Wickedly Unraveled

by Deborah Blake

  “Idiots,” she said, without much vehemence. “Who calls the sheriff’s department because the neighbor’s cows are in their yard again? Call the damned farmer to come get his cows. I’m sure as hell not going to send a deputy to go round ‘em up.”

  “Sorry,” she said, looking directly at Barbara. “I’ve been doing this job for a long time. You’d think I’d get used to the stupid.”

  “Ha,” Barbara responded, having spent many years complaining about the same thing. “You never get used to the stupid. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” She nodded. “Hello, Nina. Is Liam in?”

  Nina raised a sparse eyebrow. “I’m sorry? Have we met?”

  “Barbara Yager,” Barbara said with an internal sigh. “I’m—” She didn’t know how the hell to finish that sentence. Luckily, Nina finished it for her.

  “Oh, wait, aren’t you that professor that came through town about a year ago? Studying local herbs or something.” Nina nodded at her. “Sure, I remember. You were only in town for a week or so. Sorry it took a minute to come back to me.”

  A year ago? That didn’t make any sense. Neither did her only being here for a week. “Right, uh, I was looking for Sheriff McClellan. Is he in, by any chance?”

  Nina’s face fell, the lines around her thin lips deepening. “I’m sorry, Ms. Yager. Liam isn’t the sheriff anymore.” She jerked her head over her shoulder, in the direction of what had been Liam’s office. A pudgy stranger sat behind his desk, reading a magazine with his feet up on an open drawer. “Is there anyone else that might be able to help you?”

  “Um,” Barbara thought for a minute while her mind raced. Liam wasn’t the sheriff? That job was his life—she couldn’t imagine him without it. Then again, he had been on the verge of losing it when they’d met. Another puzzle piece she didn’t like clicked into place,

  “Does Belinda Shields still work here?” Belinda had been Liam’s deputy, and her mother, a Russian immigrant, had set everything into motion by Calling for the Baba Yaga when Belinda’s daughter Mary Elizabeth had gone missing, along with three other local children. The family had ended up becoming friends after Barbara and Liam rescued the little girl, and Babs occasionally spent time with Mary Elizabeth, although Babs still wasn’t all that good at “playing.”

  “Sure,” Nina said. “I can get her for you.” She spoke into an intercom, then gave Barbara a serious look. “But if you met her when you were here before, don’t be surprised if she seems different. She hasn’t been the same since her daughter disappeared. Changes a person, that kind of loss does. So don’t take it personally.”

  Mary Elizabeth was never found? They didn’t rescue the children? What the hell was going on?

  Before she could ask, Belinda came up to the desk. The petite woman was noticeably thinner, the already unattractive tan polyester uniform hanging on her as if it had been made for someone else. There were lines of strain permanently etched around her warm brown eyes and pale pink mouth, and the smile she gave Barbara was superficial at best. Even her light brown hair in its neat braid seemed to have faded. Barbara, who would have sworn she didn’t have a heart, could feel it cracking around the edges.

  “Hello,” Belinda said. “Nina said you wanted to talk to me?” The deputy gestured toward her desk, tucked toward the back of the main room. “Why don’t we go sit down. Can I get you some coffee?”

  “Ugh. No thank you,” Barbara said, possibly with more vehemence than she’d intended.

  Belinda gave a short laugh. “I can see you’ve had our coffee before.” She slid into her chair and waited until Barbara had taken the seat in front of the desk. “It’s Doctor Yager, isn’t it? I remember there was some sort of fuss about a permit the last time you were here. Then I saw you talking to Sheriff McClellan a few times at Bertie’s. Things were a little…hectic around that time.” She shook her head, as though to dismiss unwanted memories. “Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to talk to you while you were in town back then. What can I do for you now?”

  “I was looking for Liam, actually,” Barbara said. “But Nina told me that he doesn’t work here anymore?”

  Belinda sighed, her breath gusting across the desk to ruffle one of the many piles of paperwork that seemed to have taken over every bare surface. The only spot free of clutter held a framed photo of a little girl of six or seven, with long blonde hair and laughing blue eyes. The edges of the frame were worn in spots, as if it were picked up often.

  “I’m afraid not,” Belinda said. “I’m not sure if you were aware of it during your visit, but three children went missing before you got here. When Liam, Sheriff McClellan I mean, couldn’t find any trace of them, the county board fired him. It was pretty damned unfair, if you ask me, because the state troopers didn’t find anything either, and the entire department searched night and day without coming up with a clue. But they fired him anyway, and replaced him with Frank Smith, the son in-law of Clive Matthews, the president of the board.”

  “I see,” Barbara said. How Liam must have hated that. “And did Sheriff Smith solve the cases?” A glance at the man in the office showed he’d put down the magazine and seemed to be hard at work on his computer. Barbara was betting on a difficult game of Solitaire.

  A bitter laugh escaped tight-pressed lips. “Frank Smith couldn’t find his own ass if you drew him a map,” Belinda said, although at least she kept her voice down. “Honestly, he’s a lousy sheriff. Luckily Dunville and the rest of Clearwater County are pretty quiet most of the time, and the other deputies and I can take care of the occasional bar fight or domestic dispute.”

  “Were any of the children ever returned?” Barbara asked. She held her breath, although she was pretty sure she knew the answer already.

  Belinda bit her lip. “No. They weren’t. They vanished without a trace, and we never found so much as a stray fingerprint or the sighting of a suspicious car.”

  “Your daughter was one of the missing children, wasn’t she?” Barbara said, as gently as she could manage. Gentle wasn’t her customary mode, but she’d gotten a fair amount of practice in the last few years of having Babs around.

  “She was,” Belinda said, reaching out to stroke the picture. “It really killed Liam that he couldn’t bring her back to me. I never blamed him, though. He would have walked through fire for that child.”

  Barbara’s mind raced. None of this was right. They had found the children, who had been stolen by a rusalka who’d used a doorway that had been accidentally opened between the Otherworld and this one. The nasty creature had disguised herself with a glamour to look like a beautiful Human woman and had taken a job with Peter Callahan, whose company’s use of fracking had opened up the portal in the first place. Together, Barbara and Liam had gone into the Otherworld and brought the children back, along with Babs, who was an unexpected bonus.

  But it sounded as though none of that had come to pass. Something was terribly wrong with the time line. Barbara suspected that Babs was right when the little girl asked if it had something to do with all the magical chaos that had erupted back at the witch’s house. But how?

  “Did any more children go missing after your daughter?” Barbara wondered out loud.

  “No, she was the last,” Belinda said, sounding tired. “Whoever took them must have moved on somewhere else, although I check constantly to see if there is any news of similar incidents happening elsewhere, and so far I haven’t come across anything.”

  “How odd,” Barbara said. And it was. She was a little worried that the other woman would wonder why Barbara was asking so many questions, but from the look of it, Belinda was probably too exhausted and worn down to care. Although possibly she was also too polite. Not a problem Barbara had ever had.

  “I met your mother the last time I was here,” Barbara said, more or less randomly. She needed answers, but she didn’t even know what questions to ask. “We had a nice chat about our mutual Russian roots. Is she well? I’d love to see her again now that I’m back in
town.”

  “I thought you had a touch of an accent,” Belinda said, a corner of her mouth turning up. I hadn’t realized you’d met my mother. It must have been right before her heart attack.”

  “Her what?” Barbara gripped the edge of the desk. She rather liked the elderly woman, who she’d seen last week baking cookies with Babs and Mary Elizabeth, seemingly in perfect health.

  “My mother was so upset about my daughter’s disappearance, she ended up having a minor heart attack,” Belinda explained. “She’s better now, but she was in the hospital for weeks and hasn’t really been the same since. She and my father gave up their farm and moved in with me.”

  Barbara drummed her fingers lightly on her leather-clad thigh. She kept coming across things that were different from what she remembered, but she wondered if this particular event wasn’t somehow pivotal to the rest of the changes. If Mariska Ivanov had a heart attack and never Called on a Baba Yaga to help find her granddaughter, then it was possible that Barbara had come to the area a year ago for another reason and had never gotten involved in the search for the missing children at all.

  Which was a pretty important piece of information, if it was true, but Barbara had no idea how it was at all helpful. Dammit.

  “Thank you.” Barbara stood up. “I appreciate your time.”

  She hesitated, not sure what else to say. “I’m going to fix this and get your daughter back” seemed rash and overly ambitious. “I’m sorry I seem to have somehow screwed everything up” wasn’t at all useful and would probably just confuse the woman. And Barbara was already confused enough for both of them.

  In the end, she just shook Belinda’s hand and walked away, glaring into the sheriff’s office on her way out of the building. It was probably just a coincidence that the poor man’s computer blew up just as she walked by. Probably.

  When she got back to the Airstream, she loaded the BMW into the back of the truck and then sat in the front seat, trying to figure out what to do next. Babs slid into the rear seat, along with Chudo-Yudo, and tugged gently on a strand of Barbara’s long dark hair.

  “Where do we go now, Baba Yaga?” the little girl asked.

  Barbara ran through several answers and discarded them all as too profane to utter in front of the child. “I’m not sure,” she said. She could park the Airstream behind the yellow farmhouse and probably no one would notice, but the thought just made her sad. In the end, she could only think of one spot to go—the spot it had all started.

  “I remember this place,” Babs said, almost cheerfully as they pulled into the patch of meadow overlooking the Clearwater River. “This is where you brought me when I first came back to this side of the doorway. It is pretty here.”

  It was, too. An untidy half acre of crabgrass and wildflowers set at a wide curve in the road, Miller’s Meadow was a perfect example of what a nice job nature did when left to itself. Its isolated location and the soothing babble of the river gave it a feeling of calm and serenity that had attracted Barbara to it in the first place.

  She parked the Airstream carefully as close as she could remember to the spot she’d put it originally, as if that action alone could magically make things go back to the way they were supposed to be. Then they all went inside and sat despondently in the living area.

  “I take it you didn’t find your sheriff?” Chudo-Yudo said after a few minutes of silence. He chewed on a large bone. Barbara and Babs each had cookies, although Barbara felt like she might choke on hers, and finally gave up and set it down on the plate mostly uneaten.

  “No,” she said shortly. Then sighed. “Apparently he’s not sheriff anymore. They fired him when he couldn’t find the missing children.”

  “But, Baba, you did find them,” Babs said, her brown eyes even wider than usual. “You did. You found them and you found me. Liam helped. He was a hero.”

  “That was before,” Barbara said. “Somehow everything has changed.”

  Babs put her cookie down too, and Chudo-Yudo helpfully snapped up the rejects.

  “But how could this have happened?” Babs asked, a little plaintively. She found the Human world confusing enough on a daily basis, no matter how hard Barbara and Liam tried to make it make sense. Their current situation was obviously much, much worse. Barbara felt a little plaintive herself. Or like throwing something, which was closer to how she usually dealt with frustration.

  “I’m not really sure,” Barbara said. “I have never heard of such a thing, even in the old tales my own Baba Yaga told me. But I have a theory of sorts. Let me see if I can explain it.”

  She snapped her fingers and a ball of yarn appeared, plucked from its usual resting spot in one of the storage cabinets that lined the walls. Barbara knitted occasionally, a skill her mentor had taught her to pass the time during the long, cold Russian winters, although Barbara had never really developed a knack for it. It was too fiddly for her, and when she missed a stitch or the yarn knotted up, she had an unfortunate tendency to turn it into something less annoying. Like a book. Or a potato.

  Still, it would do for an illustration, as well as anything could.

  She held up the coil of rough gray wool.

  “Imagine that this yarn is our timeline. The one you and I remember, Babs, where everything turned out okay, and you and Liam and I ended up together.” She rolled the ball along the floor, where it unrolled as it went. “Somehow time has moved backwards, so that we have moved backward a few years, and are now about a year from the events that culminated in the children being rescued.” She retrieved the yarn and rewound it.

  “Obviously, that shouldn’t be possible, but since we’re here, it clearly is.” She growled quietly to herself. She only liked the impossible when she made it happen.

  “But I don’t remember this timeline you’re talking about at all,” Chudo-Yudo said, dropping cookie crumbs on the floor. “I don’t remember Liam, or any of the other events you have talked about. If we went back along the timeline together, wouldn’t I remember those lost years too?”

  Barbara resisted the urge to throw the yarn across the room. Barely. “One would think so. But in this case, I think something else happened. A part of the witch’s spell moved time in the wrong direction,” she gazed at Babs, “which is one of the reasons why we never, ever, ever mess around with time when doing magic. It is just too unpredictable and hard to control.”

  Babs nodded. This was one lesson she was unlikely to forget.

  “More than that, though,” Barbara said, holding up the yarn again. “I think that when the witch’s time-reversing potion mixed with my magic, and spilled over onto other herbs and tools in her kitchen, it caused an even more drastic reaction. Time didn’t just move backwards, it unraveled.”

  She pulled apart the strands of yarn until the end was frayed and messy. “It would have been relatively easy to rewind time the way I rewound this ball of yarn. Unraveling, however, is a lot more complicated.” She plucked at one strand. “Some pieces have stayed the same, like Babs being with us, and me having at least visited Dunville.” She held out another one. “But other pieces have changed beyond recognition. The trick will be twisting them all back together so that they put us back where we should be. Where we started out.”

  Chudo-Yudo shook his massive head. “Can you do that? Is it even possible? Isn’t there a chance that you might make things worse? I don’t want to end up being an actual dog instead of a dragon. Or being stuck with some other Baba Yaga. I’ve barely gotten you trained the way I like you.”

  Barbara squeezed the ball of yarn until it squeaked and turned into a little gray mouse. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry.” She put the mouse down on the floor, where it scampered off to hide among the ever-changing flowers of the embroidered rug.

  “I don’t know, Chudo-Yudo.” She rubbed her hand over her face, suddenly feeling exhausted beyond measure. “But I can tell you this. I am going to keep trying until I manage it. I waited eighty years to find Liam. I’m not going to lose him n
ow.”

  Chapter Four

  Chudo-Yudo pondered that for a moment. “If you insist on doing this, I think you’re going to need some help,” he said. “More help than one very handsome dragon disguised as a pit bull and an adorable, very talented, but untrained miniature Baba Yaga can give you.”

  “Maybe we can ask the Riders to come,” Babs said, perking up. She loved all three of her honorary uncles, who were always happy to play with her or teach her interesting things, like how to build a fort or navigate through a forest or kill a man using only one finger.

  Barbara snorted. “Tempting, but this is a magical issue, not a brute force one. I’m not sure how much good Alexei, Gregori, or Mikhail would do us. My sisters, on the other hand, could definitely be useful.”

  Bella and Beka weren’t her sisters by blood, exactly, but the three of them were all Baba Yagas, and together they dealt with any problems that fell under their job descriptions within the United States. They usually each worked on their own, but they were always willing to help each other out if necessary. They felt like sisters, and that was what mattered.

  She pondered her choices briefly and then pulled out her cell phone and hit the number for Beka, the youngest of the Baba Yagas, who usually took care of issues on the Western third of the country. She lived by her beloved ocean in her hut on chicken legs-turned converted school bus.

  Of course, Beka’s phone, being magical as well as practical, recognized the call as coming from Barbara.

  “When did you get a cell phone, Barbara?” the younger woman asked, sounding amazed.

  Barbara rolled her eyes. “Never mind that,” she said. “I’ve got an emergency. It’s too complicated to get into on the phone. If you’re not in the middle of a Baba Yaga task, is there any chance Marcus can spare you to come help me for a few days?”