“I know. She was compelled by dark magic. I told her to keep the ring in the box. It was the one rule in the house when our mother was still alive. There was nothing more I could do in Sighi?oara but sit around the hospital and squabble with family, so I left to give them space.” She shrugged and then added, “I am also looking for my dog. My crows tell me she is close.”
“I saw her in the Hoia Forest with two wolves,” I said. “Near Cluj.”
“With wolves? That is good,” she murmured. “If she’s gone wild, there’s a chance she has broken that man’s magical hold. I will find her again. Funny that I’ve anguished more over Lupu than my own blood.”
“This is all our fault. If my father hadn’t taken the job with Rothwild, then none of this would have happened. Your sister... and now Huck. They’ve taken Huck!”
“Hush, girl.” Smooth hands gripped my face. Smoke curled around my hair. “My sister’s fate is her own making. Now, what is this about the boy?”
I started to explain about the tavern, but behind us in the distance, a shout interrupted me. Lovena dropped her cigarillo on the street and squinted over my shoulder, peering down the deserted cobbled street. I swung around and saw it too.
A dark figure ambling toward us. Stumbling. Shuffling.
Huck!
I knew his tall frame as I knew my own hands. But something was horribly wrong. I dropped our luggage and raced toward him as he staggered into the light of the adjoining rowhouse.
His peacoat hung open. Blood dripped from small cuts on his forehead, down the bridge of his nose and over his brow. His eyes were glazed. He moved as if drugged, barely standing.
“Huck!” I cried out.
Lovena yanked me back as I reached for him. “No! He’s bewitched. Can you not hear it, child?”
I stared in horror at his dazed face, and then Ididhear something. Faintly. A strange buzzing, like a cicada trapped in a spiderweb.
What had they done to him?
Lovena began murmuring something low and wicked sounding in a language I didn’t understand, but Huck stopped a few feet away. He stared in my direction, but his eyes didn’t see. Something was on his chest—a piece of paper. It was pinned to him with an old-fashioned hatpin, several inches long, like a note tacked to a bulletin board.
His eyes fluttered shut, and he collapsed on the cobblestone.
I wriggled out of Lovena’s grip and ran to him, dropping to my knees by his side. “Huck? Huck!” He was out cold. Or dead. Was he breathing?
“Move,” Lovena said. She opened his eyelid with her thumb and inspected his eye. Bloodshot. Pupils as big as the moon. “He’s alive.”
Relief gusted out of me as footsteps approached at my back. I glanced around to see the Zissu brothers hurrying toward us from their shop door. “He’s been tampered with,” Mihai said.
“Dark, quick magic,” his brother agreed.
“He smells ofiarba fiarelor—white swallowwort,” Lovena said, and then explained, “It’s an ancient plant known to the Dacians. Very toxic. It may have been mixed with something else, but I know it’s used in possession spells. It opens the mind to the spellcaster.”
“Sarkany,” I said.
Lovena’s face darkened. “The devil who stole Lupu.”
“His goons took Huck from the tavern—the server saw men in black robes. She called them priests. It’s the same men we told you about, the ones who followed us from Istanbul.”
“This is what was used on my sister,” Lovena murmured.
Petar bent over Huck’s face and pointed. “That, on his forehead. A magical compass. He was sent out like a homing pigeon. Looks as if that’s some kind of message he was bewitched to deliver.”
My fingers trembled over the hatpin. The top was decorated with a small metal dragon. I yanked it out of him and whimpered when his body jerked in response. When I pulled the paper away from the pin, it left a smudge of Huck’s blood.
It was a folded note. I opened it and read words scrawled in smeared ink:
I have your father at the castle.
Take the path under the Black Church. It will be unlocked.
