by Jenn Bennett
Father was in more danger than I’d originally assumed.
We needed to catch up to him, and fast.
7
NO ONE WAS ATTENDING THE customs window on the sleepy train platform. Two Bulgarian guards were smoking cigarettes and the customs worker was chatting with our engineer. Beyond the platform, a docked steamboat was visible through a break in the trees, waiting to ferry passengers across the Danube. We headed in the opposite direction.
It was simple enough to slip around a small outbuilding, which provided temporary cover while we picked our way over two additional sets of train tracks. However, to stay out of sight we were forced to skirt a small ravine. This seemed doable at first, considering that I was in a delirious state fueled by exhilaration, fear, and adrenaline. Half an hour later I realized several disappointing things: (a) the “small” ravine was several miles long; (b) the small Bulgarian town of Ruse was in the other direction; (c) there was nothing but damp woodland beyond the tracks; (d) the Danube was nowhere to be seen.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, my Mary Janes were positively ruined. I briefly considered digging a pair of boots out of my satchel, but there was no sense in muddying them, too.
“Um, Huck?”
A grunt was his reply.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked.
“Away from the train.”
Right. Excellent. “And do you happen to know where we are now?”
“I do not.”
“All right, yes. I see.”
“We should keep walking,” he said. “We’ll find something soon.”
From one to ten, I’d rate my confidence in that happening a weak four. Possibly a three.
All I could tell about our current location was that we were most definitely in the Bulgarian countryside, which was all flat fields and jagged telephone lines. I wondered if this was some of the land that everyone’s favorite impaler, Vlad, ruined during his Burn It All Down defensive military march. Certainly seemed like a good place for a haunting, which temporarily lifted my spirits and gave me something to focus on while we trekked.
Alas, I saw nothing that even hinted of the paranormal. There was, however, quite a bit of mud and more than a little dying, overgrown grass. It would be a laughable stretch to label this area picturesque—more like woeful—and it became downright depressing when we finally reached a road of sorts, a lane for horses. It wasn’t long before we spotted two mares pulling a farmer’s cart.
Huck suggested we wave the farmer down to ask for a ride.
“In the back of a wooden cart hauling manure?” I said, covering my mouth and nose.
He shifted his head to see it better. “You think that’s what it is?”
“I don’t think it, Huck. I smell it.”
Huck made a face as the wind wafted it in his direction. “Oh good God—now I do too.”
“Maybe we should wait for a car or a bus . . . something that doesn’t involve dung?”
“Dung-free would be good,” Huck agreed.
After a quarter hour passed, we spotted another cart in the near distance, this time pulled by a single horse, driven by a man in a dark hat. The cart itself was not only dung-free but laden with crates of clinking bottles.
“Smells like flowers,” Huck said as we increased our pace and headed toward him.
It did. Roses. Perfume? Rose oil? Whichever, it was miles better than manure. “Maybe he’s a trader.”
One who took a suspicious look in our direction, guided his cart to a crossroad, and cracked a whip on his horse. We ran to try to catch him, waving frantically, but were only able to watch in disappointment as his clinking cart disappeared over a hill.
“Rose Valley,” I said, breathless. “In the Balkan Mountains. Bulgaria is famous for its roses there.”
“Is it?” Huck asked, incredulous.
“Bet you anything that man came from Rose Valley and is taking rose oil to market.” And where there was a market, there was civilization. Maybe even other carts that would give us a ride. Or single horses. Cars? Cars would be nice! “We should follow him.”
Yet, by the way the trader sped away from us—as if we were demons, freshly ascended from the netherworld—I privately wondered if finding any sort of ride might be a problem. We didn’t speak Bulgarian. We were stranded in the middle of nowhere. And I had only a single Turkish lira to exchange for services.
Maybe we should have tried to flag down the dung cart, after all.
Best not think of it now. As Huck said, something would work out. It always did.
We followed the distant sound of the trader’s clinking cart until we could hear it no longer. Then we rambled blindly in its direction. And rambled. And rambled. The initial excitement of escape had worn off, and I was no longer watching over my shoulder, expecting Mr. Sarkany’s white dog to come barreling across the dreary landscape. Even hunting for the ghosts of Vlad’s victims was getting dull.
An hour or more after we’d left the train, we gave up on ever finding the trader again. Or a market. Maybe not even civilization. Dispirited, I finally gave up the chase and set down my satchel in patch of non-muddy grass, forcing Huck to stop with me. “Do you have a compass?”
“No. Why?” he said.
“Because if we could figure out which direction we’re going, maybe we could find the Danube. It runs across the southern border of Romania and is one of the longest waterways in Europe. How could we have lost an entire river?”
“Either we’re extremely talented or complete morons,” he said, stripping off his flat cap and surveying the landscape through squinting eyes. “Not sure which.”
“Can you tell which way we’re going from the sun’s position?”
“What sun? All I see are clouds and gray sky. I can tell by my watch that we’ve got little more than an hour before sundown.”
I whimpered. I really did not want to be stuck out here after dark.
“Hey, running from the train was your idea. I seem to recall you saying this would be an adventure.”
“This isn’t an adventure. It’s a tribulation.”
“Same difference.”
“Is it, now? You’re the expert, I suppose. And what exciting adventures have you been on for the last year and half in Belfast, pray tell?”
“I’ve been working at an airfield, if you really must know.”
“Doing what? Smuggling hooch over the border?”
He looked away and stared into the distance. “I’ve been doing engine maintenance.”
“Fixing engines and whatnot?”
“And whatnot.”
“What about flying?”
“I’m grounded,” he said. “They don’t let me fly.”
“Not ever?”
“Not ever,” he confirmed. “Administrator in the licensing office knows my family is Catholic, and he doesn’t like Catholics, see, so every time I go in to apply, he finds a new way to give me the runaround with the paperwork. And my boss at the airfield won’t let me fly with an American license, so . . . I’m grounded.”
This made me sad. Back when we were all still together, Father gave Huck a little yellow biplane named Trixie for his sixteenth birthday, along with flying lessons over the wide field near our house in the Hudson Valley. Huck loved Trixie. He used to take it up do aerobatics. Spins and stall turns . . . silly tricks to show off, until Father shouted at him over the radio, threatening to set fire to the yellow biplane.
Now it sat in a shed at the back of our property.
“You should be flying,” I said. “You’re a good pilot. You used to love it.”
“Know that, don’t I?”
“You must miss it.”
“Of course I do. You don’t have something be a part of your life every day and then not miss it when it’s taken away from you.”
My heart squeezed. I struggled to keep my emotions in check as I stared at the back of his long wool coat. “No, you do not.”
He gave me a quick
glance over his shoulder. “Fox said you’d been volunteering at Vassar’s collegiate library across the river.”
“That was only during the summer. They received an extensive donation from a private book collection, and I was helping catalog it.”
“And you got fired?”
He said this with a little amusement behind the lilt in his voice, and that made me think he and Father had been having a laugh about it when they were off on their little males-only jaunt in Tokat.
“I didn’t get fired,” I said as my cheeks heated. It was only that I’d gotten into a very small fight with another volunteer who didn’t know Latin and was filing everything wrong. But the thing about that particular library is that your voice really carries, and maybe I used a few choice and mildly profane words that caused one of the less-sturdy librarians to have a fit . . . which in turn caused me to be politely but firmly dismissed. But I wasn’t getting paid anyway, so technically you can’t be fired.
“Not what I heard,” he said as though he was trying to provoke me.
“Well, you heard wrong. It wasn’t a real job.”
“Was it not?”
“It was only temporary,” I told Huck as frustration and embarrassment mounted. “Much like everything else in my life.”
His shoulders tensed beneath the wool of his peacoat. He glanced over his shoulder but didn’t look me in the eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means never count on people to be there when you need them. They only disappoint you.”
Huck swung around. “What are you trying to say, Theo?”
Old anger and hurt welled up to the surface as if they’d been slinking in the dark corners of my broken heart, head down, tail swishing back and forth, waiting for a chance to pounce.
“You know damn well what I’m trying to say. You left, Huck. I woke up the next morning and you were gone. You didn’t even say goodbye. You just dropped off the face of the planet!”
“I didn’t leave by my own accord, banshee. I was thrown out of the damn house like a bum.”
I stilled, caught between the old hurt I’d been eagerly unearthing and a shiny new doubt that stood in its way.
Huck had been thrown out of the house?
That was not what Father told me.
I blinked at Huck. “Father said . . . He told me you made the choice to go and live with your aunt. That you said it would be better for everyone.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie,” Huck rumbled. His dark, bushy brows knitted together into a dark slash. “He gave me an ultimatum. He said if I didn’t go back to Belfast and ‘cool off,’ I’d never see either one of you again.”
My chest tightened. “What?”
“You know what he always says—family first. Well, according to him, I broke that rule. I violated his trust, committed a crime against God himself, and sullied his perfect angel of a daughter.”
There was so much wrong with that, I didn’t know where to start. “You didn’t . . . sully me.” Not any more than I’d sullied him. If anything, it was a mutual sullying.
“Apparently he saw enough to pass judgment,” Huck mumbled.
My face heated even now. I remembered it all too well, what happened last year. My birthday. The impromptu party at Foxwood with some friends while Father was away in New York City. The glass of champagne. The fistfight between Huck and a boy who liked me. The broken china. Father’s butler throwing everyone out. Huck sneaking into my room when it was all over, apologetic for ruining the party, his left eye red and swollen, already showing signs of a purplish bruise.
The champagne still swirling inside my head . . .
The next thing I knew, we were all over each other. His hands, my hands. His mouth, my mouth. Other parts of us . . . For the briefest of moments it was glorious. The world slipped away, and I didn’t realize we were making so much noise. And that’s when Father burst in.
After a rage-filled chaotic moment when Father was chasing Huck out of my room, threatening to kill him, I tried to confront him—which wasn’t easy, because Father and I didn’t talk about anything that made him uncomfortable.
And apparently figuring out that I had forbidden feelings for Huck was the absolute worst mistake I’d ever made. I went down to Father’s study that night to apologize—even though I had nothing to apologize for. Even though he’d never in his life, not once, said the words “I’m sorry” to me for things he’d done—and he’d done a lot, believe me. Despite all this, I was humble and ready to do penance, and . . .
He gave me a look I’d never forget as long as I lived. It was something between horror, shame, and disappointment. I’d failed him. I was no longer his little girl. I was a shameful floozy.
And I thought I couldn’t hate him more for making me feel that way. But now here I was, realizing that I had so much more bitterness to give.
But it wasn’t all for Father.
“You just gave in to him without a fight?” I said.
One dark brow lifted. “What?”
“With Father. You didn’t even try?”
“Of course I tried!” he said, throwing his arms into the air. “I begged and pleaded. I told him I was sorry, that I’d shovel horse shite and chop firewood. That I’d never even so much as look you in the eye again, and that it was all a huge, drunken mistake, but he didn’t listen.”
I didn’t think it was possible for my chest to feel any tighter. My ribs were going to crack. “Well, I’m sorry that I was such a huge, drunken mistake!”
“I didn’t mean it like—” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now, because it was a mistake, Theo. Maybe not to you, because you’re sitting pretty in your gilded tower, still the apple of Fox’s eye. While me? I had to move to a strange country that I didn’t even remember, because the last time I was there I was still in diapers. I didn’t know any of my family there. I was a stranger in a strange land.”
“But your mother’s sister, your aunt—”
“Yes, I’ve been living with my aunt. I work nearly every day and, apparently, I’m a spoiled cur who’s lived in a fancy house too long and should be reminded of his place. Not to mention that I give most of my earnings to her, because she has a bad leg and can’t put food on the table—and hates me because I look like my mam!”
Oh. I hadn’t realized . . . Father had made it sound like Huck had happily returned to the bosom of his Irish family. His real family, because we were only temporary. Silly me for thinking otherwise.
Father lied about all of it? Why?
“I’m barely living,” Huck said. “I can’t fly. I’m stuck in Belfast. And I lost everything—my life, my country, my family. Do you know how that feels?”
“I lost my mother!” I said angrily.
“So. Did. I,” he said, thumping his chest with each word. “Right in front of my face. And my da. Every time I look in the mirror, I’m reminded, aren’t I?”
As if magnetized, my eyes were drawn to the scar on his cheek, and I felt a prickle of shame for looking.
“You don’t know what it’s like to lose everything,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like to feel as if you’re living on the edge of a knife, forever in debt to someone for pulling you out of the gutter. And how could you? You were born into privilege. No matter what trouble you get yourself into, you’re still Empress Theodora in Fox’s eyes, and I’m just a stray that he took in from the cold.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Don’t I? I know you fall into shite and come out smelling of roses and that you never think of consequences because you’ve never had to. Like now. We’re lost in a foreign country at nightfall and everything’s going wrong, but hey ho, it’s an adventure,” he said sarcastically.
That stung. Anger flared, hot and all-consuming, and I seriously considered slugging him in the stomach. “You’re a jackass!”
“Maybe I am. But I’m a jackass who’s responsible for getting you safely to your father, so I gue
ss you’re stuck with me right now, aren’t you?”
“He always had your loyalty, didn’t he?”
It was something my father demanded from everyone in his purview. We didn’t have to like each other, but we’d shed blood for each other. All for one and one for all. Even the Foxwood staff was devoted to the Fox cause.
I made a scornful noise. “Richard Damn Fox, god among men.”
“He’s the closest thing I have to a father anymore!” Huck shouted.
“Yeah, well, he’s the farthest thing from a parent to me right now, so you two can have each other.”
I snatched up my luggage and lengthened my strides across the rocky Bulgarian ground, leaving Huck several steps behind as I tried to cool down. He easily caught up to me. “Where are you going?”
“To find a boat. I’m going to Bucharest if it takes me all night. Then I’m going to strangle my father and go back home to New York. I don’t care about this stupid Vlad Dracula ring anymore,” I said, alarmed to feel angry tears brimming. “I was never intended to know about it anyway, and I’m just a mistake to you anyhow, so what do you care?”
“Banshee—”
“Don’t call me that,” I said, shoving him sideways. “Screw you, Huxley Gallagher. I wish I’d never seen your stupid face again.”
After a loud, anguished bellow that echoed around the field, he didn’t say another word to me, nor I to him. I could hear him marching behind me. For ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty. I wanted to turn around and confront him, but I was terrified I’d break down and sob my eyes out, and as my thickheaded father always said, Foxes don’t cry.
Ugh. Why did Huck always get under my skin like this? No one hurt me like he did. No one! All the desperate, wounded feelings I’d experienced last year after Black Sunday came back at me like an ill wind, and my world fell apart all over again. Because it was just as I feared. That night meant nothing to him. A mistake. He was more concerned with losing Father’s love than mine. And from the sounds of it, he blamed me for ruining his life.
Did I?
Was it my fault?
Were all the moments leading up to that night just in my mind? My heart used to race so fast when he stepped into the room. I lay awake in bed thinking about him, feeling as if butterflies danced on my skin when I pictured his face. His unruly curls. His smiling eyes.
