They’d been secretly meeting up after I went to bed. He bragged constantly that he was touring regional hotels, making gobs of money crooning sentimental love songs to drunken tourists.
“Your father will return soon,” she said.
“You’re... leaving me? In the middle of a foreign city?”
She shrugged and waved a hand. “You are no little mouse. Have you not traveled the world with your scoundrel of a father?”
“Hey!” I said sharply. No one gets to besmirch my family but me. “He’s a distinguished adventurer and historian. He’s been hired around the world by dukes, sultans, and contessas.”
“Yes, Iknow,” she said, voice sodden with French sarcasm. “You boast of all the places you’ve been with him. Am I not your ‘hundredth’ tutor, useless and interchangeable, as you so often remind me?”
Yikes. “I don’t think I’ve ever said that.” I had. Yesterday. During our last argument. “And of course I need you. You speak the local language, and—”
She snorted. “Obviously you are comfortable storming through the city alone like a typhoon. And the hotel staff will cater to your every whim, so it’s difficult for me to feel sympathy. Goodbye, Miss Fox. I hope our paths do not cross again. Ever.”
She marched away, blending into throngs of pedestrians ambling down the market’s corridor, while I stood rooted to the floor in shock. It took me several panicked heartbeats to realize that she carried the book of traveler’s checks; all I had was a few bills in my handbag, enough for a taxi back to the hotel and little more. I called out to her, snaking my way through the crowd. “You have all the money!” I shouted.
“Consider it my severance fee,” she shouted back before her head disappeared in a throng of shoppers, leaving me behind.
Alone.
In a foreign country.
With no money.
And no word from my wayward father as to when he’d return.
What in God’s name was I going to do now?
2
ISPENT AN HOUR WILDLY SEARCHINGthe market’s labyrinthine corridors for Madame Leroux like some orphaned puppy in disbelief that its owner had truly gone. Then I came to my senses: she was probably back at the hotel. Maybe I could still convince her to stay.
When I found my way outside, the late-afternoon drizzle had turned to a steady rain, and there were no taxicabs in sight. Everything was muddy and ugly, and when a speeding car veered too close to the curb, splashing foul-smelling gutter water across the front of my skirt, I wanted to break down and cry.
Honestly, I blamed my father for all of this. Yesterday I sent a telegram to a hotel across the country in Tokat to ask why he was delayed. No response. This wasn’t entirely unusual. Likely he was still up in the mountains on his treasure-hunting expedition—that is, if he hadn’t fallen off the mountain and his body wasn’t currently being torn apart by buzzards. Either way, I’d bet my last lira that when he found out about Madame Leroux’s betrayal, it would somehow be my fault. Because she was right about one thing: disaster seemed to follow me wherever I went.
But I wasn’t the only one. This was genetic. My father courted disaster as if it were the belle of the ball. Hiring a tutor who deserted me and stole all our money was just one in a long list of things my bullheaded father had botched. To the public, Richard “Damn” Fox was a decorated war veteran, a medieval historian, a wealthy antiquities collector, and a brash adventurer who never met a risk he wouldn’t take. But what people didn’t know was that he was also unbelievably selfish, would rather die than apologize or admit mistakes, and often was an all-around terrible father.
Mentally cursing his name, I shook out my leg in a feeble attempt to rid my shoe of mud as a car stopped in front me. A taxicab—finally! Breathless, I climbed into the back seat and gave the driver the name of my hotel. My body wilted with relief when he nodded, and the car pulled away from the historic covered market. Away from the scene of my misfortunate afternoon.
I peeled off a black beret—one that I always wore when traveling—and shook fat droplets out of the soft wool. I was soaked from head to foot. This really wasn’t my day. As the old city rushed past my rain-spattered window, my thoughts turned over the incident in the market and everything Madame Leroux had said. On one hand, I wasn’t surprised she’d want to quit. I traveled with my father several times a year, and each time he had to hire a new tutor for me. And to be honest, Madame Leroux and I had started off on a sour note because it wasn’t until he’d hired her, until we’d traveled by train from Paris and arrived in Istanbul, that my father confessed the truth about the job that had brought him here. We’d had a terrible fight about it before he left. Screams. Threats. Tears. Begging.
I hadn’t exactly made a good impression on my new tutor.
But in my defense, my father had blindsided me. Though he almost never allowed me to accompany him on his expeditions, he did allow me to research them. I spent several days before our trip across the Atlantic collecting information on a Byzantine treasure hoard rumored to be hidden in the mountains outside Tokat; however, when we arrived here, he revealed the real reason for his travels.
A client had asked him to find a ring that had once belonged to Vlad ?epe?.
As in Vlad the Impaler. Prince of Romania. House of Dracule?ti. Fierce warrior and enemy of the Ottoman Empire. Notoriously cruel and bloody. Possible inspiration for the famous fictional vampire Count Dracula.
My mother had told me countless wild stories about both the man and his myth. He’d become an antihero in my mind, someone who dared to rise up against tyranny. Someone who had his own moral compass. A folk hero like Robin Hood, William Tell, or Paul Revere. Just with a lot more blood.
There’s a bit of lore that says when Vlad was killed in Wallachia, his enemies, the Ottomans, took his head back to Turkey, to prove he was dead. My father became convinced that Vlad’s ring may have been buried with his head. And that’s where my father was now. In northern Turkey—a place Vlad was imprisoned as a boy—searching for the Impaler’s grave.
Some might think that the skull of Vlad would be the more important historic find than a ring. But it wasn’t just a random piece of jewelry. Vlad’s ring imbued the wearer with some kind of dark, magical power, if one believed there was any grain of truth in the stories that surrounded it.
Most of what I knew about the ring came from a brief entry inBatterman’s Field Guide to Legendary Objects—my favorite book and an illustrated catalog of artifacts purported to be cursed, lucky, magical, mythical, and mysterious. Excalibur, the Book of Thoth, the Spear of Destiny, the philosopher’s stone. And Vlad the Impaler’s war ring was included there too, alongside a medieval woodcut of Prince Vlad. In it, he was depicted wearing the ring while sitting at a table dining in front of his impaled enemies. There wasn’t a detailed description or firsthand account, only a brief caption: stories circulating in the late 1400s after his death said the ring was rumored to help Vlad in battle, a sort of occult talisman that may have been cursed.
