The Lady Rogue

by Jenn Bennett

  Anyway, it didn’t matter, because when I asked her about the sale of Vlad Dracula’s bone ring, she confirmed that Rothwild was an acquaintance of her late husband, Cezar, that she didn’t know him well. All she knew was that Rothchild had been eyeing the ring for some time and that her husband had sold it to him in a moment of charity between friends. There was no documentation accompanying the ring—nothing historical that would authenticate it. That’s what she said. I’m not sure I believe her, but I didn’t have the patience to press her about it too far, because the room was filled with taxidermy that smelled of bad chemicals and hellfire, and my damn lungs were strained by a summer cold, so I couldn’t stop coughing.

  Regardless, the interview seemed to be going nowhere, around and around, so we left. The only interesting thing of note was a photograph I saw in the hallway as we were being shown the door by the maid. It was taken in 1929 at some kind of fundraiser for a political cause, according the caption. It was Rothwild with his arm around Natasha. Which made me wonder if she was keeping secrets.

  “Huh. I suppose you’re right,” Huck said as his eyes flicked across my father’s scrawled words. “Natasha is probably ‘the widow’ from Fox’s cipher.”

  “She lives here in Bucharest,” I said excitedly. “We could go talk to her. Maybe she’s seen Father. Maybe she can point us in the right direction. Or, oh! Maybe Father is even there right now.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Huck warned.

  “Andrei can help us find her address, I’ll bet.”

  I was talking too fast, and I fully expected Huck to tell me I was mad. But he didn’t. He just stared at the journal entry, scratching his neck. And then his eyes met mine. “Well, then,” he said. “We’d better go before it gets too late.”

  “Yes, let’s,” I said, happier than I should have been that he was willing to trust me and give this a chance.

  “Let’s hope she isn’t really a praying mantis,” he added with a smile that revealed the attractive gap between his teeth.

  If she could point us to where my father might be, I honestly didn’t care.

  After paying the check on our hours-long meal, we dashed across the wet boulevard and flagged down Andrei at the desk. He was able to track down an address for the widow in minutes. By the time we’d hopped into a taxi and passed along the written address to the driver, it was well past seven o’clock and pouring down rain. An ominous start to our journey across the city and one that only worsened during the drive. Thunder and lightning cleared the streets of pedestrians and snarled the traffic. So badly, in fact, when we neared the stradă we needed to be on, we found it had been blocked by police, who were clearing away an automobile accident.

  Our driver muttered something rapidly in a low voice that I couldn’t quite catch over the noise of the rain beating down on the taxi. In Romanian, I asked him to repeat himself, but he was busy rolling down his window to shout at another car that was trying to turn around in the middle of the street.

  “I think he’s telling us we’ll need to walk the rest of the way,” Huck said. “The road’s blocked.”

  “We’ll be soaked,” I said. If not from rain above, then from the water below that was flowing down both sides of the street like small rivers. I tucked my fur collar into my coat and did the same with the cuffs of my sleeves. “Oh, well. At least the rain’s slowing a little. Can’t be that far.”

  Huck paid the driver the taxi fee and a bit extra to wait for us. At least, I thought it was understood. But as soon as we were out of the cab, it turned in the middle of the road, backed up, and then sped away in the opposite direction—and no amount of shouting brought it back.

  “We’ll find another one,” Huck shouted, flipping up his wool coat’s wide collar and lapels to shield himself from the rain. “Come on.”

  We avoided the uniformed poliţiei and made our way down a hill, trying to match up the numbers on the handwritten address to the homes that sat along the road. But half were unmarked, and others were hard to see in the dark. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel, Huck made a funny noise. I looked up and saw what he saw.

  An ambulance. Police. A crowd of black umbrellas.

  They were all gathered around a three-story house covered in ivy; gold light shone from two windows on the top floor like a pair of malevolent eyes. They looked down on the driveway, watching a scene playing out, and as we quickly approached, we saw it too.

  A coroner’s van was parked there, lights flashing in the rain. And into the back, a bagged body was being loaded. Another body lay facedown on the wet pavement just outside the side entrance. From her uniform, she was a maid, and her head was bleeding so badly, even the rain couldn’t wash it away. Two other servants stood under a portico, weeping.

  “Please tell me that isn’t Natasha Anca’s home,” I said as we gawked at the gruesome sight with the rest of the onlookers.

  “That it is,” a middle-aged man to my side said in a heavy accent. “I hope you were not friends.”

  “No,” Huck said. “Not friends. We didn’t know her.”

  “Very good.” The man nodded approvingly. White hair stood out under the dark of an umbrella. His coat and suit looked well made and expensive. “I live two houses down,” he told us. “And ever since she and her husband moved in five years ago, she’s been a blight on polite society. Séances. Tarot card readings. Debauched parties and orgies . . .”

  “Oh?” Huck said, sounding as scandalized as I felt. “She and her husband—”

  “Not her husband. Just Natasha,” he said. “Before he died, her husband had been . . . How do you say? Bedbound. Paralyzed. He hadn’t left the upstairs room in two or three years. All the parties were downstairs. Natasha lived off his money and did as she pleased. She was a wicked woman. No one will be surprised that this has happened.”

  “What exactly did happen?” Huck asked.

  “They say a hound from hell burst into the home and ripped out her throat before chasing down one of the maids, which I suppose is that poor girl,” he lamented, gesturing toward the body on the ground. Bulbs flashed in the rain as the police took photographs.

  I gave Huck a worried look. He returned it.

  “A hound from hell?” I repeated.

  The man shrugged. “A rabid stray, perhaps. The priest says hellhound”—he pointed to a black-attired Romanian Orthodox man of the cloth, who looked as if he might have come from the small church across the street—“and the servants who believe in superstitious folklore say it was Satan’s beast, collecting a debt. Regardless, this is what happens when you court disgrace.”

  The police were blocking the bodies now. My gaze slid over the ivy-covered stone of the widow’s home, up to the demonic windows that looked like eyes. Despite both the rain and the police attempting to disperse the crowd, no one was leaving.

  The man tilted his head beneath the umbrella and studied us a little closer. “How do you know Natasha?”

  “Aye, well, you see, we’re looking for someone,” Huck said diplomatically. “We were hoping she had some information about them.”

  I opened my mouth to add something to that, but no words came out. Because on the other side of the ivy-covered house, I spied movement. A man was taking refuge from the rain in a doorway. He watched the police while a white dog sat obediently at his feet. My pulse doubled.

  “Time to leave,” I said quickly, pulling Huck away from the neighbor. “Thank you for talking to us, but we must go. Now.”

  “Don’t blame you, young lady,” the man said, before stepping toward the curb to cross the street. “Get as far away from this as you can. Nothing good can come of it.”

  When we were out of earshot, Huck said, “Mind telling me why you’re yanking on my arm like you’re trying to outrun a demon?”

  “We are! Look over there, in the doorway,” I whispered.

  Huck jerked his head toward the man and froze. Sarkany couldn’t see us—at least I didn’t think so—and I did
n’t want to take any chances that his dog might sniff us out. For once Huck and I were on the same page. He grabbed my hand, and I didn’t have time to think too hard about the forgotten pleasure of his fingers around mine while we splashed through puddles, away from the police. Away from the bodies. Away from the devil and his white dog.

  When we turned the corner, we couldn’t see the coroner’s van anymore, so we ducked under the overhang of a building to get out of the rain and caught our breath.

  “Andrei warned me,” Huck said, letting go of my hand.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I went to the registration desk to have him look up the widow’s address,” Huck said in a daze. “Andrei warned me that there was a house in this neighborhood that has a dark reputation. I thought it was just a silly urban story.”

  Even our taxi driver had known. He hadn’t been warning us about the traffic accident blocking the street. Now that I replayed his rapidly spoken words in my head—the ones I couldn’t catch before—I was able to ferret out the taxi driver’s meaning. Casele diavolului, he’d repeated in warning.

  House of the devil.

  JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX

  July 1, 1937

  București, Kingdom of România

  Jean-Bernard and I got mildly soused in a friendly pub with a young Romanian scholar named Liv, a boy not more than a couple years older than Huxley. Not only had Liv heard about Vlad Dracula’s war ring, but he knew all sorts of stories about it. Most of them were half-baked (or maybe that was me after several glasses of pălincă), but the most interesting were stories about who owned the ring after Vlad.

  According to Liv, the ring has been hidden dozens of times for hundreds of years, but it is always found. Gilles de Rais was the first to acquire it after Vlad. He was a noble French knight and a comrade-in-arms to Joan of Arc. Then he obtained the ring and killed a hundred children.

  Then Elizabeth Báthory, the Blood Countess of Hungary, supposedly owned the ring. She’s said to have murdered up to six hundred girls. (The court stopped counting officially at eighty.) The bone ring worn on her thumb was not able to be removed, so her entire thumb was cut off, ring and all, before she was imprisoned in a tower, where she remained until her death.

  John Dee, infamous court magician to Queen Elizabeth, also got his hands on it. Dee’s equally infamous assistant, Edward Kelley, said the ring instructed him that the two men should share their property. And wives. But when he said the ring told him to kill, Dee drew the line and sold it, saying it was bedeviled.

  And let’s not forget Peter Niers, a German bandit who dabbled in the black arts. He confessed to killing five hundred people before he was executed—broken on the wheel.

  Several politicians acquired it. And a pope. Oh, and the son of a Turkish sultan. Actually, it was rumored to have left Europe and crossed into the Ottoman Empire twice. The first time was a few months after Vlad Țepeș was beheaded; the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus sent it to the Turks in exchange for Vlad’s head. The second time, it was secreted away in a mosque for five years in the 1800s before they wanted nothing more to do with it and sent it back to Wallachia.

  That’s what I’m most interested in—that second time it returned to Europe.

  Where did the Turks send it?

  11

  WE WALKED AROUND BUCHAREST FOR what seemed like a lifetime to make sure Sarkany wasn’t tailing us. Then it took a second lifetime to find another taxi that would take us back to Hotel Regina. By the time we got up to our room, it was almost eleven o’clock. Both of us looked and felt like drowned sewer rats and took turns in the bathroom, changing into dry clothes. My coat was probably ruined. I dried it off as well as I could and hung it up, hoping for the best.

  Trying to clear my head of both the shock of the murder scene and of seeing Mr. Sarkany again, I stood in front of our balcony doors, peering out over the busy boulevard’s bright lights. Across the street, rows of city rooftops were still wet with rain and shining in the moonlight. I shivered while my hair dried, wishing the hotel would turn on the heat, and then I tried to figure out what to do next.

  No, we didn’t find my father tonight. But at least we found out a few things. We learned that the widow, Natasha, dabbled in the occult. Which was interesting. And that my father’s notes had mentioned a photograph hanging inside her house that showed her cozied up to Rothwild. That was doubly interesting. Were Natasha and Rothwild lovers? Was he aware of her extracurricular esoteric interests? Or was the picture my father saw merely a random photograph from a random event?

  Maybe Natasha Anca was a dead end, both figuratively and literally.

  Except Sarkany and his dog were there.

  And Sarkany and his dog had killed her.

  Why? I dug my father’s journal out of my handbag and flipped through the pages, trying to spot something that would help me understand or point me toward something that could.

  “Ugh. I can’t stop thinking about all that blood,” Huck said as he toweled off his hair. “A dog tore out that poor woman’s throat.”

  “Seems so, yes,” I said.

  “Not just any dog. The white wolf dog. I told you that man was dangerous.”

  “You did.”

  “And I told you that wolf dog of his was a beast.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then why do you have that damned journal in your hands? What more do you need to see to know that this is all a terrible, dangerous game? We can’t play—we don’t even know the rules! Only Fox did, and he’s not here.”

  “No, he’s not here!” I shouted back at him, suddenly angry and scared at the same time. “Don’t you get it? Something is wrong, Huck. Really, terribly wrong. We need to find him. The widow couldn’t help us, so we need to follow Father’s path to the ring—just like he said in the journal.”

  “The same one that says one of the people he questioned last summer was a hermit? Have you lost your mind? I am not tracking down some hermit in the middle of nowhere.” With a flick of his wrist, he threw the wet towel he’d been using on the floor. “That’s a fool’s journey, banshee, and I’m no fool.”

  “Well, maybe I am,” I snapped. “Because my father is in trouble, and I’m not going to twiddle my thumbs in a stupid hotel room, hoping he’ll come back. I’m going to find him.”

  “Oh, are you, now? You’re going to ride out into the night like Grace O’Malley on horseback just to prove something? Do you know how stupid that is?”

  “Don’t really care.” I lifted the leather journal. “Follow the ring, find my father. That is the official plan now. If you want to leave, fine. Leave. I’ll find him by myself.”

  “With what money? We’re nearly broke!”

  “I’ll sell something. Or send a cable to Father’s accountant and ask him to wire me cash.”

  “Mr. Fitzgerald? Pfft. Good luck with that. When we were in Tokat, Fox mentioned he was somewhere in Canada, hiking up a mountain. You’ll never reach him.”

  Not for the last time, I was incensed that Huck had been gone for an entire year and still managed to know more about my father’s work than I did.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, a little flustered but also too worked up to give in now. “I’ll think of something. Whatever it takes. I’m going to find Father, and he’s going to be fine, and maybe I’ll even find Vlad’s cursed ring, too.”

  “Ugh. You sound just like him. You know that? Stupidly stubborn.”

  “Whatever. Better to be stubborn than give up.”

  “Better to be dead, you mean? Did you not see the coroner hauling away a bloody body?” he said, sounding nearly hysterical. And for a moment my heart clenched, because it struck me that the bloody murder scene we’d witnessed may not have looked all that different from the scene young Huck had been a part of when his parents died in that streetcar accident. I worried it stirred up traumatic memories for him—just for moment. Then his jaw turned steely, and I realized I was probably just being overly sensitive, b
ecause clearly he was fine.

  That’s what I got for caring.

  I made a shooing gesture. “Go on, then, leave. I really don’t care. Enjoy the Orient Express while I’m off doing what needs to be done. But know this, Huxley Gallagher,” I said, pointing at his chest. “I’ll never forgive you for deserting me again. Not as long as I live. So if you walk out now, I never want to see your damned eyes in front of my face!”

  He swatted my finger away, scowling down at me. “Do you think that little of me? Do you?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore. I thought I knew, but I’ve been lied to so many times, I just . . .” Unable to finish, I fought back a sudden swell of tears, angry at Huck. At my father. And at myself for caring about either one of them.

  “Look at me, banshee,” Huck said, bending down until his face was in front of mine. “You aren’t the only person worried about Fox, you know. He may not be my father, but he did help raise me. If I were the one who’d disappeared, he’d come looking for me. So shut the hell up about it. I’m not deserting you in the middle of Romania. I’m supposed to be keeping you safe.”

  “Only because Richard Damn Fox told you to,” I said. “Clearly you care more about him than you ever did about me—which I was too blind to see at the time. Thank the gods he caught us together, because it saved me from more heartbreak.”

  Something like fire caught behind his eyes. “C’mere to me,” he said as he reached forward with both hands and firmly held my face. He spoke in a low, tense voice, nose almost touching mine. “You don’t think I’ve suffered?”

  “Not like I did.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You left me!” I cried, angry and hurt and feeling as if he’d stripped away my armor.