Wickedly Magical (6 page)

“Of course you can,” Grace said, shooing them off and sliding one arm around Jonathan’s waist possessively. “That will give me more time to spend with Jonathan.” She gave a suggestive little wiggle before letting him go. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Jonathan?”

As he turned toward the old lady, he thought for a moment he caught a glimpse of an almost savage fury on her face, and strange glinting sparks seemed to shoot from her eyes. But it must have been a trick of the light, since when he looked again, she was just a harmless old woman giving Grace a bland smile.

“Your girls are just lovely,” Miss Volkova said in a quiet voice. “You are very lucky to have them.”

“I’m a very lucky woman,” Grace agreed, but she was gazing coyly up at Jonathan in that way she had that could turn him on in an instant.

Time to end this tour and move on to something more entertaining. He was pretty sure the medallion had done its job anyway.

“Well, I hope you enjoyed your visit here,” he said, turning around to lead his guest back toward the front. He’d noticed she’d arrived in a limo, complete with a driver, which encouraged him even more. As they moved away, he patted Grace on her lovely round bottom and whispered, “This won’t take long. Meet me in my room in a few minutes.” She giggled and ran off without a backwards glance at her children.

“It was very educational,” the old woman said. “Very educational indeed.”

“Wonderful,” Jonathan said, helping her into the backseat of the limo. “So, shall I get that lovely room set up for you, Miss Volkova? No need to wait, is there? I hope we will see you again soon.”

She gave him a small, wicked smile. “You can count on it, my dear. You can definitely count on it.”

***

Chudo-Yudo glanced up as Barbara stalked into the Airstream still dressed in her “old lady goes visiting” clothes, but looking otherwise like herself again, down to the scowl on her long-nosed face.

“How did it go?” he asked, then ducked as one sensible shoe came flying by his head to smash into the wall behind him. Its twin followed, accompanied by some impressively rude language, most of it in Russian. The previous Baba’s education had been very thorough.

“Ah,” he said. “That well.”

He strolled over to the refrigerator, opened the door with one paw, and delicately picked up a beer between his teeth. He waited until clothes had stopped arcing through the air and handed it to Barbara.

“Thanks,” she said, dropping to the floor with a sigh and taking a long swallow. “I feel like I should scrub the inside of my brain out with soap.”

Chudo-Yudo gazed at her thoughtfully. “Nice underwear. Black lace suits you.”

“Shut up,” she said, but without much vehemence behind it. “If I had to wear those silly clothes for one more minute I was going to implode.”

“Messy,” he commented. “As, I take it, our situation is?”

The empty bottle clinked as she put it down. “Messy indeed. Most of the people I met there seemed genuinely happy, but how much of that was due to the circumstances and how much was due to our friend John’s magical talisman, I couldn’t tell.”

She got up and grabbed a pair of leather pants and a tee shirt with a picture of a pair of legs wearing striped socks. The shirt read:
Things just haven’t been the same since they dropped that house on my sister.

Chudo-Yudo nodded his approval as she came back over to sit on the couch. “So he does actually have one, then?”

“Oh you bet,” she said. “I managed to get a good look at it, and my best guess is it was probably something created by a Mer or Selkie mage. Their languages are so similar, and I couldn’t tell with just the short glance I got, but it definitely wasn’t Human in origin.”

“Uh oh,” Chudo-Yudo said. “That’s not going to make Her Majesty very happy.”

“I’ll just have to get it back before she finds out that an arcane object found its way into Human hands and is being misused,” Barbara said. “Believe me, I’m not going to let him keep it.”

“Is he evil?” the dog asked, an eager gleam in his wide brown eyes. “If he’s evil, I’d be happy to eat him for you.”

Barbara chuckled. “You’ve got a little drool there, buddy. But no, I don’t think he’s evil. Just greedy and self-absorbed, maybe a little broken inside. If I let you eat every Human that answered that description, you’d get very fat.”

“I could work out,” Chudo-Yudo suggested. “Besides, dragons don’t get fat. It’s a metabolism thing.”

She shook her head. “Nice try, but no. But just because I’m not going to let you eat him doesn’t mean I’m going to let him keep playing house with a bunch of brainwashed followers.” The corners of her mouth turned down in a grimace. “Especially not when children are involved.”

“Did you find Ivan’s little girls?” One giant paw snaked out to smack at a tiny lizard that had forgotten it was part of a carpet. The lizard gave a high-pitched squeak and flattened itself back out into the weave of the cloth again.

“I did.” Barbara got up and paced across the small room. “They haven’t been harmed as far as I can tell, but they’re not happy. They miss their father, and their mother barely seems to know they’re alive. Too busy playing footsie with Jonathan.”

“Footsie, eh? Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Chudo-Yudo snorted, and a wisp of smoke drifted up to the ceiling. “Do you think she’s under the control of the talisman?”

Barbara shrugged. “Hard to say. And I don’t care. The kids deserve to be with their father, and he deserves to be with them. Not to mention that I promised, and a Baba Yaga never breaks a promise. Legs, yes. Hearts, occasionally. But never a promise.”

“So are you going to go back in as yourself or as the old lady?” Chudo-Yudo asked. “And how are you going to get Jonathan to hand over the necklace? I’m pretty sure he isn’t going to give it up willingly, and you don’t want to risk any of the children getting hurt if there is a fight.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” Barbara said, baring her teeth in a grin that almost frightened even Chudo-Yudo. He thought it was probably a pretty good thing that Jonathan wasn’t there to see it. “When I’m ready to get it, that necklace is coming with me. But I’d like to figure out a way to negate its power once and for all. We wouldn’t want a thing like that to fall into the wrong hands.”

Dog and woman gazed at each other wordlessly, both imaging the already powerful High Queen of the Otherworld with a magical talisman that made people want to do whatever she desired. Of course, most people did that already, out of simple self-preservation.

“I see your point,” Chudo-Yudo said.

“Besides,” Barbara added. “I have an idea. But I need to take a walk and see if I can come up with something that will render that necklace into a chunk of useless, decorative metal. And maybe blow off some steam before my head explodes. I’ve been hanging out with Humans too much. They make me twitchy.”

Chudo-Yudo rolled his eyes. “You know, Baba, you were Human once.”

She shrugged, heading towards the wardrobe door that opened up to reveal a secret passage to the Otherworld or a closetful of clothes, depending on the mood it was in, and whether or not you knew the right way to ask.

“That was a long time ago. After all these years of drinking the Water of Life and Death, not to mention living the life of a Baba Yaga, I have about as much in common with Humans as you do.” She opened the closet, pulled out a sword, which she belted around her slim waist, then closed it again.

Chudo-Yudo raised one furry eyebrow. “You planning to start a fight with someone?”

“I said I needed to blow off some steam, didn’t I?” Barbara said, rapping three times on the wardrobe and sending a jolt of magic through the handle. It creaked open to show her a bunch of leather pants and a few silk shirts, and she pushed it shut with a curse and tried again. This time the space behind the door was gray and foggy, with occasional glints of sparkling flitting lights, like fireflies, off in the distance. A distant roar echoed into the trailer, and the smell of spring flowers drifted through the air.

“That’s better,” she muttered, kicking the door frame gently with the toe of one boot. “You are the worst door in the history of doors.”

Turning back to Chudo-Yudo, she said, “I just thought I’d see if Koshei was around, and maybe wanted to get in some swordplay.”

The dragon-dog gusted a charcoal-scented sigh in her direction. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?” He shook his massive head. “Look, I’ve got nothing against Koshei. For a dragon, he makes a very handsome-looking guy. And I know that he’s been a companion to Baba Yagas down through the centuries, and he makes you happy on the rare occasions when he decides to make an appearance. But has it ever occurred to you to hang out with someone who is maybe a little closer to your genetic structure?”

Barbara gave him a smile that didn’t hide the flash of melancholy in her eyes. “Right. Because there are lots of guys standing in line to date a long-nosed, older-than-she-looks, fairy-tale wicked witch.”

Chudo-Yudo gave her an innocent look. “Hey, you’re not
that
wicked,” he said, not denying the rest of the list.

A slammed door was his only answer.

“Besides,” he said thoughtfully as he wandered over to magically pluck a bone out from underneath a couch that had no underneath, “who says wicked can’t be good?”

***

Barbara spent a little time enjoying the usual (that is to say, unusual) enjoyments of the Otherworld, but she couldn’t shake her edgy restlessness as the back of her mind constantly gnawed at Ivan’s problem like Chudo-Yudo gnawed at a bone. Finally, she gave up and headed back towards the path she’d taken in.

But in typical Otherworld fashion, the land refused to cooperate. She took one walkway in what she thought was the right direction, only to find fronds of ten-foot-tall blue ferns in her way. Turning in another direction, the track disappeared altogether, replaced by a cerulean pond filled with cavorting nymphs who waved at her gaily as she walked by.

“Seriously?” she muttered under her breath. “Anyone would think you didn’t want me to go home.”

To her left, a phoenix flashed brightly through the air, highlighting a narrow trail through fire-singed flowers. The Otherworld was sometimes helpful, and sometimes not, Barbara thought to herself as she strode towards the newly revealed path, but rarely subtle. Fine. She wasn’t all that subtle either, so she could hardly complain. She’d clearly been thinking hard enough about her current quandary for the mystical world to notice, and point her towards . . . something. She only hoped it wasn’t the edge of a cliff.

At the end of the path, she found a sparkling fog, much like the one she’d come through on her way from the Airstream into the Otherworld. For a moment she was confused, thinking she’d simply followed a different route back. But when she put her hand into the transitional mist, the door she touched was slightly rougher than hers, with a rounded top instead of her square one.

“Hey!” she said, to no one and nothing in particular. “Wrong Baba residence.” Or was it?

Shrugging, she reached out and rapped briskly on the door. After a moment, it opened to reveal a pretty but startled face topped by a mass of red curls held up in a loose bun. A few freckles adorned a nose almost as aristocratic as hers, and full lips parted in amazement.

“Barbara!” Bella said, her surprise turning to pleasure as she recognized her unexpected guest. “What are you doing here? Come on in.”

Barbara stepped through the doorway into a space even smaller than her own. Unlike her modern-looking Airstream, her sister Baba lived in an updated version of a gypsy caravan; compact and homey, mostly made out of wood like the magical hut it had once been, it was well suited to Bella’s travels through the more sparsely settled parts of the country. In some ways the most traditional of the three American Baba Yagas, Bella tended to keep to herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people. She just liked trees and animals and mountains better.

“Sorry to barge in unannounced,” Barbara said. “I was wandering around in the Otherworld and apparently it decided you could help me with a problem I’m dealing with.” She gave her fellow Baba Yaga a wry smile. “No idea how, though.”

Bella lifted an eyebrow. “Huh. Well, why don’t you tell me all about it and we’ll see what we come up with. I’ve learned over the years never to underestimate the magic of the Otherworld. I swear, sometimes it seems almost sentient.”

Barbara snorted. She’d grown up popping in and out of the Otherworld with her mentor, and if anything, she thought Bella’s assessment wasn’t giving the mystical land enough credit. If it thought Bella had the answers Barbara sought, odds were, Bella did.

As the younger Baba fixed them both tea on her tiny stove, Barbara greeted Bella’s companion. Unlike Barbara’s Chudo-Yudo, and the one that lived with Beka in her converted school bus, Bella’s Chudo-Yudo was a female dragon who took the form of a huge Norwegian Forest Cat. Kashka, as Bella called her, was about forty pounds of muscle, fur, and attitude, and with her gray-brown pelt, tufted ears and feet, and wide ruff, she looked more like a lynx than a domesticated cat. Of course, Chudo-Yudo didn’t look all that tame either. For good reason.

“Hello Kashka,” Barbara said politely, inclining her head in the cat-dragon’s direction. “It’s nice to see you.”

Kashka stretched, slowly rising from where she’d been sprawled over much of the bed that spanned the back of the caravan, and her wide mouth opened into an exaggerated yawn that showed sharp white teeth. “Hello, Baba Yaga,” she said, then lay back down and seemingly went back to sleep. Only the slit of green showing from under mostly closed eyes revealed her interest in their unexpected guest.

Barbara stifled a laugh. She’d always thought the cat shape suited Kashka’s haughty disposition quite well. In contrast, her mistress was vibrant and cheerful—when she wasn’t losing her temper and setting things on fire. Still, no one was perfect. All three Babas—not true sisters of the blood, of course, but related by magic and mission—had their own little flaws.

The two Baba Yagas sipped strong black tea while Barbara related Ivan’s tale, and what she herself had discovered since meeting him. When she’d finished, Bella looked thoughtful, playing with a strand of hair until the whole mass tumbled down from its bun. Barbara handed her the stick that had been holding it up without comment. It looked like Bella had been wandering through the woods and just picked up whatever was handy, as usual.