Wickedly Unraveled

by Deborah Blake

  Chudo-Yudo had already taken care of that part, immediately anointing a favorite tree. Sometimes she thought he took the “dog” portion of his dragon-dog disguise a smidge too far.

  “I’m not saying it isn’t nice to have a house,” he said. “But I don’t quite understand why you bought it. I mean, if we somehow figure out how to fix this mess, we’ll be back in the right timeline, and you’ll already own it. If you can’t fix it, won’t we just get back into the Airstream and hit the road again?”

  Barbara watched a beat-up brown pickup truck roll into the driveway and felt her heart thump in her chest as the tall man in need of a haircut hauled himself out from behind the wheel.

  “No,” she said firmly. “We’re not going anywhere. I have a mission to accomplish—two of them, now that I have been officially Called by Mariska—and I fully intend to succeed. But I needed a back-up plan in case I don’t, and this is it.

  “The first time around in this timeline, I let Liam McClellan slip through my fingers. I thought there was no way to make a relationship with a Human work. Now I know differently, and I intend to pursue him until I get him back.”

  Chudo-Yudo stared up at her, his red tongue lolling in amazement. “You’re going to woo the ex-sheriff? Who are you, and what have you done with my Baba Yaga?”

  “Ha,” she said. “You know the answer to that already. And yes, yes I am. The man isn’t going to know what hit him.”

  “It’s got great bones, but it is going to take a lot of work,” Liam said. “A lot of work.”

  “Oh, I don’t think there are any actual bones here,” Barbara said. “Just one ghost, and she’s perfectly harmless.”

  Liam blinked. “Uh, no. I didn’t mean real bones. That’s just a way of saying that the structure of a house is sound.” He clearly wasn’t quite sure if she was pulling his leg or not. “Do you really believe the house is haunted?”

  At her feet, Chudo-Yudo was doing his barking-laugh thing. Barbara’s booted foot twitched in his direction, but she stopped herself before she stubbed her toes again.

  “We’re all haunted by something, sheriff,” she said.

  “I’m not the sheriff anymore, Ms. Yager,” he said. “But point taken.”

  “And you were calling me Barbara last night. Not to mention when I was here a year ago,” she said. “If you’re going to be playing with the bones of my house, we might as well be on a first name basis.”

  Liam laughed. “There is that. So what did you want me to work on first? We need to walk through the whole building and make some notes,” he looked at the house and shook his head. “Extensive notes. But it would help to know where you wanted me to start.”

  “I’m not too worried about the cosmetics,” Barbara said. Truth was, she could use her magic to fix almost anything that was wrong with it, but that would defeat the purpose of buying a house that needed a handyman. “I’d like to move into it as soon as we can, so all the functional stuff, like making sure the bathrooms work and the kitchen is useable, that comes first.”

  “Practical,” Liam said with a small smile. “I like that in a woman.”

  I know. Barbara just nodded. “Shall we go inside?”

  They walked in through the back door into the kitchen. The mice were gone, but the sink still dripped and the linoleum floor was bubbled and warped, a trap to catch the feet of the unwary. The once white walls were dingy and gray.

  Liam bent down and pulled up the edge of one of the floor tiles. “You know, I think there is decent wood under here. You’d be amazed at the number of people who covered up perfectly good pine floors with manmade crap during the sixties and seventies.”

  “Oak,” Barbara said without thinking. “It’s oak.”

  He got onto his hands and knees for a closer look. “So it is. I guess you did a pretty thorough walk-through before you bought the place.”

  She actually hadn’t set one foot in the door, but she thought it was probably best not to mention that. After all, she’d walked through it nearly every day for over three years. That was practically the same thing.

  Liam was checking out the sink and scribbling something in a notebook when Babs wandered through the room. Pat pat pat. “Hello, kitchen,” she said, running her hand along the walls. “Hello refrigerator. You’ll feel much better when we turn you back on.” Pat pat pat. “Hello stove. Don’t worry, we’ll fix that back burner.”

  Barbara bit back a laugh at the look on Liam’s face. He’d probably never seen a small pixie-haired child greeting a house before. Thankfully, Babs didn’t pat him too, merely gazed at him with those wide, too-wise eyes and said, “Hello Liam. Barbara says you are going to make our house look pretty again. I would like that.”

  “I like making things look pretty and work better,” Liam said. “Maybe you could help me with some of the simpler parts. If it is okay with your mother.”

  Babs mouthed the word mother, as if tasting its flavor to see how it sat in her mouth. Barbara realized that no one had ever used it to describe her before. She often referred to Babs as her adopted daughter, since that was the simplest way to explain the girl’s presence, but she mostly thought of their relationship as mentor and apprentice. That was the way things always were between Baba Yagas and the girls they raised to eventually take up their roles when the time came.

  Liam had definitely been Babs’ father, but Barbara had never thought of herself as a mother. Certainly her own Baba mentor, a cranky and antisocial woman at the end of her career, had nothing motherly about her, either treating Barbara like a handy servant or an annoying and inconvenient encumbrance, depending on her mood.

  It wasn’t traditional, but hell, very little about her existence in the last few years had been. “Her mother thinks that would be a very good idea,” Barbara said firmly. “You should always take advantage of an opportunity to learn a useful skill.”

  She was rewarded by one of Babs’ rare smiles, which lit up her normally solemn face and rendered it radiant.

  “Yes,” Babs agreed. “That would be good. You will have to be here a lot to fix things. That is good too.” She gave a decisive nod and continued on her way through the room, still patting things and chatting to inanimate objects.

  “She’s adorable,” Liam said. “A little unusual, but adorable.”

  “Odd, you mean, and yes, I suppose she is. She had a difficult start in life, and she’s still trying to figure out how to act around normal people.” She gave a brief laugh. “I’m not a particularly stellar example of normal, either, I’m afraid. But she is very smart and fascinated by pretty much everything, so I hope you meant it when you said you’d let her help.”

  “I did,” he said. “I like kids.” Only someone who knew him as well as Barbara did would have seen the shadow pass over his eyes. Long before she’d met him, he and his then wife had lost a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—it had destroyed his wife and their marriage and the thought of that lost child still made him sad. Having Babs in his life had almost wiped that shadow away, but of course, in this timeline, that hadn’t happened, so the darkness was still there.

  “You know,” he said, breaking away from his own bleak thoughts, “I don’t remember you mentioning you intended to adopt.” There was a suspicious undertone to the question, no doubt the old lawman’s habit of questioning anything that seemed strange.

  Barbara shook her head. “It was kind of unexpected.”

  “Ah,” Liam said. “Hence the sudden desire to buy a house and settle down. I understand now.”

  Not exactly, Barbara thought. But close enough. “So can you start work right away?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I have to warn you, though, it isn’t going to be cheap.”

  “Not to worry,” she said. “I have a fairy godmother.” Or at least, the Queen of all the fairy godmothers

  “That must be handy,” Liam said. “Know where I can get one?”

  Barbara gave him a smile so warm, it heated up the room ten degrees an
d charred the paper of his notebook along one edge. Liam looked a little shell-shocked. “You never know,” she said. “Anything is possible.”

  Chapter Ten

  After Liam had made endless notes in his neat block writing, he drove off to get supplies, promising to be back in the morning. Barbara’s chest tightened as he pulled out of the driveway, and she had to remind herself that her plan was working and she would see him again. Even if he had no idea that she was anything more important than a new client. Breathe, she reminded her lungs. It’s going to be okay. Breathe.

  Then she took her own turn around the house, walking from room to room with a sage smudge stick and a carved jade bowl full of salt, cleansing away any old negative energy and making the space her own at the same time. Not Babs’ pat pat pat, but close. She greeted the resident ghost politely and opened all the windows—at least the ones that still would open.

  When she was done, she glanced around the dingy living room with distaste. She liked a clean house, so this just wouldn’t do. Even if they weren’t going to be moving inside for a while. She waved one hand, flicking her fingers to draw a few arcane symbols, and the layers of dust and dirt lifted up and wafted gracefully out the windows.

  “That’s better,” she said decisively. From a shadowed corner, Anna, the ghost, nodded in agreement.

  “It is like that movie Liam showed me once,” Babs said, peering in from the doorway between the living room and the hallway. “Mary Poppins. It was silly, but I liked it. There was singing and dancing.”

  Barbara grimaced. “Well, if you think I am going to start singing and dancing about like a ninny while I clean, you are very much mistaken. But feel free to do it yourself if you are so inclined.” That she’d like to see.

  Babs scrunched up her button nose. “I do not think the dancing actually has any effect on the end result, do you?” Instead she concentrated and then snapped her fingers once, twice, three times.

  Lacy filaments of cobweb sailed in long strands out the windows, an eerie sight if you weren’t prepared for it. The room looked better already.

  “Nicely done,” Barbara said, going over to give the girl’s hair a gentle tug. “You’ve been practicing.” Barbara’s own mentor had rarely wasted time or energy on praise, and she was determined to do better at raising her own little Baba. It had helped that Liam had been such a good example, since Barbara had very little experience with the more Human (or kind) aspects of childrearing.

  They went through each room, cleaning the superficial dirt and dust in much the same way (there might not have been dancing, but Barbara was pretty sure she heard Babs humming under her breath). It wasn’t an activity that took much concentration, so Barbara used the time to think, mostly about what to do next.

  In the long run, she had to figure out a way to knit together the unraveled pieces of the timeline. But to do that, she first had to identify the individual threads that were no longer where they belonged. Perhaps if she could put enough things back the way they were supposed to be—like having Mariska Ivanov ask her to find the children—that would help.

  Of course, nothing would be exactly the same. For instance, the first time around, Mariska had sent Belinda to ask for the Baba Yaga’s aid, but the older woman had been the one to send out the initial Call that brought Barbara to the area. It would have to do. Barbara was pretty sure that the final solution would require a spell and some massively powerful magic, but anything she could do to make the task seem less completely impossible could only be a good thing.

  Getting Liam back in her life was part of that, although she would have done it anyway. But now she needed to decide which unraveled bit to tackle next. There were two big ones that immediately came to mind: Brenna and Maya.

  The Queen would already have her own people searching for Maya in the Otherworld, but Barbara had a feeling they wouldn’t find her there.

  Rusalkas were water creatures who once lived in the rivers and lakes of Russia. They tended to be dangerous and bloodthirsty at the best of times, and it was probably a good thing for Humans when they were relocated to the Otherworld with most of the other Paranormals.

  Maya had stumbled onto the unguarded portal and come through the doorway with two goals in mind. The first was to steal Human children to trade for power. The pollution of the waters on this side of the doorway had affected the waters in the Otherworld, eventually diminishing the magic of those whose essence was closely entwined with that element. In Maya’s twisted mind, the exchange was only fair. Her second goal, no less important than the first, was to exact revenge on the Humans who caused that desecration out of greed and carelessness.

  When Barbara had closed the portal, she would have ended Maya’s ability to carry out her first task, but that didn’t mean Maya would have given up on her second goal. If Maya had been trapped in the Human world when the doorway was shut, it was almost certain that she was still up to no good. The question was, how to track her down?

  When they were done with the bulk of the superficial cleaning at the house, Barbara returned to the Airstream and pulled her laptop out from the cabinet that also held some old books and Chudo-Yudo’s spare water bowl. She placed it carefully on the counter but didn’t lift the cover.

  “You know, it works better if you turn it on,” Chudo-Yudo said from where he was curled up in a spot of sunlight near the sofa.

  Barbara grimaced. “Not for me, it doesn’t.” She had reluctantly succumbed to using a computer because of the benefits of being able to look up information with ease wherever she was. (Baba Yagas didn’t need anything as frivolous as a WiFi signal.) But she’d never really gotten comfortable with technology and tended to look at her laptop as though it were an intermittently helpful gremlin who might at any moment decide to turn around and bite her.

  Sadly, Babs was even less at ease with most modern tools after being raised in the Otherworld, and the ones she did like tended to become a bit more animated than was normal. Liam’s last coffee maker had developed the unsettling habit of asking whether you wanted cream or sugar until he’d finally begged Babs to stop chatting to it.

  “I need Beka and Bella,” Barbara said, shoving the laptop away. “They’re much better than I am at this kind of thing, and besides, I need to let them know what’s going on.”

  “You tried telling Beka,” Chudo-Yudo reminded her. “It didn’t go very well.”

  Barbara gritted her teeth. “I haven’t forgotten,” she said. “But now that the Queen has agreed there is something wrong, and I have an official mission, they’ll have to believe me.” She thought about it for a moment. “Or at least they have to listen, and hopefully they’ll agree to help.”

  She pulled out the despised cell phone. “Besides, I have to warn them about Brenna. The woman is clearly up to something, and Beka is right in the line of fire.”

  Chudo-Yudo growled under his breath and said something rude in dragon.

  “I couldn’t agree more, old friend,” Barbara said. “I don’t care if the Queen doesn’t believe me. That witch is going down.”

  Barbara breathed a huge sigh of relief when Bella come through the cabinet with the wonky handle, trailed by a teenaged Jazz. To begin with, Barbara hadn’t been at all sure if Jazz and Bella would have found each other, since most of the events that led up to their meeting probably never occurred. But apparently Jazz becoming Bella’s apprentice was another one of those immutable things that hadn’t changed no matter how much everything else had.

  Maybe some parts of reality were destiny and would have happened in any timeline? Or perhaps they were simply strands that hadn’t unwound. Barbara had no idea.

  There was one change, though. Jazz was still a teen of about fifteen or sixteen, rather than the seeming adult nearly ten years older that she’d become after working a powerful spell in a futile effort to give the Riders back their immortality. That made sense, since if Brenna never stole their immortality in this timeline, there was no reason for Jazz to attempt such an
insanely impossible magical working. In some ways that was also a relief, although it was yet another difference, and Barbara had had a glimmer of an idea about that spell…

  “So what’s all the urgency?” Bella asked as they closed the closet behind them. “I was in the middle of painting a particularly nice patch of woods and the sunlight was just perfect.”

  When she wasn’t on a Baba Yaga mission (and sometimes when she was), Bella presented herself as a traveling artist, moving about the more deserted parts of the middle of the country in a modern caravan on wheels, just as Barbara used the guise of an herbalist doing research in her Airstream.

  “I was doing homework,” Jazz said with a grimace. “Personally, I appreciate the interruption.” She looked much the same, although her brown hair was cropped short and sported a purple stripe along one side, and at some point she’d had her ears pierced and wore small dangling silver pentacles along with her blue jeans and a tee shirt bearing the name of some band Barbara had never heard of. Mind you, that was almost all of them.

  Barbara crossed her fingers behind her back hopefully and asked Bella, “So, did Sam mind you coming? You guys didn’t have plans or anything, did you?”

  The pretty redhead squinted at Barbara. “Sam who? What are you talking about?”

  “Damn,” Chudo-Yudo said.

  Barbara had been afraid of that. “I’ll explain in a minute, as soon as Beka gets here. No point in going through it twice, although I’ve told Beka a little bit already. Not that she believed me.”

  She stared at the closet. “What’s taking her so long, anyway? All she has to do is step through the hidden doorway in the bus, dart through the Otherworld, and come out here. I called her before I called you. She should have been here already.”