“Important, yes,” Iduyan said. “But nothing that cannot wait. We were actually preparing to leave this place and move to somewhere even more secluded. The world encroaches even here, alas. This ritual was to lend us strength and help us prepare to uproot ourselves from our home.” She smiled up at him. “Perhaps you might be able to join us for a time. It would be pleasant to reconnect after so many years apart.”
Gregori took a deep breath, hating what he had to say next. “That might be nice. But it is a discussion for another hour. For the moment, I am afraid that I am the bearer of less happy news.”
Iduyan’s face grew grave. “What is this news?”
“I am sorry, Mother, but I believe that there is one among your people who is responsible for calling down the goddess Morena and inflicting a great blizzard on the city of Minneapolis.”
She shook her head. “That is not possible. No one here would do such a thing. Besides, we do not leave this place. It is our refuge from the outside world.”
She spoke with such complete certainty, Gregori almost doubted his own suppositions. But Jarilo said, “I spoke to Morena myself. Her description of the man who called her would seem to point in this direction. Is there no one among you who travels out into the lands beyond your village?”
Iduyan turned slowly to face a man whose features were similar to both hers and Gregori’s, as were many of the others in the room. The man was older than Gregori, with close-cropped hair and the tough-as-leather look of one who had grown up in the harsh lands of Mongolia.
“Batbayar,” she said. “My most dedicated aide and confidant. Only you are entrusted with the task of taking our goods to sell in the lands outside, and bringing back what few supplies we need that we cannot make ourselves.” The corners of her mouth drew down. “Tell me you have not done this thing of which my son speaks.”
The man called Batbayar looked down at the floor, but when he raised his head, his black eyes blazed with fury. “How can you call him your son? He abandoned you years ago without a backward look. How long has it been since he visited? He was not even sure you were still alive!”
Iduyan’s expression did not change, but something in her posture made Gregori think that underneath her calm exterior, she was anything but.
“You admit you were responsible for summoning a goddess to create a deadly storm?” she asked in a soft voice. “What possible reason could you have to do such a thing?”
“I became aware that someone was seeking to find us,” Batbayar said. “When I realized who it was, I believed it was in the best interests of our community that he not succeed. It is my job to keep us safe—to keep you safe, so that you might continue your great work. He would have been a disruption to your concentration, a distraction that could upset our careful balance. I was looking out for you, Iduyan, as I have always done. He had to be stopped.”
Iduyan stared at her disciple as if she had never seen him before. “You did not think that I was capable of making this decision for myself, Batbayar? Truly?”
He thrust out his jaw. “You have always told us not to let sentimentality stand in the way of our spiritual growth. I had hoped to make things easier for you by removing the complications his presence might cause.”
Gregori thought his mother had the look of someone who might be counting to ten. In multiple languages.
“He is my son,” she said through clenched teeth. “That is hardly a complication. It is bad enough that you would make such a choice on my behalf, but to prevent his visit by use of violence goes against everything our community stands for. How could you?”
“I did not resort to violence,” Batbayar protested. There was a hint of panic in his voice as he began to realize that for once, Iduyan was not responding with benevolent tolerance.
“You called down a blizzard,” Iduyan said. “I assume that this storm threatened the lives and welfare of those it affected.”
“In fact,” Gregori said quietly, “there is a large homeless population in the city. I am not at all certain we saved every one of them from freezing to death. In addition, there were countless accidents and much chaos due to power outages. People may have died. Even if they did not, the disruption to schools and businesses will no doubt continue for days as the area digs out from underneath all the snow.” He tilted his head in Jarilo’s direction. “If not for the intervention of my father and a Baba Yaga named Bella, the storm would be raging still.”
Iduyan closed her eyes briefly, as if in pain. But when she opened them to look at Batbayar again, they were as clear and cold as the ice the storm had left behind.
“I am appalled,” she said, “that you would abuse my trust in this way. That you would turn your back on my teachings. That you would in any way endanger not just an entire city but also my own son.”
Batbayar started to speak but she raised her hand to stop him. “You are banished, Batbayar. Anathema to me and to this sacred community of which you were once a valued member. You may have time to gather your belongings and what supplies you need to survive the next few days, but then you must leave this place and never return.”
“But I will age like a normal Human if I return to the world outside,” Batbayar said. Tears sprang into his eyes as the magnitude of his loss hit him. “You and the rest, you are my family. Where will I go?”
“Perhaps you should have thought of all that before,” Iduyan said, her tone firm but not unkind. “It is my hope that you will spend whatever time you have left seeking to do better, and learning from your errors.”
He held out his hands beseechingly, but she just shook her head and turned her back. A moment later, everyone else in the room had done the same. It was as if he had ceased to exist.
Gregori would have felt sorry for the man, if not for the suffering he had caused. As it was, he simply watched in silence as Batbayar slowly walked out of the building, his shoulders slumped and his head bowed. Gregori thought Batbayar might stop and say something as he passed by Gregori and his father on the way out, but his measured pace never wavered.
There was a brief flash of inner sight—a split-second vision of a black-haired man floating facedown in an ice-edged pond. Gregori hoped it was only a possibility and not a certain future outcome. Either way, Batbayar was no longer his problem. That mission was accomplished. Now Gregori just had to figure out what to do next.
Once Batbayar had left the building, the remaining disciples turned back to face Iduyan, who waved them out with a simple gesture. This left her standing in the middle of the room with Gregori and Jarilo.
“I am sorry, Mother,” Gregori said.
“The apology should be mine,” she said. “Clearly, I have not been paying as much attention to my own people as I should have been.” She sighed. “It is distinctly possible that I have been so immersed in my spiritual studies all these centuries, I have lost track of my own humanity. How very ironic.” She gave Jarilo a wry smile. “I believe the last time I was truly focused outward instead of inward was when you and I were together.”
“Perhaps I might offer some assistance, then,” Jarilo said, bowing over her hand and bestowing a kiss on her palm.
Gregori blinked. What?
Iduyan merely raised an eyebrow in question. “And how exactly do you propose to do that?” she asked.
Jarilo shrugged. “I confess to being somewhat drained from all the unexpected activity during the time when I am usually asleep. Dead. Whatever. I would be grateful for a quiet place to regain my strength before returning to the realm of the gods.”
He gave her a smile that reminded Gregori of his brother Mikhail. It was easy to see where his youngest sibling had gotten his charm. “You could lend me some of your healing energy, and in return, I might endeavor to remind you of what it felt like to be a woman, and not just a shamaness. What do you think?”
A hint of pink touched Iduyan’s tan cheeks
. “You are certainly welcome to stay,” she said. “I will consider the rest.”
She turned to Gregori. “What of you, my son? Will you be staying for a time? I would like to learn of how you lost your immortality.” She spoke matter-of-factly, for which he was grateful. “It would seem that much has changed since last I saw you. Perhaps you would be willing to tell me the story of how these changes came to be; there might be things I can help you with.” She took a breath. “You do realize that if you remained here forever, you would live much longer than the span left to you otherwise.”
Gregori bowed. “I would be pleased to stay for a time, Mother. We have much catching up to do, indeed. And I would very much appreciate any insight you might have into my new gifts. They were the reason I sought you out in the first place. In the end, I found at least some of the answers I was looking for on my own, but there is still much for me to learn, and I could not aspire to a better teacher.”
She put one gentle hand on his cheek, a slightly wistful expression on her face. “But you will not stay forever?”
“Forever is a long time,” Gregori said. “And I have a life waiting for me in the outside world. At least, I hope I do. I need to make sure that I have mastered my new abilities and will not cause harm to myself or to others, but once I have done that, I must see where my true path lies.”
Jarilo chuckled. “I may not be psychic, but I believe I might venture a prediction.”
“Is there a woman?” Iduyan asked, sounding intrigued. “Is she good enough for our son?”
Gregori did his best not to mimic one of the teenagers’ eye rolls. How had he gone from having no parents to suddenly having two? And how on earth was he going to survive the experience?
CHAPTER 31
CIERA opened the refrigerator door to get out some food for her new kitten and, as always when she closed it, found her fingers straying to touch the postcard she’d put up there when she’d gotten it more than three months before. The front of the postcard was a black-and-white photo of five old-fashioned Mounties seated on a porch, and said Canada, eh? She wasn’t sure where the hell he’d found it, but it cracked her up every time.
She rarely looked at the back, but then she didn’t need to. She had memorized the short message soon after she’d received it.
Dear Ciera,
I found my mother and she is well, as am I. That other problem was dealt with. I am staying for a while, as there is much to learn and Iduyan and I have catching up to do. Jarilo is here too. I hope to return with the spring.
Yours, Gregori
As a message, it left much to be desired, she thought. Yes, it covered the basics—his mother was still alive, he was coping with his new abilities, the man who had summoned the storm had apparently been punished in one way or another, and (really?) his father had decided to stick around. All very well and good, as such things went. But it wasn’t exactly an effusive declaration of either affection or intent.
What did “I hope to return with the spring” mean, anyway? Return to the city? Return to the monastery? Return to her? Was “yours” a polite closing meaning nothing or a literal promise? Ciera had no idea. And what did “spring” signify? March had come and gone, as had April, and May was well into its first week. Maybe he was back and hadn’t contacted her. Maybe he had decided to stay with his mother, or changed his mind about returning to Minneapolis and was currently traveling to visit one of his brothers, or a Baba Yaga. Hell, for all she knew, he was in Paris.
But the postcard still sat firmly in the middle of the fridge, and she still kept hoping, although for what, she wasn’t sure.
It wasn’t as though she’d had a lot of time to brood about it. In the days after Gregori left, things had gotten pretty crazy. Somehow the newspapers had gotten wind of the fact that she had been the one to take down Victor, as well as the story of how she had been helping the homeless teens of the city, thanks to Victor’s men, who told the police all about the woman who fought back, and Shannon, Kelli, and Julie Ann, who kept telling anyone who would listen that she had saved their lives. She and the three girls had been questioned by the police (who wanted to give her a medal), lauded by the press, and had generally become a nine-day wonder.
As with most news stories, the bulk of the attention had died away after something more interesting had arisen, but it was too late; her secrets were out. Except the vigilante part, which she had miraculously persuaded Julie Ann, Kelli, and Shannon to keep to themselves, thank goodness. The talk of the vigilante’s existence had been limited to those in the neighborhood, so the police must have assumed that the balaclava found on Victor’s body belonged to him. But her past with Victor, and her previous life, those the newspapers found with ease and spilled all over page six. When it came out that Victor had killed Skye Blue, who had been much loved in the city, the furor rose to a pitch usually reserved for crooked politicians found in bed with somebody else’s wife.
Ciera had been braced for fallout at her job at the university, but no one there seemed to care, other than some initial amazement that she was more interesting than she had ever appeared to be. Few of the students kept up with the local news, and if her superiors had any questions, they kept them to themselves.
The folks at the soup kitchen, on the other hand, had nothing but questions, but after a couple of weeks of the girls repeating the story as loudly as possible, with the facts becoming more and more exaggerated over time, people got bored with the entire thing and went back to the more important business of keeping everyone warm and fed. Ciera couldn’t have been more relieved.
There were only two truly unexpected consequences from the newspaper article, one positive, and the other less so.
A few days after the first of the stories hit the papers, Ciera got a call from Skye Blue’s parents, who asked if she would be willing to meet with them. If Ciera had any hopes for shared grief, or bonding over memories of Skye, they vanished after the stiff and formal greeting. Not to mention that Skye’s parents were accompanied by a lawyer and an accountant, and that all of them were in the kind of designer clothing that made Ciera’s tidy work attire look shabby and uninspiring.
They met in an upscale coffee shop, and Ciera spent the time fetching her coffee feeling confused and off balance. Were Skye’s parents planning to sue her or ask for the money her mentor had left her for college? It was all she could do not to duck out the back and run away. But she was done running.
As it turned out, they wanted to continue Skye’s work with homeless teens.
Bob and Nancy might not have been the type to mourn openly, but it was clear that they had loved and valued their only daughter, for all that they could not comprehend the lifestyle she chose.
“We never really understood her,” Nancy said, stirring artificial sweetener into her coffee. She was stick thin, perfectly coiffed, and had clearly had some plastic surgery. But her eyes were wistful as she talked of her daughter. “I can’t pretend we did. It was like one of those fairy tales about changelings, where the child you were supposed to have was switched with one from a magical land. She was always so different from us.”
Her husband patted her hand. “It wasn’t that we didn’t love her,” he said. “We just thought we knew what was best for her. College, marriage to the right boy from the right family, a proper career, children when the time was right. But she wasn’t interested in any of that, and when we kept on pushing, eventually she just left. Wandered away and did the things she wanted to anyway. The last ten years of her life, we only ever saw her at Christmas, and even then she’d come for an hour or two and then leave to serve up turkey to the homeless. She did mention you, though, and how much joy you brought to the last year of her life. We looked for you after she was killed, but there was no sign of anyone named Suzy Johnson, and we eventually gave up. We talked about doing something in her honor, but until we saw the news stories, we had no idea where to start.”
He and his wife exchanged glances that told Ciera they still didn’t understand their strange changeling child. But also that they had loved her, no matter what.
“We’d like to create a legacy for her,” Bob said. “It won’t make up for losing her, but we think it would be what she would have wanted. And we would like you to take charge of it.”
“I don’t understand,” Ciera had said. “Take charge of what?”
“The Blue Skies Center for At-Risk Youth,” Nancy said. “We have already started the ball rolling.” She nodded at the lawyer and the accountant, who had nodded solemnly back. “We’ve funded it for the first five years, although we hope that the city and private donors will eventually step in to help expand its reach. It will be primarily a live-in youth home providing short-term housing, food, education, and counseling for teens who are homeless or at risk of becoming so, plus some outreach programs. Initially, it would serve twenty-five residents at a time, with the goal of enabling them to move on to become productive members of society.”
“We would like you to be the one to run it,” Bob added. “As administrator, you would have full control of the center’s facilities and direction. Plus, of course, a generous salary and an on-site apartment. We believe that this is what Skye would have wanted.”
Ciera had almost fallen out of her chair. But in the end, she had said she would consider it and get back to them. She had taken the wads of paperwork the lawyer and accountant handed over, shaken hands with Nancy and Bob, and then wept like a baby in the taxi on the way home.
In the end, she had said yes, of course. As they had said, it was what Skye would have wanted.
Naturally, it had all taken time to pull together. Skye’s parents had bought a suitable building, and Ciera had put together a program, hired staff, and picked the first twenty-five residents. Kelli and Shannon were roommates, and Julie Ann was going to be working as a resident advisor, helping with the day-to-day living in the girls’ wing. “If you can’t be a good example,” the teen had said in a grim voice when she accepted, “be a horrible warning.”
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