25. Katerina
Within an hour or two, all three journals have been read by the guys, and while they found another tidbit or two, none of it is very helpful.
Kristiana has been busy snapping photos of nearly every page.
“You can take the journals,” Amanda says. “You don’t have to photograph them.”
“You’re just going to hand them over?” the middle-aged woman, whose name is Abigail, I discovered, asks.
“I’m aged fairly well,” Amanda says. “So far, I’ve never once turned into a horse.” She smirks. “I think we can safely assume it’s not going to happen to me. They might need them more.”
“To be fair,” Gustav says, “I have also never turned into a horse.”
“So what’s the real problem, then?” Gabe asks. “Why did you come here?”
Gustav explains the basics about how Leonid was Rurikid, how they sort of lost track during the Time of Troubles, and his family wasn’t in Russia. And then when they returned, and he managed to tap into his powers. . .things went a little haywire.
“You’re from the nineteen hundreds?” Gabe asks.
I love that no one even questions anything we say now, after having witnessed the horse to human transformation.
“I’m not,” Gustav says. “These four are.” He points at the guys and me. “They brought their feud forward inadvertently. They thought they were cursed for refusing to help two of the families when there was a famine, but it turns out, Leonid sort of cursed all of them accidentally when he tried to force them to share their powers.”
“Which is exactly what you have to do,” I say. “I think that’s how he got confused. Some of what was in the Romanov records mirrors what we’re reading here, which was different than the method for the Rurikid line, because that first time, Baba Yaga gave all the power to just one person.”
“And you’re like the magical supervisor?” Abigail asks, catching on quickly. “So you can only really use your power when you force it?”
“Something like that,” Gustav says. “For what it’s worth, we’re really sorry for dragging you nice people into this.”
“You think the new ruler of Russia is coming here?” Amanda asks.
“We do,” Gustav says. “Or at least, we think he’ll be following us, and since we’re here. . .” He spreads his hands. “Now that we’ve gotten the information from the journals, we should move along.”
“If he finds out I’m a Liepa,” Amanda says, “I’ll be in danger either way.”
“I doubt even Leonid would suddenly attack an—” I cut off, not wanting to call her an old woman.
“It’s okay,” Amanda says. “I’m more than ninety years old.” She laughs. “You can always tell the truth around me. I’m not one for telling myself lies, at least, not anymore.” She slams a hand against her heart. “I’ve got a pacemaker now, just in case I didn’t feel ancient before.”
Alexei stands up, and I realize he means to offer to heal the lady. I can tell the exact moment he remembers that he can’t. My heart goes out to him. I may not love him anymore, but he’s a good man. There’s a reason I cared about him for so long.
“You don’t have to run away.” The man who has spent most of the night quietly sitting beside Abigail and watching over Gabe and Whitney finally speaks.
“We don’t want to put your lovely family at risk,” Gustav says. “We really do appreciate your help, but?—”
“But you’re our family now,” Amanda says. “And we protect our family here in Birch Creek.”
I start to laugh, assuming it’s a joke, but then I realize they’re not laughing. In fact, they’re not even smiling.
“If there’s some Russian dictator coming out here to attack you,” Steve says, “it might be nice to have some people you know to back you up.”
I can’t believe these people are even saying this. “We could never ask?—”
“Of course not.” Amanda takes two steps over and sets a mug with tea in it at my shoulder. “But with family, you don’t have to ask.”
For some inexplicable reason, I burst into tears.
Abigail, Amanda, Amanda’s old-man husband whose name I keep forgetting, and Whitney all stare at me, kindly. Gabe skips over and wraps his arms around my body, crumpling me against him. “It’s fine, though. You can cry here, I promise.”
Which only makes me cry harder.
A moment later, Whitney has also wrapped her arms around me from behind. The third person to join the group hug shocks me.
It’s Gustav.
His big, warm arms wrap around both kids and me. When he finally lets go, I actually feel much better.
“I appreciate your offer more than you know,” Gustav says. “I’m sure we all do. But we couldn’t possibly endanger your family for the very same reason that you’re willing to help. Once we have found a place to spend the night, we’ll gather our things and go, and we’ll head out for good in the morning. Our best way to keep safe will be to continuously move.”
“Or you could stay in a town that no one cares about with people who are watching your back.” Steve crosses his arms. “Think about it overnight. You might decide to stick around for a few more days at least.” He stands up. “But for now, you have to stay with us tonight. We insist.”
There’s a rather large scafuffle when they start assigning rooms and making sleeping arrangements, but in the end, Gabe and Whitney take sleeping bags in to join Nate in their parents’ room, and the three couples disperse into the bedrooms, leaving me and Gustav on the sofas in the family room.
I’m surprised no one presses for Gustav to try and do anything that night, but we’re all pretty tired, and if we want to be ready to leave in the morning, we should all catch up on some lost sleep. I won’t lie and say it doesn’t feel nice to sleep in a place that’s mostly safe, but I almost miss the room with just the one bed. I’m about to drift off to sleep when I hear him.
“Do you think I can do it?” Gustav sounds more like Gabe than he does like himself.
“Do what?”
“You know—forcibly take someone’s power?”
I’m not sure he wants to believe he can do it. It sounds like he might not want to be able to do any magic at all, with the way he phrased that question. I flip onto my back. “I’m not sure. I never had to take my power. After I earned it, so to speak, it just sort of showed up, whether I wanted it or not.”
“How?”
I shrug, but then I realize he can’t see me. “I zapped things, at first. Without meaning to, I’d just shock stuff. People and animals, mostly.”
“That sounds really annoying.”
I chuckle. “I mean, for me it wasn’t.”
“Still, if you didn’t think you could control it.”
“I guess, but I had Boris and Dad, who weren’t generally super helpful or kind. But about that, they were at least telling me what to do and what was a bad idea.”
“Like what?” Gustav asks. “Like, don’t go outside in the rain, or you’ll short circuit your brain?”
I can’t help laughing at that notion. “Not so much, no. One nice side-effect of our ability is that electricity, specifically lightning or any other electric current, won’t harm me. It would be like. . .if you had a catcher’s mitt on and someone lobbed you a baseball. You’d catch it and be able to do what you wanted with it without hurting your hand.”
“Even with a mitt, sometimes catching a ball hurts,” Gustav says.
“That’s not a very manly thing to say.” I’m smiling in the dark, but again, he can’t see it. “But it’s honest, I suppose.” I snort. “And sure, I mean, I suppose if I really was struck by lightning, it might be uncomfortable, but I could absorb and redirect it, so I’d be fine.”
“I wonder what it’s supposed to feel like for me. I mean, I have no idea where to even start in trying to force a power.”
That’s an interesting question. “It may not be the same for you, but I can feel the magic sort of pulsing in my head.” I tap my forehead, and then I realize he can’t see that either. We do a lot of things every day that rely on sight. It’s strange for me to function without it. “My power usually kind of hovers right behind my forehead, just above my eyes. I can feel the power, sort of waiting there.” It’s weird because I can almost feel it right now, even though I know it’s not there. “When I need it, I can kind of squint up my eyes and focus, and, bam.”
I zap Gustav.
“Ow.” He bolts upright on the sofa. “What just happened? That hurt!”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I haven’t had my power in so long that I didn’t realize—” My powers. When did Leonid give them back? And more importantly, why?
“You—you have them?”
“I’m as shocked as you,” I say. “What could it mean?”
Gustav’s quiet. “Maybe it’s his way of trying to get you to call him.”
Of course it is.
Gustav’s a genius.
I talked to Leonid. I offered him a deal, and he even gave me a phone. Then I never called, and now he can’t so much as track it. I never asked him to restore Alexei’s powers, and he has no idea where we are. . . But clearly he wants to find us.
So he’s summoning me with a treat, like he would a dog.
“I don’t want to use it now.” My voice is small, and I remember my epiphany from earlier, the one that made me change without thinking. The one that led us here. “I think Leonid’s been holding those weird trials. . .and just killing anyone he finds who’s dark.” I don’t explain my guess very well, but Gustav’s silence tells me that he gets it.
“Would he really do that?”
“You tell me,” I whisper. “Would you feel confident doing that?”
“Not at all,” he says. “But I’ve only had this ability for a few days. I wonder what having it for years and years would do to me? Would I become more sure of my ability? Would I be confident of what the light or dark means?”
“He can’t just go around killing people,” I say. “It’s wrong.”
“But it’s okay for the government to execute people, even though they really have no way of knowing whether the criminals did what they’re charged with doing?”
“I don’t know, but?—”
“He is the government,” Gustav says. “The people elected him, and this is how he’s chosen to keep people safe. There’s a disturbing kind of simplicity in his version of justice.”
“He’s like a villain in a television show or a movie.”
“He’s literally out there, a wannabe Batman or something, eliminating anyone who’s bad.”
“And he has a bad-o-meter,” I say. “Or at least, he thinks he does.”
“What if he’s right?” Gustav asks. “What if he’s uniquely situated, better even than any impartial judge, to know what people will do and rid the world of all the darkness that threatens it?”
“You can’t kill someone for what they might do,” I say. “You can’t kill them for ‘badness’ either. Unless he has a real reason—evidence of something they’ve done wrong—he should not, he cannot just kill people. These powers. . .you may not have them yet, but when you do, you have to remember that it’s wrong to use them that way.”
“I think maybe I do feel it,” Gustav whispers. “I feel something up behind my forehead, kind of pressing on me.”
I sit straight up on the sofa. “You do?” When I’m looking directly at him, I can make out his general shape and size, even in the dark.
He grunts. “I’m not sure. I thought it was just a headache before, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I think maybe it’s not. It’s been there since, well, since the day I leapt in front of the men to save you. Looking back, that sounds kind of stupid, but people get headaches.”
I slide down to the end of the sofa that’s closest to him. “When I want to use my power, I focus on that spot, and then I push.”
“But what if I use one Leonid has?” he asks. “Would that pull him here?”
I wish I knew. “Do you think he felt me zap you?”
Even in the low light, I see his silhouette shrug.
“I hate just waiting here, helpless, hoping he won’t find us,” Gustav says. “I want to do something.”
“Then do it,” I say. “Just try.”
“Try what, though?” He sighs. “I haven’t even seen what any of you can do, not really.”
“Aleks can find and feel the earth or rocks or minerals that are close, no matter where he is. He can summon diamonds from deep in the earth. He can create a swirling tornado of dirt. It sounds kind of weird, but it’s actually pretty cool.”
Gustav grunts, and then. . .something in the corner crashes.
A dog starts barking. Lights turn on. Bootsteps and the dog-barking come closer, and then Steve’s staring down at a zebra plant that Gustav killed. Its dirt is spilled all over the floor.
“What happened?” Steve asks. His dog’s spinning round and round in circles, whining.
I’m not sure Gustav knows what to say. We’re both sitting, stock still, on our respective sofas, wide-eyed.
A door at the end of the hall whips open and Aleks shoots around the corner of the hallway. “You did it.” He blinks quickly. “I felt it.”
“I guess that answers the question of whether Leonid would know,” I say.
“How did you do it?” Aleks asks.
“What are you people saying?” Steve asks in English. “Is everything alright?”
“It’s better than alright,” Aleks says in English. “We just found our weapon.”
“Weapon?” Steve looks around the room intently. “What is it? Where is it?”
Gustav stands. “I guess it’s me.” But for all his talk earlier about not wanting to sit around helpless, he doesn’t look very pleased. And when Aleks takes him outside and forces him to spend the next two hours trying to shove dirt piles around, he looks downright disheartened. Kristiana spends the whole time in with me, wringing her hands and watching out the window. I haven’t given her much credit for being a very good sister, but she clearly does love him.
After Gustav comes back inside, dirt-coated and weary, trudging his way to the shower, I take the chance to ask Aleks what he thinks. Unlike Gustav, he’s spotless.
“He’s. . .” Aleks shrugs. “He’s not very good at it, but that’s hardly a shock. He’s never done anything like this at all, and we’re asking him to jog on day one. All of us learned by shifting a handful of dirt at a time.” He sighs. “He’s so dirty because, at the end, in addition to deflecting my little dirt tornadoes, he made one of his own.”
I didn’t expect Aleks to take it easy on him, but that sounds rough. “You know, Leonid crashed after he got a new power.”
“He seems fine,” Aleks says.
“What does that mean?” Kris asks. “He looked pretty tired to me.”
“He was using a new power,” Aleks says. “He should be tired.”
A moment later, there’s a loud wham in the bathroom. I very nearly rush in.
“Naked man,” Aleks says, blocking me with his arm. “I’ll go.”
I can’t help at least peeking around the corner of the open doorway, and what I see isn’t encouraging. Poor Gustav, hair still sudsy, has passed out in the shower.
“Maybe he would have done better in his training,” Kris says, “but he was worn out from accessing a new ability.”
When he sleeps for the next twenty hours straight, we all agree that might have been the issue. It does help us make up our minds about something.
We decide to stay in Birch Creek, at least for now. The nice thing about a tiny town is, if Leonid does turn up here, we’ll know it right away. Amanda, Abigail, and Steve make up a lie about how we’re on the run from the Russian mob, and their new leader’s after us.
The entire town appears resolved to help keep us safe.
Which is really cute.
And it makes me very nervous for all of them, right down to sweet little teenage Gabe. He tears into his workouts on his Smith Machine in the garage like gaining more muscle mass will keep him safe from Leonid the Executioner.
I wish anything we were doing would be sure to keep us safe. I’m beginning to worry that nothing we do will make any difference when Leonid does find us.