by Jenn Bennett
But it was. Very real. Did I still have family here? I didn’t even know where her old family home was, and that made me angry at my father for failing to share any of this with me—for everything. All of this was his fault, and I couldn’t even yell at him for it. All I could do was shadowbox a stuffed dummy that looked like him in my mind.
Sleep deprived and road weary, Huck and I exited our bus at a terminal across from the central train station and stopped at a posted tourist board to get our bearings. It had a helpful map and information in English, German, Hungarian, and Romanian.
“Oh, look,” Huck said, reading a factoid. “Local legend not only claims that the Pied Piper of Hamelin reemerged here after luring away children from Lower Saxony, but also that Vlad the Impaler’s army captured a nearby castle for a year when he was quarreling with local merchants. Maybe that’s where you get your temper from, banshee.”
“Thanks for that. Lovely to be reminded that I’m descended from a monster who murdered thousands of people.”
“Everyone’s family has some bad nuts,” Huck said.
“Oh, really? Do you have a famously cruel warlord in yours?”
“I had a great-uncle who shot his wife and died in prison. That’s close, yeah?”
I snorted. “Exactly the same.”
He knocked his shoulder against mine as if to say “it’s not so bad,” but we both knew that wasn’t true. And after staring at the information board like lost puppies, both of us deep in our thoughts, he sighed heavily and said, “Well, I suppose we’re here for a reason.”
“Suppose we are,” I said gloomily. “Or we’re the biggest chumps in the world on a wild-goose chase.”
“Take heart, banshee. Fortune favors the chump. We just have to be patient.”
“Bear and four bears?”
“Think we’re facing about ten bears at this point, sadly.”
But only one I cared about, and that was my father. Now that we were here, standing in the middle of this fairy-tale town, I felt the thousand and one reasons I had to be angry at him fall to the wayside, and taking their place were the thousand and one reasons I had to worry about his current safety. I mean, sure, I wanted to kill him. I just didn’t want anyone else to do it.
My relationship with my father had always been complicated. Guess a whirlwind trip through Romania hadn’t changed that.
“We’ll find him,” Huck said softly, giving me a supportive smile.
I nodded, a little embarrassed that he’d read my thoughts so easily.
Huck looked around the snowy streets, rubbing his hands together rapidly to stave off the cold. “Where should we go? Sun will be setting soon.”
“I think we need to figure out where the Zissu brothers’ shop is and try to make it there before it closes. I have their business card, but it doesn’t have an exact address. Maybe we can find it on a public map?”
“Or we could ask someone?” Huck suggested.
“Maybe there?” I pointed a gloved finger toward a charming-looking building across the street from our train station. A sign outside read: CENTRUL DE INFORMARE TURISTICĂ.
“Looks promising,” he agreed. “Let’s hurry.”
After making our way across the wintry street, we were greeted enthusiastically by a cheerful man behind a tiny information window. He was initially confused by the Zissu business card and insisted it wasn’t listed in the well-worn telephone book on his desk, turning it around so that we could see. No Zissu. No shop. How could that be? But after he made a trip to find someone else in the center, he returned and said, “My manager knows of one antiques shop that may go by this name. It is near an old coffeehouse on a street called Porta Schei. Not far from here.”
That was something, I supposed. Feeling hopeful, we exited the welcome center and followed the man’s directions to a destination a few blocks away in the old part of town, where narrow streets connected to a bustling, open piața, Council Square. There, tourists were snapping photographs of horse-pulled carts and a stately European fountain. We headed past them toward a grand, cross-topped cathedral that towered over one corner of the town square: the Black Church, the largest Gothic cathedral between Istanbul and Vienna. I remembered my mother telling me about it. It garnered its name after a seventeenth-century siege, when an enormous fire blackened its walls.
I craned my neck and stared up at the church in awe. Would have been better if my mother were here to share the moment. I slipped fingers inside my coat and curled them around my Byzantine coin necklace. I made it here, I told her inside my head, and it gave me a little peace in a day filled with tumult.
Beyond the imposing church, we found a narrow, one-way stradă where the crowds dwindled. Renaissance-style corniced buildings bordered the street for several blocks, their facades crumbling and cracking. In one of these, near a sad, dark coffeehouse, Huck spied an old shopfront. Hanging in a lone window was a glazed blue palm that I recognized immediately: a hamsa talisman, to ward away evil. The sign above the window plainly said:
ZISSU BROTHERS
RARE JEWELRY AND ANTIQUES
“Appears to be the place,” I said as I peered through the window. “Looks empty. Maybe they’re about to close.” A little tremor skittered down the back of my neck, and I wasn’t sure if it was excitement or apprehension.
Had Father come here? Inside, I could find everything I wanted, or it could be another dead end.
Steel spine, chin up.
Huck sniffled and rubbed his nose, looking a bit apprehensive himself. “Don’t get your expectations too high,” he told me. “Fox isn’t going to miraculously be inside here.”
“No worries there,” I said, pushing open the shop’s wooden door. “I’ve never once associated Richard Damn Fox with a miracle.”
A bell above the door tinkled as we entered the small shop. Old floorboards creaked and groaned under our feet. Huck was right, of course: Father wasn’t here. No one was. Were the owners even here? We made our way past walls lined with old oil paintings in elaborate frames. Low shelves and display cases held anything and everything—antique clocks, ivory brushes, candlesticks. Beautiful old globes. Even a golden harp in the corner. But as I took in the potpourri of antiques, I realized something: I couldn’t “hear” anything. No heartbeats. No weird buzzing. No nausea. Nothing I’d felt in the Sighișoara museum around the bone band in the glass case. Did that mean that the third bone band wasn’t here?
I couldn’t decide if that was a good or a bad thing.
Honestly, after everything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours, I wasn’t entirely convinced I hadn’t imagined some of it.
In my Batterman’s Field Guide, Dr. Lydia Batterman wrote an entire foreword titled “Believing in the Unbelievable.” She said that sometimes, when things are too hard to comprehend, the mind makes excuses for them. Tries to match them up with logical reasons even when they don’t quite fit—that wasn’t a ghost; it was the wind rustling the curtain. A trick of light. The house settling.
And at that moment my father’s skeptical gene reared its head, and I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t “heard” the bone band. I was only exhausted. It was the cold weather clogging up my ears. I’d eaten bad food. For that matter, maybe Dr. Mitu had been wrong about his research. My mother would have known she was related to Vlad Dracula.
Right?
Dust motes danced in a sloping column of afternoon light that slanted through the front window, casting the hamsa talisman onto the floor. My eyes flicked first to the shadow and then to the back wall of the shop toward a wooden counter. Standing behind it were two rail-thin elderly white-haired gentlemen wearing identical red bow ties. Identical heavy, broomlike mustaches covering their upper lips. Identical bushy brows and curious eyes twinkling behind round, tortoiseshell eyeglass frames.
Twins. Most definitely twins. The only way to tell them apart was that one wore a suit jacket and the other stood in his suspenders and white shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled up to his
elbows as he held an old quill over a ledger.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” I said in Romanian.
“Good afternoon,” the man on the right said.
“Lovely day,” his twin with the quill said.
“Do you speak English, perhaps?”
“But of course,” the first man said, switching languages with ease. “You are American, yes?”
“American,” I confirmed.
Huck removed his flat cap. “We’re looking for Mr. Zissu?”
“You found him,” they answered in chorus, both smiling.
“I’m Mihai,” the man on the right said with a crisp cant of his head, “and this is my brother, Petar.”
Petar gestured with the feather on his quill. “May we help you find something?”
“I certainly hope so,” I said. “Miss Theodora Fox and Mr. Huxley Gallagher. We’re looking for my father, Mr. Richard Fox. I’m hoping he may have come here to see you?”
Mihai said, “We know of him, domnişoară.”
“American treasure hunter,” Petar said. “It’s possible our paths have crossed, though not directly. We travel frequently. Sometimes we are interested in the same objects. Sometimes we hear gossip about places he’s been or things he’s found. . . .”
The twins gave each other a look that I couldn’t quite interpret.
“You haven’t seen him today?” I asked. “Or yesterday?”
They blinked in unison. “No,” Mihai said. “He has never set foot in our shop.”
But the business card . . . and the cipher. He said plain as day in the journal that he needed to retrace his steps from this summer’s trip to Romania. Had he intended to come here but never made it? Had I missed something?
My gut twisted as a heavy hopelessness settled over me. I was so sure he’d come here. Where else could he have gone? Had he given up on the ring and gone to Paris? Back to New York? Was he dead in a ditch? WAS HE? I shared a worried look with Huck.
“Do not be sad,” Mihai said, giving me a kind smile. “We may still be able to help you. We’ve heard rumors about what Mr. Fox is seeking.”
His brother leaned against the edge of the counter. “He isn’t discreet. And neither is his employer.”
I stilled. Steady, I told myself.
“Do not look so surprised,” Petar said. “We know of Mr. Rothwild.”
“You . . . do?”
“Though he has never set foot in our shops, either,” he added, gesturing with his quill toward the walls.
“Can’t enter what you can’t find,” Mihai said, and the brothers snickered together with dark delight.
I sneaked a glance at Huck’s leery face. Oh, he was definitely regretting coming here. Should we be backing out of this shop? My gut was useless. I had no instincts about these strange brothers. I felt as if everything I’d learned in Father’s journal was just torn into a thousand pieces and thrown into the air.
Petar smoothed out his thick mustache with two fingers, taming both his bushy hair and his smile. “But you found us, didn’t you? Which was no surprise. We had a hunch you would.”
“You . . . did?” I said, feeling as if the walls were closing in. Like I was the victim of some massive inside joke and the world was laughing at me.
“In a way,” Mihai said, excitement dancing behind his eyes, “we’ve been waiting for you to find us.”
20
A DISTRUSTFUL NOISE BURRED FROM HUCK’S throat. His hand gripped my elbow and tugged urgently. He wanted to leave, but I couldn’t just walk out. Not now.
“You’ve been . . . waiting for me?” I finally managed to say. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Your father searches for the bone ring, yes?” Mihai said. “He mistakenly thought his employer’s ring was a reproduction and that we were in possession of something that was more authentic.”
Silence filled the small shop. I didn’t know how I should respond, whether I could trust them or whether to run far, far away. But they already seemed to know this much, and I needed information. Since when was I scared of two skinny old men? Steel spine.
“Yes?” I said, and then more firmly, “Yes. That’s right. But if he thought you had what he was looking for, why didn’t he come here?”
“It would have been a waste of time for him to visit us,” Mihai explained. “We would not have given him our ring anyway.”
Huck made a choking sound. “You . . . have one of the bone bands?”
“Oh, yes,” Petar said. “We acquired it twenty years ago in an estate sale near Sibiu.”
“A few have coming looking for it,” Mihai said with a small smile. “Recently, they have mostly been associates of your father’s employer.”
“Do not worry. They cannot enter our shop. We’re protected.” Petar gestured behind me to the window, and for the first time I realized there was more than the hamsa talisman there: scrawled Hebrew and esoteric symbols of the kabbalah were painted around the window’s glass.
Spells. Magical wards.
This was no antiques shop. And the twins were not simple merchants.
I had the sinking feeling that they were like Lovena. Witches. Wonderworkers. Magicians . . . or at the very least, knowledgeable about such things. My head swam with disjointed thoughts; goose bumps raced over my arms.
“Maybe that’s why Mr. Rothwild hired your father,” Petar said. “He and his people wrongly thought they could trick their way in here.”
Mihai chuckled. “They cannot.”
“His people . . . Rothwild’s associates, you mean?” Huck asked.
“Societas Draconistarum,” Mihai said, spreading his arms.
“The Order of the Dragon,” I murmured.
“Indeed.” Petar thrust the inky tip of his quill into a brass stand on the counter as he elaborated. “Order of the Dragon, founded in 1408 by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund as a secret society. Kings, popes, politicians, noblemen graced its membership. It is said that the order dissolved and disappeared from history because its highest-ranking members were secret occultists.”
Mihai added, “It was Sigi’s wife, Barbara of Cilli, who was said to be the original occultist. She was accused of alchemy, witchcraft, and immoral behavior by the courts. They called her the Black Queen, and she would have likely been burned at the stake had she not been taken by the plague. Some say her ghost still haunts the Yugoslavian city of Zagreb.”
His twin leaned over his ledger. “Some also say she had a macabre ring made to aid the order in their fight against the Ottoman Empire. They needed a secret weapon to keep the Turks from advancing across the continent. The Turks were rich and powerful, and very smart. The Holy Roman Empire needed something big to push their borders back.”
“And what is bigger than a dragon?” Mihai said, eyes shining with excitement. “But they would settle for the might of a dragon tethered inside a human body.”
Hot and cold chills raced over my body. My mind flicked back to the traders’ camp and Valentin’s stories of the Dacian great white wolf: a man’s soul inhabiting the body of a legendary beast.
But this was inverted. A mythical beast inside a human body.
Petar held up one finger. “However, in order to achieve this miraculous weapon of war, the Black Queen fashioned a ring from the femur bones of Turkish sorcerers. And she forged this ring in the blood of a Wallachian ruler named Vlad Dracul, whom we would know as the father of Vlad the Impaler. But the older Vlad would not wear it. He was a bit afraid of the Black Queen and feared the ring was cursed.”
“Rightly so,” Huck mumbled, still gripping my elbow.
“So he instead secretly gave it to his son,” Petar said.
Mihai smiled devilishly. “A bit like a king asking his right-hand man to taste his soup in case it’s poisoned. He wasn’t a very good father.”
“Let me show you.” Mihai retreated to a tall, overflowing bookcase behind the counter. When he returned, it was with a clothbound book that I knew all too well.<
br />
“Batterman’s,” I said, heart racing wildly.
“You know it?” Mihai asked, cracking it open.
“I have a copy in my bag.”
He looked pleased. “It is an excellent reference. We have contributed many photographs to the last edition. Dr. Lydia Batterman is a personal acquaintance.”
Had I been wary and mildly frightened by these two odd brothers? No more. I was in their thrall now and shook away Huck’s hand from my elbow to inspect their copy of my favorite field guide.
Dozens of pages in the book were marked with tiny pieces of blue paper. Mihai bent low, grunting, until he found the right marker and flipped to a page. “Here,” he said, turning it around to give Huck and me a better view. He pointed at the middle of the page. “Perhaps you have seen this already.”
Pfft. Perhaps it was the wrong time to brag that I’d committed entire sections of the book to memory. I glanced to the open page, expecting to see the familiar woodcut of Prince Dracula enjoying a quiet lunch in front of his impaled corpses. But Petar had the field guide open to a different section in the book, two hundred years after Vlad. His finger tapped above an engraving of an infamous French woman: Catherine Monvoisin.
“More widely known simply as La Voisin,” Mihai said. “She was a fortune-teller, a sorceress, and a poisoner for hire who confessed to the ritual murder of a thousand infants in black masses. That was before she tried to poison Louis XIV and was burned at the stake for her crimes in 1680. But look closely at her carved ivory ring in this rare engraving.”
He offered me a magnifying glass. I held it above the engraving and saw clearly:
Three bands woven together to form one ring.
