Wickedly Magical (Baba Yaga, #0.5)(3)
And so it had.
Now Ivan stood in front of a tall, dark-haired woman with glittering amber eyes and a forbidding expression, and he wasn’t at all sure that he’d come to the right place. She looked fierce enough to be a witch, and her nose was, perhaps, a little long, but she was way too beautiful to be the ancient crone he was seeking. Did Baba Yagas have assistants?
“Well?” the woman asked again, a faint Russian accent making her low voice sound almost familiar in his ears. “Did you want something?”
Ivan held out the box his grandmother had given him, his calloused hands barely shaking at all.
“My name is Ivan Dmetriev. I have come to redeem a favor owed to my family by the Baba Yaga. Can you take me to her?” he said.
The dark-haired woman snatched the carved wooden container out of his fingers, muttered something in Russian, and tapped the top of the box three times. It popped open, and he caught a glimpse of something that shone with an iridescent glimmer in shades of red tipped with black. It looked like a shard of rock, if rocks ever came in that color. Or maybe some sort of shell from a creature that lived in a mythical sea.
Strong fingers snapped the box shut before he could get a better look, and it disappeared into a pouch Ivan hadn’t noticed before. If anything, the woman’s scowl deepened.
“A family debt of honor,” she growled. “Wonderful. Just what I needed. Now I’m never going to get that beer.” At her feet, he could swear the dog was laughing.
***
Barbara stared at the box in front of her, as if her gaze could cause it to burst into flames. Which it could, of course, if she wanted it to, but that wouldn’t get rid of the problem. She’d recognized the contents immediately—not a shell or a crystal, but rather, a single large dragon’s scale. And not from just any dragon, either. The scale inside the wooden box came from her dragon. Her Chudo-Yudo, and therefore the Chudo-Yudo of the Baba Yaga who’d trained her. Why her mentor Baba had given such a token to this man’s grandmother was a mystery, but given it she clearly had. Which made it—and him—Barbara’s problem.
Her mentor was long gone, having lived well beyond even the normal couple of centuries that Baba Yagas were granted by their use of the Water of Life and Death, a gift from the High Queen of the Otherworld that prolonged life, increased strength, and boosted the Baba’s natural magical powers. (While also conferring obligations to the Queen and the denizens of her world, of course. There’s no such thing as a free elixir.) Barbara had inherited her predecessor’s home, her possessions, and her duties. And now it looked like she’d inherited one unused promise, as well. Fabulous.
“I guess you’d better come in,” she said, and walked back to the Airstream. Where the front door had disappeared. Again.
“Oh, cut that the hell out,” Barbara said, giving the blank silver wall a hard whack with her fist. “You’re supposed to hide the door from visitors, not from me, you temperamental tin can.”
Her guest gaped at the suddenly visible door, and then at her. “How, what?” Then added with alarm, looking over his shoulder, “You know, you probably shouldn’t do that. In all the stories, it says it’s not a good idea to anger the Baba Yaga.”
“You don’t say?” Chudo-Yudo muttered, although thankfully, he said it in Dog, not in English (or gods forbid, Dragon, which tended to involve a lot of flames).
Barbara rolled her eyes. “It’s my house; I can bang on it if I want to.”
Ivan stopped dead, one foot hovering over the second step. “Wait. Your house? You’re the Baba Yaga?” He gazed at her in disbelief. “But the Baba Yaga is an ugly old crone, and you’re, you’re . . . not!”
Chudo-Yudo was laughing so hard, Barbara had to push him out of the way to get inside; not an easy task with a two-hundred-pound dog. She muttered an obscenity in Russian and beckoned her unwelcome guest the rest of the way in.
“Thank you, I think,” she said. “And yes, I am the Baba Yaga. One of them, anyway. It’s more of a job title than a name, really. You can call me Barbara, if you’re more comfortable with that.”
Ivan stumbled his way to the couch, alternately staring at her and around the inside of the Airstream with wide eyes. Apparently its rich velvets and colorful tapestries hadn’t been what he’d been expecting. Nor was she, obviously.
Barbara made an effort to be nice. She wasn’t very good at social situations; being rescued from a desolate orphanage and raised in the forest by an ancient and antisocial witch would do that to a person. Still, it wasn’t as though she couldn’t manage to be polite—she just rarely bothered.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked. “It will probably smell like blue roses, but it’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”
“Uh, okay,” Ivan said. “Um . . . I thought that Baba Yaga lived in a hut on chicken legs.”
“Sure,” Barbara said, tossing some tea into a pot and pouring hot water over it.
“But when my adoptive mother and I moved here from Russia she decided we needed to blend in with our new land better. Both the hut and the flying cauldron have gone through a couple of permutations since then, but I’m pretty happy with this one.” A flower from the rug started trying to grow up the leg of the galley table and she nudged it back in unobtrusively with one booted foot. “Generally.”