Barbara chuckled. “I’m afraid your little toy won’t work anymore, Mr. Bellingwood. Or should I call you Mr. Bell?” Around the room, people were exchanging bewildered glances, as if suddenly waking to find themselves in an unexpected place.
She raised her voice, so everyone could hear her. “I’m sorry to say that you have all been the victims of trickery.” With one deceptively frail-looking hand, she reached out and yanked the necklace out of Jonathan’s grip, breaking the chain in the process, and leaving a red welt to add to his other wound. She held the medallion up to show them. “This little trinket had the ability to influence your minds, making you do whatever this man wanted you to do, including giving him most of your money, apparently.”
A murmur of whispered discussion flowed around the table like a sea serpent, a mixture of confusion, anger, and sorrow.
“You are now free to make your own choices,” Barbara continued, ignoring the babble. “Stay if you want, or go. But this time it will be of your own free will.”
One attractive woman midway down the table sighed and shrugged her shoulders in resignation. “Hell, men have been lying to me all my life. At least here the food is good, and no one is slapping me around. I’m staying.” A couple of others seemed to agree, but most of the group didn’t take the news quite so well.
The older couple from the end of the table stared at Jonathan with horror and disgust, the man furious and the woman in tears. They stopped in front of him long enough for the man to say, “I can’t believe I let you talk us into signing this ranch over to you. You’ll be hearing from our lawyer.” He put his arm around his weeping wife and they walked away with their shoulders bowed.
A curvy brunette with bright blue eyes shoved her chair away from the table so hard it fell over, marched up to Jonathan, and slapped his face with enough force to leave her handprint glowing for a moment in the midst of his artificially tanned cheek. “You son of a bitch. I can’t believe I left my husband for you. Yes, he’s kind of boring, but at least he’s a good man, and never lied to me. I hope like hell he’ll take me back after the way I treated him.” She walked away without a backward glance, only stopping long enough to grab a gangly ten-year-old boy from the kids’ table before sweeping out the door.
One by one, most of the people in the room left, with or without comment. Finally, the only ones left were Jonathan, Grace, Barbara, and a few others who sat there looking stunned.
Barbara picked up the stickpin, wiped it off on the tablecloth, and stuck it carefully back through her lapel. The medallion she put in her pocket, even though it no longer posed a danger. Better safe than sorry. Besides, the Queen would no doubt want to trace it back to its origins, so she could express her displeasure personally to its owner for being so careless as to allow it to fall into Human hands.
As she stood up, Jonathan gazed at her numbly, still clutching at his chest as though he couldn’t quite believe the necklace was no longer there.
“Why?” he asked her. “Why did you do this to me? Everything was perfect until you ruined it. Why?” The last word came out as a wail.
Barbara looked down at him dispassionately, unmoved by his grief. He’d done too much damage to too many lives for her to feel sorry for him.
“Two reasons,” she said. She held up a finger. “One—you had something that didn’t belong to you and you abused its power for your own selfish gains.”
A second finger went up in the air, and then swiveled to point at Elena and Katya, sitting together at the children’s table, looking bewildered. “And two, you stole another man’s children, and then, when he wouldn’t give them up without a fight, you used that same power to destroy his reputation. I might not have gotten involved for the first one, but the second made this my business. You should have left Ivan Dmetriev alone.”
Grace jumped up out of her chair and went around to face Barbara. “Ivan? What on earth does Ivan have to do with this?”
“Ivan called me in to help,” Barbara said, “when you and your boyfriend left him no other choice. You turned the justice system against him, so he came to me for justice instead.”
“What are you, some kind of bounty hunter?” Grace asked, more belligerent than afraid. “You can’t do anything. The law is on my side. I’m their mother.”
“Nothing so mundane as a bounty hunter,” Barbara said with a grim little shadow of a smile. “I am a Baba Yaga. And your Human laws are not my concern.” She dropped just enough of her veil to let her real self show out through her eyes, and Grace turned pale and took an involuntary step backward.