Wickedly Dangerous (Baba Yaga, #1)(40)
“I take it that’s a no, then,” Chudo-Yudo said, closing the book with a broad canine sigh. “Didn’t the mechanic do a good job?”
Baba stomped over to sit next to him, flexing her toes in the soft fibers of the rug with relief. She hated wearing shoes. And never wore socks.
“Bah,” she said. “The bike is fine. At least as fine as it can be, until I can do something about the way it looks. But I ran into a problem.”
Chudo-Yudo cocked his head to one side. “How unusual for you,” he said in a sarcastic tone.
“This is serious,” Baba said, scrubbing her face with both hands, as if she could wash away the last couple of hours. After visiting three more people, and being variously yelled at, cried on, and threatened with a lawsuit, she felt like she was covered with some kind of viscous, malignant sludge. “Someone’s been tampering with my herbal remedies,” she told the dog.
That got his attention, and he sat up straight, the book sliding unnoticed to the floor, where tiny silk flowers helped to break its fall.
“The hell you say!” His brown eyes went wide. “All of them? How? Why?”
Baba shook her head. “All the ones I could track down anyway. Bob told me that people had been complaining, and his father—” she took a deep breath at the memory of the old man’s nasty accusations—“let’s just say that ‘witch’ is the nicest word being used to describe me. I had one woman whose arm swelled up when she used my cream on it, another who sneezed so hard she fell off a stool and broke her ankle, and a guy who came to me for a hair growth shampoo that made his hair fall out instead.” And hadn’t that been fun to try and fix subtly. Great goddess.
“Holy Mother Russia,” Chudo-Yudo said. “That’s awful.”
“Those aren’t the worst, though,” she said, heart heavy as she remembered the hysterical mother who swore Baba’s cough syrup had made her baby so sick, she’d had to take him to the emergency room.
The woman had been distraught, and wouldn’t let Baba into the house, slamming the door in her face when Baba asked to come in. She’d had to do what she could to help the infant from outside, standing in the insubstantial shadows by the bedroom window and praying that no one would drive by and ask what the hell she was up to.
“As to how, I have no earthly idea,” she added. Her head felt like it was reverberating with the accusing voices of all those she’d let down; she couldn’t think a clear thought past the murk and the misery of it all.
“All the medicines I’ve been able to get back look like my mixtures in my bottles, but every single one of them has been adulterated with something horribly wrong.”
She pulled the vials and jars out of her pockets, which as usual held as much as she wanted them to hold. Chudo-Yudo put his massive head down next to them and sniffed. Then he let out a huge snort, eyes watering and black nose twitching.
“Ugh. That’s nasty,” he said, rubbing a paw across his muzzle. “Feh.”
Baba looked for something else to throw, frustration making her fingers itch to break things. “Tell me about it. And all those people now think I’m responsible for making the dreadful concoctions. I hate this.”
She didn’t normally care what anyone thought about her, but this was different. For one thing, she’d found the town, and the people in it, unusually charming. Before this all happened, she’d actually been daydreaming about staying. Just an idle fancy of course, but still. For another, it touched on her honor; that made it matter. And anyone who dared to make a baby sick on purpose and blame it on her? That person was in for a world of pain.
Chudo-Yudo’s furry face rumpled in puzzlement. “But how could anyone tamper with all those treatments without someone noticing? It’s not like a person could go from house to house messing with the jars in every single place. Someone would have seen something suspicious, wouldn’t they?”
Baba sighed. “You’d think so. And if Maya was behind it for some reason, she’s not exactly a ‘blend in with the locals’ kind of gal.”
“Maybe she crawled in through their windows?”
Baba snorted at a vision of the neat and polished Maya slithering in past gingham curtains to land in someone’s bathroom sink. “Somehow I don’t think so, but I suppose anything is possible. For all we know, she’s really some creature the size of a cat.” She shook her head. “This is getting out of hand. I think it’s time to call in the Riders and see if they’ve learned anything useful. They’ve been out wandering around all this time, and the only messages I’ve gotten from them are variations on, “Sorry, nothing yet.” Maybe they saw something while they were searching for the missing kids.”
She looked down toward where her dragon tattoos curled around her arms and shoulder; as long as the Riders were on a mission for her, each one bore her link in his own symbol. That made the task easier, since while they carried the mark, she could summon them with a thought—albeit a concentrated and directed thought. After all, it wouldn’t do to have them show up every time one of them happened to cross her mind.
She closed her eyes, sat up straight, and centered herself, letting go of the anger and frustration, breathing them out with every exhalation until she was calm and focused. Then she drew a picture in her head of Mikhail Day: his almost too-handsome features that hid a childish love for puns and riddles, and a weakness for damsels in distress, sweet desserts, and showing off. She visualized the white clothes he always wore that never seemed to dare show a smudge, and the long fall of his blond hair when it hung loose in the evening as he carved a wooden figurine by the light of the fire in the old Baba’s hut. Come back, she sent out silently into the ether. I need you. Come back.