“Yes?”
“I thought I saw a wolf following me.”
“A wolf? Are there wolves in Turkey?”
He shook his head, blinking rapidly. “I was probably imagining it. Maybe it was just a stray mutt, salivating over my exquisite leg meats.”
He chuckled to himself, but when our eyes met, I knew he was serious. He’d seen something. What that was exactly, I didn’t know. But it had spooked him.
“I believe you,” I said.
He exhaled forcefully, as if trying to rid himself of the memory, and absently scrubbed the top of his head with his fingers. “I swear to all the saints, banshee, I’d never felt so paranoid. I can’t even explain it. I just knew in my gut something didn’t feel right. And when I got back to the hotel with a rental car a few hours later... Fox was already gone.”
“And you have no idea where he went? No clue at all?”
“None. Apparently he left the journal at the hotel desk about a half hour before I showed up. I searched the hotel lobby and restaurant. Our room. The street outside. Nothing. He just disappeared. All I know from the hotel manager is that a few minutes before I left to fetch a car, Fox left the hotel himself. An hour or so later, he strode through the lobby, went up to the room, and rushed back down with the journal. The hotel manager said he seemed distracted and unnerved. Like something had scared him.”
I’d never seen my father scared. Not since Mom died.
The train rocked, clacking along the tracks. I didn’t know what to think about everything Huck had just told me. My father’s mystery meetings. The men following Huck. A wolf in the streets of Tokat... It all sounded like something straight out of one the pulp magazines that Huck liked to read—Amazing Stories,The Black Mask,Weird Tales. It was just that this story was missing half the pages. I pressed him for more information, but there was nothing more to give.
Maybe my father’s journal would shed some light. I retrieved it from my satchel and unwrapped the leather straps that bound it; then I opened it up on my lap.
Thick pages were covered in my father’s neat scrawl. A few things were stuck here and there—receipts, addresses, a flattened Tootsie Roll wrapper. Three photographs. The first was of Jean-Bernard, smiling in front of a fountain. He was an extraordinarily handsome man; I remembered my mother joking that he was unfairly prettier than her. I wondered where—and when—it had been taken.
The next two snapshots, however, were far more interesting.
“Is this...?”
“Yeah,” Huck confirmed. “That’s the original ring, there. The one that the man who hired Fox has in his possession—his name is Rothwild. A Hungarian, I think. He’s nuts for Vlad the Impaler. Knows everything about the man. And for some reason he thinks his ring is fake. A reproduction or something.”
The black-and-white photographs showed a crooked band of bone with carved symbols on the side and some odd hatching along the top. Fascinating that this crude, strange ring could be the cause of so much chaos. My heartbeat increased, head spinning with what I knew about the ring from myBatterman’s Field Guide to Legendary Objects. Shame that I didn’t have access to an archive with more information about Vlad. If Father had only told me about the ring before we crossed the Atlantic on this trip, I could have helped him research, as I normally did. Maybe then we wouldn’t be in this situation, hiding like mice while he put us all in danger.
I slipped the photographs into the back of the journal and thumbed through the pages, glancing at dates and places my father neatly logged at the top of each entry. It was so strange to have this in my hands, when it had always been off-limits. For him to just hand it over and trust me to keep it? Very odd.
Something caught my eye when I was flipping through the entries. A page had been torn out. “I wonder what this was,” I murmured, feathering my fingertip over the ragged edge that remained. Then I noticed something on one of the pages that flanked the tear. It appeared that Father had written a word in cipher. Not just in this entry, but three pages later. And another. A word or two here and there... a few longer phrases. Huh.
Puzzle pieces began rearranging themselves inside my head.
“Did you look through this already?” I asked Huck.
“What answer do you want to hear?”
“The honest one would be nice, but I know that’s difficult for you.”
His stare was hot lava pouring down a mountain. Absolute fury. “Ineverlied to you,” he said in a low voice. “Not once. Not even about the weather.”
I hated the way he affected me. “Apparently you’ve changed, because it seems to me you’ve been lying to me since you left home, running around with Father, God only knows where. Did you watch me check into hotels in Germany and France? Were you tailing us this spring when we sailed to Mexico, waiting for the moment that I was safely tucked away before joining Richard Damn Fox for an exciting no-girls-allowed expedition?”
“He visited me in Belfast this summer before he went to Jean-Bernard. That’s it. He sent me a train ticket and asked me to join him in Tokat. I arrived there a day before him. I thought—”
“You thought what, Huck?”
He threw an arm up in frustration. “I thought you’d be there with him, okay? I made myself sick, sitting in that tiny hotel room, thinking you were going to walk into the lobby with him. When he came alone...” He shook his head, eyes darkening as he muttered, “It doesn’t matter now. Fox tells you only what he thinks you need to know, nothing more. You should know that better than anyone.”
He wasn’t wrong. That’s exactly how my father operated. Never admit mistakes. Never say you’re sorry. Keep everything to yourself. Those were my father’s personal mantras. He trusted no one but himself, and sometimes maybe not even that.
But what surprised me more was Huck’s confession. He’d expected me to be with Father in Tokat? Had he made himself sick because he wanted to see me, or because he was dreading our reunion? I was too chickenhearted to ask.
