by Jenn Bennett
“And it nearly killed me!”
“Good!” I shouted. “Because it did kill me.”
His fingers trembled around my face. “Losing you shattered me into a thousand pieces. Ever since, I’ve walked around with this misery inside me, trying my damnedest to keep this tiny spark of hope alive that Fox would let me come back—that your heart hadn’t grown cold. That you hadn’t moved on to someone else and forgotten me. That all of it wasn’t for naught, because if it was? Christ, banshee. I didn’t know what I’d do. So there. Are you happy now? Are you happy to know that I wanted to die without you? Are you?”
Seismic waves vibrated inside me and shook silent tears from my eyes. They streamed down my cheeks before I could stop them or fully come to grips with what he’d said. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t moved on to someone else, that I couldn’t, maybe not ever. That this battered, broken heart of mine wanted him still, even now.
But the words were trapped in my throat.
“Ah, hell and fire,” he mumbled as his thumbs swept over my cheeks, wiping tears away as his own eyes became wet and glossy. “Please don’t cry, banshee. You know I can’t handle it when you cry. Then I want to cry, and it ruins my tough-guy reputation, and none of us want that, do we?”
“Maybe,” I choked out, laughing a little, because if I laughed, then I wouldn’t cry, and if I didn’t cry, then I could regain some semblance of control over my wild emotions and attempt to figure out what all of this meant.
“I shouldn’t have said any of that,” Huck said in a softer voice, fingertips brushing hair away from my face. “It’s not fair. Not right now when there are other things to work out. Sarkany and that damned dog. Your father . . .” He paused and said, “And maybe none of it matters. I don’t even know if he’ll let me come home yet.”
“Of course he will,” I said.
“He hasn’t decided. And that could mean that when this is all over, I go back to Belfast. I don’t even know when I’d see you again. If.”
If? That was impossible. Father wouldn’t do that.
Would he?
“He told me . . . ,” Huck started, hesitating. “Fox said if he ever allowed me back home, it would be strictly as a member of the family. Not as his ‘daughter’s paramour.’ ”
“Oh,” I said, both insulted and embarrassed. “I see.”
I gently pushed Huck’s hands away and wiped beneath my eyes with the side of my hand. He stepped into the bathroom and returned with a wad of toilet paper. I thanked him with a nod, blew my nose, and tried to gather my thoughts. Tried desperately to summon my armor back and stop shaking like a frightened Chihuahua caught in the rain.
“Banshee?”
I looked up at him. His face was a collection of sharp lines and deep hollows, and I couldn’t decide if he was trying to tell me something or ask me a question.
“Never mind,” he mumbled, shaking his head, and the mask slipped back on. Nothing was wrong at all. Nothing to see here. A quick tilt of his mouth that didn’t quite make a smile. “Let’s draw a line under this conversation for now,” he suggested. “At least until we figure out what to do about Fox, yeah?”
Was that what I wanted? To leave this gaping emotional wound open and undressed when it likely needed stitches? Everything felt raw and confusing between us again, and that wasn’t what I’d imagined it would feel like. Because I had imagined it, a thousand times in a thousand different ways—Huck telling me that what I felt for him wasn’t one-sided or temporary. I fantasized about him showing up at Foxwood after piloting a plane over the Atlantic, telling me that he couldn’t bear to stay away any longer. Or finding out that he’d gotten conked on the head and had amnesia this entire time, and that he’d woken up in a hospital whispering my name.
However I imagined it, though, I always pictured myself falling into his arms and him kissing the daylights out of me and both of us blissfully happy forever and ever more, amen. I didn’t picture myself hurting and hollow. Or feeling bewildered. Or still unsure about where we stood. Wondering whether, if I freely opened myself up to all the wild feelings I used to feel for him, my father would snatch him away from me a second time.
“You’re right,” I told him, my voice still a little rough. “We need to focus on finding Father right now. That’s what’s important.”
“Yes, that’s what’s important.” He nodded firmly, hands thrust in his pockets, jingling loose change. “So then . . . just how do you propose we do that?”
12
HOW TO FIND MY FATHER in Romania. Right. That.
To figure that out, I needed my brain. And to access my brain, I needed to stop thinking about everything Huck had just told me. So I shoved all my erratic emotions into a box, nailed the lid down, and buried it deep and dark. Then I focused on finding a solution to the problem of pinpointing Richard Damn Fox’s whereabouts.
The only way I knew to accomplish this monumental task was to do what I’d already suggested to Huck and continue what we’d started. The widow, the hermit, and the twins . . . Retrace Father’s summer trip through Romania to find Vlad Dracula’s ring—and pray to God that was what he was currently doing.
The widow was a dead end. Next on Father’s list was the hermit. I figured I’d look through the journal until I found a clue to the hermit’s identity. The only entry I could recall offhand that even remotely suggested a hermit-type person was one in which Father mentioned visiting someone who lived in a colorful cottage outside Bucharest. But I’d need to decipher the name, because if I remembered correctly, part of that entry was written in cipher.
Sitting against the headboard of my hotel bed, I began half-heartedly flipping through the journal’s pages, but it was well past midnight and I already had a headache from working with the journal for hours this afternoon. Maybe also from all the crying, but I was trying not to think about that.
After a few minutes I found myself staring blankly at the pages, unable to even summon the will to read them. I suppose Huck saw this, because he quietly tugged the journal out of my hands, closed it, and said, “We’ll do it tomorrow, yeah? We’re cold and tired, and neither of us has slept well in . . . well, days, really.”
“I am tired,” I admitted.
“Let’s just call it quits and try tomorrow. Things will seem easier in the morning.”
He was right, and I knew it. So I packed away the journal, stopped thinking, and fell into my bed like a body into a grave. I wasn’t sure how long I dozed, but I didn’t stay asleep. I woke suddenly and harshly, blinking into darkness.
Someone was shaking my shoulders.
“Theo!” Huck whispered. His distinctive silhouette blocked the moonlight streaming in from the balcony doors. “For the love of the saints, wake up!”
I started to answer, mildly panicked, but he clamped a hand over my mouth.
All right. Now I was absolutely panicked.
“They found us,” he whispered. “A porter just knocked on our door to warn me that two men in black robes are asking for our room number downstairs. They know we’re here.”
Images of the men who had broken into my hotel room in Istanbul filled my head. I pried his fingers off my mouth and sat up. How had I not heard a knock on the door? And how had these men followed us? Was Sarkany here too?
“Get up, now!” Huck was in his underwear, struggling to get a leg into his trousers, hopping on one foot. “We need to leave. Hurry!”
Body on autopilot, I threw off the sheets and quickly dressed, uncaring about impropriety. We both tossed our possessions into our bags, struggling in the dark, and met at the door. Huck listened, ear against the wood, and then cautiously opened it to peer outside.
“Clear,” he whispered, motioning for me to follow. I closed the door behind me, squinting into the hallway light. Huck headed toward the service stairwell with access to the roof—one that we’d seen porters slipping past during cigarette breaks. But when Huck tried the handle, it wouldn’t budge.
Locked.<
br />
He uttered a string of profanities as we changed course and jogged toward the main corridor. We had two options: the guest stairwell or a single, small elevator behind an ornate metal door. I stood on tiptoes to peer through a diamond-shaped window into the black of an empty elevator shaft and moving cables. “The lift is coming up,” I told Huck.
“Might be them. Can’t chance it. Come on!”
We sprinted to the stairwell and raced down several flights, my short legs struggling to keep up with Huck’s generous strides. Why oh why were we unlucky enough to be booked into a room on the highest floor? When we circled around the second-floor landing, Huck peered over the railing and stopped short. I slammed into his back. A shout from below echoed around the walls, and that’s when I saw them: the two black-robed men from Istanbul.
And they saw us, too.
Huck shoved me back up the way we’d come. I raced up a flight of stairs, lurched through the third-floor door, and ran down the corridor. A finely dressed couple was headed toward their room, and I nearly bowled over the woman as I sailed past. Her partner said something nasty in Romanian to my back, but I didn’t turn around. I just made a beeline toward the elevator and pressed both the up and down buttons repeatedly.
“C’mon, c’mon!” Huck whispered.
Our pursuers burst onto our floor right as the elevator dinged.
Huck rattled the elevator handle until it opened to reveal a wide-eyed lift operator behind a scissor gate. No time for niceties. I pulled open the gate myself, and we stumbled onto the lift—an old, rickety box barely big enough for the three of us. While Huck closed the scissor gate, I shouted, “Lobby!” at the operator, a pasty-faced boy no older than me. Thankfully, he reacted quickly and threw the crank into the down position. The elevator groaned in protest. Then it began descending.
I fell against the elevator’s wall, head sagging in relief.
“Is everything okay?” the elevator attendant asked in halting English.
“No,” Huck said. “Bad men are chasing us. Can you let us out at the lobby and go find help?”
He agreed, though I wasn’t sure he completely understood. And either he was new at the job or as nervous as we were, because when he pulled the lever to stop the lift, he missed lining up the elevator with the lobby floor by several inches. Huck didn’t care. He yanked the scissor gate open and half shoved, half lifted me over the mismatched floors, then scrambled behind me into the lobby.
I frantically glanced around the large, domed space. Where was everybody? Our helpful friend Andrei was gone for the night, and in his stead was a boy I didn’t know, bent over the registration desk with his head on an arm. The guard sitting on a stool by the hotel entrance was asleep too. The elevator attendant shouted at the boy behind the registration desk. He didn’t move. For the love of Pete, was he drunk?
Or drugged.
My blood ran cold.
I didn’t think the employees were dead.
But I wasn’t sticking around to investigate.
“Hide!” Huck warned the elevator operator as he grabbed my hand. Then we both sprinted across the lobby together.
At first we headed for the entrance. But the idea of racing down the well-lit boulevard—where we could easily be spotted by the men chasing us—made me nervous. “This way!” I told Huck, and we turned into the nearby corridor that housed the hotel’s amenities.
We jogged past a pair of late-night lovers locked in an embrace and a restaurant that was turning up chairs onto tables for the night. The only establishment that was still open was a brewhouse, and the sharp scent of beer and cigarette smoke wafted as a man stumbled out of its door. Men in tuxedoes were drinking and laughing at the bar, and someone was singing a folk song at the top of their lungs.
Behind us, a stampede of footfalls raced through the lobby. The robed men were catching up.
We picked up speed and raced past a gated cinema lobby with a single ticket window, a self-serve popcorn vending machine, and double doors leading into the theater—locked for the night. The only person here was a befuddled old man, sweeping up.
Huck tugged me forward, toward a door on the other side of the cinema. The knob turned, and he swung the door open.
For one terrible second I thought it was a broom closet. But no, it was a dim stairwell. The service stairwell—the one that was locked on our floor. We quickly ducked inside and found two choices before us: the first was a windowed door to our right that led down a dark corridor, perhaps to the hotel kitchen or laundry, but we’d never know, because it was locked.
That left the second choice: the stairwell.
“Up!” Huck said, and we took the dimly lit stairs two at a time, jogging around the landing. The floor numbers were crudely marked in paint on the concrete walls—2, 3, 4 . . . My calves burned, and I couldn’t get enough breath into my lungs. I mentally cursed both gravity and my own lack of athleticism as I stumbled up flight after flight of stairs, too afraid to look back when I heard a door slam somewhere below us.
Huck raced up the final flight of stairs to the door at the top. He pushed it open, and we rushed out onto—
The hotel’s roof.
Fresh air! Night air. Cold air. It needled my struggling lungs as I inhaled the chemical scent of pitch and smoke rising from chimneys.
We were six stories above midnight streets, and the rooftops of Bucharest stretched as far as I could see in the darkness. Cars streamed down the boulevard, and an ambulance’s siren wailed in the distance. For the briefest of moments it all felt like freedom.
Until I realized there was no place left to run.
“Shut it!” Huck said. “Shut the rooftop door.”
Next to my feet, a large cement block looked as if it was there to serve as a doorstop. “What if it locks?” I asked, frantic.
“I hope it damn well does!” He shouldered past me and slammed the metal door until it clicked into place, testing it for good measure.
Locked out. Them. And us.
Do not panic. Steel spine, chin high. You are not a coward.
I surveyed the roof. Cigarette butts, glass soda bottles, and a dead pigeon littered the area near the roof-access door. At the other end of the building sat the hotel’s glass dome, shining light over the roof, but there was no viable path to get to it. The building was shaped like an L that cradled a courtyard in the back, and the only thing to do was to head there, so we stepped over broken tile and telephone wires, threading our way across the rooftop.
“Look!” I said when we got to the end. “There’s a drop-down ladder. I think it leads to the hotel courtyard.”
We glanced over the parapet. A secondary roof blocked our view of the ground; the ladder looked as if it stopped at a narrow ledge extending around the building, two floors down.
“We may be able to reach room windows from there,” I said as a chilly night wind whipped my hair into my eyes. “Surely someone will let us inside.” And if not, we could break a window. I was desperate, but when a wave of dizziness rolled over me, I was not entirely convinced that I didn’t have a yet-unrealized fear of heights. I couldn’t remember ever being this high up.
A noise sounded from across the rooftop. The roof-access door. Someone was pounding on it.
“Damn it all to hell!” Huck whispered.
“How did they find us here?” I asked, feeling mildly hysterical as another wave of dizziness hit me. “This is impossible!”
“They’ve tracked us somehow. Maybe that hellish wolf dog caught our scent at the murder scene in front of Natasha Anca’s house.”
“Through a taxicab? Miles and miles through a big city?”
“I don’t know! Jesus and Mary, banshee . . .”
“Oh!” I said, holding out my hands. “Oh!”
“What? What?!”
I patted my coat pockets. “You’re going to think I’m mad.”
“Already do. Tell me!”
“That banknote . . .” I quickly pulled my handbag from th
e top of my satchel and thumbed through it as I talked. “Sarkany handed me an old Turkish banknote in the hotel lobby in Istanbul. Remember, I told you? He said I dropped it, but I didn’t, and oh God—where did I put it? I went to my room, and you were there, and I got all discombobulated, and it’s not here!”
Huck’s eyes flicked toward my satchel. “Was that in the hotel room in Istanbul?”
“Uh, yes, but—”
Before I could protest, he snatched it from me, turned it upside down, and shook half the contents onto the roof. Deft fingers sorted through my silk underclothes and stockings. “Think, banshee. What did you do with it when—”
Huck stopped, midsentence, and pulled out a scrap of paper: the banknote! He unfolded the wrinkled paper, flipped it over, and held it up to the moonlight. And I knew immediately that my hunch was right:
A design had been inked onto the back.
Not a design. An ominous-looking occult sigil.
“I’ve seen this!” I whispered. “In the Hammer of the Witches.”
“What the hell . . . ?” When Huck tilted the banknote, a spiderweb made of dusty light blossomed over the paper and shot across the roof toward the door.
We both yelped. Huck dropped the banknote.
Not an illusion. Very much real.
“What is this hellish wickedness?” Huck said, thoroughly alarmed.
“A spell,” I said, astounded. “Some kind of tracking spell.”
“This is . . .”
“Magic. Witchcraft. Spellwork.” Right in front of our eyes! After everything esoteric I’d read, after all the research I’d done . . . Here was the proof that it existed. Maybe not tangible proof, but I knew what I saw.
“It’s a trick of light—stage magic,” Huck insisted.
I shook my head. “Sarkany isn’t Harry Houdini. He’s an occultist. And he’s been tracking us since Istanbul. The train, and . . .” My wolf dream in the vardo wagon. Had Sarkany and his hound been outside, stalking us while we slept? A terrible chill went through me.
“Do you believe it?” I asked.
