by Tosca Lee
22
* * *
A normal person would appreciate the vivid blue of the Adriatic, the colorful villages nestled on the coast of the even larger Krk island as we skim past, bright houses clustered like pockets of pebbles toppled down a hill. Would be fascinated with the almost perfectly round islet in the bay of that larger island, and the captain’s explanation about the monastery that occupies it.
But as the captain takes it upon himself to chatter at length about the island’s two-thousand-year-old walls and mile-long bridge connecting it to the mainland, all I can think is that, despite hunching against the gunwale, I feel far too exposed.
That, and I didn’t have nearly long enough with Goran—the only living tie to my mother I’m aware of, and the only one capable of even beginning to answer my questions.
I pray he lives long enough for me to find my way back. The minute it’s safe, I’m there.
It occurs to me then that I’m neglecting the one piece of information I do have.
The one Ivan died to get to me.
I tear open the envelope to discover a single item: a key on a loop of string. It’s new and unremarkable except for an engraving on one side: SOME RISE BY SIN, SOME BY VIRTUE FALL.
I peer inside the envelope, but there is nothing else. I glance at Claudia, who has been watching me. If she’s curious, she hasn’t asked, and for that I’m grateful. She may be intent on punishing me for abandoning her or Katia or the underground as a whole, but she’s no sadist. After being the least informed person in any discussion I’ve had for days, I need this moment.
I consider the engraving, but of course it doesn’t ring a bell, and turn the key over four or five times in my hand.
I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with this or where it came from, let alone what it goes to. And I kick myself for not opening the envelope in front of Goran so I could ask him.
Eventually, I knot the string around a belt loop and tuck the key in my jeans.
Half a mile off the turquoise coast of Rabac, Claudia points in the direction of a beach behind a posh hotel. She makes a brief phone call as the boat motors toward an inlet just past a rocky finger. The moment we pass from view of the beach she glances at me, and tosses the phone overboard. Piotrek’s fedora follows. The captain kills the motor, and an instant later she has shed her shoes and stepped onto the gunwale. Her eyes glint at me in the first hint of a real smile I can remember.
“Thank you,” I say to the man, hands pressed together. His mouth gapes as a splash sounds behind me. I shed my jacket, drop my hat. “Really. We appreciate it.” I toe out of my sneakers and step up onto the wale.
The water is a welcome shock. I swim hard for a full thirty seconds before looking back in time to see the boat turn south. Claudia’s laugh sounds, bright as a bell across the water ahead of me.
“It is a good day, Audra!”
“Why?” I shout.
“We’re alive!” She wriggles in the water, disappears once beneath the surface before striking out toward shore, and I realize she has just shed Piotrek’s pants.
I laugh, as much at her audacity as in relief just to be moving and, yes, alive.
The beach—which is really more of a clearing behind the hotel—is composed entirely of pebbles; there is no white sand here. I walk gingerly the last feet to shore, breathing hard, sodden in wet clothes, my arms covered in goose bumps beneath the bright autumn sun.
A shout sounds from somewhere near the road as two forms appear on the hill. Piotrek waves, and Luka tosses down a bag. Claudia, still dripping, retrieves it, sorts through the contents, and drops a T-shirt, a pair of army green pants, and sandals with the tags still attached in my arms.
“I had Piotrek pick up some things. Come to think of it, he probably had to send Luka.” She smirks.
“You thought of everything,” I say, tugging on the pants, which, to my surprise, actually kind of fit, before transferring the key, a few wet bills, and my driver’s license to a dry pocket.
She shakes back her hair. “Of course.”
I dress quickly, exchanging my wet shirt for the trendy-looking black one.
“Let’s not tell Piotrek yet that I got rid of his favorite jeans,” she says.
Five minutes later, we’ve shoved the bag of wet clothes between us in the backseat of the car.
Whatever Piotrek’s initial reaction to Claudia’s sneaking off without him, he’s apparently over it. He murmurs in Croatian as she drapes an arm around him from behind, lifts her hand to kiss it as he pulls onto the road. Meanwhile, Luka has yet to speak to me.
“Find anything?” he says finally, a few kilometers down the road. His jaw is tight, the ends of his hair catching in two days’ stubble.
“Not enough.”
I stare out the window as we head east, remembering Goran’s eyes as he told the story of my mother. Something about her affects him deeply, or did once. And I wonder if she had that effect on everyone.
I wonder, too, why I could sense him when Claudia couldn’t. Is it because her father, like Piotrek’s, was not Progeny? Both of Ivan’s parents were; surely he would have felt Goran fifty feet away, as I did. But Ivan’s no longer here for me to ask.
* * *
We stop at a gas station in the red-roofed village of Delnice for fuel, coffee, and sandwiches, after which Claudia and Piotrek go in search of new phones. Luka and I find a bench in a small park just off the main street to eat our lunch in silence.
“You know,” I say, picking the tomato out of my baguette, “it’s not going to help for you to be mad at me.”
“I’m not mad,” he says and tears a bite out of his sandwich. A minute later he says, “I just don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand? I need answers.”
“You need to stay safe. Staying alive is a lot more important than answers, Audra!”
“I had Claudia with me.” I don’t mention that I had in fact planned on going alone.
“You’ve known her less than a day!”
“And I’ve known you for what—a week?”
He exhales a forceful breath, puts down his sandwich, and looks away.
“You know,” he says. “In the time we’ve been together, you and I have had exactly one fight.”
“About your sacred duty to kill me?”
He grimaces.
“No. It was when you came back to me.” He shakes his head. “Oh my God. I cried like a baby. After months of not knowing whether you were alive . . . When you came back, I said the only way to stay alive was to go on. As though I were still hunting you, and you were on the verge of finding something I was waiting to acquire. Because we didn’t dare get found out. And I was happy to take every hour I could get with you for the next three years.”
“Three years?”
“Hunters don’t get forever, Audra. If we don’t make the kill and acquire the memory in five years, a fresh hunter’s brought in. And the old one is taken out.”
“Taken . . . out.”
He shrugs. “It makes sense. It keeps the hunter eager. It keeps the mark guessing. It takes care of the problem if we’ve been made. I’d been assigned to you two years before.”
I quit picking at my sandwich. In fact, I’ve lost my appetite.
“The Scions kill their own hunters?”
“I don’t think it happens often.”
“What happened to ‘one hunter, one mark’?”
“There’s still only one hunter. He just has a different face. I wanted to keep up the ruse. Live the time we had left. You’d be on the run after that from a new hunter, but you’d be alive. I knew you could outsmart any killer coming in cold. But you wouldn’t accept that. You became obsessed with finding a way to get out from under the eyes of the Scions. I was so tired of the entire thing. Talking every day about a death sentence I wanted to forget. It was all you talked about. We forgot how to live, to remember that we were happy, right then. And we fought.
“You felt betr
ayed—even more than the day I told you what I was—that I seemed willing to settle for the time we had left. In my mind, being with you as long as I could was more than I could ask for. And more than I felt I honestly deserved. But you felt like I was giving up.”
“So I found a way to die,” I say.
“You were convinced it was our only option. But I was afraid. That something like we had was already a miracle and couldn’t be done twice in this life. That you wouldn’t want me again. That I couldn’t win you again. You had much more confidence in my ability to do that than I did. Finally, I promised that even if I failed or, God forbid, you fell in love with someone else . . . I’d be there to protect you. Because that one I knew I could keep.”
I stare at my sandwich.
The weird desperation that day in the Food Mart. The manic way he chased me up Lily Bay Road. Coming after me to Indiana . . .
When I look up, his expression is pained.
“I didn’t come here to feel helpless. And that’s how I felt this morning. When I realized you were gone and then saw the murders on the news, I was convinced you had died in a hundred horrible ways. I know now exactly why you weren’t willing to just take the years we had left. The constant worry and fear . . . I get it, and I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I say awkwardly. “It’s not like I remember.”
He reaches over and takes my hand between his. “You loved me once. You don’t have to believe me. You don’t even have to like me, though of course I wish you did. But I’ll take knowing you’re alive over knowing you’re mine any day.” He looks up at me. “All that is to say, if nothing else, please don’t do that to me again.”
I say nothing. If he’s playing me, I already feel like an idiot—to myself, most of all. If he’s not . . . that’s actually harder to consider.
So here we are, both hunted. But it’s not the same. I may have months to be allowed to learn something useful to the Historian. Five years at most, under the watchful eye of a new hunter probably already assigned to me. But Luka’s turned traitor. For all he knows, he has hours. He’s wrong in one thing: This isn’t about protecting just me anymore.
* * *
The drive becomes less scenic as we leave the coast behind. Claudia and Piotrek chat in English about the new phones they’ve picked up but I hardly hear them. Luka’s words chase me like monsters.
You loved me once.
I try to remember if I have ever loved anyone. My adoptive parents, of course. I know I loved them. I remember putting so much care into a Mother’s Day card, drawing heart after heart on the inside. I love you, Mommy. Waiting for my father to come home after some kind of trip that kept him away. Throwing myself at him the minute he came in the door. I don’t remember them, but I remember that.
I have fractured memories of crushes—of some faceless, towheaded boy. A jock at school trying to kiss me. The faint sense that he had just eaten a bunch of peanuts. I’m pretty sure that didn’t end well.
Crushes, dates, parents . . . peanuts. But romantic love?
“Well? Let’s see it,” Claudia says.
“See what?”
“The key.”
I’m hesitant. It feels personal, attached in my mind to Goran’s story of the rain, and my mother. But I pull the key out of my pocket and hand it to Claudia.
She turns it over and even lifts her shades to study it closely.
“Where did you get that?” Luka says.
I tell him the story of the chapel in Lubenice, the monastery, the monk. I feel guilty that I didn’t tell him about the key earlier or show it to him first. I feel guilty about a lot.
“I don’t remember you mentioning a Goran before,” Luka says.
She hands it back, and Luka reads the engraving with a frown.
Claudia’s tapping at her phone, apparently looking it up.
“Does anyone even use actual keys anymore?” I say.
“What does this mean?” Luka asks, holding it so the letters glint.
“No idea.”
“Shakespeare,” Claudia says.
Shakespeare?
“Maybe you’re rich!” Piotrek says, I assume for Luka’s benefit. But we all know nothing I’ve hidden would be so mundane as money.
“What we need are passports,” Luka says, handing the key back.
“We will get those,” Claudia says. “Once we meet up with friends.”
“Where?” Luka says, back to playing stupid.
“Zagreb.”
I glance at Luka in the backseat.
They’re taking us to the underground.
23
* * *
At first sight of the old Communist-era apartments on the outskirts of Zagreb, I sink into the backseat behind a pair of sunglasses Claudia picked up in Delnice. Even Claudia seems to be keeping a low profile. Her hair, which has dried in waving curls, covers the sides of her face otherwise obscured by a pair of oversize Breakfast at Tiffany’s–style shades. The sun has disappeared with the coast; overhead, the sky is oppressive, threatening rain.
I’ve spent half the car ride on Claudia’s new phone reading anything I could find about Elizabeth Bathory, skimming everything from Wikipedia and History.com to the Weird Encyclopedia for details. Her Protestant roots and Lutheran mother. Her fluency in Latin, German, and Greek, which made her one of the most educated women of her time. That she had an illegitimate daughter before her marriage to Ferenc Nadasdy, the national hero. Apparently she was a doting mother, attended church, and refused to hand over the running of her estates after Ferenc’s death.
Independent, wealthy, beautiful, and smart. A toxic cocktail for any woman of the time, made lethal by the fact that she was a Calvinist and richer than the king—who didn’t dare risk her allying with her cousin in Transylvania against the crown.
There’re plenty of theories about her sadism and rages. That her aunt Klara, an herbalist, was a witch (of course). That it was Ferenc who taught her how to torture lazy servants by poking papers between their toes and lighting them on fire. That the palatine, a man named Thurzo, was an old family friend and the one responsible for saving her from the death penalty after he arrested her. Possibly because he, too, was a Protestant.
As we cross the river Sava into the city, I can’t help but look out at the dull gray water. I think of my mother, floating in the Danube, swollen and grotesque, if not faceless. No, the face she wears is mine.
I had thought we would stay near the outskirts of the city, perhaps in one of the nondescript and depressing apartment buildings that look like they’re made entirely of concrete. But as industrial areas give way to trees and then cultivated parks, I realize with alarm Piotrek is driving directly to the center of the old upper city.
Claudia turns around to peer between the front seats at us—or rather, at Luka.
“Luka,” she says, hesitating. “You understand that talking about Ivan or any of our friends who may know him . . . would be very unsafe for all of us?”
“You mean because of his involvement in the mafia,” Luka says, voice low.
“Exactly.”
“I understand.”
“Good. We’ll have time to rest at my place.”
“I thought we were going to meet your friends,” I say.
“We are. Tonight.” Claudia’s face tilts down toward my shirt. “But not like this.”
We get out on a narrow street.
“Where’s Piotrek going?”
“To get rid of the car,” Claudia says.
We follow her through an old tunnel. There’s a shrine inside locked behind an elaborate iron grate. A couple of wooden pews sit across the way, and I realize this isn’t a tunnel so much as an old city gate. Three people stand in front of the shrine, gazing through the grate at a painting of a crowned Virgin Mary. An old woman sells candles nearby. To my surprise, Claudia buys a candle from her, lights it, and sets it beside several others before rejoining us.
“Now we go,” sh
e says, flashing me something in her hand: a key.
Here in the medieval city center, buildings run together like long row houses. There are windows everywhere, two and three stories high. And I wonder with some paranoia who could be watching us even now.
We pass an old church with Gothic windows and a roof covered with two huge crests in brightly colored tiles that make it look like it was made out of Legos.
“What’s that?” I say.
“If you want a tour, hire a guide,” Claudia snaps.
The early afternoon sky lends the peeling plaster of the buildings a dingy cast despite their clean bisque and yellow hues. Claudia stops in front of an old door at the end of the street. The entire side of the building is covered in graffiti, like something from the inner city more than anything historic.
She lets us in and walks us down the hall to an unremarkable entrance that I am sure leads to the basement. She opens it with another key, and it does indeed reveal a narrow flight of stairs ending in a single door.
“This place is creepy,” I murmur as she flips on the single bulb overhead. “Who lives here?”
“We do,” she says.
At the bottom of the stairs, I notice some kind of symbol etched in the chipped paint of the frame: two rectangles sharing a bottom line like twin towers and the earth between them.
“What’s this?” I say as she unlocks the door. “Nine-eleven?” She glances back at me as she flips on the lights, setting a half dozen bulbs ablaze in a crystal chandelier shaped like a flying ship.
She hesitates, glancing at Luka.
“I’m going to find the restroom,” he says on cue. She points him down the hallway.
After he’s disappeared, she turns toward me. “You’re playing a dangerous game, bringing him here.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
Does she know? Can she tell what he is?
“Commoners have no place in our world,” she says.
I relax a little. “Then why did you just let him into your flat?”
“Because despite Ivan’s misgivings, I knew you—better than Ivan did in some ways. He was right; you did many things that never made sense. But you always had your reasons. Even when you disappeared. I don’t understand it, and I’m angry with you—”