Wickedly Magical (Baba Yaga, #0.5)(14)
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?”