“Let me show you.” Mihai retreated to a tall, overflowing bookcase behind the counter. When he returned, it was with a clothbound book that I knew all too well.
“Batterman’s,” I said, heart racing wildly.
“You know it?” Mihai asked, cracking it open.
“I have a copy in my bag.”
He looked pleased. “It is an excellent reference. We have contributed many photographs to the last edition. Dr. Lydia Batterman is a personal acquaintance.”
Had I been wary and mildly frightened by these two odd brothers? No more. I was in their thrall now and shook away Huck’s hand from my elbow to inspect their copy of my favorite field guide.
Dozens of pages in the book were marked with tiny pieces of blue paper. Mihai bent low, grunting, until he found the right marker and flipped to a page. “Here,” he said, turning it around to give Huck and me a better view. He pointed at the middle of the page. “Perhaps you have seen this already.”
Pfft.Perhaps it was the wrong time to brag that I’d committed entire sections of the book to memory. I glanced to the open page, expecting to see the familiar woodcut of Prince Dracula enjoying a quiet lunch in front of his impaled corpses. But Petar had the field guide open to a different section in the book, two hundred years after Vlad. His finger tapped above an engraving of an infamous French woman: Catherine Monvoisin.
“More widely known simply as La Voisin,” Mihai said. “She was a fortune-teller, a sorceress, and a poisoner for hire who confessed to the ritual murder of a thousand infants in black masses. That was before she tried to poison Louis XIV and was burned at the stake for her crimes in 1680. But look closely at her carved ivory ring in this rare engraving.”
He offered me a magnifying glass. I held it above the engraving and saw clearly:
Three bands woven together to form one ring.
I inhaled sharply, unable to keep my hand from shaking with exhilaration.
Puzzle ring!I was right. I was right. I was right....
Trying to stay calm, I read the notation next to the engraving, which said that though witnesses in Louis XIV’s court claimed the ring once belonged to the devil, modern archivists have suggested this was a mistranslation and that they meant “dragon,” because a scaled creature graced the tops of the joined bands.
How about that? It was here, inBatterman’s, all along.
The giddy joy of discovery zipped through me. I felt light-headed.
When I looked up from the page, the twins were both smiling at me. Petar said, “I can see from your face that you were already aware your father’s quest was misinformed. He should have been looking for three rings, not one.”
I elbowed Huck discreetly, but he wasn’t feeling the same triumphant buzz I was enjoying. All of this was too much for him. Any second he’d be making the sign of the cross.
“I never thought to look for the ring in other entries,” I told the twins, gesturing toward the book. “I know my father didn’t either. He... doesn’t appreciateBatterman’sas I do.”
Petar nodded, sympathetic. “He is a skeptic. If he’d consulted us at the start of his quest, we would have told him no good could come of looking for Vlad’s war ring, because Mr. Rothwild uses people until he doesn’t need them any longer. They are disposable to him. And Mr. Fox will be disposable when Mr. Rothwild gets what he wants.”
Disposable? That was the last thing I wanted to hear. A fresh shot of panic pinged down my spine... and then something struck me.
“But Rothwild doesn’t have what he wants yet,” I said. “Not if you still own one band of the ring.”
“We’re only caretakers,” Petar insisted. “It’s not ours to own.”
“But you have it?” I pressed.
“We should be certain,” his brother whispered, and the two men exchanged a look and nod before Petar turned toward me.
“May I see your hand?” he asked, urging me to come closer. Looking at me much the same way as Lovena had.
“Do you want to listen to my blood?” I asked.
His smile was slow and broad. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Careful,” Huck whispered low under his breath.
He wasn’t wrong to be cautious, of course, but I was curious. And if these men were our enemies, I couldn’t see why they’d share all of this information with us so willingly. Just because they were... well, a little odd didn’t say anything about their moral character. At least, that’s what my gut was telling me.
