Chapter I
The sunlight glowed warm on his face and glinted over the building’s slate roof. Dr. Ethan Dalton raised his hand to shade his eyes, scattering the rays through his fingers.
At six stories high, with the architectural look of a palace, the university in Bucharest, Romania had been a great place to spend the whole day discussing breakthroughs in genetics. In Ethan’s previous experience, presentations of cutting-edge genetic research more often took place in droll, hidden surroundings, like a certain 1970s office building in uptown New York City.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” a voice yelled.
Ethan abandoned his study of the building to watch Dr. Jack Murray–wearing a T-shirt, khaki hiking pants, and a suspiciously wide, dimpled grin–jog toward him.
“Our presentation ended ten minutes ago,” Ethan replied. “How are you changed already?”
Jack clapped his hands and extended them wide. “That’s ten whole minutes we’ve been free to explore, man! C’mon, get your stuff from the hotel. We’re burning daylight. I’ve got the rental car already.”
“We have the whole weekend. What’s your hurry to leave Bucharest? There’s a lot we haven’t seen here.”
“I told you Alexi said we have to get up to the mountains near Brasov. And we’re going hiking, so tell me you have different shoes.”
Ethan eyed his dress shoes and considered the time Jack had somehow convinced him to climb up the under-construction building on Columbia’s campus to watch the New Year’s fireworks. Getting down had been terrifying, and Ethan had vowed never to follow Jack into anything like that again. But that hadn’t been the last thing Jack had talked him into. No suggestion of Jack’s ever seemed optional. Ethan should have known better than to agree to explore a foreign country with him.
“You’ve got to get out of the lab more,” Jack said.
Ethan spun in a half circle and gestured at his surroundings. “I’m pretty far out of the lab right now, aren’t I?”
“And would you even be here without me talking you into it?”
Maybe not, but Ethan wasn’t conceding the point. “Just tell me you’ll leave enough time for shopping. I need to get Lee something.”
Jack playfully shoved Ethan’s shoulder. “Oh yeah? That’s going well, huh? We’re to the gift stage already?”
Ethan had only been dating colleague Lee Chen for a few weeks, and even that amount of a relationship seemed like a miracle that he didn’t want to mess up. “You think I shouldn’t get her anything?”
“Nah, go for it. We’ll have time when we get back. But I’m serious about the shoe question,” Jack prodded.
How is it possible for a genetics nerd to be such a jock? Ethan wondered, not for the first time. Nearly every weekend, Jack returned to work with pictures of a waterfall or some other natural wonder he had escaped the city to find. He even looked more like an outdoorsman with his athletic physique and stylishly spiked dark hair, while Ethan better fit the mold of a genetics professor with shoulders that were constantly stooped over something and hair that was forgotten for months at a time.
Ethan pushed Jack back. “I have tennis shoes, all right? Let me go back to the hotel and pack up. There’s no telling what you’re going to get us into.”
After only twenty minutes to change and pack, Ethan found himself herded into the rental car with his overstuffed suitcase. While Jack drove, Ethan rested against the passenger seat and watched the unfamiliar sights drift by. Having lived in New York City all his life, he’d seen a fair share of peoples and cultures, but he hadn’t ventured far to explore them. Instead, he’d spent most of the last eight years of his life focused downward on the very tiny building blocks of life and their mysteries.
Jack, his research partner and fellow author on the research they were presenting at the conference, had convinced him to come out of his lab and travel halfway across the world to share knowledge with other like-minded academics. The experience, and his budding relationship with Lee, had Ethan thinking about how to divide his focus between research and the rest of the world.
Views of architecturally varied buildings gave way to rolling hills draped with grass, its green tired from the long summer but not yet yellowed.
“Oh, did you see that road sign?” Jack cut into Ethan’s reverie, jerking his attention back to the road but not in time to see the sign.
“No. What did it say?”
Jack’s lips moved into several silent shapes before he said, “You know. Something in Romanian.”
“Wow.”
Jack’s ever-present grin belayed concern.
Ethan reached for Jack’s phone perched in a cup holder. “Why, where are we?”
“Well, I think I’ve lost service. The GPS is still pulled up, but it may have started having some trouble getting a lock on us.”
“So we’re lost,” Ethan concluded.
“No, no, we’re not lost. I’m just not sure it knows where we are.”
“That’s the definition of lost, Jack.” Ethan set the phone down and retrieved his own to reveal the same lack of connection.
“We must be on this road here.” Jack pointed to the screen. “I’ll make the next left and see if I can get it back on track.”
As they drove closer to the rolling hills visible through the windshield, the hilltops became naked rock reaching for the sky above, and the road degraded into a pothole-covered one lane.
“There’s no way this is the road you’re supposed to be on,” Ethan said.
“No.” Jack used a finger to scroll the map around. “And this doesn’t have us on a road at all anymore.”
“Just turn around and go back.”
“Hold on, let me see if there’s something up here.”
Ethan opened the glove compartment and pushed aside some rental papers to find a map. Unfolding it in his lap, he studied it for almost a mile before looking back up with no further insight. It was pretty hard to use a map to figure out where he was going if he didn’t know where he was to begin with.
Jack made another turn that took them down a narrow road with even more pot holes in it.
“Seriously, there’s no way this is going back to the highway,” Ethan insisted. “Just turn around. We’re only losing more daylight out here.”
“It’s an adventure!”
“Until you need food and a place to sleep.”
“It’s not even dark yet. We have time.”
“If we turn around now.” Ethan pointed at the GPS which had them in a blank field of green.
“Fine, fine,” Jack sighed. “We’ll turn around when I find a drive or turn off or something.”
Five minutes after Ethan would have stopped and made a three-point turn–or however many points were necessary–Jack eased the car off the road next to an old post and rail fence. The ground momentarily evened out, but as Jack drove forward, the car bucked and threw Ethan forward to catch himself against the dash.
Jack winced but kept cranking the wheel to get them back on the worn pavement facing the other direction. “Ok, here we go.”
As he started driving back the way they had come, the bumping didn’t stop.
“That can’t be good,” Ethan groaned.
Jack stopped in the middle of the deserted road and opened his door to look. When he grunted without further explanation, Ethan got out to see for himself.
The back left tire was flat.
“Here’s hoping there’s a spare in the trunk,” Ethan said.
Not wanting to pull off the narrow road again, Ethan took turns with Jack keeping a lookout for any traffic and scraping his knuckles on the pavement while trying to work the jack and the wrench.
As they finished, the sun dropped below the ridge of the mountain, and Ethan squinted in the twilight at the spare tire that looked little better than the flat one they had just wrestled off. “We’re not going to get far on this.”
“Well…” Jack’s grin had mellowed a level. “We’ll just–hey, look. A person.”
Following Jack’s wave to the field on the other side of the fence, Ethan spotted a wiry old man who had the look of a tree that had grown clinging to the rock of the mountain. He was approaching slowly through the field of brown stalks.
“What are the odds he speaks English?” Jack asked.
“Better than the odds that we speak Romanian.” Ethan started for the fence.
The old farmer met them there, and, after listening to Jack’s eager questions and looking them over for a solid minute, he cracked a smile that showed several missing teeth. “American?”
“Yes, we are,” Jack confirmed.
“Come! My village. Stay. Fix tire.” His limited English was indeed infinitely better than their Romanian.
“Where?” Jack asked eagerly.
He gestured further down the road they were on, waved his hand in some vague directions, and pointed up and then down with a few words that could have been instructions. Jack continued to nod as though he understood, but Ethan lost track after the first wave.
When he finished, Ethan asked, “You have new tires, out here?”
“I find, bring.” The man waved, confidently dismissive. “You come. Visit. See.” He opened his arms toward the mountains.
“Are there some trails back here? Hiking?” Jack pantomimed hiking with a walking stick.
“Yes, yes!” the man agreed. “Hike. Climb. Cave–beautiful!”
“Really? A cave?”
Ethan tried to get Jack’s attention while keeping his voice low to avoid seeming disrespectful to the friendly farmer. “I don’t know about following this guy’s random directions.”
“C’mon.” Jack turned to him. “You’re right, it’s getting dark. Let’s just go to this guy’s village, let him help us out with the tire, maybe spend the night and explore tomorrow. It’s beautiful out here! Why not take advantage of where we ended up, even if we didn’t mean to, huh?”
Ethan rubbed a hand over his face. Next time I travel with you, I am doing the planning, he thought. But he followed Jack back to the road. “Did you really understand his directions to the village?”
When Jack insisted that he did, Ethan helped direct him through a four-point turn to reverse their direction yet again before climbing into the car himself.
It was completely dark by the time Jack took another turn onto a road that was barely paved but sloped down into a valley. “Here’s that left turn he mentioned. See! We’ve got this!”
The minutes stretched out as Ethan peered forward until, out of the darkness, warmly lit windows appeared below and in front of them.
Jack drummed the steering wheel in victory. “Now we’re talking!”
The town was nestled in the hollow of the dark mountains. As they drove onto a bumpy cobblestone road, the light from the house windows was enough to show pale colored walls, shadowy red tiled roofs, and wooden fences between them.
Jack stopped in front of a building that seemed noisier with people than a home would have been. “C’mon, adventure time.”
“And the last four and half hours haven’t counted, because…?” Ethan pried himself out the squeaking car door.
At their approach, the painted wooden door of the building opened, and Jack greeted the first person they met with the whole story of their journey. The old man whose shoulders said he might have been a lumberjack when he was younger answered in curt Romanian and then waved over a younger man with a full beard who was able to greet them in English.
Ethan opted for a shorter version of their tale. “We’re here from the States at a conference in Bucharest. We were driving and got a bit turned around.”
Once they realized that Jack and Ethan needed a place to stay, the group of men became very hospitable. Before he knew what was happening, Ethan was seated at a table with a beer in his hand and some kind of sausage and potato dish in front of him.
Jack struck up a conversation with the bearded man and learned that his name was Nikolai. The others clustered around them as Nikolai told them the village had existed in nearly the same form for centuries, nestled in the base of the Carpathian Mountains. Nikolai also confirmed that there was much natural beauty to explore should they stay.
At that point in the conversation, the old lumberjack started an angry sounding rant that seemed to be directed at them.
After Nikolai argued back in Romanian, Ethan tentatively asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing wrong. He is–how you say–superstitious. Of the mountain,” Nikolai said.
“What about it?” Jack leaned forward.
Now we’re in for it, Ethan thought. If there was some local legend to go with the great outdoors around them, Jack was definitely going to be hooked.
“Old stories,” Nikolai said. “Monsters steal children and take them back to their cave and thing like that.”
One word from the old man’s rant rang some kind of bell in Ethan’s memory. “What’s strigoi?”
Some of the other men at the table got up and wandered away.
“It is the evil, ah, demon. It eat blood and hide in the caves.” Nikolai shrugged but looked away.
Ethan just nodded. Demons that drank blood. In Romania. He wasn’t much into fairy tales, but even he had heard that one before.
Jack was grinning again.
Nikolai changed the subject and asked them about lodging. When they finished eating, he led them down the cobbled street to a house he called an inn. With its stone walls, small wood-lined windows, and vines growing over the arched doorway, it had an old-world cottage charm that was impossible to get at home in New York City. They hadn’t seen the old farmer around anywhere yet, but Nikolai agreed that he could help them find a replacement tire tomorrow, so they prepared to spend the night.
An older, tidy-looking lady who seemed to speak exactly three words of English welcomed them and escorted them to a room upstairs with two single beds, a wooden chair, and a small table. She pointed down the hall to a bathroom. Ethan thanked her repeatedly while Jack carried their two large suitcases up the very narrow staircase.
Closed into their small room, Jack held out his arms. “Admit it. This is not an experience we were going to get locked up in the four-star hotel in Bucharest.”
Ethan hesitantly acknowledged, “Maybe not. Just remember you don’t have to go looking for things to all go wrong to have fun.”
“This is about the time the Ferris wheel got stuck,” Jack said.
“You could have just waited for it to get fixed.”
“You didn’t have to follow me.”
Ethan quirked one side of his mouth in a half grin and shook his head. “As if that’s ever an option with you.”
“We’ll get you over your fear of heights yet. And everything else.”
“I’m not scared of everything,” Ethan argued. “I just don’t have a death wish.”
Jack laughed. “You good if I hit the bathroom first?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” Ethan perched on the edge of one of the frilly dressed beds and pulled a scientific periodical out of the front of his suitcase.
“You’re such a nerd.”
Ethan shrugged. “I have a PhD in genetics. I think that’s been established.”
Jack gave an exaggerated gesture at himself. “But that clearly doesn’t mean you can’t also be cool.”
With a wave to get Jack to leave, Ethan leaned back against a lacy pillow and opened the journal to the first article. As far as he was concerned, the greatest adventure was discovering something new. That could be accomplished in the pages he read just as easily as whatever crazy outside adventure Jack had in mind.
