“Look!” I said when we got to the end. “There’s a drop-down ladder. I think it leads to the hotel courtyard.”
We glanced over the parapet. A secondary roof blocked our view of the ground; the ladder looked as if it stopped at a narrow ledge extending around the building, two floors down.
“We may be able to reach room windows from there,” I said as a chilly night wind whipped my hair into my eyes. “Surely someone will let us inside.” And if not, we could break a window. I was desperate, but when a wave of dizziness rolled over me, I was not entirely convinced that I didn’t have a yet-unrealized fear of heights. I couldn’t remember ever being this high up.
A noise sounded from across the rooftop. The roof-access door. Someone was pounding on it.
“Damn it all to hell!” Huck whispered.
“How did they find us here?” I asked, feeling mildly hysterical as another wave of dizziness hit me. “This is impossible!”
“They’ve tracked us somehow. Maybe that hellish wolf dog caught our scent at the murder scene in front of Natasha Anca’s house.”
“Through a taxicab? Miles and miles through a big city?”
“I don’t know! Jesus and Mary, banshee...”
“Oh!” I said, holding out my hands.“Oh!”
“What? What?!”
I patted my coat pockets. “You’re going to think I’m mad.”
“Already do. Tell me!”
“That banknote...” I quickly pulled my handbag from the top of my satchel and thumbed through it as I talked. “Sarkany handed me an old Turkish banknote in the hotel lobby in Istanbul. Remember, I told you? He said I dropped it, but I didn’t, and oh God—where did I put it? I went to my room, and you were there, and I got all discombobulated, and it’s not here!”
Huck’s eyes flicked toward my satchel. “Was that in the hotel room in Istanbul?”
“Uh, yes, but—”
Before I could protest, he snatched it from me, turned it upside down, and shook half the contents onto the roof. Deft fingers sorted through my silk underclothes and stockings. “Think, banshee. What did you do with it when—”
Huck stopped, midsentence, and pulled out a scrap of paper: the banknote! He unfolded the wrinkled paper, flipped it over, and held it up to the moonlight. And I knew immediately that my hunch was right:
A design had been inked onto the back.
Not a design. An ominous-looking occult sigil.
“I’ve seen this!” I whispered. “In theHammer of the Witches.”
“What the hell...?” When Huck tilted the banknote, a spiderweb made of dusty light blossomed over the paper and shot across the roof toward the door.
We both yelped. Huck dropped the banknote.
Not an illusion. Very much real.
“What is this hellish wickedness?” Huck said, thoroughly alarmed.
“A spell,” I said, astounded. “Some kind of tracking spell.”
“This is...”
“Magic. Witchcraft. Spellwork.” Right in front of our eyes! After everything esoteric I’d read, after all the research I’d done... Here was the proof that it existed. Maybe not tangible proof, but I knew what I saw.
“It’s a trick of light—stage magic,” Huck insisted.
I shook my head. “Sarkany isn’t Harry Houdini. He’s an occultist. And he’s been tracking us since Istanbul. The train, and...” My wolf dream in the vardo wagon. Had Sarkany and his hound been outside, stalking us while we slept? A terrible chill went through me.
