I’D RIDDEN ON MY SHARE of airplanes. Mostly Puddle jumpers, for short distances, and in Huck’s little biplane, Trixie, over Hudson Valley.
But this aircraft was no Trixie, and we weren’t flying over fields and rivers while the sun shone.
This was a ramshackle postal plane, and we were flying in a snowstorm, two thousand feet above the Carpathian Mountains.
“Stop clutching the instrument panel,” Huck’s voice said inside my headset. He sat next to me in the cramped cockpit, and though I had the volume turned up as loud as it would go, I was still having trouble hearing him over the insane racket of the single-engine plane. “Grab the coward strap up there, if you feel you must.”
“I’m not a coward!” I said, clutching a leather strap above my window.
“No need to yell in my ear. Relax. We’re fine.”
Liar. None of this was fine. Snow drove against the windshield so hard, I couldn’t see past the propeller on the nose of the plane—which meant he couldn’t see, either. When I dared to look out my window, I occasionally spied a single light in the mountains below, but mostly I just saw darkness. And the plane was rattling so hard, I was almost positive my tailbone was bruised.
Whose idea was this anyway, taking a stolen airplane up in a snowstorm?
Oh, right. It was mine.
“We’re going to die,” I said.
“I swear to all the saints,” Huck complained, “if you say that one more time, I’m going to open that airdrop door in the back and shove you out.”
My teeth chattered as I glanced over my shoulder at the belly of the plane and felt a twinge of guilt. Dirty canvas postal bags filled the narrow space. Pretty sure stealing mail was a worse crime than borrowing a plane.
“How far have we got now?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes, if this equipment is accurate. Let’s add that to our list of prayers.”
Several excruciating minutes passed in which my thoughts dwelled on the decrepit state of the airplane, how it was over a decade old and had been retrofitted with several improvements, half which didn’t work, according to Huck. There wasn’t even a working parachute onboard, which was the one thing that had truly given Huck pause before we took off. Why oh why hadn’t I listened?
As I was thinking about all this, Huck suddenly changed the plane’s direction and altitude.
“Um . . . what’s happening?” I asked.
“Storm’s too bad. I’ll have to take a different route.”
“Do we have enough fuel?”
“Couple hours’ worth. Don’t worry about that. I’m just going to circle back around and backtrack a bit. Try to fly around the storm so I don’t have to fight the wind.”
I hated all of this. In minutes, all our forward progress was lost as we flew back over Sighișoara, headed in the wrong direction. Just how far north was he going to fly in order to avoid the storm? Seconds ticked by, then minutes, and then we were entirely off track.
A sputtering sound rocked the cockpit. For a moment I thought it was coming from my headset, but when I pulled the padded rubber away from my ear, I heard something worse.
Silence.
The cabin was still shaking, but the unearthly sound of the engine had just . . . stopped.
No engine.
All the lights on the instrument panel faded.
It felt like being in Trixie the biplane when Huck was doing engine-stall tricks in the air. But this was no time for tricks, and Huck’s face had gone still.
He was scared.
The airplane suddenly took a sharp dip downward.
“Shite!” Huck shouted, pulling the plane back up until we were stable again. Then he fiddled with the instrument panel, and I recognized what he was doing, the same thing he’d done when we’d first gotten inside this nightmare cockpit: he was trying to start the engine.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he mumbled.
The engine didn’t respond.
He smacked the instrument panel violently. “May the devil break you into a thousand pieces, you rusty metal fucker!”
“Huck . . . ,” I said. And then: “Huck! ” louder. “W-what is going on?”
“Engine failure. Probably the carburetor. I told you this was a terrible idea!”
And I knew we were going to die up here. I knew it, knew it, knew it!
“Okay, all right. It’s all right . . . I’m going to try to land it,” he said as he slowly forced the airplane downward. “Don’t panic. We’re gliding now. We can glide for miles. If I can just find a clearing or a road—a river even. Keep your eyes open for anything.”
“I would if I could see!” I told him as my stomach dropped along with the nose of the plane.
“We’ll have better visibility when we get lower. I just don’t want to clip a mountain.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’ll try my best, banshee.”
I blew out several huffed breaths, trying to calm myself, but it just made me light-headed.
But—oh! Huck was right: I could see things now. The dark mountains. And city lights. Couldn’t be Brașov; we’d gone too far in the wrong direction. “Lights over there,” I shouted.
“That’s Cluj, I think. Best not try to land there. Too many people.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers!” I snapped.
“Beggars don’t plow down a bunch of innocent people! We can’t risk hurting anybody. We need to find a highway or a field outside of town.”
“Where, then?” I said, squinting into the windshield. “All I see is mountains and forest outside the town. Which seems like a terrible place to die. If you’re going to kill us—”
“I’m going to save us, banshee. See that? On my side.”
I saw . . . a large black spot in the middle of a large forest—a circular clearing. Extremely large. I just couldn’t tell if anything was built in that clearing.
“If that’s Cluj, then these are those haunted woods. The Hoia Forest,” he said, sounding far too excited for someone who was about to crash a plane. “Remember? The brochure we were reading on the train? One of the many places Vlad was beheaded? The brochure said it was near Cluj, and it had a big dead spot where nothing grew. This is that dead spot!”
“Yay?” I said.
“I think there’s room to land.”
“Wait!” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Fifty percent sure? Besides, it’s too late now. Better there than in the trees.” Huck took the plane lower. The sheer of wind as we descended was almost as loud as the engine had been before it died.
“My kingdom for a fucking parachute,” Huck mumbled as he tilted the plane, guiding it over the treetops, lower, and lower, and lower. . . .
“Oh, Huck,” I said. “I’m so very sorry.”
“What’s that? Must need to clean my ears, because that sounded like an apology. And Theodora Fox never apologizes.”
“I mean it, Huck. I’m truly sorry.”
“Why? You didn’t kill the engine.”
“But I may be killing us. We should’ve slept in the hangar as you suggested.”
“It’s done now. Don’t think of it.”
How could I not? I thought about that and about my father. Of the cursed bone ring calling to me back in Sighișoara. Of Lovena telling me I had old blood and of Valentin’s stories about giant white wolf priests.
And I thought about Huck. His hands on my face in the hotel in Bucharest . . . I left everything on the table, unfinished and unsaid. I should have talked to him. I should have told him how I felt. Now it was too late.
Still. If I was going to die with anyone, I was glad it was with him.
This was it. I braced for death. How truly ironic that we were going to die where the Impaler, Vlad Țepeș, was rumored to have been beheaded.
“Banshee?”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to try to land us best I can. But if I screw it all up and I die but you survive, I want you to know something.” The entire plane was shuddering. Everything below was coming toward us far too fast. “I regret . . .”
The rest of his words were lost under the riotous sound of the plane.
Regret what? Regret what?
“What did you say?” I shouted.
“Hold on,” he yelled back. “This is going to sting like Satan’s whip!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for death. Then I opened them again, because, dammit, I was not a coward!
Much!
Something banged against my side of the plane. Did a wing clip a tree branch? We tilted precariously to one side, and then—
We hit the ground with a terrible crash. All at once it was:
My head hitting the back of the seat.
A wave of earth and snow coming up over the propeller.
Glass shards flying.
The sound of grating-ripping-screaming metal.
Bumping, bumping, bumping . . .
And then: darkness. And the most awful silence.
Every muscle in my body had turned to stone. I couldn’t move for several seconds. Couldn’t even breathe. Snow gusted through my broken window and landed on the sleeve of my coat. Everything smelled like pine needles, engine oil, and literal scorched earth. Was I paralyzed? I moved one thing at a time, successfully testing fingers, arms, legs—oof! Sharp pain. I’d scraped the tops of my knees on the underside of the cockpit. But nothing serious.
“Banshee?” Huck’s voice was broken, and that made me think he was, too. This jostled my foggy brain.
I ripped off my headset. “Huck?”
“Are ya hurt?” he asked.
“No. A little. Not much. Are you?”
“My back—”
Oh God!
“—feels like it got kicked by a horse, but I’m all right, I think.”
Relief washed over me as he pulled off his headset and dropped it on the instrument panel.
He shook himself and said in a daze, “I never thought for one second that I could land this piece of junk, but, by God, I wrestled it down, didn’t I? And we’re alive, hoo-hoooo!” he whooped.
“Um, Huck?” I asked, sniffing the night air that was blowing in my window.
“Yes?”
“What’s that smell?”
“Huh?”
“Is that diesel?”
He swore profusely and reached behind the cockpit seats to snatch up our bags. “Out! Out now!”
I brushed away broken glass and tried the handle. “My door is jammed!”
He kicked his own door—one, twice. It flew open with a bang, and a gust of wind rushed through the cockpit. He tossed our bags outside and practically ripped my arm off, dragging me across his seat as he exited. I couldn’t even get a word out. His hands were around my waist, and I was half lifted, half jumping into the snow.
Snow! And ground, most solid! Who cared that it might be haunted ground where nothing grew? Not me, buddy! I could have dropped to my knees and kissed it—and I almost did exactly that by accident because my knees were wobbly as Jell-O. Huck yanked me back upright. We grabbed our bags as flames shot up over the plane.
“Now run!” Huck shouted.
He didn’t need to tell me twice. I held my beret against my head as we dashed over the clearing. Light from the flaming airplane cast a disorienting, dancing shadow and made it difficult for my eyes to adjust to our surroundings, but I finally spotted the edge of the clearing . . . and the darkness of the forest beyond.
As we rushed into the trees, a thunderous explosion shook the ground and lit up the clearing, spewing up shards of metal that littered the ground behind us. I stumbled forward, racing as if the devil were behind me in the blazing inferno. Racing until my lungs and calves burned. Until Huck nearly tripped me, trying to gawk at the plane.
“Look!” he said, breathless, thrusting out an arm to slow me down.
I stopped to look. And to listen. The explosive fire was dying down. There were only muted pops and black smoke billowing as the blaze consumed the crumpled metal carcass.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I said between hard breaths, sprinting a few more steps just to be certain I was far enough away.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Huck said in a rough voice, clutching his rucksack against his heaving chest with one hand and using the other to hold himself up against the trunk of a tree.
“Are we safe?” I asked, still panicked. “Will it explode again?”
“It’s fine, fine,” he mumbled, catching his breath. “All the petrol . . . poof! No more fuel, no more explody.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “That was . . . Oh God. Think I’m . . . going to have . . . a heart attack. That was . . . not good. Not good at all.”
“Thought we were walking shish kebobs,” he agreed, letting his head drop in relief.
That made two of us. We caught our breath and stared back at the wreckage in a daze. I patted my coat pocket. Lovena’s talisman was still there. Maybe she’d saved us from death by flame. Or death by mangled bodies in a plane crash.
“What about the fire spreading?” I asked. I didn’t want to be responsible for burning down an entire forest.
“The snow will keep it from spreading to the trees. It’s too wet to burn. It’s all right now,” he assured me, flipping up his coat collar to shield his neck from the biting wind. “We’re alive, and it’s going to be all right now.”
But it wasn’t. Not exactly. Death by fire was quick. Now we were stuck in a dark forest, miles away from what we assumed was Cluj—a city far, far north of where we needed to be. On top of that, it was snowing, and there was no shelter in sight.
And it was cold. Very, very cold.
Right. Okay. “So . . . what now?” I asked as Huck slipped the straps of his rucksack over his shoulders. “How do we get out of here before we freeze to death? I’m worried this fire will draw wild animals.”
“Nah. Just the opposite,” he said, still a little breathless. “Animals run from forest fires.”
“Coyotes are attracted to campfires.”
“Europe doesn’t have coyotes.”
“But it has bears. . . .”
“Christ,” he mumbled. “Like arguing with a mule, it is.”
I frowned. “Mule? That’s what you think of me?”
He shook both his hands and his head. “Now is not the time. I’m freezing my bollocks off. We need to concentrate on finding a way out of here, yeah?”
Okay, fine. “That’s north,” I informed him.
“Is it?” he asked, looking up at the moonlit sky for reassurance.
“Pretty sure. You looked at the forest on that map. Which way should we go?”
He glanced around. “That way.”
“You sure? Are you just saying that? Because I seem to recall that time we got lost in Mexico City, and you wouldn’t ask for directions but insisted you knew the way, and we ended up—”
“Bzzzt!” He mimicked zipping his lips together. “Not now, banshee. Just start walking.”
“Since you know where we’re going . . . ,” I mumbled. “Lead the way.”
Irritable and anxious, both of us headed off in the direction Huck insisted was right, farther into the forest, away from the clearing, our breath white in the darkness. We trudged through falling snow, tripping over underbrush and winding our way through the trees in silence. The farther we went, the more I worried. This didn’t feel like the way out. Not that I was entirely sure where “out” was either. But it felt as if we were going away rather than toward civilization, and that made me nervous.
After a half hour or more of hiking through black woods with no foreseeable end, we came to an eerie grove of strange trees. Their curved trunks were shaped like fishhooks—as if some terrible storm bent them a hundred years ago and they’d just continued growing that way. I’d never seen anything like it. Along with the dead clearing, it was plain to see why people called this forest haunted. All I knew was that every woodland sound made my pulse race, and I was jumping at shadows.
When we spied moonlight on the other side of the strange, twisted grove of bent trees, I couldn’t have been more relieved. Huck pointed out a small stream. “Let’s follow that,” he suggested.
I agreed. Better than roaming around aimlessly anyway.
Though the stream was narrow—we could cross it easily—its presence created a break in the tree canopy that allowed columns of pale light to filter into the dark woods. We hurried to the light like moths to flame.
“It’s not cold enough to ice over yet, so that’s something,” Huck remarked on the flowing water before glancing upward. “I can’t tell if the storm is passing or if the trees are just blocking out most of the snow.”
“Perhaps this would be a good time to look at the map of the forest in the brochure you picked up. May be enough moonlight to read it.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t a map so much as a vague blob with some symbols indicating ghosts and beheading locations, what have you.”
“Are you joking? You said you were certain this was the way out!”
“Now, now. Temper, banshee.”
“We’re lost in a haunted forest, Huck!”
He held up a finger. “Not lost. Here’s a stream. Bound to lead somewhere, yeah?”
I shoved his chest with both hands, and he stumbled backward in the snow. “Are you kidding me? You should have killed us in the plane crash while you had the chance. Because now I’m going to have to strangle you, and bears will eat your carcass!”
“I told you animals lust after my leg meats—” He shielded himself and laughed as I smacked his arm several times. “Hey, now! Control thyself, empress. We’re not lost, I tell you. I know exactly where we are.”
“So do I—lost! In a haunted forest.”
“You love ghosts,” he said, grabbing my gloved hand.
“I love warmth and not freezing to death too! I love not crashing planes in the middle of the wilderness.”
“I told you I didn’t want to steal it! You should be praising my name for landing that bajanxed hunk of metal! Now, stop trying to hit me, for the love of the saints.” Exasperated, he grabbed my other hand too.
“What did you say when we were going down?”
“Pardon?”
“When we were crashing—”
“Landing,” he corrected.
“You said ‘I regret’ . . . something. You regret what?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me!” I said, pulling against his grip.
“Just did,” he insisted. “I said, I regret nothing.”
“Oh,” I said, a little breathless. I stopped trying to yank my hand away from his. “You mean . . . ?”
He looked down at me with snowflakes clinging to his lashes. “You know what I mean. Everything. From the first time I kissed you until that night in your room. It’s what I meant to tell you before. I do not think that what we did was sinful or a crime against God, no matter what Fox says.”
“You don’t?”
He shook his head, and in that moment I felt the invisible wall between us fall away with the snow. And there it was: our connection. It wasn’t broken after all. It hadn’t disappeared with the months we’d spent apart.
“I don’t either,” I said in a small voice. “I don’t regret a thing.”
His grip loosened, and his hands tentatively clasped mine. Such a simple thing, holding hands. Such a simple, miraculous thing. My heart pounded rapidly inside my chest.
Somewhere in the forest, a branch snapped. Might have been a squirrel or the weight of snow breaking a twig. But it was loud enough to invade the magical, perfect moment that I was feeling with Huck. And then something changed in my peripheral vision.
It was on our side of the stream and much bigger than a squirrel.
It was also moving.
“H-huck,” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“What kind of haunted things are supposed to be in these woods? Ghosts?”
His head turned ever so slowly toward the approaching shape. It was moving with care.
Stalking us.
“That’s no ghost,” he whispered. “Ghosts don’t growl.”
No, but wolves did.