Diana shook her head. “If I hadn’t seen evidence of it firsthand, and if you hadn’t been so careful about making sure you didn’t touch my car – which I really appreciate, by the way – it might be different. But it’s the most logical solution at this point in time, given what I now know about people having magical powers.”
“Thank you,” Calvin said. “For believing me. I know it must be difficult.”
“Not as difficult as you might think,” Diana said. Then, she arched an eyebrow. “Is that it, now? Really, truly it? No other secrets?”
Calvin held up his hands. “No more secrets! I swear!”
“Good.” Diana rubbed at her face for a moment, before squaring her shoulders. “Okay. Next item on the agenda: breaking this curse.”
Our mate does not hesitate to run headlong into battle!the wyvern said approvingly.
“You said something about a riddle?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“I hate riddles,” Diana muttered.
Calvin nodded in agreement. “There’s a reason why I went into construction, rather than linguistics.”
And the wyvern is no help whatsoever,he mentally added.Not that it would ever admit that.
Such petty things are beneath a being of my immense cognitive stature,it sneered.I am too cerebral a creature to trouble myself with childish puzzles.
Calvin rolled his eyes internally.I guess that’s one way of saying ‘I have no idea.’
He dug around in his pocket for the scrap of paper that he’d jotted the riddle down on the previous day. Pulling it out, he read:
“I am mother and father, but never birth or nurse. I have a bark, but no bite. I'm rarely still, but I never wander. What am I?”
“Uggggghhhhhh.” The sound seemed to have been ripped from the very depths of Diana’s soul. “Did I mention that I hate riddles? Because I hate riddles.”
She sighed, obviously trying to force a positive attitude through sheer force of will. “What was that again?I’m a parent, but not a nurse?”
“Never birth or nurse,” Calvin said, scratching his head. “I’m completely stumped.”
Diana blew a loose strand of hair out of her eyes in frustration. “Do you want to go back to my place and try to work this out? I never thought I’d say this after that breakfast we ate, but I’m starting to get hungry, and the last thing we need is to find ourselves out in the middle of nowhere at midnight, half-starved and still unable to work out this freaking riddle.”
“Good thinking,” Calvin said. He had a bottle of water and some trail mix with him, but it wasn’t going to be enough to last them for a long time. And maybe a change of scenery would help them get a new perspective on the riddle.
Suddenly, an idea came to him. “Or… we could go see Kieran.”
“Kieran?” Diana said, tilting her head in curiosity. “He seems to have made quite the impression on you. I don’t know if he’s the riddle-solving type, though.”
Whoops,thought Calvin.I’ll have to be a bit more careful with what I say.
As much as he was happy to share all of his own secrets with Diana, he didn’t want to go around revealing Kieran’s shifter status if it was something that he wanted kept private. It would be easy to accidentally give it away if he went into too much detail about their conversation.
“I had a chat with him about the curse last night when I got to the B&B,” he said carefully.
Diana looked surprised. “You talked to a stranger about getting cursed by a strange woman in the woods?”
“It just kind of slipped out,” Calvin admitted. “But it turned out that Kieran actually knows about these things. When I told him about what had happened by the pond, he said I’d seen a sprite.”
“A sprite?” Diana said. “I… don’t actually know what that is. Besides the soda, I mean, but I don’t think you’re talking about that.”
“Not the soda,” Calvin confirmed. “Sprites are… mythical beings, I guess – kind of like a water fairy. I didn’t know they still existed. This one wasnotpleased to see me, but Kieran said he knows another sprite nearby that is a lot less confrontational.”
“No wonder you wanted to know how well I knew Kieran,” Diana said thoughtfully. “I can safely say that I didnotknow that he was friends with water fairies.”
