“Not dead. Not alive. When the spirit is angry or restless, or doesn’t receive proper burial rites, like burning the possessions, then it can come back. The Romanians call them—”
“Strigoi,” I said in chorus with him. “A revenant, returned from the dead.”
“You know about this,” he said with a smile.
I nodded. “I’m fascinated with folklore and legends. I’ve never heard the Romany term though.”
“Wait, are you talking about... a vampire?” Huck asked, doing an admirable Bela Lugosi impression with his face and hands.
Valentin chuckled but shook his head. “That is fiction from your people, yes? Bram Stoker? Count Dracula? Your vampire is fiction, my friend, but many people in these lands believe that creatures likemulloandstrigoiare very real, indeed.”
“I certainly hope not,” Huck said.
“Do not worry. There is safety in numbers. If they come for us, we will fight them, yes?” he said, elbowing Huck on his arm cheerfully. Then he looked up and spotted someone approaching and said, “Ah, here is my wife, Ana.”
A plump, red-cheeked girl nearly as tall as Huck stepped to Valentin’s side. She wore a long skirt that fell around her ankles and black, laced boots. Dark waves peeked from beneath a knitted hat. Valentin said something to her in Bulgarian, a long explanation during which I was able to pick out a few words like “Orient Express” and “Amerikanski” and then our names. She smiled and nodded.
“Ana says you are welcome and that she was right to make me look for you, which she is now gloating about,” he reported with a grin. “She understands a little Romanian but doesn’t speak English.”
“Thank you for helping us,” I told her in Romanian.
She smiled and nodded, and Huck and I smiled and nodded in return, and after a brisk back-and-forth between husband and wife—presumably about where we would sleep, as she gestured to the wagon and tents—Ana motioned for us to follow her toward a folding table near the bonfire. A makeshift outdoor kitchen had been set up there with a large pot.
“I must help with a few chores,” Valentin told us. “But please eat and sit by the fire. Take a rest.”
Before leaving, he helped Ana fill our hands with tin cups of plum brandy and bowls of hot polenta topped with a thick stew. The metal dishes were dinged and beaten, and I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of meat bits were in the stew. But when Ana guided us to an abandoned blanket to sit upon, and we were able to put down our luggage and warm ourselves near the fire, Huck and I both found the food to be satisfyingly good.
Mostly, anyway. The plum brandy... took some getting used to. The first taste burned the back of my throat, and Huck laughed at me—which only made me more determined to drink it. After the second sip, it was more bracing than harsh, and the warmth it provided was pleasant. Much nicer than the Irish whiskey Father sipped after dinner.
Several campers looked us over as we ate, and one friendly elderly man who spoke Romanian briefly stopped by our blanket—to opine that we’d gotten lost and reassure me that they’d take us over the Danube tomorrow. But mostly the campers just returned to their own conversations, unconcerned that we were there. We finished eating and watched as the two children I’d spotted earlier raced past the bonfire. A dark-haired girl and boy, maybe eight years old. They spotted us and stared, but their initial hesitant shyness fell away when Ana bent down to tell them about us and Huck held up a hand in greeting. Before long we were caught up in a tangle of arms and giggles.
“Whoa!” Huck said, chuckling, as he held them at bay. The boy snatched Huck’s flat cap, and the girl laughed when Huck’s wild curls sprang to life. They were like ants on sugar, climbing on Huck until he tipped over backward, causing a duet of delighted screams—until a Bulgarian mother came to collect them and lead them away.
“You’re smiling,” Huck said after the children were gone, retrieving his hat from the dirt to brush it off.
“Am I?”
“For the first time since we... left the train.”
Since our fight, he meant but didn’t say.
“That’s because I’m not shivering from the cold and miserable,” I said. Even the caked-on mud clinging to my shoes had dried in front of the fire—enough, at least, that I was able to kick and scrape quite a bit of it away.
“You were right about following the rose oil cart,” he said. “This is turning out okay, yeah? Food. Kind people. It was the right thing to leave the train. Better here than with that man and his wolf dog.”
For now at least.
We sat in silence for a while, watching the people around us. Things felt unfinished and awkward between us. Or maybe I was just self-conscious about being a stranger in a strange camp. So I drank more of my plum brandy, and it not only warmed my stomach but also loosened my tongue. “Interesting what Valentin said about the vampiric folklore, don’t you think?Mullosandstrigoi.”
“That’s right up your alley, isn’t it?” he said. “People rising from the dead.”
I flicked my eyes toward his, prepared to say something catty in response, but the look on his face wasn’t combative.
“Plenty of folk in Northern Ireland believe superstitions like that too,” he said. “My mam always threatened ‘I will haunt you’ when I was a terror as a child.” He almost never spoke of his mother. I wondered if he still missed her like I missed mine. I wished she’d haunt me. I used to dream about her ghost visiting me in my bed. When I’d wake up alone in my room to find no ghost or spirit, not even a rustling curtain, it was the worst kind of disappointment.
Huck rubbed his hands together for warmth. “My aunt says the dead must be buried at home, because if not their spirits will rise and haunt the family. But I think this is more an inconvenience than something to be feared. I mean, who wanted to hear poor, dead Cousin Eileen wailing outside the window because you were too cheap to ship her body home when she died abroad?”
“If we die in Bulgaria, I hope someone ships our bodies home,” I said, smiling a little. “I’ll be most annoyed if I’m forced to spend eternity roaming the barren countryside like we did today.”
