“What about another door?” Mikhail asked. “It’s not like you have the only one.”
“Of course not,” Baba scowled. She was very zealous about her job guarding the passageway between the two worlds. “There are a few natural gateways left, but the nearest ones are in Ontario and New York City, and they’re watched over twenty-four/seven. There’s no way an entire battalion of supernatural creatures could have waltzed right through one of those doorways, swarmed across New York State, and nobody noticed. You boys must be wrong.”
“Or Maya found another door,” Gregori said quietly.
The silence that followed that simple sentence resembled the hush after an explosion, before the chaos hit and bits of things began raining onto the ground.
“Another door,” Mikhail repeated. He shook his head. “Impossible.”
“‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’” Gregori said.
“Huh?” Alexei just stared at him.
“Sherlock Holmes, you moron. Don’t you ever open a book?” Mikhail smacked the large man on the shoulder, then shook out his hand. “Damn. I have got to remember not to do that.”
Baba thought about it for a minute while the boys argued good-naturedly about the merits of Russian versus English literary works. It should, in fact, be impossible for a new door to the Otherworld to simply appear. But the existence of one would certainly explain much of the strange activity in the area, if Otherworld creatures were responsible for the damage and mischief the locals were experiencing. And if Maya was from the other plane, a glamour could mask alien features, rather than disguise human ones. Not to mention that would sure as crap explain the huge golden stag that had almost killed her. She had sensed something Otherworldly when she first saw Maya at that meeting, but she’d dismissed the feeling. Maybe she’d been too hasty.
“You know,” she said, thinking aloud, “there was one time when a huge earthquake somehow accidentally opened a portal that hadn’t existed before. Do you remember?”
“Nineteen sixty, Lumaco, Chile,” Gregori said. “The South American Baba called us in to help with cleanup. It was a nightmare.” He looked thoughtful. “I’d forgotten about that. But there haven’t been any earthquakes here lately, have there?”
She shook her head, curling one strand of black hair around her finger and chewing on it absently as she pondered. “Noooo . . . but they’ve been doing all this drilling deep into the shale. Fracking, they call it. You don’t suppose that could have opened up a new doorway, do you?”
“No matter how improbable,” Gregori said again. “If there was one, that would explain where all the creatures we sensed came from.”
Baba could feel the blood rush out of her face, and she suddenly felt as if the air temperature had dropped twenty degrees. “Oh gods. And why we haven’t been able to find any trace of the missing children here. She took them to the Otherworld.”
Four sets of eyes looked at her, appalled. “But. But that’s against the rules,” Chudo-Yudo said, dropping his current bone on the floor with a crunch. “No one is allowed to steal Human children and bring them across anymore. That’s punishable by banishment!”
The Riders’ faces grew, if possible, even grimmer. Banishment was one of the most feared punishments in the Otherworld. For people who lived almost forever, “never able to go home” was a very long time.
“Maya didn’t strike me as the type to care about rules,” Baba said. “But if those kids are on the other side . . .”
She didn’t have to finish the sentence. They all knew that humans who spent any amount of time in the Otherworld were sometimes changed in ways that were next to impossible to undo.
“We can look for them there,” Mikhail said, doubt coloring his voice like gray smoke, “but if someone wants to hide something in the Otherworld, it usually stays hidden.”
Baba knew he was right. In a place that constantly changed and shifted according to the needs and desires of those who lived there, there were too many forgotten corners and veiled niches to search before it was too late.
“I asked Koshei to see if he could find anyone who knew Maya on the other side,” she said, knowing he would have already reported in if there was any news. “Maybe he’ll turn up something that can help.”
Gregori cleared his throat and gave Baba a meaningful look.
“What?” she said. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
Mikhail added his own cool blue gaze. “Somebody has to tell the queen and king.”