“Because whatever it is, it’s even more valuable or threatening than you are.”

I close my eyes. But every time I do, I can’t stop seeing Luka beaten nearly to death. Can’t stop thinking of Nino, who didn’t survive. I would gladly trade the gifts and power Nikola seems to crave so much for a common life without them, surrounded by the people I love. Given the choice now, I wouldn’t take a single step further.

But I am not surrounded by those I love. And I have been unable so far to protect them.

My mother failed in this regard, too.

Something nags at the back of my mind. The incongruences in her notes. If her mind was like mine, she would never have needed to write notes at all. Or having done so, could have destroyed and retained the information.

Unless they were meant as a message to someone who could make sense of them, who thought like she did.

Someone like me.

“Is there any possibility they’ll let Luka live?”

“I suppose that depends,” Rolan says quietly.

“On what?”

“On you.”

41

If I never see this stretch of highway to Bratislava again it will be too soon.

Claudia is in hysterics at the thought of me with a hunter. It’s 2:00 A.M., and I’ve asked her to dispose of the envelope I left with her somewhere safe, if such a place exists. Or to burn it if it doesn’t. Pain twists in my chest at the thought of losing those few precious remnants of my mother. Of Luka.

“Whatever you do,” I say, “don’t open it, don’t read it, don’t even feel it, or you’ll end up in the same position I am.”

My mother’s notes—the ones Nikola found—are spread across my lap, but I am convinced, once again, that they are a red herring.

Jester seizes the phone from Claudia.

“Where are you? We’re coming there.”

“No. Get out of the city. Stay safe. Set up shop. I’ll need your help.”

An hour later I’m just trying to hold my brain together. To summon meaning from the inconsistencies between Nikola’s collection and mine. To decode the numbers (or letters) tattooed on my back in case they served a dual purpose. To trace imaginary roads between the Bathory family estates, scattered like pebbles across the Austro-Hungarian empire. Searching, all the while, for patterns until my mind is as cluttered as one of my mother’s pages.

I ask Jester to research the burial grounds of the Bathory relatives, the conspiracy theories about the location of her body, which has never been found. It’s got to be near the last place she drew breath, at Cachtice in modern-day Slovakia, northeast of Bratislava.

“But it wouldn’t be a church, I don’t think,” I say. Her name was unholy at her death.