“How are you at history?”

“I suck at history.” My own, especially.

He lets out a slow breath. “You . . . are not a normal person.”

“I think I have that figured out.”

“No. You’re very different. Your mother was, too.”

Hearing the word mother sets off an inexplicable ache in me. Try as I might to summon a face, there is nothing. “Do you know her?”

“I knew of her, your birth mother.”

Birth mother.

“She’s gone, Audra,” he says.

I stare out at the dark line of trees. I’ve studied Rolan intermittently for the last hour, searching for anything in the lines of his face or set of his jaw that might tell me what I’m doing leaving the state with a stranger in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on my back and the cash in my pocket. But suddenly I can’t look at him.

He lets out a slow, audible breath. “You, your mother, your grandmother, her mother before her, for four hundred years . . . You’re all descended from a Hungarian noble named Elizabeth Bathory. The Blood Countess. The most prolific female serial killer of all time.”

I slowly turn to look at him.

“And you’ve all been hunted by people like Luka.”

Serial killer. Hunted. “I don’t understand. Blood . . . Countess?”

“According to legend, she tortured and killed over six hundred servant girls in her lifetime. She bit, whipped, and starved young female servants before killing them. Poured water on naked girls in the winter until they froze. Burned them, stuck them with needles, ate their flesh . . .”

I lift my hand. “Okay, wait a minute . . .”

“After her husband died she continued to move between her estates. Bodies showed up wherever she went. Outside city walls, in gardens, even under beds.”

“I said stop!”

“You want to know? I’m telling you!” he says. “The servant girls were peasants. Their families had no recourse. But when Elizabeth started an etiquette school and several young noblewomen disappeared, the Hungarian king opened an investigation. After more than three hundred testimonies, Elizabeth’s accomplices were burned at the stake. Elizabeth, though, was the widow of a national war hero, niece to the former king of Poland, cousin to the prince of Transylvania, and richer than the crown, which owed her money. She never faced trial. Instead, she was walled up in a room in one of her castles, where she lived three years until she died, in 1614. The name Bathory has been a curse ever since. That is the short version.”

I stare at him, realizing I have placed my life in the hands of a raving lunatic.

He glances at me. “I’m not telling you anything you can’t look up on your own.”

“Okay . . . but even if that’s true, so what? It’s the twenty-first century. This has nothing to do with me.”

“It has everything to do with you.”

“How?” I demand.