Wickedly Unraveled

by Deborah Blake

  “You are the Baba Yaga, aren’t you?” Mariska asked, her voice weaker than Barbara remembered, but her posture as upright as ever.

  Barbara made the tiniest of bows in her direction. “I am,” she said, still in Russian. “Shall we speak later?”

  Mariska nodded. “Come, dinner will be getting cold,” the older woman said in English. “I will get another plate for the little one. I hope she likes beef stroganoff.”

  “I like almost all foods,” Babs said. “Except snails. I do not like snails. The French are very silly to eat them.” She had insisted on trying escargot at a restaurant once. That might have been when Barbara had decided to institute the “don’t set things on fire” rule.

  Mariska gave a creaky laugh. “I don’t like them either. The French eat many strange things. Come, come and sit down. My stroganoff is much better than snails.”

  They followed her into the kitchen, where a long farmhouse table was set with cheerful red pottery plates and blue glass goblets. Sturdy wooden chairs with bright flowered cushion were pulled up around the table. Mariska hurried to set one more place, although there already seemed to be enough plates for the five of them.

  They’d no sooner sat down than the back door flew open and a familiar man with dark blonde hair and broad shoulders came hurrying in. He put a six pack of beer down on the table and leaned over to kiss Mariska on one wrinkled cheek.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was fixing a fence for someone and time got away from me.”

  Mariska clucked her tongue at him. “You work too hard, dear boy. Sit down and eat. But don’t give Ivan one of those beers. You know they make him silly.”

  Ivan waggled bushy gray eyebrows at Babs and said, “Don’t listen to her, malyshka. I am never silly.”

  “Oh, you have guests,” Liam said, sliding into his space at the table.

  “You remember Barbara Yager, don’t you, Liam? She was in town for about a week last year. I think I saw you two chatting a few times at Bertie’s,” Belinda said, putting a beer mug down in front of him and then sitting down across from her mother. “Barbara, Liam comes to dinner a couple of times a week. My mother worries he doesn’t eat enough, otherwise.”

  Barbara ended up sitting between Babs and Liam. Her right side, the one closer to him, felt hotter than the left, and she struggled to keep a neutral expression on her face.

  Liam gave her the crooked smile that had charmed her from the very beginning. “Yes, of course I remember her,” he said. “Hello, Barbara, I hadn’t realized you were back in town.”

  She had to clear her throat before she could speak. “Yes, well, we just got here. This is my adopted daughter Babs.” Barbara gave the little girl a sideways glance from under lowered lashes, worried about how she would react to Liam’s sudden appearance. What if Babs forgot that she wasn’t supposed to know him?

  But she should have known better than to underestimate the girl.

  “Hello,” Babs said. “We are having beef stroganoff for dinner. Mariska is a very good cook.”

  “Yes, she is,” he said. “I didn’t realize you had a daughter,” he said to Barbara. “I don’t remember you mentioning her the few times we talked.” His checks flushed, and Barbara realized to her delight that their mutual attraction had clearly been as real and immediate in this timeline as it had been in the other.

  “Ah,” she said. “I hadn’t adopted her then. How have you been?”

  He flushed again, this time more out of embarrassment, she thought. “Life has been challenging for all of us,” he said with a shrug. “I’m doing okay.” He opened a beer, and handed one across the table to Belinda. “Would you like a beer?”

  “I’d love one,” Barbara said. “So, I hear you’re not the sheriff anymore. I’m sorry. I know you really liked the job.”

  He shrugged again, pushing a shaggy length of hair out of his eyes. “I’m doing handyman work these days. I like that too. There is something very satisfying about taking something that is broken and fixing it. The law was rarely quite that simple.”

  “I expect it wasn’t,” she said. Then added casually, “You know, I will probably be needing a handyman. I just bought the yellow farmhouse out on the South River Road, and it could use a lot of work.”

  Babs sputtered milk onto the table, her face lit up by a smile. “You bought our house? That is wonderful!”

  Barbara bit her lip, trying not to smile at this rare show of enthusiasm. “Yes, I bought us a house. That was the surprise.”

  “You’re staying in the area?” Belinda asked, looking amazed. “I hadn’t realized anyone was even looking at that house. It has been empty for long time.” She widened her brown eyes. “You know they say it is haunted.”

  Mariska chuckled. “Oh, I doubt this one is afraid of ghosts.” Her own brown eyes twinkled, and she patted her husband’s hand. “Did you hear that, dear? The Baba Yaga is staying.”

  Belinda’s brow wrinkled. “Baba Yaga. You called her that before, when she first got here. Is that some kind of Russian nickname I’m not familiar with? The only Baba Yaga I’ve ever heard of is the witch from the stories you used to tell me when I was a child. Some of them scared the heck out of me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Barbara said, a tiny smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “It isn’t an insult.” She swiveled so she could face Liam, trying not to seem as though she was holding her breath. “So, are you available to do some work on my house?”

  “I’d be delighted,” Liam said. “I’ve always liked that old place.”

  Me too, Barbara thought. Especially when you’re in it.

  Chapter Nine

  After dinner, Barbara left Babs helping with the dishes, a chore the girl enjoyed immensely for some reason, and walked out into the back yard with Mariska. They took their cups of strong tea and sat under a giant old oak on a couple of sturdy benches set in front of an unlit fire pit.

  “So,” Mariska said after a few minutes of companionable silence. “You truly are the Baba Yaga? The witch I told my daughter stories about when she was about the same age as your little girl?”

  “I am,” Barbara said. Then added, “At least, I am one of them. It is a job title, you know, not an actual person. There are two others here in America, Beka and Bella, but they usually deal with issues in the western third or the middle of the country, respectively.”

  “The Baba Yaga,” Mariska said with a satisfied sigh. “I always knew you were real.” She smiled shyly at Barbara. “When I was growing up in the Old County, my grandmother told me the stories, as her grandmother had passed them on to her. She always swore, my Babushka, that she had met the Baba Yaga once, as a child lost in the woods near where she grew up.

  “But she described the witch as an old crone with hair as white as mine, and a great beaky nose, and iron teeth. Terrifying, my Babushka said, although the witch guided her back to the path, and only took her basket of berries as the price for helping her.”

  Barbara touched her own nose a trifle self-consciously. “Well, I don’t have white hair or iron teeth, so that’s something.” She winked at Mariska and for a moment, there were two old women sitting on the benches. Then only one, with an astonished look on her face, and a tall woman with a cloud of long dark hair and a nose that was a little long, but fit well with her strong face.

  “The old woman my grandmother met? She was an illusion? A masquerade?” Mariska took a gulp of her tea.

  Barbara shrugged. “Perhaps. It was traditional, after all, especially in those days. We do grow old, eventually, though, so the one your Babushka met might have been genuinely ancient. It is hard to say. But your grandmother must have been polite, if the Baba helped her. We may not be the evil witches of the old tales, but it is also tradition that we only help the worthy seeker, who approaches us correctly.”

  “Neither good nor bad witches,” Mariska said. “But with the potential for either, depending on the actions of those who deal with them.”

  �
�Something like that, yes,” Barbara said. “Although some of us are softer-hearted than others. You should meet my sister Beka. She is actually quite kind.”

  “And you are not?” Mariska gave a tiny shake of the head. “You are remarkably gentle with my daughter, and you came to visit an old woman simply because you were asked. These do not seem like the acts of an unkind person to me.”

  Barbara lifted the corner of her mouth in her barely there hint of a smile. “You happen to have caught me on a good day. I have many, many bad days.”

  “Oh?” Mariska raised a feathery white eyebrow.

  “I once turned a man into a toad after he asked me for directions.”

  Mariska choked on her tea. “You did?”

  “Well, he patted my ass and called me sweetie,” Barbara said, by way of explanation. “And I turned him back later. Not that there was much difference, really. A toad in either form, that one.”

  “Ah,” the older woman said. “There was many a day in my youth when I would have done the same if I had your power. It must be nice.”

  Barbara cast a longing look back toward the house, where she could hear the deep rumble of Liam’s voice, mixed with Babs’ higher pitched tones. “Sometimes,” she said. “But there are problems even my power can’t fix. Or at least, not rapidly or easily. I suppose it remains to be seen if they can be fixed at all.”

  Mariska glanced from Barbara to the kitchen windows that sent a warm glow of light out into the darkness, but said nothing. She only pressed her thin lips together as if wondering whether or not to speak.

  Finally, she said, “I have no wish to be turned into a toad, but I need to ask a boon of you, Baba Yaga. I will gladly give you anything you wish in payment, including my own life, although it is worth little, considering how few years there are left in this worn out body of mine.”

  Barbara sighed. She had known this was coming since Belinda had told her that her mother wished to meet the mysterious herbalist she had missed the first time around.

  “Mary Elizabeth,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “My granddaughter,” Mariska agreed. “And the other children who went missing, whose families pine as much as we do. Can your powers find them and return them to us, Baba Yaga? And if so, would you be willing to undertake the task?”

  “This is a formal request for the aid of the Baba Yaga,” Barbara said carefully. “Is that correct?” There were, after all, rules to be followed, even for her.

  Mariska bowed her white head. “It is. I ask for your help in finding my granddaughter and the other children who disappeared, and for the gift of their safe return. I will pay whatever price is required.”

  The air and ground around them shivered, and the night birds fell silent as the universe shifted to accommodate the magical bargain. Such compacts were sacred, and they changed things even by their very existence.

  Barbara was counting on it.

  “I accept your request,” she said in a formal tone. “The price will be three tasks, which you will perform whenever I demand them.” Or figure out what the heck they would be—something important enough to fulfill the agreement but not so onerous that they would strain an old woman with a bad heart. I wonder if baking me cookies would count. If they were really big cookies.

  “Very well,” Mariska said. She wiped away a tear unobtrusively and took a deep breath. “Can you find her, Baba Yaga?”

  Barbara pondered how to answer that question. It had been one thing not to tell Belinda, who didn’t understand what or who she was dealing with. Mariska, on the other hand, was a different matter. What Mariska chose to share with her daughter was her choice.

  “I have already found her,” Barbara said slowly. “And the other children too.”

  Mariska gasped, a hopeful look lifting the sadness from her face, but Barbara held up one hand in caution.

  “This is not exactly the good news it sounds like,” Barbara said. “They were taken to the Otherworld. You must know what this means.”

  The older woman’s face fell. “They can never come home?” she whispered.

  “It is too soon to say,” Barbara said. “Mary Elizabeth and the other girl have aged more than they would have in a year on this side of the doorway. The small boy who was taken hasn’t aged a day. There would be no way to explain this if I were to bring them back now. Moreover, they have been changed by their time in the enchanted lands.”

  She patted Mariska lightly on the hand, something she would probably never have done before living with Babs. “But they are alive and well, and being treated with kindness, and I hope that is some kind of comfort.”

  “Time has gone awry and must be returned to its correct path. I am not even sure that such a thing is possible.” She poured the rest of her tea out on the ground and then snapped her fingers, so that it streamed backward into the cup—a simplified demonstration. “I can make you no promises but this: I will do my utmost to do whatever is necessary to make it possible for them all to be back home with those who love them. You have my word on it.”

  Mariska gave her a watery smile. “I have absolute faith in you, Baba Yaga. I know that you will not fail.”

  Barbara tipped the cup again, watching the cool tea sinking away into the dirt below. She wished she shared the other woman’s certainty. It helped to have this be an official task: the universe often seemed to line up so that things fell into place when a Baba Yaga was on a mission. But nothing was guaranteed, and Barbara still had no idea how to mend the unraveled threads of time.

  The next morning, they moved the Airstream to its regular spot out behind the barn at the yellow house. It felt good to be home again, even if home was currently a dusty, dirty long-uninhabited wreck with broken windows and several generations of mice families living in the walls.

  “I somehow thought that buying a house took a lot longer than an afternoon,” Chudo-Yudo said after giving the mice a strong suggestion that it might be healthier to relocate to the great outdoors. Or the neighbor’s house. Their choice.

  Barbara snorted down her long nose. “Well, it helps to have a bag of gold and the ability to magically alter documents. Plus, I’d already bought the house before, which made it easier. I knew who to talk to without having to go through all the official channels. The thing has sat derelict so long, they practically begged me to take it off their hands.”

  She looked sadly at the house on which she and Liam had worked together to make into a warm and comfortable home. Just like the first time she’d acquired it, it was nowhere near ready for anyone to move in. There were broken windows and many of the shutters were barely hanging on. Bits of broken shingles littered the ground amid the overgrown shrubbery that had crept up to cover much of the lower story, making it dim inside even on this sunny day. The floors and surfaces were covered with dust, and cobwebs hung in swaths from corner to corner.

  “Déjà vu all over again,” Barbara said softly. She glanced over at Chudo-Yudo. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Can you tell me what happened during the time we were here last year? From what I can tell, we hung around for a week, but since I wasn’t involved in searching for the lost children, what the heck did I do all that time? And why did we come here in the first place, if I wasn’t Called by Mariska Ivanov?”

  “The ‘why’ we came here was simple,” he said. “There was some sort of imbalance between our world and the Otherworld that was creating chaos over there. The Queen summoned you to see if you could figure out if something on our side of the doorway was causing it. That led you to this area, and then it took you a couple of days to find an unauthorized portal that had been opened up by the local fracking operation.”

  He shook his massive head. “Why we stayed after that, I’m not sure. Once you’d closed the portal, we could have left, but after that sheriff showed up on the first day with some nonsense about needing a permit to park the Airstream in an empty meadow, you started acting goofy.” The other penny dropped. “Wait a minute. That guy, that sh
eriff, he’s your Liam? The one you say you ended up married to? Holy crap. And he was at that dinner you went to last night? Man, that must have been interesting.”

  That was one word for it. Agonizing was another. “So what did I do for the rest of the time we were here, once I’d done what I’d come here to do?”

  “Mostly you hung around someplace called Bertie’s, and a couple of times that sheriff guy came out here for barbeque and a beer after his shift was over. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention. Nothing ever happened. You just sat there and neither of you talked much, and he got more and more stressed about whatever case he was working on. Then one day you just woke up and said, ‘This is crazy. What was I thinking, me and a Human? We have nothing in common.’ And you hooked the Airstream up to the truck, and we left. I think it was not long after that you went to the Otherworld and came back with Babs, after you went to check that the imbalance had been righted.”

  Well, that explained that. Without the common goal of finding the missing children to bring them together, not to mention common adversaries to fight, she and Liam had never fallen in love. Or if they had, she hadn’t stuck around long enough for them to act on it. Not surprising, really. Before she met Liam, she never even considered trying to have anything resembling a normal relationship. It just wasn’t something Baba Yagas did. At least not before her. And in this timeline, apparently not after, without her example to lead the way for Beka. She still had to check in with Bella. Perhaps the middle Baba had had more luck with her love life than the other two.

  She looked back at her poor neglected house with a sigh. Back to the beginning again.

  Babs didn’t seem to mind, thankfully. She was clearly just happy to be back on familiar ground. Since they’d pulled in, she had been walking around talking to everything from the trees to the fading yellow paint, giving them all her familiar pat pat pat as if to reassure them. Barbara suspected it was comforting for the girl as well, although being a Baba Yaga in training, she was also spreading little bits of her energy around as she went. Barbara intended to do the same thing soon, kind of like an animal marking its territory. Only with less peeing.