Until three barefoot kids stood hand-in-hand in front of the dark window, gazing raptly. Misha faltered. He glanced up, almost eye to eye with a shaggy-haired boy in a ragged, homespun tunic, then he played on.
I could see Misha through all three.
I sat upright and peered around the pilaster. Sure enough, Misha was playing alone. Yet I would swear he’d seen those ghosts.
I turned back to the mirror, and there they were, reflected in the window glass, through Misha.
They were so still that at first I thought the blurring of their outlines no more than the ghostly vapor that Tania had talked about, until I noticed how very shaggy the blond boy was. His hair had thickened to a wild ruff, his hairline arcing down to his nose. His lengthening nose. The backs of his hands ruffled up into fur, and when I glanced back to his face, a jolt ran along my nerves when I saw a wolf’s head atop his sloping shoulders.
The boy turned my way, his chatoyant eyes glowing a feral red as he gazed straight at me in the mirror. To his side the smaller boy and the girl had also changed, one into a lynx and the other into a Shepherd dog.
Both looked my way. As the song trilled toward its ending the three gave powerful leaps and bounds directly through the wall to the south, and vanished.
Misha finished, glanced thoughtfully at the wall, then shook his instrument as the listeners clapped and hailed him.
Did anyone see that? I took a look, but no one seemed alarmed, surprised, upset. Misha was alone in the center of the room. I did not want to call attention to myself any more than I wanted to interrupt him, so I counseled myself in patience as he performed an arrangement by Debussy that shot me right back to my childhood, dancing as my grandmother played piano. But the memory visit was brief, because my mind was caught in the now. I watched carefully, but the ghosts did not reappear in window, mirror, or in the room.
When the song finished, once again everyone applauded, though there were fewer in the room. Misha began taking his instrument apart to put it away, and as the others got up to go, falling into conversation in a way that suggested that they were accustomed to these practices, I walked up to the boy.
“Did you like it, Mam’zelle?” he asked.
I gave him the compliments he deserved—though it was a struggle to find superlatives powerful enough—then I stepped a little closer and said in a low voice, “Those ghosts. You see them, right?”
“Fyadar?” he asked, and my nerves fired.
“That’s Fyadar?” I exclaimed, biting down the I thought he was just a legend. My grandmother had told me stories about Fyadar and his child companions when I was small. In fact, it was those half-remembered stories that had prompted my quest to find her relatives, when she sank into the depression that nearly became a coma, the spring before.
And Theresa had shared the forbidden comic books that several generations of Dobreni kids had made during the long decades of occupation.
Fyadar was real?
Misha shrugged. “That’s what I call him, when he talks. They don’t always talk. But they like my music,” he said, flashing a grin. “They come most often when I am alone and play on the hillside near the arch.” He pointed. “But nobody believed me. You are the first grownup to see them.” He looked enquiringly at me.
“I saw them in the window glass, reflected by the mirror,” I said. “They turned into animals and went through the wall that way.”
He turned his head to glance at the south wall and gave a short nod. “Usually they go up into the mountain, and sometimes down toward the city. That was very strange.” He fought a yawn, his eyes tearing.
“We will be up early,” Tony said. “Time for everyone to get their rest. Thank you, Misha. As always, it was excellent.”
The boy grabbed up his battered case and scampered off, leaving Tony and me alone.
He stood in the doorway, his coat slung over his shoulder. His clothes were as rumpled as mine, his boots scuffed with a layer of mud on the uppers, his hair tousled, and golden whiskers glinted along his jaw line. “What did you see?”
“Ghost children. They turned into animals and ran south.”
“He’s talked about ghosts ever since he began using words. We thought he was . . .” Tony touched his head as I followed him down the hall to another stairway, this one leading up to the attic. “Sometimes that goes with talents like his.”
“He’s completely sane,” I said. “No, check that. He’s as sane as I am. However sane that might be.”
“No argument here. Not after the past few days,” Tony said as we reached the top of the attic stairs.
From the rumble of voices at the other end of the long hall, it was clear there was a dorm there, but we didn’t turn that way. A sharp right and Tony flicked on the light in a small room with a single window, a bed, and a trunk. It had its own bathroom.
Tony shut the door with a backward thrust, then slung the coat across the trunk. “I don’t like sleeping in the museum,” he said, turning his thumb below.
“This is your room,” I said.
“Yes.”
I looked from the coat on the trunk to the window, with the faint glimmer of lights far below in the valley, to the bed. The bed. Up at Tony.
“Do I go or stay?” he asked.
And there it was again, the tingle of attraction. It had gotten past my guard in the doorway of the music room without my notice, or I hadn’t wanted to notice, and here we were, and my heart thrummed.
The truth is, sexual attraction is about as solid as a bubble. Which is fine if it goes both ways, because two can live quite happily in that magic bubble. But thinking it’s love just because it’s strong, or you want it to be . . . well, I knew what love was. Even with my nerves responding to Tony’s lazy smile, his reflective gaze, my thoughts returned to Alec, and I could see him patrolling the city streets though he had to be exactly as tired as the rest of us. Guarding Dobrenica. Maybe thinking of me.
“Worried about your rep?” Tony held out his hands. “Everyone in the valley probably thinks we’re in the sack right now.”
“My rep that your family has already done its best to smear?” I retorted, turning back to him. “All I care about is my own self-respect. Because fun as it would probably be—you’re as good a kisser as you are a dancer—you don’t respect me any more than I respect you.”
“I’m beginning to. And I can’t believe you don’t respect me.”
“I respect your skills. But you? I don’t even know you, Duke Karl-Anton von Mecklundburg. I am beginning to wonder if anyone does. I’ve taken plenty of heat for my lies last summer, but I’ve been trying to make up for them. You? You seem to exist in a web of lies, half-truths, and misdirections. Like it’s all a game, and here you are, but I wonder if it’s not about me at all. Just some testosterone antler-dance game with Alec. No. That I can’t respect.”
Tony had made no step toward me, nor I toward him, but I couldn’t look away from those slanted black eyes.
And he knew it. “Deny you feel it.”
My mouth had gone dry. “Of course I feel it. And I’m not afraid, either, if that’s your next smart remark. I’m sure sex with you would be like a roller coaster without brakes, but like the roller coaster, it has to end, and it’s the messiness of the ending I want to avoid. That includes conversations with two people I do respect.”
He looked away, and it became easier to breathe. “Sociopaths among narcissists. That’s what . . . someone called me and my family recently. What a rep I’ve got,” he mourned.
“And you’ve earned every bit of it,” I stated, betting myself a couple million dollars and a castle or two that his “someone” was Beka. Then I looked at his face, the tell-tale flush, and made a discovery.
“It was!” I exclaimed. “It was Beka—and you care! I can insult you all day long (and I enjoy every second of it) but when she does, you care.” When he didn’t answer, I kicked the trunk. “Yet here you are, putting moves on me! Wow, that is so . . .” I whooshe
d out my breath while I tried to get my head around just how much I’d managed to miss. “Okay, I’ll let that drop. Except for just one thing, considering where we are standing right now, and that is, she totally has my sympathy.”
“Right, then.” Tony took a step toward me, but just to pick up his coat again. “We’ll take off at sunup.” A casual wave, and he was gone.
I collapsed on top of the bed—his bed—with all my clothes on, folded my arms across my chest, and waited for the nightmares.
THIRTY-SIX
TANIA HAD TOLD ME that Grandfather Armandros (and others) were always with me. “With” I had discovered, is a tricky word when it comes to ghosts. It’s not quite like they’d become detachable shadows, it’s more like there’s ease of access and difficulty of access.
This sank in the next day, when we set out just as the sun topped the northeast peak, spilling weak, milky light down into the valley, touching pale blue on the tiny rooftops of the city far below. It was too far to see how the city had fared during the long night. From a distance it looked peaceful, but that could be deceptive.
The sleigh riders were quiet, weapons ready as we set out.
Tony acted as if our last conversation had never happened, which was a good reality check for me—I was braced for rudeness, coldness, a second-verse-same-as-the-first, but zip. In fact, it was so zip, I strongly suspected that, far from smoldering over his rejection in proper Byronic form, he’d had plenty of offers of comfort or company. But then he’d never been much of a Byronic hero—or villain.
I heaved a private sigh of relief and got the prism out of my pocket. It was time to put my Special Snowflake power to work.
Sedania lay on the lower slope of the Dsaretsenberg, or the Dsaret Mountain. It was the biggest of all the Dobreni mountains. Not the highest—that was Riev Dhiavilyi, the Devil’s Mountain, on top of which Tony’s castle lay. The Dsaret mountain was more like a wrinkle in the land made up of three interlocking ridges, which I had learned were veined with mineral deposits.
And, if the ancient tapestry was right, somewhere in the middle of these three ridges lay a portal to a different dimension, or whatever the Nasdrafus was.
There was no question anymore about the existence of the Nasdrafus, at least in my mind. Those vampires had to come from somewhere. Even in the relative isolation of this part of Europe, if huge crowds of vampires had been thundering around making noises like snakes and bats, surely someone would have mentioned it on Facebook. Or, in Dobrenica, Madam Waleska’s sister would have broadcast it on her gossip network, which was just as fast as the Net.
Misha’s concert replayed in my mind as we swooped up ancient valleys, past stands of trees seldom seen by humans, past crags that at first glance looked like castle towers.
The prism lay cradled on my lap. Once I’d figured out how to think “Esplumoir” at Armandros, instead of trying to look for him, there he was, smoke rising and rising from the cigarette that would never burn down. He only appeared when I held the prism in a specific direction, and if I turned the prism a degree to the right or to the left, he vanished. But if I kept it steady, there he was, like an ectoplasmic homing beacon.
Twice Tony said, “Are you sure?” after I’d point and say, “That way.” We were heading into wild country, far from signs of settlement. “I’m sure,” I said.
After the third time, I held the prism out. Tony tried to look into it, but all he saw was his thumb on the other side. From then on, he took directions without question.
As we whooshed over the snow, I began to get a visceral understanding of the poem about Santa’s flying reindeer—we seemed to fly over those pure white slopes, which were only occasionally marked by animal footprints of various kinds.
The midday sun was sitting atop one of the northern mountains when Tony said, “We might be headed for one of the old mines.”
Though he’d warned me of the old political problems at dinner the previous night, I still hadn’t counted on another threat besides vampires. “Is that going to get us into trouble with the consortium people?”
“I don’t expect much trouble now. The mines mostly shut down over winter. It’s spring when things liven up.”
Nevertheless, he was watching in all directions, including the sky.
I was watching the sky myself. Everyone was. I discovered by listening to the sleigh riders that there was a Dobreni term for how the winter sun seemed to roll along the mountaintops from east to west. No need to talk about the danger of being caught outside when the sun finally sank beyond St. Xanpia’s Romanesque church up above Riev. Because the vampires had to know we were searching for the portal.
Then there the more normal dangers. Twice Tony’s head turned sharply. I spotted the twin tracks of snow vehicles, blurred from a light snowfall. At one point he waved his fist in a circle and pointed at a forest road with fresh tracks. One set of our wingmen peeled off and vanished as the rest of us raced down a gully near a huge waterfall so strong it hadn’t frozen, though there were blue-ice dragons teeth hanging dramatically down.
An hour or so later, Tony gave me a puzzled frown and said, “Are you sure that thing is still working?”
“No,” I said cordially. “But I haven’t lost Armandros, for whatever that is worth. Why?”
“It’s just that we’re running out of mountain. A tricky bit of country with some very deep gorges, then we’ll start up the hill to the Eyrie.” He glanced upward. “And nightfall comes fast up here.”
“All I can tell you is—whoa. Hold on.”
I lost my grandfather’s ghost. But when I twisted to one side, there he was again. “That way.”
“That’s some rough country. I wouldn’t put it past the old sod to be having us on.”
“That’s what I see.” My sense of conviction faded when I gazed downward into the shadowy ravine that lay between Mt. Dsaret and Devil’s Mountain.
Tony put up three fingers, and one of the sleds approached, the reindeer kicking up clods of mud and snow.
“Raise the villages on the Castle Road,” he ordered. “We’re not going to make it to the Eyrie by nightfall. We’ll need reinforcement.”
The lanky teenager riding shotgun waved his weapon as the driver—probably his dad—yanked their team in a ninety-degree turn, then raced along the road we’d been traveling until our turnoff into the valley. Tony motioned the next sled into its place, driven by a woman a few years older than me, the Magyar cast to her features handed down from plains riding ancestors a thousand years ago. Niklos’s sleigh brought up the rear.
Tony picked up the reins to our sleigh, and off we went again, single file now, into a dangerously steep and narrow valley overshadowed with thick, ancient spruce and fir.
Armandros remained a steady image in the prism. “I can’t promise anything,” I shouted, without lifting my gaze from the facet. “But I think we might be getting closer.”
That’s when a ghost wolf dashed across the snow in front of us, the flying feet making no mark in the snow.
Tony had slowed the reindeer, which involved bracing his feet and leaning back as he tugged. When their pace abated, he glanced around.
“Ah.” He pointed up at a sheltered little nook with wild roses growing all around in thorny frame. “Now I know where we are.”
I peered up at one of the shrines frequently found along roadways. It was mossy with age, crowned with snow. When I squinted, I barely made out the outline of a crowd of ghosts clustered around the shrine. Was that mail and armor glinting in the sun? Helms on heads? When I tried to bring them into focus, they vanished.
“The oldest couple of mines are along here,” Tony said, still with that slight frown as he scrutinized the smooth white slope, the silvery glistening firs, the tangle of brambles and old stone. “Abandoned for centuries.”
We moved forward again, at a slower pace, and passed a mine. The snow had obscured most of the road carved by years of heavy carts being hauled in and out. Only the too-regular c
ontours of the road indicated that humans had once worked there. Ghosts hovered around the entrance, vaporous as smoke, watching us. Or watching something, maybe eternity.
We passed the second mine a short time later.
Armandros led us steadily farther down the valley, which began to worry me. The shadows were much longer, and bluer.
I think everybody felt the same. The sleigh teams held their weapons ready as they watched warily in all directions.
Then Armandros winked out. I slewed wildly on my bench until I caught him again. “That way!” I pointed without looking up from the prism.
“Kim, we can’t go any farther.”
I lowered the prism. We’d come to rest on a cliff edge. Beyond was a sheer drop into steep mountain, fir-covered on three sides. I took in Tony’s odd frown, an expression I’d never seen before. “You don’t believe me.”
“We’ve come this far,” he said, and checked the chamber on his weapon. Again.
It was an uncertain gesture—the first I’d ever seen him make, and that opened up a new world of possibilities. “You don’t want to believe me. You don’t want to believe in the existence of Vrajhus,” I said slowly. “You can’t beat it in a fight. You can’t control it with half-lies and deception.”
“Do you really think this is the time to be discussing my shortcomings?” he retorted, his cheeks edged with color. He pointed the barrel of his weapon toward the sun for emphasis.
“No.” I turned my gaze back to the prism. And found our grandfather. “Up there. That cliff.”
“We’ll have to go on foot.”
I jumped out—and promptly landed up to my knees in snow. Tony pulled a sword from the rack beside the driver’s seat, carrying the rifle in one hand and the sword in the other.
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