“That’s the funny thing about curses and riddles,” Barbara said. “And why fairy tales are such a pain in the butt.” Chudo-Yudo snorted in agreement, almost setting the edge of Barbara’s pants on fire. “Once such things are set in motion, not even the people involved have any control over them.”
Day took pity on Jenna, who looked even more confused than ever. “Think of it like this: once someone casts a curse—in this case, Zilya—destiny kind of takes over. I suppose that’s the only way it could truly be fair, with no room for cheating.”
“Which, let’s face it, Zilya would have done, if she could have,” Barbara added.
“So Zilya cast the curse, but once your many-great-grandmother invoked the riddle clause, whatever riddle Zilya made up on the spot didn’t actually come from her. She would have opened her mouth and recited it, but without any conscious power over how it came out. Then both she and your family were stuck with the results. The universe maintains the balance. Think of it as another unseen law, like gravity. Nobody really knows why it works the way it does; the universe is just designed that way.”
Jenna wrinkled her nose in a way that Day found absurdly endearing. “Well, okay, I kind of get that. I mean, it goes along with a lot of the fairy tales I’ve read. But that still doesn’t explain how Mick could be in a riddle that was given to my great-great-great-great-whatever-grandmother all those years ago, does it?”
Day and Barbara exchanged glances, and the witch raised one eyebrow in question. Day shook his head at her and sighed.
“There are a few possibilities,” he said, putting off the moment of truth. “Maybe you really are meant to be the one who solves the riddle.”
“Or maybe any of your relatives could have met him, somewhere along the line,” Barbara said flatly. “Mikhail is, or rather he was, the White Rider, companion to the Baba Yagas. He has been around for thousands of years.”
Jenna’s eyes got round and her jaw dropped. She stared at Day. “So when Zilya said something about you not being immortal anymore, she wasn’t making some kind of snide comment? You really are immortal?”
“Not now,” Day said, and pushed his chair away from the table with a scraping noise that made Chudo-Yudo put his huge paws over his ears. “And I still don’t believe I am any kind of solution to this riddle. I’m not any kind of solution to anything, as Barbara well knows.”
He winced inwardly at how unpleasant he sounded, but he couldn’t just sit there and have the rest of this conversation. Not with Jenna. Not with Barbara. Not with anyone.
“I’m sure Barbara can come up with some ideas on the rest of the riddle,” he said abruptly, heading for the door. “Since she was clever enough to figure out this bit. I need to get some air.” He figured he’d duck back into the Airstream and be gone before either of them realized he’d left.
“Just be back in time for dinner,” Barbara said. And added in a deceptively sweet tone, “By the way, I’ve locked the trailer from here, so if you’re planning on returning to your hideout in the woods, you’ve got a long walk ahead of you.”
Day grunted and slammed the door behind him. Hard.
* * *
DAY stared at the trees behind Barbara’s barn blindly, not seeing sturdy oaken wood and tall pines. Instead, his sight was filled with the memory of his fellow Riders’ limp bodies, dragged into magical cages when they followed him into Brenna’s trap. A trap that never would have worked if she hadn’t played on his well-known weakness for rescuing helpless women.
Vision after vision played out in his mind, as they had so many times before. Alexei and Gregori, tortured until they passed out or screamed in agony. Alexei’s hands burned red and oozing from his attempt to distract Brenna, Gregori bleeding from a dozen stab wounds as he did the same. The look on their faces when the Queen pronounced the three of them immortal no more.
He doubted they’d ever forgive him for that. It didn’t matter; he’d never forgive himself. Brenna might have been the one who stole away their futures, but it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Mikhail.
Mikhail had no idea where his brothers were now. Out seeking their new lives and their new paths, like him, probably. He didn’t even know which side of the doorway they were on. He hadn’t spoken to either of them before he’d left the Otherworld, and they’d barely spoken to one another while they were still there and healing. Everyone insisted they weren’t angry, merely recovering, as he was. But how could they not be angry? He was so furious with himself, sometimes the heat of it threatened to burn him up from the inside like the fires Brenna set to fuel her rank potion.
His cabin in the midst of the woods was the closest he’d come to peace, of a sort. Not forgiveness, never that, nor excuses for the harm he’d allowed to befall his beloved comrades. But at least until today he’d stopped seeing their bruised and battered faces, except in his nightmares.
Now this. Jenna had no idea what she was asking. He wanted to help her, really he did. She was sweet, and no one deserved to have their baby stolen away just because a faery had suffered a fit of pique centuries before and Jenna’s entire family had suffered the consequences. But he just couldn’t. Not after what happened. Never again. She would have to find her help elsewhere.
Day blinked rapidly, coming back to find himself kneeling on the grassy earth, white-knuckled hands clenched on his thighs, so tight he could barely loosen them again. He dragged in a ragged breath, suddenly tired beyond measure.
He staggered to his feet, not sure if it had been hours or only minutes since he’d sunk into the fugue state he thought he’d left behind him in the Otherworld along with the two men he loved best in all the world. Apparently he wasn’t quite as healed as he’d thought. Clearly he needed more time on his own to regain his equilibrium. A lot more time. Maybe as many years as he had left in a life now measured in decades instead of centuries.
No matter. He knew himself well enough to admit that he would never be able to find the peace he sought if he simply abandoned Jenna. But with any luck, by the time he’d taken a long walk and pulled himself back together again, Barbara would have solved the entire thing and figured out a way past whatever barriers would prevent her from telling Jenna what to do.
And then he could just go home and . . . well, do whatever he was going to do with the rest of his life. As soon as he could decide what that was.
* * *
“IS he all right?” Jenna asked Barbara softly. The look on Mick’s face before he’d stormed out just about broke her heart. She could tell he’d been terribly wounded by something in his past, but she had no idea what to do or say to help. And was a little afraid to ask what had happened to him. She really wanted to know, but it was none of her business. Not to mention that Barbara didn’t seem like the type to gossip about her friends.
“It kind of seems like being involved in my mess is bringing up some bad memories and making things worse. Maybe I should go.” Although where she’d go if she left, she wasn’t sure.
“Not a chance,” the other woman said, glaring down her slightly long nose. “You and Mikhail were brought together for a reason. I know it, you know it, and deep down, he knows it too. Baba Yagas don’t believe in coincidence, and neither do Riders. He just needs a little time to adjust to the idea that his time for hiding out is done.”
* * *
“I’M not hiding out,” Mick protested a few hours later, when he returned from wherever he’d disappeared to. “I just need some space to figure out who I am now. Hell, what I am now, since I’m not a Rider anymore.” He took a sip of the tea Barbara had forced on him. He would rather have had vodka.
“Ding!” Barbara said cheerfully. “Time’s up. Life calling on line two.”
“I knew I would regret the day when Liam introduced you to television,” Mick muttered under his breath. “So, what have you been talking about since I’ve been gone? Have you come up wi
th any more answers?”
“Not exactly,” Jenna told him, shaking her head ruefully. “We went over all of my grandmother’s notebooks, but we didn’t spot anything helpful.” She gestured at the leather-bound books spread all across the table, next to her empty knapsack.
“We also talked about how the fact that Jenna showed up on the doorstep of the only person for miles around who actually had years of experience with faeries and the Otherworld was too convenient to be a coincidence,” Barbara added, giving Mick a pointed stare. “I told her you would agree.”
Mick sighed. “Yeah, there’s really no escaping that one. Sometimes fate is a relentless bitch.” There was a bitter tone in his voice.
Jenna gazed at him across the table. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to drag you into my troubles.” Not that she wasn’t grateful that his long walk seemed to have brought about a change of heart.
“No, I’m sorry,” Mick said. “I don’t mean to be so ungracious about this. It’s not your fault.” He gazed at her over his mug, his eyes a startlingly bright blue. “I don’t know if I believe in destiny, exactly, since that would imply that we don’t have the freedom to choose our actions, and I think we do. But I have seen enough in my very long life that I’ve come to believe that there are times when some power—call it the gods, the universe, whatever you please—decides to take a hand in events. Maybe this curse has gone on too long, and the universe feels a need to right the imbalance. Maybe your baby is going to grow up to be someone special and the gods want him or her to stay on this side of the doorway.” He shrugged. “Either way, I’m clearly a part of this whether or not I want to be. We’ll just have to make the best of it.”
Jenna held back a sigh. It wasn’t exactly an enthusiastic endorsement, but she supposed it was the best she was going to get. At least he was willing to help, no matter how reluctantly.
“What do we do next, then?” she asked.
Barbara pulled a laptop out from underneath the cupboard. “Now we search the World Wide Web,” she said. “There has got to be a clue out there somewhere, and by golly, we are going to find it. Preferably before dinner. I’m a terrible cook when I’m rushed, and I’m not all that great when I’m not.”
CHAPTER 7
STUART Wilmington Wadsworth III, Stu to his friends, very carefully swung his golf club and tapped his ball a little too much to the left so it went into the rough.
“Bad luck,” said his father, Stuart Wilmington Wadsworth II, as he sank a putt into the eighteenth hole. “That’s just like you, isn’t it? So close, but no follow-through.” He leaned down to pocket the ball.
Stu glanced at their caddies, who were studiously ignoring the conversation as usual. “I suppose you’re right, Father. I guess this means I owe you a drink at the clubhouse.” He tapped his ball in, added up his just-lousy-enough score, handed his club to his caddy, Miguel, and climbed into the golf cart.
His father heaved himself up into the driver’s seat. The two were clearly identifiable as family, although the elder Wadsworth was forty pounds heavier and what little was left of his hair was more gray than the brown it had started out. But they both had straight patrician noses, strong chins, and an air of prosperity. When Stu looked at his father, it felt as though he could see a mirror into his future. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation, although that was only one of the many reasons he saw his father as little as possible.
The fact that the guy was a merciless, mercenary, inflexible son of a bitch might also have something to do with it.
As they rode down the fairway toward the clubhouse and that promised drink, they returned to the conversation they’d been having when Stu threw the game. He’d hoped that gloating over his triumph would distract his father from the topic, but apparently Stu wasn’t going to win there either.
“To be honest,” Stuart Senior said, his jowls jiggling as they bounced onto the path to the clubhouse, “I don’t know why you stayed with her as long as you did. She was a nice enough girl, I suppose, but she wasn’t good enough for you. I always thought she was after your money.”
Stu sighed. Jenna was a lot of things, but greedy wasn’t one of them. At least, he hadn’t thought so. Before. Ironically, he’d mostly dated her to make his father happy, since his playboy ways had gotten him into such trouble, and she’d seemed like a stabilizing influence.
“You think everyone is after our money, Father. Jenna didn’t ask me for anything. She just stood there and lied to my face. Tried to tell me that the baby was mine, when she knew damn well I’d had a vasectomy when Julie and I were at the end of our marriage.”
Senior grunted. “And don’t think I’ve ever forgiven you for that particular piece of stupidity either. I can’t believe you threw away any chance of my having a grandchild from my eldest son just so you could thwart a woman you ended up divorcing two months later.” He scowled at Stu, barely taking his eyes off the road. “You’re an idiot. You’ve always been an idiot. I can’t believe you’re my son.”
“Sometime I find it hard to believe, too, Father,” Stu said. He occasionally had fantasies about being the secret love child of his mother and the gardener. Or a plumber. Anyone other than the man sitting next to him. Of course, if that were true, he’d be broke, and he wouldn’t like that much either.
“So what are you going to do about the situation?” Senior asked, finally getting to the meat of the issue. Stu knew his father hadn’t asked him to play golf just for the joy of his company.
“There’s nothing to do,” Stu said. “I already told her that I knew the baby couldn’t possibly be mine and that there was no way I was going to marry her and raise some other man’s bastard. It was bad enough she fooled around on me, but trying to lie her way out of it was ridiculous. So I told her we were through, made sure that Mitchell understood that it wasn’t in his best interests to keep her on as his personal assistant, and then wiped my hands of the entire mess.” He didn’t mention how stunned he’d been by her betrayal, as unexpected as it was unfair. He’d actually been faithful to her, probably the first time in his life he’d ever bothered, including during his previous marriage. And this was how she repaid him.
“Are you completely certain the baby isn’t yours?” his father asked, sounding both annoyed and marginally hopeful. “After all, vasectomies do fail occasionally.”
“That’s what Jenna said,” Stu groused. “You know as well as I do that the odds are astronomical. It’s a lot more likely she thought she could have both me and some piece of fun on the side.”
“What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, eh?” his father said in a smug tone. He prided himself on never straying from his marriage vows, even after he and Stu’s mother moved into separate bedrooms. Stu didn’t figure it was much of a hardship, since as far as he could tell the old man was a lot more interested in money than he was in women anyway.
“Still, you should at least get her to take a blood test. After all, there were astronomical odds against my grandfather striking oil the first time he sank a well, and yet here we are. The Wadsworths are all about beating the odds. And taking advantage of every opportunity when it comes along. Get the girl to take a test, just in case.”
Shit. “It’s too late, Father. She’s gone. Good riddance, I say.”
The golf cart screeched to a halt, startling a nearby flock of geese that had been dozing on a water hazard.
“What do you mean, she’s gone?” His father turned around now and gave him the full force of the Wadsworth Senior basilisk glare.
Stu shrugged. “Gone. She’s got no job and no prospects of one. I made sure of that. I hired a PI to check up on her.” Well, less to check on her than to find out who the hell she’d been sleeping with. Then the incompetent ass had failed to find so much as a clue. “It looks like she’s cleared off. There’s no sign of her. Like I said, good riddance.”
He thought actual stea
m was going to come out of his father’s slightly sunburned ears. “Oh my God! What did I do to deserve such a moron for a son?” Senior threw his hands up in the air. “Situations like this have to be controlled. You can’t just let the woman disappear into thin air. Who the hell knows what mischief she is up to?” His face turned reddish-purple, and for a minute Stu hoped the man would actually have a heart attack.
“You’ve always been a loose cannon, boy, bringing embarrassment to the family with drugs and partying and inappropriate women and bad business deals, but this is the last straw. Don’t you realize what’s at stake here? What if the child is yours? Then Jenna could go after your inheritance, what’s left of it, plus try to get her hands on a chunk of the family money. Even if the child isn’t yours, we need to be able to prove it.”
Senior shook his head. “Your brother Clive would never have let things get so out of hand. I’ve had it with you, Stuart. Go find the girl and get her to agree to a prenatal DNA test. I’m not waiting nine months to find out just how screwed we are. If that baby is a Wadsworth, it needs to be under our control from day one. If it’s not, we want to make sure your woman doesn’t go around telling everyone it is.”
Stu opened his mouth to protest but his father silenced him with a wave of his hand, the sun glinting off the large gold-and-diamond ring on his pinky.
“I mean it, Stuart. It is time for you to step up and prove that you can do whatever needs to be done to protect this family. Or else you can consider yourself out of it, once and for all.”
* * *
ZILYA stomped her foot. Daintily, of course. She might be peeved, but she was still a faery, and there were standards to be kept. In fact, that was the whole point, really. Some people, some royal people, might be willing to let the old ways go, but Zilya and many of her friends still thought such things were important. Plus, of course, those old ways worked in her favor. She wasn’t about to let such an extraordinary and precious advantage go now.
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