My Wild Horse King (The Russian Witch's Curse Book 4)

24. Gustav

True? What was true? What’s this kid saying?

“I have got to find my grandma,” he says. “Can you guys wait here for a second? She is never going to believe this.”

I grab his wrist and drag him back.

The muck rake drops to the ground with a clatter.

“Not so fast, kid.”

“I’m not a kid.” The boy scowls. “I’m seventeen years old.”

“That’s still a kid,” I say.

“You—are you Liepas?” He glances between Katerina and me. “Or from one of the other families?”

Now it’s our turn to be shocked. “Who are you?” I release his wrist.

“I’m Gabriel Brooks,” he says. “And I’ve known about you for a really long time.” He shakes his head. “No one ever believes they’re anything but stupid fantasy, but I’ve actually turned them into a comic book.” He’s beaming. “But to really see you, with my own two eyes.” He whistles. “Grandma Mandy’s finally going to have to read them.”

“Wait, them?” I ask. “Do you have the journals?”

Gabe nods. “When I was like, ten, I was obsessed with them. After I translated the Russian parts with Google Translate, I pored over them.”

This can’t be happening. “So they didn’t get burned up in a fire?”

“Oh, I stole them way before Grandma Mandy pretended to die.”

“She. . .what?” I’m so confused.

“It’s a long story, but when I bring the journals up, everyone just rolls their eyes. I gave up on talking about them a few years ago.” Gabe’s eyes are bright, and he grabs my wrist this time. “Let’s go.”

“But the stall?” Katerina points. “Did you need to. . .?”

Gabe shrugs. “Someone else’ll get it. Who cares about fifteen bucks an hour when I’m talking to real horse-shifters.” His eyes light up then. “What’s your other power?”

“Lightning,” Katerina says before I can wave her off.

“We should find my sister, too,” I say. “Then we can all go over together.”

“Oh, good idea,” Gabe says. “The more the merrier.” His eyes light up. “Wait, can your sister turn into a horse, too?”

“Not exactly,” I say. “But we do have three more horse-shifters in the group.”

Gabe’s bouncing on his feet as he walks.

“Should we meet with this Amanda without everyone else first?” Katerina whispers. “She seemed pretty adamant earlier.”

“Meet with her?” Gabe freezes. “Did you already talk to her?”

I nod slowly. “We came here looking for her, hoping to find the journals. But when we found her, she said they were destroyed.”

Gabe balls his hands into fists and growl-shouts. “I swear, it’s like they don’t listen to me at all.”

Seems like we’ve hit on a sore topic.

He inhales a time or two, and then he nods. “Well, they’re going to have to listen now.”

“Actually, the fewer people who know about all this, the better,” Katerina says.

“Sure, sure,” Gabe says. “But obviously Grandma Mandy can know, because, like, she can probably turn into a horse too, right?”

Katerina’s frowning. “Gustav can’t even?—”

“She should know any part of it she wants,” I say, before Katerina can bum the kid out. “But we have a few questions we’re hoping to find answers to as well, and there’s a dangerous man following us, so the quicker we can find them, the better.”

“There you are.” Aleksandr, Kristiana right behind him, barrels around the corner. He breathes a heavy sigh of relief.

“Over here,” Kris says.

Grigoriy, Mirdza, Alexei, and Adriana round the bend, all of them showing signs of relief at finally finding us.

“Whoa,” Mirdza says. “You already went all the way out and changed—” She freezes when she sees Gabe, her mouth clicking shut.

“They didn’t go anywhere,” the boy says with a grin that cannot be repressed. “She just ducked into that stall right there.” He points. “And then bam, she turned into a human!”

Aleksandr turns toward us slowly, like he’s trying to figure out how to bury us without anyone finding out.

“It’s fine, though,” Katerina says. “We spoke to Amanda and she told us the journals had been destroyed.”

Grigoriy’s massive shoulders droop. “How is that fine?”

“But when Gabe here saw me shift,” Katerina says, “he told us he has the journals. He knew just what and who I was.”

“Actually,” Gabe says, “you didn’t answer before.” His brow furrows. “But you did say lightning. Does that mean you’re a Kurakin? Or no, wait, they’re the flame ones. You must be a Yurovsky. Right?” He spins around, meeting each person’s eye in turn. “Am I right?”

Aleks, Grigoriy, and Alexei eye him strangely, like he’s a bug they’re contemplating the advisability of squashing.

“It’s fine,” I say. “He knows because of the journals. Apparently as a young child, he found them and took them.” I clear my throat, specifically not saying he stole them. “And he’s had them translated.”

“Well, kind of.” He shrugs. “I mean, Google Translate isn’t amazing. Once, when I was using it for my homework, it translated sister as camera.”

“It—what?” Adriana’s having trouble following his rapid-fire English, I think.

“He’s offered to take us to see them,” I say. “I thought we should follow his lead.”

We’re nearly to the parking lot of the fairground when Gabe stops. “Dangit. I wonder if Whitney’s done with her stupid barrel crap.”

“Wait, you know Whitney?” It makes sense, I guess. She did say Amanda was her grandmother as well. “Is she your sister?”

“You met her too?” Gabe looks bummed. “Man, they always do things before me.”

He’s jealous—like we’re his new toy. Teenage boys are the worst. And their focus is ridiculously bad. “Your sister—what’s bad about her not being done with barrels?”

“Oh, right.” He sighs. “When she went off to college, I got my own room—I’d had to share with my baby brother Nate—but now she’s back for the summer, so she’s stolen her room back, and the journals are in there, under my bed.”

“We should hurry, then,” I say.

“Or, at a thought,” Kristiana says, “if she’s home, we can just explain that we need to get in the room to grab something.”

Gabe and I exchange a glance, and the kid laughs. “She clearly doesn’t have a sister.”

I laugh. “No, she doesn’t.”

But it’s irrelevant. When we reach his house—we follow his beat-up old truck home—no one else is even there.

“We’ll stay out here,” I insist. There’s no way we’re going to follow a teenage boy inside his house. Part of me wants to drag him back to the fairground and insist that we meet his parents and clear this with his grandma first, but access to the journals is too important. Lately, it has felt like anything that could interfere with us does.

When he walks out, he hands us a stack of paper held together with black binder clips.

“What’s this?” Kristiana looks annoyed. If she were a horse, she’d have her ears back.

“Oh, that’s my translations.” He nods. “And the parts that didn’t make sense, I just kind of changed a little so the whole thing reads easier.”

I might strangle him. “It’s not an English project,” I say. “It’s journals, right? Why would you change it?”

“Some of it didn’t make any sense after I plugged it into Google,” he says. “Actually, a lot of it didn’t.”

Kris is gritting her teeth. “So you don’t speak or read Russian?”

He shakes his head. “Took me a little bit of poking to realize it was Russian. I thought it’d be Latvian. I guess some of it was, but most is Russian for sure.”

A vein in Aleksandr’s head is throbbing. “Where are the original texts?”

“Hm.” He scratches his chin. “I’m not totally sure. Did you want those instead?”

“It would be helpful,” Kris says.

Unfortunately, while he’s inside looking, three more cars pull into the drive. One of them was the same red truck that was parked outside Amanda Saddler’s yesterday.

“What on earth is wrong with you people?” Amanda’s wagging her finger at us, and if it was a light saber, I think we’d all be dead.

“The thing is,” I say.

But before I can say anything else, Aleksandr shifts.

One second he’s a tall, arrogant Russian man with dark hair and designer clothing. The next, he’s a massive black stallion, his perfectly groomed hair blowing artfully in the breeze.

Doors pop open on all three of the new vehicles. Everyone’s talking at once, so I can’t keep anything straight.

“I’m Kristiana Liepa,” my sister says. She points at me. “This is my brother Gustav.”

Everyone falls silent.

“Amanda Saddler’s our cousin, and her father took my grandfather’s journals with him when he fled Latvia years ago.”

“They belonged to my father,” Amanda says with a huff. “Crazy old man.”

Gabe shoots through the front door. “Whoa. Is this the big tall, scowly guy?” He’s staring at Obsidian Devil, my sister’s husband’s horse name.

That is such a weird phrase to think.

“He is,” I say. “His name’s Aleksander Volkonsky. He’s a very wealthy Russian nobleman who’s currently fleeing because the lunatic who just took over the Russian government wants us all dead.” I scan the circle.

There’s a man and woman who look like they could be the boy’s parents. The woman has light brown, blonde-streaked hair and a commanding air. The man’s in pretty good shape for an old guy, and he’s positioned himself slightly in front of her, as if he’ll shield her from all the madness any way he can, even if it’s with his body. Next to Amanda there’s an older man with broad shoulders and bright eyes. He looks the most irritated with us.

When Whitney pops out of the back seat, though, she looks even more excited than Gabe. “Did that man just turn into a horse?” She steps forward. “I’m so not staying in there with Nate anymore.”

Some kid, maybe Nate, is banging on the window.

A moment later, he bursts through the other door. “Wow, what a cool horse.” He jogs toward Aleksandr, and everyone springs into action at once.

Kristiana reaches for the boy, as do four other hands, but the kid’s quick. His little blond head shoots through all the hands as he walks right up to Obsidian Devil.

The massive stallion lowers his head and presses his nose into the boy’s hand.

“It’s fine,” Kristiana says. “Because he’s not really a huge stallion.”

The boy turns back toward us, confused.

“I mean, he is,” Kris says. “But he’s also my husband.”

A split second later, Aleksandr shifts again, and now he’s back to being the same, arrogant force of nature I’m used to seeing.

“What’s your power?” Gabe asks. “Please let it be flame.”

“Mikhail Kurakin’s a nightmare,” Katerina snaps. “You should be glad he’s not here.”

Gabe smacks his own forehead. “He said Volkonsky. I should have known it’s earth, but I’m just so excited that I can’t think straight.”

“I can’t believe that my grandfather’s claims weren’t totally insane.” Amanda Saddler’s shaking her head. “We should probably go inside.”

She’s not wrong. Standing on the street is just inviting more madness, and that’s the very last thing we need.

Gabe’s house is largeish, but with this many people in it, three of them quite young, it feels very, very full.

“I can’t believe you stole those journals,” Amanda says.

“I told you like four times,” Gabe says. “You told me to quit speaking nonsense.”

“You told me that you thought our family had horse-shifters in it.” Amanda’s shaking her head. “Even my dad never said anything as crazy as that.”

“He probably thought that one day, you’d read them,” Gabe says.

“He probably didn’t believe it himself,” she says, still eyeing Aleksandr sideways.

But Gabe doesn’t let us down. A few moments later, he emerges triumphant with a box, and in the bottom of it, there are four crumbling journals. He was right about the languages, too. Three were in Russian, and one’s mostly Latvian.

“I’ll take this one,” Mirdza offers. “Since it’s Latvian, it’s probably the newest, and therefore the least helpful.”

“I’ll take a Russian one,” Aleksandr says.

“And me,” Alexei says.

“I’ll take the third,” Grigoriy says.

They’re undeniably correct that their Russian is the best, so I’m left standing around like an idiot while my sister’s husband and his friends pore over our family journals looking for any sort of clue we can use.

At least we don’t have to wait for very long.

“This first entry. . .” Aleksandr whistles.

“What?” Kris is leaning over his shoulder, but the rest of us are stuck waiting.

“I think it has our answer, right here.” Aleksandr’s head never lifts from the journal, his hands as gentle as I’ve ever seen them where he’s touching the edge. “For it to make sense, you need to know who the Seven Boyars were.”

Alexei straightens. “They were the self-appointed leaders in Russia’s provisional government during the Time of Troubles. They brought the misery to an end when they made my ancestor the new monarch. They chose the Romanovs to rule, basically.”

Aleksandr finally looks up. “And Gustav and Kristiana’s relative was Fyodor Sheremetev.”

That name means something to them, I can tell.

“Why is everyone reacting like that?” Amanda asks. “Was he a villain?”

Alexei shakes his head. “He was the most powerful of the boyars. He set my family on the throne.”

“The opening passage reads,” Aleksandr says, “I had no idea what I was agreeing to. When first we saw her, Baba Yaga appeared as a maiden. She had such an open air. She had such a lovely countenance. We were all inclined to listen to her, and to believe anything she promised.”

“So it was them,” Grigoriy says. “She did meet with our ancestors.”

“We already knew all this,” Alexei says.

“But we didn’t know this,” Aleksandr says. “Had I known she intended to make me the individual responsible for commanding this group, I would have refused. Not a day goes by that one of the others does not come to me, complaining about some thing or other that Misha has done.” Aleksandr looks up, like that should mean something.

“Who’s Misha?” I ask.

“Short for Michael,” Alexei says. “The first Romanov to rule.”

“But why does that matter?” I ask.

“Because Fyodor’s commanding the group,” Aleksandr says, “not the Romanovs.”

This is tedious and we’re only five minutes into the search. “But you already said?—”

“It goes on,” Aleksandr says. “At first, I resisted taking on all their powers. Baba Yaga said I didn’t have to command them, but someone has to intervene, or these poor pups will destroy one another before this new government has a chance.”

“Gustav has to take our powers,” Grigoriy says. “So it is different than with Leonid. We can’t just surrender them.”

They all turn to look at me like that explains everything. “But how?” I ask. “How am I supposed to do that?”

The only answer they give is to turn their faces back into the books.

Fabulous.