Page 95 of My Wild Horse King

“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 thenbam, 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’sstolenher 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.”

---