Coronets and Steel (Dobrenica)

Too much imagination was tantamount to lying―that’s what my grandmother taught me. So when I first got the sense that someone was following me, I ignored it. Who’d waste time following me?

Me, being Aurelia Kim Murray, a grad student from California with a passion for ballet and fencing, and a hopelessly romantic vision of the world. I had some to Europe to track down my grandparents’ families, but so far I’d had no luck.

I couldn’t explain the sense of urgency that drove me, even to myself. It has begun that day four months ago when my grandmother lay restlessly in her bed, her eyes glittering with fever as she gripped my hand. “Your mother is too gentle,” she’s whispered in her aristocratic Parisian French. “I cannot send her to steal the breach.”

Breach? What breach? With her family? With my grandfather’s family? Neither Mom nor I knew anything about Grandmother’s family or the handsome man in the silver-framed photo that Gran always kept on her bedside table.

“She wouldn’t talk about her life before California,” my mom has said, as we waited in yet another specialist’s office, hoping to find out why, though Gran had recovered from her fever, she had not spoken since.

Nothing had come of my search in Paris, or Vienna, and no matter how fast I walked along the grand boulevards, I knew I couldn’t outpace my sense of failure.

And that’s when I met my first ghost.

But seeing ghosts wasn’t my biggest problem. I was being followed, and I was about to find out more about my lineage than I had ever imagined possible in my wildest, most fanciful dreams…or nightmares.