Playing With Fire

by Adrienne Woods et al.

  “How inclined is this vampire to bite into human necks?” Camille asked. “Because I’ve seen Twilight and Interview with the Vampire and what-not, and I’m not too keen on becoming a blood bag.”

  “He won’t do that.” I hoped. How well did I really know him? I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, partially because we had a deal that was far more profitable to him—why drain me of all my blood once when he could have a lifetime supply of witch blood that increased his strength every time he drank it? Btu humans?

  Had he ever killed humans? Probably. He’d been around four hundred years.

  I had tried to avoid talking to him as much as possible during our secret rendez-vous, so I had always refrained from asking, but maybe when all of this was over and my sister was safe… Maybe I should have a real conversation with him them.

  A conversation about what we were. If… If this was still just a deal we struck, or if there was more to it than that. Because yesterday, when he came to the forest when I called him, when he held me like that under the light of the crescent moon, so close to him that I could practically feel every inch of his body…

  Well, then it had seemed there was a lot more at hand than just a business exchange.

  “All right, well, then that’s settled.” Camille got up from the bench and rubbed her palms. “When do we meet with this Arthan guy? I’m dying to meet him—not literally.”

  “At seven at the graveyard.” I shot a worried glance at Dean, who was hunched over and looked like he was ready to throw up any second. “Are you okay? If you don’t want to go through with this…”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll be there. That’s what friends are for, right?” He smiled at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

  Dean seemed a lot more upset at this “I’m a witch, I hang out with vampires, and oh, you know, Baba Yaga’s are real too” thing than Camille was. But this had always been our dynamic: Dean was emotional to a fault, quick to help, quick to emphasize, but it also made him a bit more anxious than Camille and I. Camille was like a rock. Whatever horrible situation you threw at her, she kept on standing tall, never backing down.

  I held out my arms. “Group hug?”

  “I thought you’d never asked.”

  Both of them hugged me, and with the three of us united like this, with friends like these who had my back no matter what, I felt ready to take on anything.

  Even the freaking Baba Yaga.

  Chapter 15

  After school ended, I had a few hours to spare before Camille, Dean and I had agreed to meet. Camille would come pick me up quarter to seven, and then the three of us would drive to the graveyard together, where we would meet Arthan. Hopefully. If he hadn’t bailed on me.

  Thinking about my sister and what happened to her earlier today when I had explained the whole story to my friends, had made me wonder about Katie. Last I heard, she was still in the psychiatric facility, ironically called “Clouds and Sunshine”, and her condition hadn’t improved much since that fateful night.

  I had to take two buses, but half an hour after school had ended, I found myself in front of the most depressing building I had ever seen. It looked like some giant had just dropped a slap of concrete in the middle of the street, carved in a window or two, and decided to call it a house. The name was even more ironic now, as nothing about the grey-colored, uninspiring building even gave the faint impression of “Clouds and Sunshine.”

  The nurse who was occupying the receptionist area was a great example of “Clouds”, but certainly not of “Sunshine”. She looked as dour as if someone had put a dog’s turd underneath her nose.

  “How can I help you?” she said with about as much enthusiasm as an automaton.

  “I’m looking for Katie Hamburg,” I said. “She’s an old friend of mine and—”

  “Room 412,” the nurse droned on, without even letting me finish my sentence. “Fourth floor. You can’t miss it, number is on the door.” She looked back down at a magazine she was reading, and I figured I wouldn’t get much else from her.

  Grunting, I turned around toward the staircases. Climbing the four floors of stairs up to Katie’s room was enough of a workout for today, the thought that I would have a second workout soon that involved digging up a corpse’s bones wasn’t exactly inspiring.

  The door to room 412 was closed. At least the door looked a little more colorful than the grey that was otherwise the predominant color in the facility; it was a light blue. Katie wasn’t dangerous or anything, so it didn’t surprise me that I could just walk in and the door wasn’t closed, she could probably leave her room whenever she wanted to.

  I knocked on the door and waited for a reply. After a few seconds, a tentative, “come in”, came from the other side of the door.

  When I opened the door and walked in, Katie looked at me as if she’d seen a phantom. Shock, disbelief, all those emotions were written all over her face, but then they vanished as quickly as they’d appeared.

  “Kieran.” She paused for a second. “I figured you would come here sooner or later.”

  I blinked, surprised. “You expected me to come?”

  “I expected you had some questions about what happened to your sister.”

  Katie’s room was small. It housed little more than a bed, a table and a chair. She was sitting on the chair, working on a drawing, and she gestured for me to sit down on the bed.

  Reluctantly, I entered further into the room and with even more reluctance, I sat down on the bed. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. They told me that… that you weren’t well.”

  Which was surprising, because to me, Katie looked all right. She didn’t look crazy, or upset, or like she needed to be in a facility such as this one. If anything, she looked… normal.

  “I’m not ‘well’, no.” Katie scratched her neck. “I haven’t been well since that day, to be honest. Something changed inside me that day.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, glancing about the room.

  “Can you tell me about that night?”

  Katie bit her lip. “Yes. You deserve to know. As you may remember, there had been rumors for weeks about a wendigo living in the forest.”

  The forest. I had a brief flashback to my time in the forest the other night, scrambling to get away from the crumbling-down cabin of the Baba Yaga.

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts. “Yes, I remember.”

  “We’d found a few corpses that had been feasted upon by the horrible monster already, and it was downright disgusting.” Katie scrunched up her nose. “Anyway, the coven agreed to go out hunting for the monster. Your grandmother took the lead, and she decided to take Samantha along because she was so talented. It was actually Samantha who begged Evangeline to let me tag along, because we were best friends and I had felt left out when Samantha got asked to all these dangerous assignments and I didn’t.” She sighed, a melancholy look flashing across her features. “I miss her, you know. Your sister. She was one of the best people I knew. The best, even.”

  I swallowed hard. “I know. I miss her too.”

  Katie grabbed my hand for a moment, squeezing it. In her eyes, I recognized the girl who had joined my sister on her many adventures, whom I had tea parties with when I was younger, on the rare occasions that Samantha agreed to indulge me and forced her best friend to play along. That horrible night had scarred Katie as much as it had me, if not more.

  “Anyway.” Katie straightened her back and took a deep breath. “We came to the area in the forest where the wendigo was said to reside, a clearing with a wide circle of mushrooms on it. We thought that was strange, a witch circle near a wendigo’s hunting ground?” She tightened her lips. “But we didn’t think more about it, we just got ready to hunt for the creature.”

  A witch’s circle of mushrooms. Like I found close to the Baba Yaga’s cabin. Was it a coincidence? Maybe there were a lot of witch circles in the forest, although the few times I’d walked through it before, for family picnics and hanging out with Camille and Dea
n, we’d never come across one.

  “The way to kill a wendigo is to shatter its heart, then bury it in a church cemetery. The rest of the wendigo’s body needs to be hacked to pieces with a silver-plated blade or axe. We had all the materials, and Samantha would use her blood magic to force all the wendigo’s blood to its heart, chattering it. Evangeline would help, and my task was to handle the hacking and slashing.” She grinned, her sadness lifting for just a moment.

  “Anyway, as soon as we had cornered the Wendigo, Samantha started with her spell, but it didn’t work out the way it should. She said something was wrong almost right away. As if the wendigo was connected to something else. It was much stronger than it should be.”

  I furrowed my brows. “Connected to something else?”

  Katie nodded. “Yes, she didn’t know what, all she said was that it felt old, and evil, and a lot more powerful than a wendigo. I can hear her saying that. The words are so clear in my mind, like she said them just now instead of months ago…” Katie coughed, clearing her throat. “After that, things went downhill fast. Samantha couldn’t control the wendigo, and it got to Evangeline. Ripped her heart out so fast none of us could even move to stop it.”

  I cringed, hearing about my grandmother’s last moments. For the coven, she was Evangeline, the powerful, just leader. To me, she was the person who’d allowed me to sit on her lap when I was young, who told me bedtime stories, and who secretly gave me candy when my parents didn’t allow me any.

  “If it’s any comfort,” Katie said while she gave me a sorrowful look. “She died right away. I don’t think she even saw it coming.”

  “Thanks.” It wasn’t exactly much comfort, but it was something.

  “Then, the wendigo tried to do the same with Samantha, but she unleashed all her powers on it, and I tried to hack into it with my axe.” She shook her head, tears rolling out of her eyes. “I slashed off one of its arms, but it didn’t even budge. It was so focused on Samantha, like it was hell-bent on taking her down. Biting at her, pouncing on her, no matter what I did to pull it off, it always returned to fight her instead of me. Eventually, it slammed its claws into her side, and she fell down, weakened… And then it looked at Samantha, balled its hand into a fist like scrunching something together, and then Samantha fell down. She didn’t wake up again.”

  “Like… like magic?” My frown deepened. Wendigo’s didn’t perform magic.

  “Yes.” Katie nodded vigorously. “And then… I summoned all the strength of the wind, and plunged that axe right into its heart. I don’t even know how I managed to do it, but the creature was so busy cackling…”

  “Cackling?”

  Realization dawned on me, so sickening and terrifying that it made the world spin all around me. Cackling.

  Like the Baba Yaga.

  That horrible sound of the witch laughing out loud while the blood was slowly boiling in her veins would haunt me for the rest of my days.

  “It fell down, clutching its heart. I think I managed to shatter its rotten heart with that blow. It wailed and cried, but I didn’t have time to chop it to pieces, all I knew was that I had to get Samantha out of there as soon as possible. She still had a pulse, but it was very weak.” She scratched her cheek. “I pulled her up, lifted her on my shoulders, and I ran and ran and ran, out of the forest, onto the street, all the way up to your house.”

  The melancholy that had taken hold of her early on during our conversation, was back in full force. “You know the rest.”

  I leaned back in my seat—or well, on the bed, which wasn’t very comfortable. “Wow.”

  “You can say that again. Afterwards, no one believed me. They thought I was just too shaken up. A wendigo that can perform magic? That’s unheard of. That’s one of the reasons they put me here, you know. Well, and because I kept on seeing it.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly like I said. Sometimes I saw glimpses of the wendigo. Or of a terrible, haunting face, wrinkled and ancient, and barely even human. I saw its reflection in mirrors and in the corner of my eyes.”

  “And that’s why they put you here?” I leaned closer toward her, putting my elbows on my knees. “What if you were just cursed?”

  “That’s what I tried to tell them. But the coven searched my entire house, up and down, and they didn’t find any hex bag. Nothing. Then, the coven performed a ritual to check if I had been cursed. Thirteen of them sat around me in a circle, scanning my magic and my mind for any hexes. Nada. I wasn’t cursed, at least not in the way we are used to dealing with. All I had that was different about me was a small mark on my wrist.” She showed her arm to me, holding up her wrist. “I figured it was from the fight or from one of the branches in the forest, as I tried to get out of there as quickly as possible.”

  It looked like a scar, I had to admit that. Just one line running vertical and a smaller crossing through it diagonally. It was far too simple to be a witch symbol. If anything, it reminded me a little of the runes on the collar of the slave-girl in the Baba Yaga’s hut, but even that could be far-fetched.

  “It might just be a scar, who knows. But ever since, I’ve been haunting by that face, by that night. Maybe it’s all in my head, like they eventually suggested.” Katie looked me straight in the eyes. “Do you think it’s all in my head?”

  I licked my lips, unsure of what to say. If someone is cursed, there is always proof. If the coven would place Samantha in a circle right now and scan her magic, they would see she was cursed; it would show right away, the curse would light up in the pattern of her magic like a Christmas tree, something that obviously shouldn’t be there but wasn’t. A curse that couldn’t be seen, and that derived all its power from two measly lines?

  All my knowledge about witchcraft spoke against that. Maybe Katie’s mind had shattered a bit that night, similar to how the wendigo’s heart had shattered when she plunged that axe into it. Maybe it was all in her head.

  But on the other hand, I didn’t believe in coincidences. A wendigo that cackled and that destroyed my sister’s mind with magic simply didn’t exist. Wendigo’s didn’t talk. They screamed, they howled, but those were the only sounds they ever made. And they certainly didn’t perform magic, let alone magic that powerful.

  A wendigo in the very forest where I had visited a Baba Yaga’s hut. Maybe even in the same spot, in the middle of a witch’s circle. A wendigo dead-set on killing my sister, barely even paying attention to Katie.

  And now, months later, a Baba Yaga showed up who wanted to put a death curse on my sister, even tough she was already in a coma and thus harmless?

  That was one coincidence too many. A Baba Yaga was strong enough to shatter someone’s mind, although shapeshifting into a wendigo was new, but…”

  “Show me your scar again.”

  Katie obliged, otherwise staying quiet. The room was pregnant with silence, and I knew what words she wanted to hear from me, but I wasn’t sure if I could tell her those if I didn’t really believe it.

  I traced the lines of the scar. The longer I looked at the lines, the more they looked like runes. Rudimentary, ancient runes, from an era long gone. Druids had used runes for their magic, but we used witch symbols, a more modern variant of it. To some, witch symbols were stronger, but others insisted that runes, when used by a powerful druid, should never be underestimated.

  “Something happened to you.” Katie looked at me with narrowed eyes, trying to read my expression. “That’s why you’re starting to believe me. You know who could be behind this, right?”

  I licked my lips. “I have an inkling of an idea, yes. But I’m not one hundred percent sure and—”

  “Maybe this will help,” Katie interrupted me. She grabbed the coloring book on her table and started skimming through it. Although I couldn’t look at the drawings in detail, each of them looked black, bleak and depressing, and filled with horrifying scenes I didn’t even want to think about. “Here.”

  She held up o
ne of her drawings, showing a face that looked like it came straight out of a nightmare—my own nightmares. Skin as wrinkly as the bast of a tree, a crooked nose like a hawk, bulging eyes that seemed to laugh at me, even from on the paper, grey hair pulled back tight around the skull.

  The Baba Yaga.

  I swallowed hard as bile rose up in my throat. I put my hand on top of the paper and pushed it down, away from me. I couldn’t bear to look at the monster that had ruined my life.

  “I believe you.” My voice was hoarse and my throat dry. God, how much I wished this was all just a nightmare I could wake up from, and that everything would be fine then.

  “You do?” Katie blinked at me, slightly surprised. “You believe me?”

  I nodded. “The Baba Yaga. I saw her.” I got up suddenly, my legs moving without me fully realizing it. “Sorry, I have to go.”

  “Wait!” Katie yelled as I raced past her, out of that cramped room where the walls seemed to come closer toward me with every passing second. “Wait!”

  I didn’t, I left the door wide open and raced through the hallway, as if the devil was on my heels. I didn’t slow down until I found the restroom, entered one of the stalls, and deposited the contents of my stomach into the toilet.

  The Baba Yaga had targeted my sister from the start. She’d somehow shapeshifted into a wendigo, or controlled a wendigo in some way, even though I had no idea how, and then she’d used it to lure Samantha into the forest and tried to kill her. When that failed, she had moved on to plan B: me.

  All this was an elaborate set-up to murder my sister, but why? What did the Baba Yaga have to gain with this? I wondered while I threw up for a second time.

  I couldn’t just go to the Baba Yaga’s hut, distract her, take the girl and lift the curse anymore. If the Baba Yaga had gone through such lengths to kill my sister before, she would do it again. It was just a matter of time.

  The Baba Yaga had put my sister on her kill list, and if I didn’t change her mind about it, or stopped her once and for all, then Samantha would be dead soon, whether or not by the curse I had created.