno. Racing until my lungs and calves burned. Until Huck nearly tripped me, trying to gawk at the plane.

  “Look!” he said, breathless, thrusting out an arm to slow me down.

  I stopped to look. And to listen. The explosive fire was dying down. There were only muted pops and black smoke billowing as the blaze consumed the crumpled metal carcass.

  We’d made it!

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I said between hard breaths, sprinting a few more steps just to be certain I was far enough away.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Huck said in a rough voice, clutching his rucksack against his heaving chest with one hand and using the other to hold himself up against the trunk of a tree.

  “Are we safe?” I asked, still panicked. “Will it explode again?”

  “It’s fine, fine,” he mumbled, catching his breath. “All the petrol . . . poof! No more fuel, no more explody.”

  “Hell’s bells,” I said. “That was . . . Oh God. Think I’m . . . going to have . . . a heart attack. That was . . . not good. Not good at all.”

  “Thought we were walking shish kebobs,” he agreed, letting his head drop in relief.

  That made two of us. We caught our breath and stared back at the wreckage in a daze. I patted my coat pocket. Lovena’s talisman was still there. Maybe she’d saved us from death by flame. Or death by mangled bodies in a plane crash.

  “What about the fire spreading?” I asked. I didn’t want to be responsible for burning down an entire forest.

  “The snow will keep it from spreading to the trees. It’s too wet to burn. It’s all right now,” he assured me, flipping up his coat collar to shield his neck from the biting wind. “We’re alive, and it’s going to be all right now.”

  But it wasn’t. Not exactly. Death by fire was quick. Now we were stuck in a dark forest, miles away from what we assumed was Cluj—a city far, far north of where we needed to be. On top of that, it was snowing, and there was no shelter in sight.

  And it was cold. Very, very cold.

  Right. Okay. “So . . . what now?” I asked as Huck slipped the straps of his rucksack over his shoulders. “How do we get out of here before we freeze to death? I’m worried this fire will draw wild animals.”

  “Nah. Just the opposite,” he said, still a little breathless. “Animals run from forest fires.”

  “Coyotes are attracted to campfires.”

  “Europe doesn’t have coyotes.”

  “But it has bears. . . .”

  “Christ,” he mumbled. “Like arguing with a mule, it is.”

  I frowned. “Mule? That’s what you think of me?”

  He shook both his hands and his head. “Now is not the time. I’m freezing my bollocks off. We need to concentrate on finding a way out of here, yeah?”

  Okay, fine. “That’s north,” I informed him.

  “Is it?” he asked, looking up at the moonlit sky for reassurance.

  “Pretty sure. You looked at the forest on that map. Which way should we go?”

  He glanced around. “That way.”

  “You sure? Are you just saying that? Because I seem to recall that time we got lost in Mexico City, and you wouldn’t ask for directions but insisted you knew the way, and we ended up—”

  “Bzzzt!” He mimicked zipping his lips together. “Not now, banshee. Just start walking.”

  “Since you know where we’re going . . . ,” I mumbled. “Lead the way.”

  Irritable and anxious, both of us headed off in the direction Huck insisted was right, farther into the forest, away from the clearing, our breath white in the darkness. We trudged through falling snow, tripping over underbrush and winding our way through the trees in silence. The farther we went, the more I worried. This didn’t feel like the way out. Not that I was entirely sure where “out” was either. But it felt as if we were going away rather than toward civilization, and that made me nervous.

  After a half hour or more of hiking through black woods with no foreseeable end, we came to an eerie grove of strange trees. Their curved trunks were shaped like fishhooks—as if some terrible storm bent them a hundred years ago and they’d just continued growing that way. I’d never seen anything like it. Along with the dead clearing, it was plain to see why people called this forest haunted. All I knew was that every woodland sound made my pulse race, and I was jumping at shadows.

  When we spied moonlight on the other side of the strange, twisted grove of bent trees, I couldn’t have been more relieved. Huck pointed out a small stream. “Let’s follow that,” he suggested.

  I agreed. Better than roaming around aimlessly anyway.

  Though the stream was narrow—we could cross it easily—its presence created a break in the tree canopy that allowed columns of pale light to filter into the dark woods. We hurried to the light like moths to flame.

  “It’s not cold enough to ice over yet, so that’s something,” Huck remarked on the flowing water before glancing upward. “I can’t tell if the storm is passing or if the trees are just blocking out most of the snow.”

  “Perhaps this would be a good time to look at the map of the forest in the brochure you picked up. May be enough moonlight to read it.”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t a map so much as a vague blob with some symbols indicating ghosts and beheading locations, what have you.”

  “Are you joking? You said you were certain this was the way out!”

  “Now, now. Temper, banshee.”

  “We’re lost in a haunted forest, Huck!”

  He held up a finger. “Not lost. Here’s a stream. Bound to lead somewhere, yeah?”

  I shoved his chest with both hands, and he stumbled backward in the snow. “Are you kidding me? You should have killed us in the plane crash while you had the chance. Because now I’m going to have to strangle you, and bears will eat your carcass!”

  “I told you animals lust after my leg meats—” He shielded himself and laughed as I smacked his arm several times. “Hey, now! Control thyself, empress. We’re not lost, I tell you. I know exactly where we are.”

  “So do I—lost! In a haunted forest.”

  “You love ghosts,” he said, grabbing my gloved hand.

  “I love warmth and not freezing to death too! I love not crashing planes in the middle of the wilderness.”

  “I told you I didn’t want to steal it! You should be praising my name for landing that bajanxed hunk of metal! Now, stop trying to hit me, for the love of the saints.” Exasperated, he grabbed my other hand too.

  “What did you say when we were going down?”

  “Pardon?”

  “When we were crashing—”

  “Landing,” he corrected.

  “You said ‘I regret’ . . . something. You regret what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me!” I said, pulling against his grip.

  “Just did,” he insisted. “I said, I regret nothing.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little breathless. I stopped trying to yank my hand away from his. “You mean . . . ?”

  He looked down at me with snowflakes clinging to his lashes. “You know what I me
an. Everything. From the first time I kissed you until that night in your room. It’s what I meant to tell you before. I do not think that what we did was sinful or a crime against God, no matter what Fox says.”

  “You don’t?”

  He shook his head, and in that moment I felt the invisible wall between us fall away with the snow. And there it was: our connection. It wasn’t broken after all. It hadn’t disappeared with the months we’d spent apart.

  “I don’t either,” I said in a small voice. “I don’t regret a thing.”

  His grip loosened, and his hands tentatively clasped mine. Such a simple thing, holding hands. Such a simple, miraculous thing. My heart pounded rapidly inside my chest.

  Somewhere in the forest, a branch snapped. Might have been a squirrel or the weight of snow breaking a twig. But it was loud enough to invade the magical, perfect moment that I was feeling with Huck. And then something changed in my peripheral vision.

  It was on our side of the stream and much bigger than a squirrel.

  It was also moving.

  “H-huck,” I whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “What kind of haunted things are supposed to be in these woods? Ghosts?”

  His head turned ever so slowly toward the approaching shape. It was moving with care.

  Stalking us.

  “That’s no ghost,” he whispered. “Ghosts don’t growl.”

  No, but wolves did.

  17

  THE WOLF’S SHAGGY HEAD CAME into sight inside a shaft of moonlight. His body followed. His gray fur was filthy and patchy, and I could count his ribs. He was starved. Possibly sick. And as he prowled closer, two others appeared behind him, one tawny, the other white.

  White. Not skinny or starved, this one. Not quite a wolf even.

  And she had only one eye.

  “Jaysus,” Huck whispered, releasing one of my hands. “That’s . . .”

  Yes. Yes, it was. Lovena’s stolen wolf dog.

  The two animals with Lupu were clearly wild. Had she escaped Sarkany and joined a pack, or had Sarkany sent her here to attack us? How was that even possible? If Sarkany indeed had stolen the ring in the Sighișoara museum as we’d assumed, and Lupu was with him then? There was absolutely no way he could have made it here by car in the same short time it had taken us to fly here.

  Impossible!

  Logically, that meant she might have broken away from him since the last time we’d seen her. Her collar with its strange symbols was missing too. Perhaps that was the spell holding her hostage.

  Or maybe I was wrong on all accounts. All I really knew was that wild animals were closing in, predators bigger and stronger than me—ones with teeth that could rip skin and break bone—and there was nothing to protect us. No weapon. No shelter to run to or gate to close.

  Nothing between them and our throats.

  I’d never been so afraid in my entire life.

  “Nice wolfies,” Huck said softly. “If we had any meat to give ya, I promise we would share. But we, uh . . .”

  We were the meat.

  “Run across the stream on three,” Huck whispered to me, more firmly grasping the hand he still held. “One, two—”

  Three!

  Racing away from the wolves, we crashed through the stream’s icy water—Huck in one stride and me in two. Cold lashed around my ankles, but I scrambled up the snowy riverbank, hearing the wolves behind us.

  Huck and I sprinted through the trees. Blindly. Instinctually. All I smelled were spruce needles and rotting leaves beneath the snow. All I heard was the steady lope of wild predators on our tail.

  Branches whipped my face. Thorns snagged my coat. We couldn’t outrun them. They were fanning out behind us, two flanking and one behind. I caught snatches of the tawny wolf weaving past trees on my right. Pointed ears. Tilted eyes. Fangs. He was closing in.

  Desperate, I made one final push to outrun him. My boots pounded the snowy ground. My lungs were close to bursting. But right ahead of us there was light—silvery moonlight. Another clearing? The end of the forest?

  Cliff!

  I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d tried.

  My foot slipped. I went airborne. Then my back hit solid earth.

  Down a steep hill I went.

  Tumbling. Rolling. Screaming.

  Earth, snow, rocks . . .

  No sense of up or down. I pitched sideways and caught a glimpse of Huck falling next to me. All I could do was scrabble the ground with flailing hands, trying to slow my fall, until I blessedly slid to a stop, slamming my hip against the trunk of a tree.

  Pain shot through my bones. All my muscles seized, and if I couldn’t force them to stop, I feared I’d die. I needed air in my lungs. I needed everything to stop hurting.

  Come on, I told myself. Breathe, lungs, breathe. . . .

  I heard something in the distance. And again, this time clearer:

  “Banshee!”

  My lungs spasmed. I coughed up dead leaves and gasped for breath—sweet relief! After a few painful inhalations, I managed to get my stinging palms flattened on the ground and pushed myself up. We’d landed in a sort of valley or gorge between two foothills. I couldn’t tell how wide the gorge was, but there was another river here; I could hear it, flowing much more rapidly than the stream above.

  “Huck!” I coughed out weakly.

  I needed to move. My legs worked. Nothing felt broken, just a lot of scrapes and various pains that felt destined to become bumps and bruises. Still had my beret, amazingly, but not my satchel.

  Pebbles tumbled past me. I squinted up the hill to the ridge above—Dear God, I fell that far?—and spied three wolfish shapes picking their way down. There was a strange, almost humanlike manner in the way they were descending. Valentin’s wolf story flickered inside my head, and a fresh wave of panic washed over me.

  “Huck!” I shouted, desperate.

  “Banshee!”

  “I’m over here!”

  Branches snapped, and then I spotted him, stumbling toward me. “Where are ya, Theo? Talk to me!”

  “Here!” I said, pushing to my feet with a groan.

  “Thank God,” he said, grasping my shoulders, touching my arms as if he didn’t believe they weren’t broken. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, metering out my breath.

  “Found your satchel way over there,” he said, holding it up and gesturing loosely. “Christ, banshee. Scared me to bits. I saw your life flashing before my eyes.”

  “We have bigger problems, up there,” I told him, pointing to the descending shapes as he handed me my satchel. “They’re following.”

  “Mother of God,” he mumbled.

  “We can’t outrun them,” I said, turning toward the river. It was much wider than the stream above. Impossible to cross on foot. We’d have to swim it, and even if we made it across, how long would we last tonight, roaming the mountains in freezing, wet clothes? My wet feet were already numb.

  But I spotted something else in the distance. Something beside the river.

  A building.

  “There!” I told Huck, pointing. “Shelter!”

  “Thank the saints—c’mon!” he said, grabbing my hand.

  Stumbling through the snow, we barreled toward not just one but several rough-hewn wooden cabins that lined the riverbank. They were half-timbered with shaggy, thatched roofs and wooden shutters blocking all the windows. No smoke in their stone chimneys.

  They looked chillingly dark and deserted.

  “Hunting cabins?” Huck said between huffed, strained breaths and the sound of our feet racing across the snow-swept ground.

  Possibly. But what I did know after a quick glance over my shoulder was that the wolves were still descending and nearing the base of the ridge; once they hit level ground, we’d have seconds before they were on us again. “If we can steal a plane, we can break into a house,” I told him, and we raced faster toward the first cabin.

  It was very small: four walls, a
chimney, and a door. A single dirty window flanked the door, but it had been shuttered from the inside. We came to a sliding stop, and Huck banged on the door. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  Most definitely empty.

  “Pick the lock, Huck!”

  “What lock? You see a bleedin’ keyhole?”

  That was strange. I rammed against the door with my shoulder. It gave a little, but so did my arm. “Ow!”

  “Move,” Huck said.

  He rammed the door with gritted teeth. Once. Twice. Three times.

  On the fourth attempt, he bellowed out a battle cry and threw his weight hard against the door. Wood splintered, and the door flew inward.

  I tossed a glance over my shoulder to see Lupu’s white body alongside her new packmates, all of them bounding across the snow. She turned her head in our direction. In a flash, the three animals were speeding toward us, heads down, eyes reflecting moonlight off the river.

  “Inside!” I shouted to Huck.

  We lunged into darkness and slammed the door behind us.

  “Help me hold it,” Huck shouted.

  As soon as I braced the door alongside him, wood rattled against my arm, and I yelped.

  The wolves were trying to get through!

  “Keep holding it,” Huck said, struggling for breath. “No way they can bust the door down. It’s as thick as my arm. Only reason we were able to get inside is because I broke a plank barring the door.”

  The heavy wood door shuddered again. I wasn’t sure if Lupu and her new wolf pack agreed with Huck’s assessment.

  “Lupu!” I called out against the wooden door. “Go home. Go back to Lovena.”

  “Doubt she’s going to pay attention to that,” Huck muttered.

  Well? That was what Lovena told me to tell the dog if we ever saw it again. Couldn’t hurt, could it? I called out again in Romanian, just for good measure, as we used our combined weight to keep the door shut. My chest rose and fell as I counted seconds, bracing for the next attack. Ten seconds. Thirty. A minute.

  Nothing. No attack. No sound of paws in the snow. Silence.

  “Are they gone?” I whispered to Huck.

  “No idea,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what; I’m not going back out there to find out, that’s for damn sure.”