Dacia’s bed was neatly made, and the room was empty.
A hundred thoughts flashed through Lou’s mind as she stood frozen in the doorway. Dacia had fled. She had eloped with Will Carver, or Lord Johnny, or even Prince Mihai.
Goodness, there were a lot of people she could imagine Dacia eloping with!
Or perhaps Dacia had gone to Bucharest. To Buda-Pesth. To Paris, London, or New York. Becoming a wolf had made her ill, and they had taken her to a doctor. Or, most likely, Aunt Kate had decided to take vengeance on her niece for her loss of position.
Radu had carried Lou back to the house last night, after he had turned back into a human, and Uncle Horia had taken Dacia. But had he brought her back to this room at all? Lou cursed herself for not looking in on Dacia.
As Lou hurried across the room to the door that led into the house, she heard a strange choking noise.
Lou felt herself start to dissipate into Smoke and got herself under control just in time. The noise had come from the other side of the bed, near the wall. She grabbed up the heavy pewter candlestick on the bedside table and crept around the bed.
Dacia was huddled on the floor in her chemise, her hair matted and her face red and swollen from crying. She looked up at Lou with bloodshot eyes, made all the more vivid by the long black-and-red scratch down her pale cheek.
“I want to die,” Dacia croaked.
“Now what have you done?”
As soon as the question left her mouth, Lou wanted to slap herself, but Dacia didn’t seem to care.
“I’m a monster, LouLou,” Dacia sobbed. She made a sudden movement as though to grab the hem of Lou’s gown, but checked herself and huddled against the wall again. “A monster! I almost killed Aunt Kate last night! I took off my clothes and ran through the woods naked! Our family turned into monsters, and I did, too!” Dacia’s sobs were dry and horrible to hear, and Lou could see that her cousin’s red eyes no longer had tears to cry.
“If you are, then I am, too,” Lou said practically. “But I don’t feel like a monster. I feel wonderful.”
“That’s because you are,” Dacia softly. “You’re beautiful, like a forest spirit. I’m an animal, a hairy animal that bites and kills and likes the taste of . . . the taste of . . . blood!” She pressed her face into her knees.
Lou was a little sickened by this last revelation, but didn’t feel that there was any need to dwell on it. She needed Dacia up and dressed, because even with her newfound sense of beauty and strength, she didn’t particularly want to face Lady Ioana alone.
“Dacia, stop wallowing at once!” Lou ordered her cousin. “Have a bath and get dressed. You will feel so much better.”
“But then what?” Dacia asked hollowly, looking up. “It doesn’t matter if I ever get dressed again.” She let her head droop, shoulders heaving. There were leaves caught in her hair. She looked up at Lou again. “You look beautiful,” she said suddenly. “That’s a good color for you.”
This sign of the old Dacia encouraged Lou. She rang for the maid to prepare a bath. The girl tried to look past Lou at Dacia, but Lou shut the door in her face.
She pulled her cousin to her feet. Dacia swayed like a willow wand, and Lou braced herself to catch the taller girl. But then Dacia righted herself, and looked around with reddened eyes.
“I can never leave here,” she said. “This will always be my room.”
“Stop being dramatic,” Lou ordered. “We’re leaving today.”
“What do you mean? What did Lady Ioana say?” Dacia bit her already ragged lower lip. “Where are they taking us now?” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.
Before she answered, Lou led Dacia to the bathroom, where the maid was fussing about with bath oils and towels. Lou dismissed her with a jerk of her head. “They aren’t taking us anywhere,” she told Dacia when they were alone. “You and I are going to Bucharest, and then on to Buda-Pesth to meet my father and brothers.”
“We are?”
“Yes,” Lou said, pushing Dacia into the bathroom and closing the door behind her. “We are. So hurry and bathe and get dressed,” she called through the door.
“Trying to lie in bed and be regal, was she?”
Lou turned to find Aunt Kate standing there, looking arch and sour at the same time. It was not a pleasant combination. She was wearing a traditional gown, and Lou thought she looked like some archaic queen. Which she was, or had been until last night.
“Was it hard?” The question slipped out before Lou could stop it.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Was it hard to live in New York all these years?” Lou clarified. “Away from the other . . . the others?”
Aunt Kate didn’t answer for a long time. She didn’t seem angry, though, so Lou relaxed very slightly.
“Yes,” Aunt Kate said finally. “It was. But Lady Ioana ordered me to go, and I went. That is the way of our family.”
“But you were the leader of the Claw, weren’t you? Their queen?”
“Lady Ioana is the leader of the family,” Aunt Kate said. She sounded as though she were reciting a lesson. “She is the true queen.”
As her aunt moved to walk around Lou, Lou stepped to the side to block her.
“And now Dacia is the queen of the wolves . . . the Claw.”
Aunt Kate winced, and put one hand to her throat, where a filmy silk scarf did not quite conceal the place where Dacia had bitten their aunt. “I believe that has been established,” she said.
“I see,” Lou said, her brain whirling. She fixed Aunt Kate with her gaze, and saw her aunt actually squirm a little, avoiding her eyes. “One more question?”
Aunt Kate just looked over Lou’s shoulder. She didn’t agree, but she didn’t walk away, either, so Lou plunged ahead.
“Will my brothers become the Smoke as well?”
“No,” Aunt Kate said. “Girls inherit their talent from their mother, boys from their father. Your brothers will take after your father, and be perfectly human. Likewise, if Ileana’s child is a boy, he will be of no interest to Lady Ioana. But if it is a girl, she will need to come here and discover her true self.” She sighed.
Lou blurted out more questions, since Aunt Kate didn’t leave. “Why am I the Smoke, then, if my mother is the Wing? Why are you the Claw? And Aunt Ileana . . . she’s the Claw as well, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is.” Now Aunt Kate brushed a hand against her cheek, as though Lou’s questions had begun to annoy her. “It’s only the talent for transformation that is passed down. The form is determined by one’s . . . inner self, I suppose.” Aunt Kate looked past her again. “Is that all?”
“Yes, thank you,” Lou said, pleased to have finally gotten some answers.
Aunt Kate started to walk on, but stopped suddenly and came closer to Lou. Lou almost backed away from her aunt, steeling herself just in time.
“My grandmother Ana was the Smoke,” Aunt Kate said softly. “The last one until now. The Smoke are always women, and first among our family, above the Claw and the Wing.” Aunt Kate looked over her shoulder, and leaned closer to Lou.
“You have no girl cousins here in Romania, but girls have been born. And died.”
Lou felt dizzy. “You don’t mean . . . how . . . not Lady Ioana?” She gasped out the question, not even sure she understood it herself.
“My mother likes being a queen,” Aunt Kate whispered. “She would have married Mihai’s grandfather, if he would have had her, but he chose another.
“Then the prophecy came, and how much easier to put a puppet queen on the throne beside a young king? All she had to do was make sure no one took control of the family from her.” Aunt Kate’s smile bore a ghost of the love she had once shown Lou and Dacia. “I did my best to protect you. I told her in every letter that I was sure you were the Wing. Told her I had tasted your blood, looked into your eyes, consulted an American seer . . .”
“But you knew?” Lou could barely form the words.
“Oh, my dear,”
Aunt Kate said, putting one hand on Lou’s cheek. For the moment her face softened, and she was the beautiful Aunt Kate that Lou had always known. “I could tell from the time you learned to walk that you were meant to fly. Higher than all of us.”
She went to her own room and locked the door.
Lou stood for a moment longer in the passage, frozen, and then finally summoned the strength to carry on to Dacia’s room. Dacia was in the bath, so Lou selected a green morning gown and laid it on the bed. She rang for the maid and asked her to help Dacia dress, and then Lou walked stiffly along the balcony to her own room.
Lou sat down for a moment on a chair. Then she got up and sat on the edge of the bed. Then she got up again, opened the shutters, took a breath of air, and fought down a little sob.
“I need to do something,” she said aloud. “I need to do something or I’ll have the vapors like some silly miss at her first ball.”
She sat at the little writing desk and carefully composed a letter to her father. She could not bring herself to tell him what she had just learned, so instead she informed him that she and Dacia would be leaving within the next few days, and promised to send a telegram with the information on their train once they had tickets in hand. When she was done she took a moment to admire her own handwriting, which was just as neat as ever and bore no sign of how badly she was shaking.
Lou thought about putting the letter on the tray in the main hall for one of the servants to post, which she had planned to do earlier, but didn’t feel quite that confident. Instead she went down to the front gate. There was an old Gypsy man there she didn’t recognize, and she gave him the letter and some money.
“I heard howling in the forest last night,” the old man said, smiling toothlessly at her.
“I didn’t notice,” she said with a quelling look.
The old man cackled with laughter, but it was easier to ignore than Lou would have thought. She went inside the gate and pulled it shut behind her.
THE DIARY OF MISS DACIA VREEHOLT
14 June 1897
I never meant for this to happen! What have I done? All I wanted was to run, to be free, to do what I felt like doing just once in this life! I’ve never hurt anyone, not even when I was going to go up north with Lord Johnny! It seems too stupid for words now. We were only going to pretend to elope so that he could spy on that man from the Treasury! But Aunt Kate caught us . . . and now I’ve caught Aunt Kate, so to speak. First with Mihai’s uncle, and now . . . this. I always wanted to be a leader, but of society, not of this. I see how childish it all was; everything in my life was just a stupid game until now. If only I could have been a fairytale queen, in a beautiful palace, with nothing to do but dance and be beautiful.
Now I am a queen of darkness and terror.
CASA DRAGOSLOVEAN
The gown laid out on her bed made Dacia shudder. She didn’t want to wear Parisian gowns, or even her old New York gowns. For all Lou’s determination, Dacia knew that all that was behind them now. Even if Lady Ioana let them return to New York, why would they want to? Could they honestly sit in front parlors with their old friends, drinking lemonade in summer and tea in winter and talking about parties and engagements, when they knew that they were . . . different?
Dacia was a wolf. She could feel it there, beneath her skin, all the time now. She could drop her dressing gown to the floor and transform in a matter of seconds if she wanted to. She no longer cared whether Jenny Darville invited her to be a bridesmaid for her wedding. She never wanted to see Jenny Darville again, or anyone from New York, in case they guessed her secret.
Will Carver’s face popped into her head, and she shuddered, causing the maid to look at her fearfully. The girl was trying to help her into her underthings, but Dacia was standing and staring out the window. If this little maid, who probably knew all about Dacia and the rest of her family, could look at her like that, how would Will look at her? Would he recognize that there was something different about her? Or would he be too caught up in his art to notice? This last thought was surprisingly bitter.
Just a few weeks ago she had been waiting for Will to propose. Everyone in New York had been waiting, too. Dacia’s friends had been green with envy, her Vreeholt relations beside themselves with delight. But then it had come to Ileana’s attention, and she had insisted that Dacia go abroad before she made any rash decisions. Dacia had of course leaped at the chance to travel, ignoring the baffling idea that marrying Mr. William J. Carver, of the Manhattan Carvers, was a rash decision.
But now she knew why her mother wanted her away from Will.
Dacia knew now that she should be grateful to her mother. Will was not half so dashing and handsome as Lord Johnny, but he was from an old and wealthy family, and was currently considered the best catch in New York. And, with his artistic temperament, he was far less boring than most New York bachelors. She’d even fancied herself in love with him, though really she was in love with the idea of him: rich, admired, and artistic.
He would have made an eminently suitable husband, but Dacia could no longer be an eminently suitable wife. Because of her mother’s legacy, this wolf that hid within her, Will would not—could not—have anything to do with her. She thought of his ravings at Bran about the monstrousness of the Dracula family and felt sick. They weren’t the monsters: she was.
She brushed a hand against the scratch on her cheek. Though it had seemed deep the night before, it was healing well and she didn’t think it would leave a scar. In the moonlight, the drops that had fallen from it had had a silver glow to them . . . and just now in the bath the dried blood had been as black as soot. The memory made her shake, and the maid looked even paler and more frightened.
“Just go, then,” Dacia said, not wanting to feel the girl’s hands trembling as she helped Dacia dress.
When the maid had gone, Dacia put the green silk gown at the back of her wardrobe where she wouldn’t have to see it and be reminded of her old, good life. She took out a traditional gown, embroidered in red and blue, and put it on, grateful that she didn’t need help with the simple garment. She even got the apron and sash in place without too much trouble. Then she braided her hair in a long plait and left her room, trying not to look timid as she checked the corridor first. She didn’t want to run into Aunt Kate.
Lou popped out of her room when Dacia passed it, as though she had been waiting for her cousin to emerge. She looked startled when she took in Dacia’s choice of clothing, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she took Dacia’s arm and led her downstairs.
“I have something to tell you,” Lou whispered as they went down. “But I can’t say it just now.”
Dacia summoned the will to look at her cousin but couldn’t make her mouth move to ask what it was Lou had to say.
From behind the sitting room door came the sound of voices. Dacia thought she could hear Lou’s mother and Uncle Horia despite the thickness of the wooden door. Everything seemed louder today, and the sunlight streaming through the open windows on either side of the front door was far too bright.
“They’re talking about us,” Dacia said, her voice dull.
What more was there to say? They had done exactly as the family had expected. No, that wasn’t true. Lou had not changed into a bat, but an enchanted being of mist, and Dacia had challenged Aunt Kate and won her place in some sort of primitive duel. But what did it all mean?
“Still?” Lou wrinkled her noise. “It’s been hours!”
Dacia’s heart sank even further, though she hadn’t thought that was possible.
“Oh, well, we’d best beard the lion in her den,” Lou said, trying to sound cheery and almost succeeding.
Lou rapped on the door and the voices within stopped. Taking this as a sign to enter, Lou lifted the latch and went in, dragging Dacia along behind.
“Good morning, Lady Ioana,” she said, nodding to the old woman. “Uncle Horia. Mother.”
Uncle Horia stood and bowed to Lou, only to sit again hastily whe
n his mother shot him a terrible look. Aunt Maria fluttered a bit as though she might rise, then subsided, and Lady Ioana turned her attention to the girls.
“Good morning,” their grandmother purred. “I hope that you both slept well. I am surprised that you did not stay abed longer. You both had quite an exciting night.”
“Yes,” Lou said, and there was a tightness in her voice that hadn’t been there before. “Quite exciting. I slept all right, but Dacia did not sleep at all. Which is part of the reason why we wanted to speak to you.”
“Oh?” Lady Ioana raised her eyebrows.
She was smiling. Dacia hated her grandmother’s smile. It was a look of pure evil, in her opinion. Bat or no, Lady Ioana most often looked like a cat that was letting a mouse get within a hand’s breadth of its home before she dealt the killing blow.
“Dacia and I need to go back to Bucharest now,” Lou said. Her voice was very even, but Dacia could feel in the additional pressure from Lou’s hand on her arm that her cousin was not as calm as she seemed. “We would like to order the travel carriage.”
“You need to go back to Bucharest?” Again the smile.
Dacia felt like her stomach was filled with ice. She wanted to run from the room, and only Lou’s arm in hers kept her from fleeing.
“Maria Louisa, don’t be silly,” Aunt Maria said, waving a handkerchief at her daughter as though wiping her request away. “There is so much to discuss! And so much to teach you!”
“Dacia is very shaken by the events of last night,” Lou pressed on. “And, although I love it here”—a trace of wistfulness showed in her voice—“I don’t think it’s the right place for us to be right now. I would like to go back to Bucharest today and then on to Buda-Pesth. We’ll say good-bye to the Szekelys, and other acquaintances we’ve made in Bucharest first, of course.” She nodded at her mother, as though convincing Aunt Maria that she would observe all the formalities of polite society.