“Oh?” Huck said, sounding as scandalized as I felt. “She and her husband—”
“Not her husband. Just Natasha,” he said. “Before he died, her husband had been... How do you say? Bedbound. Paralyzed. He hadn’t left the upstairs room in two or three years. All the parties were downstairs. Natasha lived off his money and did as she pleased. She was a wicked woman. No one will be surprised that this has happened.”
“What exactlydidhappen?” Huck asked.
“They say a hound from hell burst into the home and ripped out her throat before chasing down one of the maids, which I suppose is that poor girl,” he lamented, gesturing toward the body on the ground. Bulbs flashed in the rain as the police took photographs.
I gave Huck a worried look. He returned it.
“A hound from hell?” I repeated.
The man shrugged. “A rabid stray, perhaps. The priest says hellhound”—he pointed to a black-attired Romanian Orthodox man of the cloth, who looked as if he might have come from the small church across the street—“and the servants who believe in superstitious folklore say it was Satan’s beast, collecting a debt. Regardless, this is what happens when you court disgrace.”
The police were blocking the bodies now. My gaze slid over the ivy-covered stone of the widow’s home, up to the demonic windows that looked like eyes. Despite both the rain and the police attempting to disperse the crowd, no one was leaving.
The man tilted his head beneath the umbrella and studied us a little closer. “How do you know Natasha?”
“Aye, well, you see, we’re looking for someone,” Huck said diplomatically. “We were hoping she had some information about them.”
I opened my mouth to add something to that, but no words came out. Because on the other side of the ivy-covered house, I spied movement. A man was taking refuge from the rain in a doorway. He watched the police while a white dog sat obediently at his feet. My pulse doubled.
“Time to leave,” I said quickly, pulling Huck away from the neighbor. “Thank you for talking to us, but we must go. Now.”
“Don’t blame you, young lady,” the man said, before stepping toward the curb to cross the street. “Get as far away from this as you can. Nothing good can come of it.”
When we were out of earshot, Huck said, “Mind telling me why you’re yanking on my arm like you’re trying to outrun a demon?”
“We are! Look over there, in the doorway,” I whispered.
Huck jerked his head toward the man and froze. Sarkany couldn’t see us—at least I didn’t think so—and I didn’t want to take any chances that his dog might sniff us out. For once Huck and I were on the same page. He grabbed my hand, and I didn’t have time to think too hard about the forgotten pleasure of his fingers around mine while we splashed through puddles, away from the police. Away from the bodies. Away from the devil and his white dog.
When we turned the corner, we couldn’t see the coroner’s van anymore, so we ducked under the overhang of a building to get out of the rain and caught our breath.
“Andrei warned me,” Huck said, letting go of my hand.
“What do you mean?”
“When I went to the registration desk to have him look up the widow’s address,” Huck said in a daze. “Andrei warned me that there was a house in this neighborhood that has a dark reputation. I thought it was just a silly urban story.”
Even our taxi driver had known. He hadn’t been warning us about the traffic accident blocking the street. Now that I replayed his rapidly spoken words in my head—the ones I couldn’t catch before—I was able to ferret out the taxi driver’s meaning.Casele diavolului, he’d repeated in warning.
House of the devil.
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
July 1, 1937
Bucure?ti, Kingdom of România
Jean-Bernard and I got mildly soused in a friendly pub with a young Romanian scholar named Liv, a boy not more than a couple years older than Huxley. Not only had Liv heard about Vlad Dracula’s war ring, but he knew all sorts of stories about it. Most of them were half-baked (or maybe that was me after several glasses of palinca), but the most interesting were stories about who owned the ring after Vlad.
According to Liv, the ring has been hidden dozens of times for hundreds of years, but it is always found. Gilles de Rais was the first to acquire it after Vlad. He was a noble French knight and a comrade-in-arms to Joan of Arc. Then he obtained the ring and killed a hundred children.
Then Elizabeth Báthory, the Blood Countess of Hungary, supposedly owned the ring. She’s said to have murdered up to six hundred girls. (The court stopped counting officially at eighty.) The bone ring worn on her thumb was not able to be removed, so her entire thumb was cut off, ring and all, before she was imprisoned in a tower, where she remained until her death.
John Dee, infamous court magician to Queen Elizabeth, also got his hands on it. Dee’s equally infamous assistant,Edward Kelley, said the ring instructed him that the two men should share their property. And wives. But when he said the ring told him to kill, Dee drew the line and sold it, saying it was bedeviled.
And let’s not forget Peter Niers, a German bandit who dabbled in the black arts. He confessed to killing five hundred people before he was executed—broken on the wheel.
