With the translator app primed by their rapid-fire banter, Liam started the tale while the three of them walked back toward the main house. He started it from far back in time. Really, really far back in time.

"Lydia had always been intrigued by the reincarnations, the occult, the rare folk beliefs. And she'd always had these elaborate dreams, almost like costume dramas."

Volya met the woman for five minutes, but he believed it. Lydia had that air about her.

"When I was young, she drove me nuts retelling them," Liam complained. "Then she met daSilva at some black-arts-meet-science-conference and it got out of hand."

Volya involuntarily cleared his throat into the looming pause. DaSilva, with the white streaks in his hair, passionate face, and the good looks of a circus magician... yeah, he smelled of a charlatan ready to take the aging divorcée for all her money.

Anabelle clip-clopped right next to him, an actual living and breathing centaur. How could he forget about her? He wished he could forget about her!

Reading his mood, Liam snorted, and so did Anabelle, an unnerving sound given her equine form.

"We didn't trust Renato at first either. So, I had him checked out. His credentials were rock-solid, believe it or not. He was—and, as crazy as it sounds, still is—an accomplished geneticist. This occult stuff is like a secret identity for him."

Once the translating app conveyed that last bit, Volya pictured daSilva as a sleek super-villain. A professor by day, a monster who turned teens into centaurs by night. An updated Dr. Moreau, but Liam seemed to like him. Weird.

"You were how old exactly when daSilva came onto the scene?" Volya asked.

Okay, maybe cynicism was strange coming from a seventeen-year-old, but a few days of comfortable living didn't erase Volya's memories of familial discords that resulted in kids dumped into his orphanage. Childhood trauma made people do twisted things, love horrible people, or simply go mad.

"I was fifteen," Liam replied. "My career was just taking off, so I had no intention of losing Lydia to some old fart's mumbo-jumbo. I needed her to help me, not waste her time on the Beyond."

"I get it."

"Our relationship was rocky, not going to lie, even after my mom had moved to the East Coast and everyone stopped trying to tear me in two. Lydia wasn't winning the Mother of the Year awards when I came to live with them."

"Hey!" Anabelle put in and Liam darted an exasperated glance at her, but didn't argue about the differences of their parent-child relationships with Lydia and the interpretation of their family structure.

"But!" Liam overrode his sister's objections, "but Lydia had a ruthless eye for talent, always pushed me toward music, even when I wanted to rage-quit. Without her, me and the gang would be still playing in the garage. Or I wouldn't even have the band by now."

Volya had a hard time processing the whole thing, even with waiting on the translating app, but Liam sounded sure, so why would he question Liam's judgment? Liam lived all that, had two feuding mothers, while he, Volya, had zero parents willing to mess with his life. He didn't say lucky you, just nodded curtly, to show that he was following so far.

"Anyway, yeah, I reconciled myself to daSilva so long as Lydia worked for me. Let her have her fun, and all that..." Liam gave an expressive shrug.

"Plus, you were fifteen."

"Plus, I was fifteen," Liam agreed. "Anyway. DaSilva ran a closed chat group of like-minded scientists who pursued theories that would have been mocked by the broader community."

"What kind of theories?"

"Oh, you know... Ancestral memory; temporal genetic imprinting; oral traditions that might have described the lost reality... And how to recover it all from ye average modern human brain," Anabelle replied instead of Liam. "I'm sure daSilva and Co will give you the whole enchilada, if you're willing to listen."

"Uh-huh." For the first time in his life, Volya stopped looking forward to breakfast.

Her lips twitched into another cute pout. "Stop frowning, Volya! I'm not pulling your leg."

He wiggled his brows, trying to smooth out the wrinkle that upset Anabelle. The girl got the short end of the stick—good Lord, would he stop feeling pity for these humble billionaires already?—would it break him to humor her?

"Were your friendly neighborhood scientists paid to do this stuff or—" Volya started to ask.

"Or," Liam clarified curtly. "But they run a think-tank for commissioned projects. It generates income to fund non-traditional research."

"Why?" Seriously, why? Why would someone paid to do decent, honest work that sent rockets into space and made fridges keep your meat cold, would spend their free time on this rubbish?! When he grew up, he wanted to be an accountant or something useful like that.

Again, Liam stayed silent, but Anabelle piped in: "Because it was cool!"

Volya gave her half-human, half-horse form a glance from under his furrowed brow. She wanted him to play ball and smile instead, but he refused. He couldn't smile away this malarkey like an American. It was a frowning matter, so he frowned.

She bit her lip, but insisted: "It was cool."

When Volya failed to agree with her the second time, Anabelle turned to the obvious culprit. "Gosh, Liam, the first guy of my age you bring home, and he's such a bore. A totally sullen bore!"

Liam upheld the truth. "He's older than you, Buttercup."

Anabelle's eyes rolled in her sockets, spine collapsing, arms whipping toward heavens. "By a year, Liam, by one stinking year! That's not an age gap."

"He's still older."

"Sure, have it your way. He's a grumpy older man. Give him a hat and a cane, why won't you?"

So maybe Volya acted old. Maybe he aged three years for every year he lived, because he had to. Suck it up, Buttercup. He didn't come to Montana to win her over with his charm. He came here to, apparently, be her knight, something he had even less experience with than with winning girls' hearts or singing. As in no experience whatsoever. Zilch. Null. Nada.

He pointedly addressed himself to Liam, not Anabelle. He had a feeling that Liam had an older soul, like him. "Okay, let's keep going. Did your mad genius club build some crazy science project?"

"Yes," Liam and Anabelle chorused.

"To read the memories recorded in the human genes, like in the Assassin's Creed or something?"

Liam sighed louder than necessary to show how happy he was to return to the sensible conversation—or what passed for a sensible conversation at the Whiterock Ranch. "Assassin's Creed, you wish... but yes, something like that."

"How?"

"Lydia provided the location and additional funds for a secret research facility. At first, daSilva intended to investigate her dreams. But then Anabelle got in there, because she just couldn't help herself."

"I was twelve!" Anabelle protested. "Twelve!"

"Because she was twelve and she just couldn't help herself," Liam amended painstakingly. "She got into the lab, activated the equipment and... well, long story short, this awful transformation had happened to her."

"Is it permanent?" Volya asked.

Silence was his answer. Then Liam cleared his throat and said. "The team's efforts ever since had focused on undoing the damage."

"So, it was all Lydia's fault," Volya summed up.

Of course, it was. It fit perfectly with the woman's eccentric aura. Some rich people courted tragedy for thrills and now her only daughter was paying the price of her obsession with the mysteries better left alone.

Anabelle tossed her head, sending her ponytail swinging from one shoulder to another, to an awesome effect, because her horse tail was also swishing.

Left. Right. Left.

Volya was so fascinated by this harmonic movement, that Anabelle's next words took a second to sink through his skull.

"You gotta understand, Volya. We... we didn't know back then that magic was real."