“A remarkable similarity,” the conductor said dryly, gaze flicking between Huck’s long body and the compact, sturdy build I’d inherited from my mother’s side of the family tree.
“Different fathers?” I said, smiling weakly.
“And mothers,” Huck murmured somewhere near the top of my head, a little too loudly. I poked his side until he made a muffled noise, pain mixed with laughter.
“Not my job to judge,monsieur.” The conductor’s biting tone was giving me the distinct impression he believed us to be unmarried lovers, trying to pull the wool over his eyes. If he only knew. Ugh.
“There’s no chance you couldn’t find another compartment for me?” I asked. I mean, surely I couldn’t sleep in the same room as Huck. I’d rather have put my hand in a locked cage and watched rats feast on my fingers. “I’d prefer, uh... my privacy, you see? Maybe someone else in the train could be moved?”
The man exhaled slowly. “I cannot move passengers who’ve had reservations for weeks, especially when everyone is already settled and you are the last to board. If I may say so, you are quite lucky to get this compartment.”
“But—”
“Everyone is already settled,” he insisted sharply, making me feel like a spoiled child being reprimanded for demanding extra pudding. “I can make arrangements for separate compartments tomorrow night. One will become available after we change trains in Romania. Tonight, however, I must ask that you stay where you are put, if you please.”
A silent scream filled my head. My heart grew legs and blindly raced around inside my chest, bumping into my rib cage and falling over, completely panicked.
Me. Huck. One compartment. Two bunks, sure. And we used to share rooms all the time when we were younger. But now...?
Before I could protest further or drop onto my knees in front of the conductor and sob delicate lady tears on his well-shined shoes, the doleful sound of a train whistle cut through the steam that now billowed over the platform.
“That will be our signal to depart,” the conductor said, motioning for us to board the train. “It is our pleasure to serve you through continental Europe. Please watch your step.”
What could I do? Not a damn thing. The tickets were exchanged, and I certainly didn’t want to sit around the station tonight, sleeping on a bench until the next express. The look Huck gave me was apologetic with a soupçon of panic as he murmured, “Family first?”
Touché.
The anxiety I was feeling manifested into a cold sweat that blossomed over the back of my neck as I climbed two metal steps and entered the train behind Huck. A moment later the conductor closed the door behind us, and the Orient Express trundled into motion. We made our way down the sleeper car’s narrow corridor, past compartment doors on our right and windows to our left. Through the glass panes, the steam-wreathed platform shifted slowly, slowly, and then faster, until it fell away into the night. We cleared the station, leaving everything behind:
The Grand Bazaar.
The Pera Palace Hotel.
The strangely dressed intruders who wanted my father’s journal.
And my father, wherever he was right now, may the devil take him.
All of these things disappeared from view but not from my thoughts, where they became tangled up with the conflicted feelings that I had about Huck and our current situation. On top of everything, like icing sugar sprinkled atop a cake, was the strange thrill that I always felt when traveling. My mother used to call it “travel fever”—a little fear of the unknown, a little excitement for adventure. Whatever it was, I embraced it like an old friend as I shuffled down the train corridor and wondered what she’d think if she could see me now, stealing away to Eastern Europe at night.
My mother had been no stranger to this sort of thing. Not to my father’s fervor for adventuring or to the strange objects that lured him around the globe, because they lured her, too. To places like India and the discovery of a two-thousand-year-old copper crown, thought to be Greek in origin, perhaps from the time Alexander the Great tried, and failed, to invade the Indian subcontinent.
The markings on the box that housed the ancient crown spoke of curses and black magic. My father scoffed at that, saying it was silly, superstitious hogwash. He encouraged her to inspect it. And though he denied it now, I overheard him telling her that he had a buyer who’d pay far more than the government would for her expertise in authenticating it.
Anything for the thrill of the take. Even if it put your family at risk.
Because it did. The local workers warned my mother that the kiln worker who’d originally dug it up had died unexpectedly.
Three weeks later she was dead too.
To be fair, the official cause of her death was a particularly dangerous species of malaria, likely contracted days or even weeks before she touched the crown. There was absolutely no proof she was cursed or bedeviled. But she wasn’t the last person to perish mysteriously after handing the crown; a government official from India’s Ministry of Culture died too. After that the copper crown was reported stolen. No leads. No witnesses. It was there one day and gone the next, much like my mother.
My father said it was nothing more than dumb luck.
But I believed. In curses. And magic spells. The esoteric and supernatural. Things that couldn’t be explained, things rarely seen and unproven. That’s why I read everything I could get my hands on about magic. Why I photographed haunted walls in ancient markets and was desperate to find proof that ghosts were real. Because I firmly believed a cursed object took my mother. And if Father continued on his devil-may-care path, one of these days it was going to take him too.
If it hadn’t already.
“Here we are. Number two. Guess this is us,” Huck said, ducking through an open door, where our carry-on luggage sat on the floor, swaying rhythmically with the steady clack of the train as it rolled along the track.
