WE EXITED THE MUSTARD-COLORED HOUSE, rattled and confused. Not knowing what to do or where to go. Ambulances were arriving, along with more uniformed poliţie reinforcements, their cars blocking many of the citadel’s narrow streets as they cleared tourists and gawkers. I questioned a stranger, who said that someone who’d been near the stage confirmed that the baroness had, indeed, survived the fall, but her condition was unknown.
The tragedy at the clock tower had been a cruel distraction. I didn’t know how, but I knew Sarkany was involved. He’d threatened the baroness, or drugged her, or compelled her with some kind of dark spellwork to jump. I believed that as much as I believed the earth was round.
Men who compete for power often succumb to violence to reach their goal.
Lovena. Had we brought this horror here to her family? Or were we just standing on the outside, unable to stop what was already in motion? With trembling fingers, I felt around my pocket for the witch’s travel talisman. Still there. If it indeed had offered us protection, I felt horrible that it hadn’t extended to Lovena’s poor sister. “This is horrific,” I told Huck. “What if Lovena’s sister doesn’t survive? Or what if she’s paralyzed? Oh God, Huck.”
“It’s terrible,” he agreed. “But this isn’t our fault.”
“Is it not?” I argued, feeling a sense of frenzy rising in my gut.
“No. I don’t think so? Jaysus, banshee, I don’t know!”
I exhaled and tried to breathe in slowly through my nostrils to calm myself. We’d witnessed something horrible. The bloody fall. The stolen ring. Chaos and confusion. I was still in a little shock. But I needed to get a grip on my emotions so that we could figure out what to do. While I was doing this, Huck realized something more immediately crucial. “They’ll think we did this,” he said, motioning toward the museum house. “They’ll think we took the ring.”
I glanced around, paranoid. “But it was already gone when we went inside. If Sarkany took it, someone had to have witnessed it.”
“Aye, but people panic and get confused, banshee,” he said. “We’re outsiders here. Easy targets. We already had to be escorted out of the house, and David will be looking to blame someone. If nothing else, we’ll be questioned by the police as suspects.”
“Dammit,” I mumbled, glancing around. My nerves were frayed. I still expected Sarkany to leap out of the shadows. But Huck was right. “We need to leave the town.”
“Agreed,” he said.
But where were we supposed to go? “Do we have enough money to take another train? We never got to talk with the baroness and find out where Father was going. . . .”
“We’ll figure something out,” he said, sounding surer than I felt. “All I know is that we can’t find Fox if we’re behind bars, and there’s nothing we can do for Lovena’s sister. We’ve got to leave, banshee.”
Part of me resisted, not wanting to feel like a criminal slipping away from the scene of the crime. But it wasn’t our crime, and what good did it do us to stick around and volunteer ourselves up as patsies?
I nodded at Huck, breath white in the cold night air. “Let’s go.”
We made our way across the square. It seemed best not to exit the citadel the way we came in, due to all the police, so we walked in the opposite direction, past drunken revelers and shopkeepers who gossiped together in doorways and beneath the festive white lights strung over the streets. Once we’d serpentined our way to the citadel’s walls and slipped out of an arched exit, I felt a little relieved.
And a little lost.
Huck spotted the river we’d crossed on our way from the train station. It wasn’t until we picked our way down a snowy hill and found a bridge to cross into the newer part of town that we slowed our manic pace, and I forced myself to think about what to do next.
Snow fell harder. After counting what little money Huck had in his pockets, we were positive we didn’t have enough for the train—or even a bus. Hotel? No. Meal? Everything here was closed anyway. The citadel was the heart of the town. This was borderland, something between civilization and countryside, and for the life of me, I didn’t know where to go. Huck didn’t either, if the permanent worry line in his forehead was any indication. But we kept walking. What else could we do?
Several minutes passed. We turned down a street and hiked alongside a paved stretch of highway that wound out of town. A few cars passed us, their headlights flashing in the dark. Huck stuck out his arm, attempting to hitch a ride, but no one stopped.
“These Sighișoarans are a tough bunch,” Huck said. “Am I that ugly?”
“Maybe you should show some leg.”
“If they hate my face, my hairy leg won’t help. I promise you that.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll just freeze to death soon. No big deal.”
Buildings were getting fewer and farther between along the road, and the snow wasn’t letting up. We found a lone apartment building and considered trying to hole up in the stairwell but couldn’t get past a barred gate. Had it been a lock, Huck could have picked it, but it looked like it could only be opened from the inside. I remembered my mother telling me that outside cities, Romanians lock up everything at night—farms, homes, barns. Night brought fear, fear brought superstition, and it was very, very dark in the outskirts of this Carpathian town.
“Looks like mountainous countryside out there,” Huck said, shielding his eyes to see past the last lamppost near the highway. “We’ll have to go back. At this point, I’d rather sleep in the clock tower. Maybe one of the churches or taverns will let us inside.”
“Or maybe we could hot-wire a car,” I suggested.
“Why, banshee, how dare you. I’m not a common criminal.”
I huffed out a shivering laugh. “You hot-wired that car in France two years ago.”
“French cars, sure,” he joked cheerfully as he shivered, hands thrust into his coat pockets. “Romanian cars are a whole other bucket o’ parts. Besides, you see any cars to hot-wire?”
Not in several minutes, I hadn’t. However, I did see something else. Something much better. Bigger, too.
“What about that?” I asked, pointing to a metal building at the end of a short dirt road that branched off the highway. It looked like a small warehouse with a covered shed extending off the back. Less a shed and more a hangar, for beneath its metal roof was the silhouette of a small airplane. And on the side of the building, a lone yellow light shone on a painted pair of words: POȘTA ROMÂNĂ.
“That’s a post office, yeah?” Huck said. “And their mail plane.”
“Airplanes don’t have locks, right?”
“You’re suggesting I steal government property?”
“Better than stealing a crop duster from a poor farmer. Besides, it’s not really stealing. It’s borrowing.”
“You sound just like bloody Fox,” he informed me, and then mimicked Father in a deep, booming voice: “ ‘Go on, pick the lock on that duke’s summer home, Huxley—dumb bastard doesn’t know Greeks from Romans, so we’re almost doing him a favor, taking this priceless statue off his hands.’ ”
I snorted a laugh, and Huck flashed merry eyes at me. Maybe the cold weather was making us both a little loopy. Or maybe I was trying to get over the shock of seeing someone plunge several stories from a clock tower. Or maybe, just maybe, hearing heartbeats while under the spell of a four-hundred-year-old ring had damaged something in my brain.
Take your pick.
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “We should borrow the plane and fly it to . . .”
“To . . . ?”
“You know,” I said, gesturing loosely. “Where my father went. To the twins. It’s next on his list.”
“We don’t even know for certain that these Zissu brothers are your father’s twins. Didn’t Lovena say they traveled around? Last she knew, they were somewhere near the Black Sea. They could be anywhere now.”
“There’s got to be a clue in the journal. I just missed it,” I insisted. “The hangar has light, so I can look it up there. When I find where they’re at, we can just fly there, find my father, then bring the plane back. Zip-zip.”
“Oh, really. That’s what we’ll do? That’s your plan?” he said, sounding both perturbed and a little amused.
I shrugged one shoulder. “Unless you don’t think you can fly a plane like that . . .”
“Pfft.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Not falling for that, am I?”
“Are you sure? That’s what a coward would probably say.”
“You forget, banshee. I have no male pride. Call me a coward. Call me soft. Bothers me not,” he said, shaking his head slowly.
“All right, then. What do you propose we do? If what David told us was true, then Father left here yesterday, which makes him a day ahead of us. We need to keep moving to catch up with him. And besides, Sarkany could be back in the citadel along with the police, who you said would question us, so we can’t go back there. And if we just sit here arguing, we’ll likely die of frostbite.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Know all that, don’t I? But we can’t fly to nowhere.”
“It’s not nowhere. It’s . . . somewhere in Romania,” I said dramatically, fanning my hand out over the landscape.
Huck laughed. We both knew this was ridiculous.
“Let’s just walk over to the hangar,” I urged. “Maybe there’s someone working inside the post office who can help us, or I can look at Father’s journal. At the very least, it’s shelter from the snow. One wall is better than none.”
With this logic Huck finally agreed, so we made our way down the dirt road. The brick building had no windows, only a locked door. When we knocked, no one answered, so we headed around back to the hangar. Not much to see there: some locked tool cabinets, a locked back door that led into the building, and an air-to-ground wireless stand—also locked.
The airplane, however, was not. Huck walked the length of it, inspecting the fuel tank, popping open panels and checking cables and mechanical systems. “Fueled up. Probably used regularly. Not the best I’ve seen by a long shot. Needs service badly. But seems airworthy for a short trip. Probably.”
“Marvelous!”
“No, not marvelous. I could lose my private pilot license back in the States—and completely ruin any chance of getting one in Belfast.”
“If we sit around here and do nothing, I could lose my father,” I countered.
“You act like I’m not concerned about that,” Huck said, irritated. “We’re both on the same side here.”
Point taken. Before we could get into another fight, I hauled my satchel to a workbench and flipped on a small overhead light there. Then I rooted through my clothes and books until I found the journal, laid it out on the workbench, and began scanning through it. “Twins, twins,” I mumbled, flipping through the thick pages.
“Maybe he doesn’t call them twins. Try looking for brothers. Or merchants.”
“Doing that already,” I said in a singsong voice.
“Or maybe it’s one of the coded words you haven’t deciphered yet.”
But it wasn’t. And after going through every page, there was nothing about any merchant twins to whom Father had talked. No traveling merchants. No dealers in arcane items. No estate sales, no visit to the town of Constanța on the Black Sea.
Nothing but the torn page.
“Damn him!” I said, throwing the journal against the wall. It knocked a pushpin out of the corner of a map, and both the pin and the journal clattered to the floor. Candy wrappers and photographs spilled from the pages. I sighed at the mess I’d made—the mess my father had made, to get technical about it.
“I hate him,” I said miserably.
Huck nodded. “I know. Me too, sometimes.”
“Easy to love, hard to like. That’s what Mother used to say about him.”
“She must have liked him though.”
“God only knows why.” I blew out a hard breath and bent to pick up the journal and the rat’s nest of scraps that had spilled from it. As I was shoving the photographs back into pages, my fingers stilled on a small ivory rectangle of heavy card stock. I didn’t remember seeing this before. . . . I flipped it over and read the printed type on the front:
ZISSU BROTHERS
RARE JEWELRY AND ANTIQUES
ARCANE AND RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY
BRAȘOV, ROMÂNIA
“Huck!” I said, shooting to my feet. “Look—look!”
“I’m looking. I’m looking.” He took the card from me.
“It was here the whole time. They’re in Brașov now. Or they were this summer, anyway, when Father was touring Romania.”
“Does appear that way, doesn’t it?” he murmured, inspecting the card as if he didn’t trust it. “You never noticed this card before?”
“Have you seen the junk that’s shoved in there?”
“Brașov . . . Why do I know that?”
“It’s my mother’s hometown. Remember? I showed you on the tourist map. With the vampire bat?” I flapped my arms and bared my teeth.
“That’s right,” he murmured. “Her parents aren’t alive anymore, right? Do you think you still have any family there?”
“Cousins, probably. Not sure if they still live there, though. They don’t know me.” My Romanian grandmother died before I was born, and my Romanian grandfather died when I was a baby. I never knew them, and my mother was, like me, an only child.
“It was the same for me when I returned to Belfast,” he said, almost as if speaking to himself. “Cousins I remembered were gone and other family I didn’t know I had were there. Funny how a family can be solid one moment and then blow away with the wind.”
Yes. Funny.
I nodded at the business card. “So what do you think?”
“About Brașov? Not much to go on. Lovena did say they traveled. What if they were in Brașov this summer when your father was traveling here, but . . .”
But they aren’t now. He didn’t have to say it. I was already thinking it myself. But the one thing I was hoping, the most important thing, was that at least my father thought they were in Brașov—it didn’t matter if they were. It didn’t even matter if the ring was there. After what had happened tonight, maybe I’d had enough of magic rings.
“What’s this?” Huck said, leaning over the workbench to inspect a large piece of paper that I’d knocked sideways on the hangar’s bulletin board during my moment of rage. “Regional map. Look—these stars are the other rural post offices around Transylvania. And these here?” he said, pointing to sets of numbers written neatly on the map’s wide bottom border. “Flight coordinates. Ten post offices, ten coordinates.”
“So this plane normally flies to these other towns to deliver mail,” I said.
“Indeed it does. And see this? Right here,” he said, pointing to a star on the map. “That’s right outside Brașov. This symbol means they keep lights burning on their runway. This airfield we’re on is too small to bother with twenty-four-seven lights. Just a waste of electricity. But the Brașov airfield is bigger.”
“So you could land there without problems?”
“No, not without problems. Look at the weather, banshee.”
“The snow isn’t sticking. The runway is clear. The plane isn’t covered in ice.”
“Not worried about icing so much, but visibility might be reduced if the storm picks up, or snow could block the intake. And who knows what it’s like in Brașov. Maybe the storm hasn’t made it there yet. Maybe it won’t. Seems to be heading west, not east. But even if we’re able to land, we’ll have to deal with another postal employee who might be working there, and I don’t speak Romanian, which makes lying rather difficult—”
“Or easy. I’ll do the talking. Or we just make a run for it.”
“We’ll still need to hike from the airfield into town.” He paused, scratching the back of his neck, and mumbled, “Maybe we could hitch a ride.”
“Surely so,” I said brightly, having no idea.
He wasn’t listening to me anyway. He was too busy mumbling to himself, talking about the weather. Looking around the hangar. Making another pass around the plane again.
But after all his grousing, I knew he was seeing things my way when he took the map off the wall and handed it to me. “You’re in charge of the coordinates. We may need to find an alternate place to land if Brașov isn’t viable. Cluj, maybe. That’s northwest from here, and it takes in planes at night, too.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Huck.”
“Sure you want to do this?” he asked seriously.
“Never been so sure,” I said. “What’s a grand adventure without a plane ride?”
“It’s adventure, all right. And possibly a huge mistake. But you know what they say. When the going gets tough, the tough steal a mail plane.”
“It’s only stealing if we don’t bring it back. And we will! Now, can we please leave this frozen hellscape? My nose is going to fall off.”
He laughed. “If you think it’s going to be any warmer in that cabin, you’re in for the shock of your life.”