“You foolish Baba Yagas, always trying to save everyone. So predictable.” Brenna tossed the globe into the air once, caught it, and then lobbed it past Bella’s head and into the tangled web surrounding Alexei’s prison.
The energy spread through the bars and followed the wisps of the magic Bella had sent into the enchantment to try and undo it, flooding her with a jolt of force that overloaded her neurons and short-circuited both her body and her power. Helpless, limbs convulsing, she slid to the dirt floor, and from there, into darkness.
* * *
JAZZ PACED BACK and forth in the caravan. When that got too annoying, she went outside and paced out there. None of which made Bella suddenly appear out of the depths of the forest.
She gnawed on an already ragged fingertip, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do. After Bella had taken off on her dirt bike yesterday morning, Jazz had spent the rest of the day alternating between worrying and trying to keep herself busy with cleaning an already clean caravan and practicing the little bits of magic Bella had taught her. Jazz wasn’t used to having someone else to worry about, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.
When Bella didn’t return for dinner, or when darkness fell, Jazz became quite certain: she hated having someone to worry about. Koshka tried to reassure her, saying that Bella was a grown woman and could take care of herself. He told her that there was nothing more powerful than a Baba Yaga (except a dragon, of course, and he was the only one of those around). Eventually he convinced her that Bella must have gone to the fire tower to stay with Sam.
“You think they made up?” Jazz asked him. “That would be great.”
He’d given one of his openmouthed, fang-filled yawns and shrugged. “Young love. How could they not? Besides, we both know our Bella is irresistible.”
Jazz had been so distracted by the fact that he’d said “our” Bella, she’d accepted his explanation and finally gone to bed, expecting Bella to be back in time for breakfast.
But breakfast had come and gone, and they were fast approaching lunchtime. Even Koshka was starting to fret a little, although he tried to hide that fact from Jazz. He’d gone out on a run briefly, saying he needed to stretch his legs, but, she thought, really searching to see if he could find any sign of Bella within the small radius he could cover without getting too far away from the caravan.
When he returned, he shook his head and dropped a pile of dead mice at her feet.
“Why don’t you take these to Sam at the fire tower? That owl must be starving by now. When you get there, you can tell Bella it is time to get her ass back here.”
Jazz was so worried, she even forgot to get grossed out by the rodents. She found a bag and tossed them inside, picking them up with a piece of cloth she made a mental note to burn later. “Good idea,” she said. “It’s going to take me a while to get there, without a dirt bike or anything. But maybe I’ll luck out and find someone going in that direction who can give me a lift.”
To be honest, she didn’t care if she had to jog all the way there. She was sure that Bella must be with Sam, in which case Jazz was seriously going to give her crap about making her and Koshka, like, freak out over nothing. All she knew was that Bella was the first person who had treated her like a real human being in years, and there was no way Jazz was going to risk losing that. Or the magic, dammit. Bella had better be at that fire tower.
* * *
ONE GOOD THING about living for months in the woods, Jazz thought as she jogged down the main path. It was better for keeping you in good shape than a gym. Of course, it helped that Bella’s campsite was only three or four miles from the fire tower. Still, she stopped for a moment at the base of the tower to catch her breath before she ran up all those stairs.
Once at the top, she banged on the door with the flat of her palm. “Sam! Sam!”
She could see him put down the binoculars and walk across the room, but waited more or less patiently for him to open the door before she stuck her head in and said, “Where’s Bella?”
The fire watcher looked baffled, the eyebrow on the unscarred side shooting up toward his hairline. “Hello to you too, Jazz. Bella’s not here. Why did you think she would be?” He waved her the rest of the way into the small space.
“Oh,” Jazz said, drooping. “I’m sorry to bother you then. Here, these are for you.” She made a face as she handed him the bag of mice. “The owlet is still okay, isn’t he?”
“He’s fine,” Sam said, pointing at the box on the table. “See for yourself.”
She went over to check on the little bird, happy to see that he looked to be thriving. “You’re taking really good care of him. The mice are from Koshka, by the way.”
“Great,” Sam said. “Er, tell him I said thank you.”
“I will.” Jazz patted the owl gently on the head with one finger and then looked back up at Sam. “Are you sure you haven’t seen Bella?”
“Not since yesterday morning after the storm,” he said. “Why, how long has she been gone?”
“She left the caravan not long after she came back from the shower,” Jazz said, trying to keep the concern out of her voice and probably failing. “She was really upset about something and took off to look for her friends some more. And she never came back.”
Now Sam looked worried too. And guilty. “I’m afraid she was upset because we had an argument. I said some pretty lousy things.”
Jazz stared at the floor. “You guys fought about me, didn’t you? Because she told you I wasn’t her niece.”
“We disagreed about a few things,” Sam said, gazing at her steadily until she raised her head. “But yes, that was one of them.”
She met his eyes. “She said you told her she should send me back into the system. You think I might have something to do with these fires, don’t you? Just because sometimes kids my age set fires. Well, sometimes people start fires by not putting out their cigarettes carefully enough, and I don’t smoke. So I think it’s pretty lousy that you just made some kind of assumption because of how old I am.”
Sam sighed. “How old you are is why I told Bella you shouldn’t be running around the forest by yourself. And yes, I did think, just for a moment, that you could be involved. But I also thought that about Bella, if it makes you feel any better. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
“Pfft,” Jazz said. “As long as you’re not hitting me with your fists, you can throw all the words at me you want. But you’re wrong about me and you’re wrong about Bella. She’s trying to stop the fires, not start more.” The “you idiot” was unsaid, but still echoed loudly between the two of them. Jazz crossed her arms across her chest and glared at him, not impressed when his expression softened.
“Did the people you ran away from hit you, Jazz?” he asked in a soft voice. “Is that why you left?”
“I left,” she made air quotes around the words, “because the hitting was about to become something much worse. And no thank you very much. I’d rather take my chances with the bears.”
Sam winced. “Couldn’t you have called your social worker, or told the police? Not all adults are bad, you know.”
Jazz rolled her eyes. “Seriously? Have you ever met a social worker? Some of them are nice enough, the ones that haven’t been in the system long enough to be, like, totally burned-out. And some of them are total shits who are just picking up a paycheck and don’t care at all about the kids. The one I had last was actually one of the good ones. But she was responsible for something like two hundred kids, so I saw her maybe three times a year. She’d come in, check out the house, ask me how things were, with Mr. I’m a Model Citizen standing right by my shoulder, and then go away, grateful that things were working out so well and she wasn’t going to have to find another placement for me when she’d completely run out of families to stick me with.”
“And the cops?”
“Right,” she sai
d. “Like they’re going to take the word of some loser who’d been in eight foster homes in ten years over a guy who sold real estate and lived in a house with an actual freaking white picket fence. All he had to do was say he’d taken away my phone and I was acting out to get back at him, and they’d look at me like I was wasting their time.” Jazz spoke with the bitterness of experience. She’d tried telling a cop about one of her foster parent’s abuse. Once.
“Besides, the kind of crap my latest foster father had in mind, the only way to go to the cops was to let it happen first, and then report it. No way in hell was I going to do that.”
“I’m sorry, Jazz,” Sam said, rubbing one hand over his scars in a gesture she’d seen him make before when he was stressed or upset. She was pretty sure he didn’t realize he did it. “No kid should have to go through that.”
Huh. “So, you believe me?” Jazz felt her heart lift, just a little. He’d better not be jerking her around.
“I do, actually,” he said. “Bella tried to tell me the system failed you, and I was so caught up in my own preconceived notions of the way things should be done, I didn’t really listen. I’m sorry.”
From what Jazz could tell, he was even sorrier that he and Bella had fought over it, but she wasn’t going to rub salt in his wounds by mentioning it.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, looking serious.
“Um, sure, I guess.”
“You seem like a really terrific kid,” Sam said, stating it like it was some kind of fact. Jazz tried not to feel all warm and fuzzy, but it was a pretty cool thing to hear someone say. Especially someone she liked and respected as much as Sam.
“Well, duh,” she said, as if people said crap like that to her all the time.
He grinned back at her, not buying it. “Yeah, I know. Captain Obvious here. But what I wondered was, if it isn’t too personal a question, how is it that you never got adopted? I mean, I think any family would be lucky to have you.”
“Damn straight,” Jazz muttered. But then she sighed again. “I guess you don’t know much about the foster care system, do you?”
Sam shook his head. “Not really, no. Just what I’ve read in the papers and seen on the news. I know there are a lot of problems.”
Jazz just barely kept herself from rolling her eyes again. “There’s the understatement of the century,” she said instead. “Mostly there are just way too many kids and not enough people who want kids. And the ones they want, well . . . have you ever gone to an animal shelter?”
He blinked at her, clearly not following her train of thought. “Uh, sure. When I was a kid, my parents took me and my sister to go pick out a kitten.” For a minute, his eyes looked sad. “Heather, my fiancée, and I were going to get a cat. We just kept putting it off because we were worried about how long we’d be away at a stretch, fighting fires.” He looked around the fire tower. “I guess it’s a good thing we never got one.”
Personally, she thought having a cat would do him a lot of good. Just being around Koshka made her feel better when things weren’t going so well. Maybe they’d let him bring one to the tower, if he asked. She shook her head, trying to get her thoughts back on track.
“Okay, so you went to the shelter, and there were probably like a bazillion cats, right?”
“There were a lot, sure. I was only ten, but I remember I wanted to take them all home with us.”
“Right,” she said. “But you could only take one. So you picked a cute kitten, right?”
He nodded, still not following.
“In any given animal shelter, there are hundreds of cats,” Jazz explained. “Lots of them are beautiful, and sweet, and well behaved. Some of them even use the litter box the way they’re supposed to, nine out of ten times. But a bunch of them are older, and have a few things wrong with them, and no one wants to take a chance on a cat that might have bad habits, or is, like, an adolescent and maybe a little hyper. So just about everyone takes home a cute kitten instead.”
“And you’re saying that no matter how terrific you are, you aren’t a cute kitten,” Sam said.
“And there are a lot of cute kittens,” Jazz agreed. “I went into the system when I was five, and really, by then I was already too old to have much of a chance of being adopted. People want babies. They don’t want kids who are too smart for their own good and have attitude.” She grinned at him ruefully. “I have been informed, numerous times, that I have attitude.”
Sam gave her the ghost of a smile in return. “Believe it or not, I can see that. But I like your attitude. I’d be more likely to call it spunk.”
“Jeez. Spunk? What are you, like, a hundred?” But she smiled to show she was kidding. Then the smile slid off her face as she remembered why she’d come in the first place.
“Listen, this little chat has been grand and all, but if Bella isn’t here, I need to keep looking for her.” Jazz gazed out the windows at the huge expanse of land surrounding them. “What if she’s out there hurt? She could have had an accident on the bike or run into some kind of a wild animal or something.”
Sam did that thing with his face that grown-ups do when they’re worried but trying to pretend they’re not so the kid won’t get upset. Jazz resisted the urge to tell him to cut it the hell out. Barely.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” he said. “She strikes me as a woman who is capable of looking after herself. And speaking of looking, hang on for a minute while I do my rounds. We already have one ongoing fire; I need to make sure there aren’t any more.”
Jazz rested one hip on the edge of the table so she could talk to the owlet while he went outside with the binoculars. He spent a long time looking off in one direction, his glasses aimed at a dark smudge that Jazz could see with her naked eyes. When he came back in, his face was drawn and pale, but he still made an effort to speak to her kindly.
“Look, why don’t you go back to the caravan. She’s probably come back by now and is worrying about where you are.”
Jazz shook her head. “Koshka would have told her where I went, if she actually came home.”
“Uh-huh.” It was Sam’s turn to roll his eyes. “I believe that Bella’s a witch, but really, a talking cat?”
“I thought she told you,” Jazz said. “Koshka’s not really a cat. He’s a dragon disguised as a cat. Of course he can talk.” She chose to ignore the fact that she’d been pretty amazed by it when she first found out.
Sam blinked. “She told me. I just thought she was kidding.”
“Right. Because people kid about dragon-cats all the time.” She tapped one bitten fingernail on the table. “Look, you said there’s a fire, right? Do you think Bella could be down there using her magic to fight it or something? That could explain why she didn’t come home.”
Sam perked up, the sadness vanishing from his face for a moment. “You know, that’s probably exactly what she’s doing. Let me check in with the county zone warden.”
He scooped up what looked kind of like a walkie-talkie and spoke into it. Jazz figured that whatever it was probably worked better in the woods than a cell phone did.
“Hey, Jake, this is Sam in the fire tower. I’m looking for a missing person, and since she has prior firefighting experience, I thought she might have joined in with the volunteers you’ve got working on this one and just forgot to tell anyone where she was going.”
“Got a description, Sam?” asked the voice on the other end of the call.
“You bet,” Sam said. “You can’t miss her. She’s a gorgeous redhead with green eyes. Last seen riding a red Enduro dirt bike.”
Jake laughed. “Sounds like she’d have been noticed if she’s out here,” he said. “I’ll check with the team leaders and get back to you, but nobody has mentioned anyone like that to me yet.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it. How goes the battle?”
“We’ve got her about sev
enty percent contained,” Jake said. “If the wind doesn’t pick up, we should have her under control by nightfall, thanks to your sharp eyes. I’ll keep you posted. Do me a favor, though, and don’t spot another one, will ya? We’ve got guys from three counties here. I’d hate to have to divide our efforts.”
“I’ll do my best,” Sam said. “Stay safe.”
“You bet.” The radio clicked over into silence.
Jazz looked at Sam. “So no one’s seen her.”
“No one mentioned it to the zone warden. That doesn’t mean she isn’t there,” Sam said. But the look in his eyes didn’t match his reassuring tone.
“Uh-huh.” Jazz pushed off from the table. “I guess I’ll go back to the caravan. Like you said, maybe she came back while I was gone.”
“Let me know if she shows up, if you can,” Sam said. “You know, send the cat with a message or something.” Just in case, he wrote his cell number on a piece of paper and gave it to her, although the things only worked sporadically in and around the forest.
“Right.” Jazz bit her lip. “Sam, did you tell her she wasn’t safe to be around?”
Sam grimaced. “Something like that, yeah. She made a ball of fire appear in her hand when we were arguing. It startled me, and I suppose it scared me, flames showing up right in front of me like that. I overreacted.”
“Jeez,” Jazz said with feeling. “I guess I can see why. But she wouldn’t have hurt you. Really.”
“I know that. It was just in the moment, well, people say things they don’t mean when they’re caught off guard.” He reached one hand up to pat his face self-consciously. “I think you know why I’m not all that great with fire.”
“Yeah. And I’m pretty sure Bella felt rotten about it afterward,” Jazz said. “Maybe you guys can make it up to each other when she comes back from wherever she is.”
“I felt rotten too,” Sam said. “But I don’t think Bella is going to forgive me for what I said, and I wouldn’t blame her. I’d just like to know she’s okay.”
Jazz really hoped Bella was. She walked toward the door, then stopped before she walked outside. “Can I ask you something?”
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