“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Huck said in a rough voice, clutching his rucksack against his heaving chest with one hand and using the other to hold himself up against the trunk of a tree.
“Are we safe?” I asked, still panicked. “Will it explode again?”
“It’s fine, fine,” he mumbled, catching his breath. “All the petrol... poof! No more fuel, no more explody.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “That was... Oh God. Think I’m... going to have... a heart attack. That was... not good. Not good at all.”
“Thought we were walking shish kebobs,” he agreed, letting his head drop in relief.
That made two of us. We caught our breath and stared back at the wreckage in a daze. I patted my coat pocket. Lovena’s talisman was still there. Maybe she’d saved us from death by flame. Or death by mangled bodies in a plane crash.
“What about the fire spreading?” I asked. I didn’t want to be responsible for burning down an entire forest.
“The snow will keep it from spreading to the trees. It’s too wet to burn. It’s all right now,” he assured me, flipping up his coat collar to shield his neck from the biting wind. “We’re alive, and it’s going to be all right now.”
But it wasn’t. Not exactly. Death by fire was quick. Now we were stuck in a dark forest, miles away from what we assumed was Cluj—a city far, far north of where we needed to be. On top of that, it was snowing, and there was no shelter in sight.
And it was cold. Very,verycold.
Right. Okay. “So... what now?” I asked as Huck slipped the straps of his rucksack over his shoulders. “How do we get out of here before we freeze to death? I’m worried this fire will draw wild animals.”
“Nah. Just the opposite,” he said, still a little breathless. “Animals run from forest fires.”
“Coyotes are attracted to campfires.”
“Europe doesn’t have coyotes.”
“But it has bears....”
“Christ,” he mumbled. “Like arguing with a mule, it is.”
I frowned. “Mule? That’s what you think of me?”
He shook both his hands and his head. “Now is not the time. I’m freezing my bollocks off. We need to concentrate on finding a way out of here, yeah?”
Okay, fine. “That’s north,” I informed him.
“Is it?” he asked, looking up at the moonlit sky for reassurance.
“Pretty sure. You looked at the forest on that map. Which way should we go?”
He glanced around. “That way.”
“You sure? Are you just saying that? Because I seem to recall that time we got lost in Mexico City, and you wouldn’t ask for directions but insisted you knew the way, and we ended up—”
“Bzzzt!”He mimicked zipping his lips together. “Not now, banshee. Just start walking.”
“Since you know where we’re going...,” I mumbled. “Lead the way.”
Irritable and anxious, both of us headed off in the direction Huck insisted was right, farther into the forest, away from the clearing, our breath white in the darkness. We trudged through falling snow, tripping over underbrush and winding our way through the trees in silence. The farther we went, the more I worried. This didn’t feel like the way out. Not that I was entirely sure where “out” was either. But it felt as if we were goingawayrather thantowardcivilization, and that made me nervous.
After a half hour or more of hiking through black woods with no foreseeable end, we came to an eerie grove of strange trees. Their curved trunks were shaped like fishhooks—as if some terrible storm bent them a hundred years ago and they’d just continued growing that way. I’d never seen anything like it. Along with the dead clearing, it was plain to see why people called this forest haunted. All I knew was that every woodland sound made my pulse race, and I was jumping at shadows.
When we spied moonlight on the other side of the strange, twisted grove of bent trees, I couldn’t have been more relieved. Huck pointed out a small stream. “Let’s follow that,” he suggested.
I agreed. Better than roaming around aimlessly anyway.
Though the stream was narrow—we could cross it easily—its presence created a break in the tree canopy that allowed columns of pale light to filter into the dark woods. We hurried to the light like moths to flame.
