Page 64 of My Wild Horse King

I don’t mention that a good twenty percent of them are dark, like horseflies. “But Katerina, why would Leonid say anything about yours?” My voice is flatter than I intended, and I would like to punch the Leonid guy.

“I asked him to tell me.” Katerina has frozen in place, and her eyes are intent on mine.

I nod. “And? What did he say?”

“Nothing good,” she says.

“Well, maybe you got better,” Kristiana says.

“I doubt it.” Katerina sighs. “But that still doesn’t help us. Gustav’s description for Adriana sounds just like Leonid’s did.”

I drop it, unwilling to keep being compared to him.

“He called Kris a null,” Adriana says. “Right?”

Kristiana nods. “Yeah, but there isn’t anything to tell us what that means, or how he knows. . .”

“It’s in the journals,” Katerina says. “We found some journals in the Romanov palace, and we were reading through them.”

“It said something about a null?” I ask.

Katerina bangs on the side of her head. “They were in a really old dialect, and I had a lot of trouble reading them. They made my head hurt, so I was looking at newer ones while Leonid read those, but I remember him saying something about it.”

“We need to see those,” I say. “They could explain what’s going on.”

“We’ll never get to them,” Grigoriy says. “Leonid surely has them for himself, if they weren’t destroyed long ago.”

“But wait,” Kristiana says. “My dad says we had journals—our family. Remember? He said they came to America with his great-uncle.”

“We need to find those,” Aleksandr says. “We were all assuming that if we could find your brother, we’d be able to prepare some kind of defense.”

“Let me get this straight,” I say. “The last time you saw Leonid, you went to try and defeat him, and you had three powers, while he had just two.”

No one disagrees with me.

“And now, he has three, and he’s the ruler of Russia?—”

“He was already the leader of Russia then,” Katerina says. “And they did manage to escape with me.”

“You waltzed in and then back out on your own though, right?” I ask. “It doesn’t sound like he was working very hard to keep you there. You said you?—”

Katerina jumps toward me so fast that she stumbles on the edge of the coffee table and falls forward.

I have to drop to my knees to keep her from hitting her head on the tile. “Whoa there, tiger.”

“I’m not a tiger.” She’s glaring at me.

That’s when I realize she probably didn’t tell anyone else that she offered to trade my safety for Alexei’s powers. It doesn’t make her look very good, but she told the person she put at risk.

And they already don’t like her.

“Returning to my initial point,” I say. “You had three powers to his two, and now you have two to his three. Yes?”

No one argues.

“But somehow you think that after finding me. . .what’s the long-term plan?”

“We don’t have one,” Kris says.

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